The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
Killing Democracy: Western Imperialism's Legacy of Regime Change and Media Manipulation Finian Cunningham, Daniel Kovalik, Jeremy Kuzmarov, KJ Noh, & Ron Ridenour
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth Stan Cox
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK James W. Douglass
“The constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper.” — former US president George W Bush
A personal journey of love for a strong mother to the land of the rising sun and a new pathway out of conscientious objector status
Every war is a war against children.
–Egalntyne Jebb, founder Save the Children a century ago.
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Short sellers have made a killing in the recent banking crisis, scalping $14.3 billion from bank stock owners just in March of this year. Short sellers “borrow” stock they don’t own and immediately sell it, driving the price down. Then they buy it back at the lower price, return the stock, and pocket the difference. Bankers say the practice is threatening the stability of the banking system and are calling for a ban on short sales of bank stock. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to decline but is investigating whether the practice constitutes illegal market manipulation intended …
Fears of Abandonment
Much needless fuss has been generated by President Joe Biden’s cancellation of his visit to Australia for the Quad meeting, a now regular gathering of leaders from the US, Japan, India and Australia. He had other things on his mind: dealing with fractious debt ceiling negotiations taking place back in the United States.
Students of US history would, or should have appreciated, the two phenomena that speckle the fiscal landscape in Washington. One is the failure of Congress to pass a budget in a timely, mature fashion. Then comes that plague known as the federal debt ceiling.
Since 1976, 22 …
In 2014, the organisation GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world’s food in its report “Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland.” The report “Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World” (ETC Group, 2022) confirmed this.
Small farmers produce up to 80% of the food in the non-industrialised countries. However, they are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world’s farmland. The period 1974-2014 saw 140 million hectares – more than all the farmland in China – being taken …
It’s official, according to a speech by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the United States is jumping off the neoliberal globalization bandwagon (a root cause of domestic extremism) and it couldn’t come soon enough as institutions of government are sucking up more and more angry exhaust fumes from constituents, as well as encountering a world trade map with China bullying its way across the world of commerce via its massive Belt and Road Initiative encircling the globe, kicking sand into Uncle Sam’s face.
Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy of capitalism that promotes freedom of markets, very little government regulation, no …
Julian Assange is in prison, indefinitely and in blatant contravention of humanitarian norms. The US national security state has spoken and put its foot down, in a show of power which has subverted the true course of democracy. Sadly, the political will to sustain the persecution counteracts the political will to terminate it, though in the fullness of time the tables may turn. The repercussions are already playing out with copycat prosecutions of journalists under draconian espionage law becoming a frightening norm through cases spanning several jurisdictions, but always following the same pattern of attacking innocent journalists for exposing government …
What does a “foreign policy for the middle class” of the United States entail? President Joe Biden’s national security adviser is rather vague about this. But in a speech in April at the Brookings Institution, Jake Sullivan enunciated a few points that do much to pull the carpet from under the “rules-based international order”, unmasking the face of the empire’s muscular self-interest. Adversaries, and allies, best watch out.
Sullivan, for one, wistfully laments the passing of the order forged in the aftermath of the Second World War, one that “lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty” and …
As the planet’s biggest investor, with $9 trillion in assets under management and an army of tech-savvy analysts trained on the scent of easy money, numbers are BlackRock’s bread and butter. A giant with such an enormous appetite should find room for all kinds of facts and figures – but this one’s a bit of a picky eater.
The BlackRock Annual General Meeting is on May 24, and resolutions submitted by shareholders will be going to a vote. The board advocates for or against those resolutions in a statement released last month. One resolution they unanimously recommend shareholders vote …
Whenever I need a brief respite from my work, I get out on my fire escape for a little air: Astoria, Queens, New York City, USA air.
From my wrought iron perch, I am regularly treated to a wide range of urban bird companions. In these moments, I can’t help but imagine what it might have been like in pre-Industrial or pre-Colombian days. I’ve read tales of the sky being darkened for days by a single flock of birds.
Sounds like another planet to me — and perhaps even to the …
Participation Mystique and Projective Identification
No one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist…Whenever there is a white screen in a black room a new religion has been established…We enter into the darkness of an artificial grotto. A luminous dust is projected and dances on a screen. We cross time and space, until some solemn music dissolves the shadows on the screen that has once again become white.
— Edgar Morin, The Stars
Why Cartesians are not Allowed at the Movies
Epistemologically, one of the major characteristics of the western world, at least as …
Meas Sokhorn (Cambodia), Inverted Sewer, 2014.
It is remarkable how the media in a select few countries is able to set the record on matters around the world. The European and North American countries enjoy a near-global monopoly over information, their media houses vested with a credibility and authority inherited from their status during colonial times (BBC, for instance) as well as their command of the neocolonial structure of our times (CNN, for instance). In the 1950s, the post-colonial nations identified the West’s monopoly over media and information and sought …
What did Chicken Little see?
—Ludwig von Mises
Once again, the police state is up to its old tricks, stoking tensions over whether or not the government is forced to shut down, even partially, due to a default on the national debt.
Yet while these political games dominate news headlines, send the stock market into a nosedive, and put federal employees at risk of having to work without pay, nothing about these high-handed theatrics will diminish the immediate and very …
Setting the Stage for the Genocide of the Palestinian People
An unusual and pleasant experience occurred when I attended the webinar book launch of Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, authored by Dr. Andrew Port, Professor of History at Wayne State University. Skeptical of Germany’s anxiety in remaining identified with the genocidal Nazi past and its servile attempts to gain Jewish approval by assisting Israel, I audaciously framed a question for Dr. Port, “You say never again, but Germany supports Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. How do you reconcile that hypocrisy?”
I admit that the question was poorly expressed and can be misinterpreted; Germany does not support Israel’s …
Hateful policies preventing Mexican carpenters from doing America's work & college creeps lying about college
I know, I know, every time I get onto the Zoom Doom thing with the Chronicle for Higher Education, the entire experience is dirty beyong dirty. Today, it was more bizarro people yammering about “talent search challenges for getting people to go into higher education.”
Three women went into their experiences recruiting and screening potential college hire-ons. The language coming from these people belies the vapidity of our times. Now, well, one woman said, “we have 30 people applying for one job, compared to a few years ago when 300 …
In 1975, Philip Agee published his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary. In the introduction he wrote,
When I joined the CIA, I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book.
Enrique Prado’s book, Black Ops: The Life …
Fighting White Elephants
Every now and then, the sharpened, dedicated means of halting a monstrous white elephant before its birth can work. The wise suddenly seem in charge, conscious and aware that folly can be averted. This, however, is a rare feat indeed. In Tasmania protests of some magnitude against a proposed stadium for Australian Rules Football are starting to have some effect. These have taken place against a dark backdrop: a persistent, critical housing crisis; the presence of homelessness; concerns about food and energy security, and healthcare.
On May 13, thousands gathered on Hobart’s parliamentary lawns protesting the $715 million proposal that envisages …
[S]uffice it to state that the US Guardian Elite are very much of and for the overworld of private wealth. Since the end of World War II, the US Guardian Elite have functioned most decisively as executors of dark power.
— Aaron Good, American Exception, p 107
Aaron Good, who received his PhD in political science at Temple University, has written an exceptional book: American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (Skyhorse, 2022). The title of the first chapter broadly lays out the thesis of the book: “Empire, Hegemony, and …
Cell phones have so many of us mesmerized.
In a recent Guardian advert pleading for readers to hand over money to the paper, leading columnist Marina Hyde declared: ‘My absolute favourite thing about the Guardian is not being told what to write.’
Hyde – or Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams, as she prefers not to be known – was, in fact, making ‘the most stupid boast’ that could be made by a journalist, to quote George Seldes (1890-1995), the US press critic. He was scornful of journalists who proclaimed: ‘I have never …
I just love it when all the media political pundits and talk show hosts ( News Talk?) throw out that word Democracy. You don’t have to go to a ranch to find more bull excrement than that. Folks, this is not a democracy and probably never was one, all the way back to our founding. Why? MONEY MONEY MONEY is the answer. As long as the masters of our republic keep allowing private money into electoral politics you will continue to smell that bull excrement — period!
The Open Secrets site follows the flow of money in political campaigns. After …
Canada’s choice Illustration: Tang Tengfei/GT
When Canadian Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino attempted to hype up the so-called China’s overseas police stations, one word stood out — could. “Mendicino concedes there could be new ‘Chinese police stations’ in Canada,” the country’s CTV News reported on Sunday.
The first paragraph of the article is filled with similar expressions, such as “there may be” new “Chinese police stations” and Royal Canadian Mounted Police will close any new sites “if they do exist.”
The real story should be why this speculation without evidence became a news story …
Although Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory in the second round of the presidential election in Turkey is almost assured ahead of the second round of votes, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, in case of victory, would alter the country’s foreign policy and put the relationship with Russia into a framework that is acceptable to the US. The question surrounding Kilicdaroglu is whether he would introduce sanctions against Russia or turn Turkey away from its newfound independent foreign policy.
Turkey is heading to the second round of the election after Erdogan achieved a better-than-expected result …
When ProPublica’s investigation into links between Republican donor Harlan Crow and the US Supreme Court surfaced, there was a sense that dark waters lurked beneath the revelations. While Justice Clarence Thomas featured prominently as the recipient of largesse and pomp from Crow – island hopping in Indonesia, private jet travel, among other treats – things were bound to get worse.
At the time of the unveiling of such ignominious conduct, Thomas did not heed the wise injunction of Lord Acton to avoid too much explaining lest the excuses become too many. His hand caught in the till, Thomas …
Today we mark the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), the expulsion, destruction, and ethnic cleansing of Palestine associated with the creation of Israel in 1948. The Nakba is a process that has never ended. Today, CJPME stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Canada and around the world and reaffirms its support for the fundamental and inalienable right of Palestinian refugees to return to the country that they were forced to leave behind.
Between 1947 and 1949, during the creation of Israel, a minimum of …
The Group of Seven (G7) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ meeting that ended on Saturday did not name China in the joint statement, nor did it mention the so-called economic coercion that has been hyped for a long time. Nonetheless, it is hard to say the G7 is returning to rationality on the issue of China. It is more likely “retreating for the sake of advancing.” The G7 has hinted that at the Hiroshima summit held from May 19 to May 21, the main statement is set to …
Roger Bannister on May 6, 1954
The first professional one-mile race was held in London on July 26, 1855. Charles Westhall won with a time of 4 minutes and 28 seconds. Over the next 90 years, the time was slowly but surely whittled down to 4:01.4 by Sweden’s Gunder Hagg on July 17, 1945.
Nine years later, on May 6, 1954, England’s Roger Bannister did the “impossible.” He ran a 3:59.4 mile. The following month, the “impossible” was done again. John Landy of Australia ran a 3:58 mile on June 21, …
How do we know a lie? And who else knows it is a lie?
Momentary respite from insane insanity news (sic) cycle
And yet, once back from the hike, the low tides churning up as the tide shifts toward the rising tide, the news is never ending. The insanity of the West, the insanity of the lies, more lies and black magic lies of the US media, as well as the zombies walking the streets and even hitting the king tide Devil’s Churn, hoping 2023 will be brought in with booze, football, firecrackers. That the world will …
