‘Heinous racism,’ is how the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor described a recent decision by Lebanese authorities to bar Palestinian refugee expats from returning to Lebanon.
Lebanon’s restrictions on its ever-diminishing population of Palestinian refugees is nothing new. However, this event is particularly alarming as it may be linked to a long-term official policy regarding the residency status of Palestinian refugees in this Arab country.
Many were taken aback by a recent Lebanese government’s order to its embassy in the United Arab Emirates, instructing it to prevent Palestinian refugees from …
Recently, during a meaningful conversation about the effects of racism and colonization with a friend he mentioned that he did not understand why people of colour seemed to want to be categorized as victims. To support this argument he cited the great misdeeds and evil that was visited upon his ancestral Scottish people. Indeed, the Scots were abused by the Empire. “However,” my friend continued, “they continued fighting and never fell into becoming the victims of the horrors that were visited on them.” He continued to expound on this …
No More War focuses on the one nation in recent times that has been continuously engaged in wars of aggression. In fact, that nation has been engaged in wars or military occupations in all but five years since its founding in 1776. Author and professor of human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh, Dan Kovalik, contrasts international law designed to keep the peace to the contravening ideology of “humanitarian intervention” used to excuse the US imperial project.
Besides being a compelling exposition on US imperial …
A week ago a former Canadian soldier instigated a harebrained bid to kidnap or kill Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Launched from Colombia, the plot failed spectacularly with most of the men captured or killed.
Still, the leader of the invasion Jordan Goudreau, a veteran of the Canadian military and US special forces, has been remarkably forthright about the involvement of opposition figure Juan Guaidó. A leaked contract between Guaidó’s representative in Florida and Goudreau’s Silvercorp USA describes plans for a multi-month occupation force which, after ousting Maduro, would “convert to a National Asset Unit that will act under the …
As part of its battle against Covid-19, Israel has closed it borders to foreigners and imposed a two-week quarantine on anyone entering the country. There are also strict requirements to wear masks in public places.
Israel, however, has thrown the rules – and caution – to the wind in approving the arrival on Wednesday of the one of the world’s most powerful statesmen.
It seems strange timing – with the world hunkered down – for the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to be making an urgent, lightning visit to a tiny country in the Middle East. But then Israel-US relations have …
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden suffered a massive brain hemorrhage today as he practiced reciting the days of the week for upcoming debates with President Trump. Campaign staff members say it will not affect his work, and insist he has no plans to withdraw from the presidential contest, unless “something serious happens.”
“We’ve been through this before,” explained senior advisor Symone Slanders. “Joe will have a stroke or two before breakfast, but by mid-morning he’s his old self again, sniffing our hair and fondling the volunteers. It’s nothing to get upset about, and we frankly resent attempts by Donald Trump to …
Following the court decision in the US to award in favour of Dewayne Johnson (exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused Johnson to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma), attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said at the post-trial press conference:
The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here. This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers… Monsanto… has used those strategies…
The human body has limits. If “temperature plus humidity” is high enough, even a healthy person seated in the shade with plentiful water to drink will suffer severely or likely die. It’s the Wet-Bulb Temperature (WBT) effect.
There is an upper limit to human capacity to adapt to excessive global heat when combined with excessive levels of humidity. That limit is expressed as Wet-Bulb Temperature. A threshold is reached when the air temperature climbs above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity is above 90 percent. Higher temperatures require less humidity, so when the air temperature is 100 degrees …
Genetically engineered crops are a form of food imperialism. This technology allows mega-corporations like Bayer/Monsanto to patent seeds, lure farmers into buying them with visions of high yields, and then destroy the ability of small farmers to survive.
Genetic engineering produces an artificial combination of plant traits which often results in foods with less nutritional value while introducing health problems to animals and humans who eat them. It increases costs of food production, pushing millions of farmers throughout the world into poverty and driving them off their land.
Agricultural corporations get control of enormous quantities of land in Africa, Latin America and …
Several media outlets reported that “hundreds of protesters did gather in small groups at a shopping mall in the town of Sha Tin, chanting slogans and holding protest flags”. A few other groups of rioters were spotted at various other locations in the city.
They were holding banners, and singing and chanting slogans that were described by Western journalists as “pro-democracy” and “anti-Beijing”.
As Hong Kong is still fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, the police, naturally, sent the rioters packing.
There are two points to be made.
First, the rioters are thoroughly confused, logically and …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 11th, 2020
US and Chinese Fists and Weapons face-off (from theFinancial Times)
The Trump administration, in seeking to divert attention from its bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mishandling of the economic collapse, is escalating the bipartisan anti-China policy, which has a long history. This increases the potential of military conflict and economic war between our countries.
President Trump is making both a global depression and war more likely. The United States needs to de-escalate its conflicts and work with China and other countries to confront the pandemic and …
Even before becoming the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump had one consistent foreign enemy – China. Partly fueled by his intrinsic white supremacy and his antipathy for the liberal elite “globalists” who evoked his personal inferiority complex, Trump has never waivered from his fierce opposition to what he saw as the “yellow peril” from China.
So when the Obama Administration announced in 2011 that the US would make “a strategic pivot” in its foreign policy to focus its military and political attention on the Asia-Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia, which meant China, it was one time that Trump supported …
Photo Source: Unsplash
As most of the world is forced to stay home, internet and technology play essential roles in almost every aspect of the population’s shelter-at-home lives. The internet keeps loved ones communicating and in touch, informs people of what’s going on in the world, connects students to their teachers and professors, and provides access to the office for those able to work at home.
But what happens to the millions of Americans without an internet connection? Pew Research found that roughly two-thirds of Americans have …
Fred Magdoff,Professor Emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and author of many articles and books on ecology, agriculture and economy, frequent Monthly Review contributor and closely associated with struggles of the working people, discusses the coronavirus pandemic in light of capitalism and agriculture in the following interview conducted on April 2, 2020.
***** Farooque Chowdhury:Since long, you are telling about and analyzing environment and ecology, and the devastation the capitalist system is doing to these. Today, in view of this coronavirus pandemic, how do you find the situation in view of your analysis?
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Bk. II, Ch. 5; source: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 6 (Romane und Novellen I), dtv Verlag, München, 1982, p. 397 (II.5).
I keep plotting a revolution no one else seems to be interested in having. So be it. I’ll have my solitary revolution. There will be no pink hats, guillotines, or marches, …
The backlash may be more revealing than the film itself, but both inform us where we are at in the fight against climate change and ecological collapse. The environmental establishment’s frenzied attacks against Planet of the Humans says a lot about its commitment to big money and technological solutions.
A number of prominent individuals tried to ban the film by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore. Others berated the filmmakers for being white, male and overweight. Many thought leaders have declared they won’t watch it.
Despite the hullabaloo, the central points in the …
When it comes to the politics of medicine and disease, the United States has always attempted to steal the limelight, while adding the now faded colouring of universal human welfare. In 1965, Washington pledged financial and technical support to the international effort to eradicate smallpox, though the initiative had initially been spurred by the Soviet Union at the behest of virologist and deputy health minister Victor Zhdanov in 1958. At that point in time, the World Health Organisation was not so much a punch bag as vehicle for US foreign policy, to be cultivated rather than rebuked.
The Keystone Cops have nothing on the rag-tag group of soldiers of fortune who failed earlier this week in their implausible plot to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, trigger a military coup, and install the US puppet, Juan Guaidó, in the presidency.
We know all about the hair-brained scheme due to a falling out of the thieves. The man behind the plot, Jordan Goudreau, spilled the beans because Guaidó only paid Goudreau $50,000 of the $200 million promised in a contract both men signed. Goudreau has released the contract as …
We are living in strange times indeed. This crisis raises many questions about the nature of freedom and what our expectations are, or should be. Everyone has their own notions about what freedom means and how far that should extend to oneself and indeed, to everyone else.
I want to start with a look at where we’ve come from before I look at where we are now, as I feel it gives a better understanding of our definitions of freedom and a better context for viewing where we are, at this moment in time.
75 years ago Germany surrendered to allied forces finally ending the ravages of the Second World War.
Today, as the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of this victory, why not think very seriously about finally winning that war once and for all?
If you’re confused by this statement, then you might want to sit down and take a deep breath before reading on. Within the next 12 minutes, you will likely discover a disturbing fact which may frighten you a little bit: The allies never actually won World War II…
Now please don’t get me wrong. I am eternally thankful for the immortal …
George Hughes front-rightThe “good,” gun-toting white goons who recently protested safety measures necessitated by COVID 19 at the Michigan state Capitol had nothing on “good” white folks in Sherman, Texas ninety years ago today. They burned down their own courthouse to get at a black suspect, and then burned him as well.
On May 9, 1930, a 41-year-old African American man named George Hughes was asphyxiated and then burned to a crisp in Sherman, Texas.
According to reports, Hughes had moved to the area from Honey Grove only …
The world is amidst the COVID-19 crisis and in our corner of the planet a presidential campaign is reduced to a single issue: Trump/not Trump. Pick your poison.
At a time that calls for national leadership or least debate on the issues, Congress unanimously passed the two-trillion-dollar Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act handing money to corporations so that they can, among other things, buy up the competition at pandemic prices.
What passes for a liberal agenda is without content
Since the 2008 economic collapse engineered by Wall Street, most of the world’s economies have been running on gas fumes and more bankrupt schemes and failed policies. Few, if any, economies have been able to return to weak pre-2008 economic growth levels. Even the Chinese and Indian economic “miracles” are not that miraculous.
To be sure, major capitalist economies have been declining since the late 1970s, and for the past few years imperialist organizations like the IMF and World Bank have routinely reviseddownward multiple economic growth estimates that are low to begin with.
Financialization, stock market manipulation, the refusal to …
In the course of the evolving patchwork of rent strikes happening right now across the US, there is suddenly a lot of talk in the press about how much the landlords are hurting. The landlords, of course, own the press, control the federal government, run all fifty states, and have a stranglehold on most of the city councils, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
My landlord, an investment company called the Randall Group that owns hundreds of residential and commercial properties up …
A health professional told me back in March that face masks were ineffective but that respirators (the N95) were. Because of the source, I thought there must be validity to this. However, it seemed counterintuitive. I reasoned that there would be differentials between using any type of mask versus no mask because no mask usage would allow aerosols to penetrate unabated, whereas a mask should capture much of the aerosol and reduce risk of spread to others and presumably should also function to mitigate breathing in viral-laden droplets. Because of the greater density of respirator material, the prophylactic would be …
It was nearly twenty years ago at a Muslim conference in Washington D.C. that I heard the distressing argument that Palestine should not be made a central topic in the American Muslim political agenda.
The point, which took many by surprise, was enunciated by a young American Pakistani Muslim academic, whose name is not important for my purpose here.
What I found reassuring then, however, was that almost everyone at the gathering shook their head in disagreement. The young academic was clearly an intellectual pariah. It was clear that Muslims, at least the attendees of that specific conference, will not be abandoning …
I admit upfront that this is a hard newsletter to read. It is about debt. There is a bloodless quality to the way that we talk about the debt of the poorer nations. There is nothing poetic here. The numbers are alienating, their outcome shocking.
In mid-April, eighteen heads of government from Africa and Europe publicly urged the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank, and the New Development Bank as well as other regional institutions to announce an ‘immediate moratorium on all bilateral and multilateral debt payments, both public and private, until …
On 1 May, International Labour Day (except in the USA), ((It is always worth recalling in the context of American exceptionalism that Labour Day in the US is the first Monday in September. Everywhere else (apart from Canada) Labour Day is celebrated on 1 May, in commemoration of the Haymarket massacre in Chicago! During a labour demonstration on 4 May 1886, a police provocateur detonated a bomb. Eight labour activists were arrested and tried, four were executed by hanging; one committed suicide and the remaining three were pardoned after …
In a previous paper entitled “Big Pharma Beware: Dr. Montagnier Shines New Light on Covid-19 and the Future of Medicine,” I elaborated upon the powerful intervention of the Nobel Prize winning virologist Dr. Luc Montagnier. In that location, I covered the reasonability of Montagnier’s assessment of the laboratory origin theory of COVID-19 and I discussed my reasons why his China-origin hypothesis is both naive and potentially dangerous. For anyone who wishes to fully appreciate reading this article, then I recommend either first reviewing my previous report OR watch the 2014 documentary Water Memory.
“We honor what we value,” goes the old saying. In our hedonistic culture we value most those who can put a ball in a hole. We ignore those who save lives through civic action.
The sports champions – golf, basketball, football, and baseball – receive riches and accolades from the masses. They are inducted into “Halls of Fame” and are the subjects of biographies, and documentary and feature films. As for the mass life-savers –few even know their names, much less their dramatic victories against overwhelming odds.
I was reminded of this contrast by a major New York Times Sports feature on Tiger Woods …
