The Base Heather Stroud
Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace You–and How to Stop It Garrison Lovely
The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth Stan Cox
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
Houthi-affiliated Yemeni coastguard patrols the Red Sea, flying Palestinian and Yemeni flags. [Credit: AFP]
In the topsy-turvy world of corporate media reporting on U.S. foreign policy, we have been led to believe that U.S. air strikes on Yemen, Iraq and Syria are legitimate and responsible efforts to contain the expanding war over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while the actions of the Houthi government in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran and its allies in Iraq and Syria are all dangerous escalations.
In fact, it is U.S. and Israeli actions that are driving the expansion …
Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), La naturaleza y los mitos II (‘Nature and Myths II’), 1975.
‘The West is in danger’, warned Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In his dangerously appealing style, Milei blamed ‘collectivism’ – that is, social welfare, taxes, and the state – as the ‘root cause’ of the world’s problems, leading to widespread impoverishment. The only …
Dr. Hassan Diab was wrongfully extradited from Canada to France in 2014, for alleged involvement in a bombing outside a Paris synagogue in 1980. He spent more than three years in a French prison before investigative judges determined that there was no evidence linking him to the crime, and ordered his immediate and unconditional release.
Hassan’s release was a moment of pure joy which we share with you in the videos below. Sadly, the joy did not last long. The French prosecutor appealed the release decision for political reasons and Hassan remains under the threat of being extradited once again to …
74 people, including 65 Ukrainian service members, were killed in the crash in Belgorod Region
United States’ fatal relationship with Israel
One word characterizes United States foreign policy – counterproductive.
Major U.S. foreign policy decisions after World War II — Vietnam War, Lebanon intrusion, Somalia incursion, Afghan/Soviet War, Afghan occupation, Iraq War, support for Shah of Iran, and Libyan Wars — have been counterproductive, not resolving situations and eventually harming the American people. The one-sided relationship the United States has with Israel is another counterproductive policy that is harmful to the American public
Persistent attention to Israel and its dubious position in the world may seem overkill, except this attention is one of the most important, mortally affecting the U.S. public. Until a …
The struggle of organized labor in Upstate New York and more specifically Central New York is one that has typically gone unnoticed on both a national and historical scale. This of course can be said about numerous regions throughout the United States among other sections of the global socialist movement for the enfranchisement of the working class and the fight against backwards reactionary culture. Lessons can be drawn from organized struggle regardless of where in the world they take place. This lack of attention paid to the struggles in this region of New York State is depriving socialists, communists, and …
What to do about it?
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
— Hunter S. Thompson
According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve:
a) purchased a Bible or other religious materials,
b) used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,”
c) shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops,
d) purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane,
e) all of the above.
In fact, if you selected any of those options in recent years, you’re probably already on a government watchlist.
That’s how broadly the government’s net is being cast in its pursuit of domestic extremists.
We’re all fair game …
Scott Morrison Departs
His type should never be seen again. Born from the dark well of swill and advertising, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was always the apotheosis of politics’ worst tendencies: shallow form, public service for private interest, and, ultimately, the scrap for survival at the expense of the grand vision. Get the vote, keep the seat. Get the party in, forget the intellectual or social picture. Bugger the broader society with a hefty stick, sod the beastly populace, betray your colleagues and everybody else besides: there is only me, Scomo, the man who will reliably fail you at every turn …
The US corporate media has maintained a near unanimous support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza – the home of 2.2 million Palestinians. While pundits engage in parlor games over what degree of violence is “justified” by the Hamas attack upon Israel, while public intellectuals fall in line with the gutless unconditional support of Israeli punitive actions, tens of thousands of Palestinian people – largely men, women, and children going about their day-to-day lives– have been killed, maimed, wounded, or terrorized.
Corruption, racism, and cowardice come together to produce a rare near-total US ruling-class consensus behind the brutal action of the …
What can be done?
There have always been some people who believe that they are entitled to rule over the rest of humanity. This is because human behavior is driven by emotions. Decades of research has demonstrated this truth. Human nature is, for the vast majority, powered by empathy and concern for the common good. There are some whose nature can be described as aggressively assertive, dominating, and driven by selfishness, greed, and power.
The anthropologist, Douglas P. Fry comments, “ Social stratification and resulting positions of leadership open the door for a plethora of injustices and cruelties that come with warfare, slavery, and other …
Temperature and repression of dissent are on the rise around the world. In Italy, right-wing government forces are now branding nonviolent eco-activists as terrorists
Rivers turn green to denounce the failure of COP28. Banners: The government speaks, the earth sinks. | XR Italia – 9 Dec 2023
Rome, Venice, Milan, Turin, Bologna, & Bari, Italy
In a dimly lit room at the back of a little independent bookstore, two dangerous radicals, members of the notorious Green Mafia, plot against the fossil-capital regime:
Johnny Frontline: [panicking] “Godfather, I don’t …
Are we born with it?
Since 2014 the U.S. has become the world’s “top oil and natural gas liquids” producer (2022: 19.1 million barrels per day). It even leads Saudi Arabia and Russia so it’s no longer dependent on Mideast oil.
When my husband and I were flying to Beirut, Lebanon to co-edit the English-language Daily Star, we noticed our tickets were paid by ARAMCO (since 1988, “Saudi Aramco,” then one of the world’s largest American oil companies. That was a factor the publisher somehow neglected to explain, along with the pro-West bias of this influential and major Arabic newspaper chain. Not long after, we took a bomb in the lobby that shook the building, but no one was killed.
Having then just departed from two years in Tulsa—he on the World, me, as a journalism professor—we were well aware of …
So much for that. Much had been promised by Florida Governor Ron De Santis to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House. But the attempt to wrest the Republican Party from the orange ogre’s meaty, waving hands was never convincing. In the end, DeSantis was more stumbler than balancer, a woeful mismatch before the forces he never staved off.
While he made his name fluorescent bright in Florida’s politics, launching attacks on Disney, skirmishing with public health officials regarding pandemic measures, and railing against minorities (LGBTQ youth figured highly), he seemed awkward away from the swamp. On the …
The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup …
The US, China, and Taiwan context
In an online video interview, libertarian judge Andrew Napolitano asked University of Chicago political scientist and international relations professor John Mearsheimer to “translate” president Xi’s remarks in his New Year speech.
The professor answered, “There is no question that the Chinese want Taiwan back. They want to make Taiwan part of China…. There is also no question that the Taiwanese don’t want to be part of China. They want to be a sovereign state. These are two irreconcilable goals.”
First, it must be stated that …
It describes what kind of government?
A teacher once said to me: “A society pays for what it values.” If so, our society values commercial entertainment, including spectator sports, orders of magnitude more than it values civics defined as the rights and duties exercised by citizens in a democracy.
What if we lived in a society that valued both equally?
1. Possibly the most visible event would be an annual Academy of Civic Heroes Awards viewed by tens of millions of people. The glitter would shine not on the winner’s wardrobes, but on their victories of justice and on …
Abahlali baseMjondolo commend the outstanding work by the South African legal team at the International Court of Justice in Hague. Many of us watched with great pride as our brilliant legal team stood in front of the world to protect humanity and end the devastating attacks against the people of Gaza that have led to the loss of more than 23 000 lives, including more than 8 000 children.
We do not see the importance of this case as being restricted to proving to the ICJ that the Israeli state is committing genocide. It is also a statement of conscience to …
Last week, as the International Court of Justice heard South Africa’s case of genocide against Israel, we put the scale of the atrocities in perspective by visualizing how many buses it would take to carry the Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. We dedicated this visual to Dunia Abu Mohsen, whose first name means “world” in Arabic, and whose time in this world was cruelly cut short by genocide.
How is it that journalists are not pausing to question the outrageous improbability of so many of the evidence-poor Hamas rape stories being advanced?
The Guardian has just published the latest in the western media’s endless cycle of stories claiming Hamas committed “systematic, mass rape” on October 7. Its article is headlined: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.
The biggest problem with these stories isn’t just the continuing absence of any meaningful evidence for “systematic” rape; or Israel’s long track record of lying to justify state terrorism; or Israel’s refusal to cooperate with independent investigators; or the racist, anti-Arab tropes that pass for sophisticated analysis in western circles.
It is …
Speech by Hezbollah Secretary General, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, on January 3, 2024, on the commemoration of the 4th anniversary of the assassinations of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis
[…] I now come to the third part of my remarks, devoted to Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”. This operation was launched on October 7 by our brothers from the Izz al-Dine al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’ armed wing), and our brothers from Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian factions joined them. The causes which led to this operation were recalled by the leaders of our brothers of Hamas, (Islamic) Jihad and other factions of the Resistance, and I myself spoke about it in detail in a previous speech, namely everything concerning the oppression of the Palestinian people for 75 years, the issue of the …
The destruction has just begun
Each genocide has its characteristics; the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people has unique characteristics that make it more dangerous than atrocities that damaged previous populations. Starting from the day that a Zionist stepped on Palestinian land, the machinery for the eventual genocide was being prepared. Failure of international organizations to take necessary precautions, even after Zionist intentions became clarified, led to the present daily toll of loss of life and loss of will to live. No mechanism is apparent to prevent the eventual denouement. A careless world has been unable to react to a major destruction of innocent people …
As the WEF and WHO drum up fear of “Disease X” there is a new set of narrative gatekeepers assembling a phony Dream Team of ‘covid dissidents.’ The trouble is most of them supported all the mandates!
Phony COVID Dissidents: Beware the Dream Team Narrative Police
While it’s near impossible to sidestep nationalist, imperialist and supremacist ideas, “leftists” should at least not promote prevailing anti-Palestinian ideological strictures. Despite the horrors Israel’s unleashed in Gaza, some who ‘stand with Palestine’ still prioritize Jewish sensitivities over opposing Canadian support for genocide.
In a hundred days 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, 60,000 seriously injured and 2 million displaced in Gaza. Half a million in Gaza are facing famine conditions and basically everyone is hungry. If Israeli-imposed hunger, disease and lack of medical care persists hundreds of thousands may end up dying. And the state perpetrating this genocide has long …
Israel has been given enormous license to control the security narrative in the Middle East for decades. This is not to say it is always in control of it – the attacks of October 7 by Hamas show that such control is rickety and bound, at stages, to come undone. What matters for Israeli security is that certain neighbours always understand that they are never to do certain things, lest they risk existential oblivion.
For instance, no Middle Eastern state will be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons on the Jewish State’s watch. Nuclear reactors and facilities will be struck, infected, or …
The ultimate consequences of global warming are difficult to truly understand by the public, policymakers and by pretty much everybody. In their hearts, they do not want to believe it’ll cause an extinction event. That’s simply too hard to believe, going too far. People cannot wrap their minds around the idea that civilization, poof, is gone. After all, extinctions are not features of human civilization. Or are they?
Archeologists tell us otherwise. Climate change and natural disasters have led advanced civilizations into utter ruin, extinction events. The Mayan Civilization, population 7-10 million, skilled as advanced astronomers that built elaborate cities without …
It was not surprising that the U.S.’s earsplitting anti-Russian uproar has recently slowed down considerably. Israel’s Zionist genocidal war on the Palestinian people entrapped in Gaza (occupied first in 1967, and then totally blockaded since 2005) stole the limelight. The momentary slowdown gave Russia some breathing time, and the U.S. a possible way out of the mess it had engineered. Irrespective of Russian voices claiming the conflict has “Entered its endgame”, or American declarations talking about a “Negotiated settlement”, the conflict continues unabated.
Let us assume that Russia would accept withdrawing from Donbass in exchange for Ukraine meeting all …
You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness. In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo. The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.
To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded. Yet, while the International …
