It must be a sure handicap to be saddled with such a name when piloting a large government department, but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken shows no sign of that bothering him. It has, however, become a hallmark of a policy that is markedly devoid of foresight and heavily marked by stammering confusion.
On his trip to Australia, Blinken showed us, again, how morality and forced ethics in the international scene can be the stuff of particularly bad pantomime. He sounded, all too often, as an individual sighing about the threats to US power while inflating those of its adversaries. …
It may be heresy to those who think the Fed is all-powerful, but the honest answer is that raising interest rates wouldn’t put out the fire. Short of throwing millions of people out of work in a recession, higher rates wouldn’t bring supply and demand back into balance, a necessary condition for price stability.
The imperial center of the capitalist attack on nature in pursuit of private profits that threaten ultimate public loss continues into the new year, but we’re hopefully closer to a solution of our racial (human) problem at this most crucial time. With countless systemic breakdowns and divisions among people that seem, especially in America, to invite calamity, it may be the rest of the world that offers the most hope. The present maniacal threats to Russia, or rather Putin, since individual villains always count for more than systems, could bring about a nuclear war. But Russia and Putin, while capitalist, …
Following Russia’s troop build-up along Ukraine’s borders portending imminent invasion, Houthi rebels in Yemen backed by Iran, which is Russia’s most dependable regional ally in the decade-long Syrian conflict, have significantly escalated missile strikes on the oil-rich Gulf States with a nod of approval from the Kremlin in order to take pressure off Russia in the Ukraine stand-off by opening a second front in the veritable Achilles’ heel of the energy-dependent industrialized world.
To buttress the defenses in the Gulf, US F-22 fighter jets arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Saturday, Feb. 12, as part of an American defense …
If there was an award for the world’s most hypocritical political party, the Liberal Party of Canada would be frontrunners to take the prize.
In their bid to ramp up tensions between nuclear armed NATO and Russia, this country’s top two politicians flagrantly intervened in Ukrainian affairs while maintaining other nations must stay out of ours.
Last week the Globe and Mailreported that Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to demand that he block legal proceedings against former president Petro Poroshenko. His political rival is accused of treason.
Under bourgeois democracy, there prevails a specific kind of interrelationship between political society and civil society, between the moment of force and the moment of consent. Governmental apparatuses are tasked with penetrating the masses from without, in order to impose capitalist ideologies on them and organize people in the forced, artificial unity of intermediate bodies. The consent thus obtained is itself over-determined by coercion. As Antonio Gramsci writes in §47 of Notebook 1: “Government by consent of the governed, but an organized consent, not the vague and generic kind which is declared at the time of elections: the State has …
On February 11th, the New York Times bannered “Spurning Demand by the Taliban, Biden Moves to Split $7 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds,” and reported that “President Biden will start to clear a legal path for certain relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion from assets that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York,” though Afghanistan is facing “a mass starvation that is in turn creating an enormous and destabilizing new wave of refugees — and raising a clear need for extensive spending on humanitarian relief” (greatly burdening the …
On January 24th, Burkina Faso bore witness to its third destabilizing coup in less than a decade. It also marked the eighth successful putsch American soldiers launched in multiple West African countries since 2008. The Intercept reports that Ouagadougou’s new leader, Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, took part in many United States led AFRICOM (Africa Command) exercises and an American sponsored military intelligence course. This …
Once upon a time, there was a delightful little girl called Cathy. People would frequently praise her to Cathy’s parents: “She is such a good girl, so obedient.” Then came a viral cloud. The government’s scientists called it Covid and said the cloud was life threatening. But the scientists said, “Don’t worry, we have the cure, and you must take it.”
On February 8, 2022, Nobel Prize winning virologist Dr Luc Montagnier passed away.
Since the earliest moments of COVID-19’s appearance, Montagnier was slandered and ridiculed for his challenges to the underlying assumptions of the disease’s causes and remedies despite the constant slings and arrows of the deep state which sought to shut the door on all such dangerous discussion.
More important than Montagnier’s claims of laboratory origins of a disease (which appears to have more to do with bacteriological than viral causes), are found in an overlooked domain of optical biophysics which the …
The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) sought to use podcaster Daniel Dumbrill, a long-time Canadian resident in China, for propagandistic purposes. The media savvy Dumbrill was prepared for this.
Said Dumbrill, “Today, I’m going to indisputably and unmistakably demonstrate how mainstream media shapes your views and opinions through manipulation, dishonesty, and outright lies.”
Influenced by the late journalist Robert Fisk, I avoid the term “mainstream media” for the simple reason that state/corporate media is not my mainstream. So I call such media what it is “state/corporate media” or “monopoly media” à la Ben Bagdikian or “mass media.” I prefer independent media or independent …
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
? Smedley Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
There are thousands of examples daily in the mainstream and left-stream and right-stream media showing how broken and corrupt this system — capitalism — is.
As soon as Moscow received an American response to its security demands in Ukraine, it answered indirectly by announcing greater military integration between it and three South American countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
Washington’s response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance, was noncommittal.
For its part, the US spoke of ‘a diplomatic path’, which will address Russian demands through ‘confidence-building measures’. For Russia, such elusive language is clearly a non-starter.
On that same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced, in …
Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau has cornered himself. The right move for Trudeau to extract himself now is to end the useless jab everyone, shut down everything, everywhere prolonged mandates, for which he will inevitably lose some credibility and face. His other options seem to be to wait out the convoy, systematically disrupt the convoy (e.g., parking fines, confiscating jerry cans, continuing the demonization of the protestors), or call in police as he has already done or even the army. Those are all losing options because it signals that he has not read the pulse of the nation and became …
Canada, Nunavut Territory, Repulse Bay, Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) stands on melting sea ice at sunset near Harbour Islands (Credit: Paul Souders / Getty Images)
The oceans of the world are undergoing a dangerous and damaging upheaval that manifests throughout scientific studies of late. Whether it’s the world’s fisheries of the Bering Strait or coral reefs of the Mediterranean Sea or emaciated Gray Whales along the Pacific coastline, study after study after study describes sudden, sharp downturns in all categories of marine life. What is going …
China and Argentina move closer together as Argentina joins the BRI and they reach agreements on investments. Russia and China signed a joint declaration opposing Taiwan independence and NATO expansion. Green China runs a low-Carbon Olympics. Gu Ailing wins a gold medal for China.
Do talking heads know the science, just talk as if they know the science, or even worse know the science and lie about it? When every randomized control trial, the gold standard of science, finds no statistically significant protection from mask wearing compared to no masking, one ought to ask why the mask mandates and why the compliance of so many people. See Dennis Rancourt’s “Masks Don’t Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy.”
Looks like the man in the White House is inadvertently doing a bit of self-projection. It’s Biden who seems to want things that he can’t get.
Top of that wish-list is for Russia to invade Ukraine. If that sounds a bit illogical, then why is Biden so obsessed about predicting an imminent military move by Russia against …
During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.
But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.
‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’.
Béjar speaks with a great deal of authority on these matters because, for the past sixty years, he has been intimately involved in the intellectual and political debates which have taken place in his native Peru …
A succession of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts aimed at hiding the truth about its origins and its current racially-driven apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than its ability to gain new supporters, or to whitewash its past or ongoing crimes.
First, there was Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants were mostly exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on May 23, 1948. Like many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians throughout the years, the massacre of Tantura …
They found it. Or so we can surmise from the confident words of the Australian National Maritime Museum. The Endeavour is a ship that will be considered alongside other vessels as monumental in its achievement and cursed in its contributions. Britain’s brilliant James Cook was its competent pilot, though it eventually ended up at the bottom of the sea after British forces scuttled it during the American War of Independence in 1778.
According to the ANMM, a wreck in Newport Harbour, off Rhode Island, could be confirmed as the Endeavour. “I am satisfied,” stated the organisation’s director and CEO Kevin …
Amnesty International’s 2022 report “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians” that exposes and condemns Israeli apartheid has provoked false allegations of lying and anti-Semitism from the mendacious and genocidally racist Zionists and their US Alliance supporters. In actuality, denial of Israeli apartheid is a lie, and the Zionists and their supporters are manifestly mendacious, racist, and both anti-Arab anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish anti-Semitic by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Arab, Palestinian and Muslim critics of Apartheid Israel.
Israeli apartheid by the numbers. 1.9 million Indigenous Palestinian Israelis (up to 50% impoverished) live as Third Class citizens under 65 Nazi-style, …
Charles Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) in New York, c.?1867–1868
Between 1935 and 1952 seven films were made based on the novels of Charles Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870). ((Silent films were made too but I will just discuss the talkies.)) They were filmed in the social realist style, a style that was popular after the Great Crash and reflected the hardships facing people at the time. Social realism is a style often used by directors, artists, composers and writers to …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 8th, 2022
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
— Frank Zappa, Interview with Jim Ladd, “Zappa On Air,” April 1977.
We are no longer free.
We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.
The media outrage at Johnson linking the Labour leader to Jimmy Savile is because his comments inadvertently exposed the dark underbelly of the British establishment
by Jonathan Cook / February 8th, 2022
“Why is Boris Johnson making false claims about Starmer and Savile?” runs a headline in the news pages of the Guardian. It is just one of a barrage of indignant recent stories in the British media, rushing to the defence of the opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer.
The reason? Last week the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, blamed Starmer, now the Labour party leader, for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, a TV presenter and serial child abuser, when his case came under police review in 2009. Between 2008 and 2013, Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Savile …
