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A reflection on the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7
by Brian Terrell / November 11th, 2019
Voices activists Brian Terrell, Kathy Kelly and Sarah Ball outside the Brunswick Courthouse (Photo by Kings Bay Plowshares 7)
“Whether nuclear weapons are actually illegal under international or domestic law (a doubtful proposition) is not relevant or an appropriate issue to litigate in this case,” so ruled Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the US District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, late on Friday October 18. This last-minute order, restricting the defense of seven antinuclear activists at a trial that began Monday morning the 21st, made a …
by Jonathan Cook / November 11th, 2019
It has been a week of appalling abuses committed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank – little different from the other 2,670 weeks endured by Palestinians since the occupation began in 1967.
The difference this past week was that several entirely unexceptional human rights violations that had been caught on film went viral on social media.
One shows a Palestinian father in the West Bank city of Hebron leading his son by the hand to kindergarten. The pair are stopped by two heavily armed soldiers, there to help enforce the rule of a few hundred illegal Jewish settlers over the city’s …
by Farooque Chowdhury / November 11th, 2019
Amidst a right-wing coup, Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to resign Sunday. Evo’s forced exit from the Bolivian presidency was a right wing coup by army and police chieftains with imperialist backing.
Prior to the putsch, imperialism-backed rightists organized unrest, violence and arson including setting fire to residences of two governors’ and of Evo’s sister.
The rightists organized the widespread violence after Evo’s October 20 electoral victory.
Two officials next in line to take over the helm of the government also resigned as Bolivia is in turmoil.
“I resign from my position …
by William Boardman / November 10th, 2019
AP Photo/Mel EvansBy withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, the US is effectively saying the global climate crisis is not our problem. This is American exceptionalism run amok. The US acts as if it can opt-out of the only planet we have because, well, because we’re special. This is not logical, this is not practical, this is not moral, and this is not possible. This is delusional. This is a crime against humanity. And yet the House Democrats remain obsessed with the low-level intrigues of Ukraine, …
by Colin Todhunter / November 10th, 2019
Efficacy of GM Bt cotton challenged, Daily NationMS Swaminathan is often referred to as the ‘father’ of India’s Green Revolution. In 2009, he said that no scientific evidence had emerged to justify concerns about genetically modified (GM) crops, often regarded as stage two of the Green Revolution.
In a December 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, however, it was argued that Bt insecticidal cotton (India’s only officially approved commercial GM crop) is a failure and has not provided livelihood security for mainly resource-poor, small and marginal farmers.
The …
by Andre Vltchek / November 9th, 2019
There seems to be no limit to Qataris tossing around their wealth. This tiny kingdom with 2.6 million inhabitants is full of ridiculously lavish gold-plated palaces, most of them built with terrible taste. It is overflowing with Lamborghini racing cars and Rolls Royce limousines, and now, even with ludicrously wasteful air-conditioned sidewalks (cold air blows from below, into the 35C heat).
Downtown Doha
Ruled by the House of Thani, the State of Qatar is truly a strange place: according to the latest count conducted in early 2017, its total …
by subMedia / November 8th, 2019
All power structures are rooted in ideology. A shared belief in this ideology is what keeps the structures of power in place. Under capitalism, the edifice of social control is built on the collective illusion of private property, and the sanctity of the so-called “free market.” Any moves taken to challenge this logic will therefore provoke pushback from the system’s indoctrinated cheerleaders, and will certainly catch the attention of the repressive and recuperative functionaries of the state. But as the saying goes… you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And you definitely can’t overthrow capitalism without messing …
by John W. Whitehead / November 8th, 2019
What happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most sacred rights. Speak up now or wake up one morning to the silence of a new kind of tyranny. The choice is ours.
— John Pilger, investigative journalist
All of us are in danger.
In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, there is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, …
by Robert Hunziker / November 8th, 2019
The planet is coming apart at the seams right before the eyes of scientists at work in remote fringe areas of the North where permafrost crumbles and collapses. It’s abrupt climate change at work in real time, but the governing leaders of the world either don’t care or don’t know. If they did, there would already be a worldwide Climate Marshall Plan to save civilization from early warning signals of utter chaos.
Across 9 million square miles at the top of the planet, climate change is writing a new chapter. Arctic permafrost isn’t thawing gradually, as scientists once predicted. Geologically speaking, …
by Alicia Jrapko / November 8th, 2019
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro Moros, Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (Photo by Bill Hackwell)
From November 1-3 more than 1,350 delegates from 86 countries representing 789 organizations, came to Havana to participate in the Anti-imperialist Conference of Solidarity, for Democracy and Against Neoliberalism. Delegates traveled from all continents, particularly from Latin America and the Caribbean. The conference was organized by the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), Central Organization of Cuban Trade Unions (CTC), along with the Cuban Chapter of Social Movements …
by Gary Engler / November 8th, 2019
While clearly not intended as a tool for the subversion of capitalism, the 2019 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report provides a fascinating glimpse at the inequality that the neoliberal era has produced, who has benefitted and those who have been left behind.
According to the tenth edition of the report, recently released, “The bottom half of wealth holders collectively accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth in mid-2019, while the richest 10% own 82% of global wealth and the top 1% alone own 45%.” (Note that this a study about wealth and not income. It measure assets …
America’s Streets and Squares Are Waiting
by Ralph Nader / November 8th, 2019
Around the world people are marching, rallying, and demonstrating in huge numbers. Some of these countries are ruled by dictators or plutocratic regimes, others are considered democracies. Despite the peril of protest, people are seeking justice, freedom, and decent livelihoods.
Many boast about the United States being the oldest democracy in the world. While there are some street protests in the US, they are sadly too few and far between. Rallies calling attention to climate disruption have received less public support and media attention than they deserve. Likewise, the Parkland rally in Washington, D.C. against gun violence could have received more …
by Media Lens / November 7th, 2019
A recent viral clip of Jeremy Corbyn featured vital truths about the corporate media that ought to be at the forefront of public consciousness in the approach to the UK General Election on December 12. The clip began:
A free press is essential to our democracy. But much of our press isn’t very free at all.
Corbyn continued:
Just three companies control 71 per cent of national newspaper circulation and five companies control 81 per cent of local newspaper circulation.
This unhealthy sway of a few corporations and billionaires shapes and skews the priorities and worldview of powerful sections …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 7th, 2019
An enduring US political tradition was in evidence in Seattle recently. Amazon had decided that the city council elections would be too important to leave alone. Seattle was their city after all. The aim of the company was much in keeping with the manor lord who prosecutes keen poachers: fund pro-business candidates sympathetic to its cause and defeat such Amazon critics as Kshama Sawant in their home town.
Council member Sawant has become something of a minor celebrity and hate figure in Seattle political circles, having battled for a $15 minimum wage in 2014, and promoted the merits of an employee …
by Ellen Brown / November 7th, 2019
What’s going on in the repo market? Rates on repurchase agreements (“repo”) should be around 2%, in line with the fed funds rate. But they shot up to over 5% on September 16 and got as high as 10% on September 17. Yet banks were refusing to lend to each other, evidently passing up big profits to hold onto their cash – just as they did in the housing market crash and Great Recession of 2008-09.
Since banks weren’t lending, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York jumped in, increasing its overnight repo operations to $75 billion; and on October …
by Edward Curtin / November 7th, 2019
Cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book and plant flowers?
— Rodriguez, “Cause“
It’s not funny, that’s for sure.
When I went to see Joker, the new Todd Philips’ film, there were five other people in the theater in the liberal, up-scale tourist town populated by wealthy second-home owners, exiles for the most part from Gotham City (NYC). When the cave’s wall lit up, there was a string of shadows projected onto it, advertisements looping repetitively for the town’s “advantages,” specifically “living and working in the same community,” something next to impossible in the town except for …
by Ramzy Baroud / November 7th, 2019
The act of Palestinian activists covering their faces during anti-Israeli occupation rallies is an old practice that spans decades. The masking of the face, often by Kufyias – traditional Palestinian scarves that grew to symbolize Palestinian resistance – is far from being a fashion statement. Instead, it is a survival technique. Without it, activists are likely to be arrested in subsequent nightly raids; at times, even assassinated.
In the past, Israel used basic technologies to identify Palestinians who take part in protests and mobilize the people in various popular activities. TV news footage or newspaper photos were thoroughly deciphered, often with …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 7th, 2019
Uprisings against the corrupt, generation-long dominance of neoliberal “center-right” and “center-left” governments that benefit the wealthy and multinational corporations at the expense of working people are sweeping country after country all over the world.
In this Autumn of Discontent, people from Chile, Haiti and Honduras to Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon are rising up against neoliberalism, which has in many cases been imposed on them by U.S. invasions, coups and other brutal uses of force. The repression against activists has been savage, with more than 250 protesters killed in Iraq in October alone, but the protests have continued and grown. Some …
by Roger D. Harris / November 6th, 2019
The Sierra Club – long a retrograde proponent of saving the planet by driving a Tesla, eating wild caught salmon, and voting blue – took positive environmental leadership with their end of the year issue of the Sierra magazine. Stating it is “time to fix the population fixation,” they examine the interactions of population, climate change, and inequality. This commendable development from bourgeois lifestyle environmentalism to a more genuine red-green understanding, though, has a way to go.
The ideology of over-population
The ideology of over-population diverts criticisms of capitalist social relations of unequal distribution. It serves to justify a system, capitalism, which …
by John Stanton / November 6th, 2019
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint that teachers hear that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issues here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be boring. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate New Flesh that is too wired to concentrate and the confining concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored means simply to be …
by C.J. Hopkins / November 5th, 2019
OK, here’s a silly one for you.
Have you ever wondered how all those Wikipedia articles get produced … you know, the ones you pull up on your phone to look up an actor, an author, or a recipe, or a historical or scientific fact? Unfortunately, one of the Consent Factory staff had an opportunity to find out recently.
Apparently, what happened was, someone (presumably one of my readers) tried to add a reference to one of my essays to Wikipedia’s Identity Politics page. The Ministry of Wiki-Truth objected, adamantly. A low-level edit war ensued. Once the …
by Todd Smith / November 5th, 2019
As an American, one can reasonably ask: “What’s happened during the last hundred years, or 36,500 days?”
Presidentially speaking, America’s gone from a pedantic, virulently anti-Communist Woodrow Wilson to a bombastic, virulently anti-Islamic Donald Trump. Coincidentally, Wilson was the most recent U.S. president to authorize an invasion of Mexico (March 15,1916), while Trump’s obsession with “our Southern border” has been more than well-documented.
Now, back in 1916, President Wilson’s “punitive expedition” was intended to capture the Mexican political outlier Pancho Villa, whose cross-border raid on Columbus, New Mexico (March 9, 1916) had killed 18 Americans. Ultimately, General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s 6,000 …
International Scientist Moors His Work on Whales at Newport, Oregon
by Paul Haeder / November 5th, 2019
New information breakthroughs for me are exhilarating. Working with all that whale data is like looking into the dark with a flashlight. It’s work that is able to contribute new information to the field.
— OSU Whale Researcher, Daniel Palacios
Whaling’s first commercial iteration with harpoons started in Japan around 1570. With many more nations participating in killing whales for exploitation over the proceeding centuries – seeking oil, blubber, flesh, and other body parts – by the turn of the 20th Century, many of the 90 species of whales were on a steep decline, endangered or near extinction.
For one Oregon State University research …
Part 1 of 17 Part Series
by Ron Ridenour / November 5th, 2019
Justas picked me up at the train station. We rode in an elder Tvind car to the campus where I would live for eight days preparing for this series. I hoped this would be a positive story for me—being with people who actually embody the vision of liberation, and fight with the oppressed, jointly struggling to empower their lives. This would be a rarity for me as nearly all my writings reflect the evils and profiteering humans inflict upon one another and the planet.
Justinas Volungevicius (Justas for short and …
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / November 5th, 2019
You have been too clever for your own good, O human nature (hominen natura)! and gifted beyond measure to your ruin. Of what avail to you to gird cities with turreted walls? Of what avail to arm hands in strife? What had you to do with the sea – you might have been satisfied with the land! Why do you not seek the sky as well – a third kingdom? In so far as you may, you do annex the sky also – Quirinus has his temple, and Liber …
Preface to a 17 part series
by Ron Ridenour / November 4th, 2019
This series of teacher-student stories, interspersed with journalistic materials and writing, is aimed at showing how thousands of mainly white Europeans and Americans from both continents together with millions of Africans and peoples from India struggle to eradicate, or greatly reduce, poverty by “fighting with the poor”. They do so out of “solidarity humanism” by using a unique and radical schooling—“another kind of school: learning by doing”—and through concrete development projects for sustainable agriculture and environment; community development; and improving the health of people by preventing-treating HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics.
What is unusual and noteworthy about these …
by Yves Engler / November 4th, 2019
If the New Democratic Party wants to be part of the solution and not a barrier to creating a better foreign policy it needs to start telling the truth.
Stephen Lewis is a liberal imperialist who largely ignores Canada’s contribution to African subjugation.
Just before the election Svend Robinson for Burnaby North-Seymour published an endorsement from Lewis. The Facebook page for the left-wing NDP candidate noted, “Thanks to the legendary Stephen Lewis for this stellar endorsement!”
The mainstream left’s deification of Lewis reflects its alignment with Canadian imperialism. Ontario NDP leader from 1970 to 1978, Lewis was stridently anti-Palestinian. He demanded the federal …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / November 4th, 2019
National improved Medicare for all is making tremendous progress during the 2020 election cycle. Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who advocate for it, are achieving record numbers of contributions and performing strongly in the polls. Candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden, who opposes Medicare for all, and Senator Kamala Harris, who came out with a phony plan she called Medicare for all, are losing ground.
This is happening because of the decades of work by the single-payer movement to educate people, organize and build consensus for …
by Don Fitz / November 4th, 2019
Dam Removal on Salmon Rivers Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest question that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become the backup for energy if it proves impossible to get off of fossil fuels fast enough.
Rivers and lakes are an integral part of human existence, with virtually all major inland cities being located next to one of them. They provide water for drinking, …
by Peter Koenig / November 2nd, 2019
The west has colonized, exploited, ravaged and assassinated the people of the Global South for hundreds of years.
Up to the mid-20th Century Europe has occupied Africa, and large parts of Asia.
In Latin America, though much of the sub-Continent was “freed” from Spain and Portugal in the 19th Century – a new kind of colonization followed by the new Empire of the United States under the so-called Monroe Doctrine, named after President James Monroe (1817-1825), forbidding Europeans to interfere in any “American territory”. Latin America was then and is again today considered Washington’s Backyard.
In the last ten years or so, Washington …
