ALASTAIR CROOKE—But first, as Tooze notes, the ‘pattern’ starts with Woodrow Wilson’s observation in 1916, that “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it”. Well, actually it was also about British élite fear of rivals (i.e. Germany arising), and the fear of Britain’s élites of appearing weak. Today, it is about the American élite fearing similarly, about China, and fearing a putative Eurasian ‘empire’.
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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Saving The Amazon’s Only Worth $20 Million — But Amazon, Inc is “Worth” $1 Trillion. What The?
28 minutes readUMAIR HAQUE—I read a headline today that made me almost choke in disbelief, in the way you do when you hear something too embarrassing to cope with. The Amazon’s burning. What did the G7 — aka the world’s richest countries — do? They gave it…$20 million.
Laugh scornfully with me. Because that figure is so minuscule it’s comical. Here’s an illustration. The Waltons (of Walmart) make $1.5 million…an hour. That means that’s the total amount the G7 gave to save the Amazon is less…quite literally…than billionaires make…in one day. -
DAVID W. PEAR—Well, let’s look at a few statistics. During the lifetime of every 1,000 black men, one will be killed by the police. The 7th leading cause of death for black men is being shot by the police. Life expectancy for black men is about 69 years of age. The life expectancy of white men is about 76. No matter what statistic one looks at, be it health, income, wealth, child poverty or education, blacks come out worse than white people. Do we really need to even discuss the discrimination in the (so-called) criminal justice system?
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How To Make Sense Of Foreign Protests, Conflicts And Uprisings
18 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It’s an amazingly reliable pattern: the entire western political/media class finds protests and uprisings endlessly fascinating when they are in opposition to governments which haven’t yet been absorbed into the imperial blob like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, pre-collapse Libya, or then-Moscow-aligned Ukraine, but any protests or uprisings within that empire are ignored at best or demonized at worst. If dissidents in the United States began donning yellow vests and holding aggressive demonstrations in the current media environment, you could safely bet your bottom dollar that they would be ignored for as long as possible and then smeared as fascists, antisemites and/or Russian pawns thereafter. This would happen with absolute certainty.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Technology, which futurists have long heralded as the deus ex machina which will liberate humanity from its self-destructive ways, is owned by plutocrats with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and is pervasively infiltrated by murderous intelligence agencies from top to bottom.
Even attempts to circulate information about the dangers of war, ecocide and oligarchy are consistently sabotaged by internet censorship, blanket de-platforming and mass media propaganda, and even imprisonment if one’s truth-telling becomes too successful.