UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4 2020 (IPS)* – At the height of the Cold War back in the 1960s, a Peruvian diplomat, Dr. Victor Andres Belaunde, characterized the United Nations as a politically wobbly institution that survives only at the will– and pleasure– of the five big powers.
UN Security Council in session. Credit: United Nations
Simplifying his argument in more realistic terms, he said: “When two small powers have a dispute, the dispute disappears. When a great power and a small power are in conflict, the small power disappears. And when two great powers have a dispute, the United Nations disappears.”
And more appropriately, it is the UN Security Council (UNSC) that vanishes into oblivion, particularly when big powers clash, warranting a ceasefire, not in some distant military conflict, but inside the UNSC chamber itself.
There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on this date, November 22, 1963. I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-seven years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today.
In other words, to understand it in its most gut-wrenching reality: that the American national security state will obliterate any president that dares to buck its imperial war-making machine. It is a lesson not lost on all presidents since Kennedy.
Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the U.S. national security state, led by the CIA, that carried out JFK’s murder.
Leading companies are turning a blind eye to the violence, exploitation and environmental destruction that is endemic in the global mining industry.
Kristin Palitza/DPA/PA Image | 15-year-old Richmond Asiamah working with mercury at a gold mine in Brong-Ahafo, Ghana
4 December 2020 (openDemocracy)* — The crunching sound of bulldozers came as a death rattle for men working deep in a gold mine in eastern Zimbabwe. On 15 November, contractors’ bulldozers converged on the mine on the outskirts of Mutare. They planned to “reclaim” it from the local community, who had been mining there independently with low-tech tools and without the backing of a company (known as artisanal or small-scale mining). However, the tonnes of soil and rock poured down the mineshaft to block up its entrances created a living grave for the men still at work underground.
4 December 2020 (Wall Street International)* — All economies are fundamentally based on the exploitation of the Earth and its resources, which are not infinite.
The most important oil companies constitute less and less transparent and more powerful economies (the case of Enrico Mattei teaches), more powerful than the States in which they are active.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 