Sites for 'truth' in Politics and Economics

[Deleted]

I've listed my choices below. Please add your choices as well.


Politcal reporting and videos

Democracy Now - www.democracynow.org - online and TV reporting by Amy Goodman and Juan González

The Real News Network - therealnews.com - good coverage of world news

Truthdig - www.truthdig.com

John Pilger - johnpilger.com




On the Middle-East

Robert Fisk reporting for The Independent - www.independent.co.uk/author/robert-fisk?CMP=ILC-refresh




On Social / Economic / Environmental injustices

New Internationalist - newint.org

Jason Hickel - www.jasonhickel.org/blog - academic/activist and author of 'The Divide'

Naomi Klein - www.naomiklein.org/articles - activist and author of "No Logo" , "The Shock Doctrine", "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate".




On Food / Farming / GM

Food First - foodfirst.org - set up by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins

GM Watch - www.gmwatch.org/en

Grain - www.grain.org

[Ava]

Thank you @astrokeen,

I like that you put truth in quotation marks. Sometimes it's just impossible to know what's really going on.

I've spent a lot of time at Democracy Now over the years, and have followed John Pilger. Checking out your other links, I think our preferences are pretty similar.

Never heard of Robert Fisk; I appreciate this link.

---

Disclaimer: I'm somewhat of a "conspiracy theorist" as I've said. These links are probably not to everyone's taste.

I've ended up at the Global Research site quite a bit:
www.globalresearch.ca/

They have articles like this, which I consider just matter-of-fact truth, while others might fault me for thinking so:

www.globalresearch.ca/drug-war-american-troops-are-protecting-afghan-opium-u-s-occupation-leads-to-all-time-high-heroin-production/5358053

Also, they report against Monsanto:

www.globalresearch.ca/glyphosate-worse/5674472

Robert F. Kennedy Jr won that case.

I am a fan of his in general.

childrenshealthdefense.org/

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Controversially, I do follow updates about the federal grand jury investigation of 911:

www.ae911truth.org/grandjury

Hopefully what's outrageous to consider now will be understood more fully in time.

[Deleted]

Thank you, too, Ava . I didn't know about Robert Kennedy Jr, so that was good to know of.


I don't think Global Research counts as a conspiracy theorist site. Unfortunately, since there is so much government fake news, any investigative journalist could be labelled a conspiracy theorist. It seems to be a relative term - theories which see all government actions as representing deep and hidden agendas being managed by a secretive underground force would be more in the realm of conspiracy theories. These theories seem to have one thing in common - they breed fear and a sense of helplessness because the conspiracy is sinister, far reaching, all enveloping, and impossible to defeat. People like Robert Kennedy, however, have proven otherwise.

[Deleted]

Jason Hickel has just published this article on how the SDGs are self-contradictory:

www.academia.edu/38812723/The_contradiction_of_the_sustainable_development_goals_Growth_versus_ecology_on_a_finite_planet

"The SDGs suffer from a fatal contradiction. Empirical evidence shows that Goal 8 (annual GDP growth of ~3%) violates Goal 12 on sustainable resource use and Goal 13 on climate change. For a flagship piece of international policy, this is unacceptable."

[Ava]

Apr 15, 2019 16:32:44 GMT @astrokeen said:

I don't think Global Research counts as a conspiracy theorist site. Unfortunately, since there is so much government fake news, any investigative journalist could be labelled a conspiracy theorist. It seems to be a relative term - theories which see all government actions as representing deep and hidden agendas being managed by a secretive underground force would be more in the realm of conspiracy theories. These theories seem to have one thing in common - they breed fear and a sense of helplessness because the conspiracy is sinister, far reaching, all enveloping, and impossible to defeat. People like Robert Kennedy, however, have proven otherwise.

I completely agree -- well said!

I forgot to mention one of my favorite investigative journalists -- William Langeweische. 

www.vanityfair.com/contributor/william-langewiesche

His latest article is such a direct and clear expose of criminal negligence and probable drug dealing within the US military:

www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/the-unsolved-mystery-of-the-soldier-who-died-in-the-watchtower

---

For added context, my political views are aligned with Peter Dale Scott's.

One of his many books:
American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library)

Everything I wrote in my first post comes together when we take Scott's research as fact:

- The US War machine is largely concerned with drug trafficking. Corporations engage in trafficking for profit (money laundering..for example, BCCI). 
- The war machine is implicated in 911, and this is partly connected to the Taliban's destruction of poppy fields: there was a "necessity" to invade Afghanistan to restore the drug supply. 
- It's clear the war machine links to Big Pharma in at least one way (supplying raw materials).
- The opioid crisis is the most striking piece of evidence showing that Pharma's agenda is profit, not health.
- Pharma has serious corruption issues across the board and cannot be trusted to self-regulate (conduct its own safety tests).
- The US govt does allow too many industries to self-regulate, including Boeing (resulting in plane crashes recently) and of course Pharma. 
- All things considered -- corruption, corporatism, lax regulatory agencies -- no drug should ever be mandated, at least not until the system is completely overhauled. Even then, overriding a person's right to their own body constitutes a radical departure from the core principles of democracy, so if we are headed there, at least let's be honest about the new political reality (totalitarianism).

But these are all taboo topics. Discussion is tricky, but that enables things to progress along the same sinister lines.

My NN is in Scorpio so it just seems my lot in life to investigate what is taboo, come what may. 
 
I guess I said too much here, but this illustrates out my whole political outlook at the moment, its areas of concentration and immediate concern. 

[Deleted]

More awful news about Trump: how he is starving Venezuelans as a strategy for regime change:

therealnews.com/stories/u-s-prepares-sanctions-to-block-food-subsidy-for-millions-of-venezuelans

Have added 'The Real News ' in the OP list of sites.

[Deleted]

Ava, thank you for introducing Peter Dale Scott.

I found a very interesting interview with him on YouTube, filmed in 2015. I intend to read more by him.

[Ava]

Thank you very much @astrokeen

Around the 42:00 minute mark, Scott talks about The Project for the New American Century. I believe it's impossible to understand world events without understanding the significance of that group, its mission, its wars. This is the point where my conversations with fellow Americans has almost always crumbled, even with people who talk about the Constitution day and night.

Short one here for added context - the "laundry list" of targeted nations:



Clark's biography:

"Wesley Kanne Clark, Sr. (born December 23, 1944) is a retired General of the United States Army. He graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1966 at West Point and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master's degree in military science. He spent 34 years in the U.S. Army, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Clark commanded Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Clark

Anyway, it is super depressing, so thanks for checking on that.

[Deleted]

Jul 3, 2019 23:25:52 GMT Ava said:

Anyway, it is super depressing.....

Yes, it is, as well as thuggish and criminal. With no regard for Arab or African lives. The men currently in the Whitehouse are no better than Cheney and Rumsfeld, and appear to be feverishly wishing for war with Iran. However, I've heard that Trump's inconsistencies might be a saving grace. 

[Ava]

Lots of "futurist" predictions along these lines lately.

www.independentsciencenews.org/biotechnology/bill-gates-global-agenda-and-how-we-can-resist-his-war-on-life/

[Deleted]

This article from the New York Times is worth a read:  ‘I’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department

www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/opinion/trump-justice-department-lawyer.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.

I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.

My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his.

But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.

This burst into public view early in the Trump administration in the litigation over the executive order banning travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, which my office approved. The first Muslim ban was rushed out the door. It was sweeping and sloppy; the courts quickly put a halt to it. The successive discriminatory bans benefited from more time and attention from the department’s lawyers, who narrowed them but also made them more technocratic and therefore harder for the courts to block.

After the Supreme Court’s June 2018 decision upholding the third Muslim ban, I reviewed my own portfolio — which included matters targeting noncitizens, dismantling the Civil Service and camouflaging the president’s corruption — overcome with fear that I was doing more harm than good. By Thanksgiving of that year, I had left my job.

[Ava]

Glenn Greenwald is on his own now. I love how he depicts the shamelessness and complete absurdity of the US media.

greenwald.substack.com/p/with-bidens-new-threats-the-russia


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald

[Ava]

Corbett Report
www.corbettreport.com/futurevaccines/

I think nothing is more important than this.

The potential dangers of these vaccines—not just the mRNA vaccines that hijack your body’s cells to begin producing proteins to stimulate an immune response, but vaccines like AstraZeneca’s that uses a chimpanzee adenovirus to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—are numerous. Not only do these vaccines present the potential for the antibody-dependent enhancement phenomenon that makes people more susceptible to the wild virus after having been vaccinated against it—which is a problem common to previous coronavirus vaccine candidates—but their potential impact on fertility has, even by the UK government’s own admission, not been tested at this point and remains “unknown.”

But even more fundamental than these particular safety concerns about these particular vaccines is the way that this fanatical, reckless and unprecedented headlong rush to push (and potentially even mandate) these vaccines on billions of people worldwide—women and children, young and old, healthy and unhealthy alike—is setting the most dangerous public health precedent in the history of humanity, a precedent that threatens to undermine our most cherished health freedoms in the name of a panic-induced “emergency.”

One of these core freedoms is the ability to refuse an experimental medical procedure, a freedom that was acknowledged in the Nuremberg Code of 1947 and enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.”

Despite the fact that the clinical trials surrounding these experimental vaccines are ongoing and that the FDA itself admits that there is “currently insufficient data to make conclusions about the safety of the vaccine in subpopulations such as children less than 16 years of age, pregnant and lactating individuals, and immunocompromised individuals” and “risk of vaccine-enhanced disease over time, potentially associated with waning immunity, remains unknown,” governments around the world are contemplating making these vaccinations mandatory, or compelling people to take them against their will by restricting their access to public life until they subject themselves to this medical experimentation.

---


The threat of forcing or compelling people to become unwilling guinea pigs in an ongoing medical experiment is immoral on its face. But even the prospect of enforcing such mandates would entail the erection of a surveillance and tracking system that further threatens basic rights and liberties. After all, in order to determine who has been vaccinated—and thus who is allowed to board an airplane or access a stadium or enter a store with a vaccine policy—there will need to be a system for identifying and tracking each vaccine recipient.

Whereas in days past, such tracking systems might have worked with identification papers, special badges to identify people’s status or other outwardly identifying marks, in the modern age, such schemes will take the form of digital apps and other technologically advanced methods for tracking, categorizing and identifying billions of people and their movements in real time.

There are already apps like IBM’s Digital Health Pass and CLEAR’s Health Pass that envision a world where our biometric ID will be linked via our smartphones to our health data in order to grant or deny access from public spaces and public events.

Why is this still in the realm of "conspiracy theory" when it's all completely obvious? I truly do not understand. 

Maybe people wouldn't be as cooperative through each step of the process, if they saw where these steps are actually headed. At the same time, the major power players make no secret of their transhumanist goals and dismantling of freedom and democracy once and for all. Writing's on the wall.
 

[Ava]

Glenn Greenwald again: 

The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.

All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.


greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarianism-in

Edit - His latest article is pure gold, too:

The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes US Myths About Freedom and Tyranny

The original substack article is coming up in html format for me, but that article has been reposted everywhere, if you cut and paste the title. 

[Deleted]

I asked William Dalrymple (on Twitter) to suggest a good read on the history of Palestine, and he suggested "The Hundred Years War on Palestine" by Khalidi. Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.

The most well-informed Middle East Correspondent, Robert Fisk, passed away in 2020. His reporting is sorely missed. He wrote for The Independent.

[Deleted]

Here's a report by an Israeli historian which I think needs to be read by everyone. In the event of what is taking place in Gaza, we at least need to raise our voices for justice.

www.palestinechronicle.com/a-wall-and-a-watchtower-why-is-israel-failing-ilan-pappe/

[Deleted]

I saw this post on Twitter. It reflects how I'm thinking about people right now.

"There are so many people I will not be taking into 2024.

I have watched you post memes, outfits of the day, your pets, funny TikTok videos, your Christmas shopping, Christmas decorations, and every single bit of food you ate on Christmas day.

But not a SINGLE thing about Gaza.

Goodbye. Don't think bout me, I won't be thinking bout you."

[Ava]

Wow

I've interpreted a lot of the posts about Gaza as more about hating Israel than mourning the senseless loss of life, just because that's the common theme I'm seeing, plus there are so many tragedies happening all the time around the globe, and people are not paying attention to those. Just in the last month we've had massive slaughter in Burundi and Nigeria, recent slaughter in Uganda, a mass casualty event in Pakistan that got almost no attention, the ongoing atrocities in Yemen, the war in Ukraine...

The whole world is falling apart.

I'm seeing the Gaza disaster everywhere I look, and I am wary of the protests and fallout expanding into a violence all its own, so forgive me if I'm not posting about it here. I do not believe this is a fire we can extinguish with more fire.

[Ava]

Also, I don't hold to the notion that we should not enjoy our lives just because other people are suffering.

Soon enough it will be our turn to suffer.

I don't want us to have our lives full the to brim with suffering, personal or vicarious.

I believe we were not put here on earth just for that.

[12YearsABlob]

On one hand, I get that silence can feel like a betrayal. Having a transpersonal moon sign, I can see how these things can get so personal. But not everyone processes it that way. Granted, there are moments where even those who don't talk politics take a moment to show support (like the BLM movement). However, even then, there will be folks who don't say anything.
Everyone's reasons are different and their relationship to such things is deeply personal. It's a case-by-case thing, IMO. If somebody's reaction, or lack thereof, bothered me, I would ask them what they think. It may not be malice or indifference that keeps them quiet.

I'm sure you have your reasons too, @astrokeen . Just speaking for myself here, since I am typically not vocal about things.