the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

by Jonathan Cook   Part 10 - An empty space   The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defence – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space. Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it. Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared...

Team Biden is planning to hold on to what it apparently sees as its “Trump card”— the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran oil exports that have gutted the Iranian economy.   by Gareth Porter  Part 1 A close analysis of recent statements by members of President Joseph Biden’s foreign policy team indicates his administration has already signaled its intention to treat negotiations with Iran as an exercise in diplomatic coercion aimed at forcing major new concessions extending well beyond the 2105 nuclear agreement. The policy could trigger a renewed US-Iran crisis as serious as any provocation engineered by the Trump administration. Although the Biden team is claiming that it is ready to bring the United States back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if Iran comes into full compliance first, it is actually planning to demand that Iran give up its main source of political leverage. Thus, it will require Iran to cease its uranium enrichment to 20 percent...

globinfo freexchange   WallStreetBets Redditors sent shock waves to speculative hedge funds who saw their gamble turn into a disaster, losing billions. The terror was evident on corporate media pundits' faces when they suddenly realized that their beloved Wall Street fraudulent system was successfully hijacked by outsiders.   As BusinessInsider reported :   Video-game retailer GameStop has dominated the headlines this week after its shares trebled in value in just three days this week, in a buying frenzy fueled by individual traders that have forced some of Wall Street's prominent hedge funds to close their bearish bets against the company with hefty losses.   GameStop's shares have hit record highs and the swarm of retail investors behind the rally have cheered each other on, primarily within the popular Reddit forum Wall Street Bets, which by Thursday, had around 3.5 million members.   Members have spent the past three weeks bidding up ...

Double Down News   The US will soon review its nuclear weapons programme. Should it spend $1.2 Trillion extending and updating it? 

globinfo freexchange   Αν δεν έχετε ακόμα πεισθεί για το πόσο υποτελές είναι το Μητσοτακικό καθεστώς σε ντόπια και ξένα συμφέροντα, ρίξτε μια ματιά σε αυτή την αποκάλυψη που προέρχεται μάλιστα από τον ίδιο τον καθεστωτικό τύπο.   Όπως αποκάλυψε ο Χριστόφορος Ζαραλίκος με βάση συγκεκριμένη στήλη της Καθημερινής :                                Κομβικό ρόλο λέγεται πως έπαιξε το ταξιδιωτικό και τουριστικό πρακτορείο TUI στην παραμονή του Χάρη Θεοχάρη στο υπ. Τουρισμού. Παρά το γεγονός πως στην Ελλάδα τέτοιες παρεμβάσεις συνοδεύονται συνήθως από αρνητικά σχόλια, στη συγκεκριμένη περίπτωση υπάρχει και η θετική διάσταση. Για να εκφράζεται καλά ένας τουριστικός κολοσσός για τον αρμόδιο υπουργό, σημαίνει πως υπάρχουν ελπιδοφόρες προοπτικές. Για να δούμε…   Δηλαδή, το καθεστώς Μητσοτάκη όχι μόνο δέχεται απευθείας εντολές από ιδι...

RT   In this episode of Keiser Report, Max and Stacy look at the soaring leverage in the stock market as investors lose their mind on stimulus checks hope. In the second half, Max interviews Farooq Ahmed of the Bitcoin Association of Pakistan to discuss the recent news that the government of Pakistan has allocated funds to mining bitcoin. 

Unable to secure a profit in immunizing poorer nations, Western multinationals, including Oxford’s private partner AstraZeneca, have prioritized those who can pay the most.   by Alan Macleod  Europe is reeling from the shock news that biotech giant AstraZeneca will not be delivering anything like the number of vaccines it promised. The company informed European Union officials that they will only be supplying 31 million doses to 27 E.U. countries, rather than the 80 million they had promised would arrive by the end of March. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti predicted that the news would reap “enormous damage” on the continent that has already sustained over 32 million confirmed cases and 703,000 deaths due to COVID-19. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had been hailed last year as a miracle in the global fight against the coronavirus primarily because the research team at Oxford University had promised to share the rights to its product with any and all drugmakers, meaning t...

Establishment's plan to stop Bernie Sanders becomes more and more evident: Elizabeth Warren as a tool to split the progressive base    Brussels bureaufascists are ready to replace Alexis Tsipras with their most faithful puppet in Greece   Trump's top hawkish neocon gives signs that the US could possibly participate in a military coup against Jeremy Corbyn  Why the US rushed to propagate the 'naval mine' scenario to explain recent attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman   It's definite: the neoliberal deep state in Brazil jailed political prisoner Lula da Silva to prevent the Workers' Party (PT) from winning the 2018 presidential election   Confirmed: the US empire seeks to 'clear' the path for the invasion of Iran    Masks fall at last: Bernie officially declares war on corporate Dems who seek to survive around Warren   Preparing the invasion of Iran: the US empire regroups its proxies in Afghanistan    The war-lobby corpora...

by Andrea Mazzarino Part 1   “ I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves, ” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “ One minute they belonged and the next, they were out, and they couldn’t fit in. They had nowhere to work, no one who related to them. And they had these PTSD symptoms that made them react in ways other Americans didn’t. ” This veteran’s remark may seem striking to many Americans who watched this country’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere unfold in an early display of pyrotechnic air raids and lines of troops and tanks moving through desert landscapes, and then essentially stopped paying attention.    As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, as well as a military spouse who has written aboutand lived in a reasonably up-close-and-personal way through the costs of almost two decades of war in the Greater ...

by Jonathan Cook   Part 4 - Suicide danger   They were deceived. Baraitser denied bail, effectively signalling that she thinks her ruling might be wrong and overturned in a higher court. That is extraordinary. It suggests that she has no confidence in her own judgment of the facts of the case. As Murray has noted: “ There was little or no precedent for the High Court overturning any ruling against extradition on Section 91 health grounds. ” Any appeal by the US against Baraitser’s ruling to discharge Assange will be hard to win. Its lawyers will have to prove that she was wrong not on her interpretation of the law, but in assessing verifiable facts. They will have to show that she was deceived by prison experts who warned – based on submissions made by the US itself – that Assange would be subjected to permanent, inhuman solitary confinement in a US super-max jail or that she was misled by medical experts who warned that in these conditions Assange would be at significant risk...

by Jonathan Cook   Part 9 - ‘Get out of jail’ card   This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalise, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.   Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “ bad Jews ”, at the instigation of Jewish organisations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew haters.  In t...

by Andre Damon   On Friday, Facebook carried out a purge of left-wing, antiwar and progressive pages and accounts, including leading members of the Socialist Equality Party. Facebook gave no explanation why the accounts were disabled or even a public acknowledgement that the deletions had occurred.   At least a half dozen leading members of the Socialist Equality Party had their Facebook accounts permanently disabled. This included the public account of Genevieve Leigh, the national secretary of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, and the personal account of Niles Niemuth, the US managing editor of the World Socialist Web Site. In 2016, Niemuth was the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US Vice President.  Facebook also disabled the London Bus Drivers Rank-and-File Committee Facebook page, which was set up with the support of the Socialist Equality Party (UK) to organize opposition among bus drivers. This follows a widely discussed call for a w...

While the US and its allies glorify Leopoldo López as a new MLK, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition  collaborates with Colombia’s narco-affiliated, death squad-sponsoring former President Álvaro Uribe.   by Ben Norton   Part 7 - Saving face in photo op with liberal Bogotá mayor   Leopoldo López’s meeting with Álvaro Uribe triggered condemnations from even staunch supporters of the Venezuelan opposition.   The avowedly anti-Chavista Americas director of the billionaire-funded US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), José Miguel Vivanco, lambasted López for the meeting, calling it a “ grave mistake ” that “ does a lot of damage to his credibility. ”   HRW has spent years heroizing the coup-plotting Venezuelan opposition leader, portraying López as a “ prisoner of conscience ” and “ Venezuela’s most prominent political prisoner ” before he was released in a failed coup attempt on April 30, 2019.  Vivanco is closely allied with far-right forces across Latin...

by Jonathan Cook   Part 5 - Vilification continues   There is a final lesson from the Assange ruling. The last decade has been about discrediting, disgracing and demonising Assange. This ruling should very much be seen as a continuation of that process. Baraitser has denied extradition only on the grounds of Assange’s mental health and his autism, and the fact that he is a suicide risk. In other words, the principled arguments for freeing Assange have been decisively rejected. If he regains his freedom, it will be solely because he has been characterised as mentally unsound. That will be used to discredit not just Assange, but the cause for which he fought, the Wikileaks organisation he helped to found, and all wider dissidence from establishment narratives. This idea will settle into popular public discourse unless we challenge such a presentation at every turn. Assange’s battle to defend our freedoms, to defend those in far-off lands whom we bomb at will in the promotion of ...

globinfo freexchange   A recent CBS News poll confirms major divisions among the US working class, something that serves perfectly the capitalist elites. One of the most interesting and disturbing findings shows that Americans overwhelmingly believe that the "biggest threat to America's way of life" is "other people in America", by 54%. That is, more than half of the other reasons combined. On the contrary, only 20% believes that "economic forces" are threatening the American way of life and this is a huge disappointment because after all these blatant systemic failures (especially in the last two decades), most Americans are still unable to identify the root of the problem, which is neoliberalism and financial capitalism. We can assume that this picture satisfies the capitalist elites. And that's because it shows that the corporate media are still able to distract Americans from the real problem by dividing them, through the old (and tested numer...

New Economic Thinking   Renowned journalist and author Chris Hedges talks about the many ways traditional media, digital media, and the two political parties have worked to prevent progressive movements and give rise to the growth of the extreme right. 

Teachers, transit and other workers in New York City denounced Tuesday’s police attack on striking warehouse workers at the Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx and called for unified action to defend the striking workers and to fight the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in schools and workplaces.   Over 1,400 warehouse and truck drivers walked out on Sunday, January 17, to demand a dollar an hour increase over three years for workers who have suffered more than 400 infections and at least six deaths from the virus. The workers perform backbreaking labor at the world’s largest wholesale food market, where workers handle more than 200 million pounds of food for distribution to grocery stores and restaurants across the region. The market generates $2.3 billion in revenue each year, accounting for approximately 60 percent of produce sales in New York City.  The operators of the produce market, many which received government bailout money, have steadfastly refused to accede to T...

Empire Files   Abby Martin and Mike Prysner bring you up to date about the DC Capital attack with shocking new and hidden details about the seriousness of the operation, the depths of the inside job, and who from the government may land in prison for it (including Trump).  Brian Becker, host of The Socialist Program podcast, joins the conversation with deep analysis about the intervention of the imperialist power structure and the reality of the fascist threat. 

It has started: Greece becomes the blueprint for the 21st century corporate feudalism UBI ... just only to save their capitalism until the next Dark Ages The neoliberal machine mocks Millennials and Gen Xers through a documentary about Bernie's awful mistreatment by the corporate media! The Slow News movement: an answer to Fake News?   When the US imperialist machine is using controversial books to build its propaganda    It has started: Spain decides permanent UBI for its citizens

by Jonathan Cook   Part 3 - Then, a perverse ruling   Her ruling, while deeply disturbing in its political and legal implications, did at least suggest that Baraitser was ready to take a compassionate approach in regard to Assange’s health, even if not his journalistic exposure of western war crimes. He should have walked free there and then, had the US not immediately said it would appeal her decision. Given Assange’s discharge by Baraitser, his team hoped that bail – his release from a high-security prison while the lengthy appeals process unfolds – would prove a formality. They hurried to make such an application after the extradition ruling on Monday, assuming that the legal logic of her decision dictated his release. Baraitser demurred, suggesting that they prepare their case and make it to her more fully on Wednesday. It now seems clear the judge manipulated Assange’s defence team. Apparently like Assange’s lawyers, former British ambassador Craig Murray, who has attende...

UK judge Vanessa Baraitser justified CIA spying on Julian Assange by citing a falsehood-filled CNN report. Her judgment highlighted corporate media’s enthusiastic role in a state-sponsored assault on press freedom.   by Ben Norton   Part 3 - CNN’s source: Untrustworthy, paranoid CIA-backed security firm   A closer look at the CNN article cited by Baraitser reveals it rests on a shoddy foundation. Published in July 2019, the CNN story was part of a larger, politically motivated campaign conceived by the US intelligence apparatus and embittered former Hillary Clinton aides that sought to portray Assange, WikiLeaks, and other political rivals as nefarious tools of the Kremlin. Co-authored by Arturo Torres Ramirez, the right-wing anti-Assange and anti-Correa Ecuadorian activist whose work has been supported by organizations funded by the US State Department and British government, the CNN article is based on exclusive access to hundreds of surveillance reports compiled by the...

by Jonathan Cook   Part 8 - The Antisemitism Industry   It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry. In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide. Instead the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they therefore deserve a unique sol...

While the US and its allies glorify Leopoldo López as a new MLK, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition  collaborates with Colombia’s narco-affiliated, death squad-sponsoring former President Álvaro Uribe.   by Ben Norton   Part 6 - Leopoldo López meets with narco-linked President Iván Duque   Colombia’s current president, Iván Duque Márquez, is Álvaro Uribe’s handpicked successor, and follows in his far-right footsteps. Like Uribe, Duque is linked to drug traffickers and organized crime networks in the country. Since he came to office in a deeply contested election in 2018, in which he was credibly accused of fraud, Colombian journalists have exposed Duque’s ties to a notorious drug lord named José Guillermo “Ñeñe” Hernández. Ñeñe Hernández was an extremely wealthy rancher involved in the drug trade, who used his illicit money to fund right-wing politicians. A leaked recording exposed that Duque used under-the-table funding from Ñeñe in order to bribe Colombians and bu...