Although Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that American workers are “thriving” during his presidency, this contention rings hollow. The mishandled coronavirus pandemic, of course, has created levels of unemployment, hunger, and misery in the United States not seen since the Great Depression. But even in the years before the pandemic, when Trump claimed he had created “the greatest economy in history,” that economy left American workers far behind.
During pre-pandemic years, the labor market was shifting, producing a rising percentage of workers concentrated in low-paying jobs. A study released by the Brookings Institution in late 2019 reported …
“Deep State” derives from a John le Carré spy novel. It is an expression bandied about rather frequently these days. It’s in danger of losing its meaning the more it becomes just another little buzzword from Hiveworld, busy bobbing among the festive fields of corn-cockle until exhaustion sets in. There is a real, non-fictional Deep State, and it’s important that we come to understand what it is, before we are driven shallow by the incessant digital stim of the trite and trivial from the cybersphere of internet ‘updates.’
One of the more mature and sober descriptions of what the Deep State …
Brenton Tarrant was sentenced last week. The Australian national who butchered, with relish, 51 individuals in Christchurch at Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre, found himself facing something unique in New Zealand: jail for life without parole. He pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one of terrorism. He also faced a tsunami of victim impact statements – over 200 in all.
The High Court Justice Cameron Mander was not too willing to delve into the substance of Tarrant’s ideas that saw noxious fruition on March 15, 2019. They constituted merely a “warped …
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
– 2 Samuel 1:25
Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr., leader of a megachurch in Lynchburg, Va. since the 1960s, founded Liberty University in 1971. In 1979 he founded the Moral Majority as a political movement opposed to abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and liberal, socialist thought; it was dissolved within a decade due to competition, infighting and mounting irrelevance. But the university became maybe the world’s largest Christian academic institution, with tens of thousands of resident and online students.
Falwell died in 2007 and his oldest son Jerry Jr. (then 46) was appointed …
The system of education in the US is failing at every level except for private, heavily endowed or extremely costly institutions for the wealthy and privileged. Students of all ages are increasingly viewed as “profit centers” for private enterprise to exploit. Private charter schools now …
A Century later: Syringes instead of bayonets and machine guns
Despite the lamentations and orders from Geneva or the local capitals of Capital, I refuse to believe that COVID-19 or the putative pathogens are a principal challenge to humanity — except for those using these viruses for policing and/or culling the population.
Instead I find we are in a situation not unlike that which led to the notorious Non-Aggression Pact concluded between the German Empire under NSDAP rule and the USSR. It is completely understandable that China and Russia …
On September 7, Julian Assange will be facing another round of gruelling extradition proceedings, in the Old Bailey, part of a process that has become a form of gradual state-sanctioned torture. The US Department of Justice hungers for their man. The UK prison authorities are doing little to protect his health. The end result, should it result in his death, will be justifiably described as state-sanctioned murder. This picture was not improved upon by a prison visit from his partner, Stella Morris, accompanied by their two children. Almost six months had passed since the last meeting.
Mexico is a semi-colony with a population of 129 million. Its political, financial and business elites are bound to the US, which receives 80% of Mexican exports. International corporations feast on Mexico’s cheap labor and resources, from the maquilas in the north, to the central mines and the coffee lands of the south. Walmart is Mexico’s biggest employer.
Mexico’s GDP per capita is nearly one-third that of the US and 20% greater than that of China. (World Bank, 2019.) But while China …
Recent news reports suggest that more parents and students are flocking to privately-owned-operated online charter schools, presumably due to concerns about the “COVID Pandemic.” ((According to many different sources, the COVID recovery rate exceeds 98%.))
Parents, students, teachers, and the public at large should be aware that:
The overall “academic performance” of cyber charter schools is consistently abysmal, even by the admission of staunch charter school promoters and school privatizers.
The “academic performance” of cyber charter schools is consistently worse than the poor overall “academic performance” of brick-and-mortar charter schools.
The graduation rate in virtual charter schools is consistently …
It has taken quite a while, but famous 2nd — or 3rd — iteration Fleetwood Mac lead singer, Stevie Nicks, has finally opined on the coronavirus crisis, and the 72 year old songstress of note imploringly had this to say, in a paraphrase: If I get this, I’ll never sing again! This was from a People magazine article appearing on Yahoo! on August 11. In a direct quote, Nicks says this: “Put me on a ventilator and I will be hoarse for the rest of my life — I don’t have much time…”
Joe Biden picking Kamala Harris for his running mate kicked off a flurry of think pieces in the media. Some of these opinions have attacked the anti-Black and casteist attitudes still prevalent among South Asians in the subcontinent and in the global diaspora.
The former prosecutor and attorney general-turned-2020 Democratic vice-presidential nominee has been propped up in much the same way as other people of color who have run for elected office. Black radicals have compared Harris’ rise to Barack Obama’s. As the first Black U.S. president, Obama regularly shamed …
In what is a turn-up for the books, a senior voice of the Catholic Church made something of an impression this month that did not incite scandal, hot rage, or the commencement of an investigation. It did, however, agitate a few editors. Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, in speaking at the online Hiroshima Day vigil, had put up his hand to defy the validity and morality of nuclear weapons and, along with them, the idea of nuclear deterrence. One of the organisers of the event, the veteran peace activist Rev. John Dear, claimed it had “never happened …
A “color revolution” is a media term for a movement based on legitimate grievances only to be co-opted into a regime change operation backed by the US and confederates. There have been so many – Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, Kyrgyzstan in 2005 – that they have run out of colors. Belarus is amidst the “slipper” color revolution.
The last Soviet republic
Belarus, a former constituent republic of the USSR, declared its sovereignty in 1990 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Under its new and now contested President Alexander Lukashenko, first elected in 1994, Belarus rejected the western-imposed “economic …
[T]he hard but just rule [of science] is that if the ideas didn’t work, you must throw them away.
— Carl Sagan ((Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Headline Book Publishing, 1997): 34.))
Astrophysicist Carl Sagan puts into plain language the principle of falsification propounded by the philosopher of science Karl Popper. Rigorous science demands that a theory must be capable of being tested and disproven; when disproven, the theory must be discarded. ((See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Routledge Classics, 2005).)) Popper posited a modus tollens (“If P, then Q. Not …
In 2017, explosive allegations first emerged that the authorities of the Chechen Republic were reportedly interning gay men in concentration camps. After a three year period of dormancy, the accusations have resurfaced in a new feature length documentary by HBO Films entitled Welcome to Chechnya. Shot between mid-2017 and early last year, the film has received widespread acclaim among Western media and film critics. Shortly after its release last month, the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an increase in economic sanctions and imposed travel restrictions against Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his family, citing the …
Only recently, the Palestinian group, Hamas, and Israel seemed close to reaching a prisoner exchange agreement, where Hamas would release several Israeli soldiers held in Gaza while Israel would set free an unspecified number of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli prisons.
Instead of the much-anticipated announcement of some kind of a deal, on August 10, Israeli bombs began falling on the besieged Strip and incendiary balloons, originating in Gaza, made their way to the Israeli side of the fence.
If fodder is needed for the argument that a Deep State is running wild and determined to depose President Donald J. Trump, this will surely help. In a statement by self-titled “former Republican National Security Officials”, a hand-on-heart allegiance is made to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The authors are intent on moving the incumbent out of office, “profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”
These former security officials, who include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard …
What a joy to travel again!
COVID-19 is not just a disease; it is also a state of mind, a psychosis, a fear. It is an event that, all over the world, unleashed irrational behavior by the governments, individuals, and media. It triggered speculations, bizarre analyses, and selective ‘cut-and-paste science.’
Result: while there are, undeniably, few optimistic success stories, including the Russian vaccine, China’s and Vietnam’s ability to contain the pandemic without ruining the economy and livelihood of the citizens, the great majority of the world is undoubtedly in …
Video of the shooting of an unarmed Jacob Blake in the back by Kenosha Police during a domestic dispute call.
One of the most shocking things I learned talking with a Los Angeles Police Officer I became friends with while working as a reporter on my first job in L.A. was that LAPD cops were trained to “empty your revolver” whenever you fired at a person.
It’s not like in Hollywood cop movies, where you see cops in gun fights with “bad guys” and they’re trading shots with each other. What it usually involves is an officer feeling threatened, …
Like the wandering and rascally Odysseus upon whom he models his life, Oliver Stone is “double-minded” in the most profound and illuminating ways. The title of his fantastic new memoir is a case in point. “One of the first basic lessons in filming,” he writes, “is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing – no exposure that can be seen; even what you see with your naked eye needs to be shaped and enhanced by the light.”
For as a true artist living out a marriage between his writing …
When one looks at a map of the world, Australia is prominently displayed at the southern end of the great Asian land mass. Then one looks at other statistics and one sees that Asia and China in particular is of huge economic importance to Australia. China, for example, is Australia’s largest source of foreign tourists, largest source of foreign students, and third largest source of foreign investment. This is in addition to taking more than one-third of total Australian exports, more than any other nation by a substantial margin.
Then one looks at Australia’s actual conduct in respect of its Asian …
There was very little controversial about it. A featured blog post in the Oxford Political Review, authored in April by Joshua Krook, suggested that COVID-19 had brought a host of benefits for big tech companies. Isolation ushered people towards online platforms. Engagement on such platforms had increased dramatically.
Names were not mentioned. Krook’s then employer, the Australian Public Service, made no appearance in the text. Tech entities were not outed, though Krook noted, in general, how “big tech companies” have been “pursuing the attention economy”, seeking to get “all our attention at all times.” With COVID-19, this had been achieved. …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 24th, 2020
Stop Voter Suppression from the Union of Concerned Scientists
Voter suppression in the 2020 election has become a topic of great concern. In reality, voter suppression has been part of US politics since the founding of the country. The oligarchs who wrote the US Constitution enabled voter suppression by not including the right to vote in it and only allowing white male property owners to vote, suppressing the votes of 94 percent of the population.
Maj. Gen. Andrew Croft, the commander of 12th Air Force, wrote on 22 August: “I have seen an increasingly contested strategic space where Beijing and Moscow are aggressively investing time and resources in Latin America to support their authoritarian models of governance. The Air Force must reinforce the strength of our longstanding commitment to the Western Hemisphere. We lose ground when we are unable to commit to spending the time and resources to fly our aircraft south and train alongside our partners.”
Croft’s statement reflects the growing American hysteria against the presence of any extra-regional actors in the Latin American …
Palestinians are not going anywhere. This is the gist of seven decades of Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonialism. The proof? The story of Ahmed Amarneh.
Amarneh, a 30-year-old civil engineer from the northern West Bank village of Farasin, lives with his family in a cave. For many years, the Amarneh family has attempted to build a proper home, but their request has been denied by the Israeli military every time.
In many ways, the struggle of the Amarnehs is a microcosm of the collective struggle of Farasin; in fact, of most Palestinians.
Those who are unfortunate enough to be living in areas …
Starting around 1848, socialists flooded the world with pamphlets and manifestos explaining the basics of “wage-labor” vs. “capital.” Yet here we are in the 21st century, having to go back to basics — even though one would think that the dire economic situation for most people today “speaks for itself.” However, given the recent misguided detour into side-issues — notably, police-style racism vs. “anti-fascism” (whatever happened to “anti-globalization”?) — a basic reminder about the primacy of “class” seems to be in order.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, beginning over 30 years ago, socialism was peremptorily consigned to …
On August 2, lockdown measures were implemented in Melbourne, Australia, that were so draconian that Australian news commentator Alan Jones said on Sky News: “People are entitled to think there is an ‘agenda to destroy western society.’”
The gist of an August 13th article on the Melbourne lockdown is captured in the title: “Australian Police Go FULL NAZI, Smashing in Windows of Civilian Cars Just Because Passengers Wouldn’t Give Details About Where They Were Going.”
Another article with an arresting title was by Guy Burchell in the August 7th Australian National Review: “Melbourne Cops May Now …
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
— Lord Acton,
It is a study both troublesome and perplexing. To what end can a state trample on human rights ostensibly to preserve such objects a public health? The coronavirus lockdowns have become a feature of global politics and relentless mandatory intrusion, the health department made sovereign, assisted by vigorous policing. States have used, and continue to use, all manner of measures to confine individuals to homes, mask them, restrict movement, while, in some cases, shutting them up as dissenters and hurrying them into obscurity. The …
With a representative like this Palestinians might be better off with no envoy in Canada. A recent profile of the Palestinian Authority’s agent in Ottawa confirms the PA is more a colonial tool than a voice for an oppressed people.
In the Hill Timesinterview Hala Abou-Hassira refuses to answer whether Canada’s anti-Palestinian voting record at the UN had harmed its bid for a seat on the Security Council. Abou-Hassira responded by saying she didn’t know how different member states voted but hoped Canada would win a seat in the future. She even refused to criticize the Canadian government for …
