Tag: USA
That’s not America. After all, Lady Liberty used to welcome newcomers with a torch, not an AR-15. We don’t wall ourselves in while bombing others in distant parts of the world, right?
Militarism in the USA & The Decay of Democracy
Democracy shouldn’t be about celebrating overlords in uniform. A now-widely accepted belief is that America is more divided, more partisan than ever, approaching perhaps a new civil war, as echoed in the rhetoric of our current president. Small wonder that inflammatory rhetoric is thriving and the list of this country’s enemies lengthening when Americans themselves have so softly yet fervently embraced militarism.
via Killing Me Softly with Militarism: The Decay of Democracy in America
A gaunt, hesitant and apparently confused Julian Assange has told a London judge he is in an inequitable fight against a superpower which has been spying on his “interior life” and on confidential meetings with his legal team.
The WikiLeaks founder is trying to avoid extradition to the US to face 17 espionage charges and one computer hacking charge.
His legal team revealed on Monday they want to deal a knockout blow to the case against him, by establishing that the charges are a “political offence” for which extradition cannot be granted.
via Wikileaks’ Julian Assange says he’s in an unfair fight against a super power at extradition hearing
The Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is one of the world players who pushed Trump to breach the 2015 treaty with Iran. Trump then slapped the severest economic sanctions on Iran ever imposed on any country in the absence of war. Trump went around the world menacing other countries into ceasing to buy Iranian petroleum and threatening billions in fines against any company anywhere in the world that invested in or traded with Iran.
Instead, Netanyahu and Trump have pushed Iran straight into the arms of China which is investing $400 billion in the country and which is now taking most of Iran’s oil exports. China seems intent on integrating Iran into its economy even more robustly than it had proposed with Pakistan.
via Israeli PM Netanyahu’s Himalayan Miscalculation on Iran: Bringing China into the Mideast
No problem to be seen here she is a Trump. However unlike her husband schools and colleges aren’t legally threatened if they dare leak any official documents. (ODT)
Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s 3rd wife, has long claimed to be a a college graduate who majored in design and architecture at University in Slovenia. This is according to a previous version of her White House bio which was taken from the internet Way Back Machine. But her current bio was just updated to show that she is actually a college dropout.
via Einstein Visa Recipient, Melania Trump, Finally Admits She’s A Dropout | Crooks and Liars
As former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted Tuesday: “Conservative MPs in UK finally standing up to Boris sadly underscores how much conservatives in the US have been cowardly in the face of Trump.”
“Cowardly” might be an understatement. Quivering Republicans have turned the party of Lincoln into a cult of Trump. They are the president’s supine enablers — and history won’t be kind to them.
via Revolt Against Boris Johnson Exposes Republican Complicity in the Cult of Trump
Australian Detention Centers are sold as Holiday Resorts by Murdoch Media’s Chris Kenny, They are places however where detainees resort to rape, suicide, and mental collapse, children included. Where doctors nurses and staff are threatened jail if they inform. (ODT)
China regards intellectual property as just another factor of production and wants to lower its price to a minimum. By contrast, high-tech American firms often derive their profits by obtaining higher and higher prices for intellectual property.
US diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks in 2010 reveal the high priority American diplomats give to the surveillance and defence of intellectual property regimes around the world. Thousands of cables and millions of words are devoted to this subject.
Australia, as a net importer of intellectual property, has good reasons to side with the developing world, which has been calling for a “development agenda” that facilitates technology transfer as a key enabler of development. Instead, Australia sides with the “patent agenda” of the US, the EU and Japan even though it comes with a high price.
via Australia backs wrong horse as IP rights loom large in US-China trade war – Michael West
Incredibly, the European press is speculating whether the US Navy will intervene, without any warrant of international law.
Trump and his warmongers have not only failed to increase US prestige among key allies in Europe, but have actually so diminished the US superpower that now small European courts are defying it.
via Another Country Defies Trump in Latest Blow to Iran Warmongers
China Isn’t Russia it is an example of what Social Engineering cand acomplish in in just 70 years for 1.3 billion people. It’s passing the USA on it’s way up while Trump is pushing the buttons and heading down. (ODT)
Neoliberalism Has Met Its Match in China | The Smirking Chimp
In an “unprecedented” revelation that highlights the consequences of the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan, the United Nations announced Wednesday that U.S.-backed forces killed more Afghan civilians than the Taliban and other armed anti-government groups did in the first three months of this year.
![The IRGC is estimated to have 125,000 personnel, comprised of army, navy and air units [File: AFP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/4/7/447e80c6d961415c843b8b3d16e95358_18.jpg "Iran rebukes US over rumoured IRGC 'terrorist' designation")
Brian Colaneri, 20, Andrew Crysel, 18, and Vincent Vetromile, 19, face weapons and conspiracy charges. A 16-year-old student at Odyssey Academy, a school in Greece, New York, was charged with the same offences but was not identified due to his age.
Islamberg was founded more than three decades ago by a group of black Muslims who follow the teachings of Pakistani Sufi scholar Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani.
The town in Delaware County has been targeted in the past. Two years ago, a Tennessee man was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison for plotting to attack the enclave.
![Vincent Vetromile, left, Brian Colaneri, centre, Andrew Crysel, right, face weapons and conspiracy charges [Greece New York Police Department/Handout via Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/1/23/cc99c8007190420bbd15c9f34088f148_18.jpg "Four arrested for plotting to bomb New York Muslim community")
via Four arrested for plotting to bomb New York Muslim community | News | Al Jazeera
LNP Australia admires FLAWED DEMOCRACY and is determined to follow it down the the gurgler (ODT)
A new index released this week offers a sobering look at how democracy is faring in the United States.
According to the 2018 edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the U.S. doesn’t even make the list of top 20—its demonstrably “flawed democracy” notching it the 25th spot.
via United States Doesn’t Even Make Top 20 on Global Democracy Index
Americans on the right, supporters of Trump and Israel, those rarely reached by the likes of this august publication, will become increasingly aware of the actual cost to the US of America’s support for Israel: $4.5 billion a year and more “frankly … if you look at the books.”
via No one cares as Trump plan delayed again | The Electronic Intifada
Today the US Congress is weighing draft legislation based on problematic logic that conflates a call for businesses to stop operating in West Bank settlements, which are unlawful under the 1949 Geneva Conventions that prohibit transferring civilians into occupied territory, with a boycott of Israel.
Companies should fulfill their human rights responsibilities by ending operations in the settlements – yet the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S. 720) would impose criminal penalties on businesses and nonprofits who stop doing business with Israel or Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, erasing the distinction between Israel and the West Bank that the US has long recognized.
The two Canadians were arrested shortly after Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou was detained
During interrogation the pair will be put under immense pressure, a former ambassador to China says
China experts are concerned the pair are being used as political hostages
Problem Trump is finding less sympathy in the US among the States. Why is Australia the 52nd State of America? (ODT)
Trump administration officials at high-stakes climate talks offered an unapologetic defence of fossil fuels on Monday, arguing that a rapid retreat from coal, oil and gas was unrealistic.
While that stance brought scorn from environmentalists and countries that favour stronger action to fight global warming, there are signs that the administration is finding a receptive audience among other major fossil-fuel producers, including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
via Trump’s climate adviser sparked protests, but he found a receptive audience in Australia
12 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, WikiLeaks began publishing government secrets that the world public might otherwise never have known.
What it has revealed about state duplicity, human rights abuses and corruption goes beyond anything published in the world’s mainstream media.
via Julian Assange and Wikileaks’ service to journalism should be applauded
Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Israeli private intelligence company Psy Group had met with Rick Gates, who was a senior member of Trump’s presidential campaign staff in 2016, and offered to use social media, fake accounts, and surveillance in order to swing the election for a Trump victory. The New York Times reported that apparently Psy Group’s offer was rejected by Trump. Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept was among the few journalists who cover the reality that Trump’s alleged collusion with foreign agents during his presidential campaign was not just about Russia, but involved other countries, as well. Jeremy Scahill explains here the role of the Israeli group Psy Group.
via » Israeli Private Intelligence Companies Turn Civilians into Enemies– IMEMC News
While the U.S. faces pressure to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia, the United Nations estimates that if current conditions continue, Yemen could face “the worst famine in the world in 100 years.”
How many white kids in Lousianna were sentanced for one punch in the same period of time? (ODT)
At the time, Louisiana was one of 28 states that doled out mandatory life sentences to juveniles. In 1993, Baton Rouge police arrested Buchanan for landing a single fatal punch during a fight with neighborhood boys. Prosecutors charged Buchanan with second-degree murder. Under Louisiana law, he was automatically tried as an adult. The judge issued a mandatory sentence: life without parole.
Over time, a series of cases forced the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the way young people are held responsible for their crimes. In 2005, the court banned the use of the death penalty for crimes committed by juveniles. Several years later, the court banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for young people not convicted of homicide. In a 2012 ruling, the court extended that ban to include homicides. And in 2016, the court made the ban on life sentences retroactive.
Following the attack, individual members of the Congress in the United States also called on their country’s army to clarify its role in the war and investigate whether support for the air raids could render US military personnel “liable under the war crimes act”.
The US has been the biggest supplier of military equipment to Riyadh, with more than $90bn of sales recorded between 2010 and 2015.
Out of the 16,000-plus raids they have launched since the start of the conflict, only a handful have been investigated, despite nearly a third of all bombs hitting civilian targets.
Last year, the UN blacklisted the Saudi-UAE alliance for causing the majority of reported child deaths and injuries in Yemen.
The global body has described the situation in Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
It has also said that least 10,000 people have been killed since the start of the conflict. However, analysts say the death toll is likely to be higher.
![Forty children were killed in the coalition air raid on Saada province [Naif Rahma/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/8/12/9d85ef96a7a94ba28ef02dfac1f70927_18.jpg "Saudi-UAE coalition admits Yemen school bus attack 'unjustified'")
via Saudi-UAE coalition admits Yemen school bus attack ‘unjustified’ | Yemen News | Al Jazeera
PORT ARTHUR, Texas — As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile “spine” of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Like other oceanfront projects, this one would protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also has another priority: to shield some of the crown jewels of the petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it.
via Big oil asks government to protect its Texas facilities from climate change – CBS News
In the book he describes a movement “fed by the rivulets of hate mongering and disinformation-fuelled propaganda flowing out of rightwing media for at least a decade and the hospitable dark environment provided by a virtual blackout in mainstream media concerning the growth of rightwing extremism”t
The savagery of US conservative media, he says, is one of the key differences between the United States and New Zealand.
“I don’t think we can escape the fact that in the US we have a cable TV station that at least 22 hours a day and seven days a week is devoted to coaching half of America to hate the other half,” Neiwert says. “That’s been going on for 20 years or more, and it’s had a profoundly toxic effect on our discourse, our social contract, our view of each other.
Australia cannot stay silent about Trump
Donald Trump is the present spokesman for this derangement, the fear’s instrument and its preposterous embodiment. Trump is a racist, an ignoramus, a huckster and a creep. The human face of our US ally is contemptuous of human rights, the free press and any democratic norm or diplomatic protocol that doesn’t suit him, or which he thinks can be trashed to his political advantage. In addition to the trade war he recently started, the US under Trump’s “America First” banner has handed China undreamed of high ground and momentous strategic gifts by retreating from its role as Asia’s security provider. The Trans Pacific Partnership on which Australian governments set so much store, Trump knocked on the head. He flirts with authoritarian thugs while attacking, mocking and undermining democratic allies and institutions of the so-called rules-based international order. He has demolished truth, or what was left of it. He may even be Vladimir Putin’s stooge.
Astronomical gap between the pay of workers and bosses exposed in report on earnings of America’s top 350 CEOs
The Maoist Revolution in China was inspired by tesesorts of numbers. (ODT)
US bosses now earn 312 times the average worker’s wage, figures show | Business | The Guardian
This is the uneducated POTUS who leads a Radicalized and Terrorist Nation. Osama bin Laden was an educated man who resisted.Who will be remembered histotically as a “good man”? (ODT)
Mr Trump managed to dent his everyman status when he suggested that American grocery shoppers have to show ID to buy stuff.
In this he quickly joined several presidents of various stripes before him who have demonstrated that they have no idea how much a gallon of milk costs and have, indeed, rarely queued to buy tinned tomatoes and a loaf of bread.
“We believe that only American citizens should vote in American elections, which is why the time has come for voter ID like everything else,” he said.
“Voter ID. If you go out and you want to buy groceries you need a picture on a card, you need ID.
“You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID, and you need your picture.
“In this country, the only time you don’t need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman. It’s crazy.”
“Socialism is no longer a dirty word in the U.S.”
No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a “Star Wars” movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than he could ever spend on himself.
Worldwide, one in 10 people only make $2 a day. Do you know how long it would take one of those people to make the same amount as Jeff Bezos has? 193 million years. (If they only buy single-ply toilet paper.) Put simply, you cannot comprehend the level of inequality in our current world or even just our nation.
So…shouldn’t there be riots in the streets every day? Shouldn’t it all be collapsing? Look outside. The streets aren’t on fire. No one is running naked and screaming (usually). Does it look like everyone’s going to work at gunpoint? No. We’re all choosing to continue on like this.
Why?
Well, it comes down to the myths we’ve been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned.
via American society would collapse if it weren’t for these 8 myths – Lee Camp — RT Op-ed
Democrats need to learn what the Republicans have understood for decades: that to win, the party needs a message that embraces the passions, values, and agenda of grassroots leaders.
China and the United States face a wider trade war after Beijing vowed on Wednesday to retaliate over Washington’s threat to impose $200bn in additional tariffs on Chinese goods.
![The United States trade deficit in goods with China hit a record $375.2bn in 2017 [File: AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/7/11/3c91b916b22b496fa01ccce13f4ea165_18.jpg "China vows retaliation for latest $200bn US tariff threat")
via China vows retaliation for latest $200bn US tariff threat | News | Al Jazeera
“Wheeler is much smarter and will try to keep his efforts under the radar in implementing Trump’s destructive agenda,” Jeremy Symons, vice president for political affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund told Politico in May of this year. “That should scare anyone who breathes.”Wheeler has spent more than two decades in Washington. His first job was working as a top aide for Oklahoma senator James Inhofe—the man who so vehemently denies that climate change is real, he once threw a snowball (video) in the middle of Congress.Before taking the job at the EPA, Wheeler worked as an energy lobbyist on Capitol Hill. One of his biggest clients was Murray Energy, which is one of the largest coal companies in the country. Murray’s CEO Robert Murray has supported Trump for years, and long worked to do away with health and safety regulations like the Clean Power Plan. Wheeler was responsible for setting up meetings between Murray and Energy Secretary Rick Perry according to the Washington Post.
Source: Scott Pruitt’s replacement Andrew Wheeler will be even more dangerous for the EPA — Quartz
Correction Robb secured the ALP’s FTA’s he merely was a minister who signed on the dotted line. The ALP did the hard yards. (ODT)
Former trade minister Andrew Robb has attacked United States policy towards China, saying both sides of politics in Washington were obsessed with a “futile and counterproductive” effort to contain the rising Asian power.
Mr Robb, who has received a large salary as a consultant to Chinese firm Landbridge, launched the broadside against Australia’s major ally during a speech to the mining industry on Monday night.
The former minister, who secured several free trade agreements during his time in government, including that with Beijing, said both China and India were re-emerging as major players in Asia and would “share” power with the US over the course of this century.
via Former trade minister Andrew Robb takes swipe at Washington’s China policy
