Question: In a society grown dictatorial and oppressive would your good friend X collaborate or resist? If you were to resist, would X support your rights or side with the apparent source of power? If asked by authorities to scrutinize neighbors, would X do so? Would X yield naturally to arbitrary requests or invasive questioning, or would a strong sense of personal identity tend to question authoritarian entitlement? How quickly might X, whom you’ve known only under the conditions of a materially rich and smoothly-running society, turn on you if society were to unravel and X’s interests were suddenly at …
A world gripped by a deadly virus has precipitated a deluge of punditry claiming to have found the primal cause of the pandemic. In a recent article Anthony Judge, for example, claims to have tapped into “the collective subconscious” to blame what he calls overpopulation. How well does this claim hold up?
Mr. Judge is concerned about “the epidemic of misinformation” regarding the cause of COVID-19 pandemic, “obscuring a neglected critical factor undermining global strategic viability.” Humanity, he posits, is “unconsciously endeavoring to communicate a vital message to itself…Collective Overpopulation Vitiating Individual Dreams.”
This time, we are told, it is different and that President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is absolutely serious about his decision to absolve his leadership from all previous agreements signed with Israel and the United States.
But this time is not different, and Abbas is not serious.
“The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the state of Palestine are absolved … of all the agreements and understandings with the American and Israeli governments … including the security ones,” Abbas declared at an emergency meeting of his leadership held in Ramallah on May 19.
Unsurprisingly, there were no massive demonstrations reported throughout …
Simply “printing” more money and adding more debt to the existing enormous debt load in the U.S. is not a solution. It is particularly irresponsible when it is done with no connection to social production and the working class. Non-fictitious value comes only from the labor-time of workers involved in the process of producing goods and services. Value cannot come from thin air. Capital does not magically produce value by itself.
Currently, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is approximately $7 trillion. The national debt is about $25 trillion. The federal debt-to-GDP ratio is 120%. The higher the ratio, the harder for …
A news website created by Tibetan exiles in India, Phayul, has featured an article on a bill (H.R. 6948) introduced in the House of Representatives by United States Congressman Scott Perry (R-PA) that promotes Tibetan separation from China.
The bill would “authorize the President to recognize the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China as a separate, independent country, and for other purposes.”
Other purposes? That the US was running geopolitical intrigues in …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 26th, 2020
Commemorating 100,000 COVID-19 Deaths
The official milestone of 100,000 dead in the United States from COVID-19 is near. This figure is certainly an undercount as thousands of deaths from COVID-19 are not being recorded. Before our weekly news analysis, we pause to commemorate those deaths.
The US, with 4 percent of the world’s population, has 28 percent of the COVID19 deaths, disproportionately impacting black and brown people. Why is the US doing so poorly? President Trump surely deserves a great deal of blame. He continues to make major errors and critical mistakes …
Christian Sorensen’s Understanding the War Industry
by Eric Walberg / May 26th, 2020
Christian Sorensen’s ambitious Understanding the War Industry documents the US war economy with zest. It’s a dull, monotonous topic but vitally important, and he manages to make it interesting. You see the military-industrial-political complex as a vast, complex hive, embedded in the larger economic monster called the United States.
That union has always been tenuous, from the revolution to the civil war and today, requiring enemies to keep very different groups in line. Ironically, since it kicked the British out, the US (i.e., the colonial settler …
Sun Yang Over the past 5 years, the sports “anti doping movement” has been distorted into a political tool to attack Russia and now China. This article reveals the bias behind the decision to ban Chinese athlete Sun Yang for eight years. For example, the president of the panel tweeted against a “yellow faced Chinese monster!” and secretly mocked the athlete’s mother in the hearing. I hope the facts presented here help get a new fair hearing for Sun Yang.
I never met the great basketball player, Bob Cousy, the man known as “the Houdini of the Hardwood,” yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I never knew, or to be more accurate, in ways I didn’t reflect upon except in superficial ways. He was the guy who brought professional basketball into the modern era with his bag of fancy tricks that included no-look and behind-the-back passes, uncanny dribbling, and a magical court sense that made the fast break into an exquisite art form. The captain and point-guard of the Boston Celtics from 1950-1963, Cousy led the Celtics to …
Leaving crises to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s management skills will never disappoint those who favour chaos and the attractions of vague direction. The double standard is to be preferred to the equal one. With the United Kingdom sundered by death and the effects of COVID-19 (the PM himself having had his battle with the virus), the population was hoping for some clarity. When, for instance, would the lockdown measures be eased?
On May 10, Johnson delivered an address from his comically staged desk which had the appearance of being trapped in the door during a bungled removal effort. “We have …
As a retired sheet metal worker, on Memorial Day, I watched the Memorial Day video put out by the general president of my union. This was my response to him.
I appreciate your stress on staying safe during this pandemic, as well as the listing of our 14 members who have died from COVID-19. I also appreciate your speaking of how our union has helped veterans transition from the military to our trade.
I want to comment on how your message affects me as a combat veteran of the Viet Nam War. It is a good thing to support veterans, in …
For several months, Western mass media called the Hong Kong rioters, “pro-democracy protesters”. It still does. But I began noticing a new, even deadlier, terminology. Now, the black-clad ninja-looking men and women that are periodically and violently clashing with the law enforcement forces are once in a while described as “pro-independence”.
Some Hong Kong citizens are defining the rioters, who recently celebrated the Americans’ “Mother’s Day” with further protests and aggressive actions, as a “political virus”.
Now many people living in Hong Kong are calling for the use of force against the predominantly young, badly-informed and poorly educated individuals — those who …
In Part I of this article, I raised some questions about the uneven distribution 0f media coverage (radio, newspapers, magazines) between leftists, social democrats and anarchists on the one hand, and Leninists on the other. The social democrats and the anarchists receive the most media attention. Next, I showed how the social democrats and the anarchists can be grouped into a single category of “New Left,” while Leninists represented the “Old Left”. I looked for patterns in their differences as I compared them across thirteen categories.
The original business with personal secrets
The unilateral declaration of independence adopted by the slave traders and slaveholders in congress assembled, otherwise known as the American Declaration of Independence, is one of the most successful psychological warfare instruments of modern history. Alone it did not win the fight of the colonial elite against its cousins in Great Britain. However, once the British regime was forced to cut its losses after the defeat at Yorktown, this propaganda document became the source of the most powerful delusion since the inception …
There have been over 1.6 million #coronavirus cases and nearly 100,000 deaths in the U.S. While many countries are gradually recovering, no turning point for the pandemic in America is on the sight. Lots of people are shocked at how America, the largest economy in the world, and a great country in the eyes of many, has got to this point. So to find out what led to this mess, let’s back up a little and take a look at the timeline.
Israeli media and Zionist apologists everywhere are busy whitewashing Israel’s globally-tattered image using the rare indictment of an Israeli terrorist, Amiram Ben Uliel, who was recently convicted for murdering the Palestinian Dawabsheh family, including an 18-month-old toddler in the town of Duma, south of Nablus.
The conviction of Ben Uliel by an Israeli three-judge court on May 18, is expectedly celebrated by some as proof that the Israeli judicial system is fair and transparent, and that Israel does not need to be investigated by outside parties.
It is not only about physically surviving the pandemic. People miss people, and places, sometimes desperately. And they die when separated.
We are bombarded by briefings and numbers. We are scared into submission by horrifying medical stories, by shocking images, and then, simultaneously, by predictions of economic and social downfall. Day and night, day and night.
But somehow, so often during this so-called coronavirus emergency, we tend to forget that people are people, not numbers, and that bare survival is far from everything.
*****
For decades we were told: “You are living in a globalized world. Borders have become redundant”. Some reluctantly, …
A review of Dan Kovalik's book No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using ‘Humanitarian’ Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests
by John Rachel / May 24th, 2020
In an era where a man like Julian Assange can be mercilessly persecuted for just doing honest journalism, it takes a great deal of courage to expose the lies and misdeeds of America’s imperial ambitions. Yet they must be exposed and condemned for exactly what they have been and continue to be. No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using ‘Humanitarian’ Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests is a book that goes the extra mile in doing just that.
At its simplest, it means to critically engage with and seek to change the material and the ideological structures of the society in which you find yourself, whether local, national, regional, or global.
It means the ability to say “no” to those in power, even if the immediate opportunities for real change are seemingly minimal to non-existent.
It is continuous intellectual and moral opposition in the face of repression and/or marginalization or both.
It is also the belief in the sanctity of human life and the dignity and worth of each human being.
We are entering the final stages of the election to decide who will head the most powerful nation on Earth. That inevitably means the progressive and dissident left in the US are again being deluged with arguments to vote for the lesser evil candidate.
It has become such a standard left argument at election time that lesser evil voting even has its own acronym: LEV. Anyone who opposes Donald Trump’s re-election come November must set aside their concerns about – and if necessary their principles against – voting for the other main candidate on offer for US president.
Earth at 10°C above pre-industrial is unimaginable. It’s a deadly horrifying thought, but as shall be explained herein, it should not be dismissed out of hand.
The following story might be labeled as reckless, and it might be criticized as a fearmongering piece of journalism and probably will be. Nevertheless, “10C Above Baseline” explores a dystopian world envisioned by John Doyle, Sustainable Development Policy Coordinator of the European Commission in Brussels.
Doyle’s thesis of a 10C world, within current lifetimes, is based upon sober-minded analysis. Of course, it envisions a planet of few or maybe no humans. Granted, it is hard to …
It has been a withering time for the airlines, whose unused planes moulder in a gruelling waiting game of survival. The receivers are smacking their lips; administration has become a reality for many. Governments across the globe dispute what measures to ease in response to the coronavirus pandemic; travel has been largely suspended; and the hope is that some viable form will resume at some point soon.
For the low-cost airline EasyJet, a further problem has presented itself. Earlier in the week, the company revealed that it had “been the target of an attack from a highly sophisticated source”, resulting …
Asset Deals: John Paul II and his successor ex-Hitler Youth and Roman Grand Inquisitor Joseph Ratzingen, Benedict XVI ((Together with the US regime this dynamic duo in the Catholic cult of death- the ancient foundation of Christendom and global terrorism- waged war against communism and national liberation.))
In 2015 I argued that the purpose of the CIA war against Vietnam was two-fold. First of all the company was charged with preserving the now US interest in what had been French business in Indochina. The second objective — a …
Image Source: Unsplash
Since the United States was established, veterans have put their lives on the line to fight for freedom and so much more. From the deadly battles of the Civil War to uniting with allies in World War I and II, to fighting against terrorism in more recent years, our military has never backed away from doing the right thing for the flag.
But it’s nearly impossible for the average person to fully grasp what a vet might have to go through during their time in …
I recently came across a tweet, where the tweet writer proclaimed:
I am convinced that 90% of racial tensions remaining in the West would evaporate within 5 years if lefties\liberals stopped racializing everything, stopped obsessing over and judging based on skin colour and stopped re-opening stale historical wounds unnecessarily…
My immediate thought was that I needed to reply and refute this misinformation as quickly as possible. Then as quickly as it came, that thought was replaced by a realization that a response to this could never and indeed, should never, be an off-the-cuff reactionary response. So, I let it sit and simmer; …
On May 15, thousands of Palestinians in Occupied Palestine and throughout the ‘shatat’, or diaspora, participated in the commemoration of Nakba Day, the one event that unites all Palestinians, regardless of their political differences or backgrounds.
For years, social media has added a whole new stratum to this process of commemoration. #Nakba72, along with #NakbaDay and #Nakba, have all trended on Twitter for days. Facebook was inundated with countless stories, videos, images, and statements, written by Palestinians, or in global support of the Palestinian people.
The dominant Nakba narrative remains — 72 years following the destruction of historic Palestine at the hands …
My columns haven’t been very funny recently. This one isn’t going to be any funnier. Sorry. Fascism makes me cranky.
I don’t mean the kind of fascism the corporate media and the fake Resistance have been desperately hyping for the last four years. God help me, but I’m not terribly worried about a few hundred white-supremacist morons marching around with tiki torches hollering Nazi slogans at each other, or Jewish-Mexican-American law clerks flashing “OK” signs on TV, or smirking schoolkids in MAGA hats.
I’m talking about actual, bona fide fascism, or totalitarianism, if you want to get technical. The kind where governments …
In Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army has cutting-edge labs researching viruses. In August 2019, Ft. Detrick labs were closed and a number of pneumonia cases, or illness with similarities to pneumonia, occurred in Maryland. What happened when the labs were shut down? What does the U.S. need the labs for? Dr. Qiao tries to connect the dots and get closer to the facts.
A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.
— Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) The Prince, 1513
Introduction
In 1939 the American director Frank Capra released Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film that was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning for Best Original Story and turned James Stewart into a major star. Stewart plays Junior Senator Jefferson Smith in Washington …
