Images are a powerful tool in the hands of propagandists. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. If a powerful image can be manipulated to tell a tale even if false, it can persuade more viscerally than can a thousand reasoned arguments.So it is with the tragic photograph making the mainstream media rounds yesterday of a lone Syrian child drowned on a Turkish shore. Reams of articles can be written about the current refugee crisis but particularly in the US they will go...

“If the freedom of speech be taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”—George Washington The architects of the American police state must think we’re idiots. With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called...

A well-done article in the New York Times reminds us that four years after the United States assassinated American citizen and Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (and his teenage son) in a drone strike, his influence on jihadists is greater than ever. At the same time, the UK’s Guardian tells us about William Bradford, an assistant law professor at West Point, who argued in a peer-reviewed paper that attacks on Muslim scholars’ homes and offices, Middle Eastern media outlets and Islamic holy sites...

In the midst of a war-fueled water crisis, the Saudi Arabia-led coalition reportedly bombed a water bottling plant in northern Yemen on Sunday, adding to mounting civilian casualties as the military onslaught enters its sixth month. "The corpses of 36 workers, many of them burnt or in pieces, were pulled out after an air strike hit the plant this morning," resident Issa Ahmed told Reuters of Sunday's bombing in the province of Hajjah. The Yemeni Defense Ministry put the number of civilians...

Following Monday’s historic stock market downturn, many politicians and so-called economic experts rushed to the microphones to explain why the market crashed and to propose "solutions” to our economic woes. Not surprisingly, most of those commenting not only failed to give the right answers, they failed to ask the right questions. Many blamed the crash on China’s recent currency devaluation. It is true that the crash was caused by a flawed monetary policy. However, the fault lies not with...

My father, a New York financier, used to call dubious stocks or bonds, “Chinese paper.” Last week, we saw a blizzard of Chinese paper, both in China and around the world. As manager of a sizeable investment portfolio (an unwelcome second job from my main work, journalism), I watched last week’s near death experience on world markets with a mixture of cynicism and alarm. First of all, remember when Americans – and particularly Republicans – demonized Mao’s China and endlessly warned about the...

The old adage, “follow the money,” is still not a bad way to suss out wrongdoing. Originated during the Watergate era, the term says if you follow the trail of money through an organization or a caper, you’ll find the guilty people at the end. With the State Department and Hillary Clinton, the advice should read: “Follow Pat Kennedy.” Meet Pat Kennedy The name of long-time State Department Under Secretary for Management, Patrick Kennedy, pictured, is unknown to most journalists and nearly all...

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” - Malcolm X After four and half years of relentless propaganda being flung around our mainstream media by propagandists, NGOs and Empire serving mouthpieces, one wonders how this stream of effluent still manages to stick to the consciences of the public it serves to deceive. Yesterday, a Facebook post...

Europeans ought to be demanding Uncle Sam’s head on a silver platter, and those of their own leaders on pikes. Thanks to 25 years of lunatic US foreign policy initiatives and relentless military aggressions, the steady drip of illegal immigration into Europe from Africa and the Middle East has become a crisis of refugees. Not only has the US killed and maimed at least a million people and displaced millions more, it has destroyed the property – water, sanitation and transport systems – that...

Hey, Big Brother? It’s me. Can we talk about facial recognition please? The Download Festival See, the police used facial recognition technology to scan the faces of thousands of attendees at the Download music festival in the UK without their knowledge. The excuse the Leicestershire Police used was that they were trying to catch “organized criminals” who specifically target music festivals to “steal mobile phones,” according to a report in Police Oracle. The collected footage is compared...

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”—Martin Luther King Jr. There’s an ill will blowing across the country. The economy is tanking. The people are directionless, and politics provides no answer. And like former regimes, the militarized police have stepped up to provide a façade of law and order manifested by an overt violence against the citizenry. Despite the revelations of the past several years, nothing has changed to push back against...

In the latest atrocity in Yemen, Saudi warplanes bombed a residential area, killing at least 65 people. Most of the victims are reported to be civilians from the Salah district of Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city. The apparent war crime committed has tragically become an almost daily occurrence during five months of relentless aerial bombardment of Yemen by a Western-backed coalition of foreign powers. In recent days, there were similar air strikes on civilian centers in the Red Sea port city...

What should be done with the estimated 15 million people living in the United States without the legal right to be here? It seems most politicians and many Americans come down on one or the other extreme. Many Republicans, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, have the idea that they can round up 15 million people and ship them back to wherever they came from. Many Democrats, on the other hand, would grant them blanket amnesty, give them citizenship, and make sure as many...

Like all other major candidates in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Rodham Clinton promises to continue the “war on terrorism.” Despite her rhetoric, Rodham Clinton has undisputedly worked directly for the benefit of terrorism around the world. At least two groups that were legally designated as terrorist organizations by the US State Department have directly benefited from her support. Mujahadeen E-Khalq (MEK), or the People’s Holy Warriors, is a strange sect of “Islamic Marxists” that was...

The Associated Press – with great fanfare - ran an “exclusive” story masquerading what was in fact a glaring propaganda piece, according to which, under the P5+1, UN-ratified nuclear deal with Iran, the country would carry out some of the inspections of its own “sensitive sites.” There was nothing specific in the piece. The crucial document the AP alleges to have “seen” was not even the final signed agreement between Iran and the IAEA. The AP did not quote any passage from the document. The...