News, views and opinions ... almost all from the Alternative Media

April 13, 2016

Both the pieces here from John Pilger are a MUST READ.  After reading the one at the link below, read his article "A World War has Begun: Break the Silence"  
Pay close attention to what the author says on how USA+gang has circled China, a nation with a Billion+ population which is aligned with India, another nation with a Billion+ population and both allied with superpower Russia.
Can we still be so blind to presume that we are not already well into WW3?  If it's nukes you are looking for to break your nonchalance, they are likely coming soon.

Trump and Clinton - Censoring the Unpalatable
....My recalcitrance was then given another meaning. The article was reprieved provided I submitted to a "review" and agreed to changes and deletions made by Truthout's "editorial committee". The result was the softening and censoring of my criticism of Hillary Clinton, and the distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:

Trump is a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism. Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama ... The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system... As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about "hope".

 The "editorial committee" clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven extreme danger to the world. Like all censorship, this was unacceptable. Maya Schenwar, who runs Truthout, wrote to me that my unwillingness to submit my work to a "process of revision" meant she had to take it off her "publication docket". Such is the gatekeeper's way with words.

 At the root of this episode is an enduring unsayable. This is the need, the compulsion, of many liberals in the United States to embrace a leader from within a system that is demonstrably imperial and violent. Like Obama's "hope", Clinton's gender is no more than a suitable facade.....

Craig Murray at his blog
Goldman Sachs: Just 5 Billion dollar Fine Compared to 13 Billion Dollar Taxpayer Bailout
Goldman Sachs aggressively sold sub-prime packages to investors as a first class product, while at the same time laying equally aggressive bets that those packages would fail. That is not my analysis; it is one of the things they have admitted as part of the deal in the United States that means that, in return for a 5 billion dollar fine, yet again no corrupt and fraudulent bankers are going to jail.

The ultimate irony is that the 5 billion dollar fine is dwarfed by the 13 billion dollar taxpayer bailout they received after the banks’ immoral antics caused massive economic collapse. So the net result of their appalling behaviour has been that they collect not only the profit from those bets the system would collapse, but an eight billion dollar net payment from ordinary taxpayers thrown in. Which eight billion dollars has been just a contribution to the bonuses and partner remuneration which have continued to bulge in their over-stuffed pockets since 2008, uninterrupted by the crash, thanks to the generosity of poor taxpayers struggling to balance their personal budgets...

Matt Agorist at FreeThought Project
A Single Delaware Address is Home to 200,000 Shell Companies — Including 2 of Hillary Clinton’s
Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama disingenuously called for international tax reform in the wake of the massive leak of millions of documents from Panamanian-based law firm Mossack Fonseca.
In what amounted to a complete dog and pony show, meant to appease the masses, Obama said the Panama Papers illustrated the immense scale of tax avoidance by Fortune 500 companies, which is estimated at trillions of dollars worldwide.

The calls for reform ring hollow as Obama remained conveniently mum on the companies operating within the US providing a tax haven for the world’s elite.

The words of Andrew Penney, managing director of Rothschild & Co., were extremely clear to international investors, as noted in a written draft for a presentation in San Francisco in which he wrote that the U.S. “is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world.”

One of these such havens is a single address in Wilmington, Delaware. 1209 North Orange Street, according to the Washington Free Beacon, has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware’s Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.

What sets this shell company factory aside from the rest....

Ongoing protests in Washington DC that the MSM are trying to push under the carpet. If not for the Alternative Media (AM) hardly anybody would know what's going on in the streets of Washington DC.

Paul Craig Roberts at his blog
Washington Continues To Destroy Latin American Reformers
Currently, Washington is conducting operations against Latin American presidents who tried to represent their own peoples instead of American business interests and Washington’s foreign policy. Washington is trying to unseat and indict President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, President Evo Morales in Bolivia, President Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Washington has succeeded in getting the president of Argentina, Chistina Kirchner, out of office, and is now seeking to have her indicted. To round off its attack on Brazil’s reformist political party, Washington is orchestrating crimes with which to tar and indict Rousseff’s predecesor, Lula da Silva.

Everyone on Washington’s Latin American list of people to be destroyed is a far better person than anyone in Washington. Washington’s Latin American targets have far more integrity, are tainted with far less corruption, and are far more committed to those who voted for them than anyone in Washington.

The danger that these reformers face is due to their innocence. They naively believe in good will between classes. They think that the rich elites, who are well connected to Washington, and that Washington itself, will accept democratic outcomes.

They believe this despite the fact that Washington, using the Spanish elite that Hugo Chavez left unmolested, overthrew Chavez. Chavez had to be rescued from Venezuela’s Spanish elite, who are .....

Translated by Joelle El-Khoury from Kamal Sheikho's original
Former IS captive: Calling it a genocide is not enough
Janet and Immanuel decided to speak about their daughter Mary, who had been captured by the Islamic State more than a year ago. They sat together holding a large photo of the entire family, whose surname they preferred to withhold.
Eyes filled with tears, Janet said in a sad voice, “This picture was taken a month before she was captured. We were attending a concert and she insisted that we take a group photo. She looked stunning that night.”

Mary’s family is from the area of Tal Shamiram, in the southwest neighborhood of Tell Tamer, in Hasaka city, where she was captured along with 234 others, including her parents, by IS militants. The abduction followed a major IS offensive on Assyrian villages at dawn on Feb. 23, 2015.

On Nov. 7, 2015, IS freed 37 Christians, including Immanuel, after nine months of detention. He told Al-Monitor that prior to his release, he “asked IS officials about my wife and Mary, but to no avail.” He contented himself with believing that they would soon be freed as well....

From BBC
Syria war: IS group killed 21 Christians in al-Qaryatain,  
says patriarch
Reports are emerging of the killing of Syrian Christians by Islamic State militants in the town of al-Qaryatain.

The town was retaken by Russian-backed Syrian forces and their allies earlier in the week.

Some 21 Christians were murdered when almost 300 Christians remained in the city after IS captured it last August, said the head of the Syrian Orthodox Church.

They included three women, Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II told the BBC.

He said some died whilst trying to escape while the others were killed for breaking the terms of their "dhimmi contracts", which require them to submit to the rule of Islam....

9/11 cover-up

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More here at FreeThoughtProject

Patrick Cockburn at CounterPunch
The Corruption Revealed in the Panama Papers Opened
the Door to Isis
    Who shall doubt ‘the secret hid
    Under Cheops‘ pyramid‘
    Was that the contractor did
    Cheops out of several millions?

The message of Rudyard Kipling’s poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions – and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.

Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that “since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren’t built or they were built very badly”. She concluded that “corruption is the key to all this”.

Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men....

John Perkins at his blog
Confessions of a Panama Papers Hit Man

As an Economic Hit Man (EHM) in the 1970s I spent a great deal of time in Panama. I hate to admit it, but I helped forge the system that has now been exposed in the Panama Papers. It is a system of legalized crimes. How else can we describe it?

This EHM system has created a global economy where 62 individuals have as much wealth as half the world’s population, big corporations enjoy the airports and highways, fire and police departments, school systems, and other infrastructure of countries like the United States without paying for them and where governments are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals. The hard-earned tax dollars of the average US citizen finances the infrastructure and social services that benefit the very rich and their corporations while they shelter their incomes in tax havens.

Although the tax sheltering schemes disclosed in the Panama Papers were developed in the 1970s – during my time as an EHM in that country – the foundations of the system go back more than a century. In 1903 President Teddy Roosevelt fomented a rebellion to wrest Panama from Colombia so that the US could build the Panama Canal. JP Morgan and Company was appointed as the new country’s official fiscal agent. Soon after that, Panama passed laws that enabled John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company to avoid US taxes and regulations by registering its ships in Panama. It was just the beginning. . .

I was sent to Panama in the early 1970s to convince its head of state...........

From Off-Guardian
“The web we want”? No, don’t think so…

The Guardian has a new section titled “The Web We Want.” It opened April 11 and currently has 11 articles running on it. Its face is festooned with images of gently smiling people from different ages, sexes and ethnic groups, making us think this is going to be a discussion about pluralism, inclusiveness – freedom.

And in a sense we’d be right. This is intended to be a discussion about all those things. Or rather about how to persuade people to give up the last named in some ill-defined “defence” of the other two.

It doesn’t say who the “we” referred to might be. The assumption is it means all of us. The readers. Members of the human race. But of course it doesn’t. There’s been no poll, no referendum to ascertain public opinion. The “we” in this sense is purely a gesture, or a rhetorical flourish toward democracy. The discussion that follows is neither democratic nor diverse. There are no shades of opinion on offer. No debates between those with different views on what the Web should be. ....