Showing all posts tagged United States
Preparing for the end of the world (at a very reasonable price)
Tim Murphy in Mother Jones: Humans have been preparing for the worst for millennia, but modern Americans have turned it into an art form. At the dawn of the Atomic Age, suburbanites scrambled to build backyard shelters and the government stockpiled food in anticipation of the day after. The spiraling inflation of the 1970s brought…
America’s wars are outsourced so there’s much money to be made
The face of America’s never-ending “war on terror” is increasingly privatised. This Washington Post article explains just one example of this trend but doesn’t examine the lack of accountability of the practice, something I’m doing in my 2013 book and film on disaster capitalism: The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed…
Breaking: US TV show discusses influence of Zionist lobby
Perhaps the only US TV host that actually honestly discusses domestic and global issues is Chris Hayes on MSNBC. His latest involves the current absurd calls by the Israel lobby and its courtiers in the US to stop the potential Obama administration nomination of Chuck Hagel as Defence Secretary because he’s an “anti-Semite“. If America…
The trauma suffered by an American drone operator
The life of an American drone pilot is rarely examined. This story in Der Spiegel… reveals the human cost of America’s supposedly clean war (oh, apart from the countless civilians murdered): A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit…
How Murdoch and his cabal corrupts democracy part 974224
One of the team behind the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein, unloads: So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of… Rupert Murdoch‘s ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America’s democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic…
Leading American Zionist worries about end of Jewish state
Jeffrey Goldberg (see here for his glorious record of loving American/Israeli-led wars) is one of America’s most read Zionists with access to Barack Obama. That supposedly makes you important in establishment media land when it really means you’re a water carrier for war-friendly policies (especially over Iran). Having said all that, Goldberg has expressed increasing…
This is not the Syria your mainstream media outlet is selling you
The intrepid Patrick Cockburn, one of the finest reporters around, travels to Syria and offers an alternative view in The Independent: It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a machete at…
The new totalitarianism in India
The always eloquent Arundhati Roy on disaster capitalism in the world’s biggest quasi-democracy: I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan.…