How we sold Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia for Plastic Shopping Bags
by Andre Vltchek / June 22nd, 2020
For months, this has been a story that I want to share with young readers in Hong Kong. Now it seems to be the really appropriate time when the ideological battle between the West and China is raging, and as a result of it, Hong Kong and the entire world is suffering.
I want to say that none of it is new, that the West already destabilized so many countries and territories, brainwashed tens of millions of young people.
I know, because in the past, I was one of them. If I weren’t, it would be impossible to understand what is now …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 22nd, 2020
The system-wide challenges the United States faces with policing are entrenched and deeply rooted. When the historical and current practices of police are examined, it is evident police have been designed to uphold the status quo including racial injustice and class inequality. Whenever political movements develop to respond to racial and class unfairness, the police have undermined their politically-protected constitutional rights.
Police have used infiltration, surveillance, and violence against political movements seeking to end injustices throughout the history of the nation. It is the deeply embedded nature of these injustices …
There are few more spiteful things in political life than a security establishment attempting to punish a leaker or whistleblower for having exposed an impropriety. Such a tendency has no ideological stripe or colouring: it is common to all political systems. In Australia, it has become clear that secret trials are all the rage. The disclosure of their existence tends to be accidental, and trials held partly in secret are also matters considered necessary by the current attorney general.
Last year, the case of Witness J made its way into the press like a threatening menace, a reminder that Australian …
But to judge everyone from the past based on the values of today – there truly is no end to how much of history would need to be erased.
— Simon Black
History is punctuated by wars, and it’s the winners whose explanations become the records that following generations assume to be as reliable as if carved in stone. The recent 100th anniversary of the First World War prompted many a rearward exploration for facts about what might have led to the “war to end all wars”. A deep search reveals that many of what had become …
I watched Mafioso Don’s speech last evening for an hour and a half. I don’t think I’ve ever watched one of his speeches live from the beginning to almost the end, but I did last night.
The stakes are high, and it felt like I should see for myself how this miserable excuse for a human being was going to make his re-election argument.
A huge part of his plan, of course, was to pack the Tulsa arena to overflowing, 22,000 inside and 40,000 in an overflow area. That part failed miserably. No overflow crowd, and no packed arena. Trump was reduced …
In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly passed a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was driven by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The resolution laid out a clear plan for the structural transformation of the world system, which was in the throes of a crisis at the time. But, the NIEO was set aside and the world order was shaped in a …
Say what you will about corporate human-resources departments, but the one thing they effectively do is keep low-grade morons with a propensity for power trips in line. Though managers and owners with inherent tendencies to be upright prick machines will always invent ways to be walking fingernails against a chalkboard, at least the specter of employees reporting them to the HR Manager looms over them like the ultimate check and balance, preventing their asshole propensities from going fully hemorrhoidal at any given time.
I’ve seen and participated in more fucked up shit in restaurants and retail stores than I can …
The impunity of U.S. police in killing and brutalizing blacks, native Americans, other minorities and the poor is being tested. It has always been clear to its victims that it demands redress, but others are also waking up to this fact in large numbers, and they are beginning ask necessary questions if we are to effectively address the problems and begin the difficult task of making the changes to a very different society.
The problems go far beyond the police. The way our government and its police treat the marginalized members of our society mirrors way our industry treats its employees. …
During the early days of the coronavirus lockdowns, in some quarters there was a certain degree of optimism around. Although millions of people were suffering, the hope was that the Covid-19 crisis would shine light on societal and economic systems across the world, exposing some of the deep-rooted flaws of capitalism. There was a belief that people working together with their respective governments could start building a fairer capitalism and more sustainable economies.
However, we see exactly the opposite taking place. In the UK, we now witness a post-Brexit trade deal being negotiated behind closed doors with the US that could see …
Since 2011, the US and allies have promoted, trained and supplied militants trying to bring about “regime change” in Damascus. Having failed in that effort, they have tried to strangle Syria economically. The goal has always been the same: to force Syria to change politically. This month, June 2020, the aggression reaches a new level with extreme sanctions known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act.
The new law is fraudulent on two counts. It is called “Caesar” in reference to a 2014 propaganda stunt involving an anonymous Syrian who was alleged to be a military photographer. He …
For almost a decade, I have been covering “Color Revolutions” in virtually all parts of the world. While making a film for TeleSur, I was facing Egyptian tanks, risking my life under sniper fire, getting roughed-up in the middle of clashes of the supporters of al-Sisi and Morsi.
Together with Syrian commanders, I was also facing the terrorists in Idlib; challenged the Ukrainian fascists; encountering Bolivian indigenous elders high in the Altiplano after the revolution of Evo Morales and MAS was crashed by the U.S.-sponsored coup in 2019. I regularly worked in Venezuela, Lebanon, and Iraq. And, of course, again and …
Tensions in the skies. RT presented a news story of the United States intercepting a fleet of Russian bombers off the Alaskan coast. Four Russian Tu-95 bombers, accompanied by Su-35 and MiG-31 fighters jets, flew from Siberia toward Alaska where they were shadowed by US F-22 fighters. The US and NORAD admitted that the Russian planes stayed in international airspace and did not enter American sovereign airspace.
Siberia and Alaska are close. At its narrowest point the Bering Strait separates Russia and the US by only 88.5 km (55 mi), so it wouldn’t take long upon leaving one coastline to approach …
Police and National Guard Attacking Protestors Outside the White House in 2020 (Erin Schaff, New York Times)
“Movement” politics is how the people flex their power, while electoral politics under the corporate duopoly is the domain of the moneyed classes.
— Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report
While it’s myth that after the stock market crash of 1929, brokers pitched themselves off of tall buildings in Lower Manhattan (None did. A real buzz killer), there was an uptick in suicides among moguls by less dramatic means for a few years. Today, …
How Implicit Bias and Racism Have Affected Marginalized Communities During COVID-19
by Beau Peters / June 19th, 2020
Image source: Pixabay
It seems almost ironic that it took an unknown pathogen sweeping like a wildfire around the globe to call the world’s attention to what black and brown people have understood for centuries.
Or at least, it would be ironic, if it weren’t so heartbreakingly sad. The fact is that communities of color have been suffocated under the knee of implicit bias and racism since long before George Floyd took his final breaths on that Minneapolis street.
And just as Floyd’s death has perhaps, finally, been the …
If you log on to the website of the restaurant in which I currently work, the first words that jump out at you are local, modern, authentic. They describe themselves as a modern Italian restaurant that uses the freshest locally sourced ingredients, whose chefs are respectful to Italian cooking methods while providing their guests the most bold and authentic flavors of Italy. They also invite everyone to join them every Sunday for a contemporary Italian Brunch filled with everyone’s favorite breakfast classics and house-made mimosas. And of course, everything on the menu is advertised as being Farm to Table.
Funding Private Enterprises With Public Funds Must Be Outlawed. Defund Charter Schools.
by Shawgi Tell / June 18th, 2020
Now is not the time to divert even more public funds to private businesses like charter schools. Disaster capitalism has harmed the public interest and public schools in many ways. The nation’s public schools have been suffering budget cuts for years and now with the “COVID Pandemic” they will experience deeper funding cuts. Yet the federal government and state governments continue to funnel huge sums of public funds to segregated non-profit and for-profit charter schools that operate without transparency and close regularly. ((See, for example, Jan Resseger (June 17, 2020), Federal CARES Act Public Education Relief Dollars Quietly Flow …
Frontline healthcare, transit, and grocery clerk workers are too busy risking their lives helping and saving people exposed to the deadly Covid-19 pandemic to see themselves emerging as the force that can overcome decades of commercial obstruction to full Medicare for All.
These heroic, courageous, and selfless people are getting the job done, often without protective equipment and adequate facilities. Many of them get extremely sick or die from Covid-19.
Fat cat CEO’s are placing full-page ads elaborately praising their workers whom they regularly underpaid and disrespected before Covid-19. These bosses are now recognizing both the physical and moral courage it takes …
The international community’s rejection of Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council isn’t a surprise. In the below introduction to my recently published House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy I detail how Liberal foreign policy has largely mimicked that of Stephen Harper who lost a bid for the Security Council in 2010.
*****
Justin Trudeau presents himself as “progressive” on foreign affairs. The Liberals claim to have brought Canada “back” after the disastrous Stephen Harper government. But, this book will …
“What is the Secret of Soylent Green?” — leading question from the theatrical trailer to the 1973 major motion picture release Soylent Green.
We live in an age of Fake News based on Alternative Facts spanning the full spectrum dominance of mis-to-disinformation. One rides the painted pony of the Major Media Circus and this “brave new world” becomes one mad, gyrating, hallucinatory blur. Acid for the Masses, with “Reality” transformed into a vast, virtual Rorschach Blot. Baked into this seemingly infinite “blot of info” — like some other virus spliced into a coronavirus in a Bio-lab, for example — are equally …
The banning of deadly police practices by many American states and cities following the murder of an African American man, George Floyd, at the hands of Minneapolis police officers is, once more, shedding light on US-Israeli collaboration in the fields of security and crowd-control.
From California to New York, and from Washington State to Minneapolis, all forms of neck restraints and chokeholds that are used by police while dealing with suspects are no longer allowed by local, state, or federal authorities.
Things along the Indian-Chinese border in the Himalayas have rarely lacked interest, notably along the secretive, heavily patrolled 3,488 km Line of Actual Control. Neither China nor India have ever quite sorted out their differences on that front, plagued by territorial claims over unclearly demarcated boundaries. The administration of Narendra Modi might well have wood global governments, but China’s Xi Jinping has remained cool. Old habits die hard, and memories of India’s disastrous defeat in 1962 against its populous neighbour remain vivid.
Early last month, soldiers from both armies engaged in a fistfight of sizeable proportion akin to a large …
In late May of this year, President Donald Trump’s special envoy for arms control bragged before a Washington think tank that the U.S. government was prepared to outspend Russia and China to win a new nuclear arms race. “The president has made clear that we have a tried and true practice here,” he remarked. “We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion.”
This comment was not out of line for a Trump administration official. Indeed, back in December 2016, shortly after his election, …
(Eco-Nihilism, Supra-Nationalism, and Societal Collapse)
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / June 17th, 2020
Western countries see the rest of the world as their playing field fit only for exploitation.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer in conversation with Andre Vltchek, in Jakarta, 2004
The “global playing field” is “level” only from the perspective of the west.
— Robert H. Wade
Spoiler alert
Introduction
The success of Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite (2019) has drawn attention to his back catalogue, in particular his first mainly English-language film, Snowpiercer (2013).
Snowpiercer is a fast-paced movie about a train on a global circular train track, set in the future after a climate change engineering experiment goes wrong. Ice cold temperatures freeze the world into …
The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic. In the Twin Cities, what began as spontaneous, peaceful demonstrations against the local police quickly transformed into vandalism, arson and looting after the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants by law enforcement against the protesters, while the initial incitement for the riots was …
Whatever corner of the world one happens to live in, the most pressing issues of the day affect everyone. Pandemics/epidemics and the environmental emergency; war and terrorism; poverty and food insecurity; overpopulation and the displacement of persons. Such crises cannot be limited by borders or controlled by nation states; no government or corporate power can manage them. They are interconnected global issues and they require a coordinated global response.
Drawn together by economic interest or shared geo-political concerns various allied groupings and regional alliances exist in the world. While such assemblies present the possibility of nations unifying, self-interest, ideology and partisanship …
Spellbound. Hypnotized. Entranced. Narcotized. Captivated. Anesthetized. Mesmerized. Fascinated. Mystified. Stupefied. From literature to film, our culture is rife with stories of men and women coming under the mental sway of diabolic schemers. Wielding the conditional clauses like a wand, Iago spellbinds Othello to a state of jealous rage, which leads him to kill Desdemona, his innocent wife. In the German series Perfume, a master of scent-making conjures fragrances unique to a particular person, and which makes him or her completely irresistible. In the film Inception, ingenious thieves implant formidable ideas in the subconscious of unwitting targets. Anywhere we look along …
The system is rigged, the government is corrupt, and “we the people” continue to waste our strength by fighting each other rather than standing against the tyrant in our midst.
Because the system is rigged, because the government is corrupt, and because “we the people” remain polarized and divided, the police state will keep winning and “we the people” will keep losing.
Because the system is rigged and the U.S. Supreme Court—the so-called “people’s court”—has exchanged its appointed role as a gatekeeper of justice for its new role as maintainer of the status quo, there will be little if …
It’s hard to admit how far off Brazil has strayed. Less than forty years ago, the country was coming out of a military dictatorship, and for more than three decades stood on a steady, and shiny, path to development. Now again, there’s a military president ruling the country, with a military as his Vice, several militaries on his cabinet, and hundreds of other military personnel on the lower ‘ranks’ of the government. And this military president comes in public and simply states that the Armed Forces of the country will not accept a supreme court rule if it comes out …
Imagine this: A so-called presidential historian for a major television network publishes an interview in the most famous newspaper in the world with the most famous singer/songwriter in the world, who has recently written an explosive song accusing the U.S. government of a conspiracy in the assassination of the most famous modern American president, and the interviewer never asks the singer about the specific allegations in his song except to ask him if he was surprised that the song reached number one on the Billboard hit list and other musical and cultural references that have nothing to do with the …
