Latest articles
by Ramzy Baroud / April 11th, 2020
Call it a ‘quarantine’, a ‘shelter-in-place’, a ‘lockdown’ or a ‘curfew’, we Palestinians have experienced them all, though not at all voluntarily.
Personally, the first 23 years of my life were lived in virtual ‘lockdown’. My father’s ‘quarantine’ was experienced much earlier, as did his father’s ‘shelter-in-place’ before him. They both died and were buried in Gaza’s cemeteries without ever experiencing true freedom outside of their refugee camp in Gaza.
Currently in Gaza, the quarantine has a different name. We call it ‘siege’, also known as ‘blockade’.
In fact, all of Palestine has been in a state of ‘lockdown’ since the late 1940s …
by Andre Vltchek / April 11th, 2020
Soon there might be silence. The liberation of Prague, as well as the liberation of Auschwitz and/or Warsaw by the Red Army, will be forgotten. At least in Europe, even in Eastern Europe, where it took place.
This is where it is all leading to. Perhaps, one day, East European governments will issue new orders to desecrate cemeteries and mass graves, all those resting places of the Soviet soldiers who, some 75 years ago, gave their ultimate sacrifice. These graves once embraced hundreds of thousands of Soviet kids and young men, who against all odds and with unimaginable courage pushed the …
(I am not a journalist, Part 3)
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 11th, 2020
Easter Marches: No social distancing for peace
Today someone sent me an article published in the US Naval Institute Proceedings in which the author describes the war against China waged by the US and suggests that like in the 1812 war against Great Britain, the US regime should issue letters of marque to its numerically larger merchant fleet empowering them to wage war against Chinese merchant shipping. His argument was that the US could not build warships fast enough to attack China’s maritime defence perimeter …
by Lawrence S. Wittner / April 10th, 2020
Decades ago, when I began teaching international history, I used to ask students if they thought it was possible for nations to end their fighting of wars against one another. Their responses varied. But the more pessimistic conclusions were sometimes tempered by the contention that, if the world’s nations faced a common foe, such as an invasion from another planet, this would finally pull them together.
I was reminded of this on March 23, when the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, called for “an immediate global ceasefire.” The time had come, he said, to “end the sickness of war and fight …
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / April 10th, 2020
Introduction
What is the future for architecture in these times of climate change and economic crises? Should sustainability and affordability be a major factor in the design and development of future buildings? What about aesthetics? There are many individual examples of modern buildings today that have positive aesthetic qualities, but can major future problems, like climate change, be resolved by individual efforts? Or will it take the role of the state with grand visions for the future? While architecture may not seem to be an important issue compared with unemployment or poverty, it is one of the most important of the …
by Edward Curtin / April 10th, 2020
Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.
— Shakespeare, King Lear
Many thousands of New Yorkers have temporarily moved into the small Massachusetts town (permanent population approximately 7,000) where I live because of fear and panic created by fraudulent disease and death data gathered and disseminated under the umbrella term Covid-19. Such deceitful, fear-inducing news concerning diseases is old hat, but this time it’s part of perhaps the biggest propaganda campaign in modern history, resulting in an unprecedented government crackdown on people’s freedom, a massive transfer of trillions of public dollars to the banks and corporations, and crumbs for average …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / April 10th, 2020
It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives…. End the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world.
— UN Secretary-General António Guterres
At least 70 countries have signed on to the March 23 call by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a worldwide ceasefire during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like non-essential business and spectator sports, war is a luxury that the Secretary General says we must manage without for a while. After U.S. leaders have told Americans for years that war is a …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 10th, 2020
Champagne corks will be popping in the Trump Empire for good reason. Whatever happens come November, the exit of Senator Bernie Sanders from the US presidential race will be a relief. The fractured republic can be reassured that the Democrats have not moved on, stuck, as it were, in the glades of vengeful melancholia and supposedly safe bets. Divisions will not be healed; suspicions will continue to foster. A bitter society, ravished by pandemic, will cast an eye to incumbency.
On Wednesday, Sanders delivered the news to his supporters. “If I believed we had a feasible path to the nomination, …
by David Swanson / April 9th, 2020
There’s a video of Lawrence O’Donnell, spokesperson for MSNBC, saying in 2020 what he’s paid to say, namely that electing a candidate with a platform you approve of is somehow in conflict with electing a candidate who can win. The logic of this is that most people are expected to vote for a candidate with a less desirable platform, which is only self-fulfilling if nobody shouts out that the hold-your-nose candidate has no clothes before a mysterious substance called “momentum” can be declared to exist and the candidate whom people actually prefer can be persuaded to give up.
There’s …
by RT / April 9th, 2020
RT’s On Going Underground speaks to legendary journalist and film-maker John Pilger about the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. He discusses the fact that the Conservative government was warned about shortages leaving the NHS vulnerable in pandemics 4 years ago, the damage privatisation has done to the National Health Service, budget cuts which have seen bed capacities fall to record lows, his criticisms of the Boris Johnson administration’s response to Coronavirus, the lack of mass-testing in the U.K. which has been seen in other countries such as Germany, South Korea and China, the government blaming China for the Coronavirus crisis, the …
by Vijay Prashad / April 9th, 2020
Days, weeks, months, an indeterminate amount of time as the world seems paralysed by the journey of SARS-CoV-2. The lack of certainty increases the anxiety. This virus, as Arundhati Roy writes, ‘seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow [of capital]. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest – thus far – in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt’. Lockdowns have now become almost …
by CGTN / April 8th, 2020
CGTN’s Zou Yue, a Wuhan native, believes the experiences that came with paying a high price fighting COVID-19 in Hubei Province, could – and should – be a lesson for the rest of the world, regardless of ideological and political differences.
https://youtu.be/q_z7dX4lGl0
by Gary Brumback / April 8th, 2020
Now that the corona virus is making its rounds it seems a good time to illustrate the great divide between calamities’ effects on the filthy rich (aka the power elite) and the rest of humanity. With perhaps one exception to be identified near the end of this piece, the difference has endured down through history because the worse aspects of human nature never seem to change.
Let’s define a “calamity” as either a natural or a man-made disaster (invariably made by men). History is chock full of calamities. The never-ending list of natural disasters goes on and on, starting maybe with …
The film-maker’s crime – like Corbyn’s – wasn’t antisemitism but recalling a time when class solidarity inspired the struggle for a better world
by Jonathan Cook / April 8th, 2020
Ken Loach, one of Britain’s most acclaimed film directors, has spent more than a half a century dramatising the plight of the poor and the vulnerable. His films have often depicted the casual indifference or active hostility of the state as it exercises unaccountable power over ordinary people.
Last month Loach found himself plunged into the heart of a pitiless drama that could have come straight from one of his own films. This veteran chronicler of society’s ills was forced to stand down as a judge in a school anti-racism competition, falsely accused of racism himself and with no means of …
by Bruce Lerro / April 8th, 2020
History Repeats Itself, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
I wrote this article almost four years ago right after the Democratic primaries in 2016. I am reposting it because it demonstrates how, while history changes, the machinations of the Democratic Party are the same, or in this case, worse. What is not relevant in this article is that there are no gender identity politics as there were with Hillary. What is new about Bernie dropping out today is that:
Bernie has conceded four months before the Democratic convention;
Capitalism has gotten worse in the U.S. because of a combination of the …
by Adam W. Parsons / April 8th, 2020
Image credit: Giacomo Carra on Unsplash
The question is whether Covid-19 will awaken us to the stark inequalities of our world, or does it simply represent a new cause of impoverishment for the vast swathes of humanity who have long been disregarded by the public’s conscience?
*****
Since the beginning of 2020, we’ve entered an extraordinary new era. There is still a great deal of fear and uncertainty about what lies ahead, and most countries are undergoing a kind of social and political revolution that is unprecedented …
by Ramzy Baroud / April 8th, 2020
While the Coronavirus continues to ravage almost every nation on earth, Arab countries remain unable, or unwilling, to formulate a collective strategy to help the poorest and most vulnerable Arabs survive the deadly virus and its economic fallout.
Worse, amid growing international solidarity, we are yet to see a pan-Arab initiative that aims to provide material support to countries and regions that have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 disease.
The lack of collective Arab responsiveness is not unique as it mirrors Europe’s own systematic failure, exhibiting ‘solidarity’ when it is financially convenient, and turning its back, sometimes at its own brethren, …
by Matthew J.L. Ehret / April 8th, 2020
In my recent paper Why Assume there will be a 2020 Election?, I took the opportunity of today’s multifaceted crisis in order to revisit an important Wall Street funded coup d’état effort of 1933-34. As I explained in that location, this bankers’ coup was luckily exposed by a patriotic general named Smedley Darlington Butler during one of the darkest moments of America and profoundly changed the course of history.
The Deep State Plot Against JFK
The danger of World War and a military coup arose again during the short-lived administration of John F. Kennedy who found himself locked in a life …
by Stansfield Smith / April 8th, 2020
We, the undersigned organizations and prominent individuals, condemn the false claims of criminal charges by the US government against the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and other high-ranking officials with the pretext of their alleged involvement in international drug trafficking.
The US government is offering a $15 million bounty for information that would lead to the arrest of Venezuelan President Maduro. Bounties of $10 million are offered for the National Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello, retired generals Hugo Carvajal and Clive Alcala, Minister for Industry and National Production Tareck El Aissami, and other Venezuelans. The US government indictments accuse the …
by Margaret Flowers / April 8th, 2020
Refrigerated trucks parked outside of a New York City hospital (Screenshot from Twitter of @bestgug)
While the United States government and corporate media point fingers at China, accusing the Chinese government of under-reporting the number of deaths from COVID-19, it is actually the US and not China that has that problem.
When the COVID-19 pandemic started, China responded quickly by reporting the novel disease to the World Health Organization and taking steps to identify and study the virus. Within a matter of weeks, it was clear that the …
by Lawrence S. Wittner / April 8th, 2020
We live with a profound paradox. Our lives are powerfully affected by worldwide economic, communications, transportation, food supply, and entertainment systems. Yet we continue an outdated faith in the nation-state, with all the divisiveness, competition, and helplessness that faith produces when dealing with planetary problems.
As we have seen in recent weeks, the coronavirus, like other diseases, does not respect national boundaries, but spreads easily around the world. And how is it being confronted? Despite the heroic efforts of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, the governments of individual nations have largely gone their own way?some denying the pandemic’s existence, …
by Michael K. Smith / April 8th, 2020
Capitalism’s “invisible hand” gives us the middle finger with ever more contempt these days.
With the national unemployment rate soaring to Depression-era levels and beyond, the self-proclaimed “job creators” of our glorious free-market paradise are now drowning in gluttonous excess from sucking the tit of the “Nanny State” they allegedly abhor. While workers are prohibited from working by shelter-in-place orders, the private owners of what should be public assets get trillions of taxpayer dollars through the Federal Reserve, which they will use to buy up everything they don’t already own at depressed, pandemic era prices. Then when foreclosures begin to soar …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 8th, 2020
Scribes of the Julian Assange case must surely gawk with a sense of horrified wonder at each proceeding unfolding at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Assange is in a battle that can only be described as titanic, seeking to avoid the clutches of the US Justice Department, not to mention its legal system, and convince District Judge Vanessa Baraitser about the merits of that argument. The gigantic canvass confronting all participants in this squalid tale of vexation and oppression is the nature of journalism itself, and the central point of sharing confidential state information that sheds light on impropriety, …
by The Network in Defense of Humanity US Chapter / April 7th, 2020
The Network in Defense of Humanity, US Chapter, expresses our heartfelt solidarity with the people of Venezuela and its only legitimate President Nicolas Maduro Moros in this hour of danger.
The US administration is creating more conflict and aggression against Venezuela, while people all over the world are fighting a dangerous virus pandemic.
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration filed bogus criminal charges against the elected Venezuelan President and thirteen other Venezuelan officials including the chief justice of their Supreme Court.
A few days ago, on April 2nd, the US deployed naval ships off the coast of Venezuela, the largest US military deployment …
by Bill Quigley / April 7th, 2020
Virus Raging. Statewide Louisiana is second only to New York in deaths per 100,000 people with 582 reported as of April 7. Six parishes (counties) in the New Orleans area are in the top ten in deaths of all the counties in the nation: St. John the Baptist, Orleans, St. Charles, Jefferson, St. James and Plaquemines, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Race. Louisiana is 32 percent African American. Yet 70 percent of COVID 19 deaths in Louisiana are of African Americans. “”These differences are produced by policy, not …
by Liu Jian / April 7th, 2020
People line up to buy face masks from a medical supply company in Nanning, China on 29 January 2020. © 2020 Chinatopix.
What we have experienced in the past two months is too dreamy and now, in retrospect, it seems not so real.
On January 23, the day before Chinese New Year’s Eve, people who were ready to celebrate the New Year were shocked by the sudden outbreak of the virus. Wuhan, a super big city with a population of 11 million, was declared closed by the government. …
by William Manson / April 7th, 2020
As Ivan Illich pointed out in Medical Nemesis (1976), the reigning medical industry enjoys a virtual monopoly on defining “disease,” as well as on the endless production of lucratively patented new drugs ostensibly effective as treatments. “Public awareness” campaigns are highly selective: one situation is a world emergency, another is simply an ongoing “problem.” As to the latter, I am referring here to what are euphemistically designated as “preventable adverse events” (PAEs). This is used as a mortality-rate category: “medical errors” directly leading to the deaths of patients.
In our current state …
by Kim Petersen / April 7th, 2020
Paul Craig Roberts, a former official in the Ronald Reagan government, has his own popular website and his articles are frequently published at the progressive Information Clearing House. I like much of what Paul Craig Roberts has to say, but liking some of the positions staked out by a person does not necessitate that a person agree with all that another person states. One can accept what seems reasonable, logical, and moral and reject that which is illogical or immoral. This is a sine qua non of a critical …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 7th, 2020
The twaddle of framing the confrontation of the coronavirus as a “war” has proven to be a cheapening, misguided exercise. France’s president Emmanuel Macron has deemed COVID-19 the “invisible, elusive enemy”, making it sound like an adept guerrilla specialising in sneak attacks. China’s Xi Jinping has gone for the language of the “people’s war”, suggesting that the virus has certain class-ridden notions. President Donald Trump has characterised himself as “a wartime president”.
Implicit in such language is the idea that nothing else matters; the resources of humanity will be marshalled in finding a vaccine and stopping the spread of infections. …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 6th, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic is magnifying the cruelty of US foreign policy. The economic collapse is showing the failure of neoliberalism and how the empire-economy is not working for the people of the world, including the United States.
The US is losing its global dominance as it demonstrates its own incompetence in response to the pandemic and its viciousness in the midst of this crisis. Other countries are showing leadership and solidarity while the US is escalating its attacks.
This is an opportunity to change direction. What seemed impossible in the recent …
