It looks all too eerily similar as a method: the expulsion of individuals from their home, the demolition of said home and the punishing of entire families. All excused by a harsh reading of local regulations. But this method, used by Israeli authorities for years against vulnerable Palestinians, has become a weapon of choice for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.
On June 12, Muslim activist Javed Mohammed, a member of the Welfare Party of India, tasted such retributive justice in witnessing the family home demolished by the Prayagraj Development Authority (PDA). The …
The great progressive Harvard economist and prolific best-selling author, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote that “Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.” I wished he had written that assertion before I took Economic 101 at Princeton. One of the vested ideas taught as dogma then was the comparative advantage theory developed by the early 19th-century British economist, David Ricardo. He gave the example of trading Portuguese wine for British textiles with both countries coming out winners due to their superior efficiencies in producing their native products.
For some time now, public school superintendents in Pennsylvania, as well as the governor of that state and many others, have been striving to restrict the charter school money grab that has been allowed to run amok in that state for years.
Cyber charter schools in particular, notorious for consistently abysmal academic results and for being even more corrupt than brick-and-mortar charter schools, have come under fire because they receive large sums of public funds that are vastly disproportionate to their needs, functions, and claims. Overhead costs in cyber charter schools, it should be noted, are much lower than overhead …
Once there was a democracy that had lost its way. Two irreconcilable views of government were tearing it apart. The first maintained that a democracy should be about more than creature comforts. A soulless democracy can also have such things. A true democracy, however, was about much more than this.
It has to do with life’s imponderables, the things of the spirit, the sacrosanct nature of each human person as an end in …
To the Police State, We’re All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / June 23rd, 2022
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
The burden of proof has been reversed.
No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.
Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of …
In April 2022, the United Nations established the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy, and Finance. This group is tracking the three major crises of food inflation, fuel inflation, and financial distress. Their second briefing, released on 8 June 2022, noted that, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic:
the world economy has been left in a fragile state. Today, 60 per cent of workers have lower real incomes than …
The shifting baseline syndrome requires today’s people disavowing things written 10 years ago, even five years ago, but those books, articles, whitepapers and radio broadcasts are actually ahead of their time . . .
And what is that expiration date for good, sound, righteous news and writing and broadcasting?
I see more and more young people, and older ones, relying on up-to-the-minute news and up-to-the-minute authors to set the stage of their own personal collapse. Who do you need to …
(while phthalates could be adding to the gender confusion)
by Mickey Z. / June 23rd, 2022
CB is short for polychlorinated biphenyls — a group of manmade pollutants that were banned by the U.S. Congress in 1979. Despite this ban, the many PCBs that were used in the construction of school buildings from the 1930s to the 1970s are still exposing kids to a dangerous threat.
PCBs are listed as a possible carcinogen in humans and have caused cancer in other animals. They were once widely used in products ranging from TVs and refrigerators to window caulking.
In schools, PCBs in window caulking is typically activated by sunlight. This creates …
Hollywood, like the US press, has not been spared the influential hand of government. Under the mask of various projects, the defence establishment has sought to influence the narrative of Freedom Land’s pursuits, buying a stake in the way exploits are marketed or, when needed, buried.
The extent of such collaboration, manipulation and interference can be gathered in National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood (2017). Matthew Alford and Tom Secker argue that a number of operations mounted by the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI were designed to further “violent, American-centric solutions to international …
The Palestine National Football Team has, once more, done the seemingly impossible by qualifying for the 2023 AFC Asian Cup. By any standards, this is a great achievement, especially as the Palestinians have done it with style and convincing victories over Mongolia, Yemen and the Philippines, without conceding a single goal. However, for Palestinians, this is hardly about sports.
This accomplishment can only be appreciated within the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
In November 2006, the Israeli military prevented all Palestine-based footballers from participating in the final match of the Asian Football Confederation qualification group …
Simplistic notions of Domination and Resistance: Polarized Dualities
When we examine the relations between those in power and those who are subordinate, a typical way of framing these relationships is as a duality. On one hand, those in power are ruling using various power bases such as force, coercion, and/or charisma. The impact of these power bases keeps people passive. In fact, some claim that powerless people come to agree they deserve to be in the position they are in. At the other extreme are open insurrections where the powerless temporarily …
... the Latest Phase of its Long-Term Strategy to Divide and Control the Left
by Stansfield Smith / June 22nd, 2022
The US rulers use many tools to disrupt and disorganize the anti-war and anti-imperialist left. Three discussed here include: (1) corporate control of the news media gives them free reign to spread disinformation and fake news against foreign and domestic targets; (2) they use government and corporate foundation resources to fund and promote a compatible left to counter the anti-imperialist left; and (3) the rulers use their control of social media and internet to censor those voices.
Since 2016 their censorship of websites, Facebook pages, Twitter, and Paypal accounts has escalated alarmingly. They target those who counter the narratives the government …
Last Friday’s decision by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel to authorise the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States is both deeply shameful and unsurprising. Her action paves the way for Assange to be tried under the 1917 Espionage Act, introduced by the US government shortly after entering World War I, with a sentence of 175 years if found guilty. In essence, the US wishes to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports the truth about the US.
An Israeli sniper shot the Al-Jazeera journalist, according to four US news organisations. But the only investigation the Biden administration will heed is an Israeli one
by Jonathan Cook / June 22nd, 2022
The New York Times published this week the conclusion of its investigation into the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
It was the fourth major US news organisation to look in detail at what happened to Abu Akleh during an Israeli army raid into the Palestinian city of Jenin last month.
The New York Times found a high probability she had been killed by an Israeli sniper, confirming the findings of earlier investigations by the Associated Press, CNN and the Washington …
Many years ago, as an enthusiast for day-hikes in real wilderness, I had lived in various places–but always the proverbial stone’s-throw from the Appalachian Trail, which stretches over 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine. Had I been young, I might have fervently embraced the thru-hiker’s quest–to complete the whole journey. But, well into middle-age, my intention was a more modest one: daily walking, in forest surroundings–not unlike Thoreau’s simple credo in his own essay “Walking.”
An anthropologist by training (Ph.D., Columbia), I found my interests (largely psychoanalytic) disparaged in the then-ideologically confused climate of academic rivalries. I wrote two books, but …
I’ve attended a lot of special ceremonies over my lifetime remembering or honoring people I know. Most memorable ones include my mom and dad’s retirement dinner in 1986 in Bangor, Maine, my son’s graduation from Rutgers University in 2005, the funerals of my (many) aunts and uncles and my parents, and two dinners in New York City in the 1980s honoring anti-racist, southern, progressive leaders Anne Braden and Victoria Gray-Adams.
Today’s special ceremony across the street from my house at the Demarest local elementary school was different. This one honored Dominick Delli Paoli, retiring after 22 years as a crossing guard …
The cases of Carole Cadwalladr and Paul Mason reveal how readily celebrated media figures are recruited to the intelligence services’ covert information war against other journalists
by Jonathan Cook / June 21st, 2022
Events of the past few days suggest British journalism – the so-called Fourth Estate – is not what it purports to be: a watchdog monitoring the centers of state power. It is quite the opposite.
The pretensions of the establishment media took a severe battering this month as the defamation trial of Guardian columnist Carole Cadwalladr reached its conclusion and the hacked emails of Paul Mason, a long-time stalwart of the BBC, Channel 4 and the Guardian, were published online.
Both of these celebrated journalists have found themselves outed as recruits – in their differing ways – to a covert information war …
A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless. But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stained by one of the highest casualty rates amongst workers in its history, marked by corruption and stained by a pharisee quality. The sportswashers, cleaning agent at the ready, will be out in force, and the hypocrites dressed to the nines.
From the start, the link between the world’s premier football (or soccer) competition and the gulf state was an odd one. Qatar and the World Cup are as connected in kinship as gigantic icebergs and parched desert sands. But money was …
Some of us have read Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Ben Bagdikian’s Monopoly Media and are aware of state/corporate media distortions, omissions, and disinformation. Other critical thinkers are likeliest aware as well and sufficiently skeptical (all information should be greeted with a measure of skepticism and substantiation should be demanded by media consumers).
All people need food, shelter and health care. In an alleged democracy, none of them need the religion of market forces governing their ability to get them. Nor do those of us temporarily comfortable while enjoying the benefits that come to a minority which does well with capitalism (as it did with slavery) but now face a choking atmosphere that no individual status or identity as glorified house negroes of slavery days will protect us since the house itself, our planet, is under deadly attack.
Brutal abuse of logic, savage assaults on morality, perverted molestations of reason; do those describe Russian …
On the pro-choice side of the abortion debate are those who believe that having a child is a matter of choice. A woman’s body belongs to herself, not to men, not to society, not to government, not to a Supreme Court, and not to religion controlled by men, who down through the ages have used every social, legal, political, and religious institution to control and oppress her in keeping with the biblical injunction of “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22).
This is merely one of at least 100 quotations from the Old and New Testaments enjoining …
(Veteran’s anti-war and peace group embroiled in censorship issue)
by Craig Wood / June 18th, 2022
Thought control hides behind Veterans For Peace (VFP) flags on the VFP Discussion Group site and this is causing consternation among members.
At a glance, the banner at the top of this page showcasing fluttering VFP flags emblazoned with its widely recognizable dove and olive branch logo appears to be an official VFP link, but it’s not. Below the banner on another line is a vague addendum informing readers that the link is a “Group by Willie Hager” and two lines under that in smaller, soft grey lettering it says “Private group.”
The number of air particles is till high in China, but it is making strong headway in reducing air pollution. China makes clear to US defense officials that it will staunchly oppose Taiwan independence. Most Africans see China in a more positive light tha the US. More …
On Thursday June 23 people will gather outside Rep Barbara Lee’s office in Oakland at 11:30 am to protest her recent vote for $40 billion for the war in Ukraine. The demonstration is called in conjunction with the International Day of Action for Peace in Ukraine called by the Peace in Ukraine Coalition. There will be a companion demonstration on the same day in at the Northampton, MA, office of Rep. Jimmy McGovern who also voted for the murderous $40 billion, and accompanied Pelosi in her recent visit to Ukraine.
This massive funding package represents a clear escalation of …
Last week (June 8-10) there were two summits in Los Angeles, California: the Summit of the Americas hosted by the US State Department and the Peoples Summit hosted by US and international activist organizations. The two summits were held in the same city at the same time but could not be otherwise more different.
Summit of SOME of the Americas
Begun in 1994, in the heyday of US international dominance, the Summit of the Americas is officially a function of the Organization of American States. It is meant to coordinate and consolidate US economic, political and cultural interests. The first …
The only shock about the UK Home Secretary’s decision regarding Julian Assange was that it did not come sooner. In April, Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring expressed the view that he was “duty-bound” to send the case to Priti Patel to decide on whether to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 grafted from the US Espionage Act of 1917.
Patel, for her part, was never exercised by the more sordid details of the case. Her approach to matters of justice is one of premature adjudication: the guilty are everywhere, and only …
