by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan / December 23rd, 2021
Steve Keen’s book, The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day economics, has become a serious menace:
I regard Neoclassical economics as not merely a bad methodology for economic analysis, but as an existential threat to the continued existence of capitalism – and human civilization in general. It has to go. (155).
Strong words? Of course, but they are wholly warranted. Neoclassical economics is the official scientific underpinning of capitalism as well …
The result of a vote, on December 14, in the US House of Representatives regarding the combating of Islamophobia, may possibly appear to be a positive sign of change, that Washington is finally confronting this socio-political evil. However, conclusions must not be too hasty.
Disquietingly, Congress was nearly split on the vote. While 219 voted in favor of the resolution, 212 voted against it. What is so objectionable about the resolution, which was introduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar, that prompted a ‘nay’ vote by such a large number of American representatives?
The resolution – ‘Combating International Islamophobia Act’ – merely called for …
Relatively recently we criticized Man of God as a film that obscures reality and, by deifying religious feeling, could lead those who adopt its standpoint only to wrong, deceptive paths. ((See Chr. Kefalis, “Green Knight or Man of God?”. Man of God, directed by Yelena Popovic, has been extolled by the Greek Orthodox Church as a model of “Christian ideals” in our times.)) Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven’s latest film, can in many ways be considered its opposite. It is a film that demythologizes, …
Examining Two Recent Irish Films: Arracht (2019) and Herself (2020)
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / December 23rd, 2021
From Macalla Teoranta website
In mainstream culture, social and political violence by the poor depicted in cinema is generally situated in narratives that try to maintain the legitimacy of the state. Consequently it also tries to delegitimize violence that may threaten the state. For example, the recent Mexican-French filmNew Order (2020) depicts the street violence and demonstrations of the poor as mindless violence, murder, and robbery, rather than as an inevitable reaction to decades of extreme poverty and oppression.
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
With Julian Assange now fighting the next stage of efforts to extradite him to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 of which are based on the brutal, archaic Espionage Act, some Australian politicians have found their voice. It might be said that a few have even found their conscience.
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was sufficiently exercised by the High Court judgment overturning the lower court ruling against extradition to demand an end to the matter. In his opinion piece for the Nine newspaper group on December 14, he argued that rights were “not created in some …
Donald Trump thinks he’s still president according to no more reliable a source than Rachel Maddow on her February 5th show. This was confirmed in May by Vanity Fair. Right-wing conspiracy theorists echo this analysis as recently as this month. Left-liberals are smugly confident that Kamala Harris’s running mate is in the White House, snoozing in the presidential bedroom. Inquiring minds ask what is the evidence nearly a year into the alleged Biden presidency that there has been a change of guard in Washington?
+The Obama-Biden union card check proposal was not on Mr. Trump’s political …
Is the COVID vaccine safe? Pfizer’s own data revealed that by February of 2021, Pfizer had already received more than 1,200 reports of deaths allegedly caused by the vaccine and tens of thousands of reported adverse events, including 23 cases of spontaneous abortions out of 270 pregnancies and more than 2,000 reports of cardiac disorders.
Haaretz’s investigative report – ‘Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in ’48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew’ – is a must-read. It should be particularly read by any person who considers himself a ‘Zionist’ and also by people who, for whatever reason, support Israel, anywhere in the world.
“In the village of Al-Dawayima (…), troops of the 8th Brigade massacred about 100 people,” Haaretz reported, though the number of the Palestinian victims later grew to 120. One of the soldiers who witnessed that horrific event testified before a government committee in November 1948: “There was no battle and no resistance. …
The mass rollout of COVID-19 vaccines should be halted immediately. These experimental vaccines pose serious dangers. That is the message contained in a statement from concerned citizens soon to be forwarded to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The statement’s signatories include medical scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, civil servants, civil society organisations and “deeply concerned mothers, fathers, husbands and wives”.
Concerned citizens of India can sign on to the ‘The Truth of COVID-19 — The India Statement’ prior to its dispatch to the PM in the link provided at the end of this article.
Internationally renowned professionals in the field of medical science have also …
The contradictions and mixed-messaging around the COVID-19 “pandemic” continue to accumulate and swirl as the “Global Health Emergency” approaches its second anniversary. For example: Just as the Phase-3 trials of the Pfizer “Vax” have come under scrutiny for alleged shoddy methodology by its sub-contractor Ventavia in Texas, the partially Big Pharma-funded FDA has unanimously approved COVID jabs for children as young as 5, even though young people are by far the least vulnerable group to the Virus. Meanwhile, places like highly “vaxxed” Vermont, Gibraltar, and Israel have been experiencing intense COVID spikes of late, whereas relatively restriction-less Florida, a retirement …
When the so-called Founding Fathers – the elites who constructed the US republic — unfolded their unique vision of republicanism and political decision-making, they went long on stability and continuity and short on broad participation and social change.
Accordingly, most of them opposed political factions or parties, but very soon after the new government came into existence, major differences arose, leading to factions and swiftly into parties.
Predictably, the break in unanimity came with the formation of two parties, in the US, a Federalist and an anti-Federalist party.
But what is truly remarkable is that subsequent political differences in the US have been …
Adoption Supply & Demand and Money in Decisions to Dismantle Roe V Wade
by Mirah Riben / December 22nd, 2021
Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Justice’s recent comments about adoption during oral arguments on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization set off a firestorm of responses and op-eds. Some focused on the irony of the American Right invoking “My body, my choice” regarding Covid vaccines and mask mandates. More outrage, however, was directed at adoption seeming to be presented as an easy or less painful “fix” for an unintended pregnancy than abortion.
The good news is it has gotten us talking about adoption, with three particularly good …
In 2015, the United States signed what is popularly referred to as the JCPOA (the joint comprehensive plan of action) a deal involving Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) designed to limit the capacity of Iran to develop nuclear weapons. In exchange for their signature, the sanctions that has been applied to Iran were meant to be lifted. That did not happen, and in 2019 the Trump administration cancelled the United States involvement in the agreement.
Fool me once, shame on the trickster for resorting to trickery. Fool me twice, shame on me. When someone has earned the reputation of a trickster, one ought to be very skeptical of that trickster. Thus, to be fooled twice by the same trickster brings shame on the gullible person.
The United States has been duping the gullible among its citizenry and also gullible people in the world for quite a while. Near the end of WWII, there was the lie that the US had to drop …
pervert\transitive verb: to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right: corrupt.
pervert\noun: one that has been perverted.
So, it must be true; we have turned away from what is morally right as a nation, and we refuse to change our ways.
It wasn’t always for affectation. For many years it was a necessity. A gun was a tool for procuring food. A gun provided protection in a hostile environment. It was true two hundred years ago. It was still quite true a hundred years ago, …
Nazis on holiday
And so, as 2021 goose-steps toward its fanatical finish, it is time for my traditional year-end wrap-up. It’s “The Year of the Ox” in the Chinese zodiac, but I’m christening it “The Year of the New Normal Fascist.”
Potential hotspots between Russia and Ukraine, 2021. Panther Media GmbH / Alamy Stock Vector
Dissident Voice has published an article by U.S. writer William Boardman on December 14 titled ‘Ukraine is a problem only as long as the West makes it one’. The article is reprinted from Reader Supported News and warns of the dangerous consequences emanating from the military threats by the Western powers against Russia. The U.S. and Russia are the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Boardman reminds. He asks rhetorically in his article, “What could …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / December 20th, 2021
It’s Christmas Eve! It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be! It’s a sort of a miracle because it happens every Christmas Eve… There are people that are having trouble making their miracle happen… It’s not just the poor and the hungry, it’s everybody that’s gotta have this miracle!
Although a major scandal erupted in 2019 over bribery and other fraudulent practices used by wealthy Americans to secure their children’s admission to elite colleges, the affluent continue to benefit from other kinds of special admission policies that are perfectly legal.
Consider the fact that, according to a recent study, only about 57 percent of Harvard’s white students were admitted on the basis of academic merit. The other 43 percent received special treatment because their parents had made large donations to Harvard, or they had parents who had graduated from …
Any agreement between governments led by the UK’s Boris Johnson and Australia’s Scott Morrison must be treated with a healthy dose of suspicion. A few minutes with the UK prime minister would lead you to believe that “Global Britain” is a meaningful term that covers loss and prestige. A session with Morrison will lead you to a brochure type of politics, policy implemented by glossy pamphlet and slogan.
The UK-Australia Free Trade signed last week has its predictable, chorusing champions. There are the free marketing dogmatists who assume that their dogma is based on fact and that such trade is a …
The message sent to journalists could not be clearer or more chilling: what happened to Assange could happen to you too
by Jonathan Cook / December 18th, 2021
It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows.
His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it published just over a decade ago hundreds of thousands of leaked materials – documents we were never supposed to see – detailing war crimes committed by the United States and Britain in Iraq and …
Sixty years ago in the late fall and early winter, a seventeen-year-old blue-eyed Bronx boy went by himself to see an afternoon showing of West Side Story on Fordham Road in the north Bronx. He took the bus to the theater but walked the few miles home in a romantic daze, in love with Maria and yearning for a girl like that for himself. The movie had mesmerized him, and though he knew about gang fights and the enmity between different ethnic groups, especially white prejudice against Puerto Ricans and blacks, he had never been involved in such violence. It …
It was meant to be time to reflect. The eager arms of a new pandemic were enfolding a society with asphyxiating, lethal effect. Public health authorities advocated various measures: social distancing, limited contact between family and friends, limited mobility. No grand booze-ups. No large parties. No bonking, except within dispensations of intimacy and various “bubble” arrangements. Certainly, no orgies.
This was what Britain was told by the government of Boris Johnson, a man famed for his rutting proclivities, to behave, huddle and battle SARS-Cov-2, and its disease, COVID-19. But the manner he, and his officials, have done so have shown the …
by John Perry and Rick Sterling / December 18th, 2021
On November 7, Nicaragua held elections in which current president Daniel Ortega received 75% support and, as a result, begins a new term of office in January. Not surprisingly, the US government described the election as a “sham.” Of more concern is that many on the left seem to agree. William Robinson’s NACLA article, “Nicaragua: Chronicle of an Election Foretold,” is a scathing critique, repeated in an interview with The Real News.
In Robinson’s article, we will show that his claims are based on falsehoods and elite bias. He appears …
Nicaragua switches allegiance from Taiwan to China; free online tutoring for students; China observes the National Memorial Day for the victims of the Nanjing massacre.
This is the most opportune time for millions of workers in Big Box retail stores and fast-food outlets to form unions. McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, and other giant chains are having trouble finding enough workers. Some of these companies are even paying signing bonuses and upping low pay.
No one who frequents the dark auditorium is really an atheist
— Edgar Morin, Marxist Movie Critic
Orientation
Cross-cultural uniqueness of celebrity culture
If members of a tribal society during Paleolithic or Neolithic times, or even members of Bronze Age Egypt or Mesopotamia had heard about the United States population’s devotion to celebrities, they wouldn’t believe it. How could you become attached to a person you will never meet, whose shelf life might be five to 10 years and who doesn’t know or care about your life? How can it be that during a period …
