Latest articles
by Christy Rodgers / May 19th, 2019
“There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.” – Franz Kafka
If artists are the antennae of the race, and writers and thinkers are also artists, then a vibration some are receiving and beginning to transmit to the culture more broadly now is new in the history of our species: the world is dying.
The world, not defined as “human civilization,” or a nation, empire, or culture, but the entire living world, which undergirds all those. Not in one region, but everywhere, all at once, and with escalating speed.
The custom at this point in the essay would be …
by Rick Sterling / May 19th, 2019
An honest and accurate analysis of the 2016 election is not just an academic exercise. It is very relevant to the current election campaign. Yet over the past two years, Russiagate has dominated media and political debate and largely replaced a serious analysis of the factors leading to Trump’s victory. The public has been flooded with the various elements of the story that Russia intervened and Trump colluded with them. The latter accusation was negated by the Mueller Report but elements of the Democratic Party and media refuse to move on. Now it’s the lofty but vague accusations of “obstruction …
by Graham Peebles / May 18th, 2019
Amidst deepening global divisions and intolerance ‘Project Maitreya’ plan to build 1,000 statues of Maitreya Buddha around the world, with the aim, they say, of inculcating an atmosphere of ‘loving kindness’; a positive gesture in a cynical world, supported by the Dalai Lama.
The coming of Maitreya Buddha was foretold by Gautama Buddha 2,600 years ago. At this time, He said, will come another great teacher, a Buddha by name Maitreya who will inspire humanity to create a brilliant golden civilization based on righteousness and truth. Both of which are widely lacking.
Who is Maitreya
According to the esoteric literature, Maitreya is not …
by Gary Leupp / May 18th, 2019
As Patrick Cockburn has observed in a recent Counterpunch column, “At the end of the day, the US Treasury is a more powerful instrument of foreign policy than the Pentagon for all its aircraft carriers and drones.” He refers, of course, to the success of U.S. sanctions on Iran and secondary sanctions on any corporations conducting trade with Iran. These have cut Iranian oil exports in half. They are, in fact, a form of undeclared warfare designed to inflict pain on the Iranian people, such that they rise up against the mullahs and topple the regime.
Cockburn notes that the European …
by Mirah Riben / May 18th, 2019
Alabama’s horrific top-in-the-nation child poverty rate and newest legislative attempt to overturn Roe v Wade, PROVES beyond a shadow of a doubt that so-called “pro-lifers” are really just anti-woman. They hate the fact that women can do the one thing men cannot and have a sick need to CONTROL her body and procreation in any way they can. The fact that it takes a man (or at least his body fluid) to procreate is not enough for these misogynists.
It PROVES beyond a shadow of doubt that they do not give a rat’s ass about children or the quality of their …
by Shawgi Tell / May 18th, 2019
After wavering and making confusing statements about charter schools three years ago when he was running for President, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who is running for President again, finally came out and issued a broad education plan on May 18, 2019 which, among other things, opposes charter schools.
Part two of Sanders’ ten-part “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education” is titled, “End the Unaccountable Profit-Motive of Charter Schools.’
Sanders begins this part of his education plan for the nation by repeating the incorrect and refuted narrative, stubbornly promoted by the left, democrats, and “progressives,” that charter schools had humble, positive, grass-roots …
by Roger D. Harris / May 18th, 2019
Uncle Sam has a problem in his South American “backyard” with those uppity Venezuelans who insisted on democratically electing Nicolás Maduro as their president instead of by-passing the electoral process and installing the unelected US asset Juan Guaidó. No matter, Amnesty International has come to the rescue with a full-throated defense of US imperialism:
Faced with grave human rights violations, shortages of medicines and food and generalized violence in Venezuela, there is an urgent hunger for justice. The crimes against humanity probably committed by the authorities must not go unpunished.
— Erika Guevara-Rosas, America’s director at Amnesty …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 17th, 2019
It had to come. A massacre, broadcast in real time and then shared with viral automatism; the inevitable shock, and the counter from the authorities. The Christchurch shootings, inflicting fifty-one deaths upon worshippers at two mosques in quiet New Zealand on March 15 this year, have spurred Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Laws have been passed regulating guns in her country. Interest has increased in monitoring white nationalist groups. But Ardern was never keen keeping the matter local.
In Paris, the NZ Prime Minister, meeting French President Emmanuel Macron, brought other leaders and US tech giants to make a global pledge …
Journalist/Educator Ends up Putting Roots Down in one of the Mossy Parts of Oregon
by Paul Haeder / May 17th, 2019
It is hoped that the coming generation will recognize that that is probably one of the greatest and most ennobling challenges that face man on this planet today. To be able to break through to understand the thinking, the feeling, the doing, the talking of another species is a grand, noble achievement that will change man’s view of himself and of his planet.
Seventy-one percent of the surface of our planet is covered with oceans, inhabited by the Cetacea. Let us learn to live in harmony with that seventy-one percent of the planet and its intelligent, sensitive, sensible, and long- surviving …
by Robert J. Burrowes / May 17th, 2019
Like many people who have struggled to understand why human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which now threatens imminent human extinction as well, over many decades I have explored the research and efforts of a great many activists and scholars to secure this understanding. However, with many competing ideas from the fields of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, among others, this understanding has proved elusive. Nevertheless, I have reached an understanding that I find compelling: Human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history because of the disintegrated nature of the …
by Shawgi Tell / May 17th, 2019
A May 2019 report of a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 Presidential voters conducted late spring of last year shows that broad public opposition to charter schools persists. ((Barone, C., Laurens, D., & Munyan-Penney, N. (2019, May). A democratic guide to public charter schools: Public opinion.)) About half of all those polled are Democratic primary voters.
The survey was commissioned by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), an astroturf group ((Astroturf groups are fake grass-roots organizations whose main aim is to trick the public into supporting ideas, policies, and arrangements that are harmful to their interests. See Sharyl Attkisson’s TEDx …
by David Rovics / May 16th, 2019
How should independent musicians survive in the streaming age? There seems to be mostly a lot of hopelessness, along with a few dead-end ideas. I have another idea: demand streaming justice. Fight back against the vulture capitalists of Stockholm. How did we get to this point? Here are my two cents.
Extinction Rebellion is challenging the workings of modern capitalism and the ecocidal society it has tortured into existence. They say we must find a different way to …
by Jonathan Cook / May 16th, 2019
I don’t write much directly about climate collapse, even though by any measure it is by far the most important issue any of us will face in our lifetimes. And I can gauge from my social media accounts that, when I do write about environmental issues, my followers – most of whom I assume share my progressive positions – are least likely to read those blog posts or promote them.
I have to consider why that is.
As I explained in my last piece, the environment has been a concern to me since my teenage years, back in the early 1980s. It …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 16th, 2019
Arms manufacturers of old, and many of the current stable, did not care much where their products went. The profit incentive often came before the patriotic one, and led to such dark suspicions as those voiced by the Nye Committee in the 1930s. Known formally as the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, the US Senate Committee, chaired by US Senator Gerald Nye (R-ND) supplies a distant echo on the nature of armaments and their influence.
The Nye Committee had one pressing concern: that the United States might fall for the same mistake it did in 1917 in committing …
by Max Parry / May 16th, 2019
Last month, 2020 U.S. presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders stirred controversy at a CNN town hall after answering a loaded question about whether his position on extending voting rights to incarcerated felons barred any exceptions such as the Boston Marathon bomber currently on death row. It was impossible for Sanders to respond honestly without being entrapped by the inclusion of Dzhokar Tsarnaev as an example, but the self-professed ‘democratic socialist’ gave a reflective explanation of the complexities of the issue behind his reasoning. The 77-year old Senator from Vermont’s thoughtful answer possibly avoided a campaign fate like that which befell 1988 …
Book Review of What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché
by Edward Curtin / May 16th, 2019
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
— Kabir, “To Be a Slave of Intensity”
Strange how a man
Can enter your life
Just like that: a knock
Out of nowhere
And you’ve slipped away
To a rendezvous with destiny
That always awaited you.
— EJC, “The Birth and Death of Trauma”
Myths and popular tales, like life, are replete with accounts of those not answering the call, of locking the door to their hearts and shutting themselves up in sterile and safe lives where the rest of the world is not even an afterthought, where others suffer and die because of one’s indifference. Answering can be very dangerous, for …
by Roger Stoll / May 16th, 2019
Nearly all US regime-change wars (Venezuela, Syria, Honduras, Ukraine, Libya, Yugoslavia, etc.) are wars of deception, fabrication, propaganda, coups and false flags. Sometimes there is a direct US military assault, more often not. These wars are waged by proxies, media puppets, hired hit-men, torturers, rapists, vandals, saboteurs, death squads and criminal gangs, through mock or pretextual social protest movements, denunciations by “human rights” organizations, and by internal and external economic assaults on the country’s people, transportation, commerce and communications. These were the methods of the 2018 war against Nicaragua, for which the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) alone, a well-known …
A Chronicle of Disorganized Chaos Foretold
by Peter Koenig / May 15th, 2019
As of May 10, Mr. Trump has arbitrarily increased tariffs on Chinese goods imported into the US, worth about 200 billion dollars, from 10% to 25%. It is an action without any foundation. An action that makes no sense at all, as China can and will retaliate – and retaliate much stronger than what the impact of the US’s new “sanctions” may bear – because these arbitrary tariffs are nothing else but sanctions. Illegality of such foreign interference aside, there is hardly any serious economist in this world who would favor tariffs in international trade among “adults” anywhere and for …
Federal Authorities Back Down After Threatening to Evict Peace Activists Inside
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 15th, 2019
Photo by Alex Rubinstein
This article describes a tense showdown that took place Monday evening between the Embassy Protectors and federal authorities, and concludes with URGENT ACTIONS people can take to resolve this dispute and stop a US-orchestrated coup.
Writing on Day 36 of the campaign to prevent a US-sponsored coup by protecting the Venezuelan Embassy from illegal takeover
Events reached a climax this Monday, as well as a new level of absurdity, when for the first time, federal authorities cut the locks and opened the embassy doors to …
by Jane Biral / May 15th, 2019
Welcome to corporate healthcare, the new normal in doctors’ offices, where profits are king and patients are commodities. With government regulatory agencies essentially adopting a “hands-off” policy, the ever-inventive medical establishment has come up with a basketful of new procedures to delude the patient population into believing that more (traditional drug-and procedure-saturated medicine) is the way to go. This at a time when American health care is growing more expensive and less effective. Life expectancy in the U.S. has been dropping for two straight years, the US. has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries and, according to a …
It Buys the Age of Destruction
by Paul Haeder / May 15th, 2019
There is no longer anything sentimental about trying to save a tree or protect an old swimming hole.
— Tom McCall, Earth Day, 1970
It always looks like skin cancer, that 10,000-foot view looking down on Earth. Looking down at Phoenix, or Cairo, or LA, the cancer grows and spreads. This unique perspective shows us how mother earth is not just torn up and concreted in, but the clear cuts and slash and burns show the power of a stupid species, us, as well as the huge plumes of death silts spreading like tuberculosis clouds and chemical rivers decaying watersheds and pushing …
by Wayne Nealis / May 15th, 2019
A political compromise with the Trump administration on immigration is necessary to prevent the electorate from consolidating behind Trump thus bolstering his re-election chances. A compromise that would win legal relief for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the US. This article assesses the political and legislative possibilities and public attitudes that make a compromise possible. One that a majority of Americans would support and that would have a chance of passing congress this session. Nearly all segments of society, from leading business organizations, to trade unions and political institutions are actively seeking a resolution. Not all agree …
by Jonathan Cook / May 15th, 2019
It is worth considering what “populism” represents outside the kneejerk scaremongering of the liberal media. Conditions are created for populism when there is widespread loss of faith in a society’s traditional organs of authority: the political class, the “mainstream” media and expert institutions.
Those most exercised about populism, unsurprisingly, are the professional class in charge of those very same institutions. Their job has always been to guard the economic interests of the ruling elite.
The rise of populism in both its rightwing and leftwing manifestations, and the more general political polarisation in our societies, are the symptoms of …
by Yves Engler / May 15th, 2019
Does Elizabeth May hate Palestinians? Does the Green Party leader want the Trump administration to attack Iran? Does she support efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s government?
I’ve been asking myself these questions since reading a Canadian Jewish News story about Paul Manly’s recent victory in the Nanaimo-Ladysmith bi-election. In a story titled “Concerns raised over new Green MP’s views on BDS” May strongly implies that the Palestinian civil society led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement is racist. “We have nothing to do with BDS,” May is quoted as saying. “We repealed it. We are not a party that condones BDS. We would …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 14th, 2019
Hegemons are never going to sound too sensible when they lock horns or joust in spats of childish anger. Power corrupts, not merely in terms of perspective but language, and making sense about the next move, the next statement, is bound to be challenging. Otherwise justified behaviour can be read as provocative; retaliatory moves duly rattle and disturb.
The Iran-US standoff is finding a surge of increments, provocations and howlers. Since the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Iran Nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) last year, Tehran has gnawed and scratched at the arrangements. Threats to close …
Political interests drive tourism plan that would blight historic city’s skyline and bypass Palestinians
by Jonathan Cook / May 14th, 2019
East Jerusalem has received new impetus from the rise of the Israeli far right and Washington’s decision to move its embassy to the city. But if completed, critics say, the long-running proposal would contribute to erasing the visibility of Palestinians in the city they hope to make their capital.
Planning for the $55 million tourism project continues despite unifying archaeologists, architects, Palestinians, and a tiny community of Jews against it – in a sign of Israel’s ever-growing confidence in making unilateral moves in occupied parts of Jerusalem.
Critics say the cable car will help hide the local Palestinian population from the roughly …
by Robert Hunziker / May 14th, 2019
Direct democracy works like a charm. Check out Venezuela’s Communes….
Venezuela’s ubiquitous Communes are proof that direct democracy works. And, interestingly enough, those same Communes are powerful buffers to attempted coups, protecting the sanctity of direct democracy in their country.
In all likelihood, John Bolton and Trump and Pence and Pompeo and Rubio were shocked beyond recognition by the failed coup attempt they helped orchestrate to overpower a democratically elected government south of the border, colloquially known as extending the concept of Manifest Destiny to its fullest extent.
To Bolton’s/Rubio’s dismay, opposition leader Juan Guaidó proved to be a clown dressed up as …
by Ramzy Baroud / May 13th, 2019
On May 4, Israel launched a series of deadly airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip, prompting a response from various resistance groups. At least 25 Palestinians were killed and nearly 200 people wounded in the Israeli attacks. Four Israelis were also killed by Palestinian rockets.
The clashes were instigated by Israel, when the Israeli military killed four Palestinians in Gaza on May 3. Two were killed while protesting along the fence separating Gaza from Israel. They were participating in the Great March of Return, a protracted Palestinian non-violent protest demanding an end to the Israeli siege. The other …
by Colin Todhunter / May 13th, 2019
What is the point in central government orders and carefully thought out regulatory norms if government officials and regulators act with blatant disregard? This is precisely what we now see happening in India where genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are concerned.
India has the greatest brinjal germplasm in the world with 2,500 varieties, including wild species. Following news in April that (genetically engineered) Bt brinjal is being illegally cultivated in Haryana, prominent campaigner and environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues says:
These varieties are now under threat of irreversible contamination (cross-pollination) because of cumulative acts over time of senseless and criminally irresponsible regulatory oversight. More properly expressed: a …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 12th, 2019
It has been an uninspiring election, punctuated by occasional moments of madness on the part of various candidates. Their sin was to be incautious in their previous use of social media, a form of communication that reveals everything and nothing about a person. In a political sense, the erring tweet and the injudicious remark on an online forum have laid waste to incipient political careers and ambitions.
This is a far cry from the supposedly mighty role the use of social media was meant to have in participatory politics. Now, the chickens have come home to roost in various unexpected ways. …
