Global
The vast majority of people who experience war directly, first-hand, rather than through Hollywood movies or politicians’ speeches, are the people who live where wars are waged. In wars involving distant wealthy nations on one-side, some 95% of those killed or injured or traumatized, and 100% of those bombed out of their homes are people against whom war is waged, most of them civilians and the rest of them people doing exactly what any Hollywood movie or politician would tell them — have told them — to do: fight back.
Overwhelmed by uncontrollable circumstances, the Greek government is bracing for another financial crisis that promises to be as terrible as the last one in 2015.
Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, announced, on September 12, that Athens has made a “robust” arms deal that will “reinforce the armed forces” and create a “national shield”.
If you do a web search for images of “Nazi salute” you find old photos from Germany and recent photos from the United States. But if you search for images of “Bellamy salute” you find countless black-and-white photographs of U.S. children and adults with their right arms raised stiffly out in front of them in what will strike most people as a Nazi salute. From the early 1890s through 1942 the United States used the Bellamy salute to accompany the words written by Francis Bellamy and known as the Pledge of Allegiance. In 1942, the U.S.
As events swiftly spiral out of control and the capitalist system teeters on the brink of collapse, Americans must plan ahead for completely unprecedented, uncertain times. It’s clear that Trump, who is obviously responsible for the mass murder of 200,000-plus Americans and economic disaster, can’t win a majority vote in the presidential race – and that he knows this. So he’s desperately setting the stage to steal the election, ranting and raving about “voter fraud” and how “mail-in ballots” are rigged. Rigging, of course, is de rigueur for the “rigger-in-chief,” and desperate to stay in power – in order to avoid being charged with a variety of crimes, not payoff hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, et al – sober people must expect this frantic conman to pull any dirty trick on (and off) the books to remain president.
The inevitable has finally happened, and the coronavirus pandemic is now ravaging the besieged Gaza Strip. On August 24, a total lockdown was imposed by the Gaza authorities following the discovery of several COVID-19 cases outside designated quarantine areas. Since then, over 1,000 cases have been identified and ten people have died. Experts estimate the number to be significantly higher.
Businesses, mosques, schools, cafes and virtually everything else is now under lockdown. The local government, alongside the UN Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, and together with many volunteers, are desperately working to keep Gaza functioning and to limit the spread of the pandemic, despite limited and ever-shrinking resources.
Gaza’s crisis is multifaceted. The Israeli siege, combined with the massive destruction from the previous war, has left Gaza in the throes of a major humanitarian disaster. With electricity outages reaching up to twenty hours per day and with fuel supplies running low, Gaza was barely functioning, to begin with.
The big banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage as Tuesday got underway -- “TRUMP’S TAXES SHOW CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE” -- might give the impression that Donald Trump is finally on the verge of political downfall. Don’t believe it for a moment.
The same kind of mistaken belief has led many to put undeserved trust in a corporate-media system. But the New York Times isn’t going to save us. Neither is the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN or any of the other mass-media outlets, “liberal” or otherwise.
New information reveals that the Election Administrator in Shelby County, TN, manipulated the bids for a new voting system to favor Election Systems & Software (ES&S). The administrator, Linda Phillips, increased competitors' bids by millions of dollars. She also increased the bids for hand-marked paper ballot (HMPB) voting systems by millions of dollars to make ballot-marking device touchscreens (BMDs) look more competitive by comparison.
The Election Commission thought they were looking at the actual bid numbers presented by 3 vendors (ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion Voting Systems), but they actually only saw Phillips' manipulated numbers.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden were athletes who got deferments and dubious medical-based exemptions to participating in the mass slaughter of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian men, women, and children.
The common criticism of one or the other of them, based on partisan loyalty, is that he should have participated in mass murder. Questioning this notion results, most often, in ad hominem attacks against the questioner: but you weren’t there, you can’t know what you would have done, etc.
But we know what thousands of young men did: they refused to go. Many chose not to use available deferments, preferring to refuse to go.
On October 8th, you’ll be able to screen online the film The Boys Who Said No.
Why would people risk 5 years in prison to take a stand against mass murder?
Were they all losers and suckers, as Trump might claim?
An earlier version of this article can be found at: https://www.globalresearch.ca/weaponizing-the-term-conspiracy-theory-disinformation-agents-and-the-cia/5524552
Many people are now painfully aware that the United States is on the verge of falling under an iron fist of repressive rule, crushing basic democratic possibilities, if Donald Trump gets a second term as president. Yet the Democratic Party nominee is weak, uninspiring, often inarticulate and apt to be distasteful or worse when he’s intelligible.
What are progressives to make of this truly dire situation -- and, most importantly, what are we to do? Right now.
At this potentially cataclysmic moment, I haven’t seen better answers anywhere than on the new website NotHimUs.org, where a basic precept is laid out in big letters on the first screen: “We’ve got our own reasons to vote for Biden, and Joe ain’t one.”
The next words are from Cornel West: “A vote for Joe Biden is . . . a way of preserving the condition for the possibility of any kind of democratic practice in the United States.”