Corruption
Government corruption
Investigative reporter Lee Fang examines the bite behind Big Business’s bark about getting rid of the Tea Party and the GOP. Fang’s conclusion: everything will continue to be ‘Business as usual.’
In one of many aspects of the burgeoning human trafficking epidemic in Britain, young children are being smuggled into the country to have their organs “harvested” to supply the huge-money black market demand for transplant organs. Vulnerable children from poorer nations such as Somalia, Vietnam, Romania, Nigeria, and Bangladesh are being targeted, but children from more prosperous nations such as China and even Britain are at risk.
Activist Ken O’Keefe brilliantly shows how to handle disinfo shill (or misinformed) Lee Kaplan, after Kaplan employs seven of the 25 rules of disinformation to attack O’Keefe’s position regarding the war in Syria.
There is no lack of evidence pointing to the existence of a small hierarchical cabal of rabid power brokers whose influence on the workings of this planet far exceeds that of the main players in the typical competitive fields of commerce and even politics. The origins of this cabal have been traced to a small network of interlinked family bloodlines going back to – and beyond – the dominant fiefdoms of power once present in the citadels of old Europe.
Economist William K. Black continues his analysis of the mortgage fraud crisis in an examination of the so-called “aggressive” prosecution of Bank of America for having sold “defective mortgages.” Black is a truthteller who does not hesitate to use the “f”-word: “fraud.”
How do revolutions happen? Who decides that a revolution will take place? Must revolutions inevitably bring violence and chaos? Chris Hedges considers these questions and contemplates the possible consequences of the mega-corporate impulse to crush all forms of meaningful dissent in what used to be our participatory democracy.
“Sensitive” – “Classified” – “Top Secret” – “Intelligence” – “Government Secrets:” these have been the traditional coded language tags used to reference and rationalize the practices of deep secret-keeping by the government and the military. This article examines analyses by NYU School of Law’s Elizabeth Goitein and George Washington University’s Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore, all of whom identify new and disturbing governmental rationalizations and motivations for maintaining ever-widening parameters of secrecy.
Prominent liberal blogger Matt Stoller has unearthed fascinating evidence for a new world order of sorts. Stoller’s entire article at Salon is a must-read. Here are the highlights…
Combat is commerce; war and capitalism are exploitative transactions; war is great for business; superpatriotism props up the increasingly profitable military-industrial complex; U.S. ‘warriors’ are prepackaged commodities in the industry of war. Ret. USAF officer William Astore analyzes the phenomenon of war as business and how this conceptualization affects all of us.
Abby Martin calls attention to the gross underestimation of Iraq War casualties, and calls out the WHO over a report that blatantly covers up the connection between the use of depleted uranium by occupation forces and congenital birth defects among Iraqis.
By Omar Cherif According to this article in Business Insider’s The Wire, in 1983, 90% of American media was owned by 50 companies; by 2011 and through relentless mergers, acquisitions and consolidations, the same 90% became controlled by six Major Corporations which dominate most of what Americans and the rest of the world read, see, […]
A newly released study by American, Canadian and Iraqi researchers concludes that the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in nearly half a million deaths.
The United States is loosening controls over military exports, in a shift that former U.S. officials and human rights advocates say could increase the flow of American-made military parts to the world’s conflicts and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions. The shift is part of a larger administration initiative to update the arms export process, which many acknowledge needed to be streamlined. But critics of the move to Commerce say that decision has been overly driven by the interests of defense manufacturers.
By Chris Hedges. The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I.
(Eyes on Trade/PublicCitizen)
The New York Times has just reported that European government officials have been taking pains to entertain corporations’ deregulatory demands for the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). The European Commission appears to have mistakenly released minutes of confidential government meetings held with U.S. and European corporations to see how their priorities could shape the proposed U.S.-EU deal. This may not come as a shock to those in the U.S. who know that the Obama administration has been regularly soliciting private advice on both TAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) from about 600 corporate trade “advisors” who are granted privileged access to negotiators and secretive trade texts.
But the just-released minutes of the meetings between EU officials and U.S. and European corporate heads (among other documents unearthed by Corporate Europe Observatory and the New York Times) reveal the incredible extent to which corporations are pushing for TAFTA to rewrite health, environmental, financial and other safeguards to be more convenient to industry interests.
