As the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s violent death (on April 4, 1968) grows closer, you can expect to hear more and more in  U.S. corporate media about the real and alleged details of his immediate physical assassination (or perhaps execution).  You will not be told about King’s subsequent and ongoing moral, intellectual, and ideological assassination. More

When, in the service of discriminating against migrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and the whole of Africa, the world’s most powerful leader refers to his victims as unworthy losers from “shithole countries,” the U.S. press senses an important possible question: Might this be considered racist?

Indeed so far are we from a popular understanding of white supremacy as being about systematic oppression, as opposed to personal foible, that it is Trump’s wording that comes to be the issue, the occasion to look into his alleged heart and at the memories of older white men. In its latest twist — I’m writing noonish on the King holiday, the story will have changed a dozen more times by when you read this — his supporters seem to cling to the view that Trump referred to much of the world as “shithouse countries” not “shithole countries.” Because, you know, having a go at “shithouse countries” isn’t racist. More

On 6 February 1976, in his syndicated column in the New York Post, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Jack Anderson revealed to his readers that “the CIA once tried to bribe the Communist World’s most famous newsman, Wilfred Burchett, into defecting to the U.S. for $100,000.”

The attempted bribe happened in Korea in September 1953, during the talks to end the Korean war. In today’s money, the CIA’s $100,000 would be equivalent to $904,239.70 according to dollartimes.org. Why did the CIA try to buy my father, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett in Korea in 1953? I don’t know. But I can guess… More