Latest articles
by Andre Vltchek / January 27th, 2020
I am not sure when and how it happened or even what precisely took place, but suddenly, nothing feels the same, and nothing feels right in Malaysia.
Several years ago, things used to be totally different here. One would land at KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) – in the past one of the most modern and well-run mid-sized airports in the world, located some 70 kilometers from the city – and feel the omnipresent optimism and pride.
Malaysia was on the rise: a fast train was connecting the airport to the sprawling metropolis. It was passing near the famous Formula-1 circuit, the …
Their “Open Letter to the Green Party”
by Stansfield Smith / January 27th, 2020
Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert wrote an Open Letter to the Green Party, asking them to support the 2020 Democratic candidate regardless who wins the nomination. It was in response to an article well worth reading by Howie Hawkins, “The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem“.
It has become too common over the last 15 years to see used-to-be anti-imperialists, or at least harsh critics of the US government’s brutal policies at home and abroad, fold under corporate America’s unrelenting onslaught on humanity and …
Will The US Listen?
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 27th, 2020
The world is saying no to war with Iran and US out of the Middle East. Hundreds of protests were held in the United States and around the world on Saturday with a unified voice of “No War.” These protests are in solidarity with massive protests in Iraq calling for the US to get out where it is now an occupying force as the government has asked it to leave.
These protests and the uprising over the US remaining in Iraq are not being covered in the US corporate media. …
by Myles Hoenig / January 26th, 2020
I just read the open letter by Noam Chomsky, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathy Kelly, Ron Daniels, Leslie Cagan, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert calling on the Green Party not to run a candidate this year.
This helped me to come to a decision. I was seriously thinking of sitting this one out but my response to the above is: Fuck You! and I will now vote for whomever the Green Party nominates.
The authors above utilize so many clichés that it’s getting beyond …
by Bill Willers / January 26th, 2020
Martin Luther King Jr. Day has morphed into an annual reminder of the truth in Vladimir Lenin’s observation that great revolutionaries, while alive, are hounded by the powerful, and later, after they’ve been terminated, are lauded by their oppressors and transformed into harmless icons to placate the masses. Among the MLK-related articles to appear recently is a reposting of Edward Curtin’s 2017 review of Willam Pepper’s book The Plot to Kill King. Pepper, King’s friend and attorney for the King Family, spent 40 years researching the assassination, and Curtin’s review …
by Edward Curtin / January 25th, 2020
We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.” An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions. These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one. The result is mass hallucination.
This is the fundamental seismic shift of our era. There is a lot of bitching and joking about it, but when all is said and done, it is accepted as inevitable. Digital devices are embraced as phantom lovers. Technological “advances” are accepted as human destiny. …
Split Hearings
by Binoy Kampmark / January 25th, 2020
It is being increasingly larded with heavy twists and turns, a form of state oppression in slow motion, but the Julian Assange extradition case now looks like it may well move into the middle of the year, dragged out, ironically enough, by the prosecution. Curiously, this is a point that both the prosecutors, fronted by the US imperium, and the WikiLeaks defence team, seem to have found some inadvertent agreement with. This is the biggest case of its kind, and will determine, for an era, how journalism and the …
by Jeff J. Brown / January 24th, 2020
As of 24 January, a grand total of 25 people in China have died from a new strain of flu being dubbed “Wuhan”, after the city where it started. A few days ago, when 17 had died, Chinese media reported that 16 of them were over 65 years of age and the 17th was 61. So, clearly, the elderly is the most at risk group. But, that’s the case for mutating flu viruses every winter.
Beijing is taking unprecedented, anti-market, anti-capitalist measures to control it. Right at the peak of …
by William Vaillancourt / January 24th, 2020
Charles Sumner caned over his anti-slavery speech
When the likelihood of a person’s death increases on the day of his or her birth, this is called the “birthday effect.” An unimaginative term, it is not derived from obscure mysticism or divine occurrences beyond one’s control, but rather the practicality that the occasion can bring increased feelings of stress and depression, and that birthday celebrations can lead to fatal accidents. But the English language has no term for someone who is born and dies in the same place, …
by Robert Hunziker / January 24th, 2020
Thwaites, in West Antarctica, is the world’s most dangerous glacier. As of January 15th, scientists have labeled it: “A Climate Time Bomb.”
Thwaites is crumbling apart on the underneath side where warm ocean currents circulate, which is clear evidence that global warming is really, truly hitting its stride even as America, obeying President Trump’s orders, rejected its commitment to Paris ’15, a major climate agreement of almost all the nations of the world.
In point of fact, America is too focused on ceaseless (mindless) NYSE trading at new heights to give …
by Vijay Prashad / January 23rd, 2020
Hangameh Golestan, Witness 1979, 1979
On 17 January, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the Friday prayers for the first time in eight years. He mocked the ‘American clowns’ who threatened Iran and said that Iran’s response to the US assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani was a ‘slap in the face’ of US power. Tensions between Washington, DC, and Tehran seem to have gone from a boil to a simmer, …
by Yves Engler / January 23rd, 2020
While the current Liberal government claims to be progressive and in favour of a rules-based international order, promotion of democracy and world peace, its actions regarding Iran demonstrate that the primary drivers of Canadian foreign policy remain US geo-political interests and the interests of the rich and powerful.
(This previous article argues this has long been the case.)
While Israeli nationalists and Conservatives demand new measures targeting Iran, the reality is ordinary Canadians will not benefit from war with the 18th most populous country in the world. The families of Iranian-Canadians will certainly not benefit.
Despite election promises to the …
by Ben Norton / January 23rd, 2020
Video and a transcript of former OPCW engineer and dissenter Ian Henderson’s UN testimony appears at the end of this report.
A former lead investigator from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has spoken out at the United Nations, stating in no uncertain terms that the scientific evidence suggests there was no gas attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.
The dissenter, Ian Henderson, worked for 12 years at the international watchdog organization, serving as an inspection team leader and engineering expert. Among his most consequential jobs was assisting the international body’s fact-finding mission (FFM) on the ground in …
by Matthew J.L. Ehret / January 23rd, 2020
Anyone looking with sober eyes upon today’s world and the feeble economic and geopolitical underpinnings holding the system together must accept the fact that a new system WILL be created.
This is not an opinion, but a fact. We are moving towards eight billion lives on this globe and the means of productive powers to sustain that growing population (at least in the west) has been permitted to decay terribly over the recent half century while monetary values have grown like a hyperinflationary cancer to unimaginable proportions. Derivatives speculation alone under the deregulated “too big to fail” banking system has resulted …
Class Trumps Partisan Differences
by Roger D. Harris / January 22nd, 2020
On January 20, Donald G. Trump completed his third year in office. My one blog that received five-digit Facebook shares predicted Trump would lose in 2016. I was spectacularly wrong but not alone. Even the Las Vegas bookies thought Clinton was a shoo-in with her unbeatable two-punch knockout of (1) I’m not Trump and (2) World War III with the Russians would be peachy at least until the bombs start falling. What could possibly have gone wrong?
More to the point, the unexpected victory of Trump was the historical reaction to the bankruptcy of Clinton-Bush-Obama neoliberalism. Now after three years of …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 21st, 2020
Billions of US tax-payers’ money will continue to be funneled into Israel in the next fiscal year, and for many years in the foreseeable future. Republican and Democratic Senators have recently achieved just that, passing a bill aimed at providing Israel with $3.3 billion in annual aid.
The Bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Senator, Chris Coons and Republican Senator, Marco Rubio, passed on January 9, only one day after Iran struck US positions in Iraq. Enthusiasm to push the Bill forward was meant as an assurance to Tel Aviv from Washington, that the US is committed to Israel’s security and …
by Shawgi Tell / January 21st, 2020
To the shock of many, the Buffalo News, Buffalo’s main newspaper, recently published an article exposing serious problems with charter schools. Like Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, the Buffalo News usually goes out of its way to provide biased reporting on charter schools, almost always presenting them in the most favorable light possible, while consistently ignoring well-documented problems.
The Buffalo News published “Viewpoints: Charter schools are no educational panacea” (( Scott, L. “Viewpoints: Charter schools are no educational panacea“, Buffalo News, January 18, 2020.)) by Buffalo School Board Member Larry Scott on January 18, 2020.
Several points are worth highlighting.
First, non-profit and …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 21st, 2020
From Stop The Militarization of Police Facebook page
In recent weeks Popular Resistance has focused on the escalation of US militarism around the world, especially in the Middle East with the assassination of General Soleimani, US troops staying in Syria to take their oil and the US refusing to leave Iraq despite being asked to leave. The US is in the midst of a potential escalation toward full-scale war in the Middle East once again.
However, militarism abroad is mirrored by militarism at home, especially in …
by Chris Wright / January 21st, 2020
At this point in history, two things are clear. First, Marx was right that capitalism is torn by too many “contradictions” to be sustainable indefinitely as a global economic system. In its terminal period, which we’re entering now (and which we can predict will last generations, because a global economic order doesn’t vanish in a decade or two), it will be afflicted by so many popular uprisings—on the left and the right—so many economic, political, and ecological crises causing so much turmoil and dislocation, that only a permanent and worldwide fascism would be able to save it. But fascism, by …
by Peter Koenig / January 21st, 2020
Why, after so many assurances to the contrary, have the three European Iran’s Nuclear Deal Partner’s – Germany, France, the UK – decided to go after Iran, to follow the US dictate again?
The short answer is because they’re cowards. They have zero backbone to stand up against the US hegemony, because they are afraid to be sanctioned – as Trump indicated if they were to honor the” Nuclear Deal”. Iran is absolutely in its right to progressively increase uranium enrichment, especially since the US unilaterally dropped out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also called Iran’s Nuclear Deal, without …
by William Hawes / January 21st, 2020
Recently, the ridiculous real estate company WeWork has faced intense scrutiny after their business model was absurdly overvalued and their CEO, one Adam Neumann, was exposed as an abusive boss as well as an overall crazy person. Investors from the Saudi royal family, companies like SoftBank and J.P. Morgan, and numerous venture capitalists poured vast sums of money into the company, fueling its overvaluation, which ran as high as 47 billion dollars. Unfortunately, mainstream media continues to trot out this story, as well as other famous instances of corporate fraud, corruption, and malfeasance as anomalies, aberrations. Somehow, absurd …
by Gerald E. Scorse / January 20th, 2020
In 2017 a Republican-controlled Congress passed a tax cut hugely tilted to corporations and the wealthy. In the waning days of 2019, the Democratic-controlled House did a kind of me-too. It pushed through a retirement bill with a provision that gives billions to those in the upper tiers.
The House’s gift to the well-off was part of a deal finalizing federal spending for fiscal 2020. In a tweet summing up the agreement, tax expert Len Burman called it “the Zombie Extenders [aka tax breaks] and Fiscal Irresponsibility Act of 2019.”
In the case of retirement policy, nothing was …
by Andre Vltchek / January 20th, 2020
In the West, there is a new wave of political correctness at work: it is all about one’s sexual orientation; who has sex with whom, and how. Suddenly, the mass media in London, Paris and New York is greatly concerned about who has the right to change his or her sex and who does not want to belong to any ‘traditional’ gender bracket.
Thinking about ‘it’, writing about it, doing it, is considered “progressive”; cutting edge. Entire novels are being commissioned and then subsidized as far away as in the Asia Pacific. Western organizations and NGOs (so-called “non-government organizations” but financed …
Constitutional eroticism
by T.P. Wilkinson / January 20th, 2020
Disclaimer: The author in no way implicitly or explicitly supports the pretensions of the US regime to commit overt or covert acts of aggression or interference in the internal affairs of other sovereign states by its constitutional or extra-legal institutions whether performed by executive, legislative or judicial institutions or their respective officers, agents or assigns. The accidents by which such violations of customary and explicit (treaty-based) international law are regularly committed by the regime is in the author’s view a matter of joint and several liability. No “branch” of the regime can transfer liability or culpability to another branch whether …
by Jonathan Cook / January 20th, 2020
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs all the help he can muster before voters head to the ballot box on March 2 – for the third time in a year. Once again, it seems as though US President Donald Trump intends to ride to his rescue.
Despite Trump’s best efforts, Israel’s two elections last year ended in stalemate. Each time, Netanyahu’s Likud party and its religious, pro-settler coalition partners tied with the secular, yet hawkish right led by Blue and White leader Benny Gantz.
The pressure on Netanyahu to win this time has intensified. His opponents in the Israeli parliament advanced plans …
(Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / January 20th, 2020
Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is a 2019 comedy-drama set in 1969 Los Angeles and features a large ensemble cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. The story centres around veteran actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), star of the 1950s Western television series Bounty Law, and and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton is worried that his career is in decline and is reticent to take advice to travel to Italy to make Spaghetti Westerns. Cliff Booth also struggles to get work in Hollywood due to rumors …
by CGTN / January 18th, 2020
A cemetery in Xayar, NW #China‘s #Xinjiang #Uygur Autonomous Region, has recently become a bone of international contention. #CNN reported that graveyards in the region were being demolished by authorities, highlighting stories such as that of Aziz Isa Elkun, a Uygur poet now residing in London, who had said he couldn’t find his father’s grave on Google Maps. So a crew from CGTN decided to find out if there was any truth to the CNN report. Click the video to …
by Shawgi Tell / January 17th, 2020
Public facilities and infrastructure are produced by the working class and people and belong to the public. They exist in order to serve the common good and to contribute to the extended reproduction of society.
This collectively-produced wealth must not be handed over to competing owners of capital who are only concerned with maximizing profit as fast as possible, regardless of the damage caused to society and the environment. Socially-produced wealth must be off limits to narrow private interests. The aims and purposes of the private sector and public sector are not the same.
Non-profit and for-profit charter schools are not public …
by Colin Todhunter / January 17th, 2020
A common claim is that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are essential to agriculture if we are to feed an ever-growing global population. Supporters of genetically engineered (GE) crops argue that by increasing productivity and yields, this technology will also help boost farmers’ incomes and lift many out of poverty. Although in this article it will be argued that the performance of GE crops to date has been questionable, the main contention is that the pro-GMO lobby, both outside of India and within, has wasted no time in wrenching the issues of hunger and poverty from their political contexts to use …
by Robert Hunziker / January 17th, 2020
The northern continental shelves of Russia, inclusive of the Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea (ESAS) are some of the least researched yet most controversial subjects in climate science today. It’s the one region that has the biggest potential to trigger runaway global warming because of sizeable subsea methane deposits, thereby taking civilization down to its knees. But, that prospect is also extremely controversial within the scientific community.
Scientific opinion runs the gamut: (1) high risk- methane bursts will bury civilization with runaway global warming – a dreadful, deadly risk (2) not to worry, it’s low risk …
