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Responsibility To Protect The World …From United States

January 13, 2018 By Ajamu Baraka, Counterpunch.org ,
One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.” This violent, lawless Pan-European colonial/capitalist project continues today under the hegemony of the U.S. empire.

Child Mortality Rate 70% Higher In U.S. Than In Other Rich Nations

January 11, 2018 Jessica Corbett, Commondreams.org , ,
American kids are 70 percent more likely to die during childhood compared with children in other wealthy, democratic nations, according to a peer-reviewed study published Monday by Health Affairs. "The U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy, democratic countries in the world for children." "This study should alarm everyone," Dr. Ashish Thakrar, the study's lead author and an internal medicine resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, told CNN. "The U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy, democratic countries in the world for children," he added. "Across all ages and in both sexes, children have been dying more often in the U.S. than in similar countries since the 1980s." The most common causes of death among children renews concerns about the American healthcare system, access to guns, and vehicle safety.

US Has Deadly Accidents And Crumbling Infrastructure

January 8, 2018 By Mike Ludwig, Truthout.org , , ,
Japan's high-speed bullet train system carries 1 million riders every day and has a remarkable safety record, at least compared to passenger trains in the United States. Passengers have taken billions of rides on Japanese bullet trains since the system was established 50 years ago, but not one passenger has died due to a derailment or collision. In the US commuters and travelers use trains less than the Japanese, but US passenger train lines have suffered five major wrecks that killed or injured passengers over the past decade, including the recent derailment of an Amtrak passenger train that killed three people and injured more than 50 others in DuPont, Washington on December 18. Among the dead were two active members of the Rail Passengers Association, a group that pushes for greater access to passenger rail services.

End Of US Empire May Be Our Best Hope For US Democracy

January 3, 2018 By Jacob Bacharach, AlterNet.org , ,
When the United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution asking nations not to build any more diplomatic missions in Jerusalem only to be drubbed 128-9 in the General Assembly, which voted on a similar non-binding resolution last week, America’s ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, loudly proclaimed that the United States would be “taking names.” Her warning fell on deaf ears, although the U.S. and Israel did manage to cajole that titan of geopolitics, Guatemala, to come around to the American view. The whole pitiful episode merely confirmed what the Trump administration has made readily apparent: Haley, like the president, has internalized the same impossible tale conservatives have been selling to Fox News grandmas for decades now...

Will USian PseudoLeft Evolve True Revolutionary Consciousness?

December 29, 2017 Loren Bliss, Dispatchesfromdystopia.net , , ,
Exemplifying how Capitalism's momentum invariably thrusts it toward fascism, Mainstream Media was headed in that direction even under the independent ownership that characterized most USian newspapers and broadcast outlets during the years of my later teens and earlier manhood, 1956 through about 1980 or thereabouts. While the only meaningful difference between local Capitalists and their global counterparts has never been more than the geographical limits of their greed, the socioeconomic interactions characteristic of local ownership exercised enough moral restraint on publishers that in most instances, mass media did not metastasize into its present-day malignancy until the news monopolies took over.

What Do You Call A World That Can’t Learn From Itself?

December 23, 2017 Umair Haque, eand.co , ,
Whenever I go back and forth between Europe and the States, a curious set of facts strikes me. In London, Paris, Berlin, I hop on the train, head to the cafe — it’s the afternoon, and nobody’s gotten to work until 9am, and even then, maybe not until 10 — order a carefully made coffee and a newly baked croissant, do some writing, pick up some fresh groceries, maybe a meal or two, head home — now it’s 6 or 7, and everyone else has already gone home around 5 — and watch something interesting, maybe a documentary by an academic, the BBC’s Blue Planet, or a Swedish crime-noir. I think back on my day and remember the people smiling and laughing at the pubs and cafes.

A Deep Vein Of Poverty Runs Through U.S.

December 20, 2017 By Emma Niles, truthdig.com , , ,
In the United States, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, 41 million people are living in poverty. Professor Philip Alston, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, wants to know why. In a new feature published by The Guardian, Alston leads reporter Ed Pilkington through some of the most impoverished communities in the country: in Los Angeles, San Francisco, small towns in Alabama and West Virginia. The article and photo essay expose “the dark side of the American Dream.” “Alston’s epic journey has taken him from coast to coast, deprivation to deprivation,” Pilkington writes. “Starting in LA and San Francisco, sweeping through the Deep South, traveling on to the colonial stain of Puerto Rico then back to the stricken coal country of West Virginia, he has explored the collateral damage of America’s reliance on private enterprise to the exclusion of public help.”

Fascism Came To America Wrapped In Rainbow Flag & Wearing A Pussyhat

November 29, 2017 Caitlin Johnstone, informationclearinghouse.info , ,
By Caitlin Johnstone for Information Clearing House - It’s a good quote, whoever said it. It warns that if manipulative oppressors are going to seize control of a nation’s government, they will obviously need to do so by appealing to the spirit of the times, the current values system of the masses. They’re not going to make their entrance screaming “Freedom is slavery!” while a band plays the Darth Vader theme. This is obvious to anyone who possesses any insight into how people think and behave. But it’s a quote from a bygone age. Christianity and flag-waving patriotism still hold value in red states, but they’ve become largely invisible to the major culture factories of New York and Los Angeles, and thus to the dominant culture of the greater United States. If fascism came to America wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross today, it wouldn’t have enough broad public support to implement its agendas, because crosses and flags don’t hold that much sway over America’s dominant value system. In order to rope in those who don’t value the old cultural value symbols, something more is needed. So when fascism came to America, it came wrapped in a rainbow flag, and wearing a pussyhat. Do you know why Democrats fixate so much on the completely unsubstantiated narrative that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election?

Was America Great When It Burned Native American Babies?

November 24, 2017 Emma Niles, truthdig.com , , ,
By Emma Niles for Truth Dig - Benjamin Madley, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was exposed to the effects of colonization at an early age. “When I was a boy,” he explains, “my father was working with Karuk people, as a psychologist. … I was getting exposure to the ongoing conflicts between colonists — us — and the indigenous people of California.” Madley is the guest for this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” podcast. He joins Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer to discuss this too-little-known aspect of California history. The two begin by talking about the label “genocide,” a term used by Madley in his book, “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846-1873.” “What are the disputes about whether this is genocide?” Scheer asks. “And what is the value of the term?” Explaining that the term has a wide range of academic definitions, Madley notes that he is using “the 1948 United Nations genocide convention’s definition, because that is the definition that almost all nation-states in the world now subscribe to.” Madley explains that because of this definition, it is possible to prosecute those who have committed genocide. “Frankly, there’s a lot at stake,” he says. “This is a major issue for the 150,000 people who identify themselves as California Indians. … Many of them see a relationship between the genocide and ongoing issues of historical trauma that are related to high rates of suicide, high rates of domestic violence and other health issues that impact California Indian people today.”

America’s Wealth Inequality Has Reached Staggering New Levels

November 21, 2017 Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, ips-dc.org , ,
By Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie for IPS - We tracked the rise of today’s uber-wealthy in a new report, “Billionaire Bonanza 2017: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us,” published by the Institute for Policy Studies. We compared those at the top to the rest of the nation, whose economic condition isn’t plastered on the glossy pages of Forbes magazine, but instead buried in a study the Federal Reserve releases every three years. We looked specifically at wealth — the money left over after totaling a family’s assets and subtracting their debt. Wealth is where the past meets the present. It’s a more accurate depiction of economic status than income, which just shows how much money one makes in a given year. When Forbes first started compiling their famous list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 1982, just $75 million would get you ranked. Even after accounting for inflation, that’s still less than $200 million in today’s dollars. These days, the price of admission is a record $2 billion — more than 10 times higher. This group of just 400 multi-billionaires owns a combined $2.68 trillion. That’s trillion with a T. And it’s more wealth than the bottom 64 percent of the U.S. population, an estimated 204 million people. That’s more people than the populations of Canada and Mexico combined. On the other side of the economic spectrum, where the rest of the country resides, economic conditions are largely stagnant. The median family owns about $80,000 in wealth, excluding durable consumer goods like cars and appliances. This figure is essentially unchanged from 1983, when the Federal Reserve first started tracking household assets using a uniform survey.

Why Are Police In The USA So Terrified?

November 21, 2017 Robert J. Burrowes, transcend.org , ,
By Robert J. Burrowes for TRANSCEND Media Service - 15 Nov 2017 – In a recent incident in the United States, yet another unarmed man was shot dead by police after opening his front door in response to their knock. The police were going to serve an arrest warrant on a domestic violence suspect – the man’s neighbour – but went to the wrong address. See ‘Police kill innocent man while serving warrant at wrong address’. For those who follow news in the United States, the routine killing of innocent civilians by the police has become a national crisis despite concerted attempts by political and legal authorities and the corporate media to obscure what is happening. See ‘Killed by Police’ and ‘The Counted: People killed by police in the US’. So far this year, US police have killed 1,044 people. In contrast, from 1990 to 2016, police in England and Wales killed just 62 people. See ‘Fatal police shootings’. Of course, these murders by the police are just the tip of the iceberg of police violence as police continue to demonstrate that the freedoms ‘guaranteed’ by the Fourth Amendment have been eviscerated. See ‘What Country Is This? Forced Blood Draws, Cavity Searches and Colonoscopies’. So why are the police so violent? you might ask. Well, several scholars have offered answers to this question and you can read a little about what they say in these articles reviewing recent books on the subject. See ‘The Fraternal Order of Police Must Go’ and ‘Our Ever-Deadlier Police State’.

South Korea Shifts Towards China

November 12, 2017 Alexander Mercouris, www.theduran.com , , , , , ,
By Alexander Mercouris for The Duran. The big news in Asia this week is not US President Trump’s grand but ultimately empty visit to China. It is the quiet steps China and South Korea have begun to take towards each other. In a recent article for The Duran I discussed how Russian foreign policy seemed to be edging towards a solution to the Korean crisis involving direct Chinese – Russian brokered talks between North and South Korea which would not involve the US. I also referred to the longstanding Russian projects to build railway lines and gas pipelines across North Korea to South Korea, providing South Korea via North Korea and Russia with a land bridge to Europe, whilst bringing the two Koreas together and binding them closer both economically and politically to the two Great Eurasian Powers ie. Russia and China. I also speculated that these Russian plans – which I said had unquestionably been worked out in collaboration with China – might also involve the two Koreas coming together in some form of confederation with each other.

How It Became A Crime To Be Poor In America

November 9, 2017 Peter Edelman, theguardian.com , ,
By Peter Edelman for The Guardian - In the United States, a system of modern peonage – essentially, a government-run loan shark operation – has been going on for years. Beginning in the 1990s, the country adopted a set of criminal justice strategies that punish poor people for their poverty. Right now in America, 10 million people, representing two-thirds of all current and former offenders in the country, owe governments a total of $50bn in accumulated fines, fees and other impositions. The problem of “high fines and misdemeanors” exists across many parts of the country: throughout much of the south; in states ranging from Washington to Oklahoma to Colorado; and of course in Ferguson, Missouri, where, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, revelations about the systematic criminalization of the city’s poor black residents brought these issues to national attention. As a result, poor people lose their liberty and often lose their jobs, are frequently barred from a host of public benefits, may lose custody of their children, and may even lose their right to vote. Immigrants, even some with green cards, can be subject to deportation. Once incarcerated, impoverished inmates with no access to paid work are often charged for their room and board. Many debtors will carry debts to their deaths, hounded by bill collectors and new prosecutions.

As Climate Talks Open, Federal Report Exposes U.S. Credibility Gap

November 8, 2017 John H. Cushman JR., insideclimatenews.org , ,
By John H. Cushman JR. for Inside Climate Change - As global climate talks resume this week, the U.S. is straddling a climate credibility gap, with the Trump administration's policies on one side of an abyss and what the government's own scientists know about climate change with increasing certainty on the other. The disconnect became more evident last week as the administration published, but then basically shrugged off, a comprehensive report on the state of climate science. Written by authoritative government and academic experts, then honed by the extreme vetting of a formal National Academy of Sciences peer review, the latest volume of the National Climate Assessment paints a stern and explicit picture of the risks of climate change. The report's executive summary pronounced that temperatures have reached the warmest point in human civilization, that our own actions are the cause, and that the worst is yet to come. It followed with a staccato drum-roll of familiar findings: "Thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world have documented changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidification; and increasing atmospheric water vapor." On Monday, the G7 countries—including the U.S.—also affirmed that climate change exacerbates health risks.

ICC Prosecutor Seeks To Investigate US Crimes In Afghanistan

November 4, 2017 Staff, icc-cpi.int , , , ,
By Staff of ICC - Today, the Situation in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has been assigned to a Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court ('ICC' or the 'Court'), following my decision to request authorisation to open an investigation into crimes alleged to have been committed in connection with the armed conflict in that State. For decades, the people of Afghanistan have endured the scourge of armed conflict. Following a meticulous preliminary examination of the situation, I have come to the conclusion that all legal criteria required under the Rome Statute to commence an investigation have been met. In due course, I will file my request for judicial authorisation to open an investigation, submitting that there is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in connection with the armed conflict in Afghanistan. It will be for the Judges of the Court's Pre-Trial Chamber, constituted by the Presidency, to decide whether I have satisfied them that the Statute's legal criteria to authorise opening an investigation are fulfilled. Given the limited temporal scope of the Court's jurisdiction, my request for judicial authorisation will focus solely upon war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed since 1 May 2003 on the territory of Afghanistan as well as war crimes closely linked to the situation in Afghanistan allegedly committed since 1 July 2002 on the territory of other States Parties to the Rome Statute.
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