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As most of the world is forced to stay home, internet and technology play essential roles in almost every aspect of the population’s shelter-at-home lives. The internet keeps loved ones communicating and in touch, informs people of what’s going on in the world, connects students to their teachers and professors, and provides access to the office for those able to work at home.
But what happens to the millions of Americans without an internet connection? Pew Research found that roughly two-thirds of Americans have …
Fred Magdoff,Professor Emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and author of many articles and books on ecology, agriculture and economy, frequent Monthly Review contributor and closely associated with struggles of the working people, discusses the coronavirus pandemic in light of capitalism and agriculture in the following interview conducted on April 2, 2020.
***** Farooque Chowdhury:Since long, you are telling about and analyzing environment and ecology, and the devastation the capitalist system is doing to these. Today, in view of this coronavirus pandemic, how do you find the situation in view of your analysis?
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Bk. II, Ch. 5; source: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 6 (Romane und Novellen I), dtv Verlag, München, 1982, p. 397 (II.5).
I keep plotting a revolution no one else seems to be interested in having. So be it. I’ll have my solitary revolution. There will be no pink hats, guillotines, or marches, …
The backlash may be more revealing than the film itself, but both inform us where we are at in the fight against climate change and ecological collapse. The environmental establishment’s frenzied attacks against Planet of the Humans says a lot about its commitment to big money and technological solutions.
A number of prominent individuals tried to ban the film by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore. Others berated the filmmakers for being white, male and overweight. Many thought leaders have declared they won’t watch it.
Despite the hullabaloo, the central points in the …
When it comes to the politics of medicine and disease, the United States has always attempted to steal the limelight, while adding the now faded colouring of universal human welfare. In 1965, Washington pledged financial and technical support to the international effort to eradicate smallpox, though the initiative had initially been spurred by the Soviet Union at the behest of virologist and deputy health minister Victor Zhdanov in 1958. At that point in time, the World Health Organisation was not so much a punch bag as vehicle for US foreign policy, to be cultivated rather than rebuked.
The Keystone Cops have nothing on the rag-tag group of soldiers of fortune who failed earlier this week in their implausible plot to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, trigger a military coup, and install the US puppet, Juan Guaidó, in the presidency.
We know all about the hair-brained scheme due to a falling out of the thieves. The man behind the plot, Jordan Goudreau, spilled the beans because Guaidó only paid Goudreau $50,000 of the $200 million promised in a contract both men signed. Goudreau has released the contract as …
We are living in strange times indeed. This crisis raises many questions about the nature of freedom and what our expectations are, or should be. Everyone has their own notions about what freedom means and how far that should extend to oneself and indeed, to everyone else.
I want to start with a look at where we’ve come from before I look at where we are now, as I feel it gives a better understanding of our definitions of freedom and a better context for viewing where we are, at this moment in time.
75 years ago Germany surrendered to allied forces finally ending the ravages of the Second World War.
Today, as the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of this victory, why not think very seriously about finally winning that war once and for all?
If you’re confused by this statement, then you might want to sit down and take a deep breath before reading on. Within the next 12 minutes, you will likely discover a disturbing fact which may frighten you a little bit: The allies never actually won World War II…
Now please don’t get me wrong. I am eternally thankful for the immortal …
George Hughes front-rightThe “good,” gun-toting white goons who recently protested safety measures necessitated by COVID 19 at the Michigan state Capitol had nothing on “good” white folks in Sherman, Texas ninety years ago today. They burned down their own courthouse to get at a black suspect, and then burned him as well.
On May 9, 1930, a 41-year-old African American man named George Hughes was asphyxiated and then burned to a crisp in Sherman, Texas.
According to reports, Hughes had moved to the area from Honey Grove only …
The world is amidst the COVID-19 crisis and in our corner of the planet a presidential campaign is reduced to a single issue: Trump/not Trump. Pick your poison.
At a time that calls for national leadership or least debate on the issues, Congress unanimously passed the two-trillion-dollar Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act handing money to corporations so that they can, among other things, buy up the competition at pandemic prices.
What passes for a liberal agenda is without content
Since the 2008 economic collapse engineered by Wall Street, most of the world’s economies have been running on gas fumes and more bankrupt schemes and failed policies. Few, if any, economies have been able to return to weak pre-2008 economic growth levels. Even the Chinese and Indian economic “miracles” are not that miraculous.
To be sure, major capitalist economies have been declining since the late 1970s, and for the past few years imperialist organizations like the IMF and World Bank have routinely reviseddownward multiple economic growth estimates that are low to begin with.
Financialization, stock market manipulation, the refusal to …
In the course of the evolving patchwork of rent strikes happening right now across the US, there is suddenly a lot of talk in the press about how much the landlords are hurting. The landlords, of course, own the press, control the federal government, run all fifty states, and have a stranglehold on most of the city councils, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
My landlord, an investment company called the Randall Group that owns hundreds of residential and commercial properties up …
A health professional told me back in March that face masks were ineffective but that respirators (the N95) were. Because of the source, I thought there must be validity to this. However, it seemed counterintuitive. I reasoned that there would be differentials between using any type of mask versus no mask because no mask usage would allow aerosols to penetrate unabated, whereas a mask should capture much of the aerosol and reduce risk of spread to others and presumably should also function to mitigate breathing in viral-laden droplets. Because of the greater density of respirator material, the prophylactic would be …
It was nearly twenty years ago at a Muslim conference in Washington D.C. that I heard the distressing argument that Palestine should not be made a central topic in the American Muslim political agenda.
The point, which took many by surprise, was enunciated by a young American Pakistani Muslim academic, whose name is not important for my purpose here.
What I found reassuring then, however, was that almost everyone at the gathering shook their head in disagreement. The young academic was clearly an intellectual pariah. It was clear that Muslims, at least the attendees of that specific conference, will not be abandoning …
I admit upfront that this is a hard newsletter to read. It is about debt. There is a bloodless quality to the way that we talk about the debt of the poorer nations. There is nothing poetic here. The numbers are alienating, their outcome shocking.
In mid-April, eighteen heads of government from Africa and Europe publicly urged the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank, and the New Development Bank as well as other regional institutions to announce an ‘immediate moratorium on all bilateral and multilateral debt payments, both public and private, until …
On 1 May, International Labour Day (except in the USA), ((It is always worth recalling in the context of American exceptionalism that Labour Day in the US is the first Monday in September. Everywhere else (apart from Canada) Labour Day is celebrated on 1 May, in commemoration of the Haymarket massacre in Chicago! During a labour demonstration on 4 May 1886, a police provocateur detonated a bomb. Eight labour activists were arrested and tried, four were executed by hanging; one committed suicide and the remaining three were pardoned after …
In a previous paper entitled “Big Pharma Beware: Dr. Montagnier Shines New Light on Covid-19 and the Future of Medicine,” I elaborated upon the powerful intervention of the Nobel Prize winning virologist Dr. Luc Montagnier. In that location, I covered the reasonability of Montagnier’s assessment of the laboratory origin theory of COVID-19 and I discussed my reasons why his China-origin hypothesis is both naive and potentially dangerous. For anyone who wishes to fully appreciate reading this article, then I recommend either first reviewing my previous report OR watch the 2014 documentary Water Memory.
“We honor what we value,” goes the old saying. In our hedonistic culture we value most those who can put a ball in a hole. We ignore those who save lives through civic action.
The sports champions – golf, basketball, football, and baseball – receive riches and accolades from the masses. They are inducted into “Halls of Fame” and are the subjects of biographies, and documentary and feature films. As for the mass life-savers –few even know their names, much less their dramatic victories against overwhelming odds.
I was reminded of this contrast by a major New York Times Sports feature on Tiger Woods …
One hundred years ago, representatives from a few powerful countries convened at San Remo, a sleepy town on the Italian Riviera. Together, they sealed the fate of the massive territories confiscated from the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in World War I.
It was on April 25, 1920, that the San Remo Conference Resolution was passed by the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. Western Mandates were established over Palestine, Syria and ‘Mesopotamia’ – Iraq. The latter two were theoretically designated for provisional independence, while Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland there.
By the end of 2020 more people will have died from hunger, despair and suicide than from the corona disease. We, the world, is facing a famine-pandemic of biblical proportions. This real pandemic will overtake the fake COVID-19 pandemic by a long shot. The hunger pandemic reminds of the movie the Hunger Games, as it is premised on similar circumstances of a dominant few commanding who can eat and who will die – by competition.
This hunger pandemic will be under-reported or not reported at all in the mainstream media. In fact, it has started already. In the west the attention …
It all spoke well of British justice, which meant poorly. As one correspondent from the Australian Associated Press put it in describing the latest case hearing for Julian Assange, “There are no lawyers here in person. Assange will not be present. There are 6 journalists here and there will be 6 members of the public.”
The icy District Judge Vanessa Baraitser had already relented last week on vacating May 18 …
The coronavirus pandemic is worlds apart from the financial meltdown of 2008-09. Even so the government’s response was identical in one telltale way. Congress once again gave a special dose of tender loving care to taxpayers who need it the least.
The 2008 bailout suspended annual required minimum distribution (RMDs) from retirement accounts. Surprise, surprise, the same tax break showed up in the $2.2 trillion stimulus signed by President Trump.
Waiving RMDs is welcome news for the well-heeled. They have plenty of income outside their IRAs and 401(k)s. They’re fine with passing up a distribution, and seriously happy …
Throughout history there has been only one thing that ruling interests have ever wanted — and that’s everything.”
— Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), p. 46.
A recent lead editorial ((April 28, 2020.)) in the New York Times reads “Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s.” Written by Jamelle Bouie, an African-American millennial (age 33) on the paper’s editorial staff, the piece contains the following opening and closing paragraphs:
Class consciousness does not flow automatically out of class identity. Being a worker does not necessarily mean you will come to identify as a worker. Instead, you …
In 1982, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, blew the whistle on the Reagan Administration’s Project BEST (Better Education Skills through Technology): a techno-fascist plan to privatize the American school system by selling it out to Big Tech corporations that deliver B. F. Skinner’s operant-conditioning method of “programmed instruction” through computerized “teaching machines.” Almost thirty years later, the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act” is primed to pump a flood of federal education funds into online charter school corporations, such as K12 Inc., …
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful. And so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people. And neither do we.
— President George W. Bush, August. 5, 2004
Hatred is disorientating, and becomes, over time, a form of enduring fanaticism. The attacks on US President Donald Trump tend to fall into this camp. Much criticism of his often grotesque conduct, from his conversion of high office to a social media spectacle of grabs and interruptions, to his whole lowering of the tone, is warranted. He has brought locker room morals and the ethics of …
Additional to the global health crisis and the coming worldwide economic collapse, Covid-19 is fuelling a humanitarian crisis. The World Food Program (WFP) warns that, “millions of civilians living in conflict-scarred nations, including many women and children, face being pushed to the brink of starvation, with the spectre of famine a very real and dangerous possibility.” The WFP’s view that the biggest impact of the pandemic will not by caused by the virus directly, but the hunger that flows from it, is in line with other concerned groups.
In a recent statement the WFP warned that “unless swift action is taken”, …
There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.
You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi …
United States president Donald Trump is proud of the US effort against COVID-19. In his 1 May remarks on protecting America’s seniors, he said,
Through aggressive actions and the devotion of our doctors and nurses, however, we have held our fatality rate far below hard-hit other countries such as Spain and Italy and United Kingdom and Sweden. We’re way below other countries.
Trump employs the logical fallacy of the confirmation bias. In this case, he selectively chooses from among the most ravaged world nations suffering from COVID-19 to compare the US. …
Back in the 1960s, the British academic establishment was rather excited about the work of Karl Popper, the philosopher who developed the concept of empirical falsification. Popper was keen to define the demarcation between the scientific and that which only mimics empiricism and scientism. A theory, according to Popper, can be considered scientific if, and only if, it is potentially falsifiable by experiments or its predictions. Popper attempted to create criteria that would deny psychoanalysis, Marxism and astrology any scientific status based on the fact that these theories are not falsifiable.
One may wonder what Popper would have to say about …
We present the narrative of this report and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their consideration. Ten Commissioners—five Republicans and five Democrats chosen by elected leaders from our nation’s capital at a time of great partisan division—have come together to present this report without dissent. We have come together with a unity of purpose because our nation demands it. [The US Pandemic of 2020], was a [time] of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States. The nation was unprepared. How …
