Latest articles
by Steve Ellis / December 10th, 2019
From BBC TV New Year’s Eve retrospective, 31st December 2019:
“As we reflect on what was the most truly remarkable election campaign in living memory, indeed in all of recorded history, it is important to recognise the fact that we as human beings, as inhabitants of the planet Earth, have been fundamentally changed by the incredible events of December 2019. We are no longer the people we were before he came. When Jesus Christ revealed himself to us on December 6th, not long into the election campaign proper and whilst standing on top of a soapbox in the middle of a …
by Rick Sterling / December 10th, 2019
The documentary movie “For Sama“ has won a host of awards in Europe and North America. Its producers and protagonists, Syrians Waad Kateab and her husband Dr. Hamza Kateab plus English film-maker Edward Watts, have received gushing praise. And the awards will probably keep coming.
Unfortunately, behind a human interest story, the movie “For Sama” is propaganda: biased, misleading, and politically partisan.
Hiding Basic Facts about Aleppo
“For Sama” is a full length documentary with a moving personal story. It combines a story of young love and the birth of a child – Sama – in the midst of war. That makes …
by Heather Stroud / December 9th, 2019
To those candidates who are putting themselves forward as MPs to become a voice within the UK Parliament — would you stand up for Julian Assange and for those who. in speaking truth, have the audacity to challenge the dialogue of power?
I am disappointed that my question relating to the arbitrary detention of Julian Assange was not presented at the Hustings meeting at Kirbymoorside. I consider it to be a question of such vital importance for all those who share a common belief in justice, truth and commitment to democracy and freedom of speech, so I have chosen to …
by Ramzy Baroud / December 9th, 2019
It is hardly surprising to see Middle Eastern countries at the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index, as the worst violators of freedom of the press. But equally alarming is the complete polarization of public opinion as a result of self-serving media and, bankrolled by rich Arab countries, whose only goal is to serve their specific, often sinister, agendas.
One does not need to highlight of how state-controlled media in the Middle East lacks the minimal required degree of partiality, let alone integrity. Only a deluded person would argue that governments that kill, torture and imprison journalists, intellectuals and …
by David Rovics / December 9th, 2019
Bulgaria, it appears, is a captured state. I’ll get to that in a minute. I first heard about Jock Palfreeman, an Australian serving a lengthy prison sentence in Bulgaria, through a fellow Australian. The context was a message from my friend Kamala that was straightforward, to the effect of, “would you write a song about Jock?”
I’m never entirely sure what the answer is going to be to a question like that, because it always depends on whether I can come up with something worth …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / December 8th, 2019
NATO leaders’ meeting at The Grove hotel and resort in Watford, north of London, on December 4, 2019 (Al Drago for The New York Times)
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) held an abbreviated two-day meeting this week in London on its 70th anniversary. On display was a zombie alliance that is bitterly divided on multiple issues and has lost its purpose for existing. Rather than recognizing it is time to end this obsolete military alliance, they decided to expand their activities, search for a purpose and …
by Lawrence S. Wittner / December 8th, 2019
A nonprofit employer is not necessarily a better boss than a profit-making one.
That sad truth is reinforced by the experience of some 2,200 nurses at Albany Medical Center, who have been fighting for a contract since April 2018, when they voted for union representation.
Even that union recognition struggle proved exceptionally difficult. The management at Albany Med?a vast, sprawling enterprise with roughly $2 billion in revenue and 9,500 workers, making it the New York capital district’s largest private employer?fought vigorously to prevent unionization. As a result, three union organizing campaigns conducted between 2000 and 2003 were defeated, although …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 7th, 2019
Summit anniversaries are not usually this abysmally interesting. While those paying visits to Watford, England on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation are supposedly signatories to the same agreement, a casual glance would have suggested otherwise. This was a show of some bickering.
France, never the most comfortable member, suggested that NATO was “experiencing… brain death”. While this observation by French President Emmanuel Macron last month would have carried little weight in another age, it struck a chord, not least because it signalled a role reversal of sorts. The US, he warned, was retreating …
by David Swanson / December 7th, 2019
West Point Professor Tim Bakken’s new book The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military traces a path of corruption, barbarism, violence, and unaccountability that makes its way from the United States’ military academies (West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs) to the top ranks of the U.S. military and U.S. governmental policy, and from there into a broader U.S. culture that, in turn, supports the subculture of the military and its leaders.
The U.S. Congress and presidents have ceded tremendous power to generals. …
by Vijay Prashad / December 7th, 2019
On 25 November 1960, three of four of the Mirabal sisters – María Teresa, Minerva, and Patria – of the Dominican Republic were assassinated for their resistance against the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The youngest of the three – María Teresa – said before her death, ‘Perhaps what we have most near is death, but that idea does not frighten me. We shall continue to fight for justice’.
Twenty-one years ago, at the first Encuentro (Encounter) of feminists from across South America held in Bogotá (Colombia), the idea germinated to …
by Klaudia Kerekes / December 7th, 2019
The Union of Cypriots is one of the prominent organizations that is fighting against the Turkish occupation of Cyprus and struggles for a united Cyprus. It also took the world’s attention with its strong image and messages lately. Today, you can hear its name when the Cyprus subject opens, anywhere, despite the fact that the solution it supports for the reunification is not the one supported by the foreign powers included in the “Cyprus game” such as Greece, Turkey or United Kingdom. It believes …
by Edward J. Martin / December 6th, 2019
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – and its two predecessor organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM) – emerged in the early 1970s, during a long-term rightist movement in the United States.
The DSA’s contribution to the American Left was its new founded identity as a radical organization born out of a merger between the DSOC and NAM. DSA also sought to become a democratic, socialist party, which fostered the inclusion members, similar to that of the Bernie Sander’s presidential campaigns (2016, 2020). Nevertheless, it was under the leadership of DSA Michael Harrington’s penetrating critique …
by Eric Zuesse / December 6th, 2019
In the December 4th statement that was made by Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan was this:
We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is. One of the things we understand most profoundly is it’s not a real democracy, it’s not a mature democracy if the party in power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. I think you heard testimony, the Intelligence Committee heard testimony about how it isn’t just our national interest in protecting our own elections. …
by Robert Hunziker / December 6th, 2019
For tens of thousands of years the Arctic’s carbon sink has been a powerful dynamic in functionality of the Earth System. However, that all-important functionality has been crippled and could be permanently severed. According to new research based upon field observations conducted from 2003 to 2017, a large-scale carbon emission shift in the Earth System has occurred.
The “entire Arctic” now emits more carbon than it absorbs, a fact that can only be described as worse than bad news. “Given that the Arctic has been taking up carbon for tens …
by Yves Engler / December 6th, 2019
Most Canadians would be surprised to learn that the sun never sets on the military their taxes pay for.
This country is not formally at war yet more than 2,100 Canadian troops are sprinkled across the globe. According to the Armed Forces, these soldiers are involved in 28 international missions.
There are 850 Canadian troops in Iraq and its environs. Two hundred highly skilled special forces have provided training and combat support to Kurdish forces often accused of ethnic cleansing areas of Iraq they captured. A tactical helicopter detachment, intelligence officers and a combat hospital, as well as 200 Canadians …
Interview with Douglas Valentine
by Michael Steven Smith and Heidi Boghosian / December 6th, 2019
Michigan Native Fights to Protect ballena asesina
by Paul Haeder / December 5th, 2019
Facts about orcas abound in Colleen Weiler’s brain, because her role is to lead policy research and engagement around what we call the Southern Resident Orcas (SROs).
Her job is with the Plymouth, Massachusetts-based US headquarters of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation non-profit, established 32 years ago in England.
Our name is what we do.
Protecting cetaceans involves direct action, lobbying lawmakers, public engagement and education/outreach to the public.
Her official title is Jessica Rekos Fellow for Orca Conservation and, for the past five years, her focus has been on orca recovery. Now headquartered in Newport, she has also been tracking the efforts of …
by Peter Koenig / December 5th, 2019
The impunity with which the US aggresses Hong Kong is insane. Equally or more insane is western media coverage of what is going on in Hong Kong. Not one word on how the incredible “pro-democracy” vote of the rather unimportant District Council Elections was achieved. Of the 18 District Councils, 452 of 479 seats (71%) went to “pro-democracy” candidates. Such an extreme anti-Beijing vote could only be obtained by massive western propaganda at the cost of millions of dollars, targeted with algorithms, developed on the principles of the now (apparently) defunct Cambridge Analytica. And this with 70% of eligible voters …
by Andre Vltchek / December 5th, 2019
Good bye, Lebanon, metaphorically and truly.
Good bye to a country which, many believe, actually has already ceased to exist.
For five long years I have been commuting between the Asia Pacific and the Middle East. And Beirut, for all that time, was one of my homes.
I arrived in Beirut when the situation in the region was beginning to be unbearable; when destabilized, tortured Syria commenced losing its children in large numbers. They were forced to leave their homeland, heading for Beirut and Beqaa Valley, and, in fact, to all parts of the world. I arrived when Syrian refugees were freezing to …
by Richard Greeman / December 5th, 2019
MONTPELLIER, France — On the eve of an “unlimited” (open-ended) General Strike called for today, more and more unions and protest groups are pledging join in.
Two things are unusual about this strike. The first is that it is open-ended, rather than the usual one-day ritualistic protest marches, and it may be prolonged from day to day by workers’ assemblies as long as necessary. The second is that the Yellow Vests, the self-organized, horizontal, social movement that sprung up spontaneously just over a year ago and is still popular despite severe repression, have decided to converge with the strike.
Just …
by Alex Anfruns / December 5th, 2019
From the terrace of Wi’am, also known as the “Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre”, you can see a horizon interrupted by the Israeli wall and a cloud of tear gas. At the foot of it, a narrow path leads the visitor off the tourist circuit to the refugee camp of Aida, jealously guarded by soldiers. At the entrance to the camp we see a large key to the return, symbolizing the identity that the 1948 refugees are unwilling to renounce. It is the Nakba or “catastrophe” as a consequence of …
by Shawgi Tell / December 5th, 2019
David Osborne is a well-funded neoliberal demagogue who has authored several books advocating the elimination of the public sphere and public interest. He has long championed the narrow private interests of major owners of capital.
Osborne has spent much of his life openly attacking the public sector and pushing for its privatization (“reinvention” and “innovation”) as fast as possible. This includes aggressively promoting school privatization through the creation of poor-performing pay-the-rich schemes like charter schools.
In a November 2019 article in the Wall Street Journal, [1] Osborne nonchalantly repeats one of …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 5th, 2019
Surveillance activities and the law are often at loggerheads. The former specialises in destroying privacy; the latter, in so far as it might be adequate, sometimes furnishes a means of preserving it. When it comes to exposing overly-eager surveillance activity, obstacles arise. Ironically, the privacy of agents, and the sacrosanct nature of their abuse, become points of issue. Public interest tests are employed, often against the public. To expose such conduct might be to compromise the State apparatus altogether.
To prosecute an open case of fair spread and free access to evidence often requires material deemed sordidly compromising. When it comes …
by CGTN / December 5th, 2019
Countless terrorist attacks occurred in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang from 1990 to 2016. Terrorism has destroyed many innocent lives, similar to what has happened around the world. Such extremism has uprooted the peaceful lives of local residents in the region.
https://youtu.be/5BtIqBU8hk8
by Colin Todhunter / December 4th, 2019
The UK-based Independent online newspaper recently published an article about a potential link between air pollution from vehicles and glaucoma. It stated that according to a new study air pollution is linked to the eye condition that causes blindness.
The report explained that researchers had looked at vision tests carried out on more than 111,000 people across Britain between 2006 and 2010 and cross-referenced results against levels of air pollution in their neighbourhoods. Those living in areas with higher amounts of fine particulate matter were at least 6% more likely to have glaucoma than those in the least polluted areas.
Glaucoma affects half …
by Paul Haeder / December 4th, 2019
The word was the ember and the forest was my life.
? Jimmy Santiago Baca, “Coming into Language,” March 3, 2014
We’re at the Flip ‘n Chicken sharing food, swapping stories about El Paso, and philosophizing about what it means to be an educator in the Early Childhood program at Oregon Coast Community College.
His looks are a cross between Lee Trevino (golfer from El Paso) and my buddy the muralist from El Paso, Mario Colin.
My hope is that I can influence high school students to become teachers . . . to be better teachers . . . go to grad school …
by Gerald E. Scorse / December 4th, 2019
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) struggles every day with an infernal problem. It’s expected to separate taxpayers from their hard-earned money and leave them feeling well-treated at the same time.
They don’t feel well-treated, far from it. According to the 2019 report to Congress by the National Taxpayer Advocate: “The current state of IRS customer experience lags far behind other government agencies and the private sector”
But the IRS doesn’t lag behind when it comes to return on investment, or ROI. That’s the standard measure of “bang for the buck”—in this case how many dollars the Treasury takes in for each …
by Media Lens / December 4th, 2019
Thoreau got it right:
‘Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.’ (Thoreau, ‘Walden’, Penguin, 1983, p.68)
The same is certainly true of propaganda. We can laugh now at McCarthyite paranoia warning of Soviet tentacles threatening every aspect of Western life during the Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood produced dozens of anti-communist films with titles like I Married a Communist and I Was a Communist for the FBI. Large-circulation magazines were titled, Communists are after Your Child. Even children’s comics declared:
‘Beware, commies, …
Going to the ICJ
by Binoy Kampmark / December 4th, 2019
Leaders currently in office rarely make an appearance before either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court. International law remains affixed to the notion that heads-of-state are, at least for the duration of their time in office, safe from prosecution. Matters change once the time in office expires.
Be that as it may, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, with an ever dwindling number of peace prizes and awards to her name for questionable responses to the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority, has a plan. She …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / December 4th, 2019
On December 2, the 25th two-week long United Nations climate conference begins in Madrid, Spain. The stated task of the conference, referred to as COP 25 (Conference Of Parties), is to make sure there are plans to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. The goals of that agreement, which are nonbinding, are:
Reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030;
Achieve a net zero global carbon footprint by 2050; and
Stabilize the global temperature increase at 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
Last week, prominent scientists issued a warning that significant changes …
