Latest articles
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 9th, 2020
Obama and Biden meet Gorbachev – did Biden learn anything? (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Congratulations to Joe Biden on his election as America’s next president! People all over this pandemic-infested, war-torn and poverty-stricken world were shocked by the brutality and racism of the Trump administration, and are anxiously wondering whether Biden’s presidency will open the door to the kind of international cooperation that we need to confront the serious problems facing humanity in this century.
For progressives everywhere, the knowledge that “another world is possible” has sustained us through decades …
by John W. Whitehead / November 9th, 2020
The 2020 presidential election may be over, but nothing has really changed.
The U.S. government still poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
This threat is especially pronounced for America’s military veterans, especially that portion of the population that exercises their First Amendment right to speak out against government wrongdoing.
Consider: …
by Colin Todhunter / November 9th, 2020
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, Switzerland, brings together international business and political leaders, economists and other high-profile individuals to discuss global issues. Driven by the vision of its influential CEO Klaus Schwab, the WEF is the main driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.
The great reset entails a transformation of society resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as entire …
by Myles Hoenig / November 8th, 2020
The long wait and frankly, the long nightmare will soon be over. At least for the Trump page of American history. If the news is true that Jared Kushner is trying to talk him into conceding, and if successful, we won’t have to worry much about what he might do to disrupt and interfere with the tally and a relatively smooth transition may take place.
Biden won with the largest number of votes than ever before. 74million +. Almost looks like democracy worked, except for all the voter suppression from both the Democrats and Republicans. But there’s a side to this …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 8th, 2020
Whatever was set to happen on November 3, President Donald J. Trump would not lose. Falling in that establishment firebreak against democracy known as the Electoral College would not erase, let alone repudiate him. His now victorious opponent, far from convincing, strengthened by only one fact – not being Trump – remains a projection of all the unresolved problems of the republic.
A Joe Biden presidency promises to be a return, not a progression. But a glance at the US electoral map suggests no easy pathway to political amnesia. A vote count shy of 71 million for Trump will be a …
by Shawgi Tell / November 8th, 2020
There is a 100% chance that the next U.S. Secretary of Education will, like many previous secretaries of education, continue to promote privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools and keep undermining the right to education. ((Arne Duncan and John B. King Jr., both former U.S. secretaries of education and both staunch supporters of privately-operated charter schools, have praised Biden’s victory. Nina Rees, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, also congratulated Biden. See Education Week, Novmber 7, 2020.)) Both Democrats and Republicans have long supported segregated charter schools—in Congress and at the state and …
by William Manson / November 8th, 2020
An old friend of mine seems lately to have finally attained that hallowed state-of-being, that kingdom of quietude (or “quietus”), which can only be called Nirvana. Yet his struggle was a long one, frequently disrupted by outbreaks of…Noise. How did he overcome this spiritual pollution–once he had ultimately attained his Epiphany of Cacophony? Perhaps these fragmentary notes from his daily journal, which is all that he left behind before he retreated into Silence, may offer an answer….
2:37 am: Due to current atmospheric conditions, the never-ending stream of 18-wheeled tractor-trailers on the Interstate (? mile away) is emitting a sustained roar. …
Imagining the Impossible
by Alan Johnstone / November 8th, 2020
Now that the election is all over, it should be the time to debate our future political activity. The Left insisted that Trump was the anti-Christ and that working people should vote for a lesser evil, the saintly figure of Joe Biden. But now with Biden in the White House they are telling us to begin organizing campaigns to save ourselves from the very evil we just helped to put into the Oval Office. The Justice Democrats and their ilk now expect us to accept the right-wing narrative that Biden can be made to take a left turn, ignoring that …
by Linda Ford / November 8th, 2020
Former radical and Black Panther advocate, now prison abolitionist, Angela Davis, is “very excited” that Senator Kamala Harris is a Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in the current US election. She admits there may be “problematic areas” with Harris’ political record, like her support of the death penalty, (or perhaps her opposition to a California bill when she was attorney general that would have had her office investigate all fatal police shootings?) but Davis has said feminists have to make “pragmatic compromises” and Harris might be “amenable” to future “progressive radical pressure.” Davis then explains that …
by Jonathan Cook / November 7th, 2020
I recently published in Middle East Eye a long analysis of last week’s report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into the question of whether the UK Labour party had an especial antisemitism problem. (You can read a slightly fuller version of that article on my website.) In the piece, I reached two main conclusions.
First, the commission’s headline verdict – though you would never know it from reading the media’s coverage – was that no case was found that Labour suffered from “institutional antisemitism”.
That, however, was precisely the claim that had been made …
by Ramzy Baroud / November 7th, 2020
The discussion on institutional Israeli racism against its own Palestinian Arab population has all but ceased following the final approval of the discriminatory Nation-State Law in July 2018. Indeed, the latest addition to Israel’s Basic Law is a mere start of a new government-espoused agenda that is designed to further marginalize over a fifth of Israel’s population.
On Wednesday, October 28, eighteen members of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) conjured up yet another ploy to target Israeli Arab citizens. They proposed a bill that would revoke Israeli citizenship for …
What It Has To Do with Inequality
by Don Fitz / November 7th, 2020
During the last 10 years I have written multiple articles documenting how Cuba has better medical practice and education than the US. To be honest, I have known for a long time that there is an area of medical training where medical students in the US get considerably more training than do those who study in Cuba.
This realization came to me when my daughter Rebecca was in her first year of medical school in Havana. When I phoned after she had been there for a few months, she said, …
by David Rovics / November 6th, 2020
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Open Letter to My Landlord #6
If you think we’re taking advantage of the moratorium on evictions, you’re damn right we are. You have been taking advantage of the tacit threat of forced eviction ever since you bought your first apartment complex.
Dear CTL/Randall Group,
(Please forward to corporate.)
I appreciate the advice you’ve been sending to your tenants about rental assistance that is available from the local authorities, most of which, as you may know, actually is not available, because the …
by Todd Smith / November 6th, 2020
Hey you, White House: Ha ha, charade you are!
— Pink Floyd, “Pigs,” from the album Animals, 1977
Here, on the bristling with White Noise precipice of another trumped-up quadrennial election, all who choose — or are “permitted” — to participate in this farce face a stark reality. Donald Trump is the Mayor of Crazy Town these days (a fact still crazy on its face, of course…), and this election appears to be little more than a final court hearing on the divorce of Trump from his trusty-yet-faithless spouse in the House, Nancy Pelosi, in light of which the impeachment proceedings were …
by Dan Corjescu / November 6th, 2020
Is the world making more love than war these days? And if so why?
It’s a question that three great contemporary intellectuals have either indirectly or directly wrestled with in their life’s work.
The first of our intellectuals is Francis Fukuyama. In his celebrated debut book The End of History and The Last Man, Fukuyama argued with great verve and imagination that Hegel’s nineteenth century insights into the mystery of human history were relevant to better understanding the political nature of our times.
Through the interpretive filter of the Russian-French philosopher Alexander Kojeve, Fukuyama explained that History’s trajectory was bent towards individual freedom …
A Call for Civil Disobedience (loosely based on a video interview with Michel Chossudovsky
by Peter Koenig / November 6th, 2020
The going narrative in the west is: “Covid is on the Rise. We are entering the second wave. We must protect our people.”
The offered recipe is testing-testing-testing. It is the instrument for increasing “cases”. The more you test, the more cases you have. Is that so difficult to understand? If tomorrow the world stops “testing”, covid is gone. Finito. Back to life. That’s what they don’t want, though. “They”, the higher-ups. Let me call them the diabolical Deep Dark State.
However, testing and the testing results are never analyzed. How many positives are asymptomatic, who are the “positives’, what are their …
by Robert Hunziker / November 6th, 2020
A notable satellite-telephonic call to colleagues in late October from Swedish scientist Örjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University briefly described a haunting discovery. On board the research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh, a 6,240-ton Russian scientific research vessel equipped with 17 on-board laboratories and a library, far off the coast of Russia, Dr. Gustafsson reported:
This East Siberian slope methane hydrate system has been perturbed and the process will be ongoing. ((“Sleeping Giant Arctic Methane Deposits Starting to Release, Scientists Find”, The Guardian, Oct. 27, 2020.))
That satellite call referenced a sleeping giant that has enough carbon firepower to adversely impact the world’s climate …
by Jonathan Cook / November 6th, 2020
At birth, all of us begin a journey that offers opportunities either to grow – not just physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually – or to stagnate. The journey we undertake lasts a lifetime, but there are dozens of moments each day when we have a choice to make tiny incremental gains in experience, wisdom and compassion or to calcify through inertia, complacency and selfishness.
No one can be engaged and receptive all the time. But it is important to recognise these small opportunities for growth when they present themselves, even if at any particular moment we may decide to avoid …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 6th, 2020
It was now the turn of other states to vent about, and at, the United States. The 2020 US presidential elections were coming down to a razor sharp wire. The Democrats were starting to feel confident in the swing states. Republicans and the Trump camp were mustering aggressive arguments on potential electoral fraud, lawyering up the heavies. The picture is increasingly ugly, and the view from political outsiders is a mix of concern laced with a touch of bemusement.
Various countries and organisations were weighing in on the US elections in a manner normally reserved for seedier regimes and states in …
Some Labour members may hope that the report will draw to a close the party’s troubling antisemitism chapter. They could not be more wrong
by Jonathan Cook / November 5th, 2020
• This is the full version of an article published in edited form by Middle East Eye
It was easy to miss the true significance of last week’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report on the British Labour Party and antisemitism amid the furore over the party suspending its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
The impression left on the public – aided by yet more frantic media spin – was that the EHRC’s 130-page report had confirmed the claims of Corbyn’s critics that on his watch the party had become “institutionally antisemitic”. In fact, the …
by The Jimmy Dore Show / November 5th, 2020
by Vijay Prashad / November 5th, 2020
Kyo?ichi Sawada (Japan), A mother and her children wade across a river in Vietnam to escape US bombing, 1965.
In mid-October, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its World Economic Outlook report, which offered some dizzying data. For 2020, the IMF estimates that the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will decline by 4.4%, while in 2021 the global GDP will rise by 5.2%. Stagnation and decline will …
by Paul Haeder / November 4th, 2020
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.
— William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
Ahh, just proposing a …
A review of Melissa A. Chappell's book, Doors Carelessly Left Ajar
by Candice Louisa Daquin / November 4th, 2020
I read a lot of manuscripts for publication as part of one of my roles as editor for an indie publishing company. It takes quite a lot to stand out these days, with everyone vying for attention.
Therefore, I appreciated the solace of honesty in Melissa Chappell’s little book, Doors Carelessly Left Ajar. She is a devout person as you can tell by her acknowledgements and this lends her a brevity of candor which is often not found in the inveigling of poetry writing. There is something refreshingly simple and …
by Roger D. Harris / November 4th, 2020
The polls closed with “no winner yet in cliffhanger presidential election,” as of Wednesday evening. Despite a period of uncertainty, which is typically the nemesis of Wall Street, the Dow climbed 0.9%, the S&P 500 opened 1.5% higher, and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.6%.
The explanation is that the financial elites know that they win regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, which is something that some leftists, who had advocated temporarily subordinating an independent working-class alternative to campaign for the leading neoliberal candidate, did not firmly grasp.
Trouncing the contender that Noam Chomsky hyperbolically called …
by Ramzy Baroud / November 4th, 2020
There is no moral or ethical justification for the killing of innocent people, anywhere. Therefore, the murder of three people in the French city of Nice on October 29 must be wholly and unconditionally rejected as a hate crime, especially as it was carried out in a holy place, the Notre Dame Basilica.
However, we would be remiss to ignore the political context that led a 21-year-old Tunisian refugee to allegedly stage a knife attack against peaceful worshippers in Nice. While it is fairly easy to recognize the individual …
by Graham Peebles / November 4th, 2020
Destructive human behavior based on selfishness, greed and ignorance has created the interrelated environmental emergency. A global crisis of unprecedented scale that threatens the survival of over a million plant and animal species, the security of tens of millions of people and the health of the planet.
Unlimited irresponsible consumption of goods, services and animal food produce is the underlying cause; destructive unhealthy behavior encouraged by short-term political and business policies rooted in nationalism and the ideology of competition and greed.
Land sea and air are contaminated everywhere, more or less; the natural climatic rhythms have been radically disrupted, chaos created where …
by Shawgi Tell / November 4th, 2020
Perhaps no other word is more central to charter school discourse than the word “choice.” “Choice” is not only a central concept in charter school discourse but a persistent source of disinformation. Disinformation refers to the deliberate hiding of the real context and relations of things so as to disorient people and cause them to act against their own interests while making them think that they are acting in their own interests. It is a form of false consciousness or anti-consciousness, and we all pay a heavy price for it.
Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools that siphon billions …
by Ajamu Baraka / November 4th, 2020
Chaos, violence, legal challenges, voter suppression and party suppression all culminated in the pathetic display of democratic degeneration on Election Day. After two decades of losing wars, plus the economic collapse of 2008, the response to COVID-19, and now the election debacle, if there were any doubts the U.S. is a morally exhausted empire in irreversible decline, they would have been erased with yesterday’s anti-democratic spectacle.
Democratic Party propagandists and “frightened” leftists are desperate. They tell their supporters and the public that the republic will not survive another term of Donald Trump. They point to his despicable, racist descriptions of undocumented …
by Mohammad al-Deirawi and Ramzy Baroud / November 4th, 2020
Mohammad Ibrahim Ali al-Deirawi was born on January 30, 1978 in Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His family is originally from Bir Al-Saba’, an ethnically cleansed Palestinian town located in the southern Naqab desert. Mohammad was arrested by the Israeli army at a military checkpoint in central Gaza on March 1, 2001. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the armed Palestinian resistance, and was freed on October 18, 2011 in a prisoner exchange between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.
Mohammad’s interrogation commenced …
