A free trade agreement is a pact between two or more nations to reduce barriers to imports and exports among them. Under a free trade policy, goods and services can be bought and sold across international borders with little or no government tariffs, quotas, subsidies, or prohibitions to inhibit their exchange.
“Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world, has been a dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers. A mountain of discarded clothing, including Christmas sweaters and ski boots, cuts a strange sight in the desert, which is increasingly suffering from pollution created by the fashion industry.”
“Sadly, the desert is also a dumping ground for cheap, unsold clothing. Shein party dresses, H&M sweaters, and more are all heaped in growing mounds. The site contains an estimated 60,000 tons of clothes from …
The Supreme Court is effectively axing a major component of the Clean Water Act, rolling back 50 years of wetland protection in a declaration of war against nature by changing a word in the text of the Clean Water Act.
Seldom, if ever, will repercussions of a Supreme Court decision be so far-reaching and detrimental to life for the planet. It’s a dagger strike deep into the heart of the world’s most significant life source. Sauel Alito changing the text of the Clean Water Act …
TC Energy, in the construction of the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline (CGL) has been reported by the Narwhal and a Citizen Monitoring Group as “having committed numerous environmental infractions, including slope failures, flooded worksites, and sediment entering wetlands and waterways.”
Helicopter flyovers of the area revealed heartbreaking footage of the destruction of our territory, currently otherwise inaccessible to us due to the ceaseless harassment of our people by the CIRG and CGL security and by gates put up to limit our access.
CGL received permits to construct a “trenchless crossing” of the Gosnell Creek and surrounding …
Maybe it’s time for some creative thinking — a totally unique strategy that benefits all Americans, not just capitalist predators.
Special use currency is not unprecedented.
Abraham Lincoln used “greenbacks” — the paper currency shown above, backed by nothing more than confidence in the government — to finance the Civil War. He printed $449,338,902 of this currency, a lot of money at the time.
A century later, on June 4, 1963, John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110 which set in motion the issuance of silver certificate notes, currency backed by silver …
Salman Rushdie once commented that those who are displaced by war are the shining shards that reflect the truth. With so many people fleeing wars and ecological collapse in our world today, and more to come, we need acute truth-telling to deepen our understanding and recognize the terrible faults of those who have caused so much suffering in our world today. The Mercenary: A Story of Brotherhood and Terror in the Afghanistan War (Public Affairs, 2023) has accomplished a tremendous feat inasmuch as every paragraph aims to tell …
• China suspends sales of U.S. company Micron
• China’s food security faces the challenge of an aging rural workforce
• Two Ming Dynasty ships found in South China Sea
• Tibetan village turned into a large Buddhist art factory
John Rachel, in his book The U.S. and Perpetual War: Interviews and Commentary (Independently published, May 16, 2023, available at Peace Dividend/Books and Amazon) has compiled a unique, concise and astonishingly compelling collection of leading left, liberal, conservative and heterodox thinkers each answering the same fifteen precisely composed questions. The questions concern the current nature of the US empire, putative US democracy, and, most important, what is to be done.
The distinguished roster of 22 respondents from politics, academia, media, law, and social activism includes Noam Chomsky, Larry Wilkerson, …
Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.
— Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002)
If a heavy resume of crimes is a guarantee of longevity, then surely Henry A. Kissinger (HAK, for short), must count as a good specimen. The list of butcheries attributed to his centurion, direct or otherwise, is extensive, his hand in them, finger fat and busy. There were the murderous meddles in Latin America, the conflicts in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. (The interventions in Laos and Cambodia are said to have left 350,000 Laotians and 600,000 …
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.
