Latest articles
by John W. Whitehead / August 27th, 2018
There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
I have known a lot of good cops, I have defended a lot of good cops, and I have been fortunate to call a number of good cops friends.
So when I say that warrior cops—hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge—have not made America any safer or freer, I am not disrespecting any of the …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 27th, 2018
Image from Creative Resistance by Natasha Mayers, Artists Rapid Response Team (ARRT)
The United States has a long history of dominating international economic institutions and has been able to use that power in the past to control other governments and enrich its industries. At present, the United States is waging an economic World War targeting much of the world economy, including allies who refuse to comply with US mandates.
Among the nations included in the US economic war are China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, Nicaragua and North Korea. …
by Said Mohammad / August 27th, 2018
Samir Amin and I at Mayakovski Theatre in Moscow
Said Mohammad: Thanks for accepting to do this interview on Samir Amin. I knew you two had met on different occasions and that you gave lectures with him. Can you tell us something about the person behind the ideas and how you remember him?
Andre Vltchek: Pleasure to be able to address your readers. The first time I met Samir Amin was in Beijing, during the First World Cultural Forum in 2015. Both of us were keynote speakers. The event …
by RT / August 27th, 2018
FILE PHOTO. © Paul Hanna / Reuters
The US may have plans to use a fake chemical attack in Syria to hit government forces with airstrikes, the Russian Defense Ministry has said. Washington is already building up strike capability in the Middle East, it said.
The warning comes a day after the Russian military said it had information about a looming provocation in Syria’s Idlib governorate, which would involve a staged chemical weapons attack. The US earlier warned it would respond to a chemical weapons attack by Syrian government …
by Gilad Atzmon / August 27th, 2018
Haaretz delivered a warning today to American Jewry. “If Trump falls, the testimonies of Cohen, Pecker and Weisselberg could spark an anti-Semitic Backlash.”
Many have passed through the Trump Administration’s revolving door and faded away quietly but those who may bring the president down are “the lawyer-fixer (Michael Cohen), the smut-dealing publisher (David Pecker) and the numbers whiz who knows it all (Alan Weisselberg).” Prominent Haaretz correspondent Chemi Shalev is honest enough to openly acknowledge that “the trio’s public profile is a Jewish stereotype.”
Shalev dared to write the article every other political analyst has dreaded putting into words let …
Book Review of The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century
by Chris Wright / August 26th, 2018
Reading the daily headlines, it’s easy to forget that the corollary of a civilization in precipitous decline is a world of creative ferment, a new world struggling to be born. If you could have a God’s-eye view of all the creative resistance rending the fabric of political oppression from the U.S. to Indonesia to Colombia, you would surely be persuaded that all hope is not lost. This conclusion is borne out in detail by a book published earlier this year, The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dario Azzellini and Michael G. Kraft. …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 26th, 2018
It was a year of manic tumult. Students revolted in Paris and other global capitals; the Tet Offensive permanently impaired the US war effort in Vietnam, at least on the home front; Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both felled by assassins’ bullets in the United States. “What is hard to convey,” reflected Todd Gitlin, “is the texture of shock and panic that seized the world a half-century ago. What is even harder to grasp is that the chief political victory of 1968 was the counter-revolution.”
Such is the impulse of the revolutionary impulse: in its aftermath …
... like blowing up a bridge to stop an advancing army
by Jonathan Cook / August 26th, 2018
The latest “scandal” gripping Britain – or to be more accurate, British elites – is over the use of the term “Zionist” by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition and possibly the country’s next prime minister.
Yet again, Corbyn has found himself ensnared in what a small group of Jewish leadership organisations, which claim improbably to represent Britain’s “Jewish community”, and a small group of corporate journalists, who improbably claim to represent British public opinion, like to call Labour’s “anti-semitism problem”.
I won’t get into the patently ridiculous notion that “Zionist” is a code word for “Jew”, at …
by RT / August 26th, 2018
FILE PHOTO White Helmets in Syria © Omar Haj Kadour / AFP
“Foreign specialists” have arrived in Syria and may stage a chemical attack using chlorine in “the next two days,” the Russian Defense Ministry said. This will be filmed for international media to frame Damascus forces.
Defense Ministry Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said the operation is planned to unfold in the village of Kafr Zita in Syria’s northwestern Hama Province in “the next two days.”
…
by RT / August 25th, 2018
File Photo: A US Air Force B-1B Lancer / AFP
The US and its allies are preparing new airstrikes on Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry said, adding that militants are poised to stage a chemical weapons attack in order to frame Damascus and provide a pretext for the strikes.
The attack would be used as a pretext for US, UK and French airstrikes on Syrian targets, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov said. USS ‘The Sullivans,’ an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer, was already deployed to …
by Deena Stryker / August 25th, 2018
American progressives have been desperate lately that their cries merely echo through a wilderness, but now comes Andre Vltchek’s latest book, Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism to magnify our voices.
As a Russian born but Western raised ‘professional expat’, Vltchek has spent his life covering the world’s tragedies, in film and word, until he can no longer bear the pain. As revealed by a series of short takes written over the last few years, Vltchek’s only hope is the energetic optimism that animates revolutionaries the world over. I was privileged to observe that phenomena in early sixties Cuba, as was at …
by Peter Koenig / August 25th, 2018
Glencore, according to statistica.com is the world’s largest mining company by revenues. As a way of introduction, here is what statistica.com has to say about Glencore.
Glencore-Xstrata is a public limited company founded in 1974 by Marc Rich whose headquarters are based in Baar, Switzerland and also has registered office based in Saint Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands. Glencore-Xstrata is also a mining company whose headquarters are based in the United Kingdom. On May 2nd, 2013, the current company was established through a merger between Glencore and Xstrata. Glencore-Xstrata is the third largest family owned business in the world and was ranked …
Israeli group submits freedom of information request as evidence grows of meddling by Netanyahu government in UK politics
by Jonathan Cook / August 25th, 2018
Has Israel been covertly fueling claims of an “anti-Semitism crisis” purportedly plaguing Britain’s Labour Party since it elected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, three years ago?
That question is raised by a new freedom of information request submitted this week by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and human rights activists.
They suspect that two Israeli government departments – the ministries of foreign affairs and strategic affairs – have been helping to undermine Corbyn as part of a wider campaign by the Israeli government to harm Palestinian solidarity activists.
The Israeli foreign affairs ministry employs staff of the country’s embassy in London, which …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 25th, 2018
It is a continuation of Malcolm Turnbull by other means. The new Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison and his freshly appointed Deputy, Josh Frydenberg have ensured that the “insurgents”, as Turnbull deemed them, did not come through. Both were respective architects – failed ones at that – of the company tax plan, voted down in the Senate, and the National Energy Guarantee, torn up by the Liberal Party room. Both claim that this was a “new generation” of leadership. These claims were extraordinary in their repudiation of reality.
Turnbull, who has promised a swift exit from federal politics, was never …
by Roger D. Harris / August 25th, 2018
After four months of violence, peace may be breaking out in Nicaragua, which has gotten those North American partisans opposed to Nicaraguan President Ortega worried. But they have one last hope.
The latest in a series of anti-Ortega articles in The Nation is entitled “An eternal night of persecution and death.” We are told: “Despite mass killings and newly authoritarian laws, a diverse opposition says the movement to oust Ortega is far from over.”
Although some analysts understand the relative calm that has befallen Nicaragua is mainly due to the failure of the opposition to sustain public support, this …
by Rick Sterling / August 25th, 2018
Western media has described the unrest and violence in Nicaragua as a “campaign of terror” by government police and paramilitary. This has also been asserted by large non governmental organizations (NGOs). In May, for example, Amnesty International issued a report titled “Shoot to Kill: Nicaragua’s Strategy to Repress Protest”.
A Miami Herald op-ed summarized, “It’s not like there’s any confusion over who’s to blame for the recent killings amid Nicaragua’s political violence. Virtually all human rights groups agree that Ortega’s police-backed paramilitary goons are the culprits.”
Much less publicized, other analysts have challenged these assertions. They claim the situation is …
by John Steppling / August 25th, 2018
Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.)
A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.)
Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.)
— Nick Turse, Chronicles Magazine, July 2018
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
The U.S. is now a endless machine for war profiteering and endless war itself. Simultaneously a hyper Imperialist machine directed toward global hegemony. Domestically it is a McCarthyesque empire of propaganda …
by Colin Todhunter / August 24th, 2018
Despite five high-level reports (listed here) in India advising against the adoption of genetically modified (GM) crops, the drive to get GM mustard commercialised (which would be India’s first officially-approved GM food crop) has been relentless. Although the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has given it the nod, GM mustard remains held up in the Supreme Court mainly due to a public interest litigation by environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues.
Rodrigues argues that GM mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests (or no testing) and a lack of public scrutiny and that unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency has taken place. She is seeking …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 24th, 2018
You can sense Australian politicians – or at least a good number of them – fuming at being cobbled together with the counterparts of other states deemed less worthy of the tag of “stable”. Take, for instance, entertaining Italy, tenaciously temporary about its leaders. “We said,” reflected a rueful Senator Derryn Hinch of the Justice Party, “‘how often they change their governments, how often they changed their leaders, what a stupid country and how irresponsible.”
The Italy of the antipodes (without the colour); a state so obsessed with leadership change that it requires a session of bloodletting every two years or …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 23rd, 2018
It was long overdue, but Pope Francis’s letter of condemnation and apology regarding the abuse of children by Catholic priests did sent a few ripples of comfort and reckoning. He conceded that the Church “showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them”. He acknowledged the “heart-wrenching pain” of the victims who had been assaulted by the clerical class, and the cries “long ignored, kept quiet or silenced”.
“With shame and repentance,” went the Pope’s grave words, “we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a …
by Ellen Brown / August 23rd, 2018
Giant Chinese tech companies have bypassed credit cards and banks to create their own low-cost digital payment systems.
The US credit card system siphons off excessive amounts of money from merchants, who must raise their prices to cover this charge. In a typical $100 credit card purchase, only $97.25 goes to the seller. The rest goes to banks and processors. But who can compete with Visa and MasterCard?
It seems China’s new mobile payment ecosystems can. According to a May 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:
The future of consumer payments may not be designed …
by Brian Littlefair / August 23rd, 2018
We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way. Romania did it the hard way. Moarte criminalului, death to criminals: armed revolution, then a series of epic Mineriads, with a mild-mannered IMF gent on hand to suck them dry. I was there after the revolution, in the long hiatus between the fourth and fifth Mineriads, and I was starving until someone told us where the soccer stars dine out.
It turned out the way it was bound to, with all the world-standard requisites of responsible sovereignty: The International Bill of Human Rights, the …
Crypto Romanticism and Its New Left Inheritors
by Bruce Lerro / August 23rd, 2018
Image from Maria Online
White popular musicians rebelling against appearances
Recently I attended two music concerts in one of our local parks that were billed as a combination of soul, rhythm and blues and blues. The musicians were all white.
I am not going to argue that white people playing this kind of music is “cultural appropriation” and that they should not play it. There are wonderful white musicians historically and contemporarily who have played in all these musical forms. What I am more interested in is the appearance of …
by John Andrews / August 23rd, 2018
It was recently reported that in just three years’ time many of those who voted for Britain to quit the EU will no longer be alive. This relates to the fact that most people who voted for Brexit were much older than those who voted to remain, and won’t have to live with the consequences of their decision. So, not for the first time, young people will have to pay for the errors of the old.
Although some old people, like me, voted Remain, many more didn’t. I believe the disastrous Brexit referendum was the direct consequence of the treacherous …
by Paul Craig Roberts / August 23rd, 2018
Russiagate is an orchestration. It is the response of the military/security complex to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign statement that he intended to normalize relations with Russia.
Trump recognized that the extreme Russiaphobia, which the hegemonic neoconservatives had whipped up since Vladimir Putin’s statement at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 that Russia was a sovereign country and intended to act like one, was a threat to life on earth. The neoconservatives, who have controlled US foreign policy since the Clinton regime, are unwilling to accept limitations by any other country on Washington’s ability to act unilaterally.
When Putin blocked the Obama regime’s …
by David Macaray / August 22nd, 2018
In the long, confounding history of inappropriate or unwarranted awards and prizes, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger being named the joint winner of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize has to rank at the top of any such list.
Clearly, it ranks higher than Roberto Benigni beating out Ian McKellen for the Best Actor Oscar, in 1998, and way higher than the Chevrolet Vega being named Motor Trend magazine’s 1971 “Car of the Year.”
Kissinger’s fellow co-winner in 1973 was the Vietnamese revolutionary and politician Le Duc Tho. So the almost saintly Mahatma Gandhi gets nominated for the Peace Prize five times …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 22nd, 2018
No one is in charge in Australia. Monday’s leadership challenge by Home Affairs minister, the potato-headed former police officer Peter Dutton, was cutting enough to leave Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull a wounded animal. The 48 to 35 margin of victory demonstrated the sheer degree of disaffection for the leadership within party ranks, and risks keeping that unenviable record of no Australian prime minister lasting out a full term of office since John Howard’s 2004 election victory.
Resignations have duly followed (some ten frontbenches outed themselves as Dutton supporters in offering their notices, though many have not been accepted by Turnbull). Dutton …
by Robert Hunziker / August 22nd, 2018
It’s entirely possible that capitalism and climate change are not compatible. They just cannot seem to live together, kinda like a marriage on the rocks. Assuming the planet is headed for a 2C climate event in the not so distant future, some kind of separation is probably necessary to avoid planetary dystopia and chaos.
A solution of sorts is often whispered in the hallowed halls of academia, and it is scribbled in obscure blogs, suggesting the abolishment of capitalism as the best way to help rid the planet of an existential threat of RGW (runaway global warming). But, that is kinda …
Without understanding what happened to the Herero and Nama people, it is impossible to understand what occurred right before and during World War II
by Andre Vltchek / August 22nd, 2018
In 2014, after I published my report about Namibia, exposing the German ‘semi-denial’ that it had committed a Holocaust in its former Southwest African colony, a renowned German university sent me a letter. I paraphrase here, but the essence of the letter is kept intact:
Dear Professor Vltchek, we are impressed by your research and your conclusions, and we would like to translate and publish your groundbreaking analyses in German language. Unfortunately, we cannot afford any payment…
It was one of the major universities in the country, with tremendous budgets and an international reputation.
I replied, asking why, with all those scholars and …
by Ralph Nader / August 22nd, 2018
About 80 days separate the people from the November 6th Congressional elections. Judging by the past midterm turnout, at least 125 million age-eligible voters will stay home. Too many people say: “Can’t be bothered;” “politicians don’t care about me;” “all politicians lie so why should I be part of that game;” “I’m not into politics;” “Nobody I like.”
Whoever finds the way to bring ten million or so of these non-voters to the polls in swing Congressional Districts will solidly control the Congress. Control of the House of Representatives by the Democratic Party stops most of Trumpism in its tracks, assuming …
