Latest articles
by Allen Forrest / June 6th, 2023
A secret for perpetual optimism.
System Fail 22
by subMedia / June 6th, 2023
This episode of System Fail highlights the tensions between Indigenous communities and the settler colonial state in Brazil. The lower house of Brazil’s congress passed a bill, PL 490, which aims to open up Indigenous territories for mining and capitalist development, subjecting established Indigenous land claims to legal challenges. The Indigenous communities have resisted the bill through blockades and protests.
Next we cover the Bwa Kale movement in Haiti, where residents take up arms against gangs terrorizing their communities, liberating their neighbourhoods and building up organization of community self-defense.
Lastly, riots erupted in Cardiff, Wales, following the deaths of two teenage boys …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 6th, 2023
Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality. The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, and fluff of the land, a legal nonsense. In a land deemed empty, sovereignty is eviscerated.
Then comes the next stage of Australia’s development. Imperial outpost, dominion, federation, a commonwealth of anxious creation. But through this, there is never a sense of being totally free, aware, …
by Eric Zuesse / June 5th, 2023
The Moldovan Stanislav Pavlovschi, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, whom the current Government of Moldova then appointed as Minister of Justice, quit that post two weeks later and joined the newly formed Dignity and Truth Platform Party. At the time of his resignation from the Justice Ministry in 2019, he said, “I identified several personal incompatibilities, which, unfortunately, according to the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova make my activity impossible as a Member of the Government. … I remain committed to the democratic and pro-European values, …
by Allen Forrest / June 5th, 2023
The Patchy Record of Australia's Myki
by Binoy Kampmark / June 5th, 2023
What is it about government contracts that produces the worst results and poorest returns? Those clods behind such deals, notably in the poison chaliced field of public transport, seem so utterly incapable at even modest competence.
In public transport, muddles, bungling and oh so much fumbling are common; the whole show comes into view when public money is thrown at a project, and the planners get enthusiastic about a contractor they favour. In the Australian state of Victoria, this seems to be of a particularly advanced order. When it comes to paying for public transport, things always seem to be …
Interview with author Wei Ling Chua
by Kim Petersen / June 4th, 2023
The other day, I counted 20 copies of a book called Forbidden City (1990) in a library. I picked it up and looked at the cover, and I realized it was about the so-called Tiananmen Square massacre. It was written as an on-the-spot account by a CBC news team during that time. By reading the minutiae, it is revealed to be a fictionalized account, as almost all western monopoly media reports of a Tiananmen Square massacre are — fiction.
As I write this, June 4 is nigh upon us, and that means it is time for the western-aligned media to crank …
by Ann Wright / June 3rd, 2023
Citizen activism to bring about changes in how brutal wars are conducted is extremely difficult, but not impossible. Citizens have successfully pushed through the United Nations General Assembly treaties to abolish nuclear weapons and to ban the use of landmines and cluster munitions.
Of course, countries that want to continue to use these weapons will not follow the lead of the vast majority of countries in the world and sign those treaties. The United States and the other eight nuclear armed countries have refused to sign the treaty to abolish nuclear weapons. Likewise, the United States and 15 …
by Global Times / June 3rd, 2023
The sudden escalation of the situation in the Balkans in the past few days has drawn great concern from the international community. From May 26, when the Kosovo authorities forced the inauguration of the Albanian mayor, triggering protests and demonstrations from the Serbs, to May 29 when violent clashes broke out between NATO “peacekeeping” troops and Serb protesters, which injured dozens of people, and then to the commander of NATO’s “peacekeeping” troops in Kosovo’s latest warning that the situation there is very dangerous and that any incident could lead to an escalation of the situation, it makes people wonder whether …
Or is Eternal Energy = Eternal Damnation?
by Don Fitz and Stan Cox / June 3rd, 2023
Like a third rate zombie movie on Netflix, delusions of nuclear fusion repeatedly rise from the dead. The cover story in the June 2023 issue of Scientific American by Philip Ball, “Star Power: Does Fusion Have a Future After All?” recycles the corporate line which was broadcast on December 13, 2022. The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had reached a “breakthrough” in developing an alternative to fission.
As Joshua Frank described the hype over nuclear fusion …
there’s no toxic …
(what do we get for all that money?)
by Mickey Z. / June 3rd, 2023
I could go on for pages about the myriad myths of both U.S. military spending and U.S. military “glory.” In fact, I’ve written two books about it — plus hundreds of articles.
For the sake of this post, I’ll share just one example of our [sic] beloved and expensive armed forces in action:
During the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing campaign (read: war crimes) over Yugoslavia in 1999, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen declared: “We severely crippled the Serbian military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50 percent of the artillery and …
by Allen Forrest / June 3rd, 2023
Instructions from elitists: Follow the science but only the science they want you to see.
by Chris Wright / June 2nd, 2023
Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and confusions. One of the greatest of lies and confusions, which I hope to help dispel in this article, is the common delimitation of the very concepts “left” and “right”: it is claimed that to be on the right is to value freedom above all—this is what “small government” is supposed to mean, for example—while to be on the left is to value equality, if necessary an equality enforced tyrannically by an enormous, Soviet-style government. Nothing could be farther from the truth than this conventional wisdom. The opposite is closer …
by Ellen Brown / June 2nd, 2023
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
A small financial transactions tax could correct a number of maladies in our economic system, from the federal debt crisis to the widening wealth divide to the rampant financialization of the economy, while eliminating taxes on income and sales.
The debt ceiling crisis has again brought into …
by Ralph Nader / June 2nd, 2023
The Military Budget, which devours over half of the entire federal government’s operational expenditures, has been exempted by Biden and the Congressional Republicans from any reductions in the debt limit deal just reached. Also exempted are hundreds of billions of dollars in yearly diverse corporate subsidies to big business freeloaders.
Most of the cuts will slash the domestic programs that protect the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people. Cuts will also be made to the starved I.R.S. budget, further weakening its capacity to pursue super-rich tax cheats and giant corporate tax escapees. The GOP insisted on continuing its …
by Vijay Prashad / June 2nd, 2023
Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.
At the close of the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima (Japan), the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States and the High Representative of the European Union (EU) released a long and informative statement. In a section titled ‘China’, the eight officials wrote …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 1st, 2023
It was an ugly case lasting five years with a host of ugly revelations. But what could be surprising about the murderous antics of a special arm of the military, in this case, the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, which was repeatedly deployed on missions in an open-ended war which eventually led to defeat and withdrawal?
Ben Roberts-Smith was meant to be a poster boy of the regiment, the muscular noble representative who served in Afghanistan, a war with sketchy justifications. Along the way, he became Australia’s most decorated soldier, raking in the Medal of Gallantry in 2006, the …
by Media Lens / June 1st, 2023
The death of novelist and essayist Martin Amis on 19 May triggered a ‘mainstream’ wave, not just of admiration, but of adoration. It is clear from the obituaries that Amis died with his reputation intact and untarnished.
In tweeting a link to his obituary for the Guardian, the Independent’s former literary editor Boyd Tonkin captured the essence of the response:
‘I had hoped so much that this would not see the light of day for a very, very long time. But sadly here it is. My obituary of …
by Allen Forrest / June 1st, 2023
It must be hard when one has has held steadfast for a long time in a belief and dismissive of scientific evidence.
by Visualizing Palestine / June 1st, 2023
In 2022, we partnered with Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and Mind the Gap consortium to visually depict effect of Israeli spyware and how technologies that uphold Israeli apartheid ripple outward to impact communities thousands of miles away from Palestine.
Join us as we put a spotlight on “the Pegasus Effect”––or how the captive Palestinian population has been used by the Israeli cyber industry as a laboratory for research and development, with global human rights consequences — at RightsCon, the leading …
The Hate Goes One Way
by Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling / May 31st, 2023
We spent nearly 20 days in Russia, including 5 days in Crimea. During our journey, we spent around 70 hours in trains riding in close quarters with Russians who we had never met before but who freely shared food and drink with us. Indeed, throughout our travels, we were treated invariably with kindness, generosity and hospitality. When people realized that we spoke English and were from the States, they tried very hard to communicate with us and to make sure that we, as visitors in their land, were comfortable and taken care of. In short, it was clear to us that while many …
by Dan Lieberman / May 31st, 2023
Protests by British university economic students against neo-classical economics highlight the notion that economic education is dominated by theories that defy practical applications and applications that cannot predict, prevent, and ameliorate periodic crises. Students learn economics from unverified and outdated theories, many contradicting one another, which leads to a confused understanding of the discipline and complicated approaches to resolving problems. Adding to the dilemma is that textbooks in Middle Schools, High Schools, and universities lack updates with recent knowledge and contain dubious propositions. It is time to examine several propositions that are prominent and …
by Allen Forrest / May 31st, 2023
Many people don’t even recognize that they are being manipulated even when it is pointed out to them.
by Binoy Kampmark / May 31st, 2023
The undertakings made by Australia regarding the AUKUS security pact promise to be monumental. Much of this is negative: increased militarisation on the home front; the co-opting of the university sector for war making industries and defence contractors; and the capitulation and total subordination of the Australian Defence Force to the Pentagon.
There are also other, neglected dimensions at work here: the failure, as yet, for the Commonwealth to establish a viable, acceptable site for the long term storage of high-grade nuclear waste; the uncertainty about where the submarines will be located; the absence of skills in the construction …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / May 30th, 2023
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
— George Orwell
Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.
To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being the driving force behind the January 6 Capitol riots, one doesn’t have to engage in violence against the government, vandalize government property, or even trespass on property that the government has declared off-limits to the general public.
To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, one …
by Allen Forrest / May 30th, 2023
Those who obey their “higher ups” and believe without evidence.
by Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling / May 30th, 2023
May of this year, we took the long, 27-hour train ride from Moscow to Crimea to see how life is there and what the sentiment of the people are as the US and Ukraine sharpen their threats to “recapture” this peninsula from Russia. And, while we were there, these threats were backed by a series of terrorist drone attacks in Crimea which, while doing little serious damage, signaled an escalation in the US/Ukrainian assault on Crimea.
Despite such threats and attacks, what we found in this historic peninsula on the Black Sea was a beautiful, almost idyllic place with a bustling …
by Don Monkerud / May 30th, 2023
Bereft of an economic program, Republicans turn to social values, beliefs, and prejudices to gain votes and turn the clock back on the change that accompanies society’s development. The GOP can no longer convince a majority of voters to support tax cuts for the rich, eliminating government regulations and cutting programs for the poor. In desperation, they are conducting a war on changing American values.
Powerful and wealthy interests discovered that rural people fear the social changes that replace the white Christian power structure with more open, inclusionary, equal, and forward-looking values …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 29th, 2023
Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types, Mark Zuckerberg. (Who claims that these troubled sorts lack irony?)
On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine on the company for transferring the data of EU users to the United States. In so doing, the company had breached the General Data Protection Regulation, which has become something of a habit for information predators from Silicon Valley.
The data in question is …
by Ted Glick / May 29th, 2023
The meaning of Memorial Day needs to be broadened.
We in the USA need to remember not just those who have died or risked death in one of the many wars the USA has been part of, going back to the original revolutionary war for independence from Britain. We also need to remember those who died or risked death or imprisonment in battles for the rights of workers to unionize, against Jim Crow segregation and for equal rights for all, for peace in Vietnam and against all imperialist wars, for the rights of women and lgbtq people, and against polluting industries …
