By Michael Collins Rupert Murdoch's reign over the $33 billion News Corporation hinges on events surrounding the company's ownership share of Britain's dominant pay TV network, BSkyB (Sky). As Business Insider said, "it's the only asset that really matters" in the News Corp collection of media properties. As a result of Murdoch scandals, News Corp lost the chance to buy 100% of Sky's shares. More troubling ...

By - John Reimann   The Fukushima-Dai-Ichi… (reactors) have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet…85 times more Cesium-137 than Chernobyl. [Its release] would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival. So commented Japan’s ...

  Historically the IMF and World Bank, like the WTO, have been characterized by “faceless” leadership. Prior to the mid-nineties, only a handful of liberal intellectuals knew these powerful international institutions existed. Even after the 1999 Battle of Seattle effectively launched the antiglobalization movement, the leaders of these august institutions remained anonymous. When the IMF issued warning ...

By Michael Collins There was something tawdry and disgusting about the phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. The News Corporation owned tabloid hacked the phone mails of several thousand citizens of Great Britain. Victims included celebrities, politicians, and even a murdered eleven year old kidnap victim. But that wasn't enough to generate type of criminal investigation of News Corporation t ...

  Since the appearance of a March 27th article by sociology professor James Petras on numerous websites (see The Afghan 17 and the Obama Cover-up), I have been closely following the dispute between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Obama administration over the number of shooters in the March 11th massacre in southern Kandahar. I’ve come to the conclusion that 1) Karzai and the Afghan parliament fa ...

by Don Weitz In a democratic system of thought control…[it is] necessary to take over the entire spectrum of opinion, the entire spectrum of discussion, so that nothing can be thinkable apart from the party line; not just that it be obeyed, but that you can’t even think of anything else. – Noam Chomsky, linguist and political activist The myths and stereotypes surrounding “mental illness” and the “violent m ...

By Michael Collins Ray Adams is a name you will hear more frequently as the latest and perhaps most fatal Murdoch - News Corp. scandal emerges. When Murdoch was setting up his BSKYB cable network in England, he had some serious competition.  ITV had a digital service called ITV Digital.  The British broadcaster was prepared to go head to head with Murdoch's network.  As the services rolled out, ITV Digital ...

Attacks on working people are happening all around the world, not simply here in the US.  From Greece to Italy, from Portugal to Turkey the mass of the world’s citizens are not only feeling the pinch of plunder, but they are saying they will not take it anymore. Meanwhile, their so called ‘leaders’ work for their private interest friends to sort out the economy and place the burden of criminal activity on t ...

video here. The Nuremberg Trials established legal precedent for War Criminals exactly in kind to US 1% “leaders” today. Both are cases to prosecute Wars of Aggression that had nothing to do with “self-defense.” Nazi leadership claimed that national “self-defense” was whatever they said. US and Allied leadership rejected this claim because making a term subjective and by dictatorial decree defeats the purpo ...

  One important aspect of the “diversity of tactics” debate (i.e. the debate whether to be exclusively nonviolent) in the Occupy movement relates to mounting evidence of the role CIA and Pentagon-funded foundations and think tanks play in funding and promoting nonviolent resistance training. The two major US foundations promoting nonviolence, both overseas and domestically, are the Albert Einstein Inst ...