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New Orleans: I’m not celebrating
By Greg Palast
This week, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, The Palast Investigative Fund is offering my film, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans as a FREE download.
It wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a homicide. This is the story you’re not supposed to know. Get it, and pass on the link.
Screw the celebration. New Orleans hasn’t “come back.” That is, there are still the Bourbon Street bars serving “Hurricanes” to sloshed tourists and Mardi Gras when white Americans can catch trinkets from floats floating over the ghosts of the drowned. New Orleans is back to 79% of its pre-flood population. Why am I not cheering? Because the original residents—that is, the majority of the pre-flood Black residents—are still wandering in America’s cruel economic desert.
Obama’s War on Venezuela
by Stephen Lendman
Endless US hot wars rage in multiple theaters. Covert destabilizing ones target numerous other countries.
Toppling Venezuela’s government has been a US objective since Chavez took office in February 1999 - so far not achieved but ongoing without letup.
Occasional US soft diplomatic talk is pure deception - including John Kerry saying Washington “seek(s) ways to improve a historically strong relationship” on the occasion of Venezuela’s July 5 independence day commemoration. Most often his rhetoric reflects longstanding US meddling in the internal affairs of other countries - flagrantly illegal under core international law ignored by Washington, operating solely by its own rules and standards.
Differing Views on China
by Stephen Lendman
Ignore demagogues like Donald Trump claiming “China is taking our jobs…taking our money…They’ll take us down.”
Gerald Celente issued a “trend alert” headlined “Market Mayhem: Don’t blame China - It’s the (global) economy, stupid.”
China is far from blame-free. Celente calls its economy “the canary in the collapsing global-equity mine.” He forecasts markets plummeting by yearend. Chickens are coming home to roost. Current market turbulence is “more than a…correction,” he stresses. “It’s a global recession” - how severe remains to be seen.
Colombia’s Killing Fields: Peace is War
James Petras
Introduction
Colombia has received more US military aid--over $6 billion dollars in the past decade -- than any country in the Western Hemisphere. For its part, Colombia allowed the Pentagon to build seven military bases, more than all the other countries in the region combined. There are over 2,000 US military officers and private US ‘mercenary’ contractors engaged in military activities in Colombia - more than any other country in Latin America.
During the decade-long (2001-2010) regime of President Alvaro Uribe, (a drug trafficker and death squad jefe in his own right), more than one-thousand trade union leaders and activists were murdered - over one hundred a year.
West Point Professor Calls Anti-War Legal Scholars Fifth Column Threats
by Stephen Lendman
Lunatics in America aren’t just in Washington. London Guardian national security editor Spencer Ackerman explained West Point Law Professor William Bradford claims “legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism represent a ‘treasonous’ fifth column that should be attacked as enemy combatants.”
He wants them, their home offices, law schools where they teach and media outlets interviewing them targeted like radical Islamists - “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage,” he wrote in an academic paper.
“Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, (dissenting) scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are - at least in theory - targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism,” he claimed.
His National Security Law Journal article headlined “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column.”
Black New Orleans 10 Years Post-Katrina
by Stephen Lendman
August 29 marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. A personal note: Its devastation and ugly aftermath inspired this 70-year-old retiree at the time to begin writing about major world and national issues along with media work pro bono.
It bears repeating some what that first article said - calling Katrina less what nature wrought, more a conspiracy of federal, state and city government along with business interests against the area’s most vulnerable residents - mainly its poor Black population.
Over a million people were displaced. Over 1,000 died. Cashing in on disaster followed. Former Republican congressman/current lobbyist Richard Baker said at the time: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it but God did.”
Egypt’s War on Press Freedom
by Stephen Lendman
Egypt is a US-supported fascist dictatorship. Anyone challenging its authority risks imprisonment or death.
Police state injustice is official state policy. Thousands are imprisoned solely for their political beliefs.
On August 29, Al Jazeera reported on three of its journalists sentenced to three years in prison by a kangaroo Cairo court.
In June 2014, Baher Mohamed, Mohamed Fahmy and Peter Greste were declared guilty of “aiding a terrorist organization” - referring to the ousted Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013, coup d’etat illegitimacy replacing it.
Mainstream Media Goes Berserk
SARTRE
The practice of objective journalism has been effectively banned from the body politik. The social culture is driven by the embodiment of an unceasing drumbeat of disinformation; spoon fed prevarications and carefully shaped distortions, projected by a mass media that is in the tank for protecting the ruling elite. The myth that the press is endowed with an inherent courage to confront the establishment has been laid bare for any honest observer to witness. However, the problem is that the bulk of the marginally functioning intellects that still accept the mind control of the corporate media, continue to linger on in their dream world of obeying the prevailing order. Some order, the nation is breaking apart at the seams all over the country. The reign of terror that appears on the boob tube, news site or printed rags from the accepted moguls of the new social media keeps pushing out the tired diatribe that the system still is working well.
US Occupies Yemeni Island
by Stephen Lendman
Fars News said “(t)he US has invaded and occupied Yemen’s strategic Island of Socotra (part of the Yemeni archipelago) in the Indian Ocean and is now building up its biggest naval base there, media reports said.” More on this below.
Obama’s war on Yemen using Saudi-led regional proxies is perhaps the region’s most destructive, underreported conflict - five months of genocidal war passing under the radar almost unnoticed.
US major media report little about it. Other Western counterparts give it short shrift. Most Americans likely never heard of Yemen - for sure know nothing about raging conflict, planned and orchestrated by Washington - to return the nation to US client state status, putting millions of Yemenis in harm’s way, suffering because of a combination of US/Saudi aggression and blockade, creating a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.
Where's the missing part, Naomi Klein? Ask Pope Francis and Mohammed Mesbahi
Adam Parsons
The latest book by Naomi Klein is essentially a call to share the world’s resources, but its thesis on social transformation is missing a crucial factor: a profound awareness of the reality of hunger and life-threatening deprivation. While Pope Francis’ recent encyclical calls on us to prioritise this global emergency in our efforts to combat global warming, Mohammed Mesbahi proposes a people’s strategy for how we can finally end the moral outrage of extreme poverty amidst plenty. Climate change is an historic opportunity to not only heal the environment, but also to roll back the tide of injustice and ever-widening inequality that is an integral feature of our current economic system.
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