Latest articles
by Shawgi Tell / September 30th, 2019
Nearly 10 county school boards in Florida recently took collective action to pursue a case against privately-operated-owned charter schools in the Florida Supreme Court.
These public school systems that serve tens of thousands of students oppose the dreaded HB 7069 legislation, which the neoliberal governor of Florida, Rick Scott, signed into law in 2017.
The law does many things, including allowing the transfer of enormous sums of public money from public schools to privately-operated-owned charter schools, thereby leaving public schools in a worse position. Understandably, public school systems want to stop the flow of tens of millions of public dollars to privately-operated-owned …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 30th, 2019
The tributes have been dripping in heavy praise: former French president Jacques Chirac and mayor of Paris, the great statesman; the man who said no to the US-led war juggernaut into Iraq; the man loved for being loved. Many of these should have raised the odd eyebrow here and there. “We French have lost a statesman whom we loved as much as he loved us,” claimed current French president Emmanuel Macron.
When greatness is tossed around as a term in French commemorations, there is always a sense of merging the corporeal flesh with the non-corporeal state. The person thereby “embodies” France, …
by Ellen Brown / September 29th, 2019
President Trump wants negative interest rates, but they would be disastrous for the U.S. economy, and his objectives can be better achieved by other means.
The dollar strengthened against the euro in August, merely in anticipation of the European Central Bank slashing its key interest rate further into negative territory. Investors were fleeing into the dollar, prompting President Trump to tweet on August 30:
The Euro is dropping against the Dollar “like crazy,” giving them a big export and manufacturing advantage… And the Fed does NOTHING!
When the ECB cut its key rate as anticipated, from a negative 0.4% to a negative 0.5%, …
A prison, a protest, an art exhibit, a family farm, an antiwar conference, rent control, World War 1 and Hunter Biden
by David Rovics / September 29th, 2019
“Are you going to write something about this? If you do, I’ll share it.”
This wasn’t exactly a writing assignment, from one of the co-founders of the venerable anarchist newspaper from Detroit, Fifth Estate, but close enough to prompt a travelogue that I’d likely have written anyway…
Peter Werbe and I were walking away from the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, after spending most of the afternoon visiting our mutual friend, Marius Mason — prisoner number 04672-061.
I …
by Christian Sorensen / September 29th, 2019
The military-industrial-congressional complex (MIC) is the noxious alliance comprised of the Pentagon, the war industry, and Capitol Hill. U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard has spoken out against U.S. military interventions in such sovereign nations as Iraq, Syria, and Libya. While Gabbard’s public discussion of the costs of war rankles some within the MIC, she does not pose a threat to the status quo, even if she beats the odds and becomes President.
Gabbard spouts MIC pabulum (e.g. troops fight for freedom, and military deployments serve the country) and consistently votes for bloated military budgets. Gabbard says she is against regime change, …
by Gary Leupp / September 29th, 2019
The U.S. appears about to announce a peace agreement with the Taliban trading the withdrawal of U.S. forces for a Taliban commitment to exclude al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups from the country. (Presumably the Taliban themselves will be removed from the State Department’s terror list.) It has been under discussion for at least several years, attracting little journalistic attention.
It’s a deal that could in fact have been cut many years and many lives ago. The U.S. top brass concluded long ago that the war in Afghanistan was not militarily winnable (and indeed generating more “terrorism”). The Taliban whatever you think …
by Vern Loomis / September 28th, 2019
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” With that unequivocal statement, Beto O’Rourke ignited right wing gun pundits who’ve kept some powder dry for just such a remark:
“Who is this “we” he speaks of? Democrats? Liberals? Bring it, fools. Come and try to take my legally purchased guns. I double-dog dare you to come to my house and attempt to violate my Constitutional rights. It’s won’t be nearly as easy as Beta O’Dork thinks. (Def-Con News)
“My AR is ready for you Robert Francis.” (Texas State Rep. Briscoe Cain)
“Why do you oppose federal licensing?” Because leading Democrats are threatening …
by Mark Petrakis / September 28th, 2019
In addition to the unprecedented giveaway of the people’s assets to multi billionaires that is outlined in the green new deal, when can I expect regime change for climate, bombing for climate, imperialist words for climate compulsory sterilization for climate, etc.
— A 9.21.19 tweet from @cordeliers
I hesitated today in posting this rather “ungloved” tweet from Club des Cordeliers… because I can see how folks are all SO worked up and feeling some infusion of “hope” in the wake of all the Greta business, but post it I did anyway.
It was soon followed by a comment from someone who I know …
by Robert J. Burrowes / September 28th, 2019
On 2 October 2019, it will be the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mohandas K. Gandhi in Gujarat, India. I would like to reflect on the visionary leadership that Gandhi offered the world, briefly comparing it with some national leaders of today, and to invite you to emulate Gandhi’s leadership.
While Gandhi is best remembered for being the mastermind and leader of the decades-long nonviolent struggle to liberate colonial India from British occupation, his extraordinary political, economic, social, ecological, religious and moral leadership are virtually unknown, despite the enormous legacy he left subsequent generations who choose to learn from …
by Donna Ross / September 28th, 2019
Ms. Bari Weiss, Op Ed columnist
The New York Times
Dear Ms. Weiss:
As I listened to you this morning on NPR, I heard a very poised and polished explanation of why you so ardently support the state of Israel and why you believe that you can be both anti-occupation and pro-Israel–both a Liberal and a Zionist. There was a time when I would have bought your argument. No more. I, and countless others, have studied the history of Israel/Palestine, have met and debated at length with highly intelligent people on both sides of the issue, and have come to the clear conclusion …
by Ralph Nader / September 28th, 2019
Donald Trump said he believes the Constitution lets him do “whatever I want as President.” In over two and a half years, Trump has been a serial violator of the Constitution, unmatched by any president in American history. Just about every day he is a constitutional outlaw.
Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein has documented twelve categories of major constitutional transgressions. Some are also statutory crimes. Many of these involve Trump overpowering the critical separation of powers that our founders rigorously established to assure that the president does not become a monarch like King George III.
The framers were very clear that Congress and …
by Jonathan Cook / September 27th, 2019
A new documentary brings to light an episode almost completely erased from Israel’s official history – and one that reveals how Israel’s apartheid character was established from its birth.
The The Voice of Ahmad by directors Avshalom Katz, David Ofek, Ayelet Bechar, Shadi Habib Allah, Naom Kaplan, Mamdooh Afdile, and Iddo Soskolne is being screened in Israel this month. It centers on the extraordinary early life of Ahmad Masrawa back in the 1950s, as the recently established Jewish state was finding its feet.
Masrawa was one of many hundreds of Palestinian teenagers in Israel who were adopted by …
by Kathy Kelly / September 27th, 2019
Recovering from a broken hip, peace activist Kathy Kelly reflects on her experiences with people disabled and traumatized by war.
*****
Its economy gutted by war, Afghanistan’s largest cash crop remains opium. Yet farmers there do grow other crops for export. Villagers in the Wazir Tangi area of Nangarhar province, for example, cultivate pine nuts. As a precaution, this year at harvest time, village elders notified the governor of the province that they would be bringing in migrant workers to help them collect the nuts. Hired laborers, including children, would camp out in the pine nut forests, they informed the …
by Don Fitz / September 27th, 2019
In 2017 Dissident Voice ran my article, “Any White Cop Can Kill a Black Man at Any Time,” which told how St. Louis cop Jason Stockley killed a 24-year-old black man, Anthony Lamar Smith. Though Stockley claimed he had fired in self defense when Smith pulled a gun on him, evidence showed that he had planted the gun after the killing. When Stockley was found “not guilty” protests by thousands in St. Louis lasted for months, just as in 2014 when another white cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in neighboring Ferguson.
Crises of cops indiscriminately killing black men keep …
by T.P. Wilkinson / September 27th, 2019
After years of teaching school and university, observing with dismay — to put it mildly — the institutional promotion of illiteracy and communicative incompetence, under the pretext that the soft prisons which are maintained for the incarceration and indoctrination of children are there to promote their personalities and get them through examinations so that they can replace their automaton parents, it took enormous digestive discipline to withstand the barrage of the past few days.
Maybe at my age — which we need not discuss — I can relax about personal extinction. However, it is nauseating to witness in the midst of …
by Graham Peebles / September 27th, 2019
During August thousands of fires ravaged the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Bolivia. Some are still burning. In the wet ecosystem of the rainforest fires are not a natural phenomenon, they are started by people, mostly well-organized criminal gangs that profit from illegal logging and land clearance.
Brazil’s right-wing President, Jain Bolsanaro, took office in January; since then deforestation in the country has doubled, there have been 87,000 fires in the Amazon, the highest number since 2010. Funding to Brazil’s Environmental Protection Agency, IBAMA, has been cut by 25%, including monies allocated for prevention and control of fires, which was slashed …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 26th, 2019
It delighted Labour supporters and party apparatchiks who had been falling over each other in murderous ceremony at the party conference in Brighton: Prime Minister Boris Johnson would come to the unwitting rescue with his own version of a grand cock-up. This involved a now defeated attempt to circumvent parliamentary scrutiny and interference ahead of the Brexit date of October 31 through a prorogation of parliament.
Johnson still felt he was in with a chance, and with good reason. The UK Constitution is a nebulous muddle of conventions, documents and interpretations, a body of constitutional law without a constitution. It …
by Rick Sterling / September 26th, 2019
Portrait
Hisham Ahmed was born in Deheisheh refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Palestine in 1963. Blind from birth, Hisham somehow surmounted all odds and ultimately earned a Ph.D from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He taught for many years at Birzeit University in Palestine, before coming to Saint Mary’s College of California in 2006. He died of cancer in July 2019, age 56. The following remembrance was given at his memorial service held on 25 September 2019 at St Mary’s College. …
by Shawgi Tell / September 26th, 2019
One of the main claims to fame of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools is that they will deliver bigger and better results than public schools in exchange for greater flexibility and autonomy to operate than public schools.
Two recent reports, however, build on extensive previous research which shows that academic performance in privately operated charter schools, which have been around nearly 30 years, is weak or no better than academic performance in public schools.
Charter schools, which annually siphon billions of dollars from public schools and are often rife with corruption, have not delivered on the big promises they have made …
by Medea Benjamin / September 26th, 2019
The environmental justice movement that is surging globally is intentionally intersectional, showing how global warming is connected to issues such as race, poverty, migration and public health. One area intimately linked to the climate crisis that gets little attention, however, is militarism. Here are some of the ways these issues–and their solutions–are intertwined.
(1) The US military protects Big Oil and other extractive industries. The US military has often been used to ensure that US companies have access to extractive industry materials, particularly oil, around the world. The 1991 Gulf …
by Kevin Zeese / September 26th, 2019
Screen Shot from YouTube Video, Protesters rally for safe access to medical marijuana.
For the first time since the war on marijuana was declared by President Richard Nixon, progressive marijuana law reform was considered on the Floor of the House of Representatives, and won by a landslide. Now, it is likely to be considered by the Senate.Yesterday, members of the House of Representatives voted 321 to 103 in favor HR 1595: The SAFE Banking Act, which amends federal law so that explicitly banks and other financial institutions …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / September 26th, 2019
As the United Nations General Assembly conducts its fall session, Popular Resistance is in New York City for the People’s Mobilization to Stop the US War Machine and Save the Planet. Themes of the mobilization are connecting militarism and climate change and raising awareness that the United States regularly violates international laws, including the United Nations Charter. These laws are designed to facilitate peaceful relationships between countries and prevent abuses of human rights. It is time that the US be held accountable.
The People’s Mobilization arose out of the …
by Denis Rancourt / September 26th, 2019
Given the state of laws in Canada, it has become necessary to state the obvious:
An individual legitimately can be punished solely for proven actual harm that is also proven to have been caused by the individual.
In a free and democratic society, laws that punish an individual for harm that is hypothesized to have occurred, or hypothesized to have been caused by the individual, or hypothesized to have both occurred and been caused by the individual, are pathological in that such laws attack democracy itself in its foundation, as explained below.
Canada and institutions and corporations sanctioned by the State enforce many …
by J.B. Gerald / September 25th, 2019
These genocide warnings concern current threats to the peoples of Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi. Beyond the primary concern for all the people in national groups, a pattern is emerging globally which should remind North Americans of past genocides against native American peoples: the masses of people forced from their homelands, the refugee camps which are meant to both save and contain the displaced, the senseless killing of civilians, the slaughter by hunger, arms and disease which lower the population numbers, and the relentless attack on native cultures to incapacitate the will to resist. The inability to recognize …
by Peter Koenig / September 24th, 2019
Monday, 23 September, the UN in New York hosted a special meeting on Climate Change. There were massive predominantly youth demonstrations of tens of thousands around the globe, many of them in New York, one of them led by Greta Thunberg, the Swedish 16-year-old climate activist, who is sponsored mostly by Soros and his clan to travel around the world and address world leaders to act on climate change – preventing climate change, stop climate change. Others with the same objective, called “Friday’s for the Future”, originated in Germany, students striking every Friday – meaning literally not going to school, …
by Andre Vltchek / September 24th, 2019
It was once a British police station, as well as the Victoria Prison Compound. Hong Kong inhabitants used to tremble just from hearing its name mentioned. This is where people were detained, interrogated, humiliated, tortured and disappeared.
Now, after Hong Kong ‘returned to China’, it was converted into the Tai Kwun Center – one of the biggest and the most vibrant art institutions in Asia.
This transformation was symbolic, the same as the conversion of the former British-era slums into public parks has been symbolic.
But now, as the pro-Western and anti-Chinese treasonous hooligans are dividing and ruining this former U.K. colony, the …
by Colin Todhunter / September 24th, 2019
Much of the following article is based on a new 20-page report by environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason. Readers are urged to access the full report containing all relevant citations here.
In a new paper published in King’s Law Journal — ‘The Chemical Anthropocene: Glyphosate as a Case Study of Pesticide Exposures’ — the authors Alessandra Arcuri and Yogi Hale Hendlin state:
As the science against glyphosate safety mounts and lawsuits threaten its chemical manufacture’s profits, the next generation of GMO crops are being keyed to the pesticide dicamba, sold commercially as XtendiMax® – and poised to be the next glyphosate. …
by Ramzy Baroud / September 24th, 2019
Experience has taught Palestinians not to pay heed to Israeli elections. But to every rule there is an exception.
Although it is still true that no Israeli Zionist leader has ever been kind to the Palestinian people, the dynamics of the latest Israeli elections on September 17 are likely to affect the Occupied Palestinian Territories in a profound way.
Indeed, the outcome of the elections seems to have ushered in a new age in Israel, ideologically and politically. But the same claim can also be made regarding its potential influence on Palestinians, who should now brace themselves for war in Gaza and …
by T.P. Wilkinson / September 24th, 2019
Today I was walking toward the restaurant where I always take luncheon on Tuesdays. I passed the Cafe Imperio in the same street. Since I was thinking about a talk I am to give in Macau the term “empire” crossed my mind more than once. The sign of the Cafe Imperio also said it was founded in 1973. Well, I thought, did the owners imagine that a year later there would be nothing left of the Portuguese empire? In 1974 the Salazar/Caetano regime was overthrown after more than 40 years. The last pretense that the empire was, in the French …
by Sean Stinson / September 24th, 2019
I want to make it absolutely clear from the outset of this piece that I am not a climate skeptic. To me it seems axiomatic that when you burn stuff, you produce heat. Humans have been burning stuff since they discovered fire, and heating the planet at an exponential rate since the the dawn of the machine age. The short term impact of human activity over the last century or so is measurably distinct from long term warming and cooling cycles and external factors such as solar activity. But …
