How Wall Street is killing Local Governments

WALL STREET CONFIDENCE TRICK: How “Interest Rate Swaps” Are Bankrupting Local Governments  “Far from reducing risk, derivatives increase risk, often with catastrophic results” – Derivatives expert Satyajit Das, Extreme Money (2011)    The “toxic culture…

2012: George Washington helping America

AT THE CROSSROADS: America 2012: What Would George Washington Do? So much water has passed under the bridge of history since George Washington helped to cut a young nation out of the fraying fabric of the British…

Obama Bluffs Netanyahu: A New Cold War?

Is the poker game between USA, Iran and Israel nearing its end? I wish I could say something smart about poker; that would be the perfect opening for an article on the ongoing poker game…

KONY 2012 Africa’s bin Laden: US Manipulative Propaganda For Oil

According to their website, the American NGO, Invisible Children, claims now to have had over 80 million viewers to their YouTube video, “Kony2012,” since its release on YouTube a few weeks ago. For anyone with the patience to sit through the entire YouTube of Kony2012, it is questionable how truthful the figure of 80 million viewers is. Eighty million is unprecedented in YouTube history by all accounts. The video features such prominent Hollywood personalities as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady GaGa, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and other notables. It’s a slick, sentimental story directed by Jason Russell, a 33-year-old now-hospitalized American filmmaker who apparently just underwent a bizarre mental disconnect on the streets of San Diego.[1] The YouTube video depicts a young Ugandan, Jacob Acaye, whom Russell claims he befriended some ten years earlier after Acaye escaped conscription into Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as an 11-year-old killer. The film portrays Kony as the world’s worst beast and terrorist, in effect, Africa’s Osama bin Laden. [2]

Part II The Jeju Naval Base Another US Base in Korea: Strategic Threat to China

Continues from Part I, “The Jeju Naval Base Another US Base in Korea: Strategic Threat to China I”: http://www.4thmedia.org/2012/03/16/emergency-report-the-entry-to-jeju-island-by-3-american-vets-for-peace-members-were-denied-forcibly-deported-by-s-korean-authorities/ Introduction to Part II Prof. Bruce Cumings, the Chicago University Professor, the world’s most renowed and…

Murder Which Happens Every Day in Afghanistan Is Not an Anomaly in War

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.