by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 4th, 2020
Now that May Day is behind us, we must build the General Strike campaign. The next strike day, June 1, should be the culmination of a month of working toward the day of action. This is the responsibility of everyone involved in the General Strike movement.
Join the next Popular Resistance General Strike call on Thursday, May 28 at 7:00 pm Eastern. Register at .
This is an ongoing campaign. We emphasize it is a campaign as campaigns provide ongoing opportunities to build the movement. The goal is to ensure …
A new collection of maps found here displays what militarism looks like in the world. Here’s a brief guide to using and understanding them.
Across the top are 10 drop-down menus on these topics: Wars, Weapons, U.S. Weapons, Money, Nukes, Chemical and Biological, U.S. Military, Air Strikes, Law, and Promotes Peace and Security.
Some of the topics only include one map, others multiple maps. The one with the most has eight maps. When you click on the name of a map in a drop-down menu, you’ll …
Congress seems to be at war with the states. Only $150 billion of its nearly $3 trillion coronavirus relief package – a mere 5% – has been allocated to the 50 states; and they are not allowed to use it where they need it most, to plug the holes in their budgets caused by the mandatory shutdown. On April 22, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was opposed to additional federal aid to the states, and that his preference was to allow states to go bankrupt.
No such threat looms over the banks, which have made out extremely well …
Criticism of the documentary, Planet of the Humans
by Paul Haeder / May 3rd, 2020
The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what …
Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak? No. Sabrina Williams’ 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most by any man or woman in the Open Era? No. Michael Phelps’ all-time record for Olympic gold medals? No.
Those records and all like them matter only to a few and will probably be broken someday.
The only unbroken American record that matters in the long run is the long trail of death, destruction, misery and exploitation ever since America’s birth by its power elite who eventually formed a corpocacy, or an alliance between corporate America and government America, with the former calling all the shots. If …
End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.
And you just better believe, boy,
somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight,
It’s the working, the working, just the working life
— Bruce Springsteen, “Factory” (1978)
President Trump, responding to meatpacking plant closures occasioned by COVID-19 has ordered the plants to stay open for national security purposes. No matter that over 20 U.S. meatpacking workers in the U.S. have died so far of the virus.
On April 7 Tyson Foods announced it was closing a pork processing plant in Iowa …
In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least ten or twenty years that capitalism is entering a long, drawn-out period of unprecedented global crisis. The Great Depression and World War II will likely, in retrospect, seem rather minor—and temporally condensed—compared to the many decades of ecological, economic, social, and political crises humanity is embarking on now. In fact, it’s probable that we’re in the early stages of the protracted collapse of a civilization, which is to say of a particular set of economic relations underpinning certain social, political, and cultural relations. One can …
This April 16th, Dr. Luc Montagnier became a household name around the world. This occurred as the controversial virologist decided to publicly state his support for the theory that Covid-19 is indeed a laboratory-generated creation and not a naturally occurring effect of viral evolution.
Referring to a study published at the Kusama School of Biology in New Dehli on January 31st, Montagnier (the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for his 1983 discovery of the HIV virus) made the point that the specific occurrence of HIV RNA viral segments spliced surgically within the COVID-19 genome could not have originated naturally and he …
On April 27, the Wall Street Journalreported about the creation of a “Manhattan Project” for Covid-19. A “secret group”, consisting in a dozen scientists and a few billionaires, was working “to cull the world’s most promising research on the pandemic” to then advise the White House in the best course of action.
As Rob Copeland wrote for the journal, the group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture-capitalist named Tom Cahill, a graduate from Duke University with extensive – maybe too extensive – contacts in the business world, as we will explore below. The “lockdown-era Manhattan Project”, as the …
The coronavirus depression is fast becoming as deep as the Great Depression. The federal government’s response has been too little, too late.
While sickness and death spread, while unemployment and small business failures soar, while health care and essential workers lack personal protective equipment (PPE), Congress is in recess until May 4.
The childlike dummy, Donald Trump, spouts bad advice daily in his televised briefings. Thursday he said we could beat the coronavirus by injecting disinfectants or somehow shining ultraviolet radiation inside our bodies.
Meanwhile, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, is MIA. Is he sitting on a park bench somewhere feeding bread …
As soon as the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading its tentacles throughout China and eventually to the rest of the world, the World Health Organization (WHO), along with other international groups, sounded the alarm that refugees and migrants are particularly vulnerable to the deadly disease.
“We strongly emphasize the need for inclusive national public health measures to ensure migrants and refugees have the same access to services as the resident population, in a culturally sensitive way,” Dr. Santino Severoni, Special Adviser on Health and Migration at WHO/Europe implored governments throughout …
Stop cutting down trees for biomass… STOP WOODY BIOMASS!
That should be a bumper sticker on every vehicle in America and around the world as easy-to-read bumper stickers are more effective than many forms of advertising. And, just for starters, maybe plaster that new biomass bumper sticker over the old one that reads: “My child is an honor student at….” Oh! Please!
According to LSA – University of Colorado/Boulder, wood accounts for 79% of biomass production and accounts for 3.2% of energy production. Wood dominates the worldwide biomass industry.
For perspective purposes, a paid lobbyist on behalf of trees could rightfully claim: (1) …
Photo: Bill Hackwell, Havana, Plaza of the Revolution
This photograph depicts how the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana usually looks on May 1, International Workers Day (IWD). Every year since 1959 when a revolution, whose backbone was made up of workers and peasants, was victorious against a brutal US-backed dictatorship, millions of Cubans and international friends fill Paseo from the Malecon to the Plaza to celebrate this day that honors all workers around the world. The march has also come to honor Cuba for holding out …
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
It doesn’t take a lockdown to pull from some of us humanists the universality of how deep the emotional, cultural, societal, economic and spiritual divide is between the have’s and have’s not.
As we move from “top” to “bottom” in the daily stories of how these forced social distancing measures, draconian business closures, far-reaching travel bans and the like are affecting lives, we need to have more humanistic ways of parsing …
This May Day finds us at an important historic crossroads. Amidst a global pandemic, this year the streets will be eerily silent as people forgo the marches, rallies and riots that are the annual rituals of international workers day. But while the streets may be calm, the class war rages on. Wildcat strikes are popping off among ‘essential workers’ who two months ago were seen as some of the lowest, most precarious participants of the gig economy. Prison uprisings are breaking out around the world at an unprecedented rate. And millions of tenants are withholding their rent in what could …
“This will be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.” That was U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams on April 5, touring the Sunday morning shows to warn of the worst week yet for pandemic death in the United States.
During these interviews, the Surgeon General also managed to show off his mask-making skills, an unwitting allusion to the fact that — contrary to the spectacular events of 1941 and 2001 (not to mention his own previous “guidance” against the efficacy of face masks) — we are far more likely on the brink of a 1918 moment. Not that the Surgeon General’s …
May Day, or International Workers Day, is celebrated with marches and rallies every May 1 to lift up the working people and their demands for freedom, equality, and justice. That is the Red tradition of May Day. But there is also an older Green tradition in which cultures the world over celebrate as Spring arrives in temperate and arctic climates or the wet season arrives in tropical climates. This Green tradition of May Day celebrates all that is free and life-giving on the green Earth that is our commonwealth and heritage. These Red and Green May Day traditions are complementary.
It is increasingly looking like a war – at least a new ‘cold’, ideological war.
But in the shadow of COVID-19, it goes almost unnoticed.
The blind horseman, who hates China intuitively, without knowing hardly anything about it, is leading the pack, pushing his president into a confrontation with the most populous country on Earth. His name is Peter Navarro.
Not that the president is ‘innocent’. Under him, the White House has become a haven of bigotry, of anti-Chinese racist sentiments. Here, not only China, but also Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Russia are hated. It was already converted …
A storm cloud of fear hangs in the air, palpable as the billions of cowering human bodies now living under threat of annihilation, festering in hearts, censoring rational thoughts, rotting souls, turning atheists to prayer. A virus has invaded planet earth, apparently threatening the extermination of humankind. And true to form, the victims look to their oppressors for guidance, then follow unquestioningly.
Few close friends are able to step outside the grand illusion, fully appreciating the ongoing iron-fisted and dehumanizing efforts of the cheap thugs and mass murderers who’ve been running the United States of America since before the so-called Revolutionary War, which was nothing more …
Former members of the leading Vietnam War-era peace organization in the US, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), recently circulated an open letter warning today’s young activists to – as the adage goes – do as I say and not as I did. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, these former leaders led the way in opposing the ravages of US imperialism and exposing what they called the “death culture.” Today, they are admonishing the new generation not to follow in their footsteps, but to go all out for what they call the “capitalist democrat” Joe Biden.
“Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it,” urged the Earl of Chesterfield in a letter of advice to his son penned in 1749. “No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” This has not tended to be the view of university governors the world over, notably in the field of ethical investments. The elite heavy weights have shown their flabbiness in the area, dragging in their approach to matters of environment and the climate. Money is just that; where it goes, in terms of …
Over 50,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. and the momentum is not letting down. This comes as President Trump and his allies are elevating their anti-China rhetoric to a new level. Their newest tactic: legitimize a conspiracy theory and blame a Chinese lab for “creating” the deadly virus.
But exactly how are they trying to spin the narrative?
The so-called Defense Department does not live up to its name; instead, the acronym and word Bloateddescribe this behemoth and its budget. We the people need defense, but the trillion tax dollars we spend a year do not provide it. Instead they pay for:
Some 800 US overseas military bases
Endless wars
The Nuclear Arsenal
Billions for Bombers and Battleships
These do nothing to make us secure. They have benefited few people in the US or the world, apart from bloated arms manufacturers and merchants, bloated military contractors, bloated generals, bloated politicians, and those in the high echelons of …
I define a “national crisis” as a calamitous event that imperils the overall well-being of the nation’s citizenry. For America, I suppose there could be several answers depending on the crisis: The President, the National Guard, the military, the Department of Homeland Security. In this article I am going to focus on some instances where the President’s answer was not the right one, and end with a President giving the right answer.
Take the case of FDR, for instance, and his answering the nation’s call with his New Deal policies and programs after the First Great Depression. The popular belief and …
Dynamic duo: Same bat virus, same fat profits From Havana to Helmstedt
The major reason for Cuba’s travel restrictions — always used as grounds for slandering the Cuban state — is the extreme difficulty Cuba has maintaining foreign exchange reserves essential for international trade, especially since the end of trade-in-kind with the COMECON. Every traveller from Cuba spends pesos that have to be covered by Cuba’s USD or EUR reserves. Since there are already more than enough obstacles imposed by the US embargo, every forex transaction is critical for …
This is a column I have been mulling over for a while but, for reasons that will be instantly obvious, I have been hesitant to write. It is about 5G, vaccines, 9/11, aliens and lizard overlords. Or more accurately, it isn’t.
Let me preface my argument by making clear I do not intend to express any view about the truth or falsity of any of these debates – not even the one about reptile rulers. My refusal to publicly take a view should not be interpreted as my implicit endorsement of any of these viewpoints because, after all, only a crazy …
Shortly after an agreement to form a “national emergency government” in Israel, leader of the Blue and White (Kahol Lavan) party, Benny Gantz, tweeted triumphantly that ‘democracy’ in Israel has been ‘safeguarded’.
But how is a deal that would grant Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a veto power over the very judicial system which will determine his fate, a form of democracy?
In January, Netanyahu was indicted on multiple counts of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. His trial is …
While the US took two-and-a-half years to identify HIV/AIDS after the discovery of the first symptomatic case in the country, China discovered, identified and contained COVID-19 within a few months. In the US, over half a million people have died of HIV/AIDS; worldwide that same number die every year. Even now, in the US, 13,000 die each year of the disease. ((See: “Number of deaths due to HIV/AIDS/Global Health Observatory (GHO) data,” World Health Organization, 2020; “Current Trends Update on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) — United States,” Center for Disease Control: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, September 24, …
