Showing all posts tagged United States
Who is protecting Wall Street criminals?
Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, whose new piece in Rolling Stone outlines the complete lack of accountability for Wall Street crooks, tells Democracy Now!, Every single former investigator or current investigator that I talked to said the same thing: Madoff went to jail because the wrong people suffered. You know, it was famous actors. It…
Canberra has no desire to seriously pressure Israel over apartheid
God forbid the Australian government took a lead on an international issue rather than simply following the US: A Sydney council’s decision to boycott Israel has been raised in the upper echelons of Australian diplomacy. The Greens-controlled Marrickville Council voted in December to join a global boycott of all Israeli products and services in protest…
Saudi Arabia’s answer to internal dissent?
Throw money as its citizens. Washington has no problem at all with the brutal rule of King Abdullah. It’s all about oil, baby:
Moral bankruptcy of the American conservative
The good old days of America just invading, bombing and regime changing when she wanted. The days of empire are wonderful for armchair generals directing the carnage. And then you have neo-con hacks like Michael Ledeen (the great man detailed here) who simply want to use American weaponary to kill people. Here’s his latest advice…
Private armies living like kings in “war on terror” fantasies
What does it take for mercenaries to stop getting contracts in occupied nations? More than a year has passed since the State Department decided to drop its contract [1] with the security firm protecting the US embassy in Kabul, following an international scandal featuring drunken debauchery [2] fit for a Van Wilder flick. But the…
Somebody tell David Cameron; Kuwait isn’t a democracy
Oh dear: Opponents of Britain’s arms trade are “completely at odds with reality”, David Cameron said, as he hit out critics of his three-day visit to the Gulf. In a staunch defence of Britain’s arms exports, as he tours the region with a group of senior defence manufacturers, Cameron said it was wrong to leave…
What the West saw in Gaddafi was oil and torture
The US had no issue with Gaddafi’s brutality and corruption as long as the oil kept flowing. Fossil fuel hunger has turned us into leeches: After New Year’s Day 2009, Western media reported that Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, had paid Mariah Carey $1 million to sing just…
Sell everything to private interests, says historian who loves war
Niall Ferguson: Privatization—a policy that has been a huge success nearly everywhere it’s been tried.
A non-controversial proposal; Arabs have right to vote for whomever they want
Here’s to small blessings. A rather good editorial in today’s Sydney Morning Herald that calls for a re-thinking of years of imperial attitudes in the Arab world and an opening to Islamists who get elected. Bravo: The patronising orientalism that the Arabs or even Muslims in general are somehow culturally conditioned to political slavery is…