“They were rebelling against the price of the gasoline – it was the starting point. And then it built up on inequality,” he said, adding that behind the “spectacular frontline” where people clashed with police, there were “clusters of people talking mostly about tax inequality.” And this “free talk” means there’s greater public discontent brewing.
“People talking is always the sign of genuine insurgency movements. In the midst of the protest it felt like the French revolution must have been like this. I don’t know if it’s conscious in the people’s heads. There is this mix of politics, vulgarity, anger, something that is not controllable and it could go either way,” he said.
Given the extent of the public anger, Moreira believes the measures the French government has taken to calm the protests will not be enough in the long run, and the entire economic system must undergo drastic changes.
Author: peterimrich
Trump Hotel voted the World’s Best by it’s clients. The judge thought otherwise. That orenge face is the embarrasment showing! (ODT)
Friday’s ruling comes in a lawsuit filed days after Trump took office in January 2017. The plaintiffs included a New York hotel owner, an events booker in Washington and a restaurant trade group that allege lost patronage, wages and commissions from clients who now prefer Trump’s businesses over theirs because of the ability to gain the president’s favor.
via Appeals Court Rules Against Trump In Foreign Payments Case | HuffPost
We are in a battle for the SOUL of this country. Hate speech like this ad should have no hiding place. Publicize the shop that made it and make sure they never. work. again.
Sinclair Airs Racist Ad During Debate ‘Burning’ AOC’s Face | Crooks and Liars
Sinclair Media vies to become Trump’s favoured messenger. (ODT)
“We are fighting to guarantee healthcare in America. To make education and housing dignified and accessible. To save our planet. To set living wages. To establish justice at home and peace abroad.” (AOC)
America’s, no! Trump’s choice to lead Venezeuala. (ODT)
The reason that the story was broken to Lipmann by three intelligence insiders is that they were disturbed that the Trump administration was apprised of their findings and did absolutely nothing about them. Trump is alleged to have said that he didn’t believe the Israelis are spying on him. That makes you wonder what they might have on him from having spied on him.
via Israel caught by FBI electronically Spying on Trump, White House
Surveillance network revealed
We also have other recent evidence of Israeli espionage in the US – albeit ignored by mainstream media and political elites.
Last year, The Electronic Intifada released in full Al Jazeera’s undercover documentary, The Lobby–USA.
Al Jazeera never broadcast the film, after Qatar, which funds the network, came under intense pressure to censor it from the very Israel lobby the film exposes.
It’s no mystery why Israel’s proxies did not want it to ever see the light of day.
The film reveals a network of organizations acting as front groups for the Israeli state’s efforts to spy on, disrupt and sabotage US supporters of Palestinian rights.
via Why would Israel spy on Donald Trump? | The Electronic Intifada
Firefighters in New South Wales and Queensland are gearing up for a week of unseasonably warm weather as they continue to battle blazes across the two states.
With the rapture pending he does not care a jot for the health of the planet – why should he, it’s all going to end soon. He’s King Cnut; trying to hold back the progressive tides until Armageddon. Unluckily for him it’s the unfolding climate disasters and a tanking economy that will see his acolytes start to abandon the pews. Morrison has a messiah complex, but despite his mushroom politics he cannot hide the incompetence and graft, his spin has spun and in the battle of ideas he’s left holding the beers. Without his religion he’s got nothing but a smirk.
It won’t be too long before the dak shatter goes terminal and the hairless Hitler, Spud-Dutton, seizes his chance. Heaven help us!
Holy shite! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Alaskan Arctic now warm enough to fuck (ODT)
via Trump opens protected Alaskan Arctic refuge to oil drillers | US news | The Guardian
We let the Ramsay Center into our Universities, Abbott wanted a Climate denier control center in one who lost his Koch Bro funding, Dr Bjorn Lomborg. What funding doe Murdoch get from the Kocks of this world? (ODT)
“It is much more dangerous to be unaware of whom you’re taking money from, and what kind of politics they support,” Kellie McElhaney, a University of California, Berkeley professor, told McBride. “You sure as heck should have some core values you’re not going to compromise on,” she added.
When there is money of the magnitude that Koch Disruptive Technologies has at its disposal, you should probably bet on the money!
What’s next for Koch Industries? Will Chase Koch be setting up a pavilion at Burning Man?
via Koch Industries, Masters of Far Right-Wing Skullduggery, Target Silicon Valley | The Smirking Chimp
Imagine if we had a day each year when we all went around asking cancer patients if they were “okay”, yet didn’t fund practical medical help for them or give them any hope? The idea is laughable, yet the analogy is real.
Yet when we consider this news only a little, it does not bode well. To use the words of high-profile whistle-blower and current member of Parliament, Andrew Wilkie said four years ago, Australia is currently in a ‘pre-police state’.[3] That sense has only grown over the years and now it is at decibels we have not heard. At the very least, it suggests an attack on the right to free speech, which we take for granted here. The Australian government today is instituting a regime that inhibits free speech through police intimidation, big money donation, and insidious legislation. The AFP going through underwear drawers? Dinners for $10,000 a head? Passing hate speech laws when no-one is looking? These actions represent a government emboldened and radicalised. It is changing our very discourse and threatens our democracy just as Hong Kong loses its independence, just like Kashmiri citizens are blinded, and all while the Brazil forest is burning. This is a free speech issue, and, it is fits with the global trend.
The Right to Free Speech is Also A Responsibility – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Someone is not getting their funding cut. It’s the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Quiet Australians! It has been a week, and nobody seems to have noticed, but the front page of the GDP release has been doctored, sorry … enhanced. In a happy coincidence for Josh Frydenberg, a spot of rounding and seasonal adjustment have delivered the Treasurer another 0.3 per cent for his next GDP.
Looking behind those GDP numbers
via Smoke and Mirrors: how the ABS tarted up the numbers for Josh Frydenberg – Michael West
While there is a strong element of truth in individual cases like this, let’s not turn it into something to generalise from either. Australian History is a documented record of Racism against Chinese for colour alone. Patterns of behaviour were culturally accepted and became systemic institutionalised for political reasons back then too, and those adversarial tactics have remained supported throughout generations today. In just the same way our Colonial attitudes did to Indigenous Australia.
Power and white culture reflected what the pecking order was among whites too but for other reasons such as religion or worse atheists primarily because they tended to deny the socially constructed order of things as natural or god-given. Socialists and Communists were a focus of danger, even more so and globally.
However, to say colour wasn’t predominant is to deny the history that landed on our shores and that still predominates and is pulled out so quickly and misused by Politicians for tactical reasons and in the case Scott Morrison PM is being used in a non-applicable but racial way in defense of Gladys Liu. Reverse Racism Black and Sino Racism aren’t Racism It’s the tactical cry of alt-right whites claiming victimhood where none exists. It’s calling Adam Goodes a Racist when he’s not. It’s a strategy of smoke screening systemic and institutional patterns of behaviour so ingrained in our cultural psyche to be regarded as usual and ill-mannered but little more. However, there is no equivalency between black and white racism because black yellow racism isn’t an institutionalised pattern of behaviour in Australia. (ODT)
It’s not racist, it’s politics: the treatment of Chinese students and MP Gladys Liu
via 
Any fool can manufacture a narrative, in fact, whole societies have manufactured consent through media ownership while vilifying those who would point out the facts to challenge them. Cruelty, victim blame, and vilification become the norms shrouded in fascicle smiley hypocrisy.
Unless, as a species, we learn the scientific facts … we are lost to this type of cruel and vile self-justification for evil. The Christian wolf in sheep’s clothing. A compulsive lying coat of thorns disguised as many colours. The smiling assassin.
Mark my words, Morrison is truly dangerous because he believes his own lies.
via The Christian wolf in sheep’s clothing – » The Australian Independent Media Network
You think John Bolton was a HAWK (ODT)
Many major retailers that previously refused to take a stand on the issue of guns in their stores are now stepping up, and this highlights the momentum on the side of gun safety advocates. The tide is turning in this country, so radical holdouts at Fox News turn to threats of violence.
Fox News and GOP Media Now Warn of Bloodshed If Democrats Win in 2020 | The Smirking Chimp
Bolton’s recess appointment as United Nations ambassador in 2005 was widely viewed as a sign of the George W. Bush administration’s contempt for the institution. (Bolton had famously remarked that if the U.N. headquarters “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”)
via Bolton Tried His Best to Draw the U.S. Into War. Luckily He Failed.
Many will rightly celebrate the departure of the US national security adviser. But however welcome the news, it reflects the deeper problems with this administration
During a Monday press spray with the annoying chopper behind him, Trump belittled the victims of Hurricane Dorian (and the Bahamas in general) and claimed that many gang members and drug dealers were trying to get into the country along with the survivors.
America has a long-standing tradition of allowing survivors of natural disasters to enter the US, but The NY Times reported that evacuees were treated horribly, “The confusion over who could come was highlighted over the weekend when 119 people from the Bahamas were ordered to get off a ferry bound for Florida because they did not have the necessary United States travel visas.”
Off-camera, a reporter asked how the United States is handling this precarious situation and instead of extending the hand of warmth and hopefulness, Trump smeared the people of the Bahamas in his usual vicious fashion.
via Trump Attacks Hurricane Dorian Survivors As ‘Drug Dealers And Very Bad People’ | Crooks and Liars
Despite being one of the worst bushfires in Australian history, alarmingly, the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, which killed 173 people, destroyed around 2,000 homes and incinerated millions of plants and animals, didn’t serve as a wake-up call.
The deeper we sink into denial, the more we commit ourselves to a reality where our children learn about environmental icons such as the Great Barrier Reef and our magnificent rainforests through history books, instead of being able to experience their wonder for themselves.
Choosing to turn away from this moment to act will be the ultimate betrayal of future generations.
Trump and Bolton offer differing narratives on ‘resignation’
In the end, it appears the President was also happy to see Mr Bolton leave. The men were even unable to agree on the circumstances of his departure.
In the President’s version, he told Mr Bolton his services weren’t required last night before asking for his resignation this morning.
Mr Bolton says he offered to resign last night, but the President said they would discuss it today.
It’s better not to be a “more normal country” if that means being as prone to invasions and coups as the United States, top Russian ministers have said, firing back at bizarre remarks by a new Pentagon chief.
It would be “great” if the West “could get Russia to behave like a more normal country,” Mark Esper, the newly appointed defense secretary, was reported to have claimed while visiting Paris this week.
“Otherwise, we should have been acting like the US, bombing Iraq and Libya in blatant violation of international law… We should have supported coups, violent and anti-constitutional, like the US and its closest allies did in February 2014 [in Ukraine].”
via 
Trumps dream of a Nobel Prize blew up in his face again but in his eagerness to show what a failure he infact is he twittered the promise of a peace accord and it’s failure ought to be sufficient to gain him the recognition he craves. Promise of peace in Iran, Afghanistan Syria and Nth Korea along with their accompanying failures Trump believes should be enough to have him crowned and celebrated as a global Caesar rather than a screwed up Nero. Afterall the blame is not his. (ODT
But little was made of that at the time. The endgame of the talks seemed near, if not the timetable. Only then came Trump’s tweets on Saturday night disclosing that he had invited the Taliban and Ghani to Camp David — but called it off, citing the bombing.
The tweets took many in the administration by surprise; there was no reason for Trump to reveal what had happened, several officials said, especially since he has not given up on the idea of a negotiated settlement.
via How Donald Trump’s secret plan to meet the Taliban came together, and fell apart
It would, of course, be foolish to pretend that there is a neat solution to the chaos in Afghanistan, a poverty-stricken country divided on tribal, ethnic, and religious lines, fought over by a bevy of outside powers, and plagued by violence for more than four decades.
There isn’t. But here’s what the hawks don’t tell you: Afghan civilians are already dying in big numbers, not only despite the presence of U.S. forces — 2018 saw Afghan civilian deaths hit a record high — but because of them, too. How many Americans are aware of the fact that in the first six months of this year, the Afghan government and its U.S.-led international allies killed more civilians than the Taliban? Shouldn’t that shock us all?
via 
olddogthoughts 
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