Latest articles
by Peter Koenig / September 7th, 2018
The current Swedish Government, led by the Social Democrats, is governed by a coalition with the Green Party since 2014. Incumbent PM, Stefan Löfven, intends to continue his government and hopes to win on general election day, next Sunday, 9 September 2018. However, for years – ever since what they call the onslaught of undesirable immigrants; i.e., the “lesser people” from the Middle East and thereabouts – the extreme right, anti-immigration, eurosceptics ‘Sweden Democrats’ are on course to become the second-largest single party in the next parliament. On Facebook the party’s leader, Jimmie Åkesson, warned that “Sweden is on fire …
by John W. Whitehead / September 7th, 2018
Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.
— Annette Fuentes, Investigative Journalist, Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse becomes a Jailhouse, February 12, 2013
It used to be that if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, …
Not only is the role of pro-Israel partisans in the UK now visible, but their ugly assumptions are under closer scrutiny than ever before
by Jonathan Cook / September 6th, 2018
Back in the 1950s, the US intelligence community coined a term: “blowback”. It referred to the unintended consequences of a covert operation that ended up damaging one’s own cause.
There are mounting indications that the intensifying campaign by the Israel lobby in the UK against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, is starting to have precisely such self-harming repercussions.
A campaign of smears
In the three years since he was elected to lead the Labour party, Corbyn has faced non-stop accusations that his party has an endemic “anti-Semitism problem”, despite all evidence to the contrary. Of late, Corbyn …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 6th, 2018
The irresistible allure of invasion and interference has never been far from US law makers. The imperium needs its regular feed and what a feed it has been over the decades, notably within the sphere of influence discomfortingly termed Washington’s backyard. The current US president has shown himself a keen follower of the idea that the US military, that old, and not yet diminished strongman of capitalism, might come into play to rid Washington of various irritations in Latin America. Venezuela has featured very highly in that regard.
It was Venezuela’s Chávism that turned so many policy makers off in Washington, …
A Review of The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care by Dr. Joseph Jarvis
by John V. Walsh / September 6th, 2018
It has long been clear that health care in America is a disaster, an overpriced and underperforming bureaucratic behemoth. It has also been clear that the answer is Medicare for All, aka Single Payer Health Care, a tried and proven solution to the problems of health care in modern, developed societies. It is also true that a majority of Americans favor such a system.
But alas, we have no such system here in the US. How to get it is one of the pressing political and humanitarian questions of the day. The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care, …
by Max Parry / September 6th, 2018
It has been nearly three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite Russia’s reemergence on the world stage as a respected power after market-oriented ‘reforms’ destroyed its economy for the duration of the nineties, the breakup of the USSR is an event regarded by an increasing amount of Russians as a catastrophic tragedy rather than a triumph of ‘freedom and democracy.’ In recent years, there have been numerous polls showing that more than half of Russians not only regret the collapse of the Soviet Union but would even prefer for its return. However, the …
by Christy Rodgers / September 6th, 2018
This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The wildfires may be out of the headlines, but they are not out. Visual images seem the only way to comprehend the scope. The cluster of little flaming circles indicating active fires, crowded over interactive maps of the Western U.S. and Canada, covering their landmasses like …
by Colin Todhunter / September 6th, 2018
Indian cities are in crisis. Spend any length of time in a large city there and you will notice the overcrowding, the power and water shortages and, during monsoon, the streets that transform into stinking, litter-strewn rivers. At times, these cities can be almost unbearable to live in. Little wonder then that the concept of ‘smart cities’ is taking hold among policy makers, however flawed the notion might seem to be.
And, not least, of course, there is the horrendous traffic chaos and congestion, the choking pollution and the increasing number of massive concrete flyovers: monstrosities that have taken their place among numerous …
by Ralph Nader / September 5th, 2018
Observers say that confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become President Trump’s second pick for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court will make the Court more conservative. It is more accurate to say Kavanaugh will make the Court more corporatist.
With Kavanaugh, it is all about siding with corporations over workers, consumers, patients, motorists, the poor, minority voters, and beleaguered communities.
Repeatedly Kavanaugh’s judicial opinions put corporate interests ahead of the common good—backing the powerful against the weak, the vulnerable, and the defenseless.
Apart from his declared views pouring power and immunity into the Presidency (which is why Trump wants him), Kavanaugh could be …
by John Andrews / September 5th, 2018
What is the point of memory if one fails to learn from the lessons it provides? Milan Kundera accurately observed that “the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. ((Hidden Agendas, John Pilger.)) The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is an organisation supposedly committed to not forgetting the infamous extermination of Jews by the Nazis during World War Two. That is not unreasonable. However, what if remembering one horrendous holocaust from the past is paid for by forgetting, or ignoring, holocausts of the present? What if remembering one horrendous holocaust from the past is used …
Who are the real anti-Semites here?
by Heather Stroud / September 5th, 2018
It is appalling to be British and observe the circus of hysterical, ridiculous accusations being flung at Jeremy Corbyn by the Jewish Board of Deputies and their Conservative and Labour cohorts. I wonder if these self-righteous accusers have any perception of how we are viewed from afar by the more sane countries around the world. There is a simple question to be asked here: “Is Jeremy Corbyn racist?” Well, the answer to that is so self evident that those who accuse him wouldn’t dare ask it.
Jeremy Corbyn has a long history of standing up for truth, justice and for all …
by Mirah Riben / September 4th, 2018
Despite the illusion of adoption as an altruistic child-saving social service . . . adoption is deeply imbued in classism, nearly always redistributing children from economically at-risk “unmarried” or “too young” mothers and fathers, or those in temporary crisis, to adopters of higher socio-economic status who can afford the tens of thousands of dollars that babies cost.
Some call it Class Warfare. I have dubbed it Reverse Robinhoodism.
Worldwide, poverty far exceeds abuse, neglect, or abandonment as the reason for adoption surrenders.
It is the poor states that produce the children …
by Yves Engler / September 4th, 2018
Strange how some people think Canada is a colony, a victim of U.S. power, when so much evidence points to the Great White North being an imperial power.
For example, Canada is an international banking powerhouse.
The Globe and Mail report on TD’s third-quarter results noted that its “international operations – mostly in the United States and Latin America – produced outsized returns” while another recent story in that paper’s business pages pointed out that the Bank of Nova Scotia and Bank of Montreal “are doing brisk business lending in international markets, helping drive third-quarter profits higher.” For Canada’s biggest …
by Ramzy Baroud / September 4th, 2018
Israel wants to change the rules of the game entirely. With unconditional support from the Trump Administration, Tel Aviv sees a golden opportunity to redefine what has, for decades, constituted the legal and political foundation for the so-called ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict.’
While US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has, thus far, been erratic and unpredictable, his administration’s ‘vision’ in Israel and Palestine is systematic and unswerving. This consistency seems to be part of a larger vision aimed at liberating the ‘conflict’ from the confines of international law and even the old US-sponsored ‘peace process.’
Indeed, the new strategy has, so far, targeted the …
A Review of David Ray Griffin’s The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?
by Edward Curtin / September 4th, 2018
The past is not dead; it is people who are sleeping. The current night and daymares that we are having arise out of murders lodged deep in our past that have continued into the present. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on “a vast tapestry of lies” that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging …
by Gary Leupp / September 4th, 2018
For days we have been informed—indeed, relentlessly reminded, instructed, lectured, preached to, told matter-of-factly (as though the whole universe knows it), bestowed with the transcendent wisdom—that the late Sen. John McCain was a true American hero.
Wow! What a man! Suddenly, we learn that he was one of the Greatest Americans of All Time. “How to hold him in reverence?” asks an African-American Democratic congressman on CNN. It is (at least on cable news) an unchallenged truth. On CNN Sunday morning “America pays tribute to a hero”—-as his old friends Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman do so.
McCain served his country, we …
by Robert Hunziker / September 4th, 2018
One of the biggest open questions of the 21st century is whether 144,000 different chemicals swirling throughout the world are properly tested and analyzed for toxicity. By almost all accounts, the scale of toxic risk is unknown. This may be the biggest tragedy of all time, a black eye of enormous proportions.
Correspondingly and very likely, not yet 100% proven but probably 99%, as a result of ubiquitous chemical presence, one hundred fifty million (150,000,000) Americans have chronic disease, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, fibromyalgia, cancer, stroke, asthma, cystic fibrosis, obesity, and osteoporosis. ((Rand Corporation Review …
by Adeyinka Makinde / September 4th, 2018
John Sidney McCain III (PHOTO: John Hume Kennerly/GETTY IMAGES)
The eulogies for the recently deceased John McCain, a US Senator for Arizona, have been plentiful, and so far as the American mainstream media is concerned, they have verged on the hagiographic. He has been variously described as a “patriot”, a “war hero” and a “defender of freedom”. Most perplexingly, McCain was lauded as a “warrior for peace”. But while praise for McCain has been dutifully administered in reverential terms by both liberal and conservative figures, the truth is …
Instead of FDR-like Planks Bringing Millions Back to Win Elections
by Barbara G. Ellis / September 4th, 2018
The challenge by progressives to Democratic party leaders for November’s midterms—and the 2020 presidential election—is to tone down the anti-Trump focus and play up domestic planks as did the Great Depression’s president Franklin D. Roosevelt (“FDR”) to solve the nation’s critical domestic needs. Campaigners do not want to waste time and energies in yet another party defeat because the party continues to abandon the interests of millions once under its “big tent” in catering to the interests of banks, big business, and the rich.
*****
So Democratic party’s leaders finally surrendered to its progressive wing’s demand to disallow the 716 …
Befuddled Party waits to be gagged by 'enemy within'
by Stuart Littlewood / September 3rd, 2018
The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party will vote tomorrow (Tuesday) on whether to bow to the bullies and adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism even though it has been roundly criticised by legal experts as unworkable. If they do, it will be hailed as a mighty victory for the dark forces behind the pro-Israel lobby in their bid to shut down criticisim of that racist state.
More than two years ago Gilad Atzmon was viewing the Labour Party’s crazed witch hunt for “anti-Semites” with misgiving. He declared, in his usual robust way, that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was not …
by Ron Forthofer / September 3rd, 2018
For over two decades, US neo-cons have been pushing for an attack on Iran on the pretext that it was developing nuclear weapons. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been a key player in this effort, exerting as much pressure as he and the Israeli lobby can for an US attack. Netanyahu also often threatens that Israel might attack Iran. Note these are the same people who pushed for the illegal US attack on Iraq based on the bogus claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Fortunately, the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran concluded that Iran did not have …
by Kim Petersen / September 3rd, 2018
Ron Newby, a former researcher at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, begins his book Tribal: Truth and Consequences by quoting mathematician Jacob Bronowski on the uniqueness of humans among animals.
Newby notes that 98% of the human genome is identical with that of chimpanzees. Members of both species have exhibited acts of violence. Is this the direction of evolution? Newby also notes that the close cousin to chimps, the bonobos, engage in sexual activity and avoid conflict. Despite this Newby posits determinism: “There can be little doubt that interpersonal violence is inherited from our …
by Jason Holland / September 3rd, 2018
Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.
? Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.
? Gwen Sharpe, “Policing Masculinity in Slim Jim’s ‘Spice Loss’ Ads,” Sociological Images, August 21, 2012
She has been missed. I looked for evidence of her somewhere in old documents, a remnant left behind, something, but she’s …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 3rd, 2018
Be wary of the self-satisfied and morally soothed. The complacent have a habit of giving the game away, glorifying themselves in satisfied satiation. Australia’s parliament seemed to be very self-congratulatory in their condemnation of the newly arrived Senator of the Katter Australia Party, Fraser Anning. Last month, the rough, seemingly untutored Anning became the convenient freak show for his fellow parliamentarians; his more seasoned colleagues, versed in the dark arts of hypocrisy, duly rounded on him. How dare he express what many of them have either felt or ignored?
Anning has volunteered himself as yet another scrounger who played the gargantuan …
by Robert J. Burrowes / September 3rd, 2018
There is almost unanimous agreement among climate scientists and organizations – that is, 97% of over 10,000 climate scientists and the various scientific organizations engaged in climate science research – that human beings have caused a dramatic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide released into Earth’s atmosphere since the pre-industrial era and that this is driving the climate catastrophe that continues to unfold.
However, there is no consensus regarding the time frame in which this climate catastrophe will cause human extinction. This lack of consensus is primarily due to the global elite controlling the public …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / September 3rd, 2018
Jail Bankers Not Protesters, Occupy Wall Street, 2011 (Photo by Stan Honda for AFP-Getty Images)
Ten years ago, there was panic in Washington, DC, New York City and financial centers around the world as the United States was in the midst of an economic collapse. The crash became the focus of the presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain and was followed by protests that created a popular movement, which continues to this day.
Banks: Bailed …
by Andre Vltchek / September 2nd, 2018
My friend, a senior UN official based in Amman, Jordan, recently received a newsletter from an Israeli institution – “IMPACT-se”. Their report was called, ‘modestly’, “Reformulating School Textbooks During the Civil War”.
It is full of analyses of the Syrian curriculum.
Interesting stuff, without any doubt: Manipulative, negative, but interesting. It made it to many other places in the Middle East; to Lebanon, for instance, where even the word “Israel” is hardly ever pronounced.
Predictably, being compiled in Israel, the report trashes Syria, its ideology, and the determined anti-imperialist stand of President al-Assad.
However, that may backfire. Excerpts that are quoted from the Syrian …
That vulgar bourgeois reformism
by Jason Hirthler / September 2nd, 2018
One quarter of American workers get no vacation time a year. None. Nada. A vast 63 percent don’t have $500 saved for an emergency, let alone anything so exotic as a vacation. Ten percent never leave their state. Ever. Not even to the fair Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, where they might have faintly approximated the glories of Venice, that cradle of Italian statehood. See that luminous city of lit gondolas erected on a swampland as a last resort against the uncultivated hordes. No, they’ve not even got enough money to afford a simulacrum of a real …
by Edward Curtin / September 2nd, 2018
Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad.
— Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, February 8, 1994
The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
It’s still the same old story. The best propaganda places individual stories within a larger framework. The individual is extolled or damned in the service of the controlling myth.
Senator John McCain is a case in point. As an individual, he is not important, except as the glorified …
A “Sudden Bout of Atypical Decency”? (Part 2 of a 2-Part Series)
by Leftist Critic / September 2nd, 2018
In Part 1, I talked about the power of social media giants and claims of “free speech” on their platforms. Again, I am referring just to the U$, as I am most familiar with the debate on “free speech” there. In the future I may expand this analysis to other capitalist countries. The bourgeois conception of “free speech” is so ingrained that Nadine Strossen, a former president of the ACLU, can spout on The Real News about a “we the people” government in the U$, while declaring that government regulation through net neutrality and antitrust laws, along …
