crime

Latin America: The Aborted Neo-Liberal Offensive

Pundits and commentators on the Left and Right are pronouncing ‘the end of the progressive cycle in Latin America’. They cite the recent presidential elections:
1. Argentina, where hard-right Mauricio Macri was elected;
2. Brazil, where President Dilma Rousseff has appointed a neo-liberal ‘Chicago Boy’ economist, Joaquin Levy, as Finance Minister and launched an IMF-style regressive structural adjustment policy designed to reduce social expenditures and attract financial speculators; and

COP 21 and the Stars Are out Waiting for Caviar

No-no-no more Bill McKibben, please. He is capitalism lite, loving each climate change bubble of CO2, nitrous oxide and toilets a flushing as part of COP 21. Can he stay home and teach? Do we need parading after parading of the usual suspects – Naomi Klein, Billy-boy, Prince Charles, Mark Ruffalo, Björk, David Bowie, Coldplay, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Colin Firth , Emma Thompson  Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow ou encore Nathalie Portman  Sean Penn, Leo Dicaprio.

Bank Crimes Pay

November 13, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking.

Bad Policy, Bad Ethics: U.S. Military Bases Abroad

The thesis of anthropologist David Vine’s latest book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, is taboo in American political discourse. It is a radical notion to suggest that foreign bases don’t protect American interests but actively harm them. Candidates who fail to reflexively support U.S. militarism face a political land mine.

Why is FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Boiling over Former Speaker Hastert’s Plea Deal?

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, founder of Boiling Frogs Post, is boiling mad these days and has launched a campaign to blow the cover off the cover-up of powerful criminals, including pedophiles, operating at the highest levels of the United States government.  The  ACLU calls her a “silenced patriot.”  Edmo

State Terror or Capitalist Terror, Military Coup or Capitalist Coup

Democratic critics of military seizures of power commonly refer to them as military coups. They adopt a very narrow and misleading conception of what is taking place.
Likewise, human rights activists and progressive analysts who conceptualize the reign of violence which follows, a ‘coup’ as state terror fail to take account of the systemic forces – the capitalist social order and class relations – which determine the classes which wield state power. They ignore the specific classes and groups which are targeted and which classes direct and benefit from terror.

Crimes of Silence

Institutionalised brutality is a rather easy thing to replicate. It begins with a selected language, and ends up justifying monstrous conduct. It pardons behaviour, and it condemns victims. The global debate on refugees is characterised by its distinct lack of humanity, and Australia, leading the charge, knows no limits on how far that lack of humanity can go.

This Has Become Routine

In his comment on the mass shootings at the Oregon community college, President Obama said: “This has become routine.”
So have police shootings of unarmed and unresisting Americans.
So have numerous other undesirable and deplorable happenings, such as the foreclosure on the homes of millions of Americans, while the “banks too big to fail” are bailed out with trillions of dollars, and such as foreign policy lies that have destroyed seven countries, bringing the US and Europe millions of refugees.