In a particular deli store in South Melbourne, a tongue-and-cheek message is attached to the cash register. “Bitcoin accepted there,” it proclaims brightly. Naturally, it is nothing of the sort, a teasing ruse for the punters and those casting an eye in the direction of the store. Cold hard cash remains king, albeit one with a tarnished crown; pandemic times have driven consumers towards such non-intimate transactions as contactless payment.
One country has decided to make using cryptocurrency a reality, sticking its neck out in adopting bitcoin as something akin to an economic messiah. Few thought it would be El Salvador, …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / September 13th, 2021
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985
The Constitution of the United States represents the classic solution to one of humankind’s greatest political problems: that is, how does a small group of states combine into a strong union without the states losing their individual powers and surrendering their control over local affairs?
Canadian imperialism in Africa has had a rare social media moment.
On Twitter K. Diallo recently posted a map of the continent with the sum of Canadian mining investment in each African country under the words “75% of mining companies globally are now Canadian. Canada is a great source of corporate neocolonialism expansion.” The tweet received 25,000 likes and 8,500 retweets.
But the map is dated. It said there was $31.6 billion worth of Canadian mining investment in Africa yet Natural Resources Canada put the number at $37.8 billion in 2019. …
Just as many predicted over a year ago, the rollout of the vaccine for Covid-19 and its implementation has introduced intense polarization and social segregation through the implementation of mandatory vaccination for employees and vaccine passports. Medical authoritarianism and the burgeoning biosecurity state are here, expanding in real time. In New York City, San Francisco, France, and Italy, vaccine passports are mandatory for entrance to nearly any indoor public venue: restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, and more. Also, hundreds of corporations, colleges, federal and state agencies are mandating rushed emergency experimental injections with no long-term knowledge of side effects.
Each day the fugitives evade capture, they demonstrate that the occupation may not be as invincible as Israel believes
by Jonathan Cook / September 13th, 2021
It would be impossible for Palestinians not to revel in six prisoners carrying out a daring escape from one of Israel’s most secure and modern jails. Israel may be working overtime to demonise the six men as “terrorists“, but for Palestinians, they are among its finest and bravest foot soldiers.
They are prisoners of war, most of whom were serving long sentences after they tried to liberate their homeland by killing Israeli soldiers or settlers – those seen to be implementing and enforcing Israel’s decades-old occupation.
Part II: Radical and Reactionary Theories of Politics: Radical Feminism, Marxism, Rational Choice Theory, Bio-Evolutionary Theory Orientation
by Bruce Lerro / September 12th, 2021
The reason I wrote this article is to get people excited about the explanatory power of the word “politics” and to make sense of the world and how to change it. In Part I of this article, I brought up some of major confusions over how the word “politics” is used to describe actions as well as to define the word theoretically. I then posed 12 questions that any political theory would have to answer. The questions were:
Temporal reach: How far back into history does politics go?
Cross-species scope: Is …
As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations and choose to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.
by Kathy Kelly / September 11th, 2021
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered …
Suddenly, the idea put forth by French President, Emmanuel Macron, late last year does not seem so far-fetched or untenable after all. Following the US-NATO hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan, European countries are now forced to consider the once unthinkable: a gradual dismantling from US dominance.
When, on September 29, 2020, Macron uttered these words: “We, some countries more than others, gave up on our strategic independence by depending too much on American weapons systems”, the context of this statement had little to do with Afghanistan. Instead, Europe was angry at the bullying …
Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration. Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective. Mature reflections may be permitted. But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record.
The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoes. For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of …
Among the topics in this episode of News on China: how China plans to control housing prices, mushroom cultivation and poverty alleviation, and China seeking the integration of Guangdong and Macao.
Review of Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored by Ray McGinnis
by Edward Curtin / September 10th, 2021
It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this book. It is a tour de force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.
Reading Unanswered Questions will roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research. …
Collage by Mickey Z In response to the events of September 11, 2001, the emergency use authorization (EUA) concept was created. The ostensible idea was to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow the use of potentially life-saving products (e.g. medicines, etc.) after a terrorist attack. However, the EUA designation was not put into effect until late 2020 — for the COVID-19 “vaccines.”
The squashing of civil liberties in The Land of the Free™ is hardly a novel idea. For just a few (of endless) examples, …
U.S. high schools should teach courses on Guantanamo: what not to do in the world, how not to make it even worse, and how not to compound that catastrophe beyond all shame and recovery.
As we tear down Confederate statues and continue brutalizing victims in Guantanamo, I wonder if in 2181, had Hollywood still been around, it would have made movies from the perspective of Guantanamo’s prisoners while the U.S. government committed new and different atrocities to be bravely confronted in 2341.
It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces. After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed.
With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion. Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale …
Thanks to corporate media, anything outside the accepted parameters of debate (e.g. CNN vs. Fox, NY Times vs. Wall Street Journal) is considered beyond the pale. Thus, when I wish to introduce you to what the transhumanists in charge have planned for you, by default, I sound like a fringe weirdo in a tinfoil hat. This highly efficient system keeps the rabble in line by encouraging each of us to do the enforcing of such censorship. We willingly limit our own access to information — in the name of “justice” …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / September 9th, 2021
Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.
A large Israeli army campaign is taking social media by storm. The unstated aim of what is known as the “#Untie_Our_Hands” initiative is the desire to kill, with no accountability, more Palestinian protesters at the Gaza fence. The campaign was motivated by the killing of an Israeli sniper, Barel Hadaria Shmueli, who was reportedly shot from the Palestinian side of the fence on August 21.
An immediate question comes to mind: what do Israeli soldiers want, considering that they have already killed over 300 unarmed Palestinian protesters and wounded and maimed …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / September 8th, 2021
I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.
What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police …
The BBC has admitted that a documentary on an alleged chemical attack in Syria in 2018 contained serious inaccuracies, suggesting that an informant known as ‘Alex’, who claimed the 2018 chemical weapons attack on Douma was staged, may have been motivated by financial reward.
On August 31, Joe Biden accepted the inevitable and announced the final departure of all open military personnel from Afghanistan.
Perhaps, the most important part of the speech had to do with the future, and here Biden was unequivocal:
And here is the critical thing to understand: The world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia. ….We have to shore up American competitiveness to meet these new challenges and the competition for the 21st century.
A major motivation for getting out of Afghanistan is to give the US a freer …
Refugees and asylum seekers provide rich pickings for demagogues and political opportunists. The Australian approach politicises their plight by arguing that they are illegitimate depending on the way they arrive, namely, by boat. The twentieth anniversary of the MV Tampa’s attempt to dock at Christmas Island with over 400 such individuals inaugurated a particularly vicious regime. Intercepted by Australia’s SAS forces in August 2001, it presented the Howard government with a stupendously cruel chance to garner votes. And my, did that government garner them with gusto!
Various European countries have also adopted an approach akin to this: naval arrivals from the …
The house of cards is crumbling. It’s a known fact that the so-called SARS-CoV-2 “virus” has never been isolated and identified which logically leads to the conclusion that the entre covid-story – what has been keeping the world in a trauma for the last 18 months – is a huge fraud of biblical proportion, not comparable to anything that has happened – or rather, was done – to humanity in recent history.
Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York, Carla Stela, reports on 31 August 2021, that the latest official figures (August 30, 2021) point to 38,488 mRNA vaccine reported and …
Speaking from the White House on August 31, President Joe Biden lied to the people of the U.S. and to the world: “Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan — the longest war in American history.” The U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end— it has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that will be more politically sustainable, one more intractable and more easily exportable. As the president admitted, “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries. We just don’t need to fight a …
Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.
Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.
Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion …
The 16 Year Old, middle class, privileged, argues that meat and other animal produce are essential for his health, his ability to play sport, and the development of his adolescent brain; besides, one person becoming vegetarian/vegan, won’t make any difference to the environmental crisis.
The total failure to respond in any meaningful way to the environmental emergency rests firmly within the boundaries of such complacency. It can be found in all areas, from politicians and corporate board rooms to small businesses, NGO’s and community groups, education institutions, homes, and, apparently, some teenagers.
Complacency and the refusal to change individual behavior and collective …
Let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario. What if there was a time when the general population was being relentlessly coerced into taking a particular drug? How would you know what to do? Where would you turn for the necessary context? Surely you wouldn’t just take the shot without doing your homework… right? That would be irrational. And you wouldn’t ostracize others for being hesitant… right? That would be even more irrational. Logically, you’d look up a relatively recent, similar scenario to see …
Benjamin Spock, M.D., Author of Baby & Child Care — An eloquent plea that Americans recognize the appalling frequency of illiteracy…a tragedy which handicaps–occupationally, politically, and emotionally–a third of the citizens of our rich, ‘advanced’ country. referencing, Illiterate America, Jonathan Kozol
Note: This is a pretty mellow piece below (parts 1 & 2), for the local, Newport News Times, where I have published. Here, an archive, of sorts, of some of my articles and op-eds….
Larrikin is a word often, and inaccurately used, in Australian political lingo. Australia’s longest serving Labor Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was known as one such figure. He was praised as the great communicator and healer between the forces of labour and capital, enjoyed imbibing, his sports and varied female company. He could also be vain and ruthless.
In June, a rather unremarkable revelation was made that Hawke had been something of an errand boy for the US imperium, a spiller of the beans and something of what Australians would call a “dobber”. Cameron Coventry, in an article published that month, …
The Biden EPA has put a stop to use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos on food crops, thereby reversing a decision by the Trump administration to allow it to continue to be sprayed on vegetables and fruit in spite of an Obama administration order in 2015 to ban the pesticide for public health reasons.
This is but one of many examples of Trump’s public health plans ignoring science and debilitating federal programs that safeguard the public, prompting the idea of whether Trump and his henchmen should be locked in pillory, as the pillory device was commonly used in the Middle Ages for …
