The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
Killing Democracy: Western Imperialism's Legacy of Regime Change and Media Manipulation Finian Cunningham, Daniel Kovalik, Jeremy Kuzmarov, KJ Noh, & Ron Ridenour
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth Stan Cox
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK James W. Douglass
There is no question that most television is a waste of time. The people connected with it realize how bad programming is and go ahead with their shows as cynically as possible. Producers are turning out programs that literally make me sick. TV seems to re-infect itself each year, using the same approach to shows and making them worse each season.
— Richard Boone, Hanford Sentinel, 1960…the intelligence empire’s efforts to manufacture the truth and mold public opinion are more vast and varied than ever before. One of its foremost assets? Hollywood.
— Nicholas Schou, The Atlantic, July 2016
Like Saddam’s WMD in …
Southwest China’s Guizhou Province says it has eliminated absolute poverty in its last nine impoverished counties, meaning there are no more counties listed as impoverished in the whole of China.
At a time when activists and commentators are puzzling over the United States’ enduring conservatism, Michael Goldfield’s new book The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides some perspective. Goldfield argues that the old question “Why no socialism in the U.S.?” reduces to “Why no liberalism in the South?”, which itself is answered, in large part, by unions’ failure to organize the region in the early and middle twentieth century. The book consists of case-studies defending this thesis and …
It seems fitting that I write this on 22 November 2020, the 57th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. The murder of Kennedy was lied about from day one. That comes as no surprise to those who follow geopolitics. What the JFK assassination tells us, however, is that the powers that be do not hesitate to lie, and keep lying, if it suits their wider geopolitical purpose.
In Kennedy’s case his death warrant was probably signed in June 1963 when he gave a speech to the American University. That speech highlighted the uselessness of America’s Imperial …
While they have constantly been at it, every now and then charter school advocates self-servingly complain more vociferously than usual about how they are unable to funnel even more public funds from public schools into the hands of narrow private interests.
A quick review of charter school news in recent days shows no fewer than a dozen well-coordinated articles about how privately-operated charter schools are not receiving their “fair share” of public funds and that public schools are getting more money than them and this supposedly puts charter schools “at a disadvantage.” The well-synchronized news articles revolve around a November 2020 …
Break out the Wagner, folks … the Germans are back! No, not the warm, fuzzy, pussified, peace-loving, post-war Germans … the Germans! You know the ones I mean. The “I didn’t know where the trains were going” Germans. The “I was just following orders” Germans. The other Germans.
Yeah … those Germans.
In case you missed it, on November 18, the German parliament passed a law, the so-called “Infection Protection Act” (“Das Infektionsschutzgesetz” in German) formally granting the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wants under the guise of …
United Nations chief warned on Friday that war-torn Yemen is in imminent danger of the world’s worst famine in decades.
Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe….
— President Kennedy, 1961 Inaugural Address
Where China and Russia are currently leading a new paradigm of cooperation and development around a multipolar alliance, it is too easily forgotten that America itself had once embodied this anti-colonial spirit under the foreign policy vision of John F. Kennedy. Even though the young leader died in office before the full effect of his grand vision …
A new term has imposed itself on the conversation regarding the impending presidency of US President-elect, Joe Biden: “The Total Reset”. Many headlines have already promised that the Biden Presidency is ready to ‘reset’ US foreign policy across the globe, as if the matter is dependent solely on an American desire and decision.
While a ‘total reset’ is, perhaps, possible in some aspects of US policies – for example, a reversal of the Donald Trump Administration’s decision to abandon the Paris Agreement on climate change – it is highly …
Oh, the act of deactivating, the process of disconnecting, the very process of uncluttering the brain — bye-bye Facebook — Emancipation!
Some might say we are caught in a fun-house . . . or caught in a psych ward. I have more and more people in my sphere — work, friends, email world, Facebook world, family — who are not only showing signs of insanity, but also lobotomy, or massive electro-shock therapy (sic-sick). They actually buy into that Matrix shit, that …
“Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.” So thundered Oxfam’s Yemen Country Director, Muhsin Siddiquey after consulting figures from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) showing that members of the G20 have exported over $17 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since the Kingdom entered the conflict in Yemen. “The world’s wealthiest nations cannot continue to put profits above the Yemeni people.”
They do, and will continue to do so, despite the cholera outbreak, coronavirus, poorly functioning hospitals, and 10 million …
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is only weeks away from the scheduled start of his long-awaited corruption trial – the endgame in a series of investigations that have been looming over him for years. As a result, he has been taking extraordinary measures to save his political skin.
One of the most surprising is his moves to get into bed with politicians representing a section of Israeli society he has long characterized as the enemy.
In recent weeks Netanyahu has been working overtime to prise apart the Joint List, a coalition of 15 legislators in the parliament who represent Israel’s large Palestinian …
Foreign influence in Canada is bad if it comes from China, but not even worth mentioning if it comes from Israel. That seems to be the position of the Globe and Mail.
Canada’s ‘paper of record’ is so gripped with anti-Chinese fervor that it is blind to a blatant double standard. Contrasting the Globe and Mail’s reporting on Canadian groups close to China and Israel highlights the xenophobic nature of their coverage.
Alongside Washington’s bid to build international opposition to China, the Globe has sought to expose Chinese influence in Canada. The paper has recently criticized Chinese government funded Confucius Institutes, which …
Promoters of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools are obsessed with students’ scores on punitive and curriculum-narrowing high-stakes tests produced by big corporations. They think that test scores on these unsound tests are the end-all and be-all. They have even convinced themselves that the more technical and professional their “academic performance” reports look and feel the more believable and meaningful such test scores are.
Putting aside the 50 problems with these top-down corporate tests, the central issue when it comes to charter schools is not students’ scores on pseudo-scientific tests, but whether education is a public good and social responsibility that …
As chief conductor of the saint factory, Pope John Paul II was always going to be, in time, canonised. Almost 500 saints were created under his watch. The previous 600 years had seen 300. But declaring him a saint in 2014, a mere nine years after his death, was speedy by the standards of the Vatican. Critics, and those more reserved about the wisdom of such a move, now have more reason to question the pontiff’s hastily affixed halo.
In a 449-page report released last week by the Vatican, …
Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion/XR recently interviewed Peter Carter, M.D., who has the distinguished title – Expert IPCC Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The interview was conducted to get to the bottom of what science says about the state of affairs, specifically the health of the planet.
The following is a video link to that brilliant interview, inclusive of a treasure trove of contemporary science events (time: 41:21 November 11, 2020).
Additionally, a synopsis of the interview follows herein, but it does not do justice to the emphasis as expressed by the participants:
Dr. Carter is currently reviewing the …
Image Source: Pexels
The planet may feel like a smaller place, thanks to the ease of travel and the internet, but the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that “approximately 1.2 billion people in the world live in extreme poverty” and earn less than a single dollar per day.
Poverty affects the health and livelihood of a large number of people worldwide. Thankfully, there are a number of human rights organizations working to end global poverty, some of which the most recognizable include The World Bank, Oxfam International, …
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) work hand in glove – smoothly. Not only are they regularly lending huge sums of money to horror regimes around the world, but they blackmail poor nations into accepting draconian conditions imposed by the west. In other words, the WB and the IMF are guilty of the most atrocious human rights abuses.
You couldn’t tell when you read above the entrance of the World Bank the noble phrase, “Our Dream is World Free of Poverty”. To this hypocrisy I can only add, ”…And we make sure it will just remain a dream.” …
Belgium is furious. On November 6, the Belgian government condemned Israel’s destruction of Belgian-funded homes in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Understandably, Brussels wants the Israeli government to pay compensation for the unwarranted destruction. The Israeli response was swift: a resounding ‘no’.
The diplomatic row is likely to fizzle out soon; neither will Israel cease its illegal demolitions of Palestinian homes and structures in the West Bank nor will Belgium, or any other EU country, receive a dime from Tel Aviv.
Welcome to the bizarre world of European foreign policy …
An interview conducted by Stephen Shenfield of the World Socialist Party of the United States with Dmitry Kosmachev, a member of the Minsk Socialist Circle, about the situation in Belarus, the current protests, and where they may lead.
*****
Stephen Shenfield: In the 1990s I made visits to five of the new post-Soviet republics – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan. I got the impression that the situation for working people in Belarus was relatively tolerable. Only in Belarus did I find no evidence of people engaged in a desperate struggle …
Recently, Dissident Voice contributor, the never-compromising class- and labor-blogger, Michael K. Smith, took on a dragon of the progressive left whose slaying really seems long overdue. Writing in his typically potent style, Smith hammered out the following:
How many times do we need to request a meaningless ‘denunciation’ of white supremacy? We, on what passes for a left, are supposed to be critics of corporate media, so why the dog-like obedience to its idiotic framing on this non-issue?…
Let us have no more Southern Poverty Law Center-style ‘studies’ of how right-wing fascists are poised to take over the country, which they’ve …
Education is supposed to encourage critical thinking. However, if critical thinking ever were a part of the education curriculum, it usually goes out the window around Remembrance Day.
Take, for instance, Canada Remembers Times the Veterans’ Week Special Edition (5-11 November 2020). It is published by Veterans Affairs Canada and made available in BC provincial elementary schools. On page one an article caught my eye: “Going to War in Korea.”
The article relates:
The Korean War erupted 70 years ago when the North Korean troops poured across the border into South Korea on 25 June 1950…. More than 26,000 Canadians traveled halfway around …
It’s about the Elusiveness of Sanity in an Insane World
Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual.
In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt to the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it induced a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity among its members. In modern …
In July 2020, US healthcare multinational UHS Delaware reached a $122million settlement with the US federal government as the result of an investigation by the FBI into fraudulent detentions of psychiatric patients for profit. Following the resolution of the investigation and civil settlement, UHS must retain an independent monitor selected by the Office of Inspector General within the US Department of Health and Human Services, who will monitor patient care protections. In addition, an independent review organisation will annually audit UHS’s claims to federal healthcare programmes.
The government claims UHS knowingly submitted false claims to Medicaid for services that were not …
The Roman poet Horace famously declared:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Wilfred Owen, the great English poet of the First World War, described this phrase as ‘the old Lie’ in his famous war poem, ‘Dulce et decorum est’. Patriotism so often means ‘honouring’ those who ‘fell in service to this country’, grand ceremonies at war memorials, feasts of royal pageantry. And then sending yet more generations of men …
For most of 2020 Covid-19 has dominated mainstream media, and whilst serious, the pandemic is but the latest in a series of dark clouds gathering upon our collective horizon: interconnected crises, from the environmental emergency to war, poverty, inequality, and social division among others. All flow from the same root – a misguided set of conclusions about life and ourselves; this fragmented and conditioned pattern of thinking fuels actions that result in the various crises we see all around us. It is the consciousness of humanity with its misplaced values and beliefs, its ideologies and reductive notions of self that …
In lieu of writing reviews of their own books – with the exception of Walt Whitman, who did that with Leaves of Grass – writers often write introductions or prefaces. The purpose of such introductions is to give the prospective readers a sense of what to expect in the pages that follow, as if the author knew exactly what he was writing when he was writing it, as if he weren’t waylaid by words along the way, or could possibly know what a reader may experience when reading them. …
On 12 March 2020, British PM Boris Johnson, referring to COVID-19, informed the public:
We’ve all got to be clear; this is the worst public health crisis for a generation.
Since that time, we have seen lockdowns, an ongoing government-backed fear campaign, fundamental rights being stripped away, dissent censored, inflated COVID-19 death numbers and the use of a flawed PCR test to label perfectly healthy individuals as COVID-19 ‘cases’ in order to fit the narrative of a ‘second wave’.
But, just for a moment, consider an alternative scenario.
The government is extremely worried about a substance that could be contributing to a spiralling public …
The WEF gang have just published (October 2020) a so-called White Paper, entitled “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda in a Post-Covid World”.
This 31-page document reads like a blueprint on how to “execute” because an execution it would be – “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020), by Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO (since the foundation of the WEF in 1974) and his associate Thierry Malleret. They call “Resetting the Future” a White Paper, meaning it’s not quite a final version. It is a draft of sorts, a trial balloon, to measure people’s reactions. It reads indeed like an …
Covid-19 Global Solidarity Coalition presents an international webinar:
SATURDAY November 21st – 20:00 EST (U.S.)
The panelists will discuss the UK extradition trial of Julian Assange, the 18 criminal offenses conjured by the U.S., and how the case impacts the 99%.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower, former defense analyst, activist.
MARJORIE COHN: Professor Emerita Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president National Lawyers Guild.
JOE LAURIA: Editor-in-Chief Consortium News, coordinator of extensive daily coverage of extradition hearings.
TO REGISTER FOR THIS INT’L WEBINAR, CLICK HERE.
To sign up …
