In the aftermath of yet another police slaying of a Black person in the US of A, Terry Everton presents what a second term with Donald Trump as POTUS might look like.
On May 28, 2020, John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Capital, said:
Both the troubling outlook for debt repayment and the unfinished hammering of an already weak labor market underscores the highly speculative nature of the latest rallies by equities and corporate bonds. In addition, corporate earnings have yet to escape from a now deep contraction. ((Moody’s Analytics, Capital markets research, May 28, 2020.))
The inherently chaotic, anarchic, unplanned, and violent nature of the “free market” ensures that the outmoded capitalist economic system always lurches from crisis to crisis and is never free of upheavals and instability.
The war on Vietnam plays an infinitely larger role in history in the common understanding of a typical U.S. citizen than does what the U.S. government did to Indonesia in 1965-1966. But if you read The Jakarta Method, the new book by Vincent Bevins, you will have to wonder what moral basis there can possibly be for that fact.
During the war on Vietnam a tiny fraction of the casualties were members of the U.S. military. During the overthrow of Indonesia, zero percent of the …
Third degree murder for 3/5 for a devalued life
Knee in throat air gone, gasping dying under the color of law!
George Floyd had no chance! The gang of state sponsored assassins had already signed his death warrant!
They think we should be grateful for watered down justice that has not and will never be color blind!
Cry out! Resist! Don’t make excuses or apologies for race-based killings!
Don’t attack those who dare to put their lives on the line to declare: George Floyd’s life mattered. Black Lives Matter—a just demand!
— Jaribu Hill, Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights and Black Alliance for Peace Coordinating …
An entire generation of Yemeni children has suffered the traumas of war, many of them orphaned, maimed, malnourished, or displaced. The United Nations reports a death toll of 100,000 people in that nation’s ongoing war, with an additional 131,000 people dying from hunger, disease, and a lack of medical care. A report from Save the Children, issued in November 2018, estimated at least 85,000 children had died from extreme hunger since the war began in 2015.
Since then, 3.65 million people have been internally displaced and the worst cholera outbreak ever recorded has infected 2.26 million and cost nearly 4,000 lives. …
The long overdue national security law for Hong Kong
by Andre Vltchek / June 1st, 2020
The Hong Kong rioters and other violent so-called opposition figures are up for a big surprise soon: their actions may simply not be tolerated anymore. In fact, they might become illegal. But not because, as the White House and the Western mass media are continuously trumpeting, “China is governed by the Communist Party”, but simply because such activities are illegal in China as well as in most parts of the world, including the United States and Europe.
In some countries, which are seen as close allies of the West, like Indonesia and India, even speaking about independence can lead people to …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 1st, 2020
The nationwide uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd and other recent racially-motivated events is a response to the bi-partisan failed state in which we live. It comes in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic and the largest economic collapse in the US in more than a century. These three crises have disproportionately impacted people of color and added to longterm racial inequality and injustice.
Black Lives Matter erupted six years ago when a police officer shot and killed Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. Since that time, police have …
Mobs are unruly, headless things. The message is the action. The platform is often violence. But what is happening across the United States cannot simply be labelled as a looting-leads-to-shooting episode. It ranks as another chapter of enraged despair and untidy opportunism.
It all began with a savage act in South Minneapolis, a killing grotesque for its indifference. The hunter in this gruesome Monday spectacle of cruelty proved to be a policeman from the 3rd Police Precinct, Derek Chauvin; the quarry, a black man by the name of George Floyd. s Floyd was held down by the knee for almost nine minutes, suffocating to …
The City of Portland, Oregon, and Multnomah County, are doing the best job in the country at kicking the can down the road. Now is the time to push for a real solution to the housing crisis, here and across the USA.
Since the pandemic hit, I have joined the ranks of the unemployed, like so many others have. Dozens of gigs planned in nine countries on three continents canceled. I’m doing better than many of my fellow musicians, because I have been moving more towards the modern, crowdfunded patronage model of artistic existence for years now, in the wake …
According to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, on May 28th, 2020, “The Ministry of National Defense and the USFK (United States Forces in Korea) engaged in a transportation operation in the middle of the night to bring equipment to the Seongju THAAD [missile defense] system in Gyeong sang buk do [Province]. The Ministry of National Defense said that it supported the land transportation operation by the USFK from the night …
Without trampling through all the historical details, we can designate the entire history of [Americans]—the glorious past so eulogized by our fathers—as the history of shame, for in that history there is more betrayal, apostasy, perfidious intrigue, ignominious defeat, well-deserved failure, base vengeance, merciless retaliation and brutality that no hypocrisy can mask…So let’s forget about the past and old glories, namely let’s leave it be, let’s no longer bring up those shames of the past and the jumbled mendacities considered worthy of praise, it’s more than enough for us just to remain on the surface of that swamp if at …
The Poverty of Liberal, Social Contract Theory of Violence
by Bruce Lerro / May 31st, 2020
I wrote this article almost four years ago in reaction to the public’s claim to be inconvenienced by Oakland protesters stopping traffic on the freeway of Interstate 880 in Oakland in solidarity with the two black men shot and killed by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. The point of that article was to show that bystanders’ ideas of where violence starts, when it starts and who the perpetrators of violence are betrays an adherence to a liberal social contract theory rooted in Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau. Even those who …
Baghdad, March 20, 2003
Inscribed on a wall across from the United Nations in New York City are ancient words of incalculable yearning:
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
— Isaiah 2:4
I’ve stood with activists in front of that same wall singing Down by the Riverside, a song promising we’ll lay down our swords and shields — “and study war no more, no more.”
In memorably eloquent words spoken after the onset …
Sawing off the branch you sit on can hardly be the best of policies. But that all depends on the nature of the branch. US President Donald Trump has huffed himself into another small historical moment, going on the offensive against social media companies using the very language his faux progressive opponents use against them. All seem to be in agreement on one point: the Silicon Valley giants have become too powerful, runaway monsters in the stakes of high influence. But sharp divergences and attitudes exist on how such companies are to be controlled, let alone disciplined.
If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be laughable: the political brigands in North America and Europe are fuming, spitting and rolling their eyes upwards towards the ceiling. They are pointing fingers in all directions, shouting incoherently “China!”, “Russia!”, “Venezuela and Cuba!”, “Iran!”; “You, You, YOU!”.
China and Russia are quietly building a new world, which includes brand new infrastructure, factories and entire neighborhoods for the people. Hospitals are being constructed, and so are universities, parks, concert halls and public transportation networks. Both countries are doing all this quickly and noiselessly, and with great determination. And despite sanctions and embargos, they …
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against. -- Malcolm X
by Paul Haeder / May 30th, 2020
Caught with their proverbial pants down? The blustery conversations tied to corona virus, lockdown, Trump LLC, Pelosi and Comp., and the failed state that is the USA are to be expected.
It is a country of nanosecond attention spans.
A country with amnesia in vitro.
A country that has sacrificed future and future-future generations for the all mighty dollar.
Dog-eat-dog?
Survival of the fittest (or in the reverse Darwinism, survival of the least fit, the least smart, the least humane, the least human).
Yeah, sure, trolls abound in the social media morass. The putridity of a buffoon on one local Facebook page can be tiring.
One nurse told Clay, “I’ve given him the highest dosage I can. It’s enough to kill a horse. Most hospice patients die from morphine, but I can only OD him within an acceptable margin of error.”
— From Christopher Bollen, A Beautiful Crime, 2020
In this age of coronavirus, it has become abundantly clear that Western culture has little respect or reverence for its elders. Deaths of the elderly seem of no account and only to be taken in stride. Such an attitude has increased the opportunities for the hospice/medical industry as it profits off the expendable bodies of older, vulnerable human beings. For me, that …
Since Hunter Thompson isn’t here to continue along the Gonzo journalistic path of fear and loathing, I’ll just have to do the job. I’m quite certain he would do so if he hadn’t left us so abruptly. And unless I’m crazy, there’s never before been a situation quite this frightening and loathsome. My lady left me a couple days ago. Turned away from the embrace of a man who refuses to wear a mask as protection from the dreaded Carumba Virus. And now I’m alone. Sheltering in place in the foothills of The Tucson Range. Our relationship trashed by the good advice of her …
The despicable police murder of a person, another Black person, who allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill has caused widespread revulsion among Americans. This time, however, authorities acted relatively quickly calling in the FBI and firing all four police officers at the scene — Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J Alexander Kueng.
George Floyd, who did not resist, was forcibly extricated from his vehicle by police, handcuffed, whereupon officer Derek Chauvin knelt for 8 minutes on Floyd’s neck while he pleaded that he was unable to breathe. Floyd’s death was the result.
As the US continues to be ravaged by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the country remains in lockdown, a morbid irony of which is that we appear to have traded COVID-19 deaths for suicides. The catastrophe has laid bare the cruelties of neoliberalism, yet this has not stopped the media from unleashing a barrage of misinformation, blaming the disaster on the president, racism, and the Chinese, interspersed with other creative attempts at scapegoating. Indeed, the pandemic appears to have coincided with a peculiar outbreak of epidemiologic hallucinations.
Many have been happy to blame the president for the country’s …
The No Canada on UN Security Council (#NoUNSC4Canada) campaign has thrust critical discussion of Canadian foreign policy into the mainstream. It has also pierced through a stultifying ‘team Canada’ nationalism that infests much of the left. While the historical record suggests otherwise, it is widely assumed that Canadian power is good for the world.
Last Tuesday the Toronto Star published a powerful open letter calling on countries to vote against Canada’s bid for a seat on the Security Council. It was endorsed by 20 groups and more than 100 prominent artists, academics, activists and authors including David Suzuki, Roger …
The wrong conclusions are being drawn about Emily Maitlis’s comments on Dominic Cummings on the BBC flagship Newsnight show this week. Her remarks are not evidence of her courage, or that journalists are being gagged, or that the BBC is suddenly capitulating to the government.
The problem is caused by our desire to focus on whether Maitlis was right or wrong about Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, breaking the lockdown rules. But it is actually a distraction to fixate on the issue of whether Maitlis should or should …
US cartoon from 1899: Uncle Sam (US) demands Open Door access to trade with China while European powers plan to cut up China for themselves. Color lithograph by J.S. Pughe. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b00548.One of the most tiresome clichés uttered by the western nations, including Australia, is their alleged commitment to the “rules based international order”. By this …
Protesters outside the torched police precinct building were frustrated with the U.S. police and authorities after African American George Floyd died in the hands of police. Derek Chauvin, the officer at the center of the incident, and three other officers involved were fired Tuesday from the Minneapolis Police Department. However, local and federal officials have yet to announce any charges against the four officers.
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / May 29th, 2020
On May 6th, President Trump vetoed a war powers bill specifying that he must ask Congress for authorization to use military force against Iran. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of deadly sanctions and threats of war against Iran has seen no let-up, even as the U.S., Iran and the whole world desperately need to set aside our conflicts to face down the common danger of the Covid-19 pandemic.
So what is it about Iran that makes it such a target of hostility for Trump and the neocons? There are many repressive regimes in the world, and many of them are …
If the planet Earth were animate, it would have shuddered at the news that S. David Freeman passed away this month. Freeman was that important to Earth’s future. In his 94th year, he inspired all he met with his burning passion, relentless energy, and keen intellect.
Freeman, an engineer and a lawyer, knew where decisions were being made or ignored regarding our energy future. He mocked the foolish embrace of fossil fuels and warned all who would listen about the deadly impact of coal, oil, and natural gas consumption on our environment. This humble son of an immigrant umbrella repair man …
In the haze of the morning, China sits on Eternity
And the opium farmers sell dreams to obscure fraternities
On the horizon the curtains are closing.
— Brian Eno, “China my China,” from the album Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, 1974
It’s a crazy and dangerous World out there, by Jingo! By now we’ve all heard what they’re saying, experts like Doc Fauci and friends: “If the coronavirus doesn’t get ya, then the giant Asian ‘murder’ hornets will!” Yikes! What’s next: an infestation of tiny totalitarians telling us all to wear masks everywhere and shut up about whatever’s going on? Well, as a scientist …
Book Review of Consciousness and the Quantum: The Next Paradigm by Dr. by Robert Oates, Jr.
by William T. Hathaway / May 28th, 2020
Consciousness and the Quantum: The Next Paradigm makes quantum physics understandable for general readers and also shows how it has practical value for us. Author Dr. Robert M. Oates Jr. presents this abstract, theoretical topic in a step-by-step manner that makes it comprehensible. He explains the discoveries that are revolutionizing the way we see the world, and he captures the drama and conflicts involved in overthrowing the old scientific worldview and building the new. In conclusion he presents the benefits this knowledge can have for our individual lives.
