Latest articles
by Shawgi Tell / October 26th, 2019
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 …
by Max Parry / October 25th, 2019
Last month, on the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, the European Parliament voted on a resolution entitled “On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.” The adopted document:
2. Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, whereby two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest …
by Heather Stroud / October 25th, 2019
Dear Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Sajid Javid and Kevin Hollinrake,
I feel compelled to write to you over my extreme concern regarding the health and well-being of Julian Assange.
Please see the link below regarding the psychological torture that Julian Assange has been subjected to, both before leaving the Ecuadorean Embassy and since during his illegal detainment in Her Majesty’s Prison; Belmarsh. To witness a man of such high intellect, integrity and courage brought to this state of confusion where he could barely confirm his own name, should send a shudder through anyone who believes that democracy, free speech, and writing/publishing the …
by Ralph Nader / October 24th, 2019
The lawmakers are doing it. The candidates are doing it. The mass media are doing it. All are excluding from their arenas the leading citizen groups as never before, since the early nineteen sixties. The nonprofit national advocacy/research organizations that led the way for social reforms are being shut out of the political process. These groups were pioneers in consumer rights, environmental protections, labor rights, and whistle-blower protections. These groups fought for freedom of information laws and practices and access to justice in ways that have made our country better in so many ways.
Television anchors like Judy Woodruff (The News …
by Media Lens / October 24th, 2019
The left has a dark secret that is becoming ever harder to ignore: it is riddled with climate scepticism, indifference and denial.
Pick your favourite left-progressive writers, check their Twitter timelines and published work for mentions of the climate crisis. Check their level of support for protesters who, despite being arrested and beaten, have finally forced the issue into ‘mainstream’ political awareness after thirty years of fatal indifference and hostility.
This week, a Canadian fossil-fuel enthusiast defaced a mural of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, painting these words over her face:
Stop the Lies. This is Oil Country!!!
Remarkably, when it comes to …
by Andre Vltchek / October 24th, 2019
Student protests, West Papua independence struggle, monstrous forest fires, an assassination attempt against Coordinating Minister, sinking capital city, earthquakes and a collapsing economy – the increasingly religiously fundamentalist Indonesia is suddenly facing too many disasters. It cannot cope with any of them.
*****
Nothing seems to be going well for Indonesia these days. People in West Papua are rebelling; an earthquake has devastated several communities in Ambon. The economy is slowing down and is expected to grow only below 5%, while the population is skyrocketing, out of control.
Students are rebelling, protesting against a proposed law that could make sex outside …
by Robert Hunziker / October 24th, 2019
Extinction Rebellion (“XR”) has hit the world stage like a flash of light with participants in more than 70 countries all within one year’s time. Its allure is simply “telling the truth” about the climate crisis… for a change. A breath of fresh air in a world filled with deceit and lies by people in positions of power.
Recently, Roger Hallam, an organic farmer and King’s College scholar and co-founder of XR, spoke at a gathering of local people in Penzance, Cornwall.
What follows is an abbreviated interpretation of that speech:
One of the biggest lies/misunderstandings about climate change is: “It’s complicated.” Meaning, …
by Craig Murray / October 24th, 2019
I was deeply shaken while witnessing Monday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening.
Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was Julian’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated ageing. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he …
by Simon Threlkeld / October 23rd, 2019
We have been taught since childhood that popular election is essential for democracy. In reality, although it is much better than, for example, a military junta, it is a very problematic way to choose public officials and is 100% not necessary for democracy.
The US political system would be far better and far more democratic if all the public officials now chosen by popular election were instead chosen by juries randomly sampled from the people.
Another very important set of public officials that could be chosen by juries are the independent and supposedly independent public officials now chosen by politicians. For example, …
by Edward Curtin / October 23rd, 2019
A few weeks ago I had a terrifying nightmare, so gruesome was it that I awoke screaming and had to run to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet. In this dark horror show, I was carving a pumpkin for Halloween. The cap came off easily and I disemboweled the slimy interior quickly, but as I did, I felt a strange sensation on my hand, as if a tongue were biting it. When I was finishing carving the face, however, the trouble really started. The pumpkin head came alive as the eyes and mouth moved and then it started speaking …
by RT / October 23rd, 2019
A Deal Prearranged Three Years Ago
by Peter Koenig / October 23rd, 2019
Prime Minister Boris Johnson came back from Brussels with a deal better than any Theresa May ever achieved, so he says. His talks with the departing European Commissioner, Jean-Claude Juncker, were very fruitful. But precise details are never known. Juncker, emotional about his leaving and handing over the office of EU Commissioner on 1 November to Madame Ursula von der Leyen, from Germany, may have made some special concessions to Johnson some rumors go. But unlikely. He is not the only one to decide. Besides, deal or no deal, or BREXIT or no BREXIT, had already been decided shortly after …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 23rd, 2019
Brand Trudeau is: Welcome to the new politics, just like the old politics.
— Shachi Kurl, Angus Reid Institute, The Guardian, August 22, 2019
Few politicians come across more as products of hashtag committee management than Justin Trudeau. His image has been doctored, massaged and spruced, and even then, the Instagram-Twitter committee did not quite see those corrupt influences that are bound to tarnish someone who believes in endless, indestructible parliamentary majorities. The image can do much, but not that much.
After being elected in October, 2015, Trudeaumania became something of a syndrome, helped along by a persistent dedication to being in …
by Ramzy Baroud / October 23rd, 2019
In December 2018, 17-year-old Palestinian teen, Ayham Sabah, was sentenced by an Israeli military court to 35 years in prison for his alleged role in a stabbing attack targeting an Israeli soldier in an illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank.
Sabah was only 14 years old when the alleged attack took place.
Another alleged attacker, Omar al-Rimawi, also 14, was reportedly shot by undercover Israeli forces in the Shufat refugee camp, in occupied East Jerusalem. He later succumbed to his wounds.
Although the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a “child” as “every human being below the age of eighteen years”, Israel …
by Andre Vltchek / October 22nd, 2019
At J. Nehru University, most students know about China and Russia only from the BBC, Reuters and other Western media outlets. Even those individuals who claim they belong to the left are not immune; influenced mainly by the British propaganda.
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It has been like this for years: usual confusion, all around India: tough nationalistic, even chauvinistic rhetoric, mixed with almost religious economic submission to the West, and often, to Western geo-political interests.
During the last few years, nationalism, as well as Hindu religious dogmatism, have been gaining ground while capitalism, often in its most vulgar and grotesque form, has been …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 22nd, 2019
Benedict Cumberbatch. Olivia Colman. Fine actors. They believe in Extinction Rebellion, or perhaps, rebelling against the prospect of extinction. The environment thing, humanity as a damnably scandalous, ecologically damaging species. But they also believe in taking sponsorship from the very same entities who are doing their best (or worst) to engage in matters of existential oblivion. So the circle of contradiction, even hypocrisy, is complete.
The matter has come to the fore over overt expressions of support for XR’s two-week effort of disruption in London by the entertainment set. Severable notable sites have received the attention of the climate change protest …
by Peter Koenig / October 21st, 2019
“I don’t want to be the best President in the history of Bolivia, I want to be the President of the best Bolivia in history.” So proclaimed Evo Morales in a pre-election rally a few days before general elections, today, 20 October 2019. At the same time, Evo declared that ever since the Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional (TCP – Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal) in November 2017 rejected an appeal by the opposition that he could run for a fourth term for President, and approved his candidacy for 20 October elections, US …
Part 1 of a 3 part series
by T.P. Wilkinson / October 21st, 2019
I was a punctual child. If the birth and marriage registers are accurate I was born exactly nine months to the day after my parents vowed before a duly ordained Roman Catholic Church to death they would part united in matrimony to remain. The untimely demise of my father, under conditions not unlike children who mistakenly play with a cluster bomb, assured, however, that all vows were satisfied. Hence I can say that I was born a child of punctuality and contractual satisfaction. I would prefer to call that sincerity.
Thirty years ago I was the accidental witness of the eruption …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 21st, 2019
US Out of the Middle East, Los Angeles protest against bombing in Syria from ABC7.com.
Stop The Turkish Invasion Of Syria
The crisis in Syria has taken a new direction with the Turkish invasion into the Northeast ostensibly to push the Kurdish peoples out. The US has added to this crisis by its green light to Turkey to attack after using the Kurds as a proxy force in the battle against ISIS.
The US’ role in Syria and in the greater Middle East has been destructive throughout …
by Todd Smith / October 21st, 2019
Snippet of a possible conversation overheard: “So, who won the Game?”
“You know, I don’t know, but Democracy was losing pretty badly when I fell asleep…”
It almost goes without saying that this is no longer a Democracy, these United States. Never mind the “fake news” President, Donald Trump: America’s not been a Democracy for a very long time — if, indeed, it ever was a…democracy. This has been the case since at least 1945, 1917, or, quite possibly, even as far back as 1776.
Beyond the powdered wigs of our founding Patriarchs, ancient Athens has always been seen as the cradle of …
by Kim Petersen / October 21st, 2019
It is up to us whether we will lift the world to new heights or let it fall into a valley of disrepair.
— US president Donald Trump addressing the UN General Assembly on 19 September 2017
The U.S. Economy is the envy of the world, as Europe and Asia slide ever toward recession.
— Trump tweet from 19 September 2019
To be supreme is, by definition, to be the greatest, to be ultimate, to reach sublimity.
However, to believe yourself to be supreme or the greatest is to belie greatness. ((I speak of supremacism, greatness as a stable unvarying attribute by virtue of which …
by C.J. Hopkins / October 21st, 2019
So, it looks like that’s it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have “hacked,” or “influenced,” or “meddled in” our democracy. Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up a last-minute military coup, it’s four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death’s heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
We probably should have seen this …
by Shawgi Tell / October 21st, 2019
Charter school promoters embraced irrationalism long ago. Their reckless antisocial agenda requires them to do so because what they are promoting has no legitimate basis; it is not consistent with modern requirements.
“Leaders” in the charter school sector have long spoken and acted like free market demagogues, desperate to treat every human responsibility as a commodity, and to make it seem like this is normal, healthy, and desirable.
While privately-operated-owned non-profit and for-profit charter schools have solved no problems over the past 28 years, they have transferred tens of billions of …
by David Penner / October 20th, 2019
Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues
We write in water.
— Henry VIII (IV.ii.)
The notion that American oligarchs amass great wealth due to their extraordinary intelligence has become a deeply engrained tenet of liberal fundamentalist dogma. For in order for neoliberalism to maintain popular support it is necessary that the media relentlessly extol the virtues of the new robber barons. This myth of the meritocracy is sustained with fawning from the presstitutes, but also from the dubious practice of philanthrocapitalism. And yet cracks have appeared in the meritocratic facade which even the mass media has not been able to conceal.
From …
The examples of Venezuela and Hong Kong
by John V. Walsh / October 20th, 2019
The summer of 2019 has seen a series of events in Hong Kong beginning with two massive demonstrations that called for the withdrawal of the Extradition Bill to Macao, Taiwan and Mainland China. The demonstrations were peaceful and the bill was quickly “suspended” and labeled “dead” by the Hong Kong government and then withdrawn by summer’s end, meeting the demand of the demonstrations.
But that was not the end of the matter. Over the summer and to this day smaller demonstrations, of hundreds or at most a few thousand, broke …
by Kathy Kelly / October 20th, 2019
My friend Marianne Goldscheider, who is 87, suffered a broken hip in July, 2018 and then, in June 2019, it happened again. When she broke her hip the first time, she was running, with her son, on a football field. After the second break, when she fell in her kitchen, she recalls her only desire as she was placed on a stretcher. “I just wanted ‘the right pill,’” she says. She wished she could end her life.
Marianne says her Catholic friends, who live nearby in the New York …
Review of The Management of Savagery
by Roger D. Harris / October 19th, 2019
Destination Afghanistan was known as the big easy back in the halcyon days of the late 1960s. Hippies from throughout the affluent West hitchhiked to the capital, Kabul, where crash pads and hashish were cheap, and the locals were tolerant. Life appeared to be mellow in the scenic shadow of the Hindu Kush Himalayans. That was then.
Now Afghanistan is engulfed in year 18 of the forever US war with no end in sight. The war has gotten so old – the longest in US history – that the Pentagon …
by Myles Hoenig / October 19th, 2019
There aren’t many politicians in America who deserve the praise that Elijah Cummings had earned over the years. He was respected by all in Congress, and by many of his Republican rivals. He was a fighter for civil right all his life, and represented the most economically exploited citizens of Baltimore, first as a member of the State House of Delegates and then in the US Congress. Yes, he did represent part of Baltimore City that is ‘rat-infested’, as President Trump liked to equate all of Baltimore (at least where black Americans lived) and by extension Mr. Cummings himself. Donald …
by Riva Enteen / October 19th, 2019
The Tsar was not the only tyrant in the world; Capitalism was worse.
— John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World
Wheat
I just came home to California from a 50-person citizen diplomacy delegation to Russia to ponder my neighbor’s bumper sticker that says “Just pretend it’s all OK.” That’s the American state of mind, but it doesn’t extend to Russians, who are painfully aware of war and its death and destruction. The still pervasive images of wheat in the cities and towns reflect the necessity of feeding the …
by Ralph Nader / October 19th, 2019
The British political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, was a man of many pithy phrases. Possibly his most widely quoted assertion is that “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
This quote fits the Trump age perfectly. Where are you, Barack Obama? Obama is still polling higher than any other politician, active or retired. Instead of speaking out, he is making movies, maybe writing another book, and otherwise really enjoying himself.
Where are you Condoleezza Rice? She encouraged Rex Tillerson to be Trump’s Secretary of State, but Tillerson was cast aside …
