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Showing posts from July, 2020

COVID-19 on Trump's rescue: a perfect timing to postpone general election

failed evolution It seems that Donald Trump may not need a loud false flag operation to postpone November's general election now that he sees his numbers going down. COVID-19 can do the job. As RT reported: Mail-in voting threatens to make the November election the “most inaccurate & fraudulent” in US history, so the nation may be better off simply postponing it, President Donald Trump has suggested in a tweet. Sharing his ongoing concerns over mail-in voting, Trump raised the possibility of delaying the election “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.” [...] Since April, Trump has apparently lost ground to Biden in terms of popularity as the US drags through the Covid-19 pandemic and an unprecedented economic slowdown. Both nationally and in battleground states, the president currently lags behind the former vice president, according to pollsters. [...] Trump has already questioned the security of mail-in voting on numerous occasions...

UK withholding Venezuelan gold is ‘perverse’

RT America The Venezuelan Central Bank won the right this week to appeal a UK court decision preventing the retrieval of $1.2 billion USD of Venezuelan gold that was deposited at the Bank of England.  In the initial ruling, the UK's high court had recognized Juan Guaido as interim president, thereby refusing to release the funds to President Nicolas Maduro. This comes as Venezuela deals with crippling US sanctions on crude oil and other goods.  Former UK MP George Galloway weighs in.

Israel leaking evidence of its involvement in covert Iran bombing campaign that threatens to spark a wider war

A relentless campaign of aggression against Iran is entering a new phase with cyberattacks on military and civilian targets that aim to cripple Rouhani’s government and set the stage for wider conflict in the Middle East. by Raul Diego  Part 3 - Israel’s trump card Barely two days into 2020, the Trump administration assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and set the stage for a relentless campaign of provocation against the Middle Eastern nation that has persisted until today. The patently illegal hit job on one of Iran’s top military leaders was a textbook application of Israel’s so-called Octopus Doctrine; brainchild of Israeli Defense Minister, formerly Education Minister, Naftali Bennet, who once stated that the world could be living with conflict in the Middle East for 100 years. The doctrine entails murdering “ Iranian advisers and officials who direct and support proxy forces in other countries. ” Trump’s willingness to do the bidding of Israel’s polic...

Why the Bill Gates global health empire promises more empire and less public health

Behind a veil of corporate media PR, the Gates Foundation has served as a vehicle for Western capital while exploiting the Global South as a human laboratory. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to intensify this disturbing agenda. by Jeremy Loffredo and Michele Greenstein Part 6 - Molding the media The Gates Foundation has also directed its wealth toward influencing news coverage of global health policy – and to perhaps suppress criticism of its more unsavory activities. The foundation has donated millions to major media outlets, including NPR, PBS, ABC, BBC, Al Jazeera, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, Univision, and The Guardian . In fact, The Guardian ’s entire “Global Development” section was made possible through a partnership with the Gates Foundation. The foundation has also invested millions in journalism training and in researching effective ways of crafting media narratives. According to the Seattle Times , “ experts coached in Gates-funded progr...

State Dept-funded Transparency International goes silent on jailed transparency activist Julian Assange

For over a year, the West’s top anti-corruption NGO, Transparency International, has not said a word about the world’s most prominent jailed transparency activist, Julian Assange. Is US and UK government funding a factor in the organization’s silence? by Patrick Maynard Part 3 - US State Department, UK government support – and corporate influence peddling There was an initial groundswell of solidarity from abroad after Assange’s arrest, with publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post commenting on how the Espionage Act charges threatened press freedom. A few major international human rights NGOs spoke out as well.  That support has been uneven over the last 15 months or so, however. After the initial burst of coverage, the hearings faded into the background, with few mainstream American or British media organizations reporting on Judge Emma Arbuthnot’s ties to UK intelligence and defense interests while she presided over pre-extradition hearings...

Capitalism may not survive 2020 global crisis, which will cut deeper and last longer than many predict

The current global crisis triggered by Covid-19 is the third capitalist crash in this century. And governments’ incapacity to consider non-capitalist solutions threatens to keep deepening this crisis into capitalism’s worst. by Richard D. Wolff Part 3 - What would have been logical response The five converging crises persuade me that today’s global crisis will cut deeper and last longer than most are currently predicting. The logical response to the 2020 crisis would have been to keep all workers employed doing all that was necessary to contain the pandemic. This means, for example, government rehiring those fired by private employers, massively training them to test entire populations, to take care of the sick, and to otherwise build what the society needs (infrastructure, education, housing, etc) under pandemic conditions of social distancing, masks, gloves, etc.  This is not the policy adopted in the US where, instead, massive unemployment of tens of mi...

Meet the far-right oligarchs working to topple Mexico’s progressive President AMLO

A Trump-like Mexican oligarch, Gilberto Lozano, is leading a coalition of corporate leaders and far-right fanatics called FRENA to try to overthrow President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. by José Guadalupe Argüello III and Ben Norton Part 10 - FRENA brands gender equality and homosexuality a communist conspiracy The cast of delirious right-wing fanatics arrayed against Lopez Obrador may seem too fringe to have a sizable impact on Mexican politics, but these are precisely the same kind of extremists that have touched off successful campaigns to overthrow leftist governments in Latin America in the past. In Bolivia, similarly fascistic elements were activated to lead the US-backed military coup in November 2019, and in Brazil right-wing forces launched a soft coup against Brazil’s Workers’ Party and ushered in the current extreme-right Jair Bolsonaro administration. A close look at the FRENA website reflects precisely the same kind of fascistic ideology that has sprea...

Russia sends signals to the West: 'we are not eager to re-join your imperialist club'

Here we go again. A month after Donald Trump talked about Russia once again attending the G7 assembly of powerful states, Germany’s foreign minister has ruled it out. Meanwhile, nobody seems to be listening to what Moscow thinks. At this point, it’s become like parents trying to punish a child by denying them what they think is a favorite toy, without realizing that the kid has already moved on to a new plaything. Despite Russia’s foreign ministry and the Kremlin repeatedly pointing out that Moscow is not enthusiastic about restoring the G8, Western members of the club continue to cross swords about whether Russia should be brought back. None seem to have consulted the Kremlin about whether it even wants to rejoin the group. In June, US President Donald Trump told Fox News Radio that it is “ common sense ” to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to an expanded G7 summit. This caused ructions in American liberal media and among some commenters in other member states of t...

Bolivia’s coup government just suspended elections for the third time

Bolivia's coup government has announced that elections slated for September will be pushed back yet again. It's another reminder that the right-wing coup-makers care nothing about democracy — they only want to institute neoliberal policies and repress Evo Morales's leftist party, who they know would win a free and fair election. by Oliver Vargas  When the Bolivian government’s electoral authorities nervously announced to the nation that elections were to be suspended for the third time in four months, the fear instilled in many seemed to suddenly melt away. It was replaced by a fury of a country whose working-class districts and rural areas were led to believe that free and fair elections, on September 6, would provide a peaceful route out of the country’s dramatic economic collapse. The hope was that these elections would mark the end of authoritarian rule at the hands of an unelected regime, who stand as proof of how the United States rules its “backyard” and...

United Tesla Company: widespread condemnation of Elon Musk’s Bolivia coup comments

Telsa CEO Elon Musk is once again under fire, this time for tweeting “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” in reference to the 2019 US-backed coup in Bolivia. by Alan Macleod   Multibillionaire Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk once again proved that he does not know how to keep silent. After being challenged on Twitter about his alleged involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Evo Morales in Bolivia last November, Musk responded, “ We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it. ” Although he later deleted his statement, he doubled down on his stance, tweeting “ Congratulations to the people of Bolivia! ” on Morales’ ouster. The pushback to Musk’s apparent confession that he was intimately involved in the violent overthrow of a foreign government and its replacement with a far-right dictatorship was swift. “ I’ve been silently fuming about this ever since he tweeted it. It just chokes me up with so much rage I can’t think of anyth...

UK 'Russia report' fear-mongers about meddling yet finds no evidence

The Grayzone A long-awaited UK government report finds no evidence of Russian meddling in British domestic politics, including the 2016 Brexit vote. But that hasn't stopped the fear-mongering: the report claims the UK government didn't find evidence because it didn't look for it, and backs increased powers for intelligence agencies and media censorship as a result. Afshin Rattansi, a British journalist and host of RT's "Going Underground", responds.

How the liberal establishment and the deep state paved the way for Trump to kill the Iran nuclear deal

globinfo freexchange It all started from a New York Times Magazine article , on May 5, 2016. It was, as it seems, a smooth starting point for a character assassination operation, orchestrated by the liberal establishment, against a key-man behind the Iran nuclear deal. The target was a relatively young man, then Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes. The operation starts already from the title of the article, where Rhodes was labeled as an "aspiring novelist". This was the "signal" that was aimed to make him (in the end) appear unreliable and therefore, to de-legitimize his most important work: the positive communication of the Iran nuclear deal. Specifically, while the article presents Rhodes as a skilled communicator (apparently due to his writing skills), it ends up making him appear, more or less, inexperienced, unrealistic (especially regarding foreign policy) and even naive up to a point. Perhaps the most impressive about this a...

Israel leaking evidence of its involvement in covert Iran bombing campaign that threatens to spark a wider war

A relentless campaign of aggression against Iran is entering a new phase with cyberattacks on military and civilian targets that aim to cripple Rouhani’s government and set the stage for wider conflict in the Middle East. by Raul Diego  Part 2 - Exhibit A, B and C The precedent for Israeli cyberattacks on Iran is strong. Perhaps the most salient example is U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet project, a computer virus developed in tandem with the U.S. and an “elite” Unit 8200 team, led by Lior Div – an Israeli software engineer who went on to found a company called Cybereason, which has been running doomsday cyberattack scenarios for the upcoming 2020 U.S. elections. The project was first authorized by the Bush administration and involved the recreation of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, according to “experts” at Israel’s Dimona complex. It was carried out a decade ago at the same facility targeted in early July. The comparable “complexity” of the covert operation has led many familia...

Why the Bill Gates global health empire promises more empire and less public health

Behind a veil of corporate media PR, the Gates Foundation has served as a vehicle for Western capital while exploiting the Global South as a human laboratory. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to intensify this disturbing agenda. by Jeremy Loffredo and Michele Greenstein Part 5 - Gates buys the World Health Organization The WHO relies on two streams of revenue. One comes in the form of assessed contributions, or obligatory funding from UN member states which is assessed through population and income. The second is voluntary contributions, which can be earmarked for specific causes. Voluntary earmarked contributions account for more than 80 percent of the current WHO budget. In other words, most of the WHO’s money comes with strings attached. As Dr. David Legge, public health scholar emeritus at the School of Public Health at La Trobe University in Melbourne, told The Grayzone , “ Obligatory contributions by nation states really only cover the cost of administratio...

State Dept-funded Transparency International goes silent on jailed transparency activist Julian Assange

For over a year, the West’s top anti-corruption NGO, Transparency International, has not said a word about the world’s most prominent jailed transparency activist, Julian Assange. Is US and UK government funding a factor in the organization’s silence? by Patrick Maynard Part 2 - Ignoring the world’s most prominent jailed transparency activist Julian Assange first became well-known when Wikileaks published a series of document troves that embarrassed the United States and its allies. Several stashes of military information exposed possible war crimes on the part of U.S. soldiers, while a collection of State Department cables from 1966 through 2010 showed American diplomatic officials being manipulated to act on behalf of U.S. companies abroad.  Shortly after those releases, Assange was investigated over a possible sexual assault in Sweden. Assange and his team worried that the investigation might be a pretext to detain and extradite him into U.S. hands, so they...

Capitalism may not survive 2020 global crisis, which will cut deeper and last longer than many predict

The current global crisis triggered by Covid-19 is the third capitalist crash in this century. And governments’ incapacity to consider non-capitalist solutions threatens to keep deepening this crisis into capitalism’s worst. by Richard D. Wolff Part 2 - Five crises Here are the five converging crises. Each country will exhibit its own mixture of some or all of them. The United States suffers them all, and this partly is why its economic crash and coronavirus pandemic are so extreme.   The first is climate change (rising air and water temperatures, floods, droughts, fires, etc.) that disrupts the world economy in multiple ways.  The second is inequality. As French economist Thomas Piketty and countless others have shown, capitalism worsens inequality of wealth and income continuously unless and until the mass of impoverished revolt or threaten to.  The third is racism. Many capitalist societies divide their people into portions kept relati...