Not the only “finest” but the ones with the biggest TV and movie coverage
While it may be common knowledge that fire departments originated as private organisations to defend the interests of property insurers, it has probably been forgotten that in the US police were originally the hired gangs of landowners and merchant-industrialists. As urban conurbations like New York City grew, the police were the action arm of the political machines that served to dominate native and immigrant workers. A job in the police department was a patronage …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 10th, 2020
Demonstrators on Wednesday, June 3, 2020 in downtown Los Angeles (AP Photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu)
The breadth of the uprising is astounding with antiracism protests in all 50 states and more than 500 cities plus more than 13,500 arrests in 43 cities. This weekend there were larger numbers of protesters in the streets including cities and towns of all sizes. In Washington, DC, where we were, the crowds were multi-racial and crossed all ages but were dominated by black youth. People were united in their opposition to racism and …
Reinstate Colin Kaepernick to a Place of Prominence to Lead the NFL!
by Kim Petersen / June 9th, 2020
The National Football League is ruing the day it denigrated the peaceful protests by some players against police brutality and inequality.
The NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has been pushed to condemn racism and admit to being wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier. He encouraged speaking out and peaceful protest. He said Black lives matter. He said he will be reaching out to players who have spoken up.
Goodell’s Missing Words
What Goodell did not do is apologize. He did not mention the most prominent peaceful protester …
In the near-two decades since the International Criminal Court was set up to try the worst violations of international human rights law, it has faced harsh criticism for its highly selective approach to the question of who should be put on trial.
Created in 2002, the court, it was imagined, would act as a deterrent against the erosion of an international order designed to prevent a repetition of the atrocities of the Second World War.
Such hopes did not survive long.
The court, which sits in The Hague in the Netherlands, almost …
Justin Trudeau is campaigning aggressively for a seat on the UN Security Council. Over the past month he has called about two dozen world leaders and recently organized calls with groupings of UN ambassadors from the Americas, Africa, Arab states and Asia. Just prior to the pandemic the PM attended the African Union Summit in Ethiopia and met with all African ambassadors in Ottawa to make his pitch for Canada’s Security Council bid.
Why devote so much energy to winning the seat? Some have labeled it a “vanity project”, which is not far off the mark. A more apt description of …
Censorship of alternative media is becoming more widespread in the COVID19 era. This article documents the case of SouthFront.
Introducing SouthFront
Where do you find daily news, videos, analysis and maps about the conflict in Syria? Detailed reports about the conflicts in Libya, Yemen and Venezuela? News about the rise of ISIS in Mozambique? Original analysis of events in the US and Russia? SouthFront is the place.
SouthFront is unique and influential, reaching a global audience of hundreds of thousands. They have opinion articles but their reports and videos are informational and factual. Their website says,
SouthFront focuses on issues of international relations, …
Beginning in December 1951, Ernesto “Che” Guevara took a nine-month break from medical school to travel by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. One of his goals was gaining practical experience with leprosy. On the night of his twenty-fourth birthday, Che was at La Colonia de San Pablo in Peru swimming across the river to join the lepers. He walked among six hundred lepers in jungle huts looking after themselves in their own way.
Che would not have been satisfied to just study and sympathize with them – …
In early November 1966, my sister and I?armed with a bucket of home-made paste, a wide brush, and a thick roll of “Vote No” posters?headed off from my student apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to plaster the surrounding area with the signs. The Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA), a very powerful police union, had placed a referendum on the New York City ballot to remove civilians from the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
We were a very small part of a long struggle?one that continues to this day?to develop a public policy that would curb police misconduct, often …
Lockdowns imposed in response to Covid-19 forced millions of people to stay at home, businesses closed and a widespread hush descended. The major beneficiary of the controls has been the natural environment; in particular there has been a dramatic reduction in air pollution everywhere. But as countries begin to lift restrictions, road traffic levels are once again increasing, air and noise pollution rising.
Changes to working patterns and daily living have created a unique opportunity to re-imagine how we live and work. Central to any new pattern needs to be the environment; many people recognize this and the importance of not …
I shouted out,
Who Killed the Kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me.
— Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, “Sympathy for the Devil” from the 1968 album Beggar’s Banquet
Destroying my 46″ Magnavox flat screen was the most liberating act of a lifetime. Damn thing told me one too many lies, so I put my right Birkenstock through it and sent it to the landfill in the next Tuesday garbage truck. There are downsides though. For example, I completely missed the Great Toilet Paper Stampede at the beginning of the premier episode of “Coronamania”. Lucky for me, I had a few rolls on hand, thus avoiding painful dog-style butt-scoots on a …
What I am saying here is familiar to many people with a knowledge of actual history, rather than the fantasy version in the textbooks. But actual history is a hidden thing, and therefore frequent reminders are necessary. Here’s my effort in this regard for today. We can call it an editorial.
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Trump wants riot police and soldiers to “dominate,” one of his favorite words as well as pastimes. While there is certainly wanton police brutality happening every day against demonstrators and other people across this country, many …
Wafaa Aludaini is a witness to many of Gaza’s recent tragedies and also never-ending resistance. She experienced the violent Israeli occupation, the subsequent blockade on the impoverished Strip, and several wars that resulted in the death and wounding of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
But none of Israel’s wars impacted Aludaini’s life as much as the 2014 onslaught which Israel dubbed ‘Operation Protective Edge.’
Of the nearly 18,000 houses destroyed, two homes, one belonging to Wafaa’s family and the other to her in-laws, were also destroyed by Israel’s bombs.
Gaza’s infrastructure, which was already dilapidated as a result of previous wars and …
The “lost child” endures as motif and theme, the stalking shadow of much literature, the background to a society’s anxiety. The child, often deemed innocent, becomes the ink blot of loss in such disappearance. In Australia, it was captured by Peter Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety(1999). In wide spaces, innocence has much room to go wrong in, to vanish and encourage judgment.
Madeleine McCann was never merely a lost child who disappeared in the Algarve from her family’s holiday apartment on May 3, 2007. She remains a fixation of the British media stable, and, it …
Who could have guessed that the Floyd protest was the best Coronavirus vaccine? The same people that warned us that the virus is the deadliest plague and staying-at-home is the only escape, now commanded us to march amongst throngs, shoulder-to-shoulder against police! It appears they have the dreadful pandemic under their command, on tap: now it’s coming, now it’s not. Not every demo has the same curative potential: it is very dangerous to demonstrate against lockdown, but it is perfectly …
It’s been a historic and heavy two weeks in the US, following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Calls for justice have grown from a mid-sized protest outside a precinct to a nation-wide uprising, leading Donald Trump to run to his bunker and threaten to call in the army. We will be continuing to follow events as they develop, but thought we’d send out a quick email with our latest vids, and some resources for navigating threats from repression, misinformation and political division.
The ABCs Insider program broadcast each Sunday morning is one of the ABCs most watched and most important programs. The three guests are drawn from the country’s mainstream media outlets. This is perhaps itself a limitation considering the broad range and frequently high standards of much political analysis in the country are non-mainstream outlets. The invited person subjected to questioning by the show’s host is almost invariably a politician drawn from either the Liberal or Labor parties.
One would be unwise to expect much more than a partisan view from the weekly political guest. It is, however, not unreasonable to think …
It was inevitable that when the coronavirus pandemic reached the occupied Palestinian territories, as it did in early March, it would find its first purchase in Bethlehem, a few miles south-east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.
Staff at the Angel Hotel in Beit Jala, one of Bethlehem’s satellite towns, tested positive after they were exposed to a group of infected Greek tourists. Israel worked hurriedly with the Palestinian Authority – the …
The protests are reminding people in Los Angeles of an incident in the early 90s that led to riots and civil unrest. CGTN correspondent Ediz Tiyansan discussed that with history professor Brenda Stevenson, who’s written a book about that period. She says what happened then draws similarities to what’s happening today. #protest
150 years ago, on April 21, 1870, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, was born. According to many, he was the greatest revolutionary of all times, a man who gave birth to both internationalism and anti-imperialism.
It is time to “revisit Communism”. It is also time to ask some basic, essential questions:
How is it possible that a system so logical, progressive, and so superior to what is, up till now, governing the world, failed to permanently overthrow the nihilism and brutality of capitalism, imperialism and neo-colonialism?
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Without any doubt, you have been told many horrifying things about Communism, especially if you …
I am not trying to be cute and play with words. That title is meant to convey what it says, so let me explain.
The people who own the United States and their allies around the world have a plan. It is so simple that it is extremely devious. Their plan has been in operation for many years. It has most people bamboozled because it is Janus-faced by design, overt one day, covert the next, but both faces operate under one controlling head. Some call this head the Deep-State. Even the Deep-State calls itself the Deep-State in a double fake. It …
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is basking in the popularity of his meticulous Covid-19 news briefings and simultaneously predicting a pandemic-driven $61 billion state deficit over four years. Astonishingly, the Governor electronically rebates an existing tiny stock transfer sales tax back to Wall Street. This stock transfer sales tax, bringing in an estimated 13 to 16 billion dollars a year, would reduce forthcoming budget cuts in health, education, transportation, and other safety nets.
No Governor in the country has the luxury of simply keeping very significant tax revenues that are already collected to avoid cutting necessities of life. Yet Governor Cuomo …
Every 4 June, a famous photo from 1989 is splashed all over the world, as a symbol against Chinese “totalitarianism” and “bloodthirsty brutality”. You know the one I’m talking about, Tank Man. It is flaunted like a Western talisman to celebrate “freedom” and “rebellion” in the face of “communist-socialist tyranny”.
Nonetheless, like all the disinformation by the Big Lie Propaganda Machine (BLPM), you’ve been blatantly brainwashed for 31 long years. Many media lies are perpetrated by omission. A truth untold is a lie, and Tank Man tops the list.
• UPDATED article on June 8: The writer has added new research, changed the slant and expanded it.
More than 100 companies are competing to be first in the race to get a COVID-19 vaccine to market. It’s a race against time, not because the death rate is climbing but because it is falling – to the point where there could soon be too few subjects to prove the effectiveness of the drug.
So says Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company that is a frontrunner in the race. Soriot said on May 24th:
The inability of the outdated capitalist economic system to provide for the needs of the people and to sustain itself has been exposed repeatedly throughout history.
However, 2020 is revealing just how grave and profound the failures and dangers of this exhausted system of advanced commodity production are. Even mainstream news sources cannot prettify the numbers.
On May 15, 2020 the Financial Times reported that, “U.S. industrial production contracted by the most in more than a century.” ((Peter Wells. Plunge in US industrial and retail activity in April laid bare, Financial Times, May 15, 2020.)) Retail sales also fell by the …
Comic ZinePaul Craig Roberts, a staunch opponent of police brutality in his writings, seeks to deny white racism or argue that we are all racist. In a recent article, he writes, “If white people are racist, how was Obama twice elected president of the United States?”
With all due respect, the question is puerile. First, as it is worded, it posits that white people are a monolith, that all white people are racist. Second, it posits that the election …
Armed police transporting suspected members of a communist youth group, Jakarta, Indonesia, October 10, 1965. Photo Credit: Vincent Bevins)
I’m guessing that “Jakarta Is Coming” or “Plan Jakarta” won’t elicit immediate recognition from most of you and until very recently that was also true for me. But before defining it, here’s a bit of necessary background:
In 1965-66, the United States engineered a systematic mass murder in Indonesia that killed more than one million civilians and an additional one million were herded into concentration camps. I’ve been following this …
