Interestingly, after the US attack on Iraqi Militia fighters on 31 December 2020, and the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, on 2 January, the first thing President Trump could come up with was bragging that it was him who gave the order to murder the popular military leader. General Qassem Suleimani was the commander of the Iranian special Quds Force. The Quds Force was created during the Iran–Iraq War as a special unit from the broader Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It has the mission of liberating Muslim land, especially al-Quds, from which it takes its name – “Jerusalem Force“, in English.
In India, the ‘development’ paradigm is premised on moving farmers out of agriculture and into the cities to work in construction, manufacturing or the service sector, despite these sectors not creating anything like the number of jobs required. The aim is to displace the existing labour-intensive system of food and agriculture with one dominated by a few transnational corporate agri-food giants which will then control the sector. Agriculture is to be wholly commercialised with large-scale, mechanised (monocrop) enterprises replacing family-run farms that help sustain hundreds of millions of rural livelihoods while feeding the urban masses.
Promoters of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools that seize billions of dollars a year from public schools have long promoted the illusion that it is mainly teachers unions that are opposed to charter schools.
Keeping in mind that 90% of charter schools have no teacher unions and that charter school owners-operators usually react bellicosely when teachers try to unionize to defend their rights and their students, it is not only teachers unions that oppose charter schools.
For years, many legislators, governors, school boards, superintendents, parents, students, teachers, community residents, education advocates, education associations, college professors, and others have also opposed non-profit …
In the early hours of January 3, 2020, the United States military assassinated Iran’s most powerful military commander, General Qasem Soleimani.
Soleimani’s killing, accomplished by means of a drone strike in Baghdad, was done without the authorization of the Iraqi government. It thus constitutes a grave breach of Iraqi sovereignty.
It also constitutes an act of war against the state of Iran. Soleimani was a high-ranking representative of the Iranian government, reputed by many to be the second most powerful official after Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The U.S. government sought to justify Soleimani’s assassination on the basis that Soleimani was allegedly …
The U.S. military-industrial-congressional triangle (MIC) is comprised of the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces; industry, the corporations that sell goods and services to the Pentagon and allied governments; and U.S. Congress, which authorizes funding for the Pentagon to purchase industry’s goods and services. The MIC is insulated. It is entirely removed from the will of the U.S. public; the public elects the congressional side of the triangle, but industry corrupts Congress (via, for example, campaign finance, strategic allocation of manufacturing plants, think tank narratives, and forceful …
by Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo / January 6th, 2020
By killing top Iranian military commander, Qasem Soleimani, American and Israeli leaders demonstrated the idiom ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both politically and legally embattled – the former has just been impeached and the latter is dogged by an Attorney General indictment and investigation into major corruption cases.
Despairing, out of options and united by a common cause, both leaders were on the lookout for a major disruption – that would situate them in a positive light within their countries’ respective media – and they found …
How Community Schools and Charter Schools Are Both Public-Private Partnerships That Medicalize Workforce Training through Socio-emotional Learning
by John Klyczek / January 5th, 2020
Democratic presidential candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren, have pledged to fix the American education system by replacing privatized charter schools with “community schools” that incorporate “socioemotional-learning (SEL)” programs. These “Democratic” community schools, which teach “social skills” and “emotional competencies,” might sound like “liberal” or “leftwing” education reforms. But don’t be fooled by the pathos of such leftist “social justice” rhetoric. The Democrats’ socioemotional community-learning centers are no more “progressive” than corporate-fascist charter schools.
Both charter schools and community schools are public-private partnerships between businesses and government agencies that “pipeline” students into “career pathways” curriculums assigned to fill workforce development quotas …
White Helmets
Vanessa Beeley is a British journalist who was invited to Canada in the fall of 2019 to present talks in seven cities on the conflict in Syria. The sponsors of her speaking tour were several anti-war groups, including the Geopolitical Economy Research Group, the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, and Peace Alliance in Winnipeg.
Beeley is an independent journalist and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East, including dangerous zones in Gaza, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and Syria. In 2017 she was a finalist for …
Once I realized to my dismay that I couldn’t believe a word of what our media and political leaders said about major events in the here and now, their credibility on controversial happenings so long ago and far away entirely disappeared.”
— Ron Unz, 2018
The 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, generated renewed interest in the First World War, its beginnings, its aftermath, and the lead up to World War II. For anyone brought up with the carefully-crafted narratives that constitute “popular” history, a dive into details of the World Wars can shake one’s …
All Coastal Gaslink workers have now been peacefully evicted from Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en territories.
Under the authority of Anuk nu’at’en (Wet’suwet’en law), and with support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs of all five clans, the Wet’suwet’en are standing up for the last of our lands and we need you to stand with us.
We will honour the instructions of our ancestors, and continue to protect our lands from trespassers.
Everyone wants the man who is still searching to have already reached his conclusions. A thousand voices are already telling him what he has found, and yet he knows he hasn’t found anything. Should he search on and let them talk? Of course.
— Albert Camus, “The Enigma” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, First published October 28, 1968
Albert Camus’ search ended sixty years ago on January 4, 1960, the day he died. Although he had already written The Stranger, The Rebel, The Plague, and The Fall, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he felt his true work had barely begun. …
Douglas Valentine believes that assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani is an act of psychological warfare which allows Trump to deflect attention from the impeachment scandal and appease his American and Israeli followers.
Kathy Kelly and Maya Evans walk with children at the Chamin-E-Babrak refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan, January 2014. (Abdulhai Darya)
The 2003 “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq had finally stopped. From the balcony of my room in Baghdad’s Al Fanar Hotel, I watched U.S. Marines moving between their jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees. They had occupied the street immediately in front of the small, family-owned hotel where our Iraq Peace Team had been living for the past six months. Looking upward, a U.S. Marine could see …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 3rd, 2020
Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, October 2011
Clearing the FOG cohosts, Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, interviewed journalist and author Chris Hedges about the significant events of 2019 and what activists must prepare for in 2020 and beyond. Hedges covered uprisings and wars in the Middle East, Balkans, and Central America for twenty years as a foreign correspondent. He has studied and written books about sacrifice zones, the failures of the liberal class and the rise of the right in the United States. He shares the wisdom he …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / January 3rd, 2020
It’s a new year, and the U.S. has found a new enemy—an Iraqi militia called Kata’ib Hezbollah. How tragically predictable was that? So who or what is Kata’ib Hezbollah? Why are U.S. forces attacking it? And where will this lead?
Kata’ib Hezbollah is one of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) that were recruited to fight the Islamic State after the Iraqi armed forces collapsed and Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, fell to IS in June 2014. The first six PMUs were formed by five Shiite militias that all received support …
In one of the poorest neighborhoods of Bogota, Belen, I saw two people bleeding in the middle of the road. One person was clearly dead. A group of onlookers was moving frantically, shouting loudly. There was an attempt to resurrect an injured man. I asked the driver to inquire whether our help was needed, but he was told something insulting by the locals, and insisted that we leave the scene immediately.
Was it a traffic accident? Or a murder? The driver did not know. He actually did not want to know.
“Look,” he said. “You may be a Russian or Chinese Communist, …
There’s a problem with America’s favorite statistic: GDP. It avoids pretty much everything that’s actually, truly, really good for society, including the importance of robust ecology. Still, it’s the biggest measure of what’s happening with the economy and used around the world, even though horribly flawed.
According to some forward thinkers, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of all finished goods and services, is a distortion that needs fixing.
Does Mr. Trump really not grasp that his sanctions left and right – and now on the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 – is committing economic suicide, not for himself, of course, but for the United States? He attempts to punish not only Russia, but all the corporations, construction companies, Russian, German and from everywhere, which collaborated and are still working on the final stretch of the1,250 km pipeline.
Nord Stream 2 is an under-water pipeline crossing from Kingisepp in Russia to Greifswald in Germany, under the Baltic sea. …
From the far distance sounded the muffled howling of a family of monkeys, monos gritones, passing the night in the crowns of the mighty trees. It echoed through the jungle like the roar of an angry mountain lion. Gruesome and terrifying, it seemed to tear the night apart, but it did not disturb the jungle. It sang and fiddled, chirped and whistled, whined and whimpered, rejoiced and lamented its ever-unchanging song with the constancy of the roaring sea.
At age 11, Saabir Gulmadin began chopping wood to support his family. Now 18, he earns about $1.50 US (120 Afghanis) for every 56 kg of wood he splits. It takes him 2 to 3 hours.
“Is the work hard on your body?” I ask.
“Ohhh, yes,” he says, without hesitation.
“Where does it hurt?”
Saabir raises his right hand to give his thin upper arm a couple of squeezes.
Saabir supports the 8 Pashtun family members in their home in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father died from an illness when Saabir was 6, and by age 8, Saabir was working in the streets, transporting items …
We need to have a grown-up talk with the grown-ups.
People like us—grown-ups, adults, parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents—we’ve lived our lives mostly optimistically, and, regardless of religion (or irreligion) with one shared article of faith: that we were working toward progress and, specifically, that each new generation would have things better than the last. Better lives. Better opportunities. Better tools. Better rules. And …
György Lukács’s views on aesthetics will be found in one of his two major mature works, The Specificity of the Aesthetic, the other one being Towards an Ontology of Social Being. They both constitute huge treatises. The Specificity of the Aesthetic extends to approximately 1800 pages, its purpose being to clarify the categories of Marxist aesthetics and the nature of the aesthetic phenomenon. It was to be followed by two further sequences – The Work of Art and Aesthetic Behavior and Art as a Social-Historical …
As in s-hole populated by Puritans, KKK, Robber Barons, Thieves, Snake Oil Salesmen, Barkers, Grifters, Cavalries, Stars and Bars, the entire white race mess
by Paul Haeder / January 2nd, 2020
Los Dias de los Muertos are highly stylized rituals grounded in Aztec mythology when those who had passed on during the year migrate to the darkness of Mictlan in the north – the 1st is reserved for the innocents, the children, and the 2nd for the rest of us poor sinners. Traditional altars, garnished with cempaxeutl (a kind of marigold), photographs of the “difuntos” (deceased ones), jugs of tequila and mezcal, the favorite cigarettes of the dead, steaming bowls of turkey mole, and spun sugar “cranios” (skulls) blanket the land from border to border. Thanks to Calderon and the drug …
Former U.S. President Barack Obama is now in severe legal jeopardy, because the Russiagate investigation has turned 180 degrees; and he, instead of the current President, Donald Trump, is in its cross-hairs.
The biggest crime that a U.S. President can commit is to try to defeat American democracy (the Constitutional functioning of the U.S. Government) itself, either by working with foreign powers to take it over, or else by working internally within America to sabotage democracy for his or her own personal reasons. Either way, it’s treason (crime that is intended to, and does, endanger the continued functioning of the Constitution …
On an ugliness scale of one to ten, if the U.S. Guantanamo prison is 7, the French military in Algeria 8, Pinochet’s controls of Chile 9, and the Inquisition 10, the severity, scale and number of Cameroon military human rights violations is possibly 4 and a half. Still, is the suffering of any victim ever forgotten.
The Republic of Cameroon continues to endure a low intensity conflict with its English minority. After Anglophone attorneys struck for better legal and civil rights in 2016 and were joined by teachers and students, …
As 2020 approached, the sense that the barbarians were not only at the gates but had breached the walls of indifference had come to the fore. But these were not conventional human forms; rather, they were the agents of conflagration, driving people to the sea, forcing them from homes and consuming territories the size of small countries. Australia was burning.
Then it became clear that the barbarians might have been among us all along, the dedicated wreckers of the biosphere, the climate change denialists who cling to a tradition highlighted by the smug authors of Genesis 1:26: that the non-human world …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 1st, 2020
Over the last decade, a national consensus has developed for a progressive left agenda on the economy, social services, the climate crisis and ending wars but the movement has not yet built the power to make that a reality. The next decade will be ripe with opportunities for transformational change due to a combination of expanding popular movements as well as escalating crisis situations.
Positive change will only occur if these movements evolve into an organized popular movement that truly represents the people’s interests against the elites. The movement must …
“They will run and not grow weary,” is a quote from the Bible (Isaiah, 40:41) that adorns the homepage of Kairos Palestine. This important document, which parallels a similar initiative emanating from South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle years, has come to represent the unified voice of the Palestinian Christian community everywhere. One of the main advocates of Kairos Palestine is Archbishop Atallah Hanna.
Hanna has served as the Head of the Sebastia Diocese of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem since 2005. Since then, he has used his leadership position to advocate for Palestinian unity in all of …
The chances for those seeking a world of solitude are rapidly run out. A good case can be made that this has already happened. Aldous Huxley’s Savage, made famous in Brave New World, is out of options, having lost to the Mustapha Monds of the world. State and corporate regulation of life, surveillance and monitoring, are reviled only in the breach. And, like Mond, we are told that it is all for the better.
Facial recognition is one such form, celebrated by the corporate suits and the screws of the prison system alike. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a keen devotee, …
Friend recounts Christmas Eve call with WikiLeaks founder
by RT / December 31st, 2019
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claims he’s ‘slowly dying’ in a UK jail and is often tranquilized and kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. He made the disturbing revelations in a phone call to his friend Vaughan Smith on Christmas Eve.
