It is the season of annual shareholder meetings for giant corporations when CEOs go through the motions of elections for their Board of Directors and approval of other resolutions. People who own stock in General Motors (GM) receive the “GM Meeting Information” in an envelope emblazoned with this disingenuous message: “Your Voice/Your Vote/Be Heard. Every Vote Matters.”
When you look inside, you learn that this virtual meeting is on June 20, 2023, “live via Webcast.” No more in-person shareholder meetings, where at least for a couple of hours a year, the GM CEO, officers …
The G7 has recently wound up its meeting in Hiroshima, and the participants joined to affirm their fear of the Threat of China. British media reported that prime minister Rishi Sunak said: “China poses the biggest challenge to global security and prosperity of our age with the ‘means and intent to reshape the world order’.” The global septet spoke of “de-risking” rather than “de-coupling” from China. This was prudent because decoupling from the world’s leading manufacturing base would risk plunging all economies into recession. China leads the world in …
Eminent Australian and Indigenous journalist, Stan Grant, was recently driven to resign from the ABC (the tax-payer-funded Australian equivalent of the UK BBC) as compere of the high-rating Q+A TV program by a flood of devastating racist abuse after he participated in a frank and truthful ABC discussion of the British Crown and genocidal colonialism on 5 continents that prefaced the ABC coverage of the Coronation of King Charles III. Stan Grant, please come back, decent Australia loves you and needs you.
The 235 year and ongoing settler-colonial Australian Aboriginal Genocide has been associated with about 0.1 million violent deaths and 2 …
Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are the new nuclear craze, especially with the U.S. Congress, as America’s representatives see SMRs as a big answer to energy needs and reduction of greenhouse gases, advertised as a green deal for clean energy that skirts the heavy costs of paying the Middle East billions upon billions. However, the devil in the details is dangerously overlooked.
I launched my career at New York City’s decadently scandalous Vertical Club — sort of the Studio 54 of gyms. On a nightly basis, I interacted with the Big Apple’s financial/social elite (and their myriad hangers-on).
As for celebrities, it was always veritable who’s who — from Arnold to Liza, Dr. J to Mr. T., Mick Jagger to Bianca Jagger, Clint Eastwood to Tom Hanks, Stallone to S.I. Newhouse, Fabio to Martina, Alec Baldwin to Alice Cooper, Bill Cosby to Mike Tyson, and …
I’ve been helping my friend from another country navigate the legal system, green card in hand, and a husband who attempted to suffocate her to death. The people in both camps — defense and prosecution — are interestingly together bedfellows, working the “system” hard, juggling which judge is this or that (pro- or con-), and using all the ugliness of a legal system that is stacked against, well, JUSTICE for one, …
In debating the validity of raising the debt limit, the United States Congress has not carefully analyzed the reasons for government debt and the meaning of all debt. The true meaning of debt has the modern capitalist system as a debt-driven system. All new money supply is debt and the money supply is the energy that sustains the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Historically, without expansion in the available money supply (debt), the capitalist system stagnates and withers.
Demystifying the mystery of debt starts with postulates ? accepted concepts that form a starting position for reason and discussion. The modern capitalist system …
Since my governor, Fascism Forever Captain Ron as I call him, just announced for President, allow me to jump into the fray. Of course, I have not much of a chance as anyone else who stands apart from the Two Party/One Party scam to get the support needed without raising and spending a fortune.
Issues! Issues! and concrete ideas are what our nation is thirsting for. Factor out the 1/4 of 1% of us and everyone else should appreciate my platform:
* Clean Election Laws for the entire nation: Maine, in 2015, counteracted a Supreme Court ruling that wiped out its 1996 …
During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where the meeting was held. Not doing so would have been an act of immense discourtesy. Despite many calls for an apology from the US for dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian population in 1945, US President Joe Biden has demurred. …
At the end of April of this year, the two of us ventured together to Russia. We went with the purpose of fact-finding and also to make a point that we do not believe that Russia should be isolated from the world through sanctions and travel bans.
At this moment, Russia is more isolated from the West than it has ever been, quite possibly in history. As just one example, while V.I. Lenin was able to famously travel from Finland via train to St. Petersburg, even during the height of WWI, the train from Finland to Russia ceased operating after …
by Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) / May 24th, 2023
An assembly of some 6,000 Quebec patriots, the Assembly of the Six Counties, was held October 23-24, 1837 despite public assemblies being banned by the British colonial government.
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) is calling for Victoria Day to be renamed Patriots’ Day. The aim is to engage people in discussion on the peoples’ patriots and debunk the monarchical-patriotic legends handed down to the younger generations in order to stop them from conceptualizing a constitution and democratic process of their own making, which opens a bright future for all. In this vein, the celebration of Victoria …
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / May 24th, 2023
Outrage continues over Justice Neil Gorsuch’s recent remarks that policy responses to COVID-19 may represent “the greatest intrusion of civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” Slavery, the historical exclusion of women and non-property owners from voting, Jim Crow, the abuses of the Red Scares and an infinite list of other violations of civil liberties are nothing to Gorsuch compared to asking people to wear masks and get vaccinations. In their attacks on Gorsuch, commentators have focused on this catalogue of grim injustices, but Gorsuch’s remarks on the specifics of COVID-19 policy should also be raising blaring alarm …
It certainly got the tongues wagging, the keyboards pressed, and the intellectually dead aroused – at least for a time. Given how many of those in the Australian press and media stable have been, for the most part, unconcerned, and in some cases celebratory, regarding the prosecution of Julian Assange, it was strikingly poignant to have his wife, Stella, present at the centre of Australia’s press epicentre: the National Press Club in Canberra.
For those familiar with the ongoing prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder by the United States via …
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / May 23rd, 2023
Patty Chayefsky’s film Network, an acid-laced spoof of capitalist media, reaches its climax when Chairman Arthur Jensen, leader of the fictional mega-corporation CAA, thunders his disapproval to the crazed but wildly popular anchorman, Howard Beale. Encouraging his viewers to protest CAA’s unpatriotic merger deal with Saudi Arabian capitalists, Jensen accuses Beal of having “meddled with the primal forces of nature.” Jensen proceeds to instruct his economically naïve employee that Beale is an old man who “thinks in terms of nations and peoples,” when in fact such things no longer exist. “There is only one holistic system of systems” proclaims Jensen, …
The upper atmosphere is cooling too fast for comfort.
Global warming is only one half of the impact of excessive CO2 emissions generated by cars, planes, trains, and industry. The other impact is rapid cooling of the upper atmosphere which may be of considerably more concern than global warming as it negatively impacts the ozone layer, which protects the planet from burning up. Hmm, this is important.
If this is going on at Surrey Memorial Hospital in British Columbia Canada where else is it going on?
“These patients take up beds and nursing support that would normally be used to treat incoming emergencies. This bed-block forces us to routinely treat strokes, heart attacks, traumas, miscarriages and palliative patients in the hallway.”
— “Visitor ‘overwhelmed’ by crowded emergency at Surrey Memorial Hospital,” Vancouver Sun, 18 May 2023
NATO and its supporters and member-nations are hiding the fact that the predominant belief in many of these nations is actually that they’re dictatorships that merely pontificate ‘democracy’ to other nations as an excuse to defeat their targeted-for-conquest nations which they call ‘autocracies’ or etc. in order to fool the public to ‘justify’ the military-industrial complex and its war-games and invasions and their enormous arms-sales.
NATO, which is America’s propagandistically ‘pro-democracy’ military alliance against Russia and against China, polled the people in 53 countries — some of which are in NATO and some of which aren’t — and asked them whether …
Things are not looking up at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a global professional services firm piratically free in sharing confidential tax information gathered from government clients. Then again, the firm’s expertise is not so much to look up to a principled heaven as down to a tax-proof Hades, buried in the scrambling minutiae of accounting and deception.
This year has been particularly eventful for PwC, notably in connection with its relationship with one of its most valuable clients: the Australian Commonwealth. It all began with the Australian Financial Review’s sniffing around the role played by now former PwC tax partner Peter Collins. …
We strongly condemn the deplorable actions of some of the protesters at Medea Benjamin’s book tour event on Friday, May 19 in Minneapolis, an event cosponsored by the local Veterans for Peace and Women Against Military Madness (WAMM). We believe that there are very legitimate, divergent positions on the war in Ukraine, even among people in the U.S. who have been longtime peace advocates. But there are ways of expressing that disagreement that are not legitimate. The violent incident that occurred on May 19 is an example of an unacceptable form of protest.
About 15 protesters gathered outside the event, chanting …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / May 22nd, 2023
… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.
— Howard Zinn, historian
Power corrupts. We know this.
In fact, we know this from experience learned the hard way at the hands of our own government.
So why is anyone surprised to learn that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, …
The history of Marxism has a parallel history of counter-Marxism — intellectual currents that posture as the true Marxism.
Even before Marxism came into being as a coherent ideology, Marx and Engels devoted an often-neglected section of their 1848 Communist Manifesto to debunking the existing contenders for true socialism.
As the workers’ movement painfully sought a system of beliefs to animate its response to capitalism, the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gradually won over workers, peasants, and the oppressed. It was not an easy victory. …
We have come to Cape Cod for a few days to forget the man-made world that is too much with us. I have asked my forgettery to get to work. As my childhood friends used to say to me, “Eddy spaghetti, use you forgetty.” The adults had no idea what they meant. Many still do not.
Here slowness reigns and forgetting seems possible, even if for just a few days. In mid-May, the beaches are deserted except …
As G7 members, Canada and Italy each has a gross domestic product of only $2 trillion. “That’s what Jeff Bezos spends on a nice steak dinner,” said CGTN Special Commentator Lee Camp. The bloc consists of the U.S. and six vassal states asking if they can shine America’s shoes. But on top of that, the U.S. itself isn’t seeing good times. Their inequality levels are beyond imagination yet the government responds by saying “It’s China’s fault!” Instead of a new Cold War against China, why not choose cooperation?
Australia is a country addictively hostile to the elderly. Despite being a continent that speaks to immemorial origins, respect for those who age is uncommon. In The Lucky Country, that seminal, repeatedly misunderstood text, written in frustrated, sour prose, Donald Horne observes that Australia is not a place where one should grow old.
And so, it follows: the rampant, habitual abuse of the elderly, seen as the gnats and brats of family and human refuse, the lack of community protections, the human rights abuses, all exposed vividly by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.
• China to use Russian port of Vladivostok
• Tech transfer to Thailand for high-speed trains
• Rural youth stay in their hometowns
• Free housing for young job seekers
