Since the Sandinistas returned to power in January 2007, child malnutrition has dropped by 45% for children under five and by 66% for children ages 6-12.
I’d like you to imagine for a moment that you are the parent of a child with asthma, living in Ciudad Sandino, just outside the capital of Nicaragua, in a barrio called Nueva Vida, which was recently founded after your family – along with 1,200 other families – was flooded out of your home along the lakeshore in Managua during Hurricane Mitch. The year …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / October 12th, 2021
In this special Indigenous Peoples’ Day episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with author and activist Ward Churchill about the wrongful imprisonment and deteriorating health of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier. A member of the American Indian Movement who was sent to prison in 1977 after a dubious trial sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences, Peltier’s continued imprisonment remains a stain on our “criminal justice” system.
One of the fundamental economic laws under capitalism is for wealth to become more concentrated in fewer hands over time, which in turn leads to more political power in fewer hands, which means that the majority have even less political and economic power over time. Monopoly in economics means monopoly in politics. It is the opposite of an inclusive, democratic, modern, healthy society. This retrogressive feature intrinsic to capitalism has been over-documented in thousands of reports and articles from hundreds of sources across the political and ideological spectrum over the last …
A Review of Shane Burley’s Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
by Chris Wright / October 11th, 2021
The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated debate among centrist and left-wing commentators that has yet to be resolved (and likely never will be): do Trump and the Republican Party today represent a recrudescence of fascism, or is this a flawed historical analogy? Writers like Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley insisted on the parallels between interwar fascism and the contemporary far-right, from demonization of ethnic “Others” to fomenting of violence against democratic institutions (as on January 6, 2021); writers such as Samuel Moyn …
Today is Indigenous Peoples Day. Across the country, a growing number of cities and states are recognizing this day in place of the traditional Columbus Day. This change reflects the growing awareness that holidays like Columbus Day are used to rewrite the past and uphold institutions of white supremacy, racism and settler colonialism. As Justin Teba writes, in Albuquerque, they issued a proclamation to recognize this as a day “ to reflect upon the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples on this land.”
The military leaders from three countries had assembled with their interpreters in Beijing’s historic Forbidden City. Chinese general Wei Fenghe hosted North Korean vice-marshal Kim Jong-gwan and the Russian army general Valery Gerasimov. Those gathered were feeling quite jovial, as they clinked glasses of champagne.
“Fight fire with fire. Isn’t that what they say,” said vice-marshal Kim.
They all raised their glasses again.
Kim likened the newly formed CHRUNK (China-Russia-North Korea) to the AUKUS collaboration where the United States and United Kingdom agreed to partner and supply nuclear submarines to Australia. CHRUNK would see North Korea being provided with nuclear submarines by China …
Finally someone, male or female, white or whatever, str8 or lgbtq+, with the balls to give Israel the finger in the mainstream media. Chappelle is the American Hamas, lobbing his homemade rockets, flying his balloons out of besieged America at the dastardly foe, which relentless steals and then colonizes our minds, forcing us to our knees to atone for our inbred antisemitism.
Analysis by former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter
by RT / October 9th, 2021
The US is playing a dangerous game of putting a public face on a policy of defending Taiwan from China, for which it has zero capability to implement.
Following a recent escalation of tensions between Beijing and Taipei, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed on Saturday to pursue “reunification” with Taiwan by peaceful means and warned foreign nations about meddling in the issue.
For the past several years, the air force of the People’s Republic of China has been flying sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, as a means of sending a signal to Taipei that China does not recognize …
Poet, Vietnam Vet and global activist retraces his steps back to a turbulent and perplexing upbringing
by Craig Wood / October 9th, 2021
Finding one’s identity and purpose can be mystifying, especially for the the poor and displaced. Tom LaBlanc, aka Strong Buffalo didn’t know he was Indigenous until he sneaked a peek at a document on his social worker’s desk when he was 15.
Until then, the only clue about his identity came from the grandmother of two brothers he’d met at a Catholic boys home in south Minneapolis. He remembers vividly sitting on her lap while “she patted my head like a dog” and listening to her Ojibwa words as her daughter translated them …
Wanting to be a parent is natural, but while there is a constitutionally protected right to parent one’s child, there is no right to have or obtain a child. Opposition to surrogacy is for the same reason it is illegal in most of the world: exploitation of women and commodification of children. Likewise, there are valid similar concerns about unethical aspects of adoption practice. These concerns are neutral as to race, ethnicity, gender roles and sexual preferences of participants. It is thus ingenuous, and antithetic to intersectionality, for any in the LGBTQ+ community to disparage critics of any unethical practice …
The recent acquisition of the Newcastle United football club by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, along with financier Amanda Staveley and the billionaire Reuben brothers, was a source of much excitement for some former players. Old boy Alan Shearer did little to conceal it. “We can dare to hope again,” he rejoiced.
In The Guardian, Barney Ronay was less enthusiastic, notably at the appearance of the House of Saud in English football. “Welcome, Mohammed bin Salman, to the billionaire boys club. No need to wipe your feet. Although maybe, on reflection, do wash your hands. Those damned spots, eh?”
Burnham describes how it is necessary that the masses believe the revolution to be beneficial to them when, in reality, it is just to transition from one ruling class to the other.
[James Burnham is] the real intellectual founder of the neoconservative movement and the original proselytizer, in America, of the theory of ‘totalitarianism.’
In the first part of this two part series, I went over how the roots for the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset can very clearly be traced back to 80 years ago, when …
In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask: Why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence?
— Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? [p. 141]
The usage of the term ‘woke’ has spread rapidly in the last ten years from meaning awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination to describing the identity politics of various ethnic groups in the USA. The term has a long history reaching back to the …
All embarked, the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes while the son of Atreus told his troops to wash, to purify themselves from the filth of the plague. They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.
— Homer, The Iliad (1.365-370)
The Biden administration’s announcement that Americans employed in companies with over 100 employees would be compelled to take an experimental gene therapy in explicit violation of the Nuremberg Code has opened a new …
Despite an enduring fascination with the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), there has yet to be published a satisfactory intellectual history of Reich’s wide-ranging ideas. In particular, scholars have failed to recognize the roots of his concepts in early 19th century Romanticism. I refer here primarily to German Naturphilosophie, which strongly appealed to those temperamentally opposed to Newton’s mechanistic-mathematical laws of physics. Having grown up on a large farm in rural Galicia, Reich no doubt found the Romantic attitude toward contact with Nature quite congenial.
For centuries, pastoral-agrarian sentiments about the land and its vitalistic forces had been central to Austro-German folk traditions. Rejecting Newton’s …
The enthusiasm with which much of the media and political establishment have characterised Frances Haugen as a “Facebook whistleblower” requires that we pause to consider what exactly we think the term “whistleblower” means.
Haugen has brought to the surface a fuzziness in what many of us understand by the idea of whistleblowing.
Even Russell Brand, a comedian turned soothsayer, whose critical and compassionate thinking has been invaluable in clarifying our present moment, joined in the cheerleading of Haugen, calling her a “brave whistleblower”.
But what do Brand and other commentators mean when they use that term in relation to Haugen?
On 1 October, the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), a network of over 200 social and political movements, had its public launch. The IPA owes its origin to a meeting held in Brazil in 2015 where movement leaders gathered to talk about the perilous situation facing the world. At this meeting – called the Dilemmas of Humanity – the idea was born to create the IPA and three partner processes: a media network (Peoples Dispatch), a network of …
Bristol university lecturer David Miller fired following an Israel lobby smear campaign despite official investigation finding no evidence of antisemitism
by Jonathan Cook / October 7th, 2021
Britain’s pro-Israel lobby gained another important scalp last week after a prolonged campaign of intimidation finally pushed a major UK university into firing one of its lecturers.
Bristol University dismissed David Miller, a political sociology professor, even though an official investigation had concluded that accusations of antisemitism against him were unfounded.
Research by Miller, a leading scholar on propaganda, had charted networks of influence in the UK in relation to Islamophobia that included the very pro-Israel lobby groups that worked to get him fired.
At the outset I must declare that I am an anti-racist Jewish Australian scientist and humanitarian writer with a sole allegiance to Australia. Coming from a famous Jewish Hungarian family near-eradicated from Hungary by the WW2 Jewish Holocaust, I am inescapably bound by the key moral imperatives from that catastrophe, to whit “zero tolerance for racism”, “zero tolerance for lying”, “bear witness” and “never again to anyone” including the Palestinians, the sorely oppressed Indigenous people of Palestine.
Recently the 2021 British Labour Party Conference overwhelmingly passed a motion supporting the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination, …
Solar energy comes to Earthlings in many ways. Ancient Persians used passive solar architecture. East Africans about the same time funneled cool ocean wind through tunnels to cool themselves.
Now at long last, solar energy is outpacing new fossil fuel and nuclear facilities on price, environmental safety, and speed of installation.
One use of solar that has not received enough attention is drying clothes with clotheslines or clothes racks. Before global warming and our climate crisis became a public concern, some local governments banned backyard clotheslines as community eyesores. Fortunately, 20 states have …
There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel’s stronghold over the US Congress, it promises to be of great consequence in the coming years.
Recent events at the US House of Representatives clearly demonstrate this unprecedented reality. On September 21, Democratic lawmakers successfully rejected a caveat that proposes to give Israel $1 billion in …
Pandora Papers is not the entire Pandora’s Box; but a part of it only. The full picture is yet to emerge, in one sense, and in another sense, the whole is already perceptible.
The way the rich have their wealth, the way they accumulate, the way they hide, the way they deceive, the way they deprive, the way they lie are in the Pandora Papers. It’s not a tale of only a king, of a few powerful and a few politicians – a section of seemingly magicians. The Papers, as like their earlier friend, Panama Papers, convey a single fact: Exploitation, …
The only surprise was that it did not come sooner. Big Tech whistleblowers are not exactly running out of the offices of Silicon Valley, so it was with some excitement that Facebook could produce a person willing enough to show us the laundry, with the dirt still caking the content.
And the laundry in question proved to be bountiful, with internal company documents running into the thousands showing a fruit salad range of mendacity, deception and approaches to combating hate, violence and misinformation on its platform. The Wall Street Journal capitalised.
Before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Production, Product Safety, and …
US funding for Israel’s missile interception system is part of its wider efforts to shore up a military system of global domination
by Jonathan Cook / October 6th, 2021
Battles in the US Congress that erupted again this week, holding up an extra $1bn in military funding for Israel, underscored just how divorced from reality the conversation about US financial aid to Israel has become, even among many critics.
For 48 hours last month, a small group of progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives succeeded in sabotaging a measure to pick up the bill for Israel to replenish its Iron Dome interception missiles. The Iron Dome system was developed by Israel, with generous financial backing from successive US administrations, in the wake …
It was ten years ago this week that thousands of people from across the country and from different social movements started an occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC that lasted six months. The action was called “Stop the Machine, Create a New World” to reflect the two-pronged approach of resistance to harmful policies and practices and building positive alternatives. The coalition behind it was the October 2011 Movement, named similarly to movements that arose in Egypt, the January 25 movement, and Spain, the May 15 movement. Popular Resistance was born from that October 2011 coalition.
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 6th, 2021
Photo credit: Rise Up Times
President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema.
But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill …
A review of Omri Boehm’s book, Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel
by Anthony Fulton / October 6th, 2021
Summer is over in Israel and so too the holiday season that includes Yom Kippur and Sukkot with their accompanying prayers of remembrance. Memory is integral to most Jewish holidays. The readings at Passover and the lighting of candles at Hanukkah are collective acts of remembrance. The importance of remembering has always been central to Jewish self-identity. As Jonathan Safran Foer would have it: ‘Jews have six senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory.’
But here there are also holidays specific to the State of Israel, traditions linked to Zionist history. …
All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.
Canada’s unpopular general election of September 20 is increasingly recognized as a mistake by the country’s leading political analysts. However, this mistake could potentially prove to be the very undoing of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in future elections.
69% of Canadians did not think that holding an election during the fourth wave of the Covid pandemic was necessary. Officials and media analysts did not make much of public opinion polls at the time. Instead, they focused on two major issues: first, whether Trudeau’s Liberal Party would be able to galvanize on the popularity of his pandemic policies to win a …
In October 2019, in a speech at an International Monetary Fund conference, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences for what he called the “democratic market system”.
According to King, the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. He concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.
