Corruption
Government corruption
After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing ISIS, politicians and papers around him wrote it off as “bluster and bigotry,” “foolish”, and “…just silly.” By almost any standard, Cruz’s proposal was laughable [not to mention pathological & inhumane], and his rivals and the media called him on it. Yet, his poll numbers actually crept up, from 15 % to 18 percent, & one poll even had at 24 %.
Two large banks in the US have changed what can be stored in safety deposit boxes: no cash, no coins other than collectibles. Clearly the new rules are targeting people who are saving extra money or buying gold or silver coins in case the economy implodes. Although it would hurt the more wealthy, it prevents the average American from preparing for the economic meltdown by having something negotiable.
Princeton University is causing a lot of controversy, with its study explaining that U.S. democracy is purely fiction and it simply does not exist.
The unique brand of .01% terror: making a game of tax avoidance while 2,500,000 children experience homelessness.
Mass surveillance has “badly shaken writers’ faith that democratic governments will respect their rights to privacy and freedom of expression,” according to a January 2015 PEN America report based on the responses of 772 writers from fifty countries. Reporting for Common Dreams, Lauren McCauley covered not only the PEN America report, but also a July 2014 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch indicating that US journalists and lawyers increasingly avoid work on potentially controversial topics due to fear of government spying.
Last year, under the auspices of a Nobel Peace Prize-Winning President, the U.S. dropped over 23,000 bombs on Muslim-majority countries.
Nearly 7 million U.S. households struggle with hunger. Yet Americans throw away 40 percent of our food—the equivalent of $165 billion each year—according to the National Resources Defense Council. That’s why U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, (D-Maine) has introduced H.R. 4184, the Food Recovery Act—a bill to address food waste.
Professor James Tracy was fired by Florida State University after questioning the official story of the Sandy Hook Shootings in 2012. He outlines 10 points that support his claim that the “Sandy Hook Massacre” was staged by government. Is this another of those false flag operations designed to facilitate gun control laws?
Compared with other capitalist countries, the US is unquestionably different when it comes to the level of state violence directed against minorities, Richard Becker reported in January 2015 for Liberation. Using 2011 figures, Becker wrote that, on a per capita basis, “the rate of killing by U.S. police was about 100 times that of English cops in 2011.” Similarly, US police were forty times as likely to kill as German police officers, and twenty times as likely to kill as their Canadian counterparts. This, Becker noted, is probably not the kind of “American exceptionalism” that President Obama had in mind when he addressed graduating West Point cadets in May 2014.
Jeff Berwick masterfully summarizes in general the negative situations in which we find ourselves now and how they will lead us to the positive world we are now creating. A Christmas and New Years message that ties in the religious and pagan bases of the holiday and leads us forward to a better world we can create now.
In service of corporate capital and with vested interests in the regions’ natural resources, the Pentagon and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been encircling Russia and China with military bases and missile defense systems, Bruce K. Gagnon reported
On World Refugee Day 2014, the global total of people who had undergone forced displacement was the highest on record since World War II. A Global Trends report compiled by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) established a figure of 51.2 million globally displaced people at the end of 2013, an increase of six million from 45.2 million in 2012.
According to an 800-page report commissioned by the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), US military personnel raped at least 54 children in Colombia between 2003 and 2007. Adriaan Alsema, writing for Colombia Reports, was first to report the story in the English-language press on March 23, 2015.
Although the corporate and progressive press alike focused public attention on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s December 2014 report on the CIA’s secret program of abductions, “brutal” interrogations, and torture of terrorism suspects, Nafeez Ahmed reported that this coverage has “whitewashed the extent to which torture has always been an integral and systematic intelligence practice since the second World War.” Despite President Barack Obama’s claims that he officially banned torture in 2009, these practices continue today, “under the careful recalibration of Obama and his senior military intelligence officials,” serving to legitimize the existence and expansion of the national security apparatus, Ahmed wrote.
Based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Ryan Gallagher reported for the Intercept that the National Security Agency (NSA) has developed a “Google-like” search engine called ICREACH, which has the capacity to gather personal information. This search engine can access over 850 million personal records, including private e-mails, chats, and some phone locations.
