I’ve been running into a lot of soft democrats and confused environmentalists lately who are all up in arms about things that really don’t mean diddly-squat in the scheme of things. You know, the presidential election (sic), all the perversity of not only Trump, but Holly-dirt, Mainlining Media, and the billionaire class, and this rotten society that still after 400 years of slavery and after a thousand treaties with indigenous peoples broken is as racist as ever.
On October 10, 2019, U.S. Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, unveiled an antisocial plan to further incentivize the rich to establish more charter schools to line their pockets at the expense of young people. DeVos has actively promoted school privatization schemes for decades; she does not support public education.
In addition to many well-established ways that the rich already use charter schools to enrich themselves, millionaires and billionaires will now also be able to use privately-operated charter schools to receive large tax cuts. And over time these tax cuts get bigger.
Thousands of Britons died last winter because they couldn’t afford adequate heating. Former UK MP George Galloway joins Rick Sanchez to explain how poverty and inequality in the UK contributed to the country’s decision to leave the EU.
Vision logic 1Each stage in the history of the civil rights movement has had a specific theme and focus. In the 19th century it was race and gender, in the 20th it was race, gender, gay, bi, trans, queer, in the 21st it is all of them +.
One could say that these are ideas whose time has come, but what kind of society lets members of its own species become slaves, servants and second-class citizens in the first place? How does a …
How a Lincoln City kid makes good on his goal to build things
by Paul Haeder / October 12th, 2019
“You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”
— Michael Crawford, writer
One might think a profile of a former Oceanlake school, Taft elementary youth and a teen who dropped out of Taft High School (Lincoln City, Oregon) who now, 21 years later, works hard as a carpenter might not be the stuff of legends.
In fact, speaking with 37-year-old Justin Marical is like a breath of fresh air along with bursts of déjà vu.
He’s scrappy, he’s gone through ups and downs as a framer and construction worker, and he faces the struggle of being a quasi-step-dad …
I seldom go to the movies anymore as I nearly always leave underwhelmed. There have been exceptions in recent years—The Martian, Birdman—but in general the most hallowed films out of Hollywood (modern ones, anyway) don’t resonate with me at all. They’re more confusing and alienating than anything else. How is it that so many people found so much to like about Moonlight, for example? or Green Book? To that list I’ll add Carol, The Hateful Eight and, last and certainly least, The Big Short. Nor was I particularly grabbed …
A few days ago (October 7), people from KPFA took part in a shut down of WBAI 99.5 FM, the Pacifica sister station in New York. This action was done in the name of Pacifica, which owns WBAI as well as KPFA and three other stations, but it was in complete violation of the Pacifica bylaws, and was planned in secret and kept from other board members. The takeover was temporarily halted by a TRO, but the studio was found in disorder, computers and other equipment were missing, though …
Awareness of climate change and the interconnected environmental crisis is growing throughout the world. Protest movements led by Extinction Rebellion and School Strike for Climate increase in number and scope, demands for action are repeated, louder and louder, anger and anxiety mounts. And yet politicians and corporations, complacent, trapped by outdated ideology and motivated by short term self-interest, respond inadequately if at all.
World leaders, “talk too much and…listen too little” – the UN Secretary General, António Guterres at the Youth Climate Summit in September. In a candid address he related that, “things [concerning climate change] are getting worse. The worst …
Gig workers in California are celebrating the passage of Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) making sure that gig economy workers are entitled to minimum wage, workers’ compensation and other benefits due to go into effect 1 January, 2020. Meanwhile, Google’s “shadow work force,” the masses of temporary workers and contractors (approximately 54 percent of Google’s work force), is challenging Google’s seemingly unmitigated power by unionizing. In fact, two weeks ago, the two-thirds of Google’s temp workers in Pittsburgh voted to unionize despite the firm outsourcing Google’s contractors, HCL America Inc., urging its temp workers to vote against …
An expedition on board the Academic Mstislav Keldysh discovered a 50-square-foot patch of bubbling methane in the East Siberian Sea (Credit: Shirshov Institute of Oceanology)
Global warming is on speed, especially in northern latitudes where an international team of scientists led by Igor Semiletov of Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia’s oldest technical institution, recently made a startling discovery aboard the Academic Mstislav Keldysh (see photo above), the kind of discovery that sends chills down the spine; i.e., “methane bubbles boiling in water.”
According to Semiletov: “This is the most powerful …
During a rally/press conference before the September 27 climate strike/protest in Montréal a friend interrupted the Prime Minister to label him a “climate criminal”. When Trudeau joined the enormous march, I dogged him yelling “criminel climatique/climate criminal”. A week later I was detained and given a $150 ticket for yelling “climate criminal” outside a café where Trudeau was holding a press conference. While some might consider it hyperbolic, the case for labeling Trudeau a “climate criminal” is overwhelming:
The Liberals spent $4.5 billion on the Trans Mountain pipeline and related infrastructure. This important government intervention is designed to expand extraction of …
It is time for the House of Representatives to announce comprehensive articles of impeachment against the chronic outlaw and violator of the public trust—President Donald J. Trump who won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote.
Six House Committees have been investigating and assembling for months the necessary evidence. Mr. Trump himself has taunted the House to impeach him. He has openly and brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas for documents and block subpoenaed witnesses from testifying. This obstruction of Congress is an ongoing impeachable offense—a grave one in the opinions of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the other framers of our …
Palestinian citizens of Israel take to streets to accuse police and politicians of exploiting crime wave in their communities
by Jonathan Cook / October 11th, 2019
Palestinian citizens of Israel escalated their protests against the police and government on Thursday by bringing sections of the country’s busiest highway to a crawl as they drove in a slow convoy towards Jerusalem for a major demonstration.
It was the latest in a series of high-stakes confrontations by Israel’s large Palestinian minority with the authorities to express their anger at police inaction over a tide of violence that has swept their communities. More than 70 lives have been claimed so far this year.
The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE…..
— Tweet, Donald J. Trump, October 9, 2019.
Granted Trump may arguably be more corrupt than Biden. But that’s splitting hairs over which crook is more crooked. Bullying vassal states and “doing well by doing good” are indicators of finesse in Washington. Inside the beltway, corruption is not a liability for holding high political …
Hong Kong is losing to Mainland China. Its poverty rates are high, it suffers from corruption and savage capitalism. It is now the most expensive city on earth. People are frustrated, but paradoxically, they are blaming socialist Beijing for their problems, instead of the legacy of British colonialism. ‘Across the line’, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Xian and other cities are leaving Hong Kong behind in almost all fields.
***** China Art Museum, Shanghai (Photo: Andre Vltchek)
When my dear friend and a great concert pianist from Beijing, …
Every time I return from visiting Palestinian refugee camps dispersed throughout Lebanon, I’m haunted by the monumental suffering that has been systematically imposed on the twelve million Palestinians. There are between 5-6 million Palestinians in exile, and 6 million under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel. Whether they live in historic Palestine or among the exiled diaspora in Lebanon and beyond, the level of discrimination Palestinians experience on a daily basis is relentless. In this proxy ‘war on terror’ tearing apart several Middle Eastern countries; whether identified as an eschatological ‘last days’ scenario or viewed as a …
Presented here is a short list of some of the most ridiculous statements, absolute gems really, from some of the hopefuls for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President. These are all either verbatim quotes from speeches, interviews, or official Twitter posts from the candidates. After I was initially rendered catatonic by examining the collective ignorance, I got it together to provide some clarity and rough translations to try and tease out the not-so-hidden agendas of each politician.
There was a lot to choose from, but I specifically picked each of these remarks because they are all exquisite examples of each candidate’s …
The author peals the imperial white mask off the black skin in an analogy to Frantz Fanon’s classic work. Racism, colonization and contemporary neo-colonialization have distorted the psyches of many people of all colors. Barak Obama’s black Kenyan roots allowed him to do …
Given the kind of responses I hear coming from both sides of the Pacific Ocean, I feel it’s necessary to say something more about what the NBA backlash in China is really about.
The NBA commissioner, both in his interviews in Japan and in his written statement to clarify himself, missed the point of what the Chinese people are actually angry about. It’s not about the freedom of an individual to express his or her personal opinions, but about the bottom line of what is acceptable in societies. In the U.S., you support freedom of expression, but do you support openly …
On August 20, Heba Ahmed al-Labadi fell into the dark hole of the Israeli legal system, joining 413 Palestinian prisoners who are currently held in so-called administrative detention.
On September 26, Heba and seven other prisoners declared a hunger strike to protest their unlawful detention and horrific conditions in Israeli prisons. Among the prisoners is Ahmed Ghannam, 42, from the village of Dura, near Hebron, who launched his hunger strike on July 14.
Administrative detention is Israel’s go-to legal proceeding when it simply wants to mute the voices of Palestinian political activists, but lacks any concrete evidence that can …
This article was first published on February 21, 2017, one month after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, more than two-and-a half years ago. What was true then is even truer now, and so I am reprinting it with this brief introduction since I think it describes what is happening in plain sight today.
Now that years of Russia-gate accusations have finally fallen apart, those forces intent on driving Trump from office have had to find another pretext. Now it is Ukraine-gate, an issue similar in many ways to Russia-gate in that both were set into motion by the …
Attracting a large audience, political theorist Nancy Fraser visited Stockholm a couple of days ago to present her view of a socialism for the 21st century. However, the talk was not only about socialism but also about its antagonist, capitalism, which, according to Fraser, must be subjected to a more refined analysis in order for a credible socialist alternative to be formulated. Current analyses of capitalism, Fraser argues, are inadequate as it is stuck in the Marxist notion of capitalism as an economic system. Rather, for this system to even function, it is dependent on a range of non-economic …
Local woman’s fight for aerial spray ban is her sense of purpose
by Paul Haeder / October 9th, 2019
We’re being accused of being eco-terrorists. But the way the laws are right now, the corporations have priority over the citizens’ right to defend their own health and safety. That’s terrorism.
— Newport resident Maria Sause
We meet at Oceana Natural Foods Co-op. Maria Kraus will turn 77 on December 9. Her face reflects five or six iterations of her
life’s journey.
Just four days 80 years ago could have changed this interview – she might not have been conceived and born. Maria’s father Franta (Francisco) left Czechoslovakia a scant 96 hours after …
Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina, localised, traditional methods of food production have given way to global supply chains dominated by policies which favour agri-food giants, resulting in the destruction of habitat and peasant farmer livelihoods and the imposition of a model of agriculture that subjugates remaining farmers and regions to the needs …
This is another version of: it is easier for capitalists to imagine the end of the world than it is for them to imagine the end of capitalism.
Charter schools are pay-the-rich schemes that emerged in the midst of the neoliberal period that was launched at home and abroad in the late 1970s.
Charter schools are one of many mechanisms the rich have concocted since the 1980s and 1990s to counter the unavoidable law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism.
Mainstream economists often refer to this inescapable law as the law ofdiminishing returns. This is when the “return on investment” …
Hundreds of people from across the Southeast converged on Atlanta on Friday September 27th for the Southeast Climate Strike & Rebellion. Organized by a coalition including Earth Strike and Extinction Rebellion, it came at the end of a global strike week called for by the school strike movement in which millions railed against the systems that are failing humanity. At least 19 were nicked for offences ranging from carrying PVC pipe for a trampoline prop to standing briefly on a piece of land designed exclusively for fast-moving metal death machines.
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 8th, 2019
Protesters outside building where Ajit Pai was giving a speech in Washington, DC, December 2017 (From Free Press)
Last week, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals finally issued a decision on a challenge to the Trump administration’s “Open Internet” rule, which ended Net Neutrality protections in 2017. While the court reversed and remanded important parts of the rule, it upheld the reversal of Net Neutrality regulations.
This decision opens the next phase of the struggle in the battle for the Internet — a battle between control of the Internet by …
“We are here at the National Bean Counters Convention with Martin Long, chairman of the Bean Counters Board. Good evening, Mr. Long.”
“Hello, Sarah, nice of you to have me on.”
“Our pleasure. Earlier this evening, in your keynote address to this convention, you called for a nationwide job action next Friday in order to impress upon this country the critical services that Bean Counters, especially in the healthcare industry, provide each and every day.”
“Indeed I did, Sarah. For far too long, our work, the day to day accounting needed for …
The meaning of democratic socialism?a mixture of political and economic democracy?should be no mystery to Americans. After all, socialist programs have been adopted in most other democratic nations. And, in fact, Americans appear happy enough with a wide range of democratic socialist institutions in the United States, including public schools, public parks, minimum wage laws, Social Security, public radio, unemployment insurance, public universities, Medicare, public libraries, the U.S. postal service, public roads, and high taxes on the wealthy.
Even so, large numbers of Americans seem remarkably confused about democratic socialism. This April, at a CNN town …
