by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / April 25th, 2023
Better not knock on the wrong door or drive into the wrong driveway, you may get shot. Kids are afraid to go to school for fear of getting killed, as the body count from mass shootings climbs every day. Hate crimes are increasing, and just driving to work is potentially dangerous. Think of tailgaters honking their horns and flipping you the bird as they speed past. Politicians address these issues by calling for gun safety legislation, increasing the number of police, and so on. But these policy responses accept the existence of aggressive behavior as a given and only treat …
Journalists are on the front lines of battles to defend the right to freedom of expression
by Andy Lee Roth / April 25th, 2023
Two cornerstones of democracy—freedom of expression and freedom of information—are under concerted attack, in the United States and around the world.
In the US, for example, reactionary elected officials seek to ban books in schools, often in the name of protecting children; and government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, seek to curb online speech that they …
“It’s a ‘monster heat spell like none before,” according to climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, describing Asia’s heatwave as the worst in history. (Source: “Extreme Heat Scorches Asia, Affecting at Least a Third of the World’s Population,” The Verge, April 19, 2023)
Global warming is hitting full stride as SE Asia, inclusive of parts of China and India literally roast. It’s a bad omen for the rest of the world as the entire planet is threatened by an emerging El Niño event starting this year.
The recently concluded LIV Tournament in Adelaide was a matter of bread, circuses and golf. It was something of a triumph for the chief sponsor: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and, more notably, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Critics, and criticism about the regime and the blood spattered House of Saud, were generally forgotten.
This vulgar display of denial and indulgence was typified by the face of Australian golf, Greg Norman. After three days of competition at The Grange, The Advertiser ran with the painful headline: “LIV-ing the dream: Golf’s boom weekend for SA.” The South Australian Premier …
To be a leftist in the United States is a dispiriting experience, but in the last year one of the more dispiriting things has been to see the attitude of many leftists themselves on a subject of crucial importance: the war in Ukraine. The consensus of the Washington establishment remains that the U.S. must support Ukraine against Russian aggression, in the form of providing enormous amounts of military aid. Progressives in Congress largely share this consensus, having voted for military aid and even cravenly retracted their letter to Biden in October that suggested he pursue diplomacy. Outside the halls …
The European Parliament just spent a whole week discussing China, and the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell will convene foreign ministers from across EU on April 24 local time to discuss the same topic. In anticipation of this meeting, Borrell published a column on April 22 urging the EU to take a more active role in the Taiwan question and calling for European navies to patrol the Taiwan Straits.
This highly provocative statement immediately attracted a lot of attention, especially in light of the …
Another tax season has ended, and more than 50 million returns arrived at the Internal Revenue Service marked “Married filing jointly”. Few of the filers had any idea that joint returns—created in 1948 and modified in 1969—may be the oldest tax inequity in America. They’ve been picking various pockets for 75 years, and there’s little chance they’ll ever stop.
Let’s find out how and why the returns came to be, and what’s at the root of the thievery. Let’s see how different parties, notably women, have been paying the price. Lastly, let’s examine a newfound connection between joint returns and America’s …
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Garland Nixon for his current thoughts. We focus here on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them.
Garland Nixon is a veteran progressive radio and television talk show host, whose analysis and hard-hitting commentary targets U.S. foreign policy with a comprehensive focus on anti-imperialist movements worldwide. He spent over 20 years in law …
He was always a step ahead, his mind geared not only for the next move, but the next sequence. He also smelt it, anticipated the audience reaction, shaped the prejudice in context for consumption. He created an antipodean version of dada art. He confused, baffled and enraged audiences with his polymathic, panoramic reach.
The genius of the late Barry Humphries first took root in Britain, along with a flowing of other Australian expatriates who had made Blighty their home. It became evident in Britain’s most famous, remorseless panner of reputation and issue, the satirical magazine Private Eye, that weedkiller of …
Market and labor in market are crucial questions both to capital and labor. The questions have been discussed and answered by economists, from the mainstream, and also from the camp of labor.
“Markets”, writes Michael D. Yates in his Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 2022), “act as a veil, hiding the face of the system. They are impersonal mechanisms, which allow us to use them without knowing what is underneath.”
Yates elaborates the issue: “We buy goods and services and are thereby dependent on those who produce our food, clothing, shelter, and services …
In ancient Rome, at one point, they wanted to make all the slaves wear something so they could identify them. Like a cloak or whatever. But then they decided not to do it. And do you know why? Hmm? Because they realized if all the slaves dressed the same, they would see how many of them there were, and they’d rise up and kill their masters. But the point is, if-if we wanna survive, …
Can the world handle a climate that exceeds the far-reaching excesses of 2022 when the entire world turned upside down with unprecedented flooding, fires, and drought?
NOAA and climate researchers in Germany and China believe an El Niño, starting in 2023-24, is the works. El Niños equate to more heat throughout the planet.
Buckle-up! El Niño could increase ocean temps by 2°-to-4° Fahrenheit, impacting the planet’s entire climate system, and it’s coming on top of the whackiest, hottest, boldest climate year (2022) in recorded history as paradoxically La Niña in 2022, which is supposed to help cool the planet, didn’t …
Twenty years ago, Noam Chomsky published a bestselling book called Hegemony or Survival. Since then, the stark choice he posed has only become more urgent. Depending on how humanity responds to the challenges of ecological destruction and imperialistic war, in the coming decade that terrifying question “Hegemony or survival?” may well be answered.
Modern history shows that the most dangerous periods are when two or more great powers are struggling for hegemony. The eighteenth century in Europe was a time of “multipolarity,” as Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia were almost continually at war, competing for geopolitical advantage and to divide …
Despite whatever charges Julian Assange may be accused of, it is well known that the WikiLeaks publisher was targeted for exposing the war crimes of the US government. In an upside-down Bizarro World, the screws are being ever so gradually tightened on Assange by the war criminals and their criminal accomplices. It is, in fact, a slow-motion assassination being played out before the open and closed eyes of the world.
Robert F Kennedy kicked off his bid for the Presidency proving he is for pretty much everything present-day politicians are against: He is against military expansion, he is against censorship, against the CIA, against authoritarianism. He’ll get no mainstream media coverage for this! So we’ll give him some air time and discuss his ideas on Redacted. What do you think? Has he got a chance?
In early March 2023, President Joe Biden embedded in his proposed 2024 budget to Congress revenue increases through tax measures that the rich and corporations do not like. Like his predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, he doesn’t really mean what he says.
Biden’s four proposed increases are significant because they would restore the corporate tax rate to 28% from Trump’s decrease to 21% in 2017, raise the top rate for income above $400,000 a year from 37% to 39.6%, raise the 1% excise tax on massive stock buybacks to 4% and get rid of the gaping super-rich private fund managers’ …
Never will the small things, those beautiful small things like OUR communities’ vibrancy and resilience, be discussed by big wigs
by Paul Haeder / April 22nd, 2023
[Photo: Area mayors pleading for state help to plug funding gaps included, left to right, Rod Cross of Toledo, Susan Wahlke of Lincoln City and Dean Sawyer of, Newport.]
Amazing, no, that in Newport, part of Lincoln County, Oregon, having this big confab, of people, citizens and “stakeholders” alike wondering what the state of the state of decay is as it plays out in Salem (OR capitol) and the blue-red divide — Portlandia gets the votes, while the eastern part of Oregon is vying to break-away into Greater Idaho. …
Throughout the 2000s, you’d find me regularly riding NYC’s subways during the very early morning hours — specifically from Queens into Manhattan — to work with personal training clients in gyms. In fact, right up to the plandemic, I was still training a couple of clients in their homes.
On those subway rides, I’d sometimes grab a copy of Metro — one of NYC’s free newspapers delivering a daily dose of corporate media propaganda. However, there was a brief period of time when Metro would allow some subversive voices into …
As we have noted before, a systemic feature of state-corporate media is propaganda by omission. Missing out salient facts, informed commentary and context about the machinations of government and big business means that the public is less able to:
Understand the world around us;
Challenge state-corporate power; and
Bring about the fundamental changes in society that have never been more necessary.
Current examples are legion, as we will see in the selection that follows.
Or fake à la Falbe: Public service choosing "US intelligence" to protect both the US and Denmark?
by Jan Oberg / April 21st, 2023
Ages ago, I was born in Denmark, and I still hold a Danish passport. Quite often, I visit the homepage of the Danish Broadcasting Company – Danmarks Radio (DR). It is public service, regulated by laws passed by the Danish People’s Parliament – “Folketinget.”
I sadly admit that there is an element of masochism in …
The mother of an 18-year-old missing worker, Rina, waits for her lost daughter in front of a barricade in Savar, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 24 July 2013.
Credit: Taslima Akhter
In memory of Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury (1941–2023)
On Wednesday 24 April 2013, 3,000 workers entered Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in the Dhaka suburb of Savar in Bangladesh. They produced garments for the transnational commodity chain that stretches from the cotton fields of South Asia, through Bangladesh’s machines and workers, and on to retail houses in the Western world. Garments for famous brands …
The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci presciently observed: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
This period that we live in is arguably shaped by three elements: two moribund (the implosion of the USSR and the centrality of US imperialism) and one vital (the promise of multipolarity). The camp associated with the US is consolidating at the same time that a countervailing multipolar tendency is emerging. Major changes are reshaping the world order, I contend, but the …
In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next few years.
As a result, almost three-quarters of Africa’s governments have reduced their agricultural budgets since 2019, and more than 20 million people have been pushed into …
Cometh the new platform, cometh new actions in law, the fragile litigant ever ready to dash off a writ to those with (preferably) deep pockets. And so, it transpires that artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, for all the genius behind their creation, are up for legal scrutiny and judicial redress. Certainly, some private citizens are getting rather ticked off about what such bots as ChatGPT are generating about them.
Some of this is indulgent, narcissistic craving – you deserve what you get if you plug your name into an AI generator, hoping for sweet things to be said about you. Things …
