Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (left) and his wife Janet Langhart Cohen (center) meet with King Mohammed VI, of Morocco, at his palace in Marrakech, on Feb. 11, 2000. Cohen and the King agreed to open an expanded security and defense dialogue, and discussed ways that Morocco could expand its leadership role in promoting regional stability in the Mediterranean and on the African continent. DoD photo by R. D. Ward. (Released)
I’m not misusing the word “war” to mean something like the war on Christmas or drugs or some TV pundit whom …
NOTE: The Kevin Zeese Emerging Activists Fund is accepting applicants for an unrestricted grant of $20,000 until December 13, 2020. Learn more at PopularResistance.org/kevin-zeese/. And join us for a webinar with Venezuelan social movements on November 18 to hear about their upcoming elections and how we can support their struggle against US intervention. Details at .
Health care will be a major issue early in the new Biden/Harris administration. Unemployment is still high with over a million people applying for unemployment benefits last week and 42.6% of working …
An update on the life of one independent artist in the fall of 2020 (in lieu of a crowdfunding campaign)
by David Rovics / November 14th, 2020
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Three months ago in August, I wrote a piece called Pandemic Panhandling, wherein I began with a brief recounting of the ways in which the music industry collapsed over the course of my musical career, prior to the pandemic, and then I wrote about some of the ways in which things have gotten exponentially worse for most formerly working musicians since the pandemic, in the US and many other places.
One dogma that is likely to persist in US foreign policy during a Biden presidency will be the sanctions regime adopted towards Iran. Every messianic state craves clearly scripted enemies, and the demonology about the Islamic Republic is not going to go begging. Elliot Abrahams, the current US special representative for Iran, told Associated Press on November 12 that, “Even if you went back to the (nuclear deal) and even if the Iranians were willing to return … this newly enriched uranium, you would not have solved these fundamental questions of whether Iran is going to be permitted to …
Disaffected Groups: “We need to unite!”
Sympathizer: “What shall we unite around?”
Democratic Party organizer: “Our differences!”
“I kind of wanted everyone to lose.”
— Krystal Ball Rising on the 2020 elections
The electoral verdict is in and the American people have rejected media drama in favor of thinking for themselves. They dislike Donald Trump’s governance, but are far from pronouncing him an Adolf Hitler clone, having awarded him some nine million more votes than last time around, to the horror of “woke” partisans, who are far more disliked than he is.
Supposedly a vicious misogynist, Trump’s share of the white woman vote, already a majority, went …
I am not a pundit, or at least not a legitimized one. I have never been a guest on any major TV network, as a pundit or as anything else. I have never taken a poll or been paid to make any predictions. But for two presidential elections in a row, the punditry was generally way off on their predictions, and I was pretty close to the mark. And yes, I also made my predictions in a public form — Twitter — prior to the elections, so there would be a record of them.
The election is now over and Joe Biden is the President-elect. What is likely to happen after Biden is inaugurated? The incoming Biden administration will face numerous huge problems left behind by the Trump administration. It is likely that Covid-19 will still be a major concern here and in many other nations around the world. President Biden will also have to deal with high levels of unemployment, of homelessness, of hunger, of people under-insured or without health insurance, of income and wealth inequality as well as an angry and divided people. In addition, the Biden administration will have to deal …
In January 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)’s Democracy Index downgraded the state of democracy in the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy”.
The demotion of a country that has constantly prided itself, not only on being democratic but also on championing democracy throughout the world, took many by surprise. Some US pundits challenged the findings altogether.
However, judging by events that have transpired since, the accuracy of the EIU Index continues to demonstrate itself in the everyday reality of American politics: the extreme political and cultural polarization; …
Republicans supporting Trump’s fraud allegations are putting democracy ‘on a dangerous path’ according to Barack Obama. But the US election system has been questioned for decades.
On 10 November 2020, the United States secretary-of-state Mike Pompeo, he of the ill-famed confession “We lied, we cheated, we stole,” spoke at the Ronald Reagan Institute.
The liar Pompeo can even speak candidly, “I’ve talked about American exceptionalism. I did so in Brussels; I did it in Cairo; I did it in Jakarta, and every opportunity that I’ve had in my public life. Sometimes it was met with a resounding thud as well. I’ve walked out of quiet ward rooms.”
Imagine a US secretary-of-state admitting that people walked out on American …
I’m not looking at schizophrenia for the moment as a sickness, but as a more or less inevitable development or consequence of a body that refines thought to such an extent that it becomes confused by its own images and beliefs and mistakes them for reality itself.
Conclusive certainty or dogma would be an obvious symptom of this crisis — a crisis which may have begun several thousand years ago and is only now approaching its ‘do or die’ moment: Learn this lesson or perish.
I think that some degree of schizophrenia is an inevitable consequence of hitting this confusion. And depending …
A recent analysis by Harvard geneticist Stephen Elledge tabulated the number of years that Americans who died from COVID-19 might have lived had they reached a typical life expectancy. The shocking answer is that the coronavirus has claimed more than 2.5 million years of potential life in the United States since 2020. And despite making up only one-fifth of the total recorded deaths from COVID-19, people under age 65 accounted for 1.2 million of potential years lost. A follow-up study now underway using race and ethnicity will very likely …
As of today, America does not seem convinced by its democratic nature and its democratic process. One poll released yesterday claims that “less than half of the Americans believe Biden is the legitimate winner of election; a third say Trump won.” By now it is reasonable to admit that America is far from being confident about anything that is traditionally associated with its core ideological roots and its founders’ philosophy.
By now it is also clear beyond doubt that the predictions of a Democratic ‘landslide victory’ …
A sense of redundancy might encourage calm. The job is done, however well or poorly. The legacy charted. But in the case of President Donald Trump, there is still much to be done. Leaving aside his priority of fortifying himself in the White House against any bailiff onslaught by president-elect Joe Biden, he is busy making decisions. One of them is something that this administration will always be remembered for: sackings.
The sacking of Defence Secretary Mark Esper was in keeping with a recently minted tradition. Trump has made a habit of cycling through appointees, notably those in the Defence Department. …
Analysts are still grappling with the fallout from the US election. Trumpism proved a far more enduring and alluring phenomenon than most media pundits expected. Defying predictions, Trump improved his share of the overall vote compared to his 2016 win, and he surprised even his own team by increasing his share of minority voters and women.
But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the US economy – the incumbent’s “trump” card – was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for Covid-19, Trump – not …
Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.
— Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler, 1961
At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy. She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one. “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social …
Australia has given the world two influential and disruptive exports in the field of media. One, currently in London’s Belmarsh Prison, is facing the prospect of extradition to the United States for charges that could see him serve a 175 year sentence in a brutal, soul destroying super max. The other, so the argument goes, should also be facing the prospect of incarceration for what he has done to politics in numerous countries. But media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the gruesome presence behind Fox News and News Corp, is unlikely to spend time in a cell any time soon. The same …
“If we are going to live another four years with President Trump, God help us, God help you and God help the whole world.”
These were the words of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, during a virtual meeting with European legislators on November 3. While some may agree with Shtayyeh’s assessment, such utterances by a top Palestinian official are hardly reassuring.
This was not the first time that Shtayyeh used the phrase, “May God help us,” with reference to US President, Donald Trump. Nor were these the only instances …
Many observers would agree that the biggest loser in the recent U.S. presidential election was not Donald Trump, it was the media. The news that was presented to the American public amounted to a tsunami of negative reporting on Donald Trump buttressed by opinion polls that turned out to be poorly executed and wrong by a huge margin. Some might argue that Trump got what he deserved as he was a bad candidate and a bad man, but the unwillingness of the media to pursue stories …
Is nuclear energy safe? What can we do about the waste? What about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima – don’t they prove that we can’t rely on nuclear reactors? Won’t a tiny amount of radiation kill you? Why are reactors so expensive to build with so many delays? Why don’t we just use renewables? Why don’t we just abandon dirty, wasteful industry and go back to the land?
These are some of the skeptical questions on the minds of progressives and even socialists. In this article I will …
When one is stuck in traffic with an old car, in my case a 1962 Mercedes diesel, with no power anything, and merely 45 bhp to deal with younger cars, there is no temptation to aggressive driving. Despite the fact that a Mercedes is a classic man’s car, there is no machismo with a vehicle that tops at 120 km/h. However, what driving such a car makes obvious is just how few good drivers there are on the road despite, or perhaps because of, the advances in automotive technology.
The job is done, Corbynism is defunct, and now Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is coming for all of those who were close to him. What of Emily Thornberry? She’s keeping quiet.
“I can’t even describe what this meant to me and my sisters, my brother, my mom and closest friends to experience together.” So remarked Kim Kardashian West with thanks and appreciation for a hologram of her father, Robert Kardashian, who died in 2003. The hologram of one of O.J. Simpson’s defence attorneys was a gift from husband and unsuccessful presidential aspirant Kanye West, a visually striking effort, yet implausible. The figure does speak of being “a proud Armenian father” but the factor of implausibility is enhanced by Kanye’s own scripting and contribution. With indulgence, the hologram tells Kim …
Okay, so, that was not cool. For one terrifying moment there, it actually looked like GloboCap was going to let Russian-Asset Hitler win. Hour after hour on election night, states on the map kept turning red, or pink, or some distinctly non-blue color. Wisconsin … Michigan … Georgia … Florida. It could not be happening, and yet it was. What other explanation was there? The Russians were stealing the election again!
But, of course, GloboCap was just playing with us. They’re a bunch of practical jokers, those GloboCap guys. Naturally, …
Robert Fisk, the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, died on 30 October aged 74. In reviewing his life and career, the newspaper for which he worked for more than two decades wrote of their star reporter:
‘Much of what Fisk wrote was controversial…’
As John Pilger noted, in describing Fisk’s journalism as ‘controversial’ the Independent was using a ‘weasel word’.
The soul of America is like the character Two Face in the Batman movie series.
One defeat of the Party of Trump and its 73 million apparatchiks is not enough. In Trump, the United States has bred its own dictator in waiting and he’s got an army of servile apostles willing to fight and die for him. Vigilance by his opponents has never been more important.
This Fuhrer dictatorship could produce only lackeys and profiteers of the most reactionary and aggressive part of German imperialist reaction. Its Germanic democracy reared the repulsive type of a human breed that …
Change doesn’t come from the top, especially within a manipulated ‘democracy’ as exists in the United States. When social transformation occurs, it follows years of educating, organizing and mobilizing at the grassroots. Elected leaders who represent that transformation ride on a wave created by social movements, not the other way around.
As many people around the country and the world celebrate the media’s announcement of the defeat of President Trump, those who advocate for transformational changes in the political, economic, legal and social systems are talking and writing about the …
The extraordinary amount of cover in the Australian mainstream media of the results of the United States election is quite unparalleled and in any other political event. The bias of the media is readily apparent: they expect a Democratic party victory and no alternative is given much space. The result is not, in fact, as clear cut as they would like us to believe. Certainly, on the claimed results Joe Biden has a convincing lead, and the local media happily endorse that, referring in unfailing deprecatory terms to Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.
Regularly, the media has reported the dire effects of European dominance on the communities of a disenfranchised minority: the public execution of African-Americans by police, the epidemic of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada, the shadow of residential schools in North America, the legacy of red-lining, the impact of the murders of the oil-rich Osage County Indians in Oklahoma, the victimization of native lobster fisherman in Nova Scotia, and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. None of these things would have been if they were not fueled …
