Protesting and rioting cannot occupy the same space. Black Lives Matter is fast becoming the ipso facto mother of the so-called Antifa. Riots in the streets will obviously require the use of force. Americans have been vocal on various sides of the issue, with some proclaiming the right to vigilantism, while others claim the federal government must intervene, regardless of the constitutionality of such conduct. There are the vast numbers who claim that there must be no peace until there is justice, that being the end of police brutality, …
It is difficult – and futile – to argue which American president has historically been more pro-Israel. While former President Barack Obama, for example, has pledged more money to Israel than any other US administration in history, Donald Trump has provided Israel with a blank check of seemingly endless political concessions.
Certainly, the unconditional backing and love declared for Israel is common among all US administrations. What they may differ on, however, is their overall motive, primarily their target audience during election time.
Insecticidal Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton is the first and only GM (genetically modified) crop that has been approved in India. It has been cultivated in the country for more than 20 years. In a formal statement to the Supreme Court of India, the Indian government has asserted that hybrid Bt cotton is an outstanding success. It therefore argues that Bt cotton is a template for the introduction of GM food crops.
However, over the last week, two important webinars took place that challenged the government’s stance. The first was on Bt cotton and involved a panel of internationally renowned scientists who conclusively …
No ruling class could survive if it wasn’t attentive to its own interest consciously trying to anticipate control/ initiate events at home & abroad both overtly & secretly.
The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.
— Michael Parenti, 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Fascism In a Pinstriped Suit, p. 32 – Dirty truths (1996), first edition
As a trauma-informed social worker (no, it’s not some buzzword or new age trend) who has worked in prisons, in closed homeless facilities, in memory care day programs, for teenager foster youth and adults living with developmental disabilities, …
On March 21, 1933, the Nazi-controlled Reichstag passed a law making it a crime to speak out against the government. The “Regulations of the Reich President for Defense from Treacherous Attacks against the Government of the National Uprising” made even the slightest expression of dissent from Nazi ideology a criminal offense. This new law, among other totalitarian measures, was part of a process known as Gleichschaltung … the process of achieving rigid and total ideological coordination and uniformity in politics, culture, and private communication by forcibly repressing (or eliminating) independence and freedom of thought and expression.
News and information can only go so far. Despite the utopian fluffiness about having multiple platforms, the consumers of news want only one thing: the reassurance that their prejudice is secure and their world view left unchallenged. The reader of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun would dare not venture into the sinned waters of The Guardian. Those of The Guardian would argue that readership was an oxymoronic term when used for the Sun.
Facebook did nothing to cure this. It simply secured an easy avenue for having pre-cooked material, tailored with its platform, available for outlets wishing to furnish them with content. Through …
Court hearings in Britain over the US administration’s extradition case against Julian Assange begin in earnest next week. The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms.
A journalist and publisher has been deprived of his liberty for 10 years. According to UN experts, he has been arbitrarily detained and tortured for much of that time through intense physical confinement and endless psychological pressure. He has been bugged and spied on by the CIA during his time in political …
In its desperate race to survive its series of crises, capitalism keeps clinging onto its old tool of dividing the working class. But, since commencing its political fight, the working class has uplifted a different call: Workers of the world unite! More than one hundred years ago, the proletariat in Russia trampled over all the divisions among the working class created by capital and achieved a historic victory — the Great October Revolution. But, today, more than a century after the October Revolution, the working class remains divided. In …
Recently, the U.S. side announced a policy statement regarding its position on maritime claims in the South China Sea and smeared China on many occasions. It is important that we list U.S. false allegations vis-à-vis the facts to debunk the falsehoods and let people know the truth.
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / September 1st, 2020
The Republican and Democratic Party conventions showed that both major parties are failing to control the pandemic and protect people, address the climate crisis and clean up the environment, support families and businesses during the economic collapse, prevent police violence or deal with any of the other major problems we face.
These were two substance-less conventions. The Democrats focused on criticizing Trump without putting forward an agenda while the Republicans claimed Biden was a front for socialism when he is a deeply embedded corporate Democrat. Trump’s term as president has …
As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All. This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal. However, it is not the final goal. It should be the first step in a complete transformation of medicine which includes combining community medicine with natural medicine and health-care-for-the-world.
Contrasting Cuban changes in medicine during the last 60 years with the US non-system of medical care gives a clear picture of why changes must be all-encompassing. The concept of Medicare-for-All is deeply intertwined with attacks on Cuba’s global …
On August 16, the Israeli navy declared the Gaza sea a closed military zone. A few days later, a group of Gaza fishermen decided to take their chances by fishing within a mere two or three nautical miles off the Gaza shore. No sooner had they cast their nets, Israeli navy bullets began whizzing all around them.
Soon after the incident, I spoke with one of these fishermen. His name is Fathi.
“My wife, my eight children and I, we all live off fishing. The Israeli navy shot at us today …
Canada is supporting US efforts to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.
A recently leaked USAID document highlights “the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.” The stated aim is to replace president Daniel Ortega with “a government committed to the rule of law, civil liberties, and a free civil society.” Highlighting Washington’s aim, Ben Norton notes, “the 14-page USAID document employed the word ‘transition’ 102 times, including nine times on the first page alone.”
Recently Canada’s representative to the Organization of American States, Hugh Adsett, …
Here are three questions I would propose to the people who read this article:
Other than being a Red Diaper Baby, what is the process by which people came to socialism and how did they handle the disapproval of their families and long-term friends?
How does having a framework for capitalism make it easier to understand what’s going on?
In spite of their grand visions, why are many American socialists so hard to be around?
I Live Two Lives
Coming out
I recently found a letter I wrote to my liberal “Friends …
If there is a point at which we realize we are taking our lives in our hands by just going downtown and marching in the streets, this might be it.
Last night a man was shot to death near the Justice Center in downtown Portland, where protests have been taking place every night for over three months. Details are still coming in, but it appears the deceased was a heavily-armed member of the far right. Another member of the far right was just arrested this morning in the working class Portland suburb of Milwaukie. He was arrested for having fired into …
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 …
