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by Ramzy Baroud / February 24th, 2021
For Palestinians, exile is not simply the physical act of being removed from their homes and their inability to return. It is not a casual topic pertaining to politics and international law, either. Nor is it an ethereal notion, a sentiment, a poetic verse. It is all of this, combined.
The death in Amman of Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, an intellectual whose work has intrinsically been linked to exile, brought back to the surface many existential questions: are Palestinians destined to be exiled? Can there be a remedy for …
by Shawgi Tell / February 24th, 2021
Months before he became president, many pointed out that harmful neoliberal policies would continue unabated in K-12 education under a Joe Biden administration. Indeed, there is a long record of both democrats and republicans supporting harmful education policies like high-stakes standardized testing, charter schools, performance-based pay schemes, NCLB, ESSA, and more.
But U.S. presidential elections always have a way of successfully enforcing amnesia and intensifying false hope in the context of a discredited political set-up that has long failed to affirm the interests of people. To be fair though, there has emerged in recent years a level of social consciousness that …
by Beau Peters / February 24th, 2021
Spend an evening watching television on any network in pretty much any town in America and you’d probably think that Big Pharma had already created a pill for anything that might ail ya. And, of course, in some ways, that’s not entirely wrong.
Today we have a world of therapies to extend our lives and help make those lives worth living, even in the face of historically lethal conditions, from diabetes to HIV/AIDS.
But that doesn’t change the fact that medicine is still a business. And, like most any business, healthcare …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 23rd, 2021
The Australian Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was unconvincing in his efforts to summon up courage. The Australian government had been left reeling in the wake of Facebook’s decision to scrap and block Australians from sharing and posting news items on hosted pages. The company’s target of opprobrium: the News Media Bargaining Code.
The Code’s ostensible purpose is to address the inequalities in the news market place by pushing digital giants and news outlets into reaching commercial deals. Failing to do so will lead to final offer arbitration between the parties, where the independent arbitrator selects one of the deals on …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / February 23rd, 2021
NATO headquarters in Brussels (Photo: NATO)
The February meeting of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Defense Ministers, the first since President Biden took power, revealed an antiquated, 75-year-old alliance that, despite its military failures in Afghanistan and Libya, is now turning its military madness toward two more formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia and China.
This theme was emphasized by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a Washington Post op-ed in advance of the NATO meeting, insisting that “aggressive and coercive behaviors from emboldened strategic competitors …
by Media Lens / February 23rd, 2021
The Insiders
In a 2002 interview with the Observer, the BBC’s John Cody Fidler-Simpson CBE of Kabul, to give him his full name and title, was asked to define the ‘essential qualities’ of a journalist. Simpson responded with typical left-field quirkiness:
There’s something slightly wrong with most of us, don’t you feel? We’re damaged goods, usually with slightly rumpled private lives and unconventional backgrounds.
This certainly rings true. In our experience, the average male journalist is pretty much as Bogart described Captain …
by Colin Todhunter / February 23rd, 2021
UK health minister Matt Hancock has warned the government’s timeline for unlocking coronavirus restrictions could be slowed as ministers remain “vigilant” against infection rates. What began in March 2020 as a three-week lockdown to ‘save the NHS’ has turned into a year-long clampdown on fundamental liberties with the spectre of freedom through vaccination (‘COVID status certificates’) and the eventual roll out of all-encompassing digital IDs on the horizon.
In the meantime, children’s education, small independent businesses, livelihoods and lives have been wrecked all in the name of a coronavirus whose impact has been overstated – certainly if we take time to …
by Paul Haeder / February 23rd, 2021
A December 2017 statement from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights notes that, while the US manages to spend “more [money] on national defence than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined”, US infant mortality rates were, as of 2013, “the highest in the developed world”.
The Special Rapporteur provides a barrage of other details from his own visit to the US, during which he was able to observe the country’s “bid to become the most unequal society in the world” – with some 40 million people living in poverty – …
by C.J. Hopkins / February 23rd, 2021
So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations!
OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency …
Israel upholds a system of Jewish supremacy over the land, and it doesn’t matter whether those challenging its apartheid rule are Palestinian subjects without rights or ‘Arab’ citizens supposedly with full rights
by Jonathan Cook / February 22nd, 2021
A short video taken by a family as they picnicked in the West Bank this month may be the best field guide yet to Israel’s complex apartheid system of state-sponsored Jewish supremacy.
In the clip posted to Facebook, armed Jewish settlers arrive unexpectedly to break up the picnic of a Palestinian family – including grandparents and two babies – at a scenic public space on a hillside north of Ramallah.
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In the occupied West Bank, the settlers are the lords of the land and used to getting their …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 22nd, 2021
It was a fittingly poor conclusion to a tournament that risked being cancelled, run to ground, or even rendered stillborn. The tennis world number one, Novak Djokovic, had captured his eighteenth grand slam against would be usurper Daniil Medvedev, whose winning streak of twenty matches was conclusively blotted. The victory was achieved before a crowd filled with vocal Serbian supporters, flags fluttering, a number sporting the šubara, a rather odd thing to wear given the warm temperature (symbolism will resist climate) and the šajka?a cap with insignia associated with the Chetnik irregulars who fought in the Second World War under …
but the Left gets on their bandwagon
by Stansfield Smith / February 22nd, 2021
The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.
The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty …
by Kim Petersen / February 22nd, 2021
The Jewish Virtual Library quotes Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as having said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Yet that could be called a lie, or more kindly put, a misattribution. Wikiquotes provides the accurate quotation, albeit not as a Nazi stratagem: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” It is sourced …
by Yves Engler / February 21st, 2021
Recent media reports of a Haitian official stashing wealth in Montréal property ignore a key element of the story: Canada’s contribution to enabling Haitian corruption.
As a neo-Duvalierist regime becomes ever more dictatorial it’s also worth revisiting Canada’s history in facilitating fraud and money laundering in the hemisphere’s most impoverished nation.
Recently La Presse reported that the wife of a governing party senator, who works at the Haitian consulate in Montréal, purchased a mansion in Laval. The story reported, “as the political crisis bogs down in Haiti, the wife of …
by Graham Peebles / February 21st, 2021
Change is in the air, it’s been hovering for some time, but thanks to Covid-19 festering social issues and inequalities have been highlighted, intensifying the need for a new approach. Talk of environmental action and reimagining how we live and work fills the airwaves; catchphrases abound, spilling from the lips of duplicitous politicians who claim they want to ‘build back better’, create a ‘new normal’, and invest in a ‘green recovery’.
Repeated often enough, and the men and women in suits are nothing if not repetitive, such slogans become totally devoid of meaning. The word becomes the thing to which it …
by Shawgi Tell / February 21st, 2021
Every year the billionaire-funded National Alliance for Charter Schools (NAPCS) produces a glossy report ranking state charter school laws. This year’s 72-page report is titled: Measuring up to the model, a ranking of state public charter school laws, twelfth annual edition.
The main goal of the report is to rank state charter school laws in terms of how “strong” or “weak” they are. This is supposed to signal to privatizers and neoliberals which states are most conducive to privatizing public schools and which are the least conducive to privatizing public schools.
When the report refers to a state’s charter …
by Margaret Flowers / February 21st, 2021
Some of the truths the COVID-19 pandemic is exposing about the United States are its racial disparities in health and access to health care. Black and Indigenous people are more likely to be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 than white people. They are two to three times more likely to be hospitalized and two to two and a half times more likely to die than white people. There are a number of factors that contribute to this.
Another related truth that is being exposed by the pandemic …
by Jonathan Cook / February 21st, 2021
It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.
It is time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly improved outcomes for their health.
The pre-print …
by Gideon Polya / February 21st, 2021
The mendacious Australian Mainstream media, Coalition Government and Labor Opposition demand via a news media Bargaining Code that Google and Facebook pay Murdoch and Nine media huge sums for quoting Links to their “information” for free.
Google seems to have surrendered to this Australian blackmail and negotiated a private deal to avoid damaging its core Internet operation of quoting Links to information for free.
Facebook has finally responded to this Australian blackmail by saying that it will not pay, and as a law-abiding organization will accordingly not quote Links to Australian …
(Legal remedies for fraud and crimes against humanity)
by T.P. Wilkinson / February 20th, 2021
Bremen is a small city-state in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is one of two cities from the medieval Hanseatic League that have retained their political identity and autonomy over several centuries. The other is Hamburg. Such historical autonomy has also produced idiosyncratic personalities and unconventional or non-conformist policies.
For instance, Bremen’s constitution was strongly influenced by merchant Calvinism. So the city is noted for its lack of ostentation. The head of the church in Bremen is the mayor in his capacity as senator for religious affairs. To distinguish themselves from the surrounding aristocratic principalities and the kingdom of Prussia …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 20th, 2021
Creepy and ruthless Facebook has again impressed with its steely indifference to civic responsibility, as if a company established by a sociopath could ever be a model of human improvement. On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg’s antisocial company took aim at Australia by blocking those in that country from sharing local and international content. As the company notice to those trying to share material went: “In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook generally restricts the posting of news links and all post from news Pages in Australia. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publications is restricted.”
As with …
by Godfree Roberts / February 20th, 2021
Like America, China is a republic and, like America, says it is democratic, but how democratic is China? A glance at history is always a good starting point
The People are supreme, the state is secondary and the Ruler is the least important: only those who please the people can rule. Mencius ((Confucius’ most famous disciple, Mencius, lived 372 BC – 289 BC.))
In Roman politics, citizens lost control of politicians after they elected them. It’s one of the system’s greatest weaknesses and it is no wonder that, like our Roman …
by Margaret Flowers / February 20th, 2021
A long-brewing crisis in Haiti, created through intervention by the United States, United Nations and allied western imperialist countries, has now come to a head. The Biden administration is openly backing a violent, corrupt and fraudulent leader, Jovenel Moïse, and maintaining the policies of previous presidents, including Donald Trump, in Haiti.
Activists in Haiti have reached out to the Haitian diaspora in the United States and to organizations that support respect for self-determination and human rights for their solidarity. Listen to my interview about the situation there with Haitian …
by Donald Canton / February 20th, 2021
Miguel Díaz-Canel and Xi JinpingIn the 1960s, the main forms of the Chinese assistance offered to Cuba were preferential trade and interest-free loans. From 1961 to 1965, China gave Cuba an interest-free loan of 60 million U.S. dollars. The two sides signed the China-Cuba Economic Cooperation Agreement, Trade and Payment Agreement, and Technology Cooperation Protocol. According to the agreement, the interest-free loan provided by China was used for Cuba to purchase complete sets of Chinese technical equipment. China purchased 1 million tons of raw sugar from …
by Yanis Iqbal / February 19th, 2021
Madagascar is in great pain. Theodore Mbainaissem, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) sub-office in Ambovombe, southern Madagascar, says: “Seeing the physical condition of people extremely affected by hunger who can no longer stand…children who are completely emaciated, the elderly who are skin and bone…these images are unbearable… People are eating white clay with tamarind juice, cactus leaves, wild roots just to calm their hunger.”
One third of people in southern Madagascar will struggle to feed themselves over the next few months. Until the next harvest in …
by John Stanton / February 19th, 2021
Our mace shaped COVID-19 enemy and its mutations merrily popping up around the United States, ironically has opened up new possibilities for inching beyond the grimy confines of industrial capitalism to new modes of work, learning and being that were initially promised by technocrats at the dawn of the Internet/World Wide Web. Indeed, the Pandemic of 2020-21 (Pandemic) revealed that remote education and work was feasible easing; for example, the pollution that filled the air with the exhaust from automobiles, buses, aircraft and idle factories.
Further, telemedicine was catapulted from mere novelty to reality as the medical community realized that simple …
by Robert Hunziker / February 19th, 2021
Ecocide is the destruction of large areas of the natural environment as a consequence of human activity.
That destruction of “large areas” has grown so conspicuously large, so threatening to all species, including human existence, that a group of international legal experts is working to submit a draft of a new law “Ecocide” to the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) at The Hague.
Stop Ecocide is the group supporting this initiative. The Stop Ecocide website mission statement says:
Protecting the future of life on Earth means stopping the mass damage and destruction of ecosystems taking place globally. We call this serious harm to nature …
by Paul Haeder / February 18th, 2021
If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it’s to contribute to the literature of hope.
— Barry Lopez, About This Life
A passing. A death. Moving on. Back to earth. A new journey.
He filled the air with lyrical words and ideas grafted to our role as writers and people living inside and with our natural world. He was steadfast in his role as a naturalist of sorts, but through and through he was a word conjurer.
He came to me when I was young, …
by Ramzy Baroud / February 18th, 2021
Motivated by their justifiable aversion to former US President Donald Trump, many analysts have rashly painted a rosy picture of how Democrats could quickly erase the bleak trajectory of the previous Republican administration. This naivety is particularly pronounced in the current spin on the Palestinian-Israeli discourse, which is promoting, again, the illusion that Democrats will succeed where their political rivals have failed.
There are obvious differences in the Democrats’ approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but only in semantics and political jingoism, not policy. This assertion can be justified if the …
by K.J. Noh / February 18th, 2021
Baek Ki Wan, the quiet, thoughtful, progressive conscience of South Korea, and its most impassioned, idealistic voice for reunification, passsed away on February 15th, from pneumonia at the age of 89. His last words were a message of support for a grieving mother fasting for the passing of Labor Rights Legislation and words of encouragement for the fired labor organizer, Kim Jin Suk. All intended money for funerary flowers or wreaths was requested to be spent on …
