Latest articles
Lebanese say Israel has gone too far
by Andre Vltchek / August 29th, 2019
Israel is right here behind this wall
After the recent Israeli attacks against Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, the Middle East has found itself in the midst of undeclared war.
Almost everyone in Lebanon appears to agree. “This time Israel went too far. In just two days, it bombed three countries,” I am told by a local UN staffer based in Beirut.
The same day, my local barber was talking like he saw it all, his voice full of sarcasm and determination:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing tough elections at …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 28th, 2019
One of the brothers Koch, David, has shuffled off this mortal coil, and the pious few looking at his passing may well think he is making it tough for camels passing through needles. As part of the Brothers Koch, he presided over a corporate empire that did its pinching best to wrest control from the purses of public accountability in the US republic. At his death, he was the eleventh richest person on the planet, on par with his dominant brother, Charles.
David K, however, went beyond the narrower spending interests of brother Charles, the one with the sharpest of eyes …
by Eric Walberg / August 28th, 2019
Russia has always fascinated me–the mystical orthodox faith brought to Kievan Rus in the ninth century, the stern heroes who defended Muscovy against the Golden Horde in the 13–15th centuries, the vast spaces, the remarkable literature of Pushkin and Tolstoy, the Bolshevik Revolution against imperialism … The West has always been a bit jealous of its proud race of genius.
I fell in love with Russia as a teen when I discovered Sergei Prokofiev and insisted–rebelling against my teacher–on playing his fiendishly difficult Toccata in D minor for my Conservatory …
by Ramzy Baroud / August 28th, 2019
Israel’s decision to bar two United States Democratic Representatives, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, from entering Israel and visiting Palestine has further exposed the belligerent, racist nature of the Israeli government.
But our understanding of the Israeli decision, and the massive controversy and discussion it generated, should not stop there. Palestinians, who have been at the receiving end of racist Israeli laws, will continue to endure separation, isolation and travel restrictions long after the two Congresswomen’s story dies down.
A news feature published by the British Guardian newspaper last June told the story of Palestinian children from Gaza who …
by John R. Hall / August 28th, 2019
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
— from Shakespeare’s Macbeth
The first time I got involved in demonstrations was back in 1967, and concerned what I considered to be a crime against mankind, over in a little country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam. Along about the same time, providence led me to drop out of Arizona State University, and enroll at the Phoenix campus extension of The Kesey College of Psychedelics. There, I devoured the curriculum, and graduated summa cum laude with a solid “A” on the final acid test within a single semester.
Unfortunately the local draft board didn’t recognize my chosen educational institution, so there I …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 27th, 2019
Morality is a job for priests. Not P.R. men.
— Tim Bell, New York Times, February 4, 2018
Lord Bell is dead, but his public relations tinkering, with all its gloss gilding and deception, remains. It was Tim Bell who cut his teeth in this dubious field, assisting Margaret Thatcher win the 1979 UK election through a mix of emotive tugging images with varying degrees of accuracy. It was also Bell who elevated public relations in politics from the level of unpolished turd worship to the level of, well, acceptable turd worship.
Bell’s own preference was for a urinary image, corporate communications seen …
by John Steppling / August 27th, 2019
In the case of both Big Tech and governmental surveillance agencies, undergirding a commitment to the inevitable and imminent time after-Earth is the appeal of science fiction aesthetics, concepts and projects, all aimed toward the new goal of having new places and opportunities to conquer, colonize and dominate post-Earth.
— Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan, b-20, August 2019
We live in a society where capital is highly concentrated, with most commodity production carried out by companies whose fates are largely shaped by financial investors. The commodities they produce, whether material or immaterial, are made available to us in a global marketplace, …
by Alex Anfruns / August 27th, 2019
The French journalist Angèle Savino lived in Venezuela for thirteen years, during which time she followed closely the conflict between the Yukpa and the major landowners. “After Chavez decided to hand over the land to the Yukpa, the assassinations ensued” – she confides. Convinced that in Venezuela, the indigenous struggle for land is also that of the peasants, Angèle Savino has long developed the idea of making a documentary that pays tribute to these men and women murdered with impunity. This documentary is called “Hau Yuru”. She tells us more in this interview.
*****
Alex Anfruns: To make your film, …
Brazil’s Bolsonaro, a World Criminal, Encouraging Jungle Burning for Private Exploitation of Freed Land
by Peter Koenig / August 27th, 2019
On 28 October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil with 55.1% of the vote and with a gigantic help from Cambridge Analytica.
At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January 2019 in Davos Switzerland, Bolsonaro made a sumptuous presentation, “We Are Building a New Brazil”. He outlined a program that put literally Brazil up for sale, and especially the Brazilian part of Amazonia. He was talking particularly about Brazil’s water resources, the world’s largest, and the rain forest – offering a huge potential for agricultural development and mining.
None of the world leaders present at the WEF, precisely those that regularly …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 27th, 2019
Students march in Melbourne, Australia. Source AAP.
The Embassy Protectors Defense Committee is calling on the US State Department to drop the federal charges against us. On May 16, federal forces invaded the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC in violation of the Vienna Convention and arrested four Embassy Protectors even though we were there with permission of the elected government of Venezuela.
Visit www.DefendEmbassyProtectors.org to send them an email, learn more and donate to the defense fund.
The …
by Andre Vltchek / August 26th, 2019
On August 25th, 2019, Israel attacked Lebanon. It has done it again.
Just as it attacked Syria, the same night.
RT reported the same day:
Israeli drone flights were “an open attack on Lebanese sovereignty” and an assault on UN Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, Hariri said on Sunday, just hours after reports of two Israeli UAV incidents in Beirut.
Hariri called the drone incursion a “threat to regional stability and an attempt to increase tensions.”
He said there’s a heavy presence of planes in the airspace over Beirut and its suburbs, adding he will consult with Lebanese President Michel Aoun on what could be …
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”
by Phil Rockstroh / August 26th, 2019
Fifty Years after rhapsodic auguries of the acid-informed era involving the coming “Woodstock Nation,” the US citizenry — convulsed by violence, strung out on all the wrong drugs, and with the Rolling Stones still touring — stumble in mortification through the grim phantasmagoria of the United States Of Altamont. What a long, strange, bad (Nixonian in its dour, paranoid cultural and political aura; Reagan/Clinton/Obama in noxious, neoliberal fantasy; Bush/Trump in cresting tsunamis of raging stupid) trip it has been.
By the mid-1970s, across the suburbs of the U.S., public and private space thronged with clog-shod, lank of hair, denim-clad, reefer-reeking legions …
by Peter Koenig / August 26th, 2019
People often ask and hint at the similarities between the Hong Kong protests and the French Yellow Vests. The former started on 31 March and are approaching their 19th week. The Yellow Vests (YV) have celebrated last weekend their 40th week of protests. As of recently some voices of Macron-infiltrates into the YV movement – or Fifth Columnists – have suggested that the YVs may support the Hong Kong protesters in solidarity for freedom….
Well, that didn’t go down well with the highly educated and well informed YV. Many of them actually felt insulted by the Macronites – ‘for whom does …
by Yves Engler / August 26th, 2019
By now most environmentally conscious people understand that Jair Bolsonaro is a bad guy. Brazil’s president has scandalously blamed environmentalists for starting fires burning in the Amazon region, after having called for more “development” of the huge forests.
Canadians are lucky we have a prime minister who is not such an embarrassment and understands environmental issues, right?
While Justin Trudeau has called for better protection of the Amazon, his government and Canadian corporations have contributed to the rise of a proto fascist Brazilian politician who has accelerated the destruction of the ‘planet’s lungs’.
In 2016 Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff was impeached …
by Lawrence S. Wittner / August 26th, 2019
On June 19, 2019, President Donald Trump bragged at his re-election kickoff rally in Orlando that, thanks to his leadership, the wages of American workers “are rising at the fastest rate in many decades.”
The reality, however, is that they are not. Indeed, wages rose at a faster rate only a few years before, under his predecessor. And a key reason for the very limited wage increases since Trump entered the White House is his administration’s success in blocking any wage increases for some workers and in reducing wage increases for others.
In fact, Trump has never been enthusiastic about …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 25th, 2019
Agnes Chow and Nathan Law accept the 2018 Lantos Human Rights Prize on behalf of Joshua Wong in Washington, DC. (Facebook)
Update: Protests continued in Hong Kong this weekend. The protesters returned to the use of violence and the police responded. The South China Morning Post reported:
In a now familiar pattern, the protesters threw bricks, petrol bombs, corrosive liquid and other projectiles at the police, who responded with tear gas, pepper balls and sponge grenades. Twenty-eight people were arrested, including an organiser of an approved protest …
The media’s relentless mythmaking keep us in the dark
by Jason Hirthler / August 24th, 2019
Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, reads as a meditation on the reliability of memory. Or even as a bill of indictments against the self-serving selectivity of memory. The book beautifully, if kaleidoscopically, reveals how an older man misremembers events of his youth, how his memories cast him in the warmth of the sun rather than cool shadow, as it were, until the actual character of his early behavior, and its consequences, is revealed by a figure from his past. The revelations force the narrator to reevaluate the narrative of his life, not always …
Irresponsible, Negligent and Criminal?
by Colin Todhunter / August 24th, 2019
In his first speech to parliament as British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson said:
Let’s start now to liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules and let’s develop the blight-resistant crops that will feed the world.
Johnson reads from a well-rehearsed script. The ‘GM will feed the world mantra’ is pure industry spin. There is already enough food being produced to feed the global population yet around 830 million are classed as hungry. Feeding the world effectively, sustainably and equitably involves addressing the in-built injustices of the global food system.
The never-ending push to force GM on the public under the …
by Howie Hawkins / August 23rd, 2019
The next president should declare a Climate Emergency, which will give the president powers to act rapidly and decisively to confront the climate crisis. The president should also create a cabinet-level Office of Climate Mobilization for the coordination of all federal agencies in mobilizing the nation’s resources to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions and 100% clean renewable energy by 2030.
On July 29, I signed the 350 Action’s Day One Pledge, which asks presidential candidates to take four steps their first day in office:
Reject all new federally-approved coal, oil, gas, and other fossil fuel project permits.
Phase out …
by Shawgi Tell / August 23rd, 2019
It is no secret that charter school advocates become disingenuous and belligerent when endless problems in the scandal-ridden charter school sector are exposed, criticized, and opposed with greater depth, sophistication, and regularity.
For nearly 30 years charter school promoters have been reluctant to admit, let alone come to terms with, profound problems with privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, seems to be the modus operandi among most charter school advocates. Anticonsciousness and incoherence pervade the unaccountable charter school sector.
Charter school promoters have never wanted the public to know the true nature and …
by Mathew Maavak / August 23rd, 2019
There is no shortage of social justice causes trumpeted by the West† with a revolving medley of “child actorvists” at the forefront. The logical observer may question whether these endless multi-billion dollar campaigns have had any tangible effect at all, except in serving as a stalking horse for mass-mediated interferences in the affairs of other nations.
Whether it is about immigration, education or the whitewashing of terrorists, they are there, ready with their scripted messages. The latest sensation happens to be Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg who is trying to save humanity from an environmental apocalypse by playing truant from school. …
by Andre Vltchek / August 23rd, 2019
It used to be done regularly and it worked: The West identified a country as its enemy, unleashed its professional propaganda against it, then administered a series of sanctions, starving and murdering children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups. If the country did not collapse within months or just couple of years, the bombing would begin. And the nation, totally shaken, in pain, and in disarray, would collapse like a house of cards, once the first NATO boots hit its ground.
Such scenarios were re-enacted, again and again, from Yugoslavia to Iraq.
But suddenly, something significant has happened. This horrific lawlessness, this …
The doors that science strives to unlock
by Paul Haeder / August 23rd, 2019
Symbioses — prolonged associations between organisms often widely separated phylogenetically — are more common in biology than we once thought and have been neglected as a phenomenon worthy of study on its own merits. Extending along a dynamic continuum from antagonistic to cooperative and often involving elements of both antagonism and mutualism, symbioses involve pathogens, commensals, and mutualists interacting in myriad ways over the evolutionary history of the involved ‘partners.’
— Gregory G. Dimijian, “Evolving Together: The Biology of Symbiosis”
It’s about being really committed. I tell students who are not any smarter than their peers that this takes hard work … …
by Robert Hunziker / August 23rd, 2019
A decade ago several prominent climate scientists discussed the prospects of a 4°C Earth. Their concern was qualified “… if greenhouse gases do not slow down, then expect a 4C Earth by 2055.” Of course, that would be catastrophic, and one can only assume those scientists must have recognized real risks. Otherwise, why address the issue of 4°C by 2055 in the first instance?
Not only that but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, AR4 (2007) addressed the 4°C issue and a 2009 International Climate Conference at Oxford, “4 Degrees and Beyond” discussed the consequences at length; …
by Gilad Atzmon / August 23rd, 2019
A few days ago Vanity Fair, the same outlet that once attempted to block the exposé of monster pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, published an article by Venessa Grigoriadis that provides some details of Epstein’s friend and alleged ‘co-conspirator’ Ghislaine Maxwell.
Multiple victims claim that Maxwell often brought girls to Epstein and that she was an active sexual participant as well. According to Vanity Fair, “a source close to Maxwell says she spoke glibly and confidently about getting girls to sexually service Epstein, saying this was simply what he wanted, and describing the way she’d …
by Eric Walberg / August 23rd, 2019
Our civilization is a top-down hierarchical one, as are most large-scale ones in the past, i.e., one-to-the-many, ‘top-down’, explains Kall in an interview with Tom Hartmann. Kall’s book, The Bottom-Up Revolution: Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity, is the distillation of his experience founding and running the website Opednews, which started as a personal blog, i.e., one-to-the-many, ‘bottom-bottom’, and morphed into a many-to-the-many, with the potential of bottom-top, as a volunteer-based collective.
Kall calls this ‘gayan’, as contributors and management are directly interconnected in a …
by Ralph Nader / August 22nd, 2019
In his 22 years in Congress (1960-1982), Paul Findley achieved a sterling record for fundamental positions, proposals and breakthroughs that revealed a great man, pure and simple. He never stopped learning and applying his knowledge to advance the right course of action, regardless of political party, ideology or pressure from various groups.
Findley, a courteous, kindly, ex-World War II navy veteran passed away earlier this month at the age of 98 in his home town of Jacksonville, Illinois. The District he represented was the one Abraham Lincoln was elected from for his one term in the House of Representatives. Findley was …
by RT / August 22nd, 2019
On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to legendary journalist and film-maker John Pilger on a round-up of all the latest issues. John describes the current state of global affairs as in a state of world war, warning that the ‘coming war on China’ he warned about…has now arrived, he also discusses the Hong Kong protests and why they have grown, along with US involvement in the unrest. He discusses the collapse of the global nuclear arms control framework with the end of the INF Treaty and the beginning of a new arms race with Russia, amid a situation …
by Gary Leupp / August 21st, 2019
Denmark, by all reports one of the happiest, most affluent societies on earth, retains a symbolic monarchy for patriotic purposes. One of the Queen’s duties is to invite foreign leaders for state visits.
So Margrethe II did the politically normal, correct thing and invited the U.S. president. She knew, of course, from her briefings that Donald Trump has a reputation for ignorance of history, contemporary geopolitics, military matters, etc., and has a tendency to insult his hosts. She knew it would be awkward; perhaps she’d chatted with Elizabeth II about her recent experience. But Denmark is a close NATO ally and …
by Jan Oberg / August 21st, 2019
This morning the Danes could wake up to a Twitter message from US President Trump that he was anyhow not going to Denmark on September 2-3 – in spite of the fact that it had been confirmed and that, formally at least, he had been invited by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II herself.
Here is his tweet
The background
Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, a few days ago visited Greenland and let it be known that the Arctic region was a very important security issue: “We can already say that to get the Americans even more closely involved in what happens in our …
