Corruption
Government corruption
Sarah Bilston: There are startling parallels between the Trump administration’s policy on immigrant families and the “New” Poor Laws of England in the 1830s, whose cruelty was illuminated by Charles Dickens in novels and other writings… I’ve taught the novels of Charles Dickens for more than 20 years. My students have tended to approach his era as a bizarre and strangely cruel period in human history. But Dickens’s world has come to life again.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader puts check on Laura Bush and Michelle Obama for selective criticism when it comes to kids harmed by brutal U.S. policies: “Would be nice if Laura Bush and Michelle Obama had expressed similar heartfelt concern for the tens of thousands of children killed or seriously maimed by the wars of their husbands in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
With the nation’s attention rightly fixated on President Donald Trump’s horrific treatment of immigrant children, House Republicans on Tuesday quietly unveiled their 2019 budget proposal that calls for $537 billion in cuts to Medicare, $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, and four billion in cuts to Social Security over the next decade in an effort to pay for their deficit-exploding tax cuts for the wealthy.
As newly published images, videos, and audio provided brief and “horrifying” glimpses inside America’s child detention facilities in the midst of President Donald Trump’s massive attack on immigrant families, all 49 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus on Monday united behind a bill that would end the White House’s family separation policy immediately—putting pressure on Republicans who claim to oppose the cruel practice to act on their words.
“The images and stories coming from the detention centers near the border are both heartbreaking and infuriating,” CREDO campaign manager Nicole Regalado said in a statement on Monday. “Republicans in Congress have the power to put a stop to Trump’s cruel family separation policy today. Democrats have coalesced around legislation that would immediately halt this barbaric practice. All we need now is for a handful of Republicans to find their conscience and stand up to the Trump regime.”
UN Report on US: 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty. The report is a terrible indictment of the U.S. and of the Trump Administration. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist told The Guardian “This administration inherited a bad situation with inequality in the U.S. and is now fanning the flames and worsening the situation. What is so disturbing is that Trump, rather than taking measures to ameliorate the problem, is taking measures to aggravate it.”
Most Americans don’t know it, but in 1977 the U.S. actually signed an international treaty called the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which mandates government responsibility to ensure their citizens do more than merely survive. Unfortunately, one U.S. administration after the other has completely disregarded it, and Congress never ratified it. Our leaders have apparently judged that we either don’t need — or don’t deserve — things like an adequate standard of living and universal health care. 164 countries have ratified the treaty, but ours won’t. Are their people more deserving than we are? As one dizzy U.S. congressman claims, “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”
Caitlin Johnstone: In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is.
As the heart-wrenching story of a Honduran mother having her baby daughter ripped from her arms by federal authorities as she was breastfeeding provided yet another example of the immense cruelty of President Donald Trump’s family separation policy, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on Wednesday led a sit-in outside the offices of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) demanding that asylum-seekers be released from government detention and reunited with their loved ones immediately.
In a recent interview, Elizabeth Warren said she agrees with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that too many Democrats lack the “guts” to take on Wall Street and argued that her party will keep suffering electoral losses until all of its members are “willing to take on the billionaire class… Until we have all of the Democrats who are willing to fight for the American people and not for a handful of billionaires and giant corporations, then it’s going to stay an uphill fight.”
The California water shortage is greatly exaggerated for political purposes, which is the justification for more government control. It is a jarring fact that only 11% of available water is allocated for urban use, 41% goes to agriculture, and 48% is allocated to protect the environment. The federal government has control over that portion and requires most of it to flow into the Pacific Ocean! As we have seen in California’s Central Valley, which used to be the breadbasket of America, supplying over 50% of the nation’s vegetables, fruits and nuts, government control over water has become control over the food supply. No water, no food.
The 66th annual Bilderberg Meeting, which has been held in locations around the world throughout the years, kicked off on Thursday in Turin, Italy and is set to end on Sunday. Despite a prestigious guest list of around 130 attendees — who will arguably have more of a global influence than any elected officials — the meeting will escape any scrutiny in the mainstream media. The reason this meeting of the global elite manages to remain free from any mainstream media coverage is no accident. This group of elite power brokers owns the media, they own the politicians, and, arguably, they own the world.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, where every position of power is appointed by either the king or other members of the Al Saud royal family from which the nation derives its name. Trump recently visited Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the U.S., and took the opportunity to deeply criticize the two nations’ mutual foe, Iran, and its commitment to democracy weeks after it held its presidential election. Though clearly hilarious and at the same time appropriately awkward, the incident highlighted the fact that mainstream journalists rarely ask the obvious questions that might so easily expose the glaring hypocrisy of US foreign policy and its leaders.
With millions of Americans already on the brink of deep poverty, Philip Alston, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights and author of the new report, warned that Trump’s tax law, deregulatory agenda, and welfare cuts are driving the poor closer to complete “ruination,” which the U.N. official defines as “severe deprivation of food and almost no access to healthcare.”
While Trump insisted that “open hostility” from Pyongyang in recent days was what ultimately led him to call off the summit, Korea experts were quick to point out that White House officials’ repeated references to the so-called “Libya model” provoked angry responses from North Korean officials, who have warned constantly over the past several weeks that it views such comments as explicit regime change threats.
After making the widely condemned and erroneous assertion that responsibility for Israel’s massacre of more than 50 Palestinians “rests squarely with Hamas,” the Trump administration on Monday unilaterally blocked a United Nations statement that expressed “outrage” at Israel’s killings and demanded “an independent and transparent” investigation. During an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley took the further step of applauding Israel forces during her speech for showing admirable “restraint” as it mowed down dozens of peaceful demonstrators.
