Category United States Politics
Pilger compares ISIS to Khmer Rouge – US complicit
Love him or loathe him, John Pilger cuts to the chase in a recent article on ISIS, From Pol Pot to ISIS: “Anything that flies on everything that moves” ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic […]
The fallacy of trickledown
Further to arguments for Guaranteed Minimum Income, the threat to employment from new technology and the multiple fallacies in the current neoliberal economic model is this well publicised TED talk and Bloomberg op-ed piece by billionaire investor Nick Hanauer. He claims capital, investors, don’t create employment unless they absolutely have to. It is middle class […]
How the current economic system fails
To reinforce many of the ideas I have expressed or highlighted over the last few years, this documentary is an excellent summary of many of them. Well worth a view, if a little American centric, but the messages are global. Extreme competitive individualism, extreme consumerism and extreme environmental degradation will destroy capitalism and perhaps western society.
XKEYSCORE – Nah, yeah
In a remarkable admission John Key has been forced to admit that Edward Snowden’s claims about the Five Eye’s comprehensive spying platform XKeyscore may very well be true but the data is not coming from mass surveillance on New Zealanders by the GCSB. This is how Key was reported in the NZ Herald; Prime Minister […]
Snowden was the star
Tonight’s Moment of Truth mostly lived up to it billing, with the notable and glaring exception of Kim Dotcom’s email revelation pertaining to John Key allegedly knowing about him well before the mansion show raid; and actively participating in his entrapment here, colluding with US interests. It is not clear why he pulled this part of […]
Time for New Zealand to leave the UN
The United Nations like the League of Nations that preceded it is nothing but a sham, a pretence for civilised debate while the economic and military behemoths of the world serve their own interests, regardless of what is expressed in its chambers and with impunity thanks to the ludicrous Security Council veto. Little old New Zealand, who so […]
Where are you on Gaza Helen Clark?
Having a browse of Helen Clark’s tweets of late you could be forgiven for thinking she has no strong personal position on Gaza. A number of retweets, mostly from the BBC, that bastion of British conservatism, reporting casualties in Gaza does not a protest make. Sure she is not the Secretary General but she is in […]
Obama’s pathetic legacy
Even before Barack Obama is half way through his second term you can tell how woeful his legacy will be. Thomas Frank in Salon has written a cutting piece Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy is a failure mocking the likely highlights of the Obama Presidential Library. The task […]
Thomas Frank on Thomas Piketty
I haven’t read Thomas Piketty’s best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century yet but I found much to applaud in Thomas Frank’s review of it on Salon. It resonates what the best heterodox economists/economic historians like Steve Keen and Michael Hudson have been saying for years. The criticism goes to the heart of of the fallacy of neo-liberalism, […]
Israel, Gaza and collective punishment
The inane and futile Palestinian/Israeli conflict is once more being played out in Gaza. Vox.com presents a very revealing graph of the disturbing asymmetry between Israeli and Palestinian casualties since 2000. Israeli response to Palestinian rockets or suicide bombers has been grossly disproportionate and there seems as little will on the Israeli side as the […]
