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...

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...

“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...

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...

The scandal surrounding the war in Iraq, unleashed by the US in 2003 with the support of its UK ally, has never gone away. In the UK it has been compounded by an inordinate delay in the publication of the findings of the official inquiry into the war. Chaired by retired civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry was set up in 2009 by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Its overriding aim upon inception was to answer, once and for all, the lingering questions over Britain’s involvement in...

“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.”—John Lennon Saddled with a corporate media that marches in lockstep with the government, elected officials who dance to the tune of their corporate benefactors, and a court system that serves to maintain order rather than mete out...

There is a new entrant in the already crowded field of Israeli Lobby funded groups opposed to an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. It is the “wounded warriors” and their families denouncing the perfidious Persians. The first salvo was fired on August 4th in a letter to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post from the daughter of an Army Lieutenant Colonel killed in Iraq by “Iranian weapons,” who concluded that “we are already at war with Iran.” After the letter ads began to appear in...

As tensions once again build in eastern Ukraine where a fragile ceasefire appears to be on the brink of collapsing and the deadly contest of wills between East and West begins anew, the West’s prize propaganda story, downed Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has again taken center stage. As part of a much wider campaign to demonize Russia and justify further encroachment east, attempts to cement the narrative that Russia was responsible for the incident before long-awaited investigations present...

Many people think the Internal Revenue Service was violating civil liberties when it harassed tea party groups. After all, the groups were targeted because they wanted to exercise their civil liberty to challenge government policies. However, the specific issue in the IRS case was the groups’ application for tax-exempt status, which seems to be an aspect of economic liberty. In fact, the IRS case demonstrates that there is no meaningful distinction between civil and economic liberties. A true...