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Photo credit: Medea Benjamin

During the  weekend of June 10-11 in Vienna, Austria, over 300 people representing peace organizations from 32 countries came together for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine to demand an end to the fighting. In a formal conference declaration, participants declared, “We are a broad and politically diverse coalition that represents peace movements and civil society. We are firmly united in our belief that war is a crime against humanity and there is no military solution to the current crisis.”

To amplify their …

The United States is about militarism. Its economy is largely based on the military-industrial complex. It has hundreds upon hundreds of military bases in lands around the planet. Yet, despite a bloated military budget, the US fails to care for all its citizens, certainly not the millions of homeless, poor, and those unable to afford medical procedures because they are without medical insurance; however, the US does house and feed its soldiers, marines, and air-force personnel abroad. Yet, when it comes to its veterans there is often a …

Alan J. Russo opened the “Conclusions” section of his extraordinary (extraordinarily fine) 1970 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review article, “Equal Protection from the Law: The Substantive Requirements for a Showing of Discriminatory Law Enforcement,” by saying:

In order to be acquitted in a penal proceeding on grounds of discriminatory enforcement, a defendant generally has been required to show that enforcement authorities have purposefully singled him out, while not acting against others for similar violations. The mere fact that an impartial law has been applied unequally does not establish a denial of fourteenth amendment rights. This requirement …

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The victory of Novak Djokovic in the latest French Open had the usual mixed reception in Australia. While Australians pretend to like radicals, larrikins and the occasional deviant, the contrary is true. Tight buttoned, properly behaved and conformist to the point of invisibility, the boringly predictable are always preferred. You can rely on them.

Even in Melbourne, a town where his following is strong (he has won 10 Australian Opens), the call back circuit on the local ABC radio station qualified, ignored, even denigrated the Serb’s latest achievement. At best, 23 grand …

Over the years, I’ve often been asked to categorize my work. I find this to be close to impossible but — when pressed — I see myself playing a Paul Revere-style role. In other words, I have important info to share. So, I call out the warning to all who have ears to hear.

All things being equal, I’d much rather compare myself to Sybil Ludington. It’s just that 99.9 percent of folks wouldn’t get the reference.

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Contrary to the vaccine hesitant crowd, retired professor Noam Chomsky opined, “People who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to, but rather to insist that they be isolated. If people decide, ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing to vaccinate,’ they should say then, ‘Well, I also have the decency to isolate myself.'”

He is one of the least empathetic of beings, a cold fish, bothered and irritated. Captured by the cradle of numbers (he is an economist); obsessed by the spreadsheet of projections that may never result, there is not much to recommend the chief of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Philip Lowe. Come to think of it, there is not much to recommend any of them, these high priests and priestesses, all of the same, pontificating cathedral.

What stands out regarding Lowe is his almost heroic lack of tact. He will forever be saddled with those remarks that encouraged many Australians …

The pace of for-profit technological innovations is accelerating, but to what end beyond corporate sales? The gap between marketing new high-tech products and assessing their intended and unintended consequences has never been greater.

Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift escapism has flopped. Trying to improve on this bizarre quest to envelop its customers, Apple plans to release the “Vision Pro”, a “mixed-reality” headset so large that Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts described it as “clunky and creepy” and predicted failure for this $3,499 rip-off.

Do mega-corporation CEOs – who spend company profits on massive stock buybacks …

This is the exposé I wrote for The Guardian that killed off “Reverend” Pat Robertson’s billion-dollar financial scams parading under the banner of The Christian Coalition.

Note: The juiciest parts I got from Robertson himself, recorded on a miniature reel-to-reel tape recorder hidden inside a fake cigarette lighter.

No-one asked why I had a cigarette lighter—but no cigarettes.  The story won The Guardian a nomination for Britain’s Business Story of the Year.

Today, Rev. Pat passed away. I’m sure that as I write this, the de-frocked Reverend will be greeted at the burning gates by his host, “Pleased to meet …

Thirty years ago, in my economics textbook in India, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better, according to the textbook, for Argentina to concentrate on the production and export of beef, while Germany should direct its resources towards the production of electronics. This example was used to illustrate Adam Smith’s ‘absolute advantage’ principle – countries should focus on what they do ‘best’, rather than diversify their economies. It seemed churlish to me, that developing countries such as Argentina should only produce raw materials, while wealthy countries …

When one of the world’s most developed culturally elite countries, France, tosses in the towel on the IPCC 2°C barrier, it sends a loud and clear message that the global warming fight is losing the battle.

Seriously, France expects 4°C. The country is bracing for 4°C according to Environment Minister Christophe Béchu: “We can’t escape the reality of global warming.” (Source: ‘We Can’t Escape the Reality’: France is Preparing for 4°C of Warming by 2100, Euronews.green, May 22, 2023).

France’s position on global warming is heavily influenced by other countries failing to deliver their targets to keep temperatures within the …

Over the last two decades, funding in Palestine has become tied to ever-increasing restrictive conditions that are used to control and limit Palestinian civil society. We partnered with Al- Shabaka and Badil to produce the visual illustrating how restrictive funding supports Israeli colonial policies, depoliticizes Palestinian society, criminalizes resistance to Israeli colonization, and thwarts Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. We created this visual to serve Palestinian organizations that are engaging with donors toward the creation of less harmful, more liberatory funding models.

They – being the howling press, the screeching vox populi, and anybody else wishing to weigh in – were very clear about it. Kathleen Folbigg was guilty as hell and deserved her special place in it. For two decades, she spent her time behind bars in New South Wales, condemned by a jury for killing her four children, Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura.

The prosecution’s approach in 2003 was glacial, instrumental and without nuance. Crudely, it was suggested that Folbigg’s diaries, given to police by her then husband, had revealed an admission of guilt for the murder of three of …

The technical achievement of advanced industrial society, and the effective manipulation of mental and material productivity have brought about a shift in the locus of mystification. . . . the rational rather than the irrational becomes the most effective vehicle of mystification.

– Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

General, man is very uselful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

–  Bertolt Brecht, “From a German War Primer”

Langdon Winner opens his prescient book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986), with an anecdote about John Glenn and his experience …

Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.

— Justice Neil Gorsuch

We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

COVID-19, for example, served as the driving force behind what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

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