Over the past few months President Trump has unilaterally by Tweet and telephone begun to dismantle the U.S. military’s involvement in the Middle East. The irony is amazing, because in a general overarching narrative sense, this is what the marginalized antiwar movement has been trying to do for decades. ((John Grant, “Donald Trump and the New, New Order,” This Can’t Be Happening, October 30, 2019.))
Prof. Harry Targ, in his important piece “United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” (MR online, October 23, 2919), reminds us of the factional dispute among U.S. foreign policy elites over how to maintain the …
The Prime Minister of Australia is fuming. Having made his mark on Australian politics by being the mining sector’s most avid defender, Scott Morrison was disturbed by the week’s events in Melbourne that saw clashes between police and protesters outside the sixth annual international mining and resources conference.
It made sense for the protesters to kick up a fuss at the big ticket event. IMARC, as the site states, “is where the global mining leaders connect with technology, finance and the future. It is Australia’s largest mining event bringing together over 7,000 decision makers, mining leaders, policy makers, investors, …
President Trump has stated his intent to withdraw US troops from Syria on several occasions since March 2018. Each time politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties, supported by the corporate-controlled media, have, based on US imperial interests, vehemently challenged the withdrawal proposal. These folks also based their opposition to withdrawal on their supposed concerns for the Syrian Kurds. Unfortunately they have shown far less concern about the welfare of Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, Afghanis and Palestinians among many other populations suffering terribly due in part to US actions.
It is a telling commentary that few of the so-called elite US …
Dirty genes, epigenetics, maladaptive Western diets & lifestyles, environmental factors play into our chronic illness problem
by Paul Haeder / November 2nd, 2019
So the presumption was that you really just need your basic macronutrients – carbohydrates, proteins, fats, etc., and the mitochondria will take care of everything. What is ignored is that to get from those macronutrients to ATP you actually need functional enzymes and you need micronutrients – vitamins and minerals at each step and there’s 22 of them you need. Thiamine happens to be the most important because of its geographic position, if you will, and because of its great limiting step along the various pathways.
No matter what other deficiency you may or may not have, if you do not …
It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist.
The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a “deep state” that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents …
Despite the fact that slavery has long been abolished it continues to blight our world, destroying the lives of tens of millions of people. The Global Slavery Index (GSI) 2018 estimates there to be 40.3 million slaves in the world; however, given the difficulty of collecting data, the areas that are not included – organ trafficking, child soldiers, or child marriage – and the fact that, as GSI says, there are ‘substantial gaps’ from the Arabs States, where 17.5 million migrants workers live, the actual number will no doubt be a great deal higher.
Over the past decade I’ve made a number of short films about the Unist’ot’en, because I believe in their struggle and also because out of all the climate activism I’ve seen in Turtle Island, theirs has the potential to block the largest chunk of greenhouse gasses coming out of Canada’s tar sands and fracked gas projects. This is because their camp stands in the way of a proposed “energy corridor” that would bring fossil fuels via multiple pipelines, to ports in the Pacific for export to Asian markets.
This past year has been pretty devastating for the camp as Canadian courts …
Promoters of privately-operated charter schools that intensify segregation and siphon money from public schools idolize the law of the jungle where the “strongest survive.”
This backward view assumes that everyone is nothing more than a consumer and that education is mainly a commodity. Such a discredited outlook is a direct assault on the modern principle that education is a basic human right and that schools must be fully-funded, publicly controlled, high quality, integrated, and available to all for free in every community. No one should have to worry about which school to send their child to. Government must take up its …
Chile is experiencing the largest and most serious political crisis and public unrest throughout Santiago and the country’s major cities since the return to ‘democracy’ in 1990. A week long of fire, tear-gas and police brutality left at least 20 people dead, thousands arrested and injured. More than 1.2 million people protested on Friday 25 October in the Streets of Chile’s capital, Santiago, not just against the 4% hike in metro-fares. That was the drop that brought the glass to overflow. Years, decades of neoliberal policies, brought hardship, poverty and inequality to Chileans. Chile is the country with the world’s …
Tires are burning, smoke is rising towards the sky. It is October, the 18th day of the month, the capital city of Lebanon, in the past known as the “Paris of the East”, is covered in smoke.
For years I was warning that the country governed by corrupt, indifferent elites, could not hold together indefinitely.
For all those five years when I was calling Beirut home, things were going down the drain. Nothing was improving: almost no public transportation, electricity shortages, contaminated and erratic water supply. Periodically, garbage has been piling up along the streets and suburban roads. Once an airplane lands …
Summary: Encouraging elementary school children to honor and glorify the military without a deeper understanding of militarism and war is simply indoctrination.
With Veterans Day upon us in the United States, many schools across the country will engage in some sort of activities or ceremonies to commemorate this holiday and those to whom it is dedicated. On the face of it, there is nothing inherently wrong with honoring people who have made sacrifices to defend their homeland, but the way we do it in the United States is fundamentally wrong and deeply disturbing, especially when young children are implicated in this.
About 12,000 years ago, late stone age humans precipitated the neolithic (agricultural) revolution that marked the start of the steady rise to civilization. Coincidentally, this occurred at the same time as the beginning of what is now known as the Holocene Epoch, the geological epoch in which humans still live.
However, since the industrial revolution commencing in about 1750, just 270 years ago, humans have been destroying Earth’s biosphere with such tremendous ferocity that the Earth we inherited at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch is vanishing before our eyes. And life is vanishing with it.
Palestine’s Christian population is dwindling at an alarming rate. The world’s most ancient Christian community is moving elsewhere. And the reason for this is Israel.
Christian leaders from Palestine and South Africa sounded the alarm at a conference in Johannesburg on October 15. Their gathering was titled: “The Holy Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective”.
One major issue that highlighted itself at the meetings is the rapidly declining number of Palestinian Christians in Palestine.
There are varied estimates on how many Palestinian Christians are still living in Palestine today, compared with the period before 1948 when the state of Israel was established atop …
Transcript of a PressTV Interview following a live press Conference by the Foreign Ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey at the UN Geneva, Switzerland
Background
GENEVA, October 28 (Xinhua) — The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, said here on Monday that the Constitutional Committee’s launch should be a sign of hope for the long-suffering Syrian people.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Pedersen said that the creation of the Constitutional Committee is a shared promise to the Syrian people to try in earnest to agree on new constitutional arrangements for Syria’s future.
The academy is filled with wonder. There are professors who cannot teach. There are associate professors who cannot write. There are tenured academics who have been promoted on the basis of being able to be the fourth author on all their papers, able to put and patch together an abstract and jot down a signature. And there are those tagging types, the sort that come to the intellectual show once it has been played, attaching their names to a monograph they have never written. All make sure about one thing: to spell their name correctly and hail the merits of …
There are two basic fields in which more than a century of critical writing and education has made no impact whatsoever on what for convenience I will call the Anglo-American progressives, some of whom apparently like to think of them as members of the Left.
Here is not the place to discuss the meanwhile virtual uselessness of the term “Left” in describing Euro-American political discourse — and eo ipso those who engage in it.
The first basic field is science — by which I mean the institutions of natural science who produce and propagate what we have come to call scientific knowledge. …
There’s no credible data to prove a successful American raid took place against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. The US coalition didn’t even carry out any airstrikes in Idlib recently.
Earlier, Trump made a rare Sunday address from the White House informing the world that al-Baghdadi was eliminated in northwest Syria in a “daring nighttime raid” with the involvement of US special forces, planes, helicopters and drones. The Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) leader met his end “crying and screaming” in the face of the Americans’ might, he said.
The renowned author and whistleblower Evaggelos Vallianatos describes British environmentalist and campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason as a “defender of the natural world and public health.” I first came across her work a few years ago. It was in the form of an open letter she had sent to an official about the devastating environmental and human health impacts of glyphosate-based weed killers. What had impressed me was the document she had sent to accompany the letter. It was over 20 pages long and contained official data and referred to a plethora of scientific papers to support the case she …
Haiti is the site of the most sustained popular uprising among many that are currently sweeping the globe. It’s also the most explicitly anti-imperialist, which is part of the reason why it has received the least coverage.
For six weeks much of Port-au-Prince has been shuttered in the longest in a series of strikes since the revolt began 15 months ago. There have been innumerable mass protests by diverse social sectors calling for president Jovenel Moïse to go.
Last week protesters reportedly threw rocks at the Canadian Embassy in Port-au-Prince. On Friday Radio Canada’s Luc Chartrand highlighted the widespread hostility towards …
Yesterday morning, President Trump announced the death of Abu Bakr Al- Baghdadi and three of his children.
President Trump said Al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, was fleeing U.S. military forces, in a tunnel, and then killed himself by detonating a suicide vest he wore.
In 2004, Al-Baghdadi had been captured by U.S. forces and, for ten months, imprisoned in both Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.
I visited Camp Bucca in January, 2004 when, still under construction, the Camp was a network of tents, south of Basra, in an isolated, miserable area of Iraq.
Before our three-person Voices delegation entered Iraq, that month, we …
Promoters of genetic modification (GM) in agriculture have long argued that genetically engineered Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk for infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.
Some scientists believe that Golden Rice, which has been developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, could help save the lives of around 670,000 children who die each year from Vitamin A deficiency …
Despite the upbeat words from America’s billionaire president about the “economic miracle” he has produced, economic inequality in the United States is on the rise.
In August 2019, the Economic Policy Institute reported that, in 2018, the average pay of CEOs at America’s 350 top firms hit $17.2 million?an increase, when adjusted for inflation, of 1,007.5 percent since 1978. By contrast, the typical worker’s wage, adjusted for inflation, grew by only 11.9 percent over this 40-year period. In 1965, the ratio of CEO-to-worker’s pay stood at 20-to-1; by 2018 (when CEOs received another hefty pay raise and workers received …
The United Nations’ independent expert on human rights in the Palestinian territories issued a damning verdict last week on what he termed “the longest belligerent occupation in the modern world”.
Michael Lynk, a Canadian law professor, told the UN’s human rights council that only urgent international action could prevent Israel’s 52-year occupation of the West Bank transforming into de facto annexation.
He warned of a recent surge in violence against Palestinians from settlers, assisted by the Israeli army, and a record number of demolitions this year of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem – evidence of the ways Israel is further pressuring Palestinians …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 28th, 2019
March in Cape Town, South Africa, March 19, 2014 (from ActiveStills.org.)
Protests against the US and big finance-imposed neoliberal capitalism have exploded across the globe. Two weeks ago, in Pink Tide Against US Domination Rising Again In Latin America, we reviewed 12 Latin America nations that are rising up against privatization, the cutting of social programs, soaring prices and low wages. In the last week, mass protests in Chile and Bolivia have begun and Lebanon has widespread protests against debt …
Mostafa Afzalzadeh: Do we see an increase in the number of countries resisting the bullying of the United States and its allies? What makes this resistance happen?
Andre Vltchek: I believe that there are two main factors. The first one is the ‘moral one’: People are more and more aware of the brutality of the Western colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism, which have been torturing the planet for many centuries. This awareness became possible mainly thanks to the non-Western mass media outlets, such as RT, Telesur, Press TV, CGTN, but also NEO, Global Times and Sputnik. The second one is the “practical …
In my last couple years of university teaching before retiring, I repeated two catch phrases as often as possible—“reasonable people can disagree” and “if two things are both true, then both are relevant.”
The first assertion—which I used so often that at the end of one semester a student gave me a coffee mug with that line printed on it—is a plea for civility among people of good will as we vigorously debate contentious issues. Such engagement fosters productive intellectual and political lives.
How could a prominent opponent of racism and hate ally with B’nai Brith?
A recent Ontario Federation of Labour supplement in the Toronto Star prominently profiled Barbara Perry. The Director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology has been quoted repeatedly in Rabble, This and other leftist outlets.
While Perry has challenged some elements of the far right, she has also aligned with groups that stoke anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-left sentiment. In May Perry spoke alongside Anthony Housefather …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / October 26th, 2019
Before she got arrested at her weekly #FireDrillFriday demonstration, Jane Fonda told TRNN’s Dharna Noor that she tried to get Netflix to give her a yearlong hiatus from Grace and Frankie to continue protesting climate inaction.
On October 24, following a three-day trial in Brunswick, GA, seven Catholic Workers who acted to disarm a nuclear submarine base were convicted on three felony counts and one misdemeanor. The defendants face 20 years in prison, yet they emerged from their trial seeming quite ready for next steps in their ongoing witness. Steve Kelly, a Jesuit priest who has already spent ten years in prison for protesting nuclear weapons, returned, in shackles, to the local jail. Because of an outstanding warrant, Steve has been locked up for over …
On Monday, October 21, 2019, democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren issued her plan for K-12 public education.
In it, she outlines her opposition to charter schools. A brief excerpt from a section of the plan titled, Combating the Privatization and Corruption of Our Public Schools, states:
To keep our traditional public school systems strong, we must resist efforts to divert public funds out of traditional public schools. Efforts to expand the footprint of charter schools, often without even ensuring that charters are subject to the same transparency requirements and safeguards as traditional public schools, strain the resources of school districts and …
