“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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
The principal perpetrator, in what AP News called “one of the most extensive bribery scandals in US military history,” popped up in Venezuela of all places. Leonard Glenn Francis bilked the US Navy out of at least $35 million.
The culprit goes by the moniker “Fat Leonard.” He tips the scales at 350 pounds, according to the US Marshals wanted poster.
ABC News reports that Navy commanders “passed him classified information and steered their ships, mostly from the Navy’s 7th Fleet to ports he controlled” in exchange for “Kobe beef, expensive cigars, concert tickets and wild sex parties at luxury hotels.”
Óscar Muñoz (Colombia), Li?nea del destino (‘Line of Destiny’), 2006.
Each year, in the last weeks of September, the world’s leaders gather in New York City to speak at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly. The speeches can usually be forecasted well in advance, either tired articulations of values that do not get acted upon or belligerent voices that threaten war in an institution built to prevent war.
However, every once in a while, a speech shines through, …
Now it so happened, as Goethe told it, that a sorcerer of superlative technical skills took on an apprentice, eager and diligent in his study of the master’s teachings. One day, while the master was away, the apprentice, perhaps overly confident in his newly-acquired command of certain techniques, decided to use these powers for a practical, if mundane, purpose. As a pupil, he was obligated to perform certain tedious household chores, most detestably the endless hauling of pails of water from the nearby stream. Why not animate, say, a broom to …
It all caused a flutter amongst the ignorant and expectant on September 21. China, it was said, was in the grip of an intriguing internal crisis. Air traffic had dramatically altered, with some 9,583 flights cancelled. There were talking heads aflame with interest on the latest social media morsel, minute and yet profound.
The issue of flight cancellations was then spuriously linked to claims that President Xi Jinping had gone absent on his return from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Uzbekistan. To this could be added two unconnected facts. General Li Qiaoming, after having occupied his post …
There are many western commentators who, apparently in profound dismay that a country which holds up the banner of socialism could be so economically successful, tiresomely deny that China practises socialism and insist that it is instead capitalist.
Author Jeff Brown wrote that China is “history’s most successful socialist and communist country.”
This conflation of communism and socialism is common but inaccurate. It fudges that, according to Marxist thought, socialism is an earlier stage in the process of reaching the end goal of communism.
That writer Ron Leighton asserts in his piece that “China is …
This is the weirdest part of the PSYOP. It’s like the morning after an office party on which you wake up almost terminally hungover to hazy memories of having performed a Tequila-fuelled blowjob on Bob in Accounting in what was either the 9th Floor Reception Area or possibly the downstairs lobby of your building while someone vaguely resembling that smirking kid in the Mail Room filmed it on his phone.
Yes, it’s the Morning After … that revolting regurgitant chorus you’re hearing is the sound of millions of Covidian Cultists down on their knees in their gender-neutral bathrooms praying to the …
It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so. It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match. The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia,” the Biden administration and their media lackeys
… will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, …
As economic crises, climate catastrophe and war crimes become increasingly normalized, a creeping nihilism is starting to take hold.
In Lebanon people have had enough of rampant corruption, inflation and limits on bank withdrawals. Without any other options, they’ve resorted to robbing banks for their own money, to the cheers of supportive crowds.
Next up in Haiti recent fuel hikes have exploded in a powder keg of rioting and looting in the capitol city of Port Au Prince.
Finally in Mexico, some revenge for family members of 43 students who went missing in 2014 and a poorly named police station gets the attention …
Things are not getting better for Optus, a subsidiary of the Singapore-owned Singtel and Australia’s second largest telecommunications company. Responsible for one of Australia’s largest data breaches, the beleaguered company is facing burning accusations and questions on various fronts. It is also proving to be rather less than forthcoming about details as to what has been compromised in the leak.
First, for the claimed story, which has been, at points, vague. On September 22, the telecommunications company revealed that details of up to 9.8 million customers had been stolen from their database. Dating back to 2017, these include names, birth …
Russia wants a peaceful Ukraine, Americans prefer one at war.
— Israel Shamir, “Putin Prefers a Bad Peace”
Even before the current round of nuclear brinksmanship in Ukraine, U.S.-Russian relations had descended to a lower point than U.S.-Soviet relations reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We’ve been courting nuclear annihilation for some time.
Those who would like to exempt Washington from blame now will have to account for U.S. hostility towards Russia and the USSR, both of which long pre-date anything that could remotely be construed as provocation by Putin. After all, the United States invaded and occupied parts of the former USSR …
