the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

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

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 anything to sa

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.

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

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 familiar wi

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

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 off

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 relatively safe from capi

Like the mysterious figure it is named for, the Caesar sanctions bill is the product of an elaborate deception by shadowy US- and Gulf-backed operatives. Instead of protecting Syrian civilians, the unilateral measures are driving them towards hunger and death. by Max Blumenthal Part 9 - Congress signs off on Syrian misery, plunging the country’s currency On March 11, 2020, the usual suspects of the Caesar production assembled on Capitol Hill for one final lobbying push. This time, the full-time regime-change lobbyist Mouaz Moustafa delivered a self-described former prisoner from Syria’s Saydnaya complex named Omar Alshogre to the House Foreign Affairs Committee to make the case for escalating the economic war. Alshogre’s dramatic performance demonstrated his background as a business consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and a motivational speaker managed by an elite speaker’s bureau to secure Ted X lecture gigs. (Back in March 2019, Alshogre was brought onto CNN to

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 9 - FRENA’s religious extremist member Juan Bosco Abascal warns of the “Synagogue of Satan” The last currently known member of the FRENA governing council is Juan Bosco Abascal, an elite businessman with very strange fundamentalist religious beliefs. On his Facebook page, where he posts non-stop anti-AMLO propaganda and has nearly 13,000 followers, Abascal says he worked as a “ leader for human development projects ” for restaurant and hotel chains, the Jalisco state’s finance ministry, and Pemex, the Mexican state-owned oil company. Abascal also helped lead an ultra-conservative NGO that calls itself Family, Force of the Future. There, he served as a consultant and speaker, addressing themes such as “ death, culture, abortion, the