Submitted by ButtCracker — Former Rep. Randy Neugebauer, a critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, may be Trump’s pick to run the agency. NEW YORK ― Big business and congressional Republicans salivate at the idea of gutting the Consumer Financial…
As tumultuous as last year was from a global political perspective on the back of a rocky start market-wise, 2017 will be much more so. The central bank subsidization of the financial system (especially in the US and Europe) that…
Submitted by: ButtCracker — The Trump administration enters office in an unsettled time. For a variety of reasons (some directly connected to Trump’s rhetoric), the great powers face more uncertainty than at any time in recent memory. In the first…
A new project has been announced by Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War and think tank New America. This collaboration has created a subset within ASU titled, “The Weaponized Narrative Initiative.” Two Co-directors, Brad Allenby and Joel…
The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained…
Submitted by: ButtCracker — Protesters wearing masks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump © Dominick Reuter / Reuters Seismic is the only word to describe 2016, especially when describing the US-Russia relationship. Paraphrasing Gramsci, it was a year in which…
Late on Friday, with the US population embracing the upcoming holidays and oblivious of most news emerging from the administration, Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which authorizes $611 billion for the military in…
Submitted by: ButtCracker — Yahoo Inc’s secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary governmental searches, according to legal…
Military, police and Homeland Security units have all long been preparing for riots and widespread civil unrest during a prolonged collapse. What is the anatomy of a breakdown? The past eight years have been extremely difficult for the real economy.…
As the hysteria about Russia’s alleged interference in the U.S. election grows, a key mystery is why U.S. intelligence would rely on “circumstantial evidence” when it has the capability for hard evidence, say U.S. intelligence veterans. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for…
Gary Cohn, President and COO of Goldman Sachs — Two former Goldman Sachs bankers and the sitting President of the Wall Street firm are taking high positions in Donald Trump’s administration despite the egregious role that Goldman Sachs played in…
Submitted by: ButtCracker — A tract of Amazon rainforest, cleared by loggers and farmers for agriculture, is seen near the city of Santarem, Para State in 2013. (Reuters/Nacho Doce) Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, released new data on the…
Submitted by: ButtCracker Edward Snowden has spent the last three years living under temporary asylum at an undisclosed location in Moscow, where he fled following his decision to leak documents relating to the United States’s surveillance programs. The impact on…
The blob is back. Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather. Earlier this year,…
A film by John Pilger — The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was…
‘The War on Democracy’ is John Pilger’s first major film for the cinema – in a career that has produced more than 55 television documentaries. Set in Latin America and the US, it explores the historic and current relationship of…
Submitted by ButtCracker — The rise of Donald Trump and Britain’s Brexit vote come at “the most dangerous time in the history of the human race,” renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has warned. Writing in an op-ed for the Guardian newspaper,…
We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire…
War, pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil and we all starve Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity…
Submitted by: ButtCracker — The ripple effects of the Donald Trump election victory in America continue to wash over the shoreline of public opinion, like mini-tsunamis hitting Pacific Rim countries. The seismic changes have indeed been global, and not least…
