Britain’s Secretary of Defense Gavin Williamson has said that leaving the European Union would allow his country to expand its military presence abroad and establish more bases in other countries.

Williamson said on Sunday that Brexit would enable Britain to re-assert itself as a global military power by extending its military presence to many more countries.

“This is our biggest moment as a nation since the end of the Second World War, when we can recast ourselves in a different way, we can actually play the role on the world stage that the world expects us to play,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph.

The comments come as many countries have suffered throughout the past century because of Britain’s military interventions.

Under the Labour-led government of Tony Blair, the UK intervened in two conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the succeeding Conservative-leader, David Cameron, authorized attacks on Libya in…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has told his American counterpart Donald Trump that the Kremlin is ready for entering into dialogue with the White House on a “wide-ranging agenda” as Moscow-Washington relations are currently at their worst since the end of the Cold War era.

The Russian leader made the invitation in a letter sent to Trump on Sunday on the occasion of Christmas, a month after the US president abruptly canceled a planned meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Argentina, citing tensions caused following Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian navy ships off the coast of Crimea.

“Vladimir Putin stressed that the (Russia – United States) relations are the most important factor for providing strategic stability and international security,” said the Kremlin in a statement on Sunday, adding, “He confirmed that Russia is open for dialogue with the USA on the most wide-ranging agenda.”

Moscow’s relations…

A female Swedish journalist became disillusioned with her country after witnessing how “in a country that claims to be one of the most feminist places on earth” the media couldn’t care less about reports of Middle Eastern migrants sexually assaulting women en masse at a music festival in 2015.

From The Guardian, “Sweden’s Dark Soul by Kajsa Norman review – ‘far from a utopia’”:

Sweden is proud of its reputation for being one of the world’s most progressive and egalitarian nations, and for a long time Kajsa Norman thought that its main defect was being rather “boring”. As an investigative journalist, she preferred more challenging environments, such as Zimbabwe. But while abroad she heard of an incident in Sweden “so disturbing and strange” that she felt compelled to investigate. What she found shook her faith in her country.

The annual We Are Sthlm music festival attracts some 200,000 people, mostly aged between 13 and 19, to Kungsträdgården Park in central Stockholm. On a balmy evening in August 2015, a middle-aged psychologist, whom the author calls Hans, as he wishes to remain anonymous, took his teenage relatives to the festival. As twilight fell, he noticed how groups of men and boys appeared and began “eyeing the young girls in hot pants”. During the evening he saw girl after girl stagger out from the crowd to ask for help from the security guards after being sexually assaulted.

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Afterwards Hans was haunted by the memory of “watching packs of predators hunt helpless prey”, and was shocked that nothing appeared in the press the next day. When he emailed the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, a journalist called him….

Zero Hedge
December 30, 2018

“Your cash is not wanted here”, a growing number of retailers and restaurants throughout the US and UK are telling customers. But are reasons being given by companies for the new “cashless” approach — speed, efficiency, and the safety of store employees — valid enough to require something as utterly and downright unAmerican as rejecting cash?

We think not, and unfortunately the trend of “cash not welcome here” establishments is growing, to the point that lawmakers are beginning to take note and could introduce legislation barring the practice, as Massachusetts has done already, and as the New Jersey State House could be set to do next. According to a Federal Reserve survey conducted in 2017 cited in The Wall Street Journal, cash represented 30% of all transactions in America, with 55% of those being under $10.

Regardless of Americans’ longtime preference for plastic in most transactions, many of which take place online, research by the Federal Reserve found that cash is still king in terms of Americans’ daily lives and usage, and as the study concluded further, this remains true across all income levels:

Not only is cash used frequently for small value and in-person purchases, it is also used by a wide array of consumers. The data on cash use by household income provides two main insights. First, consumers make—on average—14 cash transactions per month, regardless of household income. It is also noteworthy that cash was the most, or second most, used payment instrument regardless of household income, indicating that its value to consumers as a payment instrument was not limited to lower income households that may be less likely to have access to an account at a financial institution.

But this reality is now pushing up against the new trend of the cashless restaurant, bar and retailer, and creating awkward and frustrating…

Britain’s Trade Secretary Liam Fox believes there is a “50-50” chance that Britain would cancel its decision to leave the European Union if the parliament rejects a divorce deal signed with the EU.

Fox, a leading supporter of leaving the EU, said Sunday that the current political situation in London meant that Brexit had an even chance for cancellation and survival.

“If we were not to vote for that, I’m not sure I would give it (Brexit) much more than 50-50,” Fox told the Sunday Times newspaper, without elaborating on what mechanism the government will seek to scrap Brexit.

The comments come as Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to put her Brexit deal to a vote in the House of Commons in mid-January.

May delayed an original vote planned for earlier this month as she faced growing criticism from across the political spectrum about the deal. However, many believe the agreement, signed off in an EU summit last month, has a little…

Online pornography, mainly distributed by US internet companies like Google, has led to widespread moral corruption and sexual exploitation in Britain and other Western countries, a political analyst from London says.

William Spring said in an interview with the Press TV on Sunday that reports showing that women are offered homes in Britain in return for sex highlights the dominance of porn in those societies.

“The main problem is the lack of morals in the West. The Western countries are dominated by pornography disseminated by the Google corporation, which has resulted in a belief that women can just be treated as chattels and objects for a man to exploit sexually,” said Spring.

The expert said offering rooms to women in Britain in return for sex was “just another example” of the fundamental problem of not respecting women in the Western societies.

He said that coupled with a soaring problem of housing in Britain, the pornographic…

France’s “yellow vest” protests and the fraud of Mélenchon’s “citizens revolution”

By
Alex Lantier

29 December 2018

The “yellow vest” protests in France and strikes organized on social media in Portugal have unmasked the petty-bourgeois milieu of union bureaucrats and official “left” parties in Europe. The eruption of a movement in the working class against social inequality blindsided them, busy as they were promoting austerity and war in presidential palaces and parliamentary speeches. Having played no role whatsoever in the movement against French President Emmanuel Macron, they are now trying to strangle it.

The Left Bloc (BE), the Portuguese allies of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI) party, does not hide its fear and loathing towards strikers and “yellow vests.” BE official Francisco Louçã denounced them: “This is a far-right operation. They are using social media to whip up aggressive politicization in far-right terms.”

Mélenchon, however, tries to influence the “yellow vests,” pompously declaring they have vindicated his populism. On his blog, he writes: “I am jubilant. Current events are, I believe, the confirmation of the theoretical model formulated in my theory of citizens revolution summarized in my book The Era of the People .”

If Mélenchon claims victory in the vapid realm of postmodernist theory, it is because for him, the “yellow vest” movement is in reality a defeat. The class struggle erupted when the “yellow vests,” including tens of thousands of Mélenchon voters, took action independently of the LFI. Masses of workers in France and internationally have received a priceless lesson: that real struggle against the ruling elite requires opposing the anti-Marxist forces that for decades…

US President Donald Trump is “immoral and dishonest,” says retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal, criticizing the American leader’s Middle East policy.

Speaking in an interview on Sunday, McChrystal, who once led the US military forces in Afghanistan, said Trump was not telling the truth most of the time.

“Do you think he’s a liar?” the former top general was asked on the set of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“I don’t think he tells the truth,” McChrystal responded.

“Is Trump immoral, in your view?” he was asked. “I think he is,” he said.

McChrystal then praised outgoing US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis for speaking against Trump and said he would not accept any job offer from the president.

“It’s important for me to work with people who are basically honestly, who tell the truth as best they know,” he said.

Mattis handed in his resignation letter earlier this month, shortly after Trump…

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

– Carl Sagan

“To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity.”

– Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

According to a study by the WWF the earth has lost over half of its wildlife in just 40 years. A staggering statistic that should shake every conscious person to their core. Each of us is a witness to this Great Dying, the sixth mass extinction, the last one being 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs.Yet despite overwhelming evidence of a rapidly crashing biosphere many leaders, if not most, in the privileged global north seem oblivious or apathetic to the carnage.All around the planet wildlife populations are in a free fall, from birds to amphibians to mammals to marine life to insects. But today the interests of capital not only dominate our economic, media and political order, they dominate our consciousness.

The Latin meaning for homo sapiens is “wise man.” But as I ponder our precarious position on theprecipice of the Sixth Mass Extinction I cannot help but be struck by its glaring irony. Standing in a cemetery crowded with the bones of countless species I am left with little room to marvel…

The New York Times wrote Christmas Day that an 8-year old Guatemalan boy died in US Border Control custody. The circumstances are not clear, or are simply not reported. A month earlier, a 7-year old girl, also from Guatemala, died also in US Border Control custody. Here too, the circumstances are not revealed. How many more children, not mentioned by any media, or any statistics have already perished, trying to make their way to a better future?  A better future, because their real and beloved future in their own countries has been miserably destroyed by the US empire’s imposed corporate abuse and fascist-like dictatorships. But who cares? They are just children of illegal immigrants; children separated from their parents to dissuade parents to migrate to the US of A.  Welcome to paradise of hell!

Currently a large portion of the US Government is shut down, due to a budget dispute between President Trump and the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party breathing down his neck and the Democrats. At stake are US$5 billion for a Border Wall Trump requests as part of the general budget, and the Democrats refuse to sign-off on it. The Border Wall would have countless nefarious and more serious killer effects. More kids in border custody, some dehydrated, some simply exhausted from the long journey, some sick, all separated from their parents, maybe for good, and neglected by US Authorities, and most of them just simply left to their plight which, in many cases,…

Victoria Friedman
Breitbart
December 30, 2018

British counter-terror police have been engaged in protecting meat industry workers as action by vegan activists has become move violent.

Workers at abattoirs, farms, and meat-producing factories have been under increasing threat by far-left animal rights campaigners, with the British Poultry Council and the National Pig Association being just two of the bodies seeking support from the counter-terrorism force, reports the Mail on Sunday.

In one historic case reported by Channel 4 Dispatches, militant vegan group SAVE attacked a Jewish kosher abattoir in east London two years ago, breaking into the building and scrawling anti-Semitic slogans on the wall, with one protester yelling, “It’s a holocaust. You Nazis!”

The report of meat producers engaging counter-terror police comes after Waitrose Foodmagazine editor William Sitwell was forced to resign over a joke about vegans, and found himself subjected to vitriol and threats of violence against him and his family.

Mr Sitwell told the Mail on Sunday, “There were threats to rape my wife, tie her up, and cut off her genitals.”

Organised vegan activists have been calling for their lifestyle to be given the same “protected characteristic” status as race, religion, sexuality, gender, and disability, under discrimination laws, which would make it a criminal offence to mock or discriminate against vegans.

The calls followed the case of Jordi Casamitjana in early December, who took his discrimination claim to the High Court after alleging that his firing from the League Against Cruel Sports was due to discrimination against his lifestyle.

Read more.

This article was posted: Sunday, December 30, 2018 at 8:59 am

…

Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri says the United States is only fueling insecurity in the Persian Gulf through its presence in the strategic region.

Speaking to reporters in the southern Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas on Sunday, the top Iranian military chief said US President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Syria was of no significance for defensive and security missions in the region.

“The US exit from Syria was the humiliating withdrawal of a country that was present there without the consent and approval of the [Syrian] people and the legal government,” Baqeri said.

Iran’s military chief noted that the Americans have always sowed insecurity wherever they had a presence, adding, “Their retreat from Syria and other parts of the region will certainly lead to increased security and peace.”

Baqeri emphasized that the Persian Gulf countries are capable of ensuring…

“America is now aiding and abetting the use of child soldiers.”

That was how Ari Rabin-Havt, deputy policy director for US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), responded to a New York Times report on Friday detailing Saudi Arabia’s use of Sudanese child soldiers as young as 14 years old to wage its vicious assault on Yemen, which has resulted in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

According to the Times, “Five fighters who have returned from Yemen and another about to depart said that children made up at least 20 percent of their units. Two said children were more than 40 percent.”

“To keep a safe distance from the battle lines,” the Times noted, “their Saudi or Emirati overseers commanded the Sudanese fighters almost exclusively by remote control, directing them to attack or retreat through radio headsets and GPS systems provided to the Sudanese officers in charge of each unit, the fighters all said.”

The Times report was met with horror by anti-war activists, who highlighted the fact that—by continuing to send the Saudis arms and provide other military assistance—the United States is directly complicit in the kingdom’s use of children as soldiers in its years-long war on Yemen.

“Children paid to kill children. This is how our ‘ally,’ Saudi Arabia, wages its disgusting war in Yemen,” wrote Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund. “And we help pay for it.”

As the Times reported, nearly all of the Sudanese soldiers paid by Saudi Arabia to fight in Yemen “appear to come from the battle-scarred and impoverished region of Darfur, where some 300,000 people were killed and 1.2 million displaced during a dozen years of conflict over diminishing arable land and other scarce resources.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration and Democrats in Congress continued to attack each other on Sunday over the proposed US-Mexico border wall that triggered a partial government shutdown, now in its ninth day.

Trump has refused to sign any kind of spending bill that does not include more than $5 billion for the wall and border security measures, narrowing prospects for the federal shutdown to end.

The last spending bill expired at midnight on December 22, starting the latest shutdown of certain government agencies.

Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said the president was waiting for Democrats to negotiate.

Congressional Democrats oppose the wall, calling it unnecessary and ineffective. They say the president is the one who refused to endorse a spending plan worked out this month by bipartisan leaders in Congress that would have avoided a shutdown.

More Americans have put the blame on Trump rather than the members of…

The threat by President Trump to fire the Federal Reserve chairman is an example of how our entire federal system has grown into a monstrosity that is overwhelmingly unconstitutional – and almost everyone, not just President Trump, is to blame.

The Federal Reserve System is an independent regulatory agency, that murky and unaccountable fourth branch of government.  As such, its members, once nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, serve whatever term is provided for in the statute creating the independent agency.

Just as the Senate cannot undo its confirmation, the president cannot undo his nomination (or the nomination of his predecessor if the appointment was made before his term began).  The purpose of these agencies is to provide a federal creature that makes laws (regulations) without congressional approval and that executes laws without presidential approval.

Against the State: An …
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
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Most of these agencies are not only “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-executive,” but also “quasi-judicial,” which destroys the separation of powers in a system not anywhere provided for in the Constitution.  There are some safeguards – the findings of an agency can be overturned by a federal court, although the findings of an independent agency have a presumption of being right.

Why were these agencies established?  This is one of the most insidious parts of the whole system: independent regulatory agencies are intended to make laws without Congress, enforce laws without the president, and judge compliance with those laws without federal courts.  Most Americans have no idea just how much power has been transferred to…

Kyle Olsen
The American Mirror
December 30, 2018

The Facebook censors nailed a Christian leader over a “dehumanizing” post from over two years ago.

The social media giant — which has been repeatedly accused of targeting conservatives for merely expressing personal opinions — temporarily suspended Franklin Graham for a post he made in 2016 regarding his view on a piece of legislation in North Carolina.

Last week I was banned from posting on @Facebook for 24 hrs because of a 2016 post about NC’s House Bill 2 (bathroom bill). They said the post went against their “community standards on hate speech.” Facebook is making & changing the rules. 1/2 https://t.co/HYIgErnp3J

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 29, 2018

“Last week I was banned from posting on @Facebook for 24 hrs because of a 2016 post about NC’s House Bill 2 (bathroom bill),” Graham tweeted on Friday.

“They said the post went against their ‘community standards on hate speech.’ Facebook is making & changing the rules.”

.@Facebook is censoring free speech. They’re making & changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules & His Word is truth. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA. You can read the post that Facebook took down last week here: 2/2 https://t.co/SIbgivZjTo

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 29, 2018

“.@Facebook is censoring free speech,” he continued in a second tweet.

“They’re making & changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules & His Word is truth. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA.”

In the 2016 post, Graham discussed Bruce Springsteen boycotting North Carolina over the bill, which would keep men out of womens’ bathrooms.

“He says the NC law #HB2 to prevent men from being able to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms is going ‘backwards instead of forwards,’” Graham…

Reuters
December 30, 2018

Britain’s trade minister Liam Fox said there is a “50-50” chance that Brexit may be stopped if parliament rejects the government’s divorce deal with the European Union next month.

“If we were not to vote for that, I’m not sure I would give it (Brexit) much more than 50-50,” Fox, a leading supporter of leaving the EU, told the Sunday Times newspaper.

With three months left until the United Kingdom is due to leave the EU on March 29, May’s Brexit deal is floundering, opening up a range of possibilities from a Brexit without a trade deal to calling Brexit off.

Earlier this month, May pulled a planned vote on her deal after admitting parliament would reject it. Lawmakers are set to vote on the deal in the week starting Jan. 14.

Read more.

This article was posted: Sunday, December 30, 2018 at 9:35 am

The United States has reportedly evacuated a military base in Syria, the first step towards delivering on President Donald Trump’s recent pledge to pull American forces out of the war-torn Arab country.

According to local residents of al-Malikiya, in the northeastern province of Hasakeh, some 50 American soldiers had already left the base and traveled to  a base in Iraq, along with their armored vehicles and other equipment.

The evacuation began after Trump, in an unexpected change of policy, announced he was going to return the troops back home because the Daesh terrorist group was already defeated and there was no reason for the US to extend military presence there.

The US has stationed about 2,000 soldiers in 18 bases across Syria since 2015. The Pentagon says the withdrawal would take between two and three months.

The controversial decision triggered backlash from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and prompted Defense…

The profound question which transcends all this day-to-day market drama over the holidays is the nature of the economic slowdown now occurring globally. This slowdown can be seen both inside and outside the US. In reviewing the laboratory of history — especially those experiments featuring severe asset inflation, unaccompanied by high official estimates of consumer price inflation — three possible “echoes” deserve attention in coming weeks and months. (History echoes rather than repeats!)

Will We Learn from History — And What Will Soon Be History?

The behavioral finance theorists tell us that which echo sounds and which outcome occurs is more obvious in hindsight than to anyone in real time. As Daniel Kahneman writes (in Thinking Fast and Slow):

The core of hindsight bias is that we believe we understand the past, which implies the future should also be knowable; but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do – compelling narratives foster an illusion of inevitability; but no such story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome .

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
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Whichever historical echo turns out to be loudest as the Great Monetary Inflation of 2011-18 enters its late dangerous phase.  Whether we’re looking at 1927-9, 1930-3, or 1937-8, the story will seem obvious in retrospect, at least according to skilled narrators. There may be competing narratives about these events — even decades into the future, just as there still are today about each of the above mentioned episodes. Even today, the Austrian School, the Keynesians, and the monetarists, all tell very different historical narratives and the…

When a general popularly known as James “Mad Dog” Mattis abandons a really mad American president, you know something has fallen off the edge in Washington. Since the Roman empire, formerly loyal military chiefs have fled crackpot leaders, and Mattis’s retreat from the White House might have the smell of de Gaulle and Petain about it.

De Gaulle was confronted by an immensely powerful hero of the people – the Lion of Verdun – who was, in his dotage, about to shrug off the sacred alliance with Britain for Nazi collaboration (for which, I suppose, read Putin’s Russia). The decision was made to have nothing to do with Petain, or what Mattis now refers to as “malign actors”. De Gaulle would lead Free France instead.

Mattis has no such ambitions – not yet, at any rate – although there are plenty of Lavals and Weygands waiting to see if Trump chooses one of them for his next secretary of defence. Besides, history should not grant Trump and Mattis such an epic panorama.

After all, no Trump tweet could compare with Petain’s 1916 “We’ll get them!” (“on les aura”) slogan, and the dignified, cold and fastidious de Gaulle would never have lent himself to the rant Mattis embarked upon in San Diego in 2005: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it’s…

University authorities suppress student protest in China

By
Peter Symonds

29 December 2018

Students at the prestigious Peking University yesterday held a protest against the decision by university authorities to suppress the Marxist student society. While the demonstration only involved about a dozen students peacefully chanting holding up placards, university guards quickly moved in to break it up and drag the protesters away.

“Give us back our Marxist student society, resist violence on campus,” the students chanted. Witnesses told the South China Morning Post that the students had locked arms. Some were injured as security guards forced them into a building, manhandling and in some cases carrying them inside.

“Several of them were pushed to the ground and suffered cuts to their hands and some had their glasses broken in the struggle,” according to one witness. At least eight of the students were still being held yesterday evening.

The protest followed the restructuring of the Marxist student society by university authorities to ensure it was firmly under their political control. It replaced the society’s leaders, including its president Qui Zhanxuan, and installed some 32 new members, many of whom were members of the Communist Youth League or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The immediate pretext for the society’s suppression was an attempt by Qui to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the birth of former CCP leader Mao Zedong on December 26 1893. He had invited students throughout the country to take part in online events to mark the occasion.

Qui was detained by police on Tuesday, given a written warning for “disrupting campus order” and then released on Thursday. He was among the students protesting yesterday and is still being held.

Members of the…

Sputnik
December 30, 2018

Nitrites used in the meat industry have long been a source of debate, with experts warning of imminent health risks that they carry, despite their anti-inflammatory and pleasant colouring properties.

The reputation of the meat industry will hit an all-time low unless it removes cancer-causing chemicals from processed products such as bacon and ham, a number of experts and politicians have warned.

The group, led by Professor Chris Elliott, stated that they have reached a “consensus of scientific opinion” that the nitrites used to cure meat produce carcinogens called nitrosamines when ingested, citing evidence that consumption of processed meat such as sausages, ham or bacon containing these chemicals results in 6,000 bowel cancer cases every year in the UK, which is over four times the number of on-road fatalities in the country. The group has kicked off a campaign aimed at taking the issue as seriously as sugar levels in foods.

“Government action to remove nitrites from processed meats should not be far away”, one of the scientists in the group, cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra pointed out, adding that if no action to this end is taken, the meat industry will be “condemned to a similar reputational blow to that dealt to tobacco”.

Not only doctors and scientists enrolled in the campaigning coalition, but also, quite a few politicians, namely Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson; former shadow environment secretaries Mary Creagh and Kerry McCarthy; the Tory chair of parliament’s cross-party group on food and health, David Amess, and others.

The coalition warned in a statement that there is no sufficient action being undertaken to raise awareness of nitrites in processed meat and the health risks they carry, “in stark contrast to warnings regularly issued regarding sugar and fattening foods”.

The coalition says the…

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Programs in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. In this interview, Wolff discusses how market-based economies have had their critics since the times of Plato and Aristotle, how both major US political parties have become subservient to the gospel of capitalism and how technology isn’t always constructive. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Vaios Triantafyllou: Picking up where we left off in our previous conversation, I would like to discuss the interplay between central planning or economic organization and the direct participation in decision-making on both a political and an economic level. Do you think that there exists such an interplay? If so, how can we make sure that the former does not interfere with or limit the latter?

Richard Wolff: You can think of economies that have existed historically, in which each producing unit (I will exaggerate now, but you get the point) was self-sufficient. Think of a farming family, a peasant family, that literally makes its own clothing, builds its own house, raises its own animals; it could be in some sense self-sufficient. But, for a long time in human history, the human community has found it advantageous in some way to shift from self-sufficiency to a division of labor so that one person bakes the bread, another person makes the shirts, another person designs the software programs and so on.

The minute you have a division of labor — and the advantage there is, as Adam Smith and many others note — you get more output per hour of input. But the minute you do that, to get that advantage, you must pay, dialectically, the price. You must deal with the negatives. One of those negatives is the need for coordination. There has to be some way that the bread maker makes enough bread but…

The mother of a Guatemalan boy, who has died in US detention, says his child was not sick when he left his country with his father, contradicting US officials’ account of the death.

Speaking to The Associated Press on Saturday, Catarina Alonzo, the mother of 8-year-old Felipe Gomez, said, her son reported he was well every time he and his dad called home during their journey to the US.

She said the last time she talked to Felipe he was in Mexico at the US border without any health-related problem.

However, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said the boy, who died early on Tuesday in Alamogordo, New Mexico, was suffering from the flu.

The boy showed “signs of potential illness” Monday and was rushed to a hospital in Alamogordo, where he was later pronounced dead, according to the agency.

He was the second migrant child this month to die in US custody after crossing the border.

Earlier this month, Jakelin Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old…

You had to love the narrative that the financial media put over about the 1000-plus point zoom in the DJIA on Wednesday: that pension funds were “rebalancing” their portfolios. It dredged up the image of a drowning man at the bottom of the deep blue sea with an anchor in one hand and an anvil in the other, switching hands.

Thursday’s last minute 900-point turnaround was another marvelous stunt to behold. Somebody gave the drowned man a pair of swim fins to kick himself furiously to the surface for a gulp of air. The truth, of course, is that pension funds are sunk, however you balance their investment loads while they’re underwater. They over-bought stocks out of sheer desperation during ten years of near-ZIRP bond yields, and started rotating back into bonds as they crept above the ZIRP handle, and now with bond yields retreating, they’re loading up again on still-overpriced stocks that pretend to be “bargains.” Everybody knows that this will not end well for pension funds. Glug Glug.

The Fall of the Ancien…
james howard kunstler
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The financial press and their red-headed step-siblings in the regular news media seem to think that getting rid of Mr. Trump will power the perpetual bull market into an Elon Musk nirvana of Martian vacations, hyperloops, and another chapter of US world domination — with Wonder Woman running the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spearheading an army of eunuchs. The New York Times made yet another pitch for impeachment today (Friday) in an editorial by the revered swamp fossil Elizabeth Drew, 83, who laid out everything but a credible case against the Golden Golem of Greatness. The newspaper makes itself more ridiculous each day in its furious…

A cyberattack has caused major printing and delivery disruptions for several major US newspapers, according to media reports.

The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and other titles belonging to Tribune Publishing were affected by the attack on Saturday. Tribune Publishing said it first detected the malware on Friday.

Citing an anonymous source with knowledge of the attack, the LA Times reported the virus has come from outside the US.

“We believe the intention of the attack was to disable infrastructure, more specifically servers, as opposed to looking to steal information,” according to the source.

Back-office systems used to publish and produce “newspapers across our properties” were hurt by the malware, Tribune Publishing spokeswoman Marisa Kollias said.

“Every market across the company was impacted,” Kollias added, but refused to give more specifications on the disruptions.

“There is no evidence that customer credit card…

The killing of a wolf pup near Corral Creek outside Sun Valley, Idaho was done to protect John Peavy’s business, Flat Top Sheep Company. Once again this raises the question of why public wildlife should be killed to increase the profitability of private enterprises operating on our public lands.

It is especially disconcerting that Peavy did not implement minimum measures to protect his own sheep, instead, used a taxpayer-funded “hired gun,” i.e., USDA Wildlife Services to kill our wolves.

Grazing on public lands is a privilege, not a right. Why should Peavy sheep, and his business interests be allowed to jeopardize, harass and kill public wildlife? If I were to harass his sheep when I discovered them polluting our streams or otherwise damaging our public lands, I would be arrested.

It’s important to note that Peavy’s sheep (and all other livestock on our public lands) are creating ecological damage to our property. His sheep pollute the water. Many studies have documented that sheep grazing can change vegetation favoring some grazing tolerant species at the cost of others sensitive to grazing pressure. Sheep also promote the spread of weeds and alien plants like cheatgrass.

The presence of domestic sheep can transmit diseases to wild bighorn sheep. And this is the primary reason bighorn sheep are absence in many mountain ranges that once inhabited.

Domestic sheep also trample and compact soil, reducing water infiltration.

The forage going into Peavy’s…

End-of-year polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and political trends over the past year and predict where things are heading in the next.

But a recent poll of European Jews – the largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a new, left wing form of anti-semitism.

The survey was conducted by the European Union’s agency on fundamental rights and was given great prominence in the liberal-left British daily the Guardian.

The newspaper highlighted one area of life in which Britain scored worse with Jews than any of the other 12 member states surveyed. Some 84 per cent of Jews in the UK believe there is a major problem with anti-semitism in British politics.

As a result, nearly a third say they have considered emigrating – presumably most of them to Israel, where the Law of Return offers an open-door policy to all Jews in the world.

Britain scored only slightly better on indices other than politics. Some 75 per cent said they thought anti-semitism was generally a problem in the UK, up from 48 per cent in 2012. The average score in the 12 EU states with significant Jewish populations was 70 per cent.

‘Playing with fire’

Jeremy Corbyn,…

President Donald Trump says talks on a trade deal between the US and China are progressing well following his phone conversation with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

Trump said in a Twitter message Saturday that his phone call with Xi was “long and very good” amid a 90-day truce between the two countries over their trade war.

Meanwhile, Chinese state media reported that Xi said teams from both nations have been working to implement an agreement reached with Trump.

“I hope that the two teams will meet each other half way, work hard, and strive to reach an agreement that is mutually beneficial and beneficial to the world as soon as possible,” state-run Xinhua news…

Government-named arbitrator to dictate Canada Post workers’ contract

By
Louis Girard

29 December 2018

Following the stipulations of the strikebreaking legislation the federal Liberal government rammed through parliament in late November, a government-appointed “mediator-arbitrator” has now been tasked with dictating the labor contracts for 50,000 Canada Post letter carriers, mail sorters, truck drivers, and post office clerks.

The arbitrator, former Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) Chair Elizabeth MacPherson, acted as mediator between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) for seven days ending December 17. Under the Liberals’ anti-strike law, this mediation process could have been extended for a further seven days. But all parties to the talks agreed this was pointless.

Through months of negotiations, government-owned Canada Post refused to even begin to address postal workers’ key concerns. These include a spike in injuries, forced overtime, two-tier wages, and precarious employment. Instead, Canada Post management relied, as it has for decades, on the readiness of the government of the day, whether Liberal or Conservative, to illegalize postal workers’ job action.

CUPW has praised MacPherson as “very knowledgeable” and touted her decades of experience in labour negotiations. In fact, as a federal mediator and later CIRB chair, she has worked to contain and suppress the class struggle and police Canada’s anti-worker labour laws. Named by the previous Harper Conservative government in 2011 to arbitrate a dispute between Air Canada and its 6,800 flight attendants, MacPherson imposed a concessionary contract on the workers they had twice rejected.

The criminalization of the postal workers’ five-week campaign of rotating…

With hundreds of thousands of federal employees currently furloughed or working without pay due to the ongoing government shutdown, President Donald Trump delivered another blow to struggling workers on Friday by signing an executive order that will freeze the pay of around two million public employees in 2019.

“This is just pouring salt into the wound,” declared Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents around 100,000 federal workers. “It is shocking that federal employees are taking yet another financial hit. As if missed paychecks and working without pay were not enough, now they have been told that they don’t even deserve a modest pay increase.”

✔️Furlough 400,000 federal workers
✔️Require another 400,000 to work without pay
✔️Freeze pay for entire federal civilian workforce
✔️Justify pay freeze on “our nation’s fiscal situation” (which was caused by massive tax cuts)
✔️Lie to troops about the military pay raise https://t.co/k9Htx7auO0

— Chris Lu (@ChrisLu44) December 29, 2018

Trump’s executive order—which largely flew under the radar of national news coverage—makes official his announcement earlier this year that he would cancel a scheduled 2.1 percent pay raise for 1.8 million non-military federal workers.

The president’s sudden concern for the budget deficit came just months after he signed into law $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, which have disproportionately flowed to wealthy Americans and large corporations.

“President Trump pushed through a tax scam that gave unprecedented handouts to billionaires and corporations—but believes it’s too expensive to pay hardworking federal workers a reasonable wage,” wrote Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) following Trump’s August…

Corruption is using a position of authority and/or trust dishonestly or for personal benefit, personal gratification, political gain or in such a way as to betray that trust.

Left-wing corruption hides under the left’s constant boasting of its tolerance toward minorities. The hypocrisy of the left is spectacular. That is why it’s well to gather a few recent examples.

1. The FBI was spectacularly corrupt during and after the 2016 election in its lenient treatment of Hillary Clinton and its campaign against Donald Trump.

2. Department of Justice officials not in the FBI acted in spectacularly corrupt ways to favor Hillary Clinton in her election bid.

3. The Clinton Foundation has been spectacularly corrupt in its sources and uses of funds.

Clinton Cash: The Unto…
Peter Schweizer
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4. Left-wing Facebook has been spectacularly corrupt in its treatment of user data.

5. Social media are spectacularly corrupt in cutting off numerous independent, right-wing and other sites and pages whose politics they wish to shut up.

6. Major television and print media are spectacularly corrupt in promoting their anti-Trump agenda.

7. “…corrupt collusion between Democratic politicians and left wing interest groups that is happening out in the open in blue states on our nation’s coasts. The state and local governments have essentially become socialist fiefdoms where opposing views are silenced and often conservatives are targeted, and cronies are paid off through the power of the purse and an unbalanced scale of justice.”

8. Spectacular leftist corruption of academic freedom and education within universities. This includes featherbedding of minorities into administrative…

A senior US military official is reportedly trying to lure American allies in the Asian Pacific region to boost their naval force in the South China Sea to support the Pentagon’s efforts to challenge China near its own territorial waters.

Warning that “the communists” intent to establish military bases in the South Pacific, US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs Randy Schriver called for the military backing of Washington’s regional allies in a recent interview with The Australian daily as cited in a Saturday report by the pro-military Star and Stripes newspaper.

According to the report, Beijing is engaged in “influence operations” in the South Pacific, “which have included donations to politicians and financing infrastructure projects in small island nations.” It further claimed that such moves have “caught the attention” of officials in Australia and New Zealand.

“I think what could potentially…

The US Navy has placed the development of hypersonic weapons on its “acquisition wish list” after Russia’s recent announcement of successful test and planned its deployment in 2019 of an “invincible” strategic missile that can fly 27 times the speed of sound.

Highlighting the growing concerns of US military officials about Russian and Chinese leading advancements on a technology that may potentially pose the threat of making existing US missile defense systems obsolete, pro-military news outlet military.com further reported on Friday that US Air Force has also put a priority on hypersonic weapons.

According to the report, under a recently proposed plan, Chief of US Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson listed the Navy’s intention to “develop and field an offensive hypersonic weapon by 2025” as a top priority.

Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov announced on Thursday that the country’s new missile, referred to as…

America’s Federal Reserve System is a private bank owned by the major banks of Wall Street, according to Stephen Lendman, a Chicago-based author and radio host.

After the stock tanked yet again on Monday, US President Donald Trump compared America’s central banking system, known as the Federal Reserve or the Fed, to a blundering golfer .

“The only problem our economy has is the Fed,” Trump tweeted. “The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch – he can’t putt!”

“Most people will be very surprised to learn that the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, is neither federal nor it has reserves,” Lendman told Press TV on Saturday.

“It’s a privately owned bank. It’s owned by the major banks of Wall Street, big ones, city groups, the Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo. The heads of these companies own the Fed,” he added.

“It’s just like a cooperation which chairs…

The outcry against Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria reveals an appetite for regional hegemony, writes As’ad AbuKhalil. It also minimizes the capacity of native militia to defend territory for which they fought and died.   

A Wise and Rare Decision

By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News

President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will withdraw 2000 U.S. troops from Syria has caused great alarm in elite circles. The New York Times and The Washington Post both warned it would leave Israel “abandoned” and “isolated” and would embolden enemies of the U.S.  Martin Indyk, a former Mideast envoy for Democratic administrations, complained that Trump did not factor in the national security interests of Israel.

Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who lost the presidency to Trump, tweeted: “Actions have consequences, and whether we’re in Syria or not, the people who want to harm us are there & at war. Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is dangerous. Playing into Russia & Iran’s hands is foolish. This President is putting our national security at grave risk.”

Hollywood celebrities have also jumped into the act.

The strong reaction to Trump’s decision (which fulfills a campaign promise to disengage militarily from the Middle East) highlights his gap with a mainstream media and foreign policy establishment that supports a more aggressive U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. The only time these detractors ever strongly supported Trump was when he ordered the bombing of Syria. Establishment spokesman Farid Zakaria, a favored CNN host and pundit, said Trump had finally become “presidential.” The only reservation was that the bombing should have been more  massive. 

Clinicians treating injured rebel fighters and civilians in Aleppo; Oct. 5, 2012. (Scott Bobb)

The latest civilian death toll in Syria is over 107,000. The media has, by and large, disregarded the extent to which U.S. bombs have contributed to this enormous loss of life. When the history of the Syrian war is written, it is very likely that the destruction of Raqqa will be categorized as a U.S. war crime—to be added to…

President Donald Trump’s announcement of an imminent withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria summoned a predictable paroxysm of outrage from Washington’s foreign policy establishment. Former Secretary of State and self-described “hair icon” Hillary Clinton perfectly distilled the bipartisan freakout into a single tweet, accusing Trump of “isolationism” and “playing into Russia and Iran’s hands.”

Michelle Flournoy, the DC apparatchik who would have been Hillary’s Secretary of Defense, slammed the pull-out as “foreign policy malpractice,” while Hillary’s successor at the State Department, John Kerry, threw bits of red meat to the Russiagate-crazed Democratic base by branding Trump’s decision “a Christmas gift to Putin.” From the halls of Congress to the K Street corridors of Gulf-funded think tanks, a chorus of protest proclaimed that removing US troops from Syria would simultaneously abet Iran and bring ISIS back from the grave.

Yet few of those thundering condemnations of the president’s move seemed able to explain just why a few thousand U.S. troops had been deployed to the Syrian hinterlands in the first place. If the mission was to destroy ISIS, then why did ISIS rise in the first place? And why was the jihadist organization still festering right in the midst of the U.S. military occupation?

Republican Gomorrah
Max Blumenthal
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Too many critics of withdrawal had played central roles in the Syrian crisis to answer these questions honestly. They had either served as media cheerleaders for intervention, or crafted the policies aimed at collapsing Syria’s government that fueled the rise of ISIS. The Syrian catastrophe was…

Bahia Amawai is a US citizen and Texas-based language specialist who helps autistic and speech-impaired children overcome their impairment.

Despite the essential and noble nature of her work, she was fired by the Pflugerville Independent School District, which serves the Austin area.

Every year, Amawai signs an annual contract that allows her to carry on with her tasks uninterrupted. This year however, something changed.

Shockingly, the school district has decided to add a clause to the contract that requires teachers and other employees to pledge not to boycott Israel ‘during the term of their contract.’

The ‘oath’ is now part of Section 2270.001 of the Texas Government Code, and it is stated in the contract with obvious elaboration so as those wishing to work, or keep their jobs with the Texan government find no loophole to avoid its penalties:

“‘Boycott Israel’ means refusing to deal with, terminating business activities with, or otherwise taking any action that is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations specifically with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israel or in Israeli-controlled territory ..”

The fact that Texas considers unacceptable even the boycott of businesses operating in the illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied West Bank puts it at odds with international law, and, subsequently with the vast majority of the international community.

But don’t rush to judgement yet,…

A British mother has been charged by a court in southern England of murdering her twins during Christmas holidays.

The Canterbury Magistrates’ Court, in Kent, on Saturday heard charges against Samantha Ford who had allegedly killed Jake and Chloe Ford, her twins, on Boxing Day.

The mother was arrested on Thursday, 27 December, after the twins were found dead at a home in Margate in the early hours of the morning.

Before she was arrested, the mother had been involved in a car crash and taken to hospital where she was treated for minor injuries. Police then visited Ford’s home in Kent out of concern for its occupants only to find the children. The twins were pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

The magistrate court decided to remand the mother, who was present during the hearing, in custody until Monday when she will appear at Maidstone Crown Court.

Homicide rates are at record high levels in the United Kingdom as experts believe issues…

They put their passion on the line, knocking on doors, dialing for dollars, giving speeches wherever they could find a podium, and working to turn out the voters to give them victory on election day.

They did this for months, then they learned that it had not been enough. Despite the soaring number of women who won races in the 2018 election, they were not among them. They were among the even greater number of women who lost.

While the winners make headlines and prepare to take office, the losers face a different reality.

“We find this narrative around women winning can be really isolating for the women who lost. There’s no guide for the day after the election if you lose,” says Erin Loos Cutraro of She Should Run, an organization she co-founded in 2011 to encourage more women to run for office.

In this election cycle, 2,015 women won their races and 2,178 women lost, according to the Center for American Women and Politics, which tallied federal, statewide, and state legislative races. CAWP says that means 51.2 percent of the women who ran in 2018 lost their election.

Those defeated included many excellent candidates that now constitute a valuable pool of experienced campaigners.

Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, a Democrat endorsed by Emily’s List and trained by Emerge Arizona, was defeated in her bid for Congress on Nov. 6 but says the blow was lessened by the realization that she had failed by about 10 points in a district President Trump carried by 21.

“We know we have moved the needle. We have made this district competitive for the first time in decades,” says Tipirneni, 51, who had set aside her cancer research to run for office after the 2016 election.

She rules out running for the same seat again and is exploring the best way for her to stay engaged politically. “In order to heal and come up from this place of sadness and loss, the thing that gives you forward movement is a plan,” she says. “I’m thinking about where I could contribute my voice and having an…

Dozens killed in protests against austerity and repression in Sudan

By
Jean Shaoul

29 December 2018

At least 37 people have been killed and 219 injured during protests opposing the Sudanese government of president Omar al-Bashir. Hundreds more have been arrested in a brutal crackdown on demonstrations against the rising cost of basic commodities including bread.

Among those arrested were 14 leaders of an opposition coalition, the National Consensus Forces, including its leader, the 85-year-old Farouk Abu Issa, who is in poor health, a senior leader of Sudan’s Communist Party, as well as leaders from the pan-Arab Ba’ath and Nasserist parties. Authorities have also blocked social media sites and disrupted internet services to stop protesters communicating.

Yesterday, security forces fired tear gas at hundreds of protesters following Friday prayers outside a mosque in Omdurman, part of the Greater Khartoum conurbation.

A crowd of protesters outside the burning offices of the ruling National Congress Party

The protests initially broke out on December 19 over the tripling in the price of bread and fuel shortages in the northeastern city of Atbara, where protesters torched the ruling National Congress Party’s offices. Atbara, is known as the “City of Steel and Fire” because of its historical importance to the rail network and the presence of a militant rail workers’ trade union that was dismantled under military rule in the 1980s.

The protests rapidly spread across Sudan’s major towns and cities, including the Riverain region—reputedly the regime’s stronghold—and the capital Khartoum, with demonstrators torching the party’s offices in Dongola. Within 24 hours, the demonstrations had escalated into a more generalized expression of opposition to years of…

The Queen Elizabeth II, the ailing British monarch who is currently 92, is planning a massive renovation of her historic residence in London with estimates suggesting the project will drain around half a billion dollar of the British taxpayer money.

The Daily Mirror reported on Saturday that the queen would be forced to move out of the Buckingham Palace, the 300-year-old residence she has been living in for the past decades, as the palace is undergoing renovations worth of about $468 million (or £369 million).

The report said the refurbishment of the palace, erected in 1703, would include replacing ageing cables, wires and boilers.

It said there was also the possibility for the monarch and her husband, Prince Philippe, 97, to stay at the palace and relocate to another wing.

Some media outlets and online users seized the opportunity to joke about the luxurious life-style of the ailing pair in the Buckingham Palace, saying that the giant…

President Donald Trump has said that Democrats are responsible for the death of two migrant children in US custody.

“Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “They can’t. If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try! The two children in question were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol.”

“The father of the young girl said it was not their fault, he hadn’t given her water in days. Border…

The Russian ruble moved sharply this week as the global equity and commodities rout continues in the wake of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates.

Russia’s central bank over-reacted to a rise in inflation as the global economy moves towards a chaotic and politically dangerous 2019.

Oil prices are moving in sync with equities as the markets have entered a panic phase anticipating a global recession next year. Normally the Ruble is very strongly tied to oil prices. But as I showed in an article just before Thanksgiving, the ruble didn’t respond at all to a drop in Brent Crude from $80+ per barrel to around $60.

Amidst a 38% drop in the price of Brent Crude since October, the ruble has fluctuated in a 4% band around 67 to the dollar. This is shocking stability given the volatility in oil prices.

Ruble weakness from earlier this year was an over-reaction to heightened sanctions by the U.S. especially at a time where the threat of further sanctions on Iran and Venezuela’s collapse kept prices high.

Oil’s Outlook

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And now it is catching up to this drop in oil prices with this week’s weakness. Oil prices are unsustainable above $65 per barrel amidst this level of supply.

They are equally unsustainable below $40 per barrel for just about everyone due to budget constraints (the Saudis) or debt-servicing (U.S. Frackers).

Since free-floating the ruble back in late 2014, Russia has been less and less affected by the fluctuations in oil prices. Because domestic costs are paid in rubles and income earned in dollars is offset by the weaker ruble.

It is government expenditures which suffer during waves of lower oil prices. But this year’s high prices have…

On December 26 Japan announced it would leave the International Whaling Commission and resume whale-hunting which was banned since 1986 when it was acknowledged (albeit reluctantly by Tokyo) that some species had been driven almost to extinction.

Irrespective of the moral aspects of the affair, and the fact that whale-killing is one of mankind’s cruelest commercial entertainments, the decision signals yet another move by Japan to assert itself on the world stage where it is demonstrating its determination to expand its military capabilities.

On December 11 Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that “Japan plans to effectively upgrade its helicopter carriers to enable them to transport and launch fighter jets.”  Concurrently the Indian Ministry of Defence noted that in the course of a large exercise being held in India by the US and Indian air forces, “two military pilots from Japan are also taking part in the exercise as observers.”  There was also aReuter’s account of Tokyo’s plans “to boost defense spending over the next five years to help pay for new stealth fighters and other advanced US military equipment.”

Coincidentally, these developments were reported in the same week as the anniversary of the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, which was totally unreported by the Western media but remembered in China where “over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people” and wreaked…

Bathed in the soothing waters of the Blue Wave, such that it was, a new US Congress will be baptized on January 3rd. But what portends when “Mad Dog” Mattis, arch racist Jeff Sessions, and deep state spooks are canonized by self-identified liberals and leftists as bulwarks against fascism? When all mainstream “opposition” politics can be reduced to a single issue: Trump. And when the mid-term elections ignored deepening impoverishment at home, endless wars abroad, and climate calamity – let alone the tax cut for the super-rich – and instead focused on the “threat” posed by (take your pick) immigrants or the Russians.

For the first time ever, the Gallup poll reported that most Democrats favor socialism to capitalism. And for good reason: as the Occupy movement proclaimed, “the system isn’t broken, it’s fixed.” An observer from the UK quipped, if the mid-term elections would have changed anything, they would not have been allowed.

The American body politic is in deep malaise with the current administration. But Trump is the symptom, not the disease, which is neoliberal rule. The conditions that allowed the ascendency of Trump were the result of the neoliberal policies of Obama/Bush and of their predecessors. Trump does not so much represent a break or reversal of Obama era policies. Rather, we are suffering a continuation and intensification of those policies as the body politic lurches to the…

A new report shows that city councils in Britain try to get rid of the homeless and rough-sleepers by giving them single tickets.

The Guardian newspaper said Saturday that thousands of rough sleepers and homeless people had been given one-way train, bus and flight tickets by UK councils in the last four years.

The report said the destinations chosen for the homeless people by the councils showed they were seeking to have them leave areas and sometimes even leave the country.

Some campaigners and MPs have criticized the councils for their “reconnection policies” in which they allegedly seek to encourage rough-sleepers to voluntarily return to areas where they have family and support networks.

They say the policy is a form of “street cleansing” by the councils as they struggle to reduce homelessness and rough-sleeping rates in their areas.

Rough-sleepers have also challenged councils’ notion that the tickets are voluntarily…

Two-year-old Abdullah Hassan, whose Yemeni mother had been banned entrance to the United States by the State Department for months to see him, has died.

Hassan died on Friday from a terminal genetic brain disease named hypomyelination in UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California. 

The two-year-old Hassan, who was a US citizen, had been brought to the US for treatment about three months ago by his father, Ali Hassan, who also bears US citizenship.

His mother, Shaima Swileh, had been barred from visiting her ailing son due to the US travel ban imposed on several Muslim countries.

For months, the US State Department, citing the presidential travel ban, had rejected her visa request. 

Swileh was eventually granted permission to enter the US days before Hassan’s death and only after she sued the Trump administration over the travel ban.

Read more:
Trump travel ban preventing Yemeni mother from seeing dying son
Rights…

Christmas wasn’t going to be much this year at the Maldonados’ tiny home in eastern El Salvador. Then 6-year-old Wilder arrived, lugging a duffel bag fat with the brightly colored remnants of his brief life in the United States — time he’d spent separated from his father by immigration authorities.

Suddenly, the two shabby rooms with dirt floors and drab adobe walls turned festive. As a pot of chicken stew simmered on a wood-burning stove, a group of barefoot children rummaged with glee through the big black bag, pulling out treasures.

Two-year-old Kevien claimed the Spider-Man pajamas and the talking Spider-Man mask that said things like, “Look out, it’s web-slinging time!” Darwin, a neighbor’s kid, posed in a pair of red Spider-Man glasses with silvery-white webs and blinking lights on the frames.

Yohana, 14 and wispy like a ballerina, picked up a glossy soccer ball that had “USA,” emblazoned on one side and called Darwin outside to play. Meanwhile, the baby, MiLeidi, 8 months old, squealed in delight at a stuffed Olaf, the snowman from “Frozen,” that was bigger than she was.

The only kid who didn’t seem to care much about the contents of the duffel bag was Wilder. He sat by himself on the only bed in the house, apart from the commotion, engrossed in games on his mother’s old cellphone. Kevien offered Wilder the talking mask, trying to entice him to come play. But, without looking up from the cellphone, Wilder shook his head and turned away.

The toys in the duffel bag were all he had left from a seven-month journey to the US with his father, Hilario Maldonado, that had taken him a world away from El Salvador and his family’s impoverished existence, to a place with television sets and hot showers, where he’d slept in a bunk bed and ate as much pizza as he wanted. They’d traveled there in a succession of trucks so crowded with other immigrants that he’d nearly suffocated, and they had reached their goal only to be separated for months in…

The White House says President Donald Trump has not yet ordered the US military to pull troops out of Afghanistan, amid reports that Trump is planning for the withdrawal of thousands of troops from the country.

“The president has not made a determination to drawdown U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and he has not directed the Department of Defense to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. personnel from Afghanistan,” Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg on Friday.

The official White House statement came after reports were published by Bloomberg and various media outlets from unnamed American officials who claimed the Pentagon was pulling out some 7,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan. The US has a total of 14,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan.

The United States — under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency — and its allies invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001…

While wages have supposedly gone up 3.4% in 2018, taxes and fees are rising at much higher rates.

Here’s a list of tax and fee increases hitting residents of one of the counties I call home; the list includes taxes/fees raised in 2017 and 2018:

1. Property taxes: between 6.5% and 10%, depending on the property class

2. Gasoline tax (county), from 8.8 cents to 23 cents, phased in over 3 years

3. General excise tax, up 6.3%

4. Garbage fee (commercial): up 27%

5. Sewer fees: up 44%

Money and Work Unchained
Charles Hugh Smith
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6. Electricity (base rate): up 7.4%

7. Annual vehicle safety inspection fee (state): up $5.81

8. County water service: up 8%

9. Accommodation fee (a.k.a. hotel tax) (state): up 10%

I may have missed a few, but you get the idea: while wages have supposedly gone up 3.4% in 2018, taxes and fees are rising at much higher rates. (Given that the Consumer Price Index underweights increases in big-ticket costs such as healthcare and college, the 3.4% gain is suspect; those households exposed to giant leaps in expenses likely lost ground).

I understand local governments are caught in a vise: wages and benefits to their employees make up the majority of their expenses, and those costs are mandated by union contracts and/or state-level agreements.

Many local governments cut services in the Great Recession rather than raise fees and taxes, and so now that the economy has “recovered,” they’re rushing to raise revenues to restore services or deal with the backlog of projects set aside during the lean years.

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The British government has granted mega contracts to three shipping companies as it seeks to cope with chaotic circumstances that could arise of a disorderly exit from the European Union next year.

The Department for Transport (DfT) said in a Saturday statement that the contracts, worth of around £100 million, will be aimed at chartering extra sea ferries to ease cross-Channel congestion if the government fails to secure the Brexit deal it has signed with the EU.

“While remaining committed to working to ensure a deal is reached, the department is helping ensure the rest of government are fully prepared for a range of scenarios,” read the statement, adding, “This extra capacity is a small but important element of the DfT’s no-deal planning.”

Many believe Prime Minister Theresa May has a little chance of going through the British parliament with her Brexit deal in mid-January. May has repeatedly indicated that if the House of Commons…

A majority of Americans have expressed support for pulling the US troops out of Syria, according to a recent poll.

According to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll published by The Hill on Saturday, the majority of the participants in the survey supported US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and reduce the country’s military presence in Afghanistan.

Trump announced that he had decided to withdraw the approximately 2,000 US troops in Syria, and cut in half the roughly 14,000 US forces in Afghanistan.

Poll results showed that 52% of respondents said they backed the withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan.

By contrast, 48 percent said they oppose the troop withdrawals and reductions, the poll found.

The announcement of the US troop withdrawal was followed by the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and Brett McGurk, the US special envoy to the so-called anti-Daesh coalition in Syria and…

Facebook: The global censor

29 December 2018

The year 2018 has seen a vast intensification of internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Twitter, transforming them from tools for exchanging information and communicating around the world into massive censorship dragnets for policing what their users say, do and think.

In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google charging that the company, in collusion with the US government, was working to shape political discourse by manipulating search results. The open letter warned that Google’s actions set a dangerous precedent for subverting constitutional protections of freedom of speech and demanded that the company cease what the WSWS called “political blacklisting” of left-wing sites.

Sixteen months later, the central argument of the open letter—that Google and its peers are carrying out political censorship—is undeniable. The regime that Google pioneered through its search engine has been expanded to all major US social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In a front-page article published Friday, titled “How Facebook Controls What World Can Say,” the New York Times writes that Facebook’s actions “make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself.”

Facebook has “quietly become, with a speed that makes even employees uncomfortable, what is arguably one of the world’s most powerful political regulators,” the article states. “Increasingly,” the Times concludes, “the decisions on what posts should be barred amount to regulating political speech—and not just on the fringes.”

The transformation of Facebook into an instrument for political censorship was driven…

Too many of those protesting the removal of U.S. forces are authors of the catastrophe that tore Syria to pieces, reports Max Blumenthal for Consortium News.

By Max Blumenthal
Special to Consortium News

President Donald Trump’s announcement of an imminent withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria summoned a predictable paroxysm of outrage from Washington’s foreign policy establishment. Former secretary of state and self-described “hair icon” Hillary Clinton perfectly distilled the bipartisan freakout into a single tweet, accusing Trump of “isolationism” and “playing into Russia and Iran’s hands.”

Michelle Flournoy, the DC apparatchik who would have been Hillary’s secretary of defense, slammed the pull-out as “foreign policy malpractice,” while Hillary’s successor at the State Department, John Kerry, threw bits of red meat to the Russiagate-crazed Democratic base by branding Trump’s decision “a Christmas gift to Putin.” From the halls of Congress to the K Street corridors of Gulf-funded think tanks, a chorus of protest proclaimed that removing U.S. troops from Syria would simultaneously abet Iran and bring ISIS back from the grave.

Yet few of those thundering condemnations of the president’s move seemed able to explain just why a few thousand U.S. troops had been deployed to the Syrian hinterlands in the first place. If the mission was to destroy ISIS, then why did ISIS rise in the first place? And why was the jihadist organization still festering right in the midst of the U.S. military occupation?

Too many critics of withdrawal had played central roles in the Syrian crisis to answer these questions honestly. They had either served as media cheerleaders for intervention, or crafted the policies aimed at collapsing Syria’s government that fueled the rise of ISIS. The Syrian catastrophe was their legacy, and they were out to defend it at any cost.

Birthing ISIS From the Womb of Regime Change

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Clinton, Kerry, and the rest of the Beltway blob lined up reflexively behind George W. Bush. The insurgency that followed the violent removal of Iraq’s Ba’athist government set…

For the longest time Vladimir Putin has assumed the role of an Ian Fleming super-villain in the imaginations of both liberal and neoconservative pundits. Like one of those well-worn set pieces in a James Bond novel, he sits opposite our British super-spy in a chess game with the world hegemony awarded to the winning side. Or in the case of a draw, multipolarity.

Any book on Putin and Russia that departs from these stereotypes would be most welcome. When it turns out to be a first-rate Marxist analysis, it should be added to your must-read list for 2019. The good news is that book has arrived in the form of Tony Wood’s Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War, a ground-breaking study that departs from the lurid personality-driven narratives that are the stock-in-trade of MSNBC or the Washington Post. Additionally, for those on the left whose ideas are shaped by Stephen F. Cohen’s pro-Putin apologetics, the book will serve as a wake-up call to return to a class rather than a chess analysis. If Rachel Maddow is for the chess-master playing white, there is no reason to uncritically root for who is playing black. In keeping with the palette analogy, it is worth recalling Lenin’s citation of Mephistopheles’s words from Goethe’s Faust in his 1917 Letter on Tactics: “Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.”

Wood’s title communicates his basic thesis, namely that Russia must be understood as a product of a…

Living in 21^st America, it’s impossible to go a single day without hearing multiple mentions of “racism.” It seems to be the lifeblood of our political-cultural life.

Because of the ever-increasing rarity of overt instances of white-on-black “racism” (and make no mistakes about it, “racism” is used to refer only to white-on-nonwhite transgressions), the architects and agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) have had to appeal to what they call “institutional” or “systemic” or “structural” racism.

The idea here is that even the best-intentioned of whites are either subconsciously racist or, at the very least, they subconsciously purvey American institutions which embed “racist” assumptions that impede black success.  Eduardo Bonilla, a loyal RIC agent, sums up the gist of this notion in the title of his book on this subject: Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.

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Very rarely, though, do we hear much about patriotism.  It’s true, of course, that we’ll not infrequently hear politicians refer to the policy proposals of their opponents as “un-American.” Yet it’s supposed to be bad form to question another person’s patriotism. Given the ease with which people, particularly leftists, hurl the R-word (as well as many other derogatory terms) at their opponents, the conspicuous paucity of charges of anti-Americanism is more than a bit curious.

Well, it’s curious on its face. But once we scratch the surface, it’s not hard at all to see why those on the left prefer for the topic of patriotism to go the way of the dinosaur:…

A political effort to impeach the entire West Virginia Supreme Court. A ballot measure aimed at giving North Carolina’s Legislature sweeping new powers to pick judges. And a bid by lawmakers to punish Arkansas’s top court for an adverse ruling on a politically charged issue.

A new Brennan Center analysis finds that attempts by state legislators to politicize or weaken courts were particularly widespread this year. That’s troubling, because when politicians drag courts and judges into the partisan muck, it becomes harder for courts to be, and appear, independent from the political actors they’re supposed to check. The three-legged stool of our democracy can stand only if the three branches are equally able to check each other.

In all in 2018, lawmakers in at least 18 states considered at least 60 bills that would have diminished or politicized the role of the judiciary. Several stories stand out, and may foreshadow what’s ahead.

The North Carolina General Assembly continued a multi-year effort to gain an upper hand in the courts. In 2018 alone, this included largely unsuccessful proposals to gerrymander judicial districts and to cut judicial terms from eight years to two. In support of the latter proposal, one legislator remarked, referring to judges: “If you’re going to act like a legislator, perhaps you should run like one.”

The Legislature also asked North Carolina voters, via a ballot measure proposing a constitutional amendment, to give it sweeping new power to pick judges. In a positive sign, however, this plan met significant resistance, including litigation that forced the Legislature to rewrite the ballot language to be less misleading, and bipartisan opposition from all five living former governors. Voters ultimately rejected the plan by a 30-point margin.

The death rate from opioid overdose among US children and teens have tripled in the past two decades amid an ongoing drug epidemic in the country, a new study shows.

Almost 9,000 children and teenagers died from opioid poisoning from 1999 to 2016, and annual deaths increased threefold over the 18 years, a team of researchers at Yale University reported Friday.

The finding suggests the opioid epidemic will likely continue unless lawmakers, public health officials, doctors and parents do more to keep the drugs out of the hands of young people, the study said.

More than 80 percent of the deaths among children and teens were unintentional, while five percent were from suicide and about 2 percent from homicide, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“These deaths don’t reach the magnitude of adult deaths from opioids, but they follow a similar pattern,” said lead researcher Julie Gaither, an…

Landlords in the UK are offering young women rooms free of rent in return for sex, a trend that has been growing amid record-high homelessness in Britain.

Renting rooms for sexual favors is seen as a growing risk by homeless charities and campaigners, and a consequence of a housing crisis where young people are unable to find somewhere affordable to live.

The Ministry of Justice says offering accommodation in exchange for sex is illegal and even placing an advert is breaking the law and could result in a seven year jail term.

The problem has become particularly marked in university towns, where young women are targeted by rogue landlords.

Two landlords in Bristol were filmed by hidden cameras in September offering free rent in return for sex, in a sting aimed at exposing the dangers faced by female tenants.

UK Justice Secretary David Lidington last year said such offers may breach the Sexual Offences Act, but there is frustration that…

Sources are everything to a journalist. Without them, their stories would be hollow. Imagine there was a ready-made list of experts always willing to bring that crucial air of credibility to any story about…Russia, for example.

Well, it turns out there is — and that list can be found on the website of the Atlantic Council — a think tank well-known for its ceaseless and enormous hostility toward Russia. Wherever there is an opportunity to throw balance and fairness to the wind in a story concerning Russia, an Atlantic Council analyst will always show up to lend a hand.

You see, experts and analysts bring the believability and legitimacy to a story; if the expert said it, that must count for something, is the general theory. These ‘experts’ provide journalists with insight into the issues and places they report on — so a journalist covering, say, Eastern Europe and Russia would make it their business to cultivate a list of people who know a little something about that region’s political, economic, social and cultural landscape who they can then approach for analysis on various stories and topics. Usually, it’s a good idea, too, to take these experts from a broad spectrum of society and political thought, so that readers are given a well-rounded and balanced view of a particular issue.

The Russia Hoax: The I…
Gregg Jarrett
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Or, you could scrap all that and just choose from the same pool of people who think exactly the same way — in this case, the Atlantic Council — over and over again. Much handier…and sure, who’s going to notice, anyway? That seems to be the modus operandi for a number of journalists on the Russia beat. Atlantic Council…

Thousands face loss of mental health coverage in the US

By
Matthew Taylor

29 December 2018

Behavioral health clinics in eight states that administer addiction and mental health services under a pilot program authorized by the federal government in 2014 face a shutdown due to Congress’ failure to renew funding for the program. Approximately 9,000 patients will lose coverage and three thousand jobs will be eliminated, according to the Washington Post .

The legislation passed in 2014, titled the Excellence in Mental Health Act, established a Medicaid-reimbursed program wherein Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) could provide a range of services including mental health and addiction services, free screening, assessment and diagnosis, individual and family-centered treatment plans, psychiatric rehabilitation services, outpatient mental health services, and outpatient primary care screening and monitoring of key health indicators and health risk.

The program was aimed at providing mental health services at an earlier stage then Medicaid-eligible patients usually receive it and encouraged participating states to search out innovative methods to administer treatment to the most vulnerable members of society, including children placed in foster care and new inmates in jails and prisons.

Integration of various forms of treatment and coordination between different providers aimed to “provide a comprehensive collection of services needed to create access, stabilize people in crisis and provide the necessary treatment for those with the most serious, complex mental illnesses and substance use disorders,” according to a document released by the National Council for Behavioral Health.

By integrating various treatments and services under a single program, the…

US officials say the Pentagon is considering recommending that Kurdish militants be allowed to keep American-supplied weapons after the withdrawal of troops from Syria.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, three US officials told Reuters that the recommendations were part of discussions at the Pentagon on a draft plan.

The initiative, they added, would be presented to the White House in the coming days with US President Donald Trump making the final decision.

Earlier this month, Trump ordered a quick withdrawal of all 2,000 US forces from Syria claiming victory over the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the war-torn country.

US media reports say the planned pullout has made anti-Damascus Kurdish militants, who have long enjoyed American support, feel abandoned by Washington.

On Friday, Kurdish YPG militants asked Damascus for protection after the withdrawal of US troops. Units of the Syrian army entered Manbij later and hoisted of the…

It’s official, Israel is racing towards early elections. But no one is talking about who can vote in them.

New elections were nearly called in November 2017 after Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman resigned in protest of Israel not going to war with Gaza and right-wing leader Naftali Bennett threatened to pull his party from the coalition if he was not given the defense portfolio. However, Netanyahu outfoxed Bennett by claiming that it was too dangerous a time to go to elections and retained the defense portfolio for himself (Netanyahu is now Israel’s prime minister, defence minister, and foreign minister), utilizing a slim 51% ruling majority.

Until last week it looked like the coalition would hold together with its small majority. But following the Knesset’s inability to reach agreement on a bill dealing with military conscription of the ultra-orthodox, and, much more importantly, leaked information that the ministry of justice was recommending Netanyahu’s indictment on charges of bribery, on Monday Netanyahu announced “It’s too difficult [to pass laws], we need elections.” With that, the Israeli national election is scheduled to take place on April 9.

Much of the already up and running election coverage is focused on the coming indictment of Netanyahu. Will he be able to stave off the attorney general until April? If he is reelected, will he try to get his coalition partners to pass a measure forbidding the prosecution of a sitting prime minister?

Other…

Calls for a Universal Basic Income have been increasing, most recently as part of the Green New Deal introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and supported in the last month by at least 40 members of Congress. A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a monthly payment to all adults with no strings attached, similar to Social Security. Critics say the Green New Deal asks too much of the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it, but taxing the rich is not what the resolution proposes. It says funding would primarily come from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks,” and other vehicles.

The Federal Reserve alone could do the job. It could buy “Green” federal bonds with money created on its balance sheet, just as the Fed funded the purchase of $3.7 trillion in bonds in its “quantitative easing” program to save the banks. The Treasury could also do it. The Treasury has the constitutional power to issue coins in any denomination, even trillion dollar coins. What prevents legislators from pursuing those options is the fear of hyperinflation from excess “demand” (spendable income) driving prices up. But, in fact, the consumer economy is chronically short of spendable income, due to the way money enters the consumer economy. We actually need regular injections of money to avoid a “balance sheet recession” and allow for growth,…

The US Defense Department is defending President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 American troops out of Syria, saying the pull out is “deliberate, well thought-out, mutually supportive, and controlled.”

In a tweet on Friday, the Pentagon also called the withdrawal the “next phase” of Washington’s support to the so-called anti-Daesh coalition, but did not provide further detail about what that support looks like.

The tweet did not specify which parties were “mutually supportive” of the decision to withdraw US troops.

Trump announced his decision to withdraw the US troops from Syria on Wednesday, asserting that the Daesh…

The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team. But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story. They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone. The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.

War is a Racket: The A…
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The relationship between Trump and his national security team has been tense since the beginning of his administration. By mid-summer 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford had become so alarmed at Trump’s negative responses to their briefings justifying global U.S. military deployments that they decided to do a formal briefing in “the tank,” used by the Joint Chiefs for meetings at the Pentagon.

But when Mattis and Dunford sang the praises of the “rules-based, international democratic order” that has “kept the peace for 70 years,” Trump simply shook his head in disbelief.

By the end of that year, however, Mattis,…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
December 28, 2018

A female Swedish journalist became disillusioned with her country after witnessing how “in a country that claims to be one of the most feminist places on earth” the media couldn’t care less about reports of Middle Eastern migrants sexually assaulting women en masse at a music festival in 2015.

From The Guardian, “Sweden’s Dark Soul by Kajsa Norman review – ‘far from a utopia’”:

Sweden is proud of its reputation for being one of the world’s most progressive and egalitarian nations, and for a long time Kajsa Norman thought that its main defect was being rather “boring”. As an investigative journalist, she preferred more challenging environments, such as Zimbabwe. But while abroad she heard of an incident in Sweden “so disturbing and strange” that she felt compelled to investigate. What she found shook her faith in her country.

The annual We Are Sthlm music festival attracts some 200,000 people, mostly aged between 13 and 19, to Kungsträdgården Park in central Stockholm. On a balmy evening in August 2015, a middle-aged psychologist, whom the author calls Hans, as he wishes to remain anonymous, took his teenage relatives to the festival. As twilight fell, he noticed how groups of men and boys appeared and began “eyeing the young girls in hot pants”. During the evening he saw girl after girl stagger out from the crowd to ask for help from the security guards after being sexually assaulted.

Afterwards Hans was haunted by the memory of “watching packs of predators hunt helpless prey”, and was shocked that nothing appeared in the press the next day. When he emailed the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, a journalist called him. Although she sounded interested, when he mentioned that “the vast majority” of the perpetrators “appeared to be Afghans”, her tone became “noticeably colder”. No article…

The US military and political establishment wants to have a new arms race with Russia and China as well, says James Jatras, a former American Senate foreign policy adviser.

Jatras made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Friday while commenting on reports which say the US Defense Department will boost research in hypersonic offense and defense weapons, in response to a recent Russian test of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile system.

The Pentagon will step its focus on hypersonic weapons as Russia and China continue their march toward fielding the technology and erode America’s dominance, Lieutenant Colonel Michelle Baldanza, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told the Voice of America (VOA).

“While the United States has been the world leader in hypersonic system research for many decades, we did not choose to weaponize it,” Baldanza told VOA.

Jatras said that the US “military and political establishment wanted to have a new arms…

Right-wing rampage in Michigan, Wisconsin lame duck sessions

By
Jacob Crosse and Patrick Martin

28 December 2018

Lame duck sessions of Republican-controlled state legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin have passed dozens of bills overturning voter decisions in the November 6 election. In both states, Republican state administrations were swept out of office—narrowly in Wisconsin, by a wide margin in Michigan—but the state legislatures remain under Republican control.

While the most publicized actions have been politically motivated slaps at incoming Democratic governors in the two states, the most substantive and reactionary actions have been to effectively reverse efforts to raise the minimum wage and expand voting rights in the two states.

In Michigan, the lame duck session passed more than 400 bills and sent them to outgoing Republican Governor Rick Snyder. He signed the first batch of measures on December 14, while vetoing four bills as exceeding the powers of the legislature. He is expected to sign the vast majority of the bills before he leaves office January 1.

Three referendum propositions were placed on the statewide ballot by petition drives and won approval November 6: to legalize personal possession and consumption of marijuana for recreational purposes (state law already permits its medicinal use); to establish a legislative redistricting process based on a non-partisan commission; and to expand voting rights, including same-day registration and easier early voting.

The state legislature is pushing through a package of bills making significant changes in how the three new referenda will be implemented. This would include barring individuals from growing marijuana for their personal use and establishing tight restrictions on licensing cannabis sales,…

The new Congress will not be sworn in until after the New Year, but, at long last, the results of the 2018 midterm elections are finalized and certified. It looked good for Democrats from the moment the polls closed on Election Day; it looks even better now.

The “blue wave” Democrats were hoping for, along with everyone else aware of the clear and present danger Donald Trump poses, materialized; the Trump Party got schlonged.

Trump knows it; so do the miscreants in his administration who are working hard night and day to “deconstruct” the worthwhile things the government does. So do House and Senate Republicans, respectable media columnists, and the talking heads on the cable networks.

Except for Trump himself, most of them also know that Trump has mainly himself to thank for the GOP’s defeat.

Those of us who appreciate the urgency of minimizing the harm Trump and his minions do should give thanks for his narcissism-driven obtuseness and for his ineptitude. Not just us: were reason more in control, everyone would be giving thanks.

But, reason is hanging by a thread. In some circles, it has gone missing entirely, giving way to the willful blindness that keeps the Trump base on board, even as the man spins out of control in full public view.

There are distressingly many bona fide U.S. citizens who do not acknowledge or even understand how much of a menace Trump is. According to some polls, roughly two out of every five Americans haven’t a clue.

It is…

Rasputin, the Russian monk who became the confidant of Alexandra, the Tsarina, and her husband, Tsar Nicholas II, was killed by a British agent, according to a documentary to be broadcast next month.

An investigation into his death in 1916 has concluded that he was murdered not as had been supposed by disaffected Russian aristocrats but by Oswald Rayner, a member of the Secret Intelligence Bureau who was working at the Russian court in St Petersburg.

Richard Cullen, a retired Scotland Yard commander who has been studying the case with Andrew Cook, an intelligence historian, says that a new forensic analysis and an examination of official records helped him to reach his conclusion.

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“I am 99.9 per cent certain of this,” said Mr Cullen, whose findings will be broadcast in the BBC2 Timewatch programme on October 1. “There is a fair weight of evidence to show that Rayner was the man. We have conclusive proof that the previously accepted versions of events are fabrications.”

Rasputin claimed to have “mystical powers”, which gained him the confidences of first the Tsarina, Alexandra – who thought that he could cure her haemophiliac son – and Tsar Nicholas. But he was highly unpopular among courtiers and his killers evaded trial, publishing memoirs that described the murder in detail.

Now it is claimed that the SIB wanted to kill Rasputin, who was hoping to broker peace between Russia and Germany, because of his influence over the Tsar. The fear, according to Mr Cullen, was that if such a deal had been agreed in 1916, 350,000 German troops would have been freed to fight the Allies on the Western Front.

According to Timewatch Rayner was known to be in St…

In a recent article published on the India-based News18 site (CNN), prominent US biologist Nina Federoff was reported as saying it is time for India to grant farmers access to genetically modified (GM) crops. In an interview with the site, she says there is no evidence that GM crops are dangerous when consumed either by people in food or by animals in feed. Federoff says that the commercial release of various GM crops in India has been halted by the Indian government due to opposition from environmental activists.

She adds that we are rapidly moving out of the climate regime in which our primary crops were domesticated, arguing that that they do increasingly worse and will yield less as temperature extremes become common and pest and pathogen populations change. She says GM will become more or less essential in an era of climate change.

In recent weeks, aside from Federoff’s intervention, GM has been a hot topic in India. In late November, a paper appeared in the journal Current Science which argues that India doesn’t need GM crops and that the track record of GM agriculture is highly questionable. The paper is notable not just because of what it says but because of who is saying it: distinguished scientist P.C. Kesavan and M.S. Swaminathan, renowned agricultural scientist and geneticist and widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India.

I recently spoke with prominent campaigner Aruna Rodrigues about developments surrounding the…

Zero Hedge
December 28, 2018

Congress has departed for the holidays and it’s looking as if striking a deal and passing a bill to end the partial government shut down won’t happen until Congress reconvenes in the new year (and with both sides digging in their heels, many Wall Street analysts expect the affected government agencies will remain closed for at least a little while longer). But that didn’t stop President Trump from reviving his threat to close the southern border if Democrats don’t sign off on the $5 billion Trump needs to ramp up construction of his promised border wall.

“We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with. Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!”

We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with. Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2018

And since the US loses so much money on trade with Mexico under Nafta rules, Trump says, he would consider closing the border to be a “profit-making operation”…

….The United States looses soooo much money on Trade with Mexico under NAFTA, over 75 Billion Dollars a year (not including Drug Money which would be many times that amount), that I would consider closing the Southern Border a “profit making operation.” We build a Wall or…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2018

…That would help revive the US car industry.

…..close the Southern Border. Bring our car industry back into the United States where it belongs. Go back to pre-NAFTA, before so…