While attention is mainly focused on the leaders of the four main parties, something sinister is happening to our politics.
White supremacy has made its way into mainstream public discourse in this country, becoming an insidious danger to our democracy.
In the past few weeks alone, two candidates running for the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) have dropped out or been forced out because of party leader Maxime Bernier’s stance on white supremacy and racism.
Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam candidate Brian Misera shared a series of videos on Twitter last month in which he asked Bernier to do more to rid the party of “racist idiots.” Rather than address his concerns, the party revoked his candidacy.
Another candidate announced he was no longer running because of the party’s “hate-filled, us-versus-them” politics. Chad Hudson was the PPC candidate for the district of West Nova. He said he found the divisiveness “dangerous for racialized Canadians in this country.” (more...)
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes' promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the '60s—never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's reflection shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the '20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ (more...)
Trouble was brewing in London 80 years ago. In the early morning of October 4th, 1936, thousands of black-shirted fascists mustered around the Tower of London. Awaiting them in the East End were Jews, union men and communists.
Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, had declared October 4th a day of destiny and reckoning. Mosley hoped his army of British Blackshirts would march east from the Tower and occupy the “Jew-ridden and communistic” dockside streets of the East End.
Mosley’s legions would be guarded by thousands of policemen, hundreds of them on horseback. He expected his fascists to sweep through London as Mussolini had marched on Rome – and, de facto, into power – in October 1922.
It would be one of the most dramatic days of the 20th century on British soil. Thee hours of fighting at the barricades, mounted-police charges and riots would become known as the Battle of Cable Street.
As the large Jewish community (mostly refugees from the pogroms of Tsarist Russia, the Baltic States and Poland) prepared their barricades around Cable Street and Whitechapel, many wondered: what would the Irish do? Tens of thousands of Irish Catholic dockers lived with the Jewish community, in an often uneasy, antagonistic relationship. (more...)
On this day in 1936, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists were blocked from marching through the streets of East London by the Jewish community and its allies.
Today we commemorate The Battle of Cable Street and remember all those who stood in the way of fascism. pic.twitter.com/erVz0JnaJX
Since the apparent death by suicide of Jeffrey Epstein in a Manhattan prison, much has come to light about his depraved activities and methods used to sexually abuse underage girls and entrap the rich and powerful for the purposes of blackmail. Epstein’s ties to intelligence, described in-depth in a recent MintPress investigative series, have continued to receive minimal mainstream media coverage, which has essentially moved on from the Epstein scandal despite the fact that his many co-conspirators remain on the loose.
For those who have examined Epstein’s ties to intelligence, there are clear links to both U.S. intelligence and Israeli intelligence, leaving it somewhat open to debate as to which country’s intelligence apparatus was closest to Epstein and most involved in his blackmail/sex-trafficking activities. A recent interview given by a former high-ranking official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Epstein’s sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad.
In an interview with Zev Shalev, former CBS News executive producer and award-winning investigative journalist for Narativ, the former senior executive for Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, Ari Ben-Menashe, claimed not only to have met Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, back in the 1980s, but that both Epstein and Maxwell were already working with Israeli intelligence during that time period. (more...)
On a rainy Sunday in 2014, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank was found hanging in his London apartment. Bill Broeksmit had helped build the 150-year-old financial institution into a global colossus, and his sudden death was a mystery, made more so by the bank’s efforts to deter investigation. Broeksmit, it turned out, was a man who knew too much.
In Dark Towers, award-winning journalist David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank’s history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how in the 1990s, via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches, often at the expense of ethics and the law.
Soon, the bank was manipulating markets, violating international sanctions to aid terrorist regimes, scamming investors, defrauding regulators, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Ever desperate for an American foothold, Deutsche also started doing business with a self-promoting real estate magnate nearly every other bank in the world deemed too dangerous to touch: Donald Trump. Over the next twenty years, Deutsche executives loaned billions to Trump, the Kushner family, and an array of scandal-tarred clients, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Dark Towers is the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality—the corporate equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. It is also the story of a man who was consumed by fear of what he’d seen at the bank—and his son’s obsessive search for the secrets he kept.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Vatican police raided the offices of the Holy See’s Secretariat of State and its Financial Information Authority, or AIF, on Tuesday and took away documents and electronic devices as part of an investigation of suspected financial irregularities, a Vatican statement said.
It was believed to be the first time the two departments were searched for evidence involving alleged financial crimes.
The Secretariat of State, the most powerful department in the Vatican, is the nerve center of its bureaucracy and diplomacy and the administrative heart of the worldwide Catholic Church.
The AIF, headed by Swiss lawyer Rene Bruelhart, is the financial controller, with authority over all Vatican departments.
The Vatican statement gave no details except to say that the operation was a follow-up to complaints filed in the summer by the Vatican bank and the Office of the Auditor General and were related to “financial operations carried out over the course of time”. (more...)
Nolah used to serve weeknights at Red Lobster — a third job she took in addition to tutoring to supplement her teaching salary. Now, thanks to the "sugar daddy" dating website SeekingArrangement.com, she's the one getting served. "I can go on a date, I can have steak and lobster, be gone for three hours after my kids are already asleep and come home with $500," she tells Yahoo Lifestyle.
The allowance-based dating site that the Nevada teacher came across in 2018 advertises itself as “the world’s largest Sugar Daddy dating site,” where it sets people up with “mutually beneficial relationships.” Dates can range from a single dinner out to a weekend trip (or longer), with payment being determined between the two parties – the sugar daddy and the sugar baby. SeekingArrangement makes it clear that it “prohibits any unlawful use of the site, including escorting, prostitution and human trafficking.” However, at least two of those interviewed by Yahoo Lifestyle say they had sex. Both women clarified that this was the result of a longterm relationship that had formed, not simply something transactional. "That is something that was built over our time together and based on chemistry and our relationship," says one.
While it might not seem like the most acceptable side hustle for an educator, it’s likely among the most lucrative. The average sugar baby makes an estimated $2800 monthly from their “daddies,” SeekingArrangement reported at the organization’s 2018 summit. Those who rely on an extra salary as a way to make ends meet are far from alone. According to EdWeek, one in five teachers have at least one extra job to supplement their income — and most of them aren’t glamorous. (more...)
