Thursday 28th of November 2024

the World's True Workings

sibel edmonds

From Chris floyd, read more of Chris Floyd...

It is all too easy to get dazzled by the facades of high politics and state policy, to be taken up with tactics, metrics, movements, trends, with ideologies and philosophies, as if the life of the world was actually conducted on this elevated plane.

But sometimes a glimpse of reality shows through the increasingly threadbare curtain, and we can see the grubby, petty, deadly truth of how the world really works. Two particularly telling glimpses came through this week, throwing harsh, glaring light on the all-pervasive corruption of American political system – and on the collusion of governments, business and the underworld in killing the poor and poisoning the planet to maintain the comfort and privilege of the "developed" world.

I.
First we have a new interview with Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator turned whistleblower who has been the target of the most draconian "state secrets" campaign in American history. A few weeks ago, Edmonds was allowed to tell part of her remarkable story in public, under oath, for the first time.

It should have been the mother of all media blockbusters: a scandal encompassing Congressional corruption, executive branch bribery, international espionage, warmongering skullduggery, nuclear proliferation – even bisexual honey traps! The headlines practically write themselves, in one-word tabloid screamers: "Sex! War! Bribes! Spies! Treason!" What journalist could resist such a feast? Alas, there are no more journalists in the editorial offices and corporate boardrooms of America's media conglomerates. And so Edmonds' testimony was buried many fathoms deep.
....

It's play for pay. Nukes, drugs, guns, war, terror -- our Establishment paladins will peddle them all, if the price is right, if there's a slice in it for them, if it suits their personal agenda.

And Giraldi points out the very crux of the matter: "of course, none of this has been investigated." Why should it be? It's the just the way things are done. The Turks and Israelis certainly aren't the first foreign interests to buy congressfolk and government officials like so many cheap suits off the rack. The Nazis and Brits did a wholesale business in bribery and influence-peddling in the years before America's entry into World War II. Gore Vidal has been a prime chronicler of the vast British espionage operation in the pre-war United States, especially in his last novel, The Golden Age.

----------------

...

Trafigura scandal

From Chris Floyd

The second curtain-tearing glimpse this week was provided by George Monbiot in the Guardian, writing about the Trafigura scandal: a well-connected oil trading company -- hard-wired to the Tories who will almost certainly take power in the UK next year -- dumping toxic slops in the Ivory Coast, striking down tens of thousands of people with disease, and killing fifteen people. As Monbiot points out, this horror story is just business as usual for governments and corporations -- including the most "enlightened" and "progressive" ones:

On the day that the Guardian [broke the Trafigura story], it also carried a story about a shipwreck discovered in 480 metres of water off the Italian coast. Detectives found the ship after a tip-off from a mafioso. It appears to have been carrying drums of nuclear waste when the mafia used explosives to scuttle it. The informant, Francesco Fonti, said his clan had been paid £100,000 to get rid of it. What makes this story interesting is that the waste appears to be Norwegian. Norway is famous for its tough environmental laws, but a shipload of nuclear waste doesn't go missing without someone high-up looking the other way.
------------------
see toon at top

a genuine new world...

The Pax Americana strategy requires its supporters to exaggerate the power and malevolence of the designated enemies of the Pax Americana: Russia, China and Iran. The exaggeration of threats is accomplished in two ways. First, defensive military measures that these nations undertake to deter U.S. attack -- Russia's attempt to intimidate Georgia, China's development of "anti-access" capabilities to reduce the ability of the U.S. to defeat it in a war over Taiwan, and Iran's not-so-disguised attempt to obtain nuclear weapons to deter conventional U.S. or Israeli attacks -- are portrayed by American policymakers and pundits as aggressive. According to this Orwellian double standard, U.S./NATO encirclement of post-Soviet Russia on its borders is alleged to be "defensive," while feeble protest gestures like Russian military flights to Cuba or the bullying of Ukraine are defined as "aggressive" actions that threaten a new Cold War. The knight with the best sword naturally wants to ban the use of shields and armor.

read more at Salon

vale gore vidal...

"Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here.  "

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/celebrated-us-author-gore-vidal-dies-20120801-23eqe.html#ixzz22GsmF3P9