The government even has a name for its war on America’s veterans: Operation Vigilant Eagle.
A Badge Of Shame: The Government’s War On America’s Military Veterans
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Monthly Archives: November 2018
The Tragedy of 21 Million Climate Refugees
One Every Second
One EverySecond (2018)
Film Review
This documentary concerns the 21 million people (one every second) who are forced from their homes (yearly) by catastrophic climate events. Islands and low lying coastal communities, especially in the developed world, are the most vulnerable. This is mainly due to flooding and contamination of crop lands by salt water. The third world poor (particularly women and girls) have limited options for relocating, and their governments are rarely in a position to help them.
This film tells the harrowing tale of a 14 year old Bangladeshi girl forced into prostitution in Dhaka when floods destroy her rural family home. She speaks quite poignantly about clients who refuse to pay unless she pretends to enjoy herself, about gang rapes and about police who threaten her with arrest unless she pays protection money or rewards them with sexual favors.
Stop sending women & children back to Fukushima fallout zone, UN expert tells Japan — RT
Over seven years later, radiation levels around Fukushima remain high, as has the apparent level of denial within the Japanese government
” A UN human rights expert has urged Japan to reconsider its policy of returning women and children to areas still high in radiation after they were displaced by the Fukushima meltdown.
Baskut Tuncak, the UN’s special rapporteur on hazardous substances, criticized the Japanese government’s decision to resettle citizens in areas with radiation levels above one millisievert per year, the threshold of health risk to groups particularly sensitive to radiation, including children and women of childbearing age.
“The gradual lifting of evacuation orders has created enormous strains on people whose lives have already been affected by the worst nuclear disaster of this century,” he said.
Tuncak presented his findings to a General Assembly committee meeting in New York. “Many feel they are being forced to return to areas that are unsafe, including those with radiation levels above what the government previously considered safe,” he added in a news release.
The…
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Russia and China Invest in Infrastructure, US Instead Spends on Military
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Eric Zuesse
China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is famous as an extension of their domestic infrastructure investments, but Russia is also investing heavily in infrastructure. Both countries need to do it in order to improve the future for their respective populations, and both Governments have avoided the Western development model of going heavily into debt in order to pay for creating and maintaining infrastructure. Both are, in fact, exceptionally low-debt Governments.
According to the “Global Debt Clock” at Economist, China has a public debt/GDP of 17.7%, and Russia’s is 8.0%. For comparison, America’s is 93.6%. (Others are: Germany 85.8%, Spain 91.2%, Italy 122.6%, Greece 147.1%, India 54.2%, Pakistan 47.0%, and Brazil 55.0%.)
The United States isn’t going into public debt in order to finance building or maintenance of infrastructure, but instead to finance expansions of its military, which is already (and by far) the world’s largest (in terms of its costs, but not of its numbers of troops).
While the US Government now spends around half of the world’s military expenditures and plans to conquer Russia, China, and all countries (such as Iran and Syria) that cooperate with those ‘enemies’ (and please click onto a link wherever you question the truthfulness of an allegation made here), Russia and China plan to improve their infrastructures, in order to boost their national economies and to minimize the impacts that (the mainly US-caused) global warming will have. These infrastructure projects are optimistic and long-term expenditures, which are being planned and built only because the countries that the US aristocracy are targeting to conquer, expect the US aristocracy to fail to achieve its clear #1 goal, of controlling the entire world and conquering them — of America’s rulers finally achieving the global fascist empire that, in World War II, Hitler and the other Axis powers had been hoping to become.
By contrast, US infrastructure is rotting; and, while every recent US President has promised to reverse that decline, none has done anything significant to repair this nation’s rotting infrastructure — it has always been just talk and empty promises. A nation that spends over a trillion dollars a year on ‘national defense’ can’t have much left over to spend on things that ‘can wait’ — such as repairing its bridges, roads, etc. — and so those repairs do wait, while even more money, than before, becomes devoted to purchases of new weaponry, such as the F-35 program. . .
via Russia and China Invest in Infrastructure, US Instead Spends on Military
Trump said the military was building migrant detention facilities along the border. The Pentagon says “NO”
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Exclusive: Pentagon balked at U.S. border troops building detention facilities – officials
Pentagon says troops won’t ‘come in contact’ with caravan migrants at Mexico border
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
President Trump said last week the army was building “massive tent cities” to house more migrants detained along the border. The Pentagon said he was wrong.
The Trump administration pushed the U.S. military to build facilities to accommodate migrants detained under Trump’s new “catch but don’t release” policy, federal officials tell Reuters. But the Pentagon reportedly refused, and last week, an official told reporters no detention centers were slated for construction.
Last Thursday in a freewheeling speech, Trump said he’d soon require the detention of anyone caught illegally crossing the southern border. Even migrants seeking asylum would be detained while waiting for their asylum hearing, Trump added. Seeing as a massive “migrant caravan” was weeks from arriving in the U.S., Trump said he had ordered the military to build tent cities to house them all.
Despite the Trump administration’s request, “the U.S. military declined a draft proposal … last month to build housing for detained migrants,” officials told Reuters. General Terrence O’Shaughnessy confirmed last week that the Pentagon was only working on requests to build facilities to support border patrol personnel and members of the military deployed to the border. And with 15,000 troops headed south to meet the much smaller — and shrinking — caravan, the Pentagon-sanctioned project will likely keep the military plenty busy. Kathryn Krawczyk
“Epidemic” Level Of Peanut Allergies Now Impacting People, But Medical Professionals Won’t Mention Link To Vaccine Adjuvants
Vaccines are full of supposedly “harmless” adjuvants … including peanut derivatives
Peanuts are high on the list of foods that kids are commonly allergic to these days. And for children who have this allergy, even the smallest exposure to a peanut can result in serious – even life-threatening – anaphylaxis. Experts freely admit that the peanut allergy situation in America is so serious as to be labelled “almost epidemic,” but insist they have no idea what’s causing the problem.
A report by Mount Sinai Hospital’s Jaffe Food Allergy Institute found that between 1997 and 2008, the number of kids with peanut allergies tripled, from just 1-in-250 to about 1-in-70. This is shocking when you consider that even a few decades ago peanut allergies were almost unheard of, and in Eastern countries like India, where children eat large amounts of peanuts, such allergies are extremely uncommon.
Clearly, something specific is causing this massive increase in peanut allergies among Western children. Could…
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Donald Trump’s Tough Talk About The Border Deployment Doesn’t Match What’s Really Taking Place
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Migrant Caravan: Pentagon Refuses Trump Order to Deploy US Troops to Border
“He creates this word picture for people that these troops are going to be hurling back invaders at the border. That’s just not the case.”
The image President Donald Trump has presented of what US troops will be doing along the southern border bears almost no resemblance to what military leaders say the troops will be doing.
Trump has promised the US military would be blocking “very bad thugs and gang members” from crossing into the country, and he’s painted a picture of armed US troops repelling “very tough fighters” from entering the country. “We hope nothing happens,” he said Thursday during a White House address. “But if it does, we are totally prepared.”
The deployment includes no ground combat units. The troops are not allowed to detain or arrest anybody at the border. They are barred from enforcing immigration or criminal law. There is no indication that troops will be manning border checkpoints. Of the 39 units dispatched, only seven are military police units. The rest are trained to do engineering work and provide logistical support or medical assistance.
Five of the units are made up of public affairs specialists, combat photographers, and media support staff — troops assigned to provide photos and news releases about what the other units are doing. As of Saturday afternoon, the Defense Department’s media site had posted more than 350 photos and videos showing the troops’ deployment and arrival in Texas and Arizona. . .
via Donald Trump’s Tough Talk About The Border Deployment Doesn’t Match What’s Really Taking Place
Greeks Fight Back Against Austerity and Fascism
Love and Revolution
Directed by Yannis Youlountis (2018)
Film Review
Love and Revolution is about the growing anarchist movement fighting Greece’s deepening austerity cuts (which have cut salaries and pensions in half and ended health care access for a million patients). The film consists mainly of interviews with anarchists over the specific projects they are organizing. The documentary emphatically challenges the recent announcement by the IMF and the European Central Bank that Greek austerity has ended. After years of brutal austerity resulting in thousands of deaths, the Greek government is further than ever from repaying its debt to European bankers.
Among the projects that most impressed me are
- a social kitchen that regular provides free meals on the street.
- an anti-eviction movement that has been by occupying and shutting down eviction hearings at the District Court.
- an ongoing squat that has provided accommodation to more than 6,000 refugees in the last five years.
- an antifascist campaign that has shut down Golden Dawn* offices in Athens and established Exarcheia, a fascist-free zone that also effectively excludes Greek police.
- a campaign to block the construction of a new airport in a pristine rural/agricultural area.
- a YouTube channel dedicated to Greek news from the viewpoint of anti-austerity activists, rather than police and banks.
*See Greek Austerity and the Rise of Fascism
Exclusive: Venezuela seeks to repatriate $550 million of gold from Britain – sources
Maduro’s government is seeking to bring 14 tonnes of gold held in the Bank of England back to Venezuela.
The Most Revolutionary Act 