Latest articles
by Alton C. Thompson / June 28th, 2020
A widespread view among observers is that Pres. Donald J. Trump is all about himself. His main interest, during his presidency, has been his re-election. For Trump, that is, re-election “trumps” the national interest!
And what’s so utterly ironic about the Trump presidency is Trump’s lack of interest in the well-being—or even continued survival!—of his supporters, but those supporters don’t seem to “get” that fact! It should be obvious why I say that:
We are in the “middle” ((Or, are we closer to the beginning?!)) of a Covid-19 crisis.
Experts have advised us that in an absence of …
Teaching It Forward
by Terry Everton / June 27th, 2020
The not-so-subtle purpose of compulsory schooling is to ensure a populace subservient to the status quo which primarily serves the ruling class. What we call education is derived from a Prussian model designed to reward individuals based on how well they stay in line and do as they’re told through the process of grading. It’s no mystery that those who conform the most by repeating verbatim the state-controlled curriculum they’re force fed receive the highest marks and are thus given the greatest opportunities for societal advancement. By discouraging individual …
by The HighWire with Del Bigtree / June 27th, 2020
As Americans turn against each other over mask mandates, many scientists are speaking out, including former professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Denis Rancourt, PhD, who just released a paper compiling seven studies on the science surrounding the effectiveness of masks.
https://youtu.be/C1ODBTdNiG0
See also: “Do Masks and Respirators Prevent Viral Respiratory Illnesses?”
by Colin Todhunter / June 27th, 2020
The deregulation of international capital flows (financial liberalisation) has effectively turned the planet into a free-for-all bonanza for the world’s richest capitalists. Under the post-World-War Two Bretton Woods monetary regime, nations put restrictions on the flow of capital. Domestic firms and banks could not freely borrow from banks elsewhere or from international capital markets, without seeking permission, and they could not simply take their money in and out of other countries.
Domestic financial markets were segmented from international ones elsewhere. Governments could to a large extent run their own macroeconomic policy without being restrained by monetary or fiscal policies devised by …
by Don Fitz / June 27th, 2020
Scenes of sorrow spread across the US. Football teams apologize. Cops march with demonstrators. Democratic Party politicians call for “structural change” in police departments.
Some of these are sincere. Others are crocodile tears shed in hopes that people will be pacified with assurances that turn out to be vague rhetoric devoid of meaning or else empty promises that will never be fulfilled. Yet, there are changes that would cost little, could happen quickly, and be reminders to future generations of what happened in 2020.
St. Louis offers a unique opportunity …
by Paul Haeder / June 27th, 2020
Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.
— Michelle Rosenthall
A feature on a local person usually doesn’t go down the rabbit hole of a person’s trauma and her battles scraping to get out of darkness.
A few artists I’ve interviewed unleashed catharses into their personal journeys, including personal hells; however, after reading my drafts, many have declined to “expose” so much of their lives for public consumption. The exposing of one’s trials and tribulations is powerful to readers, but many times opening up in person is easy; seeing it in print is devastating.
“Out of sight, …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 26th, 2020
President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton would have been confident. His indulgent The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir pitted him against the administration in a not infrequent battle over material that is published by former officials recounting their giddy days in high office. On June 17, the US government filed a civil suit seeking a preliminary injunction ahead of the planned release of the memoir on June 23, and a “constructive trust” arising from all profits issuing from the publication of the work.
Bolton had, as Jack Goldsmith and Marty Lederman point out, signed …
by Robert Hunziker / June 26th, 2020
Over the past 20 years, like clockwork, severe droughts have hit the Amazon every five years with regularity 2005, 2010, 2015. Of course, droughts have hit the Amazon rainforest throughout paleoclimate history, but this time it’s different. The frequency and severity is off the charts.
Recent data is starting to show 2020 as another dire year. “The old paradigm was that whatever carbon dioxide we put up in [human-caused] emissions, the Amazon would help absorb a major part of it,” according to Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s JPL. ((“NASA Finds Amazon Drought Leaves Long Legacy of Damage”, NASA Earth Science, August 9, …
by Ajamu Baraka / June 26th, 2020
Hundreds of people are unnecessarily dying every day with African Americans representing a disproportionate number of those deaths. 80 million people are now without health coverage, millions are unemployed, over the next two months evictions will resume with an expected explosion of homelessness. And what is the response from the state that is tasked with the responsibility to promote and protect the fundamental human rights of its population?
While trillions of dollars were transferred to the corporate sector though the CARES Act meant to support the economy through the crisis, the state continues to ignore the existential crisis faced by millions …
by William Manson / June 25th, 2020
The unexamined life is not worth living.
— Socrates
From our earliest years, we are over-socialized. An organized regimen of daily activity, we are taught, is the basis for a “productive” life. Such “productivity” — unlike immeasurables such as deepening self-awareness — is later concretely identifiable in such acquisitions as university degrees, “positions,” “achievements,” and so on. Of course, Calvinist-Puritan Europeans feared that “idle hands did the devil’s work” (sensuality, adultery, drunkenness, etc.). To “keep busy,” by contrast, was to produce tangible results often beneficial both to self and community.
But what of our highly active, even frenetic, daily lives in the early 21st …
It’s the Empire, Stupid
by Philip A. Farruggio / June 25th, 2020
by Terry Everton / June 25th, 2020
The chasm between what is often uttered on a corporate level and what is actually meant is as cavernous as the stale air which has moved in and taken up permanent residence between the ears of most District Managers. The words you actually hear pursing your employer’s chapped lips are little more than the white noise acting as a Klingon cloaking device camouflaging the between-the-lines code you’re assumed to be too daft to crack. But not unlike most mediocrity masquerading as authenticity, what isn’t said is usually louder than …
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / June 25th, 2020
Symbols are what unite and divide people. Symbols give us our identity, our self-image,our way of explaining ourselves to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell; and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.
— Mary Robinson, Inauguration speech as President of Ireland, December 3, 1990
Dublin is connected with Irish patriotism only by the scaffold and the gallows. Statue and column do indeed rise there, but not to honour the sons of the soil. The public idols are foreign potentates and foreign heroes […] the Irish people are doomed to …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 25th, 2020
It is one of the oldest professions, stacked with rules, conventions and protocols. It is also tribal and hierarchical. The law, presided over its executors, the judges, do not do transparency well. It stands to reason: according to Charles Dickens, the business of the law is to make business for itself, creating its own impenetrable labyrinths and traps while insisting on its own policing. Now, the high priests in Australia are asking searching questions about the case of former High Court justice Dyson Heydon.
On Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age revealed the existence, and the findings of an …
by Ramzy Baroud / June 24th, 2020
The painful truth is that the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas has already ceased to exist as a political body that holds much sway or relevance, either to the Palestinian people or to Abbas’ former benefactors, namely the Israeli and the American governments.
So, when the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, announced on June 9, that the Palestinian leadership had submitted a ‘counter-proposal’ to the US’ Middle East peace plan, also known as the ‘Deal of the Century’, few seemed to care.
We know little about this ‘counter-proposal’, aside from the fact that it envisages a demilitarized Palestinian state …
by Kim Petersen / June 24th, 2020
Question: Should people from the oppressor group tell the oppressed people how to conduct their resistance?
Should Jews tell Palestinians what form their resistance to Israeli oppression should take? During World War II should Germans have directed Jewish, Roma, Slavic resistance in the concentration camps?
Nowadays, should whites be telling Blacks how to resist systemic racism — a racism entrenched by segments (and maintained by a plurality) of White society?
I think not. That is why I have a problem, with a likeliest well-intentioned essay, “Racism: Another Crossroads.”
The writer identifies himself as a White male. He then …
by Gerald E. Scorse / June 24th, 2020
Writing TV commercials was fun but retirement would be heaven. I could do whatever I pleased. I’d get to spend weekday afternoons at Yankee Stadium with the sun shining down on the boys of summer.
Then a new world appeared out of the green. I invested my profit-sharing in the stock market. I discovered that newspapers had business pages as well as sports pages. I puzzled over terms I’d never seen before (such as basis prices, which I’ll return to). Looking back I realize this was just the start of an endless tax education.
All federal tax laws are pieces of a giant …
by Stansfield Smith / June 24th, 2020
The film Wasp Network, based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, The Story of the Cuban Five by Fernando Morais, is a co-production between France, Spain, Belgium and Brazil. It was shown in Cuba last December, soon after it came out. You can now watch it on Netflix.
It is not a film on the Cuban Five, and not a Cuban film. It is a story about three of the Cubans who infiltrated the Miami network of terrorist groups dedicated to destroying the Cuban socialist system. The story focuses on Rene Gonzalez, with Geraldo Hernandez receiving …
by John R. Hall / June 24th, 2020
For a half century, I’ve been of the opinion that there is just one social issue of real importance. Until we put an end to state warfare, or mass-murder for corporate profit, all other causes are meaningless. Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that the age of bombing for dollars has nearly come to an end. The fighter jets from nearby Davis-Monthan AFB no longer rip the silent skies asunder, practice-strafing the city of Tucson, replaced instead by what appear to be slow moving surveillance aircraft. The long protracted age of war is done. Great cause for celebration, no? Unfortunately, …
by Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold / June 24th, 2020
Joe Biden wants you to believe that he is opposed to Israel’s likely annexation of parts of the West Bank that Netanyahu plans to carry out in July. “I do not support annexation,” he said during a call with American Jewish donors on June 16. But only a month ago, Biden senior foreign policy advisor Tony Blinken insisted that under absolutely no circumstances, not even the annexation of the West Bank, would Biden consider …
by Media Lens / June 24th, 2020
In his classic science fiction novel, Foundation, Isaac Asimov posited a future in which ‘psychohistorians’ could predict outcomes based on past history and the large-scale behaviour of human populations by combining psychology and the mathematics of probability. Using ‘psychohistory’, the protagonist Hari Seldon discovers that the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire will collapse in 500 years. He warns the galactic rulers of this likely fate, while explaining that an alternative future in which human knowledge is preserved can be attained. For his trouble, he is exiled to the remote planet of …
by Robert Hunziker / June 23rd, 2020
(Courtesy of Globe and Mail)
Never before this year 2020 has the world-famous Doomsday Clock registered only “100 seconds-to-midnight.” According to the Science & Security Board, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, since WWII, the world has never been so perilous.
Alas, it’s been a long journey (73 yrs) all the way up to 100 seconds to midnight versus the original 1947 setting of seven minutes to midnight. The safest setting was at 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 at the end of the Cold War. The wonderfully famous iconic …
by Ellen Brown / June 23rd, 2020
BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the hands of a megalithic private entity with the private capitalist mandate to make as much money as possible for its owners and investors; and that is what it has proceeded to do.
To most people, if they are familiar with it at all, BlackRock is an asset manager …
by Luke Eastwood / June 23rd, 2020
I am a white person. I am also male. Some people would immediately dismiss my opinion on that basis, but they would be wrong to because prejudice is wrong. Like all decent people, I am appalled by racism and prejudice in general, but I see the behaviour and reactions of many people (although well-intentioned rage) causing more division, not easing the problem. In fact, they are only fanning the flames of conflict.
When I was six years old I kissed a girl – we climbed under a desk in the empty classroom. We held hands and for a brief moment kissed. …
by Yves Engler / June 23rd, 2020
Canada’s defeat in its bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council is a major victory for Palestinian solidarity. It also puts Canada’s Israel lobby on the defensive.
Israeli politicians and commentators have begun to publicly bemoan the loss. Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, told the Jerusalem Post, “we are disappointed that Canada didn’t make it, both because we have close ties with the country and because of the campaign that the Palestinians ran against Canada.” In another story in that paper headlined “With annexation looming, Canada’s UNSC upset is bad news for Israel, US” …
Part 2
by Farhang Jahanpour / June 23rd, 2020
Pulling down statues may make us feel good but will not eliminate the root causes of racism and discrimination.
Part Two – Part 1 here.
The protests to the cruel killing …
Part 1
by Farhang Jahanpour / June 23rd, 2020
Part One – Part 2 here.
The gruesome killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 25 May 2020 has given rise to an unprecedented campaign against police brutality in …
by Peter Koenig / June 22nd, 2020
Imagine, you are living in a world that you are told is a democracy – and you may even believe it – but, in fact, your life and fate is in the hands of a few ultra-rich, ultra-powerful and ultra-inhuman oligarchs. They may be called Deep State, Illuminati, or simply the Beast, or anything else obscure or untraceable, it doesn’t matter. They are less than the 0.0001%.
For lack of a better expression, let’s call them for now “obscure individuals”. These obscure individuals who pretend running our world have never been elected. We don’t need to name them. You will figure …
Israel subjugates its Palestinian citizens while being eager to showcase their successes in order to portray itself as a western-style democracy
by Jonathan Cook / June 22nd, 2020
An Israeli diplomat filed a complaint last week with police after he was pulled to the ground in Jerusalem by four security guards, who knelt on his neck for five minutes as he cried out: “I can’t breathe.”
There are obvious echoes of the treatment of George Floyd, an African-American killed by police in Minneapolis last month. His death triggered mass protests against police brutality and reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement. The incident in Jerusalem, by contrast, attracted only minor attention – even in Israel.
An assault by Israeli security officials on a diplomat sounds like an aberration – a peculiar …
by Simon Threlkeld / June 22nd, 2020
It would be far better and far more democratic if laws are decided by legislative juries rather than by elected politicians.
By a legislative jury, which can also be called a legislative minipublic, I mean a representative random sample of the public that meets to make an informed decision about a proposed law. Such randomly sampled juries can be large enough to be statistically accurate representations of the public, numbering perhaps 800 or more citizens. Jurors can be paid to work full-time for as many days or weeks as needed to make an informed decision. As representative samples of the public …
