Latest articles
by Robert Hunziker / December 24th, 2019
The Amazon rainforest is a crucial life-support ecosystem. Without its wondrous strength and power to generate hydrologic systems across the sky (as far north as Iowa), absorb and store carbon (CO2), and its miraculous life-giving endless supply of oxygen, civilization would cease to exist beyond scattered tribes, here and there.
Sad to say, a recent scientific analysis of the health of the Amazon rainforest is downright dismal. The world’s two leading Amazon scientists, Thomas Lovejoy (George Mason University) and Carlos Nobre (University of Sao Paulo) recently reported:
Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it …
by Colin Todhunter / December 24th, 2019
Daniel Maingi works with small farmers in Kenya and belongs to the organisation Growth Partners for Africa. He remembers a time when his family would grow and eat a diversity of crops, such as mung beans, green grams, pigeon peas and a variety of fruits now considered ‘wild’.
Following the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s, the foods of his childhood have been replaced with maize. He says that in the morning you make porridge from maize. For lunch, it’s boiled maize and a few green beans. In …
by Yves Engler / December 24th, 2019
The Canadian media gets a failing grade when it comes to its coverage of chemical weapons in Syria.
Among the basic principles of reporting, as taught in every journalism school, are: Constantly strive for the truth; Give voice to all sides of a story; When new information comes to light about a story you reported, a correction must be issued or a follow-up produced.
But the Canadian media has ignored explosives revelations from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It’s a stark example of their complicity with belligerent Canadian foreign policy in Syria.
In May 2019 a member of the OPCW …
by Andre Vltchek / December 24th, 2019
I constantly receive such letters; letters which repeat, again and again, year after year, basically the same thing: “If only we would have an opportunity to vote out our damn system!”
Such letters, emails and messages keep coming to me from the United States, but also from the United Kingdom. Particularly, after certain events, like when the Western empire overthrows some progressive government in Asia, Latin America or the Middle East.
I honestly wonder: “Don’t my readers actually periodically have that proverbial opportunity they are longing for? They can, can’t they, install socialism; to let it storm into Downing Street like an …
(A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life)
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / December 23rd, 2019
Two girls protesting child labour (by calling it child slavery) in the 1909 New York City Labor Day parade.
The Factory
“And such should childhood ever be,
The fairy well; to bring
To life’s worn, weary memory
The freshness of its spring.
But here the order is reversed,
And infancy, like age,
Knows of existence but its worst,
One dull and darkened page;—”
by Letitia Elizabeth Landon – The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems (1835)
Introduction
The idea of a child-centred Christmas is taken for granted now …
by Douglas Valentine / December 23rd, 2019
I’m not an Evangelical Christian, lover of Israel, or someone who wants to ban Muslims from entering America. Would never put a kid in a cage or a dog in a box.
I’m not a wounded warrior, won’t allow guns or flag waving in my house, don’t voluntarily stand for the Anthem.
Don’t ride a Harley or make menacing faces. IMHO, leather vests, blue jeans and jack boots make for a silly ensemble on aging white nationalists.
Not a banker, CEO, landlord. Don’t invest my hard-earned $$$ in pharmaceutical corps (though I have nothing against opioids, per se). I want to “tax the …
by Bruce Lerro / December 23rd, 2019
Orientation
As one of the co-founders of Planning Beyond Capitalism, you might ask why we would publish an article about atheism? Shouldn’t we just stick to political economy and leave people’s beliefs about the origin of the universe and our place in it for future generations to figure out? We have many reasons for thinking that an atheist stance is crucial for revolutionaries to take. Politically, I trust atheists more than anyone else, because I trust that their political commitment is to this world since we do not have a back-door escape of some God looking after …
by Max Parry / December 22nd, 2019
The October decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria did not only precipitate the Turkish offensive, codenamed ‘Operation Peace Spring’, into Kurdish-held territory which followed. It also sparked an outcry of hysteria from much of the so-called “left” that has been deeply divided during the 8-year long conflict over its Kurdish question. Despite the fact that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were objectively a U.S. proxy army before they were “abandoned” by Washington to face an assault by its NATO ally, the ostensibly “progressive” politics of the mostly-Kurdish militants duped many self-identified people on …
by Colin Todhunter / December 22nd, 2019
Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter addressed to three senior officials in Britain: John Gardiner, Under Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the British government; Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England; and Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health and Social Security.
Her letter focuses on the issue of food and the herbicide glyphosate. But the issues she discusses should not be regarded as being specific to the situation in Britain: they apply equally to countries across the world which are facilitating the interests of global …
by Lawrence S. Wittner / December 22nd, 2019
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / December 22nd, 2019
Bernie Sanders is the person you used to be but forgot about
by Dave Lindorff / December 22nd, 2019
Sanders is a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination this year, but you wouldn’t know it if you rely on the corporate media
I keep reading that polls show young people — the so-called Millennial Generation aged 23-38 — are overwhelmingly backing Bernie Sanders in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (along with even younger voters) while the so-called Baby Boom Generation of people now aged roughly 55 to 75 are going for Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg or some other ossified mainstream Democratic pol.
Speaking as …
by Shawgi Tell / December 21st, 2019
Transparency and accountability have never been the strong suits of non-profit and for-profit charter schools.
Unlike the nation’s public schools, all charter schools (about 7,100) are run by unelected individuals, and many, if not most, charter schools regularly violate open-meeting laws, are not subject to public records laws, and avoid audits.
In these and other ways, non-profit and for-profit charter schools do not really want to be answerable to the public because they highly value their inherently private status, which is what allows them to cynically operate as pay-the-rich schemes under the veneer of high ideals. Charter school operators desperately want the …
by Peter Koenig / December 21st, 2019
Does anyone know what COP25 stands for? Probably very few. It’s unimportant. As unimportant as the whole roadshow itself. Just for the hell of it, for those who read this article, COP means Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The 25 stands for the 25th year that such annual conferences have taken place, every year in another country. What a tourist bonanza for the hundreds, if not thousands of attendees and participants who travel — by air, many of them business class — to these most questionable, even useless, conferences.
The first …
by Dan Corjescu / December 21st, 2019
Globalization, Democracy, and Migration are themes which continually ignite both scholarly and non-scholarly debate. Not so surprisingly, none of this is new. In his own inimitable way, the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, touched upon all these current hot topics and more.
Kant’s political writings have only relatively recently been appreciated by the likes of political philosophers in the Anglo speaking world, a fact that was given a significant boost by the works of no one less than John Rawls especially in his A Theory of Justice and The Law of Peoples.
Putting the recent reception of Kant’s work aside, we now …
Western moral decay
by Jan Oberg / December 21st, 2019
Child from Eastern Aleppo receiving food in the Jibrin reception camp, December 14, 2016On December 12, 2012, on the day, 4 years earlier, Western countries and allies – perversely calling themselves Friends of Syria – carried through a regime change by statement and set up a Syrian National Council of people never elected by anyone in Syria and told the world that it was, from now on, the only ‘legitimate representative of the Syrian people!’
During the 4 years, Western, Saudi, Turkish …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 20th, 2019
On November 27 this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, delivered an address to the German Bundestag outlining his approach to understanding the mental health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. These comprised two parts, the initial stage covering his diplomatic asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, the second dealing with his formal detention in the United Kingdom at the hands of the UK legal and judicial system. The conclusion was a recapitulation of previous findings: that Assange has been subjected to a prolonged, state-sponsored effort in torture, …
by Gary Olson / December 20th, 2019
Vladimir: Let us not waste time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Agate Keller: Don’t Wait for Lefty! …
by Evan Jones / December 20th, 2019
Emmanuel Macron
Emmanuel Macron is a spiv, a first class spiv. Yet Emmanuel Macron is President of the French Republic, which is a worry.
The stamp of the man could have been readily gauged from his curious appointment and period as Economy Minister, August 2014 to August 2016, under President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
Macron’s first action as Economy Minister was the privatization of the Toulouse-Blagnac airport (SATB). It was a process steeped in anomalies, for which reason it has been the subject of unprecedented court …
by Michael Pappas / December 20th, 2019
Police are bad for our health. It is up to all those who strive to improve societal well being to oppose the violence the institution of “law enforcement “continues to perpetrate on us all.
APHA members rally in front of the conference center before the APHA vote on the policy statement (Image from Medium)
I was recently starting an overnight hospital shift, when I received a text from a medical colleague working in a hospital in New York: “The NYPD are here harassing a gunshot wound victim who is …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / December 20th, 2019
The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must therefore learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.
This premise misses the obvious lesson that Washington insiders refuse to learn: the underlying fault is not …
by John Steppling / December 20th, 2019
Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.
— Vladimir Lenin ((“Letters from Afar,” March/April 1917.))
Many on the left seem to have forgotten that capitalism is actually bad. That the reason the planet sinks under the weight of pollution and militarism is because of capitalism. Nothing that works within the capitalist system is going to save anyone and will only reinforce the existing problems and further the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised.
Now allow to me first start with a few observations on writers published by leftist sites, in …
by Linda Ford / December 19th, 2019
As Australian activist John Pilger recounts his visit to the world’s most abused US/UK political prisoner, Julian Assange, he gives us the brutal details of how the friends and families of political prisoners also face punishment, gauntlets, humiliation. And he tells of the terrible conditions and terrible treatment meted out to Assange, and the weakened, vulnerable state in which he finds his friend. But as he was leaving, Pilger looked back to see Julian Assange sitting with a raised fist in the air. Not beaten. Still defiant.
The women political prisoners I’ve written about recently are also still defiant—in spite of …
by Media Lens / December 19th, 2019
When we started Media Lens in 2001, we had a rather naïve expectation that journalists might: a) want to respond rationally to reasoned criticism; and b) have privileged access to unparalleled journalistic resources, experts and arguments that would enable journalists to respond with serious points to our challenges. In particular, we imagined that BBC journalists and editors – being funded from the public licence fee – might actually feel obliged to respond.
We were quickly disabused of such notions. Reasoned debate with journalists employed by the misleadingly-termed ‘mainstream’ media is …
by Robert Hunziker / December 19th, 2019
Five years ago: Nations of the world met in Paris to draft a climate agreement that was subsequently accepted by nearly every country in the world, stating that global temperatures must not exceed +2C pre-industrial. Global emissions must be cut! Fossil fuel usage must be cut!
Today: Following Paris ’15, global banks have invested $1.9 trillion in fossil fuel projects.
Not only that, global governments plan to increase fossil fuels by 120% by 2030, including the US, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada, and Australia.
Additionally, over that past 18 months China has added enough new coal-based power generation (43GW) to power 31 …
by Andre Vltchek / December 19th, 2019
It is amazing how easily, without resistance, the Western empire is managing to destroy “rebellious” countries that are standing in its way.
I work in all corners of the planet, wherever Kafkaesque “conflicts” get ignited by Washington, London or Paris.
What I see and describe are not only those horrors which are taking place all around me; horrors that are ruining human lives, destroying villages, cities and entire countries. What I try to grasp is that on the television screens and on the pages of newspapers and the internet, the monstrous crimes against humanity somehow get covered (described), but the information becomes …
by Ramzy Baroud / December 19th, 2019
Three years ago, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2334. With fourteen members voting in favor and one abstention, the Resolution was the equivalent of a political earthquake. Indeed, it was the first time in many years that Israel was roundly condemned by the international body for its illegal settlement policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Unlike previous attempts at holding Israel accountable, this time the Americans did nothing to protect its closest ally.
What has happened since then, however, has been a testimony to the failure of the UN to furnish meaningful mechanisms that would force violators …
by C.J. Hopkins / December 18th, 2019
Well, it looks like we’ve somehow managed to survive another year of diabolical Putin-Nazi attacks on democracy. It was touch-and-go there for a while, especially coming down the home stretch, what with Jeremy Corbyn’s desperate attempt to overthrow the UK government, construct a British version of Auschwitz, and start rounding up and mass-murdering the Jews.
That was certainly pretty scary … but then, the whole year was pretty scary.
The horror began promptly in early January, when Rachel Maddow revealed that Putin was projecting words out of Trump’s mouth in real-time; i.e., …
The Global Culture: Part Two of a Four-Part Series
by William T. Hathaway / December 18th, 2019
The previous article,”The Homeland“, described the origins of Vedic civilization in India. This one tells how it spread around the world.
Vedic civilization was in full flourish 7,000 years ago, the most advanced on the planet. “The country was a leader in world trade relations amongst such people as the Phoenicians, Jews, Assyrians, Greeks, … Romans, … Egyptians, Turks, Portuguese, Dutch, and English.” ((Advancements of Ancient India’s Vedic Culture, Knapp, Stephen (Detroit: World Relief Network, 2012) p. 147.)) “The culture of India has been one of the world’s most civilizing forces. Countries of the Far East, including China, Korea, Japan, …
by Rick Sterling / December 18th, 2019
Jeremy Corbyn lost the election but one of his political friends, the progressive Mexican leader named Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has been in power for one year. He is carrying out the plans and priorities described in his 2018 book New Hope for Mexico.
*****
With 129 million people, Mexico is the 10th most populous country in the world. It has the largest population of any Spanish speaking country and is twice the size of the United Kingdom.
Mexico is in a period of profound change. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and the Morena Party are charting a dramatically …
