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Jim Paul on the UN Security Council as a Tool of U.S. Domination

Jim Paul for 19 years was the exzecutive director of Global Policy Forum and was chair of the NGO working group on the UN Security Council. He is the author of the just-released book Of Foxes and Chickens: Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council.

The book is available free in English or German:
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/of-foxes-and-chickens

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.

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Wanna place bets?: With @TheRichKidsOfIran Instagrams, Somebody is Stirring Up a Hornet’s Nest

By Dave Lindorff

Scroll through the Instagram account ‘@RichKidsofTehran’ or RKOT and ask yourself: Knowing how aggressively the Iranian regime has gone after those — particularly women — who flaunt their sexuality and expose themselves with hair uncovered and with parts of their body exposed that are supposed to be kept covered except at home, who would be putting these clearly inflammatory images of both semi-nudity and ostentatious financial excess online?

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Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, A Mother Confronts a World on Fire

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Let me mention a small joy of my life. One afternoon and evening a week I take care of my 5½-year-old grandson, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we take care of each other.  We always stop for cookies — grandparents being allowed, according to The Official Rulebook of Child-Rearing (see p. 349), to shamelessly feed sweets to their grandchildren.  read more

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Susan Collins Brags To Me About Her Vote For Tax Law To Benefit General Dynamics

Not only Congress but also the Maine Legislature is pressured by General Dynamics to provide tax relief. Maine Democrats Rep. Jennifer DeChant and Sen. Eloise Vitelli are sponsoring a bill to give GD $60 million from state coffers this year  —  because servicing corporations is a thoroughly bipartisan affair.


Maine’s senators are wealthy people. Senator Susan Collins has just sent me a long email explaining why I should be delighted that she helped pass a tax bill that 78% of her constituents responding to a poll in the Bangor Daily News said will not benefit them.



Most of us allegedly represented by Collins are not at all wealthy, and her claim that we will benefit under the new tax laws is only true in the very short term.


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Tomgram: Engelhardt, Seeing Our Wars for the First Time

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Mapping a World From Hell
76 Countries Are Now Involved in Washington’s War on Terror
By Tom Engelhardt

He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced, “shrouded in secrecy,” flew on an unmarked C-17 transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan. All news of his visit was embargoed until an hour before he was to depart the country.

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No more worshiping of the military Time to Call out US Militarism for What It Is: The Key Threat to America’s Security

By Dave Lindorff

            I was in the grocery store a while back when, after my items were tabulated, the checkout clerk asked, “Would you like to contribute to the Wounded Warriors fund?”

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            I glanced at the line of people to my left — a little cross-section of America — and feeling a little skeptical about how they’d respond, I said, “No I don’t think so. I’d read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Silvio Carillo on U.S. Support for Coup and Stolen Election in Honduras

Silvio Carillo is an Oakland-based freelance multimedia journalist, director of the website BertaCaceres.org and nephew of Berta Cáceres, a Honduran activist who was assassinated there in March 2016 after being awarded the Goldman Prize for her environmental activism. Carrillo just wrote the New York Times op-ed “America’s Blind Eye to Honduras’s Tyrant.”

He can be found at Twitter.com/JusticeforBerta or Facebook.com/justiceforberta

Help pass the Berta Caceres Act.

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Remaining Peaceful Was Their Choice

December 31, 2017

People living now in Yemen’s third largest city, Ta’iz, have endured unimaginable circumstances for the past three years. Civilians fear to go outside lest they be shot by a sniper or step on a land mine. Both sides of a worsening civil war use Howitzers, Kaytushas, mortars and other missiles to shell the city. Residents say no neighborhood is safer than another, and human rights groups report appalling violations, including torture of captives. Two days ago, a Saudi-led read more

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The “Merchants of Death” Survive and Prosper

During the mid-1930s, a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade, combined with a U.S. Congressional investigation of munitions-makers led by Senator Gerald Nye, had a major impact on American public opinion.  Convinced that military contractors were stirring up weapons sales and war for their own profit, many people grew critical of these “merchants of death.”

Today, some eight decades later, their successors, now more politely called “defense contractors,” are alive and well.  read more