Latest articles
Book Review of Kiriti Sengupta's Dreams of the Sacred and Ephemeral
by Nandita Samanta / August 1st, 2018
Among the many books I’d bought this year from the International Kolkata Book Fair there were three titles that connected me to Kiriti Sengupta: the two books he authored and the other was Appraisals: Breaking the Barriers (edited by Sunil Sharma & Dustin Pickering), a collection of the critiques of Sengupta’s many books. I read Appraisals first to understand what others had to say about him, and then I approached Dreams of the Sacred and Ephemeral, a poetic trilogy, published by Hawakal (2017). As reviewer I had two choices, i) to think likewise and read him comparing his works with …
by James Petras / August 1st, 2018
For decades and longer, the United States and Europe lectured and encouraged countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia to welcome and accept foreign investment as the virtuous path to modernization, growth and prosperity.
With few notable exceptions western leaders and academics promoted unlimited flows of capital (and the outflows of profits). No section of the targeted economies was off-limits – agriculture, mining, manufacturers, utilities, transport and communication were to be ‘modernized’ through US and European ownership and control.
…
by Ralph Nader / August 1st, 2018
In elementary school they taught us the names of inventors. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Robert Fulton the steamboat, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, and Thomas Alva Edison the electric light bulb. Nowadays we rarely know the names of the inventors of modern technology—think biotechnology, nanotechnology, pharmaceutical technology, safety technology. Not every breakthrough is invented by a single person, but there are still clusters of people inventing new things each year.
Over twenty years ago, my associates searched for inventors of the air bag so we could celebrate their achievements. It’s not as if the names of such inventors are …
by Jason Holland / August 1st, 2018
Hear me out. I realize the idea of sharing may seem like a vulgarity to the sophisticated American mind, could rile a few people up. The mere suggestion of sharing without receiving something in return may tempt good capitalists of the world to spit on me in disgust, call me commie filth, and possibly launch a war against me – And maybe I have that coming, but just to play commie’s advocate for a moment I thought I’d address the extremely controversial idea of sharing.
On the surface, and perhaps in reality, sharing seems awful. The United States has an abundance …
by Media Lens / August 1st, 2018
What will it take for society to make the deep-rooted changes required to prevent the terrifying and awesome threat of climate breakdown? This summer’s extreme weather events are simply a prelude to a rising tide of chaos that will be punctuated by cataclysmic individual events – floods, heatwaves, superstorms – of increasing severity and frequency. How long before people demand radical action from governments? Or, and this is what is really needed, how long until citizens remove corporate-captured governments from power and introduce genuine democracy?
Consider just some examples of this summer’s extreme weather. In Japan, ferocious …
by Colin Todhunter / August 1st, 2018
Like many countries, India’s food system was essentially clean just a generation or two ago but is now being comprehensively contaminated with sugar, bad fats, synthetic additives, GMOs and pesticides under the country’s neoliberal ‘great leap forward’. The result has been a surge in obesity, diabetes and cancer incidence, while there has been no let-up in the under-nutrition of those too poor to join in the over-consumption.
Indian government data indicates that cancer showed a 5% increase in prevalence between 2012 and 2014 with the number of new cases doubling between 1990 and 2013. The incidence of cancer for some major organs …
by Hiroyuki Hamada / July 31st, 2018
People sometimes ask me what religion Japanese people practice. I usually end up saying that Japanese people aren’t very religious at all. But paradoxically, if you go to Japan, you encounter huge shrines at tourists’ spots and there are numerous smaller ones across the country in many forms. You visit a Japanese household, you might also find a shrine, a box shaped prayer spot, called butsudan.
There certainly are indications that Japanese society is bound together, to a certain extent, with beliefs, values and norms deriving from variations of Buddhism and Shintoism.
To me, who grew up in Japan, it is natural …
by Julian Vigo / July 31st, 2018
This month, Current Biology published an article about the revival of Lysenkoism, a pseudo-scientific concept developed by Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898– 1976), the Ukrainian-born Soviet agronomist. His theory was that environmental changes to crop plants like wheat, rye, potatoes, and beets, are heritable through the organism’s cells, dismissing entirely the role of genetics. Developed in the 1920s, Lysenko’s theories were fully adopted under Stalin and had disastrous consequences for the people of the Soviet Union when v_e_r_n_a_l_i_s a_t_i_o_n (the chilling of seeds to stimulate germination) combined with his complete rejection of modern genetics contributed to the disaster …
But it would lower the total cost of health care
by Margaret Flowers / July 31st, 2018
Of course, a National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA) system would increase federal spending, but not by as much as they claim. NIMA would create a national health insurance, like most other wealthy countries have, funded only through taxes. This would replace our current complicated, privatized healthcare system, funded through a mix of premiums, out-of-pocket costs and taxes, which is the most expensive in the world. Countries that treat health care as a public good invest in a universal system because they know it improves the …
by John Steppling / July 31st, 2018
U.S. imperial actions in Vietnam and elsewhere are often described as reflecting “national interests,” “national security,” or “national defense.” Endless U.S. wars and regime changes, however, actually represent the class interests of the powerful who own and govern the country.
— John Marciano, “Lessons from the Vietnam War,” Monthly Review, December 1, 2016
The Bretton Woods institutions are like arsonists, lighting new social fires, then waiting for the NGOs and local communities to play firefighter.
— Eric Toussaint, (Your Money or Your Life:? The Tyranny of Global Finance, June 1, 2005)
We found the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. We found biological laboratories.
— President George …
by Ellen Brown / July 31st, 2018
The president has criticized Federal Reserve policy for undermining his attempts to build the economy. To make the central bank serve the needs of the economy, it needs to be transformed into a public utility.
For nearly half a century, presidents have refrained from criticizing the “independent” Federal Reserve; but that was before Donald Trump. In response to a question about Fed interest rate policy in a CNBC interview on July 19, 2018, he shocked commentators by stating,
I’m not thrilled. Because we go up and every time you go up they want to raise rates again. … I am not …
Findings and Non-Findings
by Binoy Kampmark / July 31st, 2018
It does little to allay the grief of relatives and friends, but the MH370 report on the doomed, and ever spectral Malaysian passenger liner merely added smidgens of further speculation. The report from Malaysian authorities into the disappearance of the Boeing 777 on route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014 will do little to contain the fever that accompanies such stories of disappearance, with MH370’s vanishing deemed by The Washington Post “the biggest airplane mystery since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.”
The Post has a point, and Earhart’s vanishing, along with navigator Fred …
by Richard Hugus / July 30th, 2018
The anniversary of the August 12, 2017 Charlottesville protest is coming up. It was on this day, so the story goes, that the left confronted the right over the right’s support for a statue of civil war general Robert E. Lee and a woman was killed by a white nationalist driving his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other protestors.
Because applications by “Unite the Right” for a return to Charlottesville were turned down, the protest this year is scheduled for Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House in Washington. The ANSWER coalition, representing the …
by Yves Engler / July 30th, 2018
Is the Canadian military a friend and ally of First Nations or an exploiter and repressor?
The military’s immense resources and cultural clout certainly enables it to attract indigenous youth to become soldiers. But First Nations have more reason than most to be wary of the Canadian Forces (CF).
A recent Ipolitics story titled “This is where I need to be’: Indigenous military summer programs ‘fantastic’ for young recruits” detailed the CF’s recruitment of Indigenous youth. The article quoted 19-year old Private Brandon Julian saying, “I love Canada … I want to serve this country.”
The story described the Bold Eagle, Raven …
by Robert J. Burrowes / July 30th, 2018
Given the overwhelming evidence that activist efforts are failing to halt the accelerating rush to extinction precipitated and maintained by dysfunctional human behavior, it is worth reflecting on why this is happening.
Of course, you might say that the rush to extinction is being slowed. But is it? Even according to BP’s chief economist:
Despite the extraordinary growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years. The share of coal …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 30th, 2018
The world of the terrifying hypothetical is programmatically standard in the Trump White House. Periods of tense calm are followed by careless flights of fury, digs and remonstrations. Mortal enemies become amenable comrades; reliable allies turn into irresponsible skinflints who ought to fork out more for their defence.
For all that swirling chaos, the one constant since the 2016 election campaign for President Donald Trump is the Iranian bogey, that defender of the Shiites, the theocratic Republic. The fear of Iran’s aspirations is an endless quarry for domestic consumption, tied, as it were with propitiating the ever hungry Israeli Prime Minister …
(Global mendacity until you choke)
by T.P. Wilkinson / July 30th, 2018
If there was ever any doubt that tobacco or properly speaking nicotine research was bought from the scientific “community” (analogous to the currently ubiquitous euphemism “international community”) then the litigation that condemned BAT and essentially the makers of the “Marlboro man” for fake research should have made the political-economic morons whose primary libidinal satisfaction derives from “climate science” wary about the apparent conversion of the corporate foundations (the principal mechanism for buying the “Left”) to “climate research”. ((Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY series in Radical Social and Political Theory, January 30, 2003.))
The Earth …
Their quarry: anti-racist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn; their weapons: anti-semitism smears; their purpose: to oust Corbyn and replace him with a compliant pro-Israel stooge
by Stuart Littlewood / July 30th, 2018
The row over anti-Semitism has erupted yet again in the UK Labour Party, as predicted a few months ago by Miko Peled, the Israeli general’s son, who warned that:
… they are going to pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn…. the reason anti-Semitism is used is because they [the Israelis] have no argument….
So Israel’s pimps at Westminster, never happy unless they’re telling everyone what to think and say, are frantically insisting that the Labour Party adopts the discredited International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism in …
by Mirah Riben / July 30th, 2018
Adoption loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful.
— The Reverend Keith C. Griffith, MBE
Every adoption is built on a foundation of tragedy and loss. This is why the TLC television show featuring family reunification “stories of people who have, for one reason or another, experienced long-term separation from members of their family is entitled Long Lost Family [emphasis added].
Universality of the Grief experienced by mothers who lose children to adoption
Yet recently, someone …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / July 30th, 2018
The quote in the headline comes from Mao Tse Tung. It was aptly used by Professor Slavoj Žižek to describe the situation we find ourselves in during the Trump era. There are many things to dislike about President Trump, but he is shaking up the establishment and raising mishandled issues that would not otherwise be discussed. He is causing chaos and his policy prescriptions are rarely correct, but he is unintentionally creating opportunities for positive change, if people can rise to the occasion in an informed and strategic way.
Žižek writes an interesting review of Trump’s recent European trip but falls short …
by David Macaray / July 28th, 2018
Most of us won’t recall it, but on February 7, 1989, the Milton Bradley Corporation proudly announced the launching of its newest board game. Modeled roughly on the buy-and-sell machinations of “Monopoly,” this new game was based upon the cult following and commercial exploits of then New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump.
We’re not making this up. The box containing the game featured a photograph of The Donald himself, looking shrewd and confident, and its snappy, in-your-face tagline was: “It’s not whether you win or lose. It’s whether you win.” Ah, yes, so wonderfully Trump-like.
Hoping to benefit from the success …
by Andre Vltchek / July 28th, 2018
Here it is – my short film about North Korea. No need to drag it, to prolong it – let’s just watch it all together:
The Faces of North Korea
This is my 25-minutes piece about the DPRK (North Korea) – country that I visited relatively recently; visited and loved, was impressed with, and let me be frank – admired.
I don’t really know if I could call this a ‘documentary’. Perhaps not. A simple story, a poem, you know: I met a girl, tiny and delicate, at the roller-skating ring …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 28th, 2018
Always trust the handy anecdote to overwhelm reality with force and false persuasiveness. The taxi driver irate at the latest opportunistic scribble in a Rupert Murdoch rag is bound to regale you with a story as you speed to the airport: “Those bloody gangs. And the police didn’t even bloody mention they were African!” A vital canon of reactionary politics is extolling the supposed reality of a phenomenon that does not affect you. All that matters is its existence, however modest its effect.
Forced difference matters in the politicisation of crime. Certain offenders command more attention than others. Saying that a …
by Nozomi Hayase / July 27th, 2018
Over 50 years ago, in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, addressing a struggle of the civil right era, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” His message is now more prevalent than ever in the current political climate surrounding WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks stepped onto a global stage with release of a huge trove …
by Robert Hunziker / July 27th, 2018
A recent UK newspaper headline read “The World’s On Fire,” which is literally true as extraordinary continent-wide wildfires consume the planet, accompanied by unbearable, insufferable, oppressive heat. Europe, North America, Japan, and North Africa are all experiencing unprecedented scorching heat.
All of which begs the question of when anthropogenic, or human-caused, global warming will be recognized as a reality by America, the second biggest contributor of greenhouse gases (GHG).
Don’t look for confirmation from the Trump administration, the U.S. Senate or House, the leadership of America (ahem). They are all deniers, and thus have blocked any and all efforts of an American …
by Paul Haeder / July 27th, 2018
In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.
It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda.
? Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 27th, 2018
Tariq Ali, whilst having a lunch in Knightsbridge with the Pakistani cricket colossus, Imran Khan, suggested that retirement should not be too problematic for him. (Khan had seemed gloomy, deep in thought about post-retirement prospects at the age of 30.) Consider, posed Ali, film, or at the very least funding for a film institute. “You could be an enabler or you could act. A film with you in it would be a surefire hit and help fund more avant-garde productions.”
Khan did not bite. He preferred politics, an area which has its fair share of thespians staking their wares. His …
by Gregory Barrett / July 27th, 2018
On 24 July 2018, a young woman single-handedly prevented the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker out of Sweden by buying a ticket for his flight and refusing to sit down so that the airplane could take off. Her noble and courageous act brought tears to my eyes after the recent months’ terrible developments in the insane, obsessive, surreal European conflict over refugees and immigration.
Like my adopted country Germany, Sweden is allowing far-right racists and xenophobic nationalists and neo-Nazis to drive its agenda on immigration and asylum law. Once a country with a noble policy of providing safety to refugees …
by J.B. Gerald / July 27th, 2018
Of genocide one thing becomes clear: the perpetrators are usually governments. The perpetrators may be cliques within the government, using the government, but the organization of such cataclysmic events is beyond the skills of amateurs. So it isn’t a surprise that the domain of preventing genocides is as tightly controlled as the mechanisms of punishment. A control not entirely foreseen by the conceptual author, Raphael Lemkin, was written-into the Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, with the support of countries which had risen to power through colonialism. It is the word “intent” as in “intent …
Teapot in a Tempest?
by James Petras / July 26th, 2018
Political leaders, media moguls and journalists have saturated the public throughout the world with claims and accusations that President Trump is destroying the World Order, undermining historic alliances, western values, the world trade organizations and violating national and international constitutions and institutions.
In the United States, legislators, judges and leaders from both parties have accused President Trump of being a traitor for fraternizing and serving as a tool of Russian President Putin.
This paper will analyze and discuss …
