Slavoj Zizek writes an interesting Op Ed for RT.com about the massive Labour defeat in the UK elections outlining some of the main factors but also highlighting how big Capital has gone to great lengths to completely discredit Corbyn

What is not realized is that while traditional Left concepts like the class war and actual socialism have been removed off the agenda by all the media and the Left itself has largely be redirected into identify politics which offers no real resistance to big Capital, big Capital themselves are still very much fighting the class war and making sure the central ideas of socialism don't get an airing nor come remotely close to be fulfilled and hence people like Corbyn have to be discredited by any and all means ... read full story / add a comment

The British state is slowly killing Julian Assange. They want him to die so as to send a message to anyone else who dares make public the crimes of governments like the US and the UK who have bombed countless countries, murdering hundreds of thousands of people in the process and which in fact has gone a long way to contributing to the waves of immigrants risking their lives to get into Europe. The World Socialist WebSite has produced a report on the situation so far.

More than 65 eminent medical doctors from the UK and around the world have issued an open letter calling for urgent action to protect the life of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange.

The doctors warn there may be serious consequences if Assange is not moved from Belmarsh Prison to a university teaching hospital where he can be assessed and treated by an expert medical team. ... read full story / add a comment

The ongoing coup (via a Color Revolution) in Bolivia to overthrow the democratically elected government and clearly instigated by the US is yet another sad example of how the lives of millions of people are cynically destroyed. But an not so surprising fact has come to light. Bolivia has probably the worlds largest reserves of Lithium now the new "oil" of this age and President Morales recently signed an agreement with China to mine this. This is the reason the US has struck now.

Here is a report from RT on the ongoing situation.
Questions remain about the circumstances that led to Morales’ ouster, and whether foreign governments played a role in it. But recent history provides reason to suspect that Bolivia’s rich natural resources are part of the answer. ... ... read full story / add a comment

The Editor of Grayzone, Max Blumenthal was arrested over a week ago in Washington DC and was shackled by his hands and ankles for over five hours in one a cage along with other inmates over the weekend. His crime? To report from outside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC last May and to burst the US media bubble on how things really were in Venezuela after the US tried to organise a coup against the elected leader Maduro and install their own puppet who would sell out the country to vulture capitalists.

What a surprise there was nothing about this in the mainstream media. If the same thing had happened in Venezuela there would have been widespread condemnation in the pro-coup mainstream media.

The World Socialist website carried a report on it yesterday. ... read full story / add a comment

In an unprecedented tweet earlier in the week President Trump carried out the worst crime in the eyes of the establishment. He admitted the US went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan based on lies and that millions of lives and trillions of dollars were therefore wasted for no good reason other than lies. This is the worst crime imagineable -that is telling the truth about this for it exposes the reality of the system. The Democrats and others are not trying to impeach Trump because of some minor thing or another. It is because they don't trust him to continue running US imperialism as have done nearly all proceeding both Republican and Democrat presidents. They don't give a f**k about democracy since they were part and parcel of the lies and wars of aggression too.

The WSWS website have carried a report on this tweet and it is reproduced here in full because it gives good context to the event. ... read full story / add a comment

The World Socialists WebSite has carried a report on the protest outside the prison in support of Assange
A large crowd rallied outside Belmarsh Prison in London on Saturday as jailed WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange received the Gavin MacFadyen Award 2019—the only journalism prize given by whistle-blowers. Assange’s father John Shipton accepted the award on his son’s behalf. ... read full story / add a comment

The WSWS website carries an interesting report on the atrocity in Sri Lanka providing background and relevant context unlikely to appear in the corporate and state media. For starters they say:

Despite an intelligence alert 10 days before, both the government and police failed to warn the public and took little or no action to prevent the terrible bombings. ... read full story / add a comment

RTE have given coverage to a housing demonstration in Galway this evening that aimed to highlight a common problem around the country which is the shortage of housing. The protest is demanding that the government start building public housing instead of relying on the private sector which are preying on people.

... read full story / add a comment

Yesterday, the governor of the Paris military district told France Info that soldiers of the Operation Sentinel counter-terror mission had been authorized to fire today on the “yellow vests.” Asked about whether soldiers were capable of carrying out law enforcement duties, General Bruno Le Ray replied: “Our orders are sufficiently clear that we do not need to be worried at all. The soldiers’ rules of engagement will be fixed very rigorously.” ... read full story / add a comment

The death last month of a former senior British police officer, John Stalker, will no doubt have rekindled many disturbing and distressful memories for the families of six men shot dead by the RUC during the dark ... read full story / add a comment

Rightwing "President" Bolsonaro who was appointed president of Brazil by arranging for a stich-up of former president Lula da Silva and getting him sent to jail but for whom polls show he would have won the election, rose to power on a rethoric of fighting corruption.It was clear all along that this concern as well as himself was bogus. However he was backed by the Western media at all stages and looked on lovingly from Washington. It been cleared all along he was their man.

Now thankfully it looks like this could all unravel, because he and his family have been embroiled in a huge scandal in Brazil involving money laundering, corruption and murder through his connections to right wing mafia type dead squads composed of former police and military officials.

During his fake campaign he rallied endlessly against a particular law in Brazil allowing federal officials immunity from prosecution and investigation and has now eaten his own hat as it were by invoking the use of the very same law to protect himself. ... read full story / add a comment

Gemma O'Doherty's Tedx speech in Longford which you never saw a mention of in the MSM. And for good reason! ... read full story / add a comment

This article is being reposted here as it is incredibly important and gives an insight into the larger framework of forces acting on the EU. From this perspective one can see how Brexit is the sabotage operation. Even though a majority voted for Brexit, clearly bigger forces wanted it and as we know the people are usually ignored. As in when in Ireland we had to vote twice on separate occasions in EU referendum before we got the right answer.

The European Union enters 2019 with a mass of unresolved problems, in addition to being torn apart by the most severe contradictions…

The first and main problem is that the EU was created as one of the mechanisms of the US’ control over Western Europe. Without the American Marshall Plan, without opening American markets for European goods, without American troops on the European continent, without NATO, eventually, the European Union wouldn’t be possible. ... read full story / add a comment

This article by Manlio Dinucci on the website VoltaireNet.org reminds us of the carnage brought fought by the US and of it's barbaric underpinnings and they are not just of the most recent election cycles.

It’s a fact, not an analysis, not even an opinion – the « free and open international order» promoted since 1945 by the United States has cost the lives of 20 to 30 million people throughout the world. No President, whoever he may be, has managed to slow the rhythm of this killing machine. ... read full story / add a comment

This is an interesting article from ZeroHedge describing what

As thousands of Amazon workers across Europe joined in coordinated strikes to protest the company's infamously "inhumane" working conditions - threatening the e-commerce giant's Black Friday operations - the company resorted to a tactic that hasn't been employed to resolve labor disputes in the West in a very long time: It called the police. ... read full story / add a comment

This essay was written by Manuel Garcia, Jr under creative commons license and is republished here as it's message needs wider circulation.

Climate change action would kill imperialism, and that is why we can’t have it in America.

American political power is based on fossil fuels, and the US military is the engine that consumes those fuels to produce that power. So long as there is an American political elite that craves lucrative personal prestige and the ability to dominate internationally, the US economy will be fossil-fueled capitalism that maintains the military colossus that enables and protects those elite ambitions. ... read full story / add a comment

This article from the World Socialist Website draws attention to the fact that not alot has changed with the character of those in power and the same underlying forces of imperialism is still very much present .

Over the past weekend, the leaders of the world’s great powers met in France to commemorate the official end of World War I. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump pulled long faces, hugged each other and gave speeches lamenting the “horror” and “tragedy” of a war that claimed more than 16 million lives.

But their talk of “tragedy” and “suicide” could not hide the fact that they are all engaged in active preparations for a new and deadly world military conflict.

... read full story / add a comment

LookLeft Magazine on Nov 2nd have published an article on the recent election of the far-right president in Brazil and it is high lighted here to draw attention to this sinister development

The election of the fascist Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil marks the beginning of an intense period of reaction. It also signals the definitive end to the social democratic experiment that began in 2002 with the election of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. ... read full story / add a comment

Climate denial group the Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) has significantly escalated its lobbying campaign to prevent climate action.

The group’s main function until now has been to hold behind-closed-doors meetings with infamous climate science deniers as guest speakers. But it has now submitted a document to the Irish Parliament insisting climate change simply isn’t as bad as scientists make out, DeSmog UK has learned.

The group, which has no publicly accessible membership or officer list, has run a series of ‘invitation-only’ events in Dublin over the last 18 months allowing familiar faces from the world of climate denial, such as Richard Lindzen, William Happer, Henrik Svensmark and Nicola Scafetta to showcase their debunked arguments against taking action on climate change. ... read full story / add a comment

There have been numerous attempts to frame the Assad regime with launching and carrying out chemical attacks in Syria. All of them so far have either been fake or carried out by the so called 'Rebels' and terrorists largely backed by Washington, London and Paris through their proxies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey before it turned away from the US after it organised an attempted coup against Erdogan.

In all cases the chemical attacks and talk of them has been used by the US and it's allies as an excuse to bomb Syria. There is absolute no reason and motive for Assad to use chemical weapons either now or in the past. At this stage he has won the war in Syria and expelled most of the terrorists or done deals with them and arranged for them to be bused out. From a logical and motive point of view it would be insane for him to do this. He would gain zero. On the other hand it makes perfect sense not so much for the terrorists who are just pawns in a bigger game, but perfect sense for the US because Syria has been on their target since at least 2001 and they have wanted regime change from the start. They have also been humiliated that their terrorists have been defeated and their regional plans thwarted. This turn-around happened largely happened after Syria invited Russia into Syria to help in the war effort and it represents the fist time since the breakup of the Soviet Union that Russia has been able to get up of it's knee and challenge the destructive insanity of the US. And so this gives some background to the report below that appeared on RT.

“Foreign specialists” have arrived in Syria and may stage a chemical attack using chlorine in “the next two days,” the Russian Defense Ministry said. This will be filmed for international media to frame Damascus forces.

Defense Ministry Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said the operation is planned to unfold in the village of Kafr Zita in Syria’s northwestern Hama Province in “the next two days.”

... read full story / add a comment