Latest articles
by Ramzy Baroud / May 6th, 2020
One hundred years ago, representatives from a few powerful countries convened at San Remo, a sleepy town on the Italian Riviera. Together, they sealed the fate of the massive territories confiscated from the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in World War I.
It was on April 25, 1920, that the San Remo Conference Resolution was passed by the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. Western Mandates were established over Palestine, Syria and ‘Mesopotamia’ – Iraq. The latter two were theoretically designated for provisional independence, while Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland there.
The Mandatory will …
by Peter Koenig / May 6th, 2020
By the end of 2020 more people will have died from hunger, despair and suicide than from the corona disease. We, the world, is facing a famine-pandemic of biblical proportions. This real pandemic will overtake the fake COVID-19 pandemic by a long shot. The hunger pandemic reminds of the movie the Hunger Games, as it is premised on similar circumstances of a dominant few commanding who can eat and who will die – by competition.
This hunger pandemic will be under-reported or not reported at all in the mainstream media. In fact, it has started already. In the west the attention …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 6th, 2020
When we think of the repression of journalists, we automatically evoke foreign lands. We rarely, however, evoke or remember our own dissidents.
— Peter Oborne, Middle East Eye, May 5, 2020
It all spoke well of British justice, which meant poorly. As one correspondent from the Australian Associated Press put it in describing the latest case hearing for Julian Assange, “There are no lawyers here in person. Assange will not be present. There are 6 journalists here and there will be 6 members of the public.”
The icy District Judge Vanessa Baraitser had already relented last week on vacating May 18 …
by Gerald E. Scorse / May 5th, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic is worlds apart from the financial meltdown of 2008-09. Even so the government’s response was identical in one telltale way. Congress once again gave a special dose of tender loving care to taxpayers who need it the least.
The 2008 bailout suspended annual required minimum distribution (RMDs) from retirement accounts. Surprise, surprise, the same tax break showed up in the $2.2 trillion stimulus signed by President Trump.
Waiving RMDs is welcome news for the well-heeled. They have plenty of income outside their IRAs and 401(k)s. They’re fine with passing up a distribution, and seriously happy …
by Gary Olson / May 5th, 2020
Throughout history there has been only one thing that ruling interests have ever wanted — and that’s everything.”
— Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), p. 46.
A recent lead editorial ((April 28, 2020.)) in the New York Times reads “Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s.” Written by Jamelle Bouie, an African-American millennial (age 33) on the paper’s editorial staff, the piece contains the following opening and closing paragraphs:
Class consciousness does not flow automatically out of class identity. Being a worker does not necessarily mean you will come to identify as a worker. Instead, you …
DeVos, Thiel, Phase 2 of Project BEST
by John Klyczek / May 5th, 2020
In 1982, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, blew the whistle on the Reagan Administration’s Project BEST (Better Education Skills through Technology): a techno-fascist plan to privatize the American school system by selling it out to Big Tech corporations that deliver B. F. Skinner’s operant-conditioning method of “programmed instruction” through computerized “teaching machines.” Almost thirty years later, the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act” is primed to pump a flood of federal education funds into online charter school corporations, such as K12 Inc., …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 5th, 2020
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful. And so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people. And neither do we.
— President George W. Bush, August. 5, 2004
Hatred is disorientating, and becomes, over time, a form of enduring fanaticism. The attacks on US President Donald Trump tend to fall into this camp. Much criticism of his often grotesque conduct, from his conversion of high office to a social media spectacle of grabs and interruptions, to his whole lowering of the tone, is warranted. He has brought locker room morals and the ethics of …
by Graham Peebles / May 4th, 2020
Additional to the global health crisis and the coming worldwide economic collapse, Covid-19 is fuelling a humanitarian crisis. The World Food Program (WFP) warns that, “millions of civilians living in conflict-scarred nations, including many women and children, face being pushed to the brink of starvation, with the spectre of famine a very real and dangerous possibility.” The WFP’s view that the biggest impact of the pandemic will not by caused by the virus directly, but the hunger that flows from it, is in line with other concerned groups.
In a recent statement the WFP warned that “unless swift action is taken”, …
by C.J. Hopkins / May 4th, 2020
There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.
You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi …
by Kim Petersen / May 4th, 2020
United States president Donald Trump is proud of the US effort against COVID-19. In his 1 May remarks on protecting America’s seniors, he said,
Through aggressive actions and the devotion of our doctors and nurses, however, we have held our fatality rate far below hard-hit other countries such as Spain and Italy and United Kingdom and Sweden. We’re way below other countries.
Trump employs the logical fallacy of the confirmation bias. In this case, he selectively chooses from among the most ravaged world nations suffering from COVID-19 to compare the US. …
by Gilad Atzmon / May 4th, 2020
Back in the 1960s, the British academic establishment was rather excited about the work of Karl Popper, the philosopher who developed the concept of empirical falsification. Popper was keen to define the demarcation between the scientific and that which only mimics empiricism and scientism. A theory, according to Popper, can be considered scientific if, and only if, it is potentially falsifiable by experiments or its predictions. Popper attempted to create criteria that would deny psychoanalysis, Marxism and astrology any scientific status based on the fact that these theories are not falsifiable.
One may wonder what Popper would have to say about …
by John Stanton / May 4th, 2020
We present the narrative of this report and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their consideration. Ten Commissioners—five Republicans and five Democrats chosen by elected leaders from our nation’s capital at a time of great partisan division—have come together to present this report without dissent. We have come together with a unity of purpose because our nation demands it. [The US Pandemic of 2020], was a [time] of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States. The nation was unprepared. How …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 4th, 2020
Now that May Day is behind us, we must build the General Strike campaign. The next strike day, June 1, should be the culmination of a month of working toward the day of action. This is the responsibility of everyone involved in the General Strike movement.
Join the next Popular Resistance General Strike call on Thursday, May 28 at 7:00 pm Eastern. Register at .
This is an ongoing campaign. We emphasize it is a campaign as campaigns provide ongoing opportunities to build the movement. The goal is to ensure …
by David Swanson / May 4th, 2020
A new collection of maps found here displays what militarism looks like in the world. Here’s a brief guide to using and understanding them.
Across the top are 10 drop-down menus on these topics: Wars, Weapons, U.S. Weapons, Money, Nukes, Chemical and Biological, U.S. Military, Air Strikes, Law, and Promotes Peace and Security.
Some of the topics only include one map, others multiple maps. The one with the most has eight maps. When you click on the name of a map in a drop-down menu, you’ll …
by Ellen Brown / May 3rd, 2020
Congress seems to be at war with the states. Only $150 billion of its nearly $3 trillion coronavirus relief package – a mere 5% – has been allocated to the 50 states; and they are not allowed to use it where they need it most, to plug the holes in their budgets caused by the mandatory shutdown. On April 22, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was opposed to additional federal aid to the states, and that his preference was to allow states to go bankrupt.
No such threat looms over the banks, which have made out extremely well …
Criticism of the documentary, Planet of the Humans
by Paul Haeder / May 3rd, 2020
The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what …
by Gary Brumback / May 3rd, 2020
Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak? No. Sabrina Williams’ 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most by any man or woman in the Open Era? No. Michael Phelps’ all-time record for Olympic gold medals? No.
Those records and all like them matter only to a few and will probably be broken someday.
The only unbroken American record that matters in the long run is the long trail of death, destruction, misery and exploitation ever since America’s birth by its power elite who eventually formed a corpocacy, or an alliance between corporate America and government America, with the former calling all the shots. If …
by Gary Leupp / May 3rd, 2020
End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.
And you just better believe, boy,
somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight,
It’s the working, the working, just the working life
— Bruce Springsteen, “Factory” (1978)
President Trump, responding to meatpacking plant closures occasioned by COVID-19 has ordered the plants to stay open for national security purposes. No matter that over 20 U.S. meatpacking workers in the U.S. have died so far of the virus.
On April 7 Tyson Foods announced it was closing a pork processing plant in Iowa …
by Chris Wright / May 3rd, 2020
In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least ten or twenty years that capitalism is entering a long, drawn-out period of unprecedented global crisis. The Great Depression and World War II will likely, in retrospect, seem rather minor—and temporally condensed—compared to the many decades of ecological, economic, social, and political crises humanity is embarking on now. In fact, it’s probable that we’re in the early stages of the protracted collapse of a civilization, which is to say of a particular set of economic relations underpinning certain social, political, and cultural relations. One can …
by Matthew J.L. Ehret / May 2nd, 2020
This April 16th, Dr. Luc Montagnier became a household name around the world. This occurred as the controversial virologist decided to publicly state his support for the theory that Covid-19 is indeed a laboratory-generated creation and not a naturally occurring effect of viral evolution.
Referring to a study published at the Kusama School of Biology in New Dehli on January 31st, Montagnier (the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for his 1983 discovery of the HIV virus) made the point that the specific occurrence of HIV RNA viral segments spliced surgically within the COVID-19 genome could not have originated naturally and he …
by acTVism Munich / May 2nd, 2020
by Daniel Espinosa / May 2nd, 2020
On April 27, the Wall Street Journal reported about the creation of a “Manhattan Project” for Covid-19. A “secret group”, consisting in a dozen scientists and a few billionaires, was working “to cull the world’s most promising research on the pandemic” to then advise the White House in the best course of action.
As Rob Copeland wrote for the journal, the group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture-capitalist named Tom Cahill, a graduate from Duke University with extensive – maybe too extensive – contacts in the business world, as we will explore below. The “lockdown-era Manhattan Project”, as the …
by Howie Hawkins / May 2nd, 2020
The coronavirus depression is fast becoming as deep as the Great Depression. The federal government’s response has been too little, too late.
While sickness and death spread, while unemployment and small business failures soar, while health care and essential workers lack personal protective equipment (PPE), Congress is in recess until May 4.
The childlike dummy, Donald Trump, spouts bad advice daily in his televised briefings. Thursday he said we could beat the coronavirus by injecting disinfectants or somehow shining ultraviolet radiation inside our bodies.
Meanwhile, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, is MIA. Is he sitting on a park bench somewhere feeding bread …
by Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo / May 2nd, 2020
As soon as the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading its tentacles throughout China and eventually to the rest of the world, the World Health Organization (WHO), along with other international groups, sounded the alarm that refugees and migrants are particularly vulnerable to the deadly disease.
“We strongly emphasize the need for inclusive national public health measures to ensure migrants and refugees have the same access to services as the resident population, in a culturally sensitive way,” Dr. Santino Severoni, Special Adviser on Health and Migration at WHO/Europe implored governments throughout …
by Robert Hunziker / May 2nd, 2020
Stop cutting down trees for biomass… STOP WOODY BIOMASS!
That should be a bumper sticker on every vehicle in America and around the world as easy-to-read bumper stickers are more effective than many forms of advertising. And, just for starters, maybe plaster that new biomass bumper sticker over the old one that reads: “My child is an honor student at….” Oh! Please!
According to LSA – University of Colorado/Boulder, wood accounts for 79% of biomass production and accounts for 3.2% of energy production. Wood dominates the worldwide biomass industry.
For perspective purposes, a paid lobbyist on behalf of trees could rightfully claim: (1) …
by Bill Hackwell / May 1st, 2020
Photo: Bill Hackwell, Havana, Plaza of the Revolution
This photograph depicts how the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana usually looks on May 1, International Workers Day (IWD). Every year since 1959 when a revolution, whose backbone was made up of workers and peasants, was victorious against a brutal US-backed dictatorship, millions of Cubans and international friends fill Paseo from the Malecon to the Plaza to celebrate this day that honors all workers around the world. The march has also come to honor Cuba for holding out …
by Paul Haeder / May 1st, 2020
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
It doesn’t take a lockdown to pull from some of us humanists the universality of how deep the emotional, cultural, societal, economic and spiritual divide is between the have’s and have’s not.
As we move from “top” to “bottom” in the daily stories of how these forced social distancing measures, draconian business closures, far-reaching travel bans and the like are affecting lives, we need to have more humanistic ways of parsing …
by subMedia / May 1st, 2020
This May Day finds us at an important historic crossroads. Amidst a global pandemic, this year the streets will be eerily silent as people forgo the marches, rallies and riots that are the annual rituals of international workers day. But while the streets may be calm, the class war rages on. Wildcat strikes are popping off among ‘essential workers’ who two months ago were seen as some of the lowest, most precarious participants of the gig economy. Prison uprisings are breaking out around the world at an unprecedented rate. And millions of tenants are withholding their rent in what could …
by Todd Smith / May 1st, 2020
“This will be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.” That was U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams on April 5, touring the Sunday morning shows to warn of the worst week yet for pandemic death in the United States.
During these interviews, the Surgeon General also managed to show off his mask-making skills, an unwitting allusion to the fact that — contrary to the spectacular events of 1941 and 2001 (not to mention his own previous “guidance” against the efficacy of face masks) — we are far more likely on the brink of a 1918 moment. Not that the Surgeon General’s …
