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Pillage and Class Polarization: The Rise of “Criminal Capitalism”
James Petras
Introduction
About 75% of US employees work 40 hours or longer, the second longest among all OECD countries, exceeded only by Poland and tied with South Korea. In contrast, only 10% of Danish workers, 15% of Norwegian, 30% of French, 43% of UK and 50% of German workers work 40 or more hours. With the longest work day, US workers score lower on the ‘living well’ scale than most western European workers. Moreover, despite those long workdays US employees receive the shortest paid holidays or vacation time (one to two weeks compared to the average of five weeks in Western Europe). US employees pay for the costliest health plans and their children face the highest university fees among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In class terms, US employees face the greatest jump in income inequalities over the past decade, the longest period of wage and salary decline or stagnation (1970 to 2014) and the greatest collapse of private sector union membership, from 30% in 1950 down to 8% in 2014.
German Companies Stop Sales of “Roundup”
by Eric Zuesse
Monsanto: German companies stop glyphosate sales
German Economic News | Published: 09:06:15 15:19 clock
According to Swiss supermarkets, German companies have announced halting sales of Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide.
In 1971, Monsanto patented glyphosate. Today its glyphosate (“Roundup”) constitutes two billion US dollars in annual sales.
David Aaronovitch And The Jewish Solidarity Industry
By Gilad Atzmon
“Zionist and most anti-Zionist Jews are captives of the same primeval Jewish mindset, and that it is this mindset that, in effect, provoked antisemitic reaction, right down to the Holocaust itself.” (David Aaronovitch, Jewish Chronicle)
David Aaronovitch, once Trotskyite, now neo-con but always advocate for Blair’s Zionist wars is alive and kicking. Yesterday in the Jewish Chronicle he found the time to attack Professor Oren Ben Dor for telling the truth about Israel and Jewish identity politics. In his Jewish Chronicle weekly column, the war-monger had the audacity to criticise Ben Dor, (himself a veteran Israeli submarine captain as well as a law scholar who found out about Jewish violence the hard way) for wishing to express his own political opinions about Jewish culture and identity politics.
Fast-track Hands the Money Monopoly to Private Banks — Permanently
by Ellen Brown
It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. — Attributed to Henry Ford
In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.
The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window. And that could help explain the desperate rush to “fast track” not only the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA would nip attempts to implement public banking and other monetary reforms in the bud.
Israel doesn't abuse children, it just murders them
By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Palestine
Throughout its unglamorous history, the UN issued many scandalous reports and adopted many scandalous resolutions reflecting lack of justice and absence of moral honesty.
This ever-existing symptom also reflected western hegemony over the international organization.
However, none of these reports and resolutions seems more scandalous than this week's report which kept Israel off the List of Shame, which includes states and entities that abuse children.
This particular report is manifestly scandalous precisely because Israel is probably one of the most obscene abusers of children under the sun.
Indeed, there are a few countries in this world that can be compared to Israel in this respect.
At the top of the list of shame sits the Nazi-like Syrian regime of Bashar el-Assad which habitually and routinely murders children (and other civilians) in large numbers, either by dropping crude barrel bombs on residential neighborhoods and crowded streets or using deadly chemical agents against heavily populated areas.
"It's like a jail," An account of life in Lebanon's refugee camps as told by a Syrian-Palestinian refugee
Louisa Lamb
Lebanon’s 12 refugee camps have become more crowded since March of 2011, but in large numbers starting in mid-December 2012, when Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp was heavily bombed. Between 70,000 and 90,000 Syrian-Palestinians have entered Lebanon and are staying mainly in Lebanon’s 12 refugee camps. Most were forced out of Syria because of persistent and accelerating civil-sectarian war, while others have left because of the lack of resources.
This young American had the privilege of speaking with Wisam, who has been living as a refugee in Lebanon since 2012. Wisam was born in 1986 in Damascus, Syria. Unlike many Syrian-Palestinians, who are often born in refugee camps, he was born in a hospital in Damascus. He is the middle-child of five, with three brothers and one sister. His father worked a bureaucratic position in the Syrian government, and his mother stayed at home with the children at their two flats in Almshtel, near Seyeda Zeinab, south of Damascus. In Syria, Wisam did not face any discrimination for being Palestinian. He remembers being treated as an equal by Syrians and by governmental agencies. Like almost all Palestinians however, he did attend UNRWA schools and reminisced, with seeming nostalgia, about what he considers was a good education, reciting the general public view that UNRWA schools were often better Syrian state schools.
The Reversal of Kerry’s Ukraine Statement Came from Obama, Not Nuland
Eric Zuesse
When Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland on May 15th contradicted her boss John Kerry’s statement of three days earlier, in which Kerry had warned Ukraine’s President Petro Petroshenko not to violate the Minsk II agreement, and not to invade Crimea, and not to re-invade Donbass, the source of this reversal was actually U.S. President Barack Obama, and not Victoria Nuland (as the State Department had reported).
When I first noticed the contradiction as I reported on May 21st, Nuland’s statement on May 15th was being quoted by Ukraine’s Interfax News Agency, without any link to its U.S. source. I looked but didn’t right away find its U.S. source, but the official Ukrainian news agency would not quote a U.S. Government official falsely, and so I went with the story on that basis.
The Senate’s Patriot Act Betrayal
SARTRE
Watching the DC establishment respond to Senator Rand Paul’s efforts to sunset important aspects of the Patriot Act is like peeling back the skin of a decaying onion to expose the rot. Members of the Senate all take an oath to defend and protect the U.S. Constitution. Well those “public servants” who are doing their perfected “Potomac Two Step” would have the public believe that next week’s vote on some version of the House passed USA Freedom Act will halt the NSA from their systematic violation of 4th Amendment protections.
As expected the disinformation from the corporatist media, USA Today misleads as expected. “The Senate voted 77-17 to advance a bill that would end the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of the phone data of millions of Americans not suspected of any terrorist activity.”
US Senate Lets Three Patriot Act Provisions Expire
by Stephen Lendman
On Sunday, Senate debate failed to extend three controversial Patriot Act provisions:
● Section 215 used as justification for bulk NSA phone, Internet and business records collection;
● the lone wolf provision amending the definition of a foreign power to include anyone allegedly "engag(ing) in international terrorism or activities in preparation thereof;" and
● the roving wiretap provision permitting "blank check" phone and Internet monitoring of individuals without identifying them by name or having justifiable probable cause.
● Unless changed by subsequent congressional action, monitoring henceforth requires "specific and articulable facts" showing targeted subjects may be foreign agents as defined under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Section 215 defenders lie claiming sunsetting the provision eliminates vital surveillance powers needed to protect against terrorist threats.
Revisiting Patriot Act Police State Legislation
by Stephen Lendman
Free and open societies don't enact police state laws like the USA Patriot Act - ever for any reason.
Lawyer Nancy Chang said earlier "(t)here's nothing patriotic about trampling on the Bill of Rights."
The legislation was written, on the shelf, ready to go long before 9/11 - awaiting an excuse to introduce and enact what no free society would tolerate.
Washington capitalized on a window of hysteria to grant unchecked executive powers. The legislation was congressionally passed and signed by George Bush on October 26, 2001 - 45 days after 9/11.
It state sponsored terror committed by the government of the United States against its own people. The mother of all Big Lies claims otherwise.
The Patriot Act’s text was 342 pages long. It controversially changed 15 US laws. It created the crime of domestic terrorism for the first time - defined as "acts dangerous to human life…that appear to be intended:
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping…"
In other words, anti-war or global justice demonstrations, environmental or animal rights activism, civil disobedience, and dissent of any kind may be called "domestic terrorism."
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