by Andre Vltchek and Mira Lubis / April 18th, 2020
Indonesia’s new shining city of the hill
An old road between Balikpapan and Samarinda passes through the poor villages, through rural slums, as well as stalls selling second-rate local fruits. The cheap, unhygienic eateries are now half-empty. While the traffic is still heavy here, the ‘real action’ is somewhere else; a few kilometers away, where the new motorway is being constructed; a motorway which will eventually connect Balikpapan, Samarinda and potentially the new Indonesian capital city which is expected to rise somewhere around the now dirt poor Sepaku …
On 4 March 2018, both Sergei Skripal and his daughter who was visiting from their shared home country of Russia, Yulia Skripal, were poisoned in Salisbury England, and — though both survived — neither of them has been allowed to communicate to the public except under the watch of their British court-appointed ‘guardians’. They also have been prohibited to communicate with any Russians. Repeated efforts by the Russian Embassy to be allowed to communicate with them have been rejected by the UK Government. The BBC reported on 18 May 2018, that, “Ms Skripal was …
The US president is in a warring mood. Having declared himself a president at war, a meaningless gesture given that the US is always, somewhere in the world, at war, finding necessary enemies in distraction was always going to be a priority. Donald Trump already had the “China virus” in his artillery, attaching nationality to pathogen. Now, and it took some time in coming by his standards, is the World Health Organization, a body which has, as its utopia, an idea of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of …
The Trump administration and the Republican’s policy towards China and the WHO is nothing short of blackmail. They are trying to pressure China into easing up debts and suppressing the country’s growing influence in international institutions.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic a careening, confused President is fibbing, flailing, breaking laws, and mishandling money. As the domino effect of this crisis mounts, the public is asking: “Where is the Congress?” Our Senators and Representatives have been home since March 20 and won’t be back until May 4th, not on the job inside the Capitol. Shameful!
Worse, some lawmakers want a remote Congress so they can remain AWOL and pretend to deal with the many crises remotely.
Why? Fear of the pandemic? Escaping rollcall responsibility? No matter that Congress can follow all the CDC guidelines and more for …
With millions forced out of work and many more stuck at home, Canadians need to ask tough questions of organizations receiving billions of dollars to protect them from foreign threats. The country’s intelligence/security sector has done little to respond to the ongoing social and economic calamity. Even worse, their thinking and practices are an obstacle to what’s required to overcome a global pandemic.
A recent Canadian Press article highlights the failure of intelligence agencies to warn of the COVID-19 outbreak. They largely ignore health-related threats despite receiving huge sums of federal money.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) has more than …
The IMF now predicts that China next year will have the highest rate of economic growth since 2011, which was the last time when China’s GDP growth-rate exceeded 9% (at 9.6%). China’s growth-rate had averaged around 9% between 1978 and 2011, then slid to around 6.5%. If the IMF is correct, then 2021 will be the first time in a decade that the country’s GDP growth-rate is restored to its former long-time norm.
The proxy war that Saudi Arabia and Iran have been waging in Yemen for the past five years goes beyond the pale of human capacity for extreme cruelty and ruthlessness, and against the spirit and the letter of the Quran. Ironically, whereas Saudi Arabia has many reasons to end the war, which prompted its decision to declare a unilateral ceasefire, Islam’s forbidding of the killing of innocent people was never considered a reason to halt the fighting. The Saudis continued to engage in a merciless war against Iran-backed Houthis, …
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
As the global pandemic grips world attention, completely unnoticed by mainstream media was the release of a final report of an academic study pertaining to another previously calamitous event of international significance. On March 25th, the conclusion of a four year investigation by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was published which determined that the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on …
The Great Gray Hope has bowed out of the presidential primary race, leaving tottering Joe Biden as the last Democrat standing. What Bernie Sanders accomplished electorally was remarkable, revealing both how far a progressive can venture and the limits proscribing further advancement to the left within the Democratic Party.
Sanders pushes the limits of the system
That Sanders was once the frontrunner and might have swept the Democratic primaries is an indicator of the neoliberal order’s decay. The coronavirus pandemic was both the final blow to the Sanders campaign …
Leaked report shows that staff worked relentlessly to damage the party’s leader, including by exploiting antisemitism
by Jonathan Cook / April 16th, 2020
The findings of a leaked, 860-page report compiled by the British Labour Party on its handling of antisemitism complaints is both deeply shocking and entirely predictable all at once.
For the first time, extensive internal correspondence between senior party officials has been revealed, proving a years-long plot to destroy Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader who recently stepped down.
The report confirms long-held suspicions that suspected cases of antisemitism were exploited by head office staff to try to undermine Corbyn. Anyone who was paying close attention to events in the party over the past five years already had a sense of that.
In Part I of this article I discussed how when Vygotsky’s work was exported to the United States it was narrowly defined as encompassing his work in child-development and cooperative learning. His interest in art history, European history and his commitment to Marxian political economy is barely mentioned. Secondly, I contrasted the differences between capitalist psychology and socialist psychology across the categories of psychological disorders, attitude towards social class, what is consciousness, motivation, emotions, intelligence, the place of the unconscious, consumptive patterns, work, free will and therapy. Then I showed how Marxian theories of individual human development differed from bourgeois …
John Lennon, prolific as a writer as much as a performer, wrote this:
Working Class Hero
As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
While some have applauded Senator Bernie Sanders for endorsing former Vice-President Joe Biden for president, some have criticized the endorsement. Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp joins Rick Sanchez for analysis.
In the June 2017 UK general election, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of power. If just 2,227 votes had gone the other way, seven Tory knife-edge constituencies would have been won by Labour, putting Corbyn in a strong position to lead a coalition government.
Labour achieved 40 per cent in the election, increasing its share of the vote by more than any other of the party’s election leaders since 1945. As we noted at the time, it was one …
Caleb Maupin is a widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and in Latin America. He was involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement from its early planning stages, and has been involved many struggles for social justice. He is an outspoken advocate of international friendship and cooperation, as well 21st Century Socialism.
What’s the matter with science? By that, do I mean, why don’t we turn away from corrupt politics and religion and follow the way of science? Or do I mean, why have we allowed science to so corrupt our politics and our culture? I mean, of course, both.
Spitting at someone is a universal insult. In Israel, however, spitting at Palestinians is an entirely different story.
Now that we know that the deadly coronavirus can be transmitted through saliva droplets, Israeli soldiers and illegal Jewish settlers are working extra hard to spit at as many Palestinians, their cars, doorknobs, and so on, as possible.
If this sounds to you too surreal and repugnant, then you might not be as familiar with the particular breed of Israeli colonialism as you may think you are.
God help us all. The acrid stench of death wafts through the air. I cough, choke, every breath is an effort, and non-stop nausea portends retroperistalsis. The ceaseless, somber wail of ambulance sirens permeates every fiber of my being. They are busy non-stop, blasting through the streets, hauling the dying and the dead to overflowing Tucson, Arizona hospitals. Soon they’ll be burning piles of corpses in the streets. There is nowhere to hide. My neighbor has become my potential assassin. I avoid her, and the virus which likely infects her, like the plague. Covid-19 changed everything…wait, I’ve heard something like that before…
In truth, none of the drivel in the first paragraph …
Cuba complained recently that a shipment of test kits, masks and respirators, donated by the Chinese Alibaba group, didn’t arrive because the American company tasked with transportation feared breaching US sanction rules. Washington imposed an embargo on Cuba in 1962 after the island nation nationalized its oil industry. The measures have been denounced by the United Nations 28 years in a row.
PressTV: What are your views on this?
Peter Koenig: First, there are no words to describe the cruelty of this and many other similar acts by the United States, to utilize this pandemic to …
Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have never stopped working to funnel as much public money as possible from public schools into their own private pockets, even if this means undermining the education and future of students attending those public schools. This massive transfer of public funds from public schools to charter schools also undermines teachers’ working conditions and has a negative impact on society, the economy, and the national interest.
Much of this unprincipled transfer of large sums of public wealth to the private sector has been …
A new study in Nature (April 2020) casts a disturbing light on the prospects of abrupt ecosystem collapse. The report analyzes the probabilities of collapsing ecosystems en masse, and not simply the loss of individual species. ((Trisos, C.H. et al, “The Projected Timing of Abrupt Ecological Disruption From Climate Change”, Nature, April 8, 2020.))
The paper states that a high percentage of species will be exposed to harmful climate conditions at about the same time, potentially leading to sudden and catastrophic die-offs of biodiversity. If high greenhouse gas emissions remain in place, abrupt events are forecast to begin before 2030 in …
These are dark days. As the COVID-19 crisis turns our world upside-down, the social isolation and atomization of capitalism has given way to full-blown social distancing. At a time when we most need to come together, we’re told that human contact can kill us. Alarm bells are flashing everywhere as the dead pile up, the economy burns, and more and more people’s mental health deteriorates. This is the most severe and far-reaching global crisis that most of us who are alive today have ever experienced. Its a terrifying, alienated, and stressful time. It’s also no time to give up. No …
The conflict between the Navy high command, a captain and his threatened crew could underscore a new meaning of national security after the pandemic runs its course, says Gareth Porter.
There’s an interview of Bill Gates in which Gates reveals more than he might have intended. Rosemary Frei details many of the Orwellian aspects of Gates’ plans. In particular, consider these comments by Gates from disparate parts of the interview:
It’s [Covid19] quite infectious, way more infectious than MERS or SARS were. It’s not as fatal as they were ….. Nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But money — ya know — bringing the economy back and doing money — that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back …
There is a debate on the Left about the role of Bernie Sanders. A good many (probably a majority) are enthusiastic. Some believe that he represents a truly progressive force and brings renewed hope in reshaping the Democratic Party to become that party of the working people, the “minorities,” women, that it supposedly once was. These folks talk about working to transform the party, call upon progressives to join and/or become active. This position is most clearly articulated by the progressive film-maker Michael Moore.
Perhaps some of us were harboring naïve hopes. We were thinking: If it became obvious that China and its government are doing things much better than the West, many of the ‘opposition figures’ in Hong Kong, including the most hardened rioters, would see reason, repent, and once and for all change their minds.
Nothing like that has happened.
Increasingly it is becoming clear that Hong Kong’s anti-government forces are not rational, not rational at all. They are not seeking the best possible solution for their territory. They are encouraged, and some of them even paid, to overthrow the system, to antagonize Beijing, …
Preparing for a pandemic requires understanding that a change in the relationship between people is primary and the production of things is secondary and flows from social factors. Investors in profit-based medicine cannot comprehend this concept. Nothing could exemplify it more clearly than Cuba’s response to the corona virus (COVID-19).
The US dawdled for months before reacting. Cuba’s preparation for COVID-19 began on January 1, 1959. On that day, over sixty years before the pandemic, Cuba laid the foundations for what would become the discovery of novel drugs, bringing patients …
In the backdrop of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, Michael D. Yates, decades-long union activist, director of Monthly Review Press and former Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine, discusses condition of the working people and steps required. The interview of Professor Michael Yates, whose academic fields include labor economics and the relationship between capital and labor, was taken on March 28, 2020.
Farooque Chowdhury: For a long time, you have been working with unions, as an organizer, educator, and negotiator. Your works on class and labor are significant. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the working people in countries, from Thailand, …
As any risk-taking pioneer knows, it is lonely taking the lead and suffering the derisive scorn of one’s compatriots. I have been there and so can understand what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the public face of the U.S. government’s coronavirus efforts, must be feeling. Fauci was recently quoted by Time magazine as saying to interviewer Kate Linebaugh:
I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you.
Time got the quote wrong. He actually said:
I don’t think we ever should ever shake hands ever again, to …
