The Base Heather Stroud
Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace You–and How to Stop It Garrison Lovely
The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth Stan Cox
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
• To read this essay on the Americans for Middle East Understanding website, click here
• For a PDF version, click here
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
Happy Birthday Comrade Lenin!
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?
*****
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.
Let’s first …
The never-ending wacko, racist-tinged things that Donal Trump says.
When Profits and Politics Drive Science
• 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 vaccine has to work and …
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 …
What does facebook actually represent? An artistic depiction contrary to how Facebook depicts itself.
More than two centuries of lies are now getting exposed. Bizarre tales about freedom and democracy are collapsing like houses of cards.
One man’s death triggers an avalanche of rage in those who for years, decades and centuries, have been humiliated, ruined, and exterminated.
It always happens just like this throughout the history of humankind – one single death, one single “last drop”, an occurrence that triggers an entire chain of events, and suddenly nothing is the same, anymore. Nothing can be the same. What seemed to be unimaginable just yesterday, becomes “the new normal” literally overnight.
*****
For more than two …
Israel’s balancing act that allowed it to reap America’s unconditional and, often, blind support, while slowly benefiting from China’s growing economic influence and political prestige, is already floundering.
Thanks to the heated cold war between the US and Chinese economic superpowers, the Israeli strategy of playing both sides is unlikely to pay dividends in the long run. Soon enough, Tel Aviv might find itself having to make a stark choice between Washington and Beijing.
When US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, visited Israel on May 13, two items topped his agenda: Israel’s imminent illegal annexation of Palestinian land and the growing Israeli-Chinese economic …
Interview with Journalist Yves Engler
In this episode of Know Your Stuff we speak with author and journalist Yves Engler about Canada’s foreign policy and the impact it has globally. Is Canada’s image as a peaceful actor and force for good a real reflection of its policy or is it just that, an image?
To watch more videos on this topic:
Dimitri Lascaris on Exposing Canadian Foreign Policy
‘Hero’ Trump brandishes a Bible to frighten away devilish protesters his DC National Guard may have missed in their brutal assault on them clearing the way for his photo-op.
The wretched and ignorant former governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has praised President Trump for his “courage” in supposedly “braving” protesters in the nation’s capital to walk across Lafayette Park from the White House and stand, Bible in hand, in front of a small …
Minneapolis organizer Tony Williams speaks about the ongoing uprisings and how groups can work towards the strategic dismantling of the police.
It is the anxiety-inducing nightmare for the studious: A dream where you find yourself in an exam hall, which might, on ordinary days, be a gym or some other facility. It is repurposed for that most cruel of blood sports: sorting out the learned from the dolts, the prize winners from the dunces. The stern invigilators gaze as you like vermin to liquidate. You are seated on a firm stool, rarely comfortable. You have been checked to see if you have any cheating accoutrements. Permitted items: scrap paper, a pencil, an eraser.
Before you, apart from the often blue-rinsed wonders wishing …
Here is one thing I can write with an unusual degree of certainty and confidence: Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin would not have been charged with the (third-degree) murder of George Floyd had the United States not been teetering on a knife edge of open revolt.
Had demonstrators not turned out in massive numbers on the streets and refused to be corralled back home by the threat of police violence, the US legal system would have simply turned a blind eye to Chauvin’s act of extreme brutality, as it has done before over countless similar acts.
Without the mass …
A Review of Robert Reich’s The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
Robert Reich’s new work, The System: Who Rigged it, How We Fix it offers a wide-ranging critique of our nation’s contemporary political and economic ills. Reich does a brilliant job succinctly reminding us of the scale and scope of corporate corruption, economic inequality, and political spinelessness in America.
Reich’s diagnosis is on point and there is not much to quibble with. He focuses the first half of the book on the finance sector and the arrogant, misguided, debauched behavior of one of its leaders, Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO …
Do you know who coined the curse, “conspiracy theory” or accusation, “you are conspiracy theorist!”? It was nobody less than the CIA in the 1950s, to silence those who saw through the lie of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. This was a complete lie by US war strategists to install fear in the population in general and in Europeans in particular and to boost the American Military Industrial complex and presenting a constant threat to the communist Soviet Union.
A complementary phrase developed in the last years is “fake news” — people who are saying well-founded truths are being …
Since I started News Junkie Post, eleven years ago, I have, as a rule, avoided the first person narrative. In my mind, there is a simple reason for an aversion for the “me, myself, and I” type of storytelling so widespread in our culture. The first person is fine for a journal, an autobiography of course, or if you have the immense literary talent of Marcel Proust. Otherwise, it amounts to a navel gazing narcissism common in our era and society as a spectacle where anyone, with no …
The food crisis that could follow in the wake of the various lockdowns that were implemented on the back of the coronavirus may have long-lasting consequences. We are already seeing food shortages in the making. In India, for instance, supply chains have been disrupted, farm input systems for the supply of seeds and fertilisers have almost collapsed in some places and crops are not being harvested. Moreover, cultivation has been adversely affected prior to the monsoon and farm incomes are drying up. Farmers closer to major urban centres are faring a bit better due to shorter supply chains.
Veteran rural reporter …
An irreverent take on what the hoi polloi protesting the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota’s finest might otherwise be doing.
(Shipwreck Scene)
Travesty or Tragedy?
I have often wondered what the world would have been like if the USA had lost 20% of its population (like the Soviet Union in WWII or Salvador and Guatemala at US hands) in any one of its endless wars?
I do not wonder that if one now searches for web entries on deaths in Africa, figures caused by starvation, political-economic terror and the lack of basic infrastructure (despite 70 years of “Western aid”) and other diseases, nothing appears before COVID-19.
There is profuse interest in wherever …
Does the societal prominence accorded professional athletes confer a societal obligation?
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
— Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958)
I have expressed an opinion on public issues whenever they appeared to me so bad and unfortunate that silence would have made me feel guilty of complicity.
Albert Einstein, Address to the Chicago Decalogue Society (20 February 1954)
The horrendous police murder of George Floyd would obviously satisfy Einstein’s criteria of being “bad and unfortunate.”
Many athletes felt the outrage and …
In a blizzard of destruction, assaults on peaceful demonstrators, provocateurs, lies, cover-ups, and fascist proclamations, America teeters at a tipping point. The murder, by police, of George Floyd, has sparked a jaw-dropping response across America. Police in many locations have behaved as instigators and perpetrators of savage violence against citizens attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and to assemble to demand a redress of grievances.
African-Americans have over 400 years of grievances to fall back upon. The video footage is undeniable, outrageous, and the crime perpetrated with the complicity …
The corporate media and corporate politicians are paralyzed with indecision. Which fake myth do we adhere to? “Black people burning down their own neighborhoods” or “outside agitators”? What if it’s both, and more…?
Media coverage of the past few days and nights of the multiracial uprising that is currently taking place in various forms in cities small and large across the United States has been confused and misleading, as usual. Media coverage of such events is usually either confusing, misleading, or both, because of the influence of the media owners, and because of the implicit biases, insufficient resources, and/or ignorance of …
• Author’s Note: Contains spoilers for Knives Out (2019), Bacurau (2019), and The Wandering Earth (2019)
How can I confound myself with those who today already find a hearing? — Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1895
Introduction
2019 was a very interesting year in cinema, in particular for the South Korean film Parasite which became the first film in a language other than English to win Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards. The success of Parasite shows the changing attitude of Americans towards foreign cinema. 2019 also showed three major new …
Well, it looks like the Resistance’s long-anticipated “Second Civil War” has finally begun … more or less exactly on cue. Rioting has broken out across the nation. People are looting and burning stores and attacking each other in the streets. Robocops are beating, tear-gassing, and shooting people with non-lethal projectiles. State National Guards have been deployed, curfews imposed, “emergencies” declared. Secret Servicemen are fighting back angry hordes attempting to storm the White House. Trump is tweeting from an “underground bunker.” Opportunist social media pundits on both sides of the political spectrum are whipping people up …
