by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 11th, 2020
Marcha en Venezuela contra las sanciones de Trump (Reuters)
Despite its failings at home, the United States intervenes in countries across multiple continents seeking to control their governments and resources.
This week, we look at the US’ latest efforts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia to undermine their independence and force them to serve the interests of the US government and transnational corporations.
In all three countries, the US has displayed a lack of understanding of the people and their support for their revolutionary processes, and as a result, is …
They’re here! No, not the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We’re not being colonized by giant alien fruit. I’m afraid it is a little more serious than that. People’s minds are being taken over by a much more destructive and less otherworldly force … a force that transforms them overnight into aggressively paranoid, order-following, propaganda-parroting totalitarians.
You know the people I’m talking about. Some of them are probably your friends and family, people you have known for years, and who had always seemed completely rational, but who are now convinced that we need to radically alter the fabric …
It is simply astonishing that the first attempt by the Guardian – the only major British newspaper styling itself as on the liberal-left – to properly examine the contents of a devastating internal Labour party report leaked in April is taking place nearly four months after the 860-page report first came to light.
If you are a Labour party member, the Guardian is the only “serious”, big-circulation paper claiming to represent your values and concerns.
One might therefore have assumed that anything that touches deeply on Labour party affairs – on issues of transparency and probity, on the subversion of the party’s …
by Bill Hackwell and Alicia Jrapko / August 10th, 2020
Photo Credit: Albert Eisenstaedt
This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9 as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity. Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki, Japan that came just three days after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then Democratic President Truman could be to …
Australia’s the kind of place where, after twenty years here, you can wake up one morning to a sucker-punch epiphany — wow! This is what it would be like if the South had won the Civil War. No slavery, but a mindset, sometimes an arrogance that comes at you like Dylan’s twisty freight train. Not a place to feel like an outsider. It can seem a bit surreal, a place where, from coast to coast, they can force their children to read To Kill A Mockingbird in the day …
One of the greatest obstacles to greater distribution of wealth and power, and therefore to an equitable society, is control of – and controls on – speech and the media. Most films, television, newspapers, Internet suppliers and other mass media are in the hands of large corporations. Even social media are controlled by large corporations, despite the …
There are few more righteous sights than the paunchy US Secretary of State savaging the People’s Republic of China with his next volley on Chinese territorial aspirations. In July, Mike Pompeo released a statement putting any uncertain minds at ease on where Washington stood on the matter. “We are making clear: Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them.”
International politics, for all that confidence, rides on the stead of hypocrisy. The more vehement a condemnation regarding a course of conduct, the more likely …
Silencing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul was a feat of primeval brutality that sent a shudder through even the most hardened officials. The House of Saud, and in particular certain members of it, had gotten a taste for blood. Soon after Khashoggi’s slicing and dicing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul at the hands of a specially assembled hit squad, another was sent ostensibly to do away with Saad al-Jabri, a former Saudi Arabian intelligence official.
The plot was foiled. The curiosity of Canadian border agents about the squad was piqued as they attempted to enter the country at Toronto’s …
Protests against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have raged on for weeks, turning violent sometimes. Israelis are furious at their government’s mediocre response to the coronavirus pandemic, especially as COVID-19 disease is experiencing a massive surge throughout the country.
Netanyahu warned protesters, thousands of whom have been rallying outside his residence in Jerusalem, against “anarchy (and) violence”. Scenes of utter chaos and violent arrests have been a daily occurrence in a country that is already in the throes of a political crisis, largely, if not exclusively, linked to the Prime Minister himself.
Desperate to create any distractions from his many …
Photo by Marc Norton
I got the email firing me from my job at the Giants ballpark on Monday evening, July 27. On Tuesday evening I learned from the San Francisco Examiner website that I was also being fired from my job at the Warriors new stadium, and that there were 2,154 other food service workers being shown the door at these two sports venues. That was a pretty cold way to get the news.
Stadium workers are overwhelmingly people of color. San Francisco stadium workers in particular have …
When US President Harry S. Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by another on Nagasaki a few days later, he was not acting as an agent untethered from history. In the wheels of his wearied mind lay the battered Marines who, despite being victorious, had received sanguinary lashings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
A fear grew, and US military sources speculated about, the slaughter that might follow an invasion of the Japanese homeland. They also pondered the future role of the Soviets, and wondered whether there were other means by which …
Massive uncontrolled unprecedented wild fires are consuming portions of the Amazon rainforest and several regions of the Arctic. Somebody somewhere must be asking why all of a sudden in unison, all over creation, two of the planets largest ecosystems are going up in smoke. It’s eerily spine chilling.
Major fires have hit the Amazon and the Arctic for the second year in a row. ((NewScientist, June 26, 2020.))
Where’s the world’s largest fire alarm when so desperately needed?
Sure, all of mainstream press covers the fires and people hear about the fires and read about the fires. But that’s the end of any …
Review of Dr. Klaus Volkamer’s new book, Weighing Soul Substance
by William T. Hathaway / August 7th, 2020
Dr. Klaus Volkamer’s new book, Weighing Soul Substance, builds bridges across the gulf that has separated science from spirituality, materialism from mysticism. It confirms the reality of auras, clairvoyance, remote viewing, psychokinesis, telepathy, and precognition, and presents empirical evidence that these phenomena have a material aspect. By using newly developed measuring technologies Volkamer detected changes in the mass of objects and people resulting only from mental activity. He proved that our thoughts produce physical changes in us and the world around us. “[H]uman thought and directed attention leave a detectable impression in our surroundings.”…
All over the world, as this essay is being written, well over 17 million COVID-19 cases have been reported, and 676,000 people died. And instead of concentrating on serious research, trying to save human lives and attempting to stop the global calamity, ‘residents’ of the White House are spending all their energy on their own political survival, as well as on the survival of the regime.
In the U.S., both the establishment and opposition are buzzing with phantasmagoric conspiracy theories. Everyone is shouting, and no one is listening.
COVID-19 has been dangerously politicized. In order to …
U.S. attacks against China have shifted to a fresh round of arbitrary threats forbidding travel to the United States by employees of Huawei and by the Communist Party of China members and their families. The reasoning behind it is astounding.
WhatsApp Image 2020-08-04 at 12.19.47
To see Beirut and its port area with a huge mushroom cloud hanging above is a truly surreal sight. But what is not surreal in battered Lebanese capital?
A big part of the downtown looks flattened, thoroughly ruined.
One of my Japanese friends based in Beirut exclaimed:
It looks like Hiroshima!
It does.
Who is behind the carnage? What really happened? Nobody is claiming responsibility. Was it sabotage, a direct attack against Lebanon, or a politically motivated terrorist act?
What is certain is that the “earth moved.” One of …
Another Mother for Peace (Poster Credit: Lorraine Schneider, 1966) With survival at stake, can weapon makers change course?
Today, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, should be a day for quiet introspection. I recall a summer morning following the U.S. 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq when the segment of the Chicago River flowing past the headquarters of the world’s second largest defense contractor, Boeing, turned the rich, red color of blood.At the water’s edge, Chicago activists, long accustomed to the river being …
Those shattered mirrors once were
The smiling eyes of children,
Now are star-lit.
This city’s nights are bright.
and luminous is Lebanon.
Beirut, ornament of our world.
Faces decorated with blood
Dazzling, beyond beauty.
Their elegant splendor
Lights up the city’s lanes.
And radiant is Lebanon.
Beirut, ornament of our world.
Every charred house, every ruin
Is equal to Darius’ citadels.
Every warrior brings envy to Alexander.
Every daughter is like Laila.
This city stands at time’s creation.
This city …
Most corporate retailers rely and count on maintaining constant environments of mistrust, fear and turnover of the people they employ to boost their profitability. By avoiding anything resembling allegiance among their staff, these barons of modern day capitalism turn and burn personnel while avoiding costly expenditures such as benefits and pay increases, instead transferring that money into their already-bloated coffers. If you’re unfortunate enough to have chugged a six pack of big box corporate Kool-Aid propaganda you may temporarily fall under the spell of their we’re one big happy family façade, but it’s only a matter of time until the …
Alleged Cover-up of Civilians Murdered by UK Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan
by Media Lens / August 6th, 2020
On August 1, a rare in-depth investigative piece appeared on the BBC News website based on credible and serious allegations that UK Special Forces had executed unarmed civilians in Afghanistan. The BBC article was produced in tandem with a report, ‘“Rogue SAS Afghanistan execution squad” exposed by email trail’, published by the Sunday Times.
Special Forces are the UK’s elite specialist troops, encompassing both the SAS (Special Air Service) and the SBS (Special Boat Service). The allegation, by two senior officers, is that there was a ‘deliberate policy’ of British Special …
On Sunday a demonstration is planned in Montréal against the Canada Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA). Under the banner “Against Israel’s annexation of the Jordan Valley. No to the Canada Israel Free Trade Agreement!”, the march is seeking to politicize CIFTA amidst Israel’s plan to formally annex parts of the West Bank.
The march follows an open letter released last month by over 100 Montréal artists and activists calling for the cancellation of CIFTA.
Signed in 1997, CIFTA was Canada’s fourth free trade agreement and first outside the Western hemisphere (US, NAFTA and Chile). In an implicit …
“Some fell to the ground and their stomachs already expanded full, burst and organs fell out. Others had skin falling off them and others still were carrying limbs. And one in particular was carrying their eyeballs in their hand.”
The above is an account by a Hiroshima survivor talking about the fate of her schoolmates. It was read out in the British parliament in 2016 by Scottish National Party MP Chris Law during a debate about Britain’s nuclear arsenal.
In response to a question from another Scottish National Party MP, George Kereven, the then British PM Theresa May …
Silicon Valley continues to sprawl in influence, and its modern robber barons bestride the globe with a confidence verging on contempt. The technology giants that mark that region of California are praised as “virtuosos of ingenuity,” to use Steve Forbes’ words, “creating and supplying products and services that were once unimaginable and that have been enabling us to survive the COVID lockdowns and working from home”.
For the most part, they have been encouraged to do so by those in Congress, who have been their handmaidens and coddlers. Now, big and bold, the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook …
What will it take for the idea of a two-state solution, which was hardly practical to begin with, to be completely abandoned?
Every realistic assessment of the situation on the ground indicates, with palpable clarity, that there can never be a viable Palestinian state in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.
Politically, the idea is also untenable. Those who are still marketing the ‘two-state solution’, less enthusiastically now as compared with the euphoria of twenty years ago, are paralyzed in the face of the Israeli-American onslaught on any attempt at making ‘Palestine’ a tangible reality.
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.
— Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business
While America continues to fixate on the drama-filled reality show scripted by the powers-that-be, directed from the nation’s capital, and played out in high definition across the country, the American Police State …
Excerpts from the writings of Esmeralda Chang from her forthcoming book Tracking the Feral Hog: The Confessions and Polemics of Esmeralda Chang.
by Esmeralda Chang / August 4th, 2020
On American Democracy
In American political discourse we frequently hear the term “our democracy.” For example, the Russiagaters are fond of this term. The term grates. The sound of the utterance “our democracy” is not as bad as the sound of fingernails scratching a chalkboard, but it’s reminiscent.
It’s been said that a great advantage of democracy is that there will be no wars under it. Since the people have no desire for war they will not vote for it. The people do not have the motive the dictator or king or queen has to start war for self enrichment. But the …
My best effort to describe the current precipice we’re on in 2,000 words.
I have been a resident of Portland, Oregon since 2007. So I have been hearing from more people than usual lately, all asking the same question: what’s going on in Portland? Portland Federal Court House Protest
I find myself struggling to give any kind of an answer to this question. As with any substantive answer to a question, so much depends on …
In the natural world, there are two kinds of responses to imminent threats: either flee or fight. Most of the time, in order to maximize chances of survival, the decision has to be made by individuals or groups in less than a split second. On one hand, the option to flee is motivated by this immediate assessment. It has, of course, an important fear factor. On the other hand, the option to fight seems brave on the …
Melbourne — Being in control of a sinking ship is not enviable. Regulations previously passed have a museum feel to them, distinctly obsolete. Directions, once dictated with confidence, lack timbre. Coronavirus is serving as that most wily and cheeky of agents, with the most appropriate of accomplices: Homo sapiens. Human beings are fed up, munching on conspiracy tales, wondering when a vaccine will arrive, and generally fatigued.
Globally, people are exhausted, disgusted, deluded and dying. Somewhere in that cocktail of ill-taste are those who think they are doing their best and abide by regulations with understanding obedience. They are told about …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / August 4th, 2020
CODEPINK (Credit)
Tensions between the United States and China are rising as the U.S. election nears, with tit-for-tat consulate closures, new U.S. sanctions and no less than three U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the seas around China. But it is the United States that has initiated each new escalation in U.S.-China relations. China’s responses have been careful and proportionate, with Chinese officials such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi publicly asking the U.S. to step back from its brinkmanship to find common ground for diplomacy.
