In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it's the fast fish which eats the slow fish. -- Klaus Schwab
by Paul Haeder / May 22nd, 2021
See, hear, speak no evil!
And, we are the slow fish, the 80 percent:
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
If winning a military battle is defined by the accomplishment of one’s military objectives, then Hamas won the current round of violence with its very first ballistic barrage on Jerusalem ten days ago. Israel, on the other hand, won’t win, can’t win and doesn’t even dream of winning. Like in recent ‘rounds’, all Israel hopes to achieve is an ‘image of victory.’ Despite its military might and destructive enthusiasm, Israel can’t prevail militarily because it doesn’t even remember what military objectives are or what they look like. …
It starts off as an exercise of anticipation. First comes the softening drinks and teasing morsels which find their mark. The audience at this promotions gig is well heeled, of an age where they have money to burn, but nowhere to burn it. They have not travelled on a luxurious prison of bliss for eighteen months. The world has been ravaged by a pandemic, and they yearn to be ravished by the flavour, surrounds and excitement that is Viking Cruises.
Cruise liners are not for all but advertise themselves as the unrivalled option of travel for the satisfied life. But every …
This started becoming clear on May 12th, and has become increasingly confirmed by events since then.
On May 12th, Al-Arabia, CBS News, and other media, reported Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz as promising that “The army will continue to attack to bring a total, long-term quiet.” And, “Only when we reach that goal will we be able to speak about a truce.” Britain’s Guardian reported his speech as having said that “Israel vows not to stop Gaza attacks until there is complete quiet.” Britain’s …
The crisis of 2020 has created the greatest wealth gap in history. The middle class, capitalism and democracy are all under threat. What went wrong and what can be done?
In a matter of decades, the United States has gone from a largely benign form of capitalism to a neo-feudal form that has created an ever-widening gap in wealth and power. In his 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, French economist Thomas Piketty declared that “the level of inequality in the US is probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past anywhere in the world.” In a …
In April, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.
Based on press reports and government statements, Microsoft would help farmers with post- harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices. In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ …
Christianity defeated and wiped out the old faith of the pagans. Then with great fervour and diligence it strove to cast out and utterly destroy every last possible occasion of sin; and in doing so it ruined or demolished all the marvelous statues, besides the other sculptures, the pictures, mosaics and ornaments representing the false pagan gods; and as well as this it destroyed countless memorials and inscriptions left in honor of illustrious persons who had been commemorated by the genius of the ancient world in statues and other public monuments …. their tremendous zeal was responsible for inflicting severe …
Colombia has been burning with the flames of resistance ever since a national strike began on April 28, 2021. The initial impetus for the large-scale demonstrations came from a regressive tax reform. The tax bill came into being due to the necessity of the Colombian state to push down the rising fiscal deficit, which could reach 10% of GDP this year. On top of this, the tight integration of the Colombian economy into the architectures of imperialism has resulted in an external debt of $156,834,000,000 (51.8% of …
Here we go again with yet another deadly and devastating Israeli military attack on Gaza that has captured the world’s attention. However, this current crisis is notably different in scope from the numerous previous major Israeli war crimes against Gaza. This time there was already ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli provocations and violence in occupied East Jerusalem including the egregious Israeli attack in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in all of Islam. There was also more Palestinian resistance to the Israeli provocations and violence in other parts of the occupied West Bank and in Israel itself with its …
Of course there are 60,000 Pentagon super (duper!) spies prancing around the globe with tracking devices in their shoes, goofy wigs on their heads, collections of comical sunglasses, and — for the employee of the month! — silicon handsleeves and silicon faces to fool the airport cops, or maybe it’s the Vaccine Nazis, or perhaps it’s the Marxist conspiracy and election stealers denounced by the head of the Space Command who was fired last week for straying from his designated delusions.
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / May 18th, 2021
Photo credit: Stop the War Coalition
The U.S. corporate media usually report on Israeli military assaults in occupied Palestine as if the United States is an innocent neutral party to the conflict. In fact, large majorities of Americans have told pollsters for decades that they want the United States to be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But U.S. media and politicians betray their own lack of neutrality by blaming Palestinians for nearly all the violence and framing flagrantly disproportionate, indiscriminate and therefore illegal Israeli attacks as a justifiable …
From the outset, some clarification is needed regarding the language used to depict the ongoing violence in occupied Palestine, and also throughout Israel. This is not a ‘conflict’. Neither is it a ‘dispute’ nor ‘sectarian violence’ nor even a war in the traditional sense.
It is not a conflict, because Israel is an occupying power and the Palestinian people are an occupied nation. It is not a dispute, because freedom, justice and human rights cannot be treated as a mere political disagreement. The Palestinian people’s inalienable rights are enshrined in …
Protection and restoration are two sides of the conservation coin — protection for spaces that haven’t yet been damaged or destroyed by large-scale human impacts and restoration for ecologically critical places that have.
Although both might seem like relatively straightforward scientific tasks, they have been and continue to be significantly shaped by colonialism — globally and in Canada.
Landscape-level restoration initiatives are somewhat new. It’s only recently that the scale of our activities has degraded entire ecosystems. Yet restoration initiatives are still subject to colonial approaches.
Consider one recent European-led, nature-based approach …
Review of The Operating System and its China-bashing
by Kim Petersen / May 18th, 2021
The State is anti-societal; some would say sociopathic. It is elitist; it is riven by affiliation with a “Core Identity Group” contraposed to the Other; in most countries, the State provides and secures the basis for capitalism to flourish, separating the population into a few haves and multitudes of have-nots. While capital flows more-or-less freely across borders, workers are at a disadvantage since they do not enjoy the same freedom of movement. Eric Laursen, in his book The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of …
No one should be surprised that Britain’s rightwing prime minister, Boris Johnson, has had barely anything to say about Israel’s pummelling of Gaza, with nearly 200 Palestinians reported to have been killed by airstrikes and many hundreds more seriously wounded.
Nor should we be surprised that Johnson has had nothing to say about the fact that Israel is using British weapons to bombard Gaza, killing families and blowing up media centres.
How can British "enhanced military collaboration" with the IDF now be deemed legal? They just bombed Al Jazeera and AP's offices using the £500bn worth of arms Britain has sold them – with no conditions on use! #FreePalestine
Johnson has had nothing to say either about Israel’s recent efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem – the very obvious trigger, along with its …
A clean, technology driven dystopia. A representation of our techno future. These were the introductory descriptions to a piece by science fiction author William Gibson on Singapore for Wired in 1993. “Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.”
Micromanaged, controlled, sterile, the city state was always going to be seen as a model for combating the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Digital check-ins were rapidly introduced to facilitate contract tracing, along with temperature scans. Plans such …
Seaspiracy is a powerful new documentary about the hazardous, unruly world of industrial fishing and stomach-churning abuse, overuse, disregard for life, as shown on Netflix, released by Disrupt Studios March 24th 2021.
The opening scene of the film sets the tone with a long-shot of an isolated fishing trawler at sea as the voice-over of a former fishing vessel crew member, who escaped forced slavery after 10 years non-stop at sea, exclaimed: “When ships are in the middle of the ocean. When problems occur. They can throw you overboard into the sea. It is dangerous for you to make this documentary. …
Saturday’s Los Angeles protest against Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza got off to a great start, as when I got on the ramp to the 405 I saw about a dozen cars and trucks with the brothers and sisters hanging out windows and standing up through sun roofs with Palestinian flags flying.
With helicopters and drones overhead and an army base nearby, there was a heavy police presence. This little resister was my favorite photo of the day:
Jared …
On April 1, a mural appeared in the Southern Italian city of Naples, depicting Palestinian workers lining at an Israeli military checkpoint near the occupied city of Bethlehem, in the West Bank. It is called ‘Welcome to Bethlehem’.
The mural, which quickly became popular in the town and on social media, was the work of a well-known Italian artist and photographer, Eduardo Castaldo.
Castaldo, who is a cinematic and television photographer, is not your typical artist, as he dedicates part of his time and efforts to championing struggles for human rights, equality and justice, especially in Palestine and throughout the Middle …
On April 24, 2021, US President Joseph Biden declared that the massacre of 1.5 million Turkish Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide. As to whether genocide is the word Americans can consent to use about Native Americans who suffered death, torture, displacement, apartheid and disease at the hands, mainly, of European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a lot less clear, although some state governors have gone for it. As for slavery, not until July 2008 did the US House of Representatives apologize for American slavery of blacks and the …
At the start of the year Israel’s leading human rights group B’Tselem released “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” Two weeks ago Human Rights Watch published a long report saying Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “amounted to the crimes of apartheid”. Since then, Israel has ramped up its efforts to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem, attacked the Al-Aqsa mosque, targeted its Arab citizens, killed ten Palestinians in the West Bank and begun once again to “mow the lawn” in …
Protests by Palestinian citizens are being greeted with a mix of police violence and vigilante-style attacks from Jewish fascists
by Jonathan Cook / May 15th, 2021
With Jerusalem ablaze and Gaza on the brink of another major Israeli onslaught, it has been easy to overlook the rapidly escalating ethnic violence inside Israel, where one in five of the population is Palestinian.
These 1.8 million Palestinians – Israeli citizens in little more than name – have spent the past week venting their frustration and anger at decades of Israeli oppression directed at their own communities inside Israel, as well as at Palestinians under more visible occupation.
Already the protests, which have been sweeping Palestinian communities inside Israel, have been greeted with …
Suspicious fire destroys Potlotek First Nation cabins. CTV.newsOn September 17, 2020, the Sipekne’katik First Nation of Nova Scotia opened its independent fishery, affirming the Band’s rights under Canada’s Supreme Court ruling of 1999 (the Marshall Decision), which allowed the Band to fish for a moderate living under its own regulations. On the 17th and in following days from 80 to 200 fishing boats of the commercial fishing industry came to St. Mary’s Bay to protest the new fishery. There were boat …
With the babble about Cold War paranoia becoming a routine matter in Canberra, the treacherous ground for war with China is being bedded down and readied. The Yellow Peril image never truly dissipated from Australia’s politics. It was crucial in framing the first act of the newly born Commonwealth in 1901: the Immigration Restriction Act. Even as China was being ravaged and savaged by foreign powers and implosion, there was a fear that somewhere along the line, a reckoning would come. Charles Henry Pearson, a professor of history at King’s College London, penned his National Life and Character: a …
This month is the 50th anniversary of National Public Radio (NPR). Knowing about my work back then with other advocates, to persuade Congress to pass legislation creating NPR and PBS, (which was opposed by most of the commercial radio/TV industry), a friend asked what I think of NPR now.
A few observations, drawn from listening to NPR largely over the WAMC station in Albany, New York during a Covid-19 year, are in order.
1. I find the features and the collaboration with other investigative groups, such as Pro Publica, very enlightening. One piece about Amazon’s warehouses was especially memorable. Moreover, Scott Simon and …
Mass protests that began in 2019 in Chile — and have deep roots in the country’s militant history of resistance to neoliberalism — are about to bring about a new constitution. This is an attempt to correct the constitution imposed under military dictatorship in 1980 (with the guidance of Milton Friedman and the so-called Chicago Boys).
The 1980 constitution ensures market rights over human rights. On May 15-16, Chileans will elect representatives for a new constitutional convention to rewrite this document. Voters will choose 155 drafters of this new constitution, which Chileans can then approve or reject in an “exit …
Review of Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
by Randy Shields / May 14th, 2021
Prepare to read Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method in one sitting because it’s impossible to put down. The book is a summation of the US government assisting the Indonesian military in killing approximately one million civilians from October 1965 through March 1966.
While the Vietnam War got most of the headlines, in Indonesia the world’s third largest communist party was winning hearts, minds and elections — much to the alarm of the United States. After years of cultivating and training the Indonesian military the US …
I was 20 years old in 1968, a good year to be 20 years old. Between the spring of 1970 and the spring of 1972 there were weeks when decades happened for me. In the space of one year:
I moved out of my parents’ house in Jamaica, Queens to Brooklyn with three other guys who I worked with in a music store me in Times Square.
I became a socialist after being given a book from my friend, Bob Bady, one of my music …
A community schools approach shows how much considering the full picture of each student’s context matters. And the Biden administration is poised to support this proven method.
by Jeff Bryant / May 14th, 2021
“What I’m working on—like making sure students have access to food, clean clothing, and streetlights—may not look like what I’m working on,” Catherine Gilmore told me over a phone call. Gilmore has worked as an educator in Hillsborough County, Florida, for 13 years, and has spent the last six years at Gibsonton Elementary School where she was in the classroom for four years prior to spending the last two years as the community schools coordinator there. During our phone call, she explained to me how her school has addressed its low scores on the state’s school performance report card. And …
The U.S. government is still appealing their stunning defeat in Julian’s extradition case. While the world waits for the UK courts to act, activists continue to draw attention to Julian’s plight.
Psaki Grilled on Assange
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was grilled yesterday on press freedom and Julian’s case. Psaki deflected New York Post reporter Steven Nelson’s question by stressing the “independence” of the Justice Department.
Activists Making Things Happen!
Activists are joining together to fund a series of #FreeAssange billboards! Led by Misty Winston, they’ve raised thousands in grassroots donations …
