Latest articles
Aside from his genuine passion for the environment, Monbiot’s position on every major issue chimes precisely with that of his employer, the Guardian. He is not his own man. He’s owned
by Jonathan Cook / October 11th, 2022
Guardian columnist George Monbiot is, by his own admission, a very busy man. Dedicated as he is to issues such as soil loss, he has yet to find the time to throw his weight behind the campaign to free Julian Assange.
When thousands of supporters poured into London from all over the world at the weekend to besiege the British Parliament, creating a human chain around it, Monbiot, like his newspaper the Guardian, ignored the event.
Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been rotting in a UK high-security prison for years, as the United States works through a series …
by Frederick Crews / October 11th, 2022
You remember Jerry Sandusky, right?
He’s the former Penn State assistant football coach and pedophilic monster who started a foundation, The Second Mile, in order to gain sexual access to prepubescent boys, hundreds of whom he molested, until eight heroic ones stepped forward to tell a jury about their ordeals in 2012, resulting in the sixty-eight-year-old Sandusky’s thirty-to-sixty-year prison term.
If you recall anything else about the case, it is probably the wrenching story of the ten-year-old “little boy in the shower,” who, on February 9, 2001, was seen being raped by Sandusky in a Penn State athletic facility. For some reason …
by E.R. Bills / October 11th, 2022
We exchanged sideways glances. It was a dubious claim, and the old judge we were talking to followed it with a glaring non sequitur.
“I think he killed himself,” insisted 76-year-old former judge Alexander Nemer. “I mean, look at the photos. Part of the man’s head is missing. Something blew it off. There’s a picture of a cat licking the inside of his skull when he’s there on the garage floor. I would generally say something took the top of his head off.”
Ignoring the disturbing image this statement conjured, Texas Public Radio …
An Objective Look at U.S. Foreign Policy
by John Rachel / October 11th, 2022
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Cynthia McKinney for her current thoughts.
Cynthia McKinney is an American politician and assistant professor at North South University, Bangladesh. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms in the United States House of Representatives, as the first African American woman ever elected to represent Georgia. She was also the first Member of Congress to demand an investigation of the events of 9/11 and the first to file articles of …
by Kathy Kelly and Nick Mottern / October 10th, 2022
Awaiting discharge from a hospital in Cairo, Adel Al Manthari, a Yemeni civilian, faces months of physical therapy and mounting medical bills following three surgeries since 2018, when a U.S. weaponized drone killed four of his cousins and left him mangled, burnt and barely alive, bedridden to this day.
On October 7th, President Biden announced, through Administration officials briefing the press, a new policy regulating U.S. drone attacks, purportedly intended to reduce the numbers of civilian casualties from the attacks.
Absent from the briefings was any mention of regret or compensation for the thousands of civilians like Adel and his family whose …
The Wikileaks publisher has been put on 24/7 lockdown in Belmarsh, his wife reports
by RT / October 10th, 2022
© Getty Images / Guy Smallman
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has tested positive for Covid-19 and is being kept in total isolation at Belmarsh Prison as he continues to fight extradition to the US, his wife Stella told media on Monday.
“The next few days will be crucial for his general health,” the lawyer, who married Assange in March, told reporters, adding “He is now locked in his cell for 24 hours a day.” Assange became sick on Friday with a cough and fever and was given …
by Paul Haeder / October 10th, 2022
Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist.
–Winona LaDuke, “Canadian Oil Companies Trample on Our Rights” by Winona LaDuke, progressive.org. June 18, 2013.
Water is life. We are the people who live by the water. Pray by these waters. Travel by the waters. Eat and drink from these waters. We are related to those who live in the water. To poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation. To honor and protect the waters is our responsibility …
by John Helmer / October 10th, 2022
Introductory annotation by Patrice Greanville, editor of the Greanville Post:
As we could reliably predict, the Western media are self-righteously denouncing Moscow and rending their garments in an orgy of hypocrisy over what they frame as an act of “depraved terror”. Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions in the captive audience have nowhere to turn (or know how) to find out the truth and the proper historical context for the Ukraine war, the first thing the Western media suppressed even before the war formally began last February.
It must be noted …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 10th, 2022
On the latest slimed path Julian Assange has been made to trod, a few things have presented themselves. The rusty sword of Damocles may be suspended above him (he, we are informed, has contracted COVID-19), but there are those, in the meantime, willing to defend him with decent conviction against his dispatch to the United States, where he is certain to perish.
From the side of decent conviction and steadfastness came the October 8 protests across a number of cities, attended by thousands. A human chain numbering some 7,000 persons formed around the Houses of Parliament in London demanding …
by Colin Todhunter / October 10th, 2022
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, grabbed the global limelight a few years ago, making headlines by stating she wanted to put “kindness” into politics. In 2019, Foreign Policy, a publication closely associated with the Atlantic Council and the US State Department, published the article ‘The Kindness Quotient’, a glowing promotion of Ardern.
The strategic marketing of Ardern in various publications has focused on her likeability, pro-environment stance, compassionate values and collaborative nature. To further appeal to liberal sentiments, she was said to represent everything Trump is not.
Ardern belongs to a set of global leaders who were groomed for their …
by Edward Curtin / October 10th, 2022
A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “ I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November. Unprecedented. You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.
We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia. Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in …
by Allen Forrest / October 10th, 2022
What do claims to be a democracy mean when elitists grab the reigns of power and rule the masses?
Activists spoke out against the WikiLeaks co-founder’s imminent extradition to the US
by RT / October 10th, 2022
by Gerald E. Scorse / October 9th, 2022
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That famous phrase from Charles Dickens sums up the double-edged sword hanging over the roughly 63 million Americans now getting monthly retirement payouts from Social Security.
Their 2022 COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) rose by 5.9%, the biggest jump in nearly 40 years. The 2023 increase is set to come in at an even-higher 8.7%. That’s the best of times. The worst of times, getting ever closer, is the date when the Social Security trust fund runs out of money—and those higher benefits this year and next will …
If Washington was involved, it would mark a dangerous new stage not only in the Ukraine war but in Europe’s acceptance of vassal status
by Jonathan Cook / October 9th, 2022
The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.
This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.
Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 …
by Allen Forrest / October 9th, 2022
What happens if humans have to compete against AI and robotics?
by Ariel Gold and Medea Benjamin / October 8th, 2022
In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like a group that is well deserving of this honor, Ukrainian peace leader Yurii Sheliazhenko wrote a stinging critique.
Sheliazhenko, who heads up the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and is a board member of the European …
by Allen Forrest / October 8th, 2022
How do spies get their start?
by Assange Defense Committee / October 8th, 2022
Today, Saturday is the big day! Activists in London are planning to surround the Houses of Parliament and U.S. activists are planning solidarity actions in Washington, San Francisco, Denver, Tulsa, and Seattle!
We have updates!
Washington DC: Rally at the Justice Department
The rally starts at 12 noon at the Department of Justice (950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW), with speeches beginning at 12:30 pm. Consortium News will be …
by Vijay Prashad / October 8th, 2022
León Ferrari (Argentina), Untitled (Sermon of the Blood), 1962.
Since 1947, the Doomsday Clock has measured the likelihood of a human-made catastrophe, namely to warn the world against the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who attend to this clock, originally set the device at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight being, essentially, the end of the world. The farthest that the clock has been from midnight was in 1991, when …
The subversive Tao of Bruce Lee
by Mickey Z. / October 8th, 2022
Teacher: “What is the highest technique you hope to achieve?”
Bruce Lee: “To have no technique.”
I’ve been known to say stuff like this — a lot: “Rediscover the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself.”
Even so, it doesn’t make me immune to the soothing charms of a hive mind. It can be intoxicating to unquestionably believe we are right about something and to have like-minded folks surrounding us to confirm it all day, every day.
“Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 7th, 2022
It is a stinker in terms of policy, and unconvincing in effect, but the wholesale, indiscriminate retention of telecommunications data continues to excite legislators and law enforcement. In the European Union, countries continue to debate and pursue such measures, despite legal challenges.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), passed in 2016, limits the ways personal data is collected in terms of legitimate purposes. The European Court of Justice has also made it clear that the mass retention of phone and location data violates the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.
Despite this, EU member states continue to subvert, by varying degrees, such …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 6th, 2022
Never underestimate the power of failure. As the Liz Truss Disaster Show demonstrates, the next pitfall is probably just around the corner. The UK Prime Minister has shown, along with her distinctly oblivious Chancellor of the Exchequer, how to balls up the economy in the shortest timeframe imaginable.
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-Budget” delivered on September 30, designed to evade the eagles at the Office of Budget Responsibility, was greeted with shock from the market boys and girls to the chattering classes. The Bank of England took it upon itself to exercise some sober restraint in the face of rampant fiscal recklessness.
The …
That would help with houselessness, aging in place, intergenerational cohesion, farm-centric living
by Paul Haeder / October 6th, 2022
W.E.B. DuBois: ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’
Patrick Duffy of ‘Dallas’ Fame Lists Oregon Ranch for $14 Million
Imagine a world where smart cohesive thinkers come together and work with these multimillionaires and get some break on the property and then get a community going there: people who want to learn how to farm-raise animals; how to preserve foods; how …
From Robert Kegan to Lev Vygotsky
by Bruce Lerro / October 6th, 2022
Orientation
Anyone who has taken a class on child, adolescent or adult development knows of Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development, Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development and Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. But as a Marxist I want to know if any of these stages can be organized according to a dialectical spiral? After all, Engels argued that there was a dialectic in nature. Marx and Engels presented a theory of society that was dialectical. Primitive communism was the thesis, slave, feudal and capitalist societies were the …
by Ramzy Baroud / October 6th, 2022
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid threw a wrench into the works when he declared from the United Nations General Assembly podium: “An agreement with the Palestinians, based on two states for two peoples, is the right thing for Israel’s security, for Israel’s economy and for the future of our children.”
The statement took many by surprise, including the Palestinian leadership.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has been addressing the UNGA every September, every year, recycling the same speech about how he has fulfilled his commitments to peace and that it is Israel that needs to engage in serious negotiations toward a two-state …
by Shawgi Tell / October 5th, 2022
The political and media representatives of the rich continue to promote maximum confusion on the economy. No coherent perspective on the economy is permitted under the existing political order. Everyone is expected to go along with what the rich and their allies repeat about the economy. Everyone has to use the same terms, the same framework, and the same outdated outlook when approaching the economy. Alternative vantage points are not tolerated.
False choices, bad options, and mixed messages abound. Week after week, one news source claims that everything is great while another says that the economic forecast looks gloomy for the …
by Media Lens / October 5th, 2022
The damaging revelations about the Labour Party in the recent four-part Al Jazeera series, The Labour Files, and the almost totalitarian silence in response by British news media, should ram home the illusory nature of ‘democracy’ in the UK.
Based on the largest leak in British political history, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has exposed how Labour party officials smeared and intimidated rivals on the left of the party. The leaked data comprises 500 gigabytes of documents, emails, video and audio files from the Labour Party, dating from 1998 …
by Ramzy Baroud / October 5th, 2022
The 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly was, in many ways, similar to the 76th session and many other previous sessions: at best, a stage for rosy rhetoric that is rarely followed by tangible action or, at worse, a mere opportunity for some world leaders to score political points against their opponents.
This should surprise no one. For many years, the UN has been relegated to the role of either a cheerleader for the policy of great powers, or a timid protester of sociopolitical, economic or gender inequalities. Alas, as the Iraq war proved nearly thirty years ago, …
by Allen Forrest / October 5th, 2022
