Well over a century ago the German statesman Otto von Bismarck remarked that countries have neither friends nor enemies only interests. History since then has done nothing to dispel the wisdom of his observation. There are many people still alive today who were alive when this country fought for its very existence against the two mortal enemies of the day: Germany and Japan.
What is the status of those two countries today? Germany is the most economically powerful nation in Europe, a vital member of the European Union and finally after decades in which its economic power was vastly greater than …
They killed black woman
Recently, when a retired Chilean U.N. employee tried to enter ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in
Santiago de Chile) to claim her pension in a bank inside the compound, her car was stopped by a U.N. security officer. She was asked to complete formalities. To her taste, the process was taking too much time, and she began honking. The head of security approached her, trying to explain the procedure, which had recently toughened up, due to the outbreak …
by Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker / July 24th, 2020
The US Senate returned to work this week after a two-week vacation during which COVID-19 exploded and the economy imploded. The moment of truth has now arrived. Will the House and Senate now bring forth a Covid relief package adequate to the Covid health and economic crises?
The last six months of the pandemic and economic collapse show that the two governing parties are presiding over a failed state. Most other organized societies have test, contract trace, and quarantine programs that have suppressed community spread of the virus and enabled a safe reopening of businesses and schools. The two major parties …
It’s no surprise that first prize, or the blue ribbon, for exceeding 2°C above baseline goes to the Arctic with permafrost that covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere. Recognition is long overdue, as it’s been totally neglected far too long by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This crucial nugget of knowledge comes by way of a recent virtual science session (1:27 in length) sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and can be watched in its entirety on YouTube:
The webcast is entitled: Thawing Arctic Permafrost: Regional and Global Impacts, hosted by John P. Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz, Professor …
By the late-90s we must have sensed that the shit was hitting the fan. The fire at Waco. The Unabomber envelopes. The downing of Flight 800. The World Trade Center bombing. Blowjobs in the White House. Oklahoma City. Tokyo’s subway sarin attack. The Khobar Towers bombing blamed on bin Laden. The ascent of Atlanta’s radio jockstrap Sean Hannity to national status on Roger Ailes’ newly established Fox News Network. OJ taking off the gloves. Rodney King wondering if we could all just get along. Cruise missiles on Bosnia on the eve of Clinton’s impeachment for blowjobs. Distracted from distraction by distraction, …
July 28 will mark almost the 90th anniversary of one of most controversial protests in U.S. history and yet it remains virtually unknown to most Americans. On that day, in 1932, 500 U.S. army infantrymen with loaded rifles, fixed bayonets and gas grenades containing a vomit inducing ingredient, 200 calvary, a machine gun squadron, 800 police and 6 M1917 army tanks, prepared to attack 17,000 unarmed men, plus thousands of their wives and children. Moments before the assault, Gen.Douglas MacArthur, in charge of the operation, turned to a police …
Is the U.S. ripe for a real revolution, where the disenfranchised and repressed overthrow the enfranchised and privileged?
Unfortunately, there are many weapons in the hands of the existing U.S. power structure. These include racism, control of the media, chauvinism, greed and more. These are all put into the service of weakening and dividing the population, and pitting them against each other, thus preventing the unity that might otherwise become …
For the first time since the Israeli war on Gaza in 2014, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is signaling its willingness to engage in negotiations regarding the release of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers believed to be held by resistance groups in Gaza. But will another prisoner exchange similar to that of October 2011 follow anytime soon?
On July 9, Palestinian and Israeli media reported on an Israeli government communication sent to the Palestinian group, Hamas, through an intermediary. It included an Israeli offer to swap the bodies of Palestinians held in Israel in …
If he’s good enough for you,
He’s good enough for me!
If he scores another few,
Then I’ll be Muslim, too!
— Sung by Liverpool supporters at Anfield, their home stadium
You must be saying to yourself, what is THAT? It doesn’t sound like anti-Muslim sentiment, but why are English Premier League football (soccer) fans singing about converting to Islam? The “he” they are referring to is Mohamed Salah, a winger for the Liverpool Reds, who over the past 3 seasons has scored 94 goals in all competitions. Salah won the Golden Boot Award in consecutive seasons, 2017-18 and 2018-19, given to the player who …
Fifteen years ago or so, after getting some books from my local library Taos, New Mexico, I came upon a meeting featuring an Indigenous man from Taos Pueblo. I forget his name but I believe the topic of his lecture was related to spirituality. He was fielding questions at the time I arrived.
One middle-aged Anglo woman asked, “I know this is a bit off topic, but can you tell me what you think of the current presidential election race between John Kerry and George Bush?”
The Pueblo leader, also middle-aged, sighed and replied, “You know, our peoples have been struggling …
So, how are you enjoying the “New Normal” so far? Is it paranoid and totalitarian enough for you? If not … well, hold on, because it’s just getting started. There is plenty more totalitarianism and paranoia still to come.
I know, it feels like forever already, but, in fact, it has only been a few months since GloboCap started rolling out the new official narrative. We’re still in the early stages of it. The phase we’re in now is kind of like where we were back in February of 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was still …
Despite the sustained protests and pleas for justice and peace, demonstrations, and riots, George Floyd’s murder continues to resonate because it accompanies an interminable chronicle of shame connecting it to other recent events. It becomes another tragic entry in the Book of Disgrace. In this sense, Floyd becomes other victims of the police. He becomes Eric Garner, attacked from behind and strangled on the sidewalk in broad daylight. He becomes twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, murdered while playing in the park. He becomes seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. He becomes Miriam Carey, Thurman Blevins, Javier Ambler, Manuel Ellis, Terence Crutcher. Atatiana Jefferson, Elijah McClain, …
In front of White House
Americans are angry. I suspected they would be, but I got confirmation that they are, all over the place: in Miami, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. Basically, everywhere I went, while “taking pulse and temperature” of this country where I used to live, cumulatively, for more than a decade, I felt frustration and bewilderment.
“What is your job?” Shouted an African-American lady, right in the middle of the Union Station in the nation’s capital. Obviously, it was a rhetorical …
The Jewish National Fund has won plaudits for its environmental work, but its agenda has been to evict on behalf of the state
by Jonathan Cook / July 22nd, 2020
The Jewish National Fund, established more than 100 years ago, is perhaps the most venerable of the international Zionist organisations. Its recent honorary patrons have included prime ministers, and it advises UN forums on forestry and conservation issues.
It is also recognised as a charity in dozens of western states. Generations of Jewish families, and others, have contributed to its fundraising programmes, learning as children to drop saved pennies into its trademark blue boxes to help plant a tree.
And yet its work over many decades has been driven by one main goal: to evict Palestinians from their homeland.
We have recently been able to view the early 1970s communications that took place between the then Governor General John Kerr and Buckingham Palace. This has been thanks to the tireless work of Melbourne academic Professor Jenny Hosking. The mainstream media have published extracts from this correspondence. The picture that emerges from the correspondence, chiefly between John Kerr and the Queen’s principal private secretary Sir Martin Charteris, is that Kerr disapproved of the Labor government and in particular the foreign policy stances that it embraced.
One of those stances was of critical relevance to the sequence of events leading up to …
By the time Alfred Marshall became prominent, the theory of capitalism formulated in Marx’s Capital had become a theoretical pillar of organised working class politics in Europe. Remarkably the so-called “marginalist revolution”, of which Marshall became a leading figure, coincides roughly with the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1886) and a major economic depression. ((For a discussion of the so-called “marginalist revolution” see, for example, Nuno Martins, “Interpreting the capitalist order before and after the marginalist revolution”, Cambridge Journal of Economics 2015, 39, 1109-1127.)) Thus the shift from economics, for the …
There is a statue of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Milwaukee, in Veteran’s Park next to the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center. It is a replica of the one at West Point.
The general stands there arms akimbo, in that memorable pose he assumed next to the diminutive defeated emperor of Japan in the famous photo soon after Japan’s surrender in Aug. 1945. (In it, Hirohito stood in rigid submission, hands at his side, in a formal suit; MacArthur towered above him, in informal dress, hands on his hips.) It was on the front pages of newspapers in Japan Sept 28, a …
Heavily armed federal officers without name tags have carried out nightly attacks on antiracist demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, and snatched people off the streets into unmarked vans, sparking widespread outrage. “What we’ve seen is a continuous escalation in violence against our protesters,” says Lilith Sinclair, an Afro-Indigenous local organizer in Portland. They note the federal violence follows many years of “severe police brutality” from local police. “It’s left the people of Portland not only worried about their safety, but, even more so, justified in the fight that we’re engaged in.”
There are only a few introductory texts on socialism that manage to be accessible, witty, and broad enough to survey its history as well as contemporary thought on the subject. Nathan J. Robinson’s new book, Why You Should Be a Socialist is able to do just that by weaving together a compelling narrative and excellent arguments that cover the rich practical and theoretical implications of socialism in a down to earth, entertaining way. There are serious holes in the book’s content with regards to theory, …
At Cerrejon (Colombia), the largest open-pit coal mine in Latin America owned equally by BHP (Australia), Anglo American PLC (United Kingdom) and Glencore (Switzerland), the situation of the indigenous people is progressively worsening. Cerrejon Limited has informed the workers that “all the existing shifts will be unified into a single 7-day work, for three days off.” With the enforcement of the new shifts, “workers would go from working 15 to 21 days and the mine would go from 4 to 3 shifts, leaving at least 25% of the current workforce unemployed.” The new shift pattern is likely to …
As the coronavirus, once again, surges out of control in the United States, it is safe to say that even those few lessons learned have been cast aside by those who place profits before people. Greed and ignorance, not public health policy, is deciding the fate of tens of thousands in our nation who are likely to die and many times that who will suffer from COVID-19 as we stumble from one surge to another. As other nations succeed, the US continues to fail under incompetent political leadership and a privatized health care system unprepared to handle a domestic epidemic, …
My post earlier this month on the so-called “cancel culture” letter proved to be the most polarising I have written – matched only by another recent post on the pulling down of a statue in the UK to a slave trader. The ferocity of the reactions to both, I believe, is related. It derives from a similar refusal, even on the left, to factor in power – and how it is best confronted – when assessing issues of speech and oppression.But first, I want to briefly address the concerns of those who …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / July 20th, 2020
While the climate justice movement has been winning important victories, stopping and slowing pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure, and putting the future of fossil fuels in doubt, the political system, long connected to the fossil fuel industry, is still fighting the urgently needed transition to clean sustainable energy. Both President Trump and former Vice President Biden put forward energy plans that do not challenge fossil fuels. The only candidate with a serious climate plan is Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins.
The movement needs to build momentum from these successes …
Melbourne — The Victorian Premier turned up for his weekend delivery of coronavirus infections, gruffly delivering the news. It has become grim if compelling viewing: the announcement about the next spike in coronavirus infections, the next gruesome statistical spread on transmission. On Sunday, Daniel Andrews had a pose that has become legend, a cross between plasticine figure and instructive despair. Stern, humourless, with little to be humour filled about, his role of late is telling people what to do. With stern command he had a message: All those in the state of Victoria, had to wear face masks. “Most of …
Personality is persona, a mask…The mask is magic…Larva means mask; or ghost…it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession.
– Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 1966
Walk the streets in the United States and many countries these days and you will see streaming crowds of people possessed by demons, masked and anonymous, whose eyes look like vacuums, staring into space or out of empty sockets like the dead, afraid of their own ghosts. Fear and obedience oozes from them. Death walks the streets with people on leashes in lockstep.
That they have been the victims of a long-planned propaganda campaign to use …
I walk up, introduce myself and thank them for joining us this evening. Before I can ask them if they’d like to begin their dinner with a cocktail, the woman reaches into her purse and slaps a Groupon down on the table, essentially broadcasting their intention to eat on the cheap.
Fuck me. It’s the last day of the month, I’m $250 short of making rent, and was hoping for a section full of 20 percenters tonight to help me get over the hump. Hopefully these couponers aren’t an omen of …
Any serious study of the relevant scholarly literature reveals at least four possible paths to imminent human extinction, that is, human extinction within five years: nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G, and biodiversity collapse.
Moreover, as I have documented previously, under cover of the non-existent ‘virus’ labeled COVID-19, the global elite is conducting a coup against humanity. That is, by bombarding us with fear-mongering propaganda to focus our attention on the ‘virus’, the capacity of virtually all people, including activists, to devote attention to the coup, and to resist it, has been effectively eliminated.
After the corona crisis, may the world be facing a monumental paradigm shift of power towards a more balanced civilization, more social justice and equity? The global almost total lockdown, chosen by most governments around the globe in response to mastering the Covid-19 crisis, devastated the world economy, as we know it, and hundreds of millions of lives. Was it necessary? Will there be a time when those responsible for this universal, scientifically unnecessary lockdown be held accountable?
The last six months, governments around the world have almost unilaterally committed an auto-destruction of their socioeconomic fabric and collectively of …
When it comes to stereotypes of the masses of revolutionary people, the masses have built barricades that look like forts which they hide behind, armed with guns. But if we trace the behavior of masses back far enough to pre-revolutionary situations, masses become groups. In order to understand how masses of people become a revolutionary force, we first need to understand how groups, small groups of ten to twenty people, become revolutionary. By revolutionary I don’t mean that groups consciously advocate for revolutions. By revolutionary I …
Americans who grew up with nightmares of nuclear weapons explosions should get ready for some terrifying flashbacks, for the Trump administration appears to be preparing to resume U.S. nuclear weapons tests.
The U.S. government stopped its atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in 1962, shortly before signing the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. And it halted its underground nuclear tests in 1992, signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996. Overall, it conducted 1,030 nuclear weapons test explosions, slightly more than half the global total.
