Latest articles
and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies
by Dan Lieberman / July 22nd, 2022
Post World War II Germany has exhibited commendable characteristics — publicly atoning for its Nazi past, working assiduously to create a thriving nation, designing a truly democratic country, integrating its European compatriots into a common market, leading others in opening borders to refugees, and modifying its previous ultra-nationalism to form the European union. Behind these praiseworthy attributes lurks another Germany and with a deadly appearance. Germany, which committed the World War II genocide, actively aids and abets another genocide ? the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Conferences, reports, articles, and discussions have described the programs and assistance by which Germany has …
by Ralph Nader / July 22nd, 2022
Other than being an adjunct booster of overseas Pentagon military operations and refortifying its vulnerable embassies, what does the U.S. State Department stand for and do anymore?
Sometimes it’s hard to see much difference with the much larger Department of Defense (DOD). Its more belligerent statements or threats since Bill and Hillary Clinton’s days have made the DOD sound almost circumspect.
Recall it was Secretary of State, ‘Generalissima’ Hillary Clinton, under Obama, who, against the opposition of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, pressed the President in 2011 to unlawfully overthrow the Libyan regime …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 22nd, 2022
The minds of defeated prime ministers are rarely pretty. In some cases, they are damnably awful places, where ruins accumulate and dust gathers in wretchedness. Such figures can become, by the admission of former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, miserable ghosts, cantankerous, bitter and resentful. Then come some, such as Malcolm Fraser, who have healthy revelations. Others just go to seed.
This may well have been the case with Scott Morrison, the accidental of Australia’s prime ministers. In 2019, he won an election deemed unwinnable. In 2022, he lost in the formidable face of a third of voters who preferred …
?? Warning: This Documentary Is Not For Sensitive People!
by Anne-Laure Bonnel / July 22nd, 2022
An exposé about the people of the Donbass. In 2016, the French journalist Anne-Laure Bonnel released a documentary following the lives of the Ukrainians separatists of the Donbass Region. The documentary captures the terrible images of a deadly conflict and an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.
by Allen Forrest / July 22nd, 2022
“Proponents of the COVID-19 vaccines’ magnetic effects say they’re due to those nasty microchips that Bill Gates has engineered into the vaccine to make us all pawns in some massive wireless chess game. Needless to say, these microchips communicate with 5G cell towers and not to our advantage. ” McGill University Office for Science and Society
by Binoy Kampmark / July 22nd, 2022
Thinktanks across Australia, tanked with cash from US sources and keen to think in furious agreement, are all showing how delighted they are with the AUKUS security pact and what potential it has for local, if subordinated industry. The United States Studies Centre, a loudspeaker for Washington’s opinions based at the University of Sydney, has added its bit to the militarising fun with a report on what AUKUS will be able to do.
The author of the report, non-resident fellow of the US Centre’s Foreign Policy and Defence program Jennifer Jackett gushes about the “more consequential” nature of various “technological …
Factionalism’ is identified as an electoral liability by Labour’s new report. But it has only intensified since Jeremy Corbyn’s exit
by Jonathan Cook / July 21st, 2022
A long-delayed report by Martin Forde QC into “factionalism” within the British Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure was finally made public this week, more than two years after a leaked internal report detailed efforts by senior staff to undermine the former leader.
The Forde Inquiry largely confirms the disturbing picture presented by the earlier leaked report, finding that Corbyn’s team, backed by a left-wing membership that favoured his democratic socialism, was pitted against right-wing party bureaucracy and a parliamentary party both committed to maintaining the neoliberal priorities of New …
by Vijay Prashad / July 21st, 2022
Photograph by Wellington Lenon / MST-PR
In the chilly Brazilian winter of 2019, Renata Porto Bugni (deputy director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), André Cardoso (coordinator of our office in Brazil), and I went to the Lula Livre (‘Free Lula’) camp in Curitiba, set up just across the road from the penitentiary where former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sat in a 15-square metre cell. Lula had been in prison for 500 days. Hundreds of people gathered each day at the Lula Livre camp to wish him …
by Allen Forrest / July 21st, 2022
Who are the people hesitant to receive the experimental vaccines for COVID-19?
by Matthew J.L. Ehret / July 21st, 2022
No longer just an ‘alternative route’ on a drawing board, the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) is paying dividends in a time of global crisis. And Moscow, Tehran and New Delhi are now leading players in the Eurasian competition for transportation routes.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
Tectonic shifts continue to rage through the world system with nation-states quickly recognizing that the “great game” as it has been played since the establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary system in the wake …
Interview with Peter Koenig
by GEOFOR / July 21st, 2022
GEOFOR: Greetings! Since our last conversation, the conflict between Russia and the West has only continued to gain momentum. How far do you think this proxy war in the Ukraine can go? Is there a chance that the situation will improve?
Peter Koenig: Thank you for having me again for an interview.
This is a million-dollar question. Especially when we consider that Russia, by far the world’s largest and resource-richest country, was for over hundred years in the crosshairs of the western empire, led by the US and since WWII also by NATO, to be overtaken or to become a “colony” – …
Digital Authoritarianism
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / July 20th, 2022
There are no private lives…. This a most important aspect of modern life…. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
? Philip K. Dick, “The Last Interview”
Nothing is private.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over …
by Yves Engler / July 20th, 2022
Last week the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Management released a report titled “The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada”. According to lead author Anatoliy Gruzd, “the research provides evidence that the Kremlin’s disinformation is reaching more Canadians than one would expect. Left unchallenged, state-sponsored information operations can stoke societal tensions and could even undermine democracy itself.”
But the report calls statements of fact “pro-Kremlin claims”. One flagrant example cited prominently is the idea that “since the end of the Cold War, NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases and broken their promise to …
by Gilbert Mercier / July 20th, 2022
Photo Credit: Gilbert Mercier
The days of the locusts have come. Nature is taking a deadly revenge on itself and us. In our instance, the swarming locusts that eat and destroy all living creatures in their paths, are ourselves, eight billion humans who have eaten, consumed, exploited and are in the process of committing matricide on the most generous parent: mother Earth. It is a self-imposed punishment, a collective suicide, the mindless destruction of our own life source. We are, indeed, the …
Resisting the "Food Transition"
by Colin Todhunter / July 20th, 2022
The ‘food transition’ is integral to the ‘great reset’. This transition is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability and warnings about the imminent need to address the Malthusian threat of too many people and not enough food to feed nine billion by 2050.
This transition envisages a particular future for farming. It is not organic and relatively few farmers have a place in it. It involves drones, driverless machines and largely farmerless farms. Cloud-based ‘precision’ agriculture as the norm – meaning GMOs and new gene-editing techniques and amalgamated farmlands growing monocultures.
The following is an abridged version of the …
by Allen Forrest / July 20th, 2022
In western so-called representative democracies who do elected politicians really represent?
Equating between the Israeli Perpetrator and the Palestinian Victim
by Ramzy Baroud / July 20th, 2022
“We regret we failed to protect you.” This was part of a statement issued by United Nations human rights experts on July 14, urging the Israeli government to release Palestinian prisoner Ahmad Manasra. Only 14 years old at the time of his arrest and torture by Israeli forces, Manasra is now 20 years old. His case is a representation of Israel’s overall inhumane treatment of Palestinian children.
The experts’ statement was forceful and heartfelt. It accused Israel of depriving young Manasra “of his childhood, family environment, protection and all the rights he should have been guaranteed as a child.” It referred …
Public and Hidden Transcripts of Resistance in Caste, Slave and Feudal Societies
by Bruce Lerro / July 20th, 2022
Summary of Part I
In Part I, I argued that the relationship between political subordination and revolution is ill-conceived if framed in a dualistic way. We are either totally submissive or at the other extreme there is revolution. However, following the work of James C. Scott’s great book Domination and the Arts of Resistance I claimed that people don’t go from being subordinate to wanting to overthrow a government overnight. There is a spectrum of growing dissatisfaction in between. I presented three in between stages: thick submission, thin submission and paper-thin submission. Then …
by Robert Hunziker / July 19th, 2022
Rain, Greenland Summit Station (Getty Image)
It rained for 9 hours at Summit Station/Greenland, 10,530’ elevation.
Greenland is sending signals to coastal metropolises around the world that it’s never too early to start building seawalls. These are not mixed signals from the big ice island. Rather, they are straightforward signals indicative of rapid breakdown of average ice thickness of 5,000 feet sooner than ever thought possible.
Stating the obvious, it’s horrible news.
In conjunction with freakish rain at the top of Greenland, the response to global warming has increasingly exposed humans as farcically …
"Activism" = Send in the clowns
by Mickey Z. / July 19th, 2022
Marching past the Metropolitan Museum of Art: June 17, 2012
I don’t write about the failings of “activism” as part of some kind of bitter vendetta. Instead, I present posts like this as cautionary tales. I lived it. It took a while but I learned from it. Now, I implore others to blaze new paths in the name of urgency and survival. We can and must do better.
Al Sharpton, basking in the glow of his deception
It was June 17, …
by Allen Forrest / July 19th, 2022
What it means to be the butt of your government’s joke. The Smart Toilet is based on reality.
by Gerald E. Scorse / July 19th, 2022
An extraordinarily cruel pandemic has been extraordinarily good to the rich, especially the super-rich. New billionaires have been coined at the rate of one every 30 hours. For those already in the category, the dollars have risen faster than ever. In the first two years of Covid, the worth of the world’s over 2,000 billionaires went up by $3.78 trillion.
To name just a couple of examples, Elon Musk went from $24.6 billion in March 2020 to $234 billion roughly two years later. The co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, merely doubled their wealth—to nearly $114 …
by Jason Holland / July 18th, 2022
There is no way around it. Nation states and their institutions behave like predatory cults that demand your subservience to them in order to get basic needs met that should be free, like access to food, water, and land. They have created a scheme where we owe other people from birth to live on land that was stolen. We are instructed on how to live by people that operate in a hierarchical power structure that runs like a mafia style good ole boy club, where the doctrine is do it our way or else. To all the people snagged into …
by William Manson / July 18th, 2022
As energy-overconsumption and related regional wars still persist, there is at least one historical advance in human thinking worth celebrating. And that is — as we move well into the 21st century — the rapid decline in the hegemony of “Belief.”
Political absolutism has historically required, or entailed, an exclusive ideological mandate, such as Marxist-Leninism or Nazism or Catholicism. When Louis XIV restored his absolute monarchy, he revoked the Edict of Nantes — thereby banishing all non-Catholics, on pain of severe persecution and/or death, from France. The Jesuit order held control over the educational system. When the youthful Voltaire visited England …
Reminder: The only thing we have to fear...
by Mickey Z. / July 18th, 2022
I just read about a recent survey conducted with school teachers that indicates that “nearly half are contemplating transferring schools or quitting altogether due to their concerns about safety.” These safety concerns are, of course, entirely based on the specter of school shootings.
FYI:
There are roughly 77 million students enrolled in schools in the U.S.
There are about 3.2 million teachers in the U.S.
So far in 2022, 27 students and teachers were killed in school-based shootings
I am not downplaying the losses. But I am inviting you to do the math …
System Fail #14
by subMedia / July 18th, 2022
Artificial intelligence reaches a new and unexpected milestone while the human condition continues to worsen.
As supply chains are pushed to the brink, working people around the globe struggle with new realities of stagnated wages and out of control inflation. While oil corporations celebrate record profits, the people of Ecuador are fighting back with work stoppages, road blocks, and riots across the country.
Meanwhile, in Tanzania, tensions have flared as the government tries to displace many indigenous Maasai people from their ancestral homelands for yet another playground for capitalist elites.
Finally, we follow up with our coverage of Giannis Michailidis, anarchist prisoner in …
by Allen Forrest / July 18th, 2022
What if you have something to hide?
by Black Alliance for Peace / July 18th, 2022
On Friday, July 15, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously adopted the resolution to extend the mandate of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) for one year (until July 15, 2023). The vote took place two days after it was postponed by the People’s Republic of China, which wanted additional consultation and significant adjustments to the resolution co-penned by Mexico and the United States.
The Black Alliance for Peace welcomed this delay, as well as several of the objections to BINUH’s renewal raised by China and supported by …
by Matthew J.L. Ehret / July 17th, 2022
Since China’s Arctic extension of the New Silk Road was first unveiled in a January 2018 white paper, a process of Arctic development has been unleashed which represents one of the most important and under-appreciated developments on Earth. Not only will 10 days be saved by goods moving between China and Europe via the Arctic route, but a new set of civilization building measures are now being unleashed in opposition to the anti-human degrowth program attempting to steer the world into a post-nation state system of de-growth and world government.
…
by Paul Haeder / July 17th, 2022
It’s truly amazing that the capitalists see the end of the world — human species, I suppose — way before they can imagine the end of capitalism. You know, that perfect system of slavery then, slavery now, and even more draconian slavery for the future. That sort is not based on whips, 15 hours a day toiling, not run by the masters of the Anglo Saxon variety raping and starving. The new-new slavery is capitalism on a digital bender. Food, water, activities, housing (not a house, but housing in the very generic term such as tents or mini-sheds), where one …
