nous les 99%

Published on The Guardian, by Chris Arnade, June 15, 2014:

Cecily McMillan is behind bars, unlike any of the architects of the financial crisis. In an exclusive conversation with the Guardian, she explains why her sentence serves a purpose …;

A former banker visits the only member of Occupy Wall Street to receive a prison sentence: it sounds like the set-up of a joke or a parable of the modern age. Instead, it was a real scene last Thursday, when I went to see jailed OWS activist Cecily McMillan at Rikers Island.   Continuer la lecture de « An Ex-Banker and Occupier walk into a Jail, guess which one’s serving Time? »

Published on ZNet (first on Portside), by Peter Dreier, June 14, 2014.

An idea that only a year ago appeared both radical and impractical has become a reality. On Monday, Seattle struck a blow against rising inequality when its City Council unanimously adopted a citywide minimum wage of $15 an hour, the highest in the nation.   Continuer la lecture de « Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Origins »

The Thai fishing industry is built on slavery, with men often beaten, tortured and sometimes killed – all to catch ‘trash fish’ to feed the cheap farmed prawns/shrimps sold in the west – Published on The Guardian, June 10, 2014: A six-month Guardian multimedia investigation has, for the first time, tracked how some of the world’s big-supermakets – Tesco, Aldi, Walmart and Morrisons are using suppliers relying on slave labour to put cheap prawns on their shelves. Slavery is back and here’s the proof … Thai ‘ghost ships’ that enslave and even kill workers are linked to global shrimp supply chain, Guardian investigation discovers modern day slavery:     Continuer la lecture de « Trafficked into slavery on Thai trawlers to catch food for prawns »

Interview with Paul Craig Roberts – Published on OpEdNews, by Rob Kall, June 12, 2014.

As AUDIO, 116.54 min
(and rough, incomplete notes):

I talk for almost two hours with Paul Craig Roberts On Russia, De-dollarization, capitalism, Psychopaths, Ed Snowden and NSA, Monsanto GMO. Corporatization of the FDA and more … //

… Rob: What are your thoughts about Monsanto and GMO. You mentioned that in Russia, GMO seeds and farming are being treated as terrorism.   Continuer la lecture de « On Russia, De-dollarization, Psychopaths, Monsanto GMO and more »

Published on Intrepid Report, by Paul Craigh Roberts, June 12, 2014 (see Paul Craigh Roberts also on World People’s Blog).

In my column, The Lies Grow More Audacious, I mentioned that Obama and the British prime minister, whom Obama has as a lap dog, just as George Bush had Tony Blair as lap dog, had managed to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany at the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion without mentioning the Russians.

I pointed out the fact, well known to historians and educated people, that the Red Army defeated Nazi Germany long before the US was able to get geared up to participate in the war. The Normandy invasion most certainly did not defeat Nazi Germany. What the Normandy invasion did was to prevent the Red Army from overrunning all of Europe.   Continuer la lecture de « World War II: The Unknown War »

Published on The Real News, by Paul Jay: … Mr. Johnson says the scale of the political investment of finance – six, seven hundred million dollars – is overwhelming. With the political power of finance, do we still have a democracy?

• Finance Is Building the Architecture of Their Own Rules, (3/8), 14.39 min, June 10, 2014;
• Reaganomics Was Crazy (2/8), 14.55 min, June 9, 2014;
• Growing Up in the Cauldron of 1960’s Detroit (1/8), 1.10 min, June 8, 2014.   Continuer la lecture de « Reality Asserts Itself – 3 Videos with Robert Johnson »

Published on Russia Today RT, June 7, 2014.

A federal judge who ordered the National Security Agency to retain all records of its secret telephone surveillance related to an ongoing case has reversed the order – just a day after it was issued.

“In order to protect national security programs, I cannot issue a ruling at this time. The Court rescinds the June 5 order,” US District Judge Jeffrey White said from the bench on Friday.   Continuer la lecture de « Thought better of it: NSA can get rid of evidence, judge says »

Published on Global Research.ca, by Eric Zuesse, June 7, 2014.

… This civil war is of massive historical importance, because it re-starts the global Cold War, this time no longer under the fig-leaf rationalization of an ideological battle between “capitalism” versus “communism,” but instead more raw, as a struggle between, on the one hand, the U.S. and West European aristocracies; and, on the other hand, the newly emerging aristocracies of Russia and of China. Like had happened in World War I, this global war is between two contending aristocratic alliances. (That’s the standard thing, we historians know; it’s nothing unusual there.) However, the documentation of the history is much clearer and far faster for this new war, than for former global wars, regarding which of the two sides had really initiated it, and why … // Continuer la lecture de « Why Ukraine’s Civil War Is of Global Historical Importance »

Published on Global Research.ca, by Umberto Pascali, June 7, 2014.

The announcement that the agreement has been actually signed and not just discussed was made by Gazprom’s Chief Executive Officer, Alexander Dyukov.

Despite the pressures from Wall Street and its military, propaganda and political apparatus, 9 out of 10 consumers of Gazprom’s oil and gas agreed to pay in Euros. Of course, the big watershed was the Gazprom unprecedented 30-years $400Bl natural gas supply to China signed in Shanghai last May 21 in the presence of President Putin and President Xi Jinping in the middle of the Anglo-american sponsored violent destabilization of Ukraine.   Continuer la lecture de « Grand Geopolitical Project: Russia’s Gazprom signs Agreement to Abandon the Dollar »

Published on Dissident Voice, by Jan Oberg, June 6, 2014.

… It’s not always included in the definitions that democracy requires a reasonable level of knowledge and information, freely available. For instance, one often hears that India is the world’s biggest democracy but 26% of the people are still illiterate (287 million people).   Continuer la lecture de « Democracy’s Crisis in 10 points »

Published on Spiegel Online International, Interview with Reiner Klingholz, by Maximilian Popp, June 5, 2014 (Translated from the German by Charles Hawley):
In recent years, Germany has begun attracting large numbers of highly qualified immigrants. Demographics expert Reiner Klingholz says that the development could be vital to the country’s future, despite ongoing problems with integration … //

… SPIEGEL: Why do children and grandchildren of Turkish immigrants have such a difficult time in school and on the labor market?   Continuer la lecture de « Immigration to Germany: Better Qualified than the Domestic Population »

uploaded on YouTube by StormCloudsGathering:

The Psychology of Power, Part 1, 37.23 min, Jan 7, 2014;

Snowden, The NSA and a Crime of High Treason, 4.54 min, June 3, 2014 … //
… and 78 more videos in autoplay: The divide that separates the ruling class from from the people who actually keep society functioning keeps getting wider and wider. Nothing illustrates this fact quite like the « debate » over the NSA’s mass surveillance and Edward Snowden’s role in exposing it.
Sources and full transcript here.

Published on Intrepid Report, by Ellen Brown, June 4, 2014.

Funding infrastructure through bonds doubles the price or worse. Costs can be cut in half by funding through the state’s own bank.

“The numbers are big. There is sticker shock,” said Jason Peltier, deputy manager of the Westlands Water District, describing Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to build two massive water tunnels through the California Delta. “But consider your other scenarios. How much more groundwater can we pump?”   Continuer la lecture de « Infrastructure sticker shock: Financing costs more than building it »

Global Power Project: Part 4 of 4 Part Series – Published on Dissident Voice, by Andrew Gavin Marshall, June 1, 2014.
(Read Part 1 here; Part 2 here; Part 3 here).

… At the 1992 International Monetary Conference in Toronto, there was a general consensus among private bankers and public officials that, as a result of enormous over-lending to Latin America and developing countries throughout the previous debt-crisis decade, the task of financing “the transformation of the former Soviet Union to a market economy” could not be left to bank loans alone. Hilmar Kopper, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, told the conference attendees that commercial banks would only engage in large-scale financing if there were “government-guaranteed credits” and “an agreement on the old debt,” implying that the banks would essentially need the guarantee of a government bailout scheme if things got bad.   Continuer la lecture de « When Fat Cats Meet in Munich: Welcoming the International Monetary Confernce »

Published on Roarmag.org, by Joris Leverink, May 29, 2014.

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Gezi uprising, a small group of textile workers explores a radical alternative: occupy, resist, produce!

Diren!Kazova, reads the sign above a small shop and cultural center in Istanbul’s busy Sisli neighborhood. Inside, the floor is made of cobblestones, giving the visitor the impression of arriving at a type of indoor street market. Slogans like ’1st of May!’, ‘Resist Kazova!’ and ‘Long Live the Revolution!’ are written on the stones, scattered across the room. From the walls hang racks full of sweaters, hundreds of them. At first glance they appear to be just ordinary sweaters. That is, until one learns the story behind them. Then suddenly the sweaters turn into symbols of resistance, signs of defiance, and the materialized hope for a more equal society, a more just economy — yes, for a better world even … // Continuer la lecture de « #DirenKazova: the Turkish factory under workers’ control »