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Anti-Empire

Anti-Empire

offsite link North Korea Increases Aid to Russia, Mos... Tue Nov 19, 2024 12:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Trump Assembles a War Cabinet Sat Nov 16, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Slavgrinder Ramps Up Into Overdrive Tue Nov 12, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

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offsite link US to Deploy Military Contractors to Ukr... Sun Nov 10, 2024 02:37 | Field Empty

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The Saker
A bird's eye view of the vineyard

offsite link Alternative Copy of thesaker.is site is available Thu May 25, 2023 14:38 | Ice-Saker-V6bKu3nz
Alternative site: https://thesaker.si/saker-a... Site was created using the downloads provided Regards Herb

offsite link The Saker blog is now frozen Tue Feb 28, 2023 23:55 | The Saker
Dear friends As I have previously announced, we are now “freezing” the blog.? We are also making archives of the blog available for free download in various formats (see below).?

offsite link What do you make of the Russia and China Partnership? Tue Feb 28, 2023 16:26 | The Saker
by Mr. Allen for the Saker blog Over the last few years, we hear leaders from both Russia and China pronouncing that they have formed a relationship where there are

offsite link Moveable Feast Cafe 2023/02/27 ? Open Thread Mon Feb 27, 2023 19:00 | cafe-uploader
2023/02/27 19:00:02Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of

offsite link The stage is set for Hybrid World War III Mon Feb 27, 2023 15:50 | The Saker
Pepe Escobar for the Saker blog A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you?re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by

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Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link Church of England Spending ?Excessively? on Diversity, LGBT and Net Zero Officers, Report Warns Thu Dec 05, 2024 15:24 | Will Jones
The?Church of England?is overspending on HR and "politicised roles" such as diversity,?social justice,?LGBT?and Net Zero officers at the expense of parishes, a report has warned.
The post Church of England Spending “Excessively” on Diversity, LGBT and Net Zero Officers, Report Warns appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Muhammad Most Popular Baby Name for Boys for the First Time Thu Dec 05, 2024 13:12 | Will Jones
Muhammad has become the most popular baby name for UK boys for the first time, new data from the ONS have revealed ? not so surprising given a third of births are to non-UK-born mothers.
The post Muhammad Most Popular Baby Name for Boys for the First Time appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Why Elon Musk Shouldn?t be Expelled From the Royal Society Thu Dec 05, 2024 11:00 | Toby Young
An Oxford prof has resigned from the Royal Society after it refused to expel 'climate change denier' Elon Musk. Since when has challenging the scientific consensus been a reason to kick someone out of the Royal Society?
The post Why Elon Musk Shouldn?t be Expelled From the Royal Society appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Vice-Chancellor Who Wanted Climate Change Lessons Embedded in All Courses Claimed ?16,000 Expenses f... Thu Dec 05, 2024 09:00 | Will Jones
A university Vice-Chancellor who called for climate change to become part of the curriculum on every course claimed more than ?16,000 in expenses on flights, figures have revealed.
The post Vice-Chancellor Who Wanted Climate Change Lessons Embedded in All Courses Claimed ?16,000 Expenses for Flights appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Is the EU About to Cut Off Funding to the Green Blob? Thu Dec 05, 2024 07:00 | Ben Pile
Is the EU about to cut off funding to the Green Blob? That's the prospect raised by an article in Politico, says Ben Pile, which reports that EU money is to be banned from being spent on "advocacy and lobbying work".
The post Is the EU About to Cut Off Funding to the Green Blob? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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Voltaire Network
Voltaire, international edition

offsite link What is changing in the Middle East , by Thierry Meyssan Tue Dec 03, 2024 07:08 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?110 Fri Nov 29, 2024 15:01 | en

offsite link Verbal ceasefire in Lebanon Fri Nov 29, 2024 14:52 | en

offsite link Russia Prepares to Respond to the Armageddon Wanted by the Biden Administration ... Tue Nov 26, 2024 06:56 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?109 Fri Nov 22, 2024 14:00 | en

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Know your Enemy Irish Labour Fatbarsturds

category international | consumer issues | news report author Wednesday October 02, 2013 09:50author by Brian Clarke - Labour Fatbarsturds Report this post to the editors

Ireland Faces 20 Years of No Growth

George W Bush economic adviser Dr Pippa Malmgren, speaking in Dublin yesterday, said Ireland faces 20 years of “no growth,” because of the European Central Bank She was speaking at a Davy Stockbroker conference in Dublin, saying Ireland should leave the euro and devalue the punt. Of course Irish politicians on the Euro gravy train will disagree.
Labour Fatbasturds
Labour Fatbasturds

George W Bush economic adviser Dr Pippa Malmgren, speaking in Dublin yesterday, said Ireland faces 20 years of “no growth,” because of the European Central Bank She was speaking at a Davy Stockbroker conference in Dublin, saying Ireland should leave the euro and devalue the punt. Of course Irish politicians on the Euro gravy train will disagree.

She said Ireland could deal with its debts, without inflating them away: “But you have to accept 20 years of no growth. That’s the only other option. It’s what European policymakers expect Ireland to do. The question is, do the Irish people have the tolerance to take that much pain?”

She said, “Germany doesn’t want inflation. Everybody else needs it, that’s the heart of the problem,” warning inflation cannot be controlled once it spirals. She said thar Cyrpus, will exit the euro zone: “If a country can leave and devalue, it raises the question for Ireland - what is the cost of staying in?”

Iceland's economy which had very similar problems with Ireland is doing very well with. Inflation at 3%, unemployment 5%, and a balanced government budget. Their currency is stable and the ireconomy grew 1.6% last year. Their government dealt very firmly with foreign creditors and did not bail out its banks. Icelandic creditors and their welfare system have been protected. Hwoever their government was voted out.

Their voters voted for the same centre-right parties responsible for the pre-crisis boom. These parties, heavily subsidized by the international bankers, who were told to go to hell with their debt, voted as a result of mainstream corporate media disinformation, for the parties who wanted to pay the foreign debtors.Nevertheless the parties of the current government programme:

Implements pro-growth policies.

Firmly oppose EU membership.

Take a firm line against foreign creditors.

With the betrayal of the Irish people of no property, once again by Labour ministers and Union Leadership on the Euro career, gravy train, we can expect the re-election of a Fianna Fail Sinn Fein American form of 'Republicanism' or tea Party if the banks have their usual way.

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws"
Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild

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Caption: Video Id: oHN18Rzhk_c Type: Youtube Video
Truthful Irish : Labour Party admit pre election lies


author by Mike Novackpublication date Wed Oct 02, 2013 14:23author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Twenty years of no growth? That MAY not be dependent on the path chosen. Choices, hard choices. I might agree with those you who think it a bad idea to go along with the foreign creditors and adopt the austerity measures that THEY demand as condition for continued credit.

BUT (and this is a big but) don't expect one of the other possible alternatives to be some bed of roses.

You are a sovereign people, you can indeed choose to tell those foreign creditors to stuff it, tell them that they can forget about getting back any of their past loans, etc. But in that case you will have perhaps that same next twenty years having to "pay cash" (until those foreign creditors decide maybe they can risk lending to you again). Means tough times, austerity that road too, but the difference is that YOU get to pick how and where the pain is shared out, not some outsiders.

Come to think of it, maybe that is PRECISELY why the people of some countries choose to accept the control of the outside bankers. When among yourselves you decide how the pain is divided up you end up fighting among yourselves, no outside boogemen to be blamed for the pain. So choose but choose with your eyes open. What would taking on THIS power of decision do to all of the other divisions important in your society? You can't expect how people divide up over sharing the pain to match how they are now divided up on other matters. It never works out that neatly.

author by Brian Clarke - All Voicespublication date Thu Oct 03, 2013 10:48author address author phone Report this post to the editors

I can't argue much with what you say Mike but surely the solution is to learn from our mistakes, stop lying to ourselves, exercise economic Irish sovereignty and stop borrowing abroad from lying banksters, whose models, are based on glorified Ponzi schemes. We then need an Irish national, collectively owned bank in compliance of transparent, honest standards, to to trade with other smaller, independent nations, that apply the same standards. It's not rocket science but first we have to get rid of the political liars committing economic treachery. I believe the video below, helps clarify our current economic reality, past errors and the Bush administrations part in the problem. Sound money is based on honesty. Clearly Irish politicians are at best chancers, more likely liars, Labour Scabs and Fatbarsturds.

Caption: Video Id: 4ECi6WJpbzE Type: Youtube Video
Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis


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author by davepublication date Thu Oct 03, 2013 13:20author address author phone Report this post to the editors

They are fat greedy c***s with their heads in the trough,they haven't had the balls to stand up for this country and re-negotiate with the EU..

Remember eamon gilmore's infamous speech frankfurts way or no-one's way? All promises before the election that never came to fruition. I wonder was that lie to buy our votes?

I for one,am glad that labour's popularity has never been so low. It seems we have woken up.

I have seen pat rabbitte's youtube clip as above and i'm truly disgusted by this abuse removed excuse for a man, this is the true form of greed. Take note!

author by Tpublication date Thu Oct 03, 2013 14:53author address author phone Report this post to the editors

For those interested in the banking system and taking back control you might be interested in the all-day forum on Sat Oct 12th in the Springfield Hotel in Leixlip, Co. Kildare with Ellen Brown author of 'Web of Debt' being the headline speaker. See here for details: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104124

There are also two public speaking events:

1) Imperial Hotel, Cork on Mon Oct. 14 -see http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104137
2) Hodson Bay Hotel, Athlone on Tues Oct. 15. -see http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104138

author by Brian Clarke - All Voicespublication date Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:01author address author phone Report this post to the editors

I believe this article by Chris Hedges one of my favourite current commentators is relevant to the discussion.

[[quote]]The Sparks of Rebellion

Editor’s note: Chris Hedges will be giving a talk titled “The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies” on Oct. 13 in the Los Angeles area. Click here for more information.
September 30, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "Truthdig" - I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt.

Vladimir Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints and, like Karl Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the worker’s state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. Pyotr Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”

The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion.

We must develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless. The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt, to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement. This is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class. Bakunin, unlike Marx, considered déclassé intellectuals essential for successful revolt.

It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” W.E.B. Du Bois commented acidly.

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them.

“History teaches that we have the power to transform the nation,” Kevin Zeese said when I interviewed him. Zeese, who with Dr. Margaret Flowers founded PopularResistance.org and helped plan the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., continued: “We put forward a strategic framework that would allow people to work together in a common direction to end the rule of money. We need to be a nationally networked movement of many local, regional and issue-focused groups so we can unite into one mass movement. Research shows that nonviolent mass movements win. Fringe movements fail. By ‘mass’ we mean with an objective that is supported by a large majority and 1 percent to 5 percent of the population actively working for transformation.”

Zeese said this mass resistance must work on two tracks. It must attempt to stop the machine while at the same time building alternative structures of economic democracy and participatory democratic institutions. It is vital, he said, to sever ourselves from the corporate economy. Money, he said, has to be raised for grass-roots movements since most foundations that give grants are linked to the Democratic Party. Radical student and environmental groups especially need funds to build national networks, as does the public banking initiative. This initiative is essential to the movement. It will never find support among legislative bodies, for public banks would free people from the tyranny of commercial banks and Wall Street.

The most important dilemma facing us is not ideological. It is logistical. The security and surveillance state has made its highest priority the breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt. The state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unraveling of the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable. It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least a quarter of the U.S. population, perhaps more, to perpetual poverty, and as unemployment benefits are scaled back, as schools close, as the middle class withers away, as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves, and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet, the future will increasingly be one of open conflict. This battle against the corporate state, right now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to build revolt. The corporate state is determined to deny us one.

The corporate state, unnerved by the Occupy movement, has moved to close any public space to movements that might reignite encampments. For example, New York City police arrested members of Veterans for Peace on Oct. 7, 2012, when they stayed beyond the 10 p.m. official closing time at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The police, who in some cases apologized to the veterans as they handcuffed them, were open about the motive of authorities: Officers told those being taken to jail they should blame the Occupy movement for the arrests.

The state has, at the same time, heavily infiltrated movements in order to discredit, isolate and push out their most competent leaders. It has used its vast surveillance capacities to monitor all forms of electronic communications, as well as personal relationships between activists, giving the state the ability to paralyze planned actions before they can begin. It has mounted a public relations campaign to demonize anyone who resists, branding environmental activists as “ecoterrorists,” charging activists under draconian terrorism laws, hunting down whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who shine a light on the inner secrets of power and condemning them as traitors and threats to national security. The state has attempted—and in this effort some in the Black Bloc proved unwittingly useful—to paint the movement as violent and directionless.

Occupy articulated the concerns of the majority of citizens. Most of the citizenry detests Wall Street and big banks. It does not want more wars. It needs jobs. It is disgusted with the subservience of elected officials to corporate power. It wants universal health care. It worries that if the fossil fuel industry is not stopped, there will be no future for our children. And the state is using all its power to stymie any movement that expresses these concerns. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Protective Service, the Park Service and most likely the NSA and the CIA (the latter two have refused to respond to FOIA requests) worked with police across the country to infiltrate and destroy the encampments. There were 7,765 arrests of people in the movement. Occupy, at its peak, had about 350,000 people—or about 0.1 percent of the U.S. population.

“Look how afraid the power structure was of a mere 1/10th of 1 percent of the population,” Zeese said. “What happens when the movement grows to 1 percent—not a far reach—or the 5 percent that some research shows is the tipping point where no government, dictatorship or democracy can withstand the pressure from below?”

The state cannot allow workers at Wal-Mart, or any other nonunionized service center, to have access to an infrastructure or resources that might permit prolonged strikes and boycotts. And the movement now is about nuts and bolts. It is about food trucks, medical tents, communications vans and musicians and artists willing to articulate and sustain the struggle. We will have to build what unions and radical parties supplied in the past.

The state, in its internal projections, has a vision of the future that is as dystopian as mine. But the state, to protect itself, lies. Politicians, corporations, the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and our ridiculous television pundits speak as if we can continue to build a society based on limitless growth, profligate consumption and fossil fuel. They feed the collective mania for hope at the expense of truth. Their public vision is self-delusional, a form of collective psychosis. The corporate state, meanwhile, is preparing privately for the world it knows is actually coming. It is cementing into place a police state, one that includes the complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the militarization of the internal security apparatus, as well as wholesale surveillance of the citizenry.

The most pressing issue facing us right now is the most prosaic. Protesters attempting to block the Keystone XL pipeline can endure only for so long if they have nothing to eat but stale bagels. They need adequate food. They need a system of communication to get their message out to alternative media that will amplify it. They need rudimentary medical care. All of these elements were vital to the Occupy movement. And these elements, when they came together, allowed the building of a movement that threatened the elite. The encampments also carried within them internal sources of disintegration. Many did not adequately control some groups. Many were hijacked or burdened by those who drained the political work of the movement. Many found that consensus, which worked well in small groups, created paralysis in groups of several hundred or a few thousand. And many failed to anticipate the numbing exhaustion that crushed activists. But these encampments did provide what was most crucial to the movement, something unions or the old Communist Party once provided to militants in the past. They provided the logistics to sustain resistance. And the destruction of the encampments, more than anything else, was a move by the state to deny to us the infrastructure needed to resist.

Infrastructure alone, however, will not be enough. The resistance needs a vibrant cultural component. It was the spirituals that nourished the souls of African-Americans during the nightmare of slavery. It was the blues that spoke to the reality of black people during the era of Jim Crow. It was the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Music, dance, drama, art, song, painting were the fire and drive of resistance movements. The rebel units in El Salvador when I covered the war there always traveled with musicians and theater troupes. Art, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Major Barbara,” said poverty is “[t]he worst of crimes” and “All the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidated the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts. The degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism, the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, severs the population from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems.

Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. It is capable of expressing what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery. “The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin wrote, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”

Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. Then we can fight.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.[[/quote]]

Ayman Al Gilmore's SATANIC ORANGE ORDER
Ayman Al Gilmore's SATANIC ORANGE ORDER

Caption: Video Id: x0ZtBynHswk Type: Youtube Video
Keiser Report: #AngloTapes & Banksters


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