My following article appears in Crikey today: The Crikey/ACIJ series on Australian companies profiting from the foreign aid budget is a welcome discussion of the rapid privatisation of services in Australia and overseas, an area largely ignored by the mainstream media. The market, lightly regulated or not, is simply accepted by most commentators as the…
Showing all posts tagged United States
Is our future with privatised everything?
How one US town, Maywood, outsourced literally everything.
Wikileaks? Nothing to see here, move on please
CNN’s Anderson Cooper publishes on his website this almost hilarious spray against Wikileaks by Clint Van Winkle, the author of Soft Spots: A Marine’s Memoir of Combat and Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder: We sent troops to Afghanistan to avenge the 9/11 attacks and few people objected. Now, the Nation is having second thoughts. People want…
Britain realises that Israel isn’t perfect and Zionists are shocked
The kind of debate over Palestine that seems almost impossible here in the US or Australia. Unthinking Zionism helps nobody but unthinking Zionists: David Cameron‘s forthright description of Gaza as a “prison camp” – and its implied criticism of Israel – has struck a chord with many Conservatives but infuriated some commentators. During a state…
Iraqi state boosted by American money (but details gone missing)
What a jolly good war. Money well spent: The Defense Department is unable to properly account for $8.7 billion out of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil revenue entrusted to it between 2004 and 2007, according to a newly released audit that underscores a pattern of poor record-keeping during the war. Of that amount, the military…
Pentagon says that stories about Pentagon aren’t true
Never trust a “Pentagon official”. Journalists should know better than trusting such anonymous sources. But of course they don’t. Hence this story: An ongoing Pentagon review of the massive flood of secret documents made public by the WikiLeaks website has so far found no evidence that the disclosure harmed U.S. national security or endangered American…
Christian Zionists and Tea Party folk want more war in the Middle East
The Tea Party essentially backs an Israeli strike against Iran.
How to spin away the Wikileaks blues
The Wikileaks revelations are a spin problem to be solved, according to the White House mouth piece, Politico: The White House is dismissing the 92,000 Afghan war reports posted by WikiLeaks as old news — but the document dump poses a potent new threat to President Barack Obama’s delicately balanced Afghanistan policy. The field reports…
Is Wikileaks head Assange a serious target?
Leaker of the Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg on Democracy Now! talks about what Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assanage could be facing: I speak from an unusual perspective there. In May 3rd, 1972, when I was on trial, in a major political trial with tremendous publicity on me, Richard Nixon, President Nixon, sent a dozen CIA assets…