Latest articles
by Robert Hunziker / August 14th, 2018
An interesting new study: ((“Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Will Steffen, Johan Rockström et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), August 6, 2018.)) lays out the pathway for Earth entering a Hothouse Climate State.
Our planet is still in danger of becoming a ‘Hothouse’ Earth despite our current efforts to manage global warming.
Counter-intuitively, that sounds like a breath of fresh air, meaning, get the bad news out of the way ahead of time so people can brace for it, no surprises. Assuming the Hothouse Planet happens, certain areas would be uninhabitable as global temps crank …
by John W. Whitehead / August 14th, 2018
It takes a remarkable force to keep nearly a million people quietly indoors for an entire day, home from work and school, from neighborhood errands and out-of-town travel. It takes a remarkable force to keep businesses closed and cars off the road, to keep playgrounds empty and porches unused across a densely populated place 125 square miles in size. This happened … not because armed officers went door-to-door, or imposed a curfew, or threatened martial law. All around the region, for 13 hours, people locked up their businesses and ‘sheltered in place’ out of a kind of collective will. The …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 14th, 2018
Comedy, Boris Johnson, and the Tories – these three share a certain comforting, if chaotic, affinity, lobbed together in some nightmarish union that risks consuming itself. But times are serious – profoundly so, we are told: Brexit exercises the nerves as if Britannia were a patient about to expire, and there is the cultural irritation posed by those naughty elements who refuse to do the good thing and integrate themselves into the land of her Britannic majesty.
Thus far, Britain has resisted the moves of other states in Europe to impose public bans on such religious coverings as the burka and …
Or, What's Wrong with Russian Collusion?
by Gary Leupp / August 13th, 2018
The question is finally being asked, by the president himself: what’s wrong with collusion? Or at least his lawyer asks the question, while Trumps tweets:
Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion.
The problem, of course, is that of collusion with an alleged adversary. Russia, we are constantly informed, is one such adversary, indeed the main state adversary, with Putin is its head.
Adversary is a very strong term. The Hebrew word for adversary is Satan. Satan is the ultimate symbol of evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Satan tempted Eve at the Tree of the Knowledge …
by Ramzy Baroud / August 13th, 2018
When Mike Treen, the National Director of the ‘Unite Union’ in New Zealand arrived at the airport in the capital, Auckland, on August 1, a group of people were anxiously waiting for him at the terminal with Palestinian flags and flowers. They hugged him, chanted for Palestinian freedom and performed the customary native Haka dance.
For them, Mike, as all of those who set sail aboard the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza last July, were heroes.
But the truth is Mike Treen and his comrades were not the only heroes for braving the sea with the aim of breaking the hermetic …
by William Boardman / August 13th, 2018
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919
Apocalyptic thinking has been with us for a long time, and it sometimes ushers in actual apocalypses, albeit at human scale, without biblical finality. For a century now, the Yeats poem above has served as an increasingly common reference point for those who fear apocalyptic events approaching. Today such fears are varied, the threats are real, and reactions …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 13th, 2018
The People United Will Never Be Defeated from the Free Farm
When in the midst of mass social transformation, it is often hard to see progress until you have the benefit of looking back after success has been achieved. One way we measure success is by recognizing the growing popular movements across multiple fronts of struggle. Another way is by observing the actions of our opponents.
Just as movements organize and develop a strategy to build power, our opponents do the same to weaken popular power. Classic signs …
by T.P. Wilkinson / August 13th, 2018
Today’s hero in popular culture is a corrupted version of Milton’s Satan, a collaborator with the rigged game of a tyrannical God. His errors are the violations of God’s law, but God does not really mind since he knows that humans could never follow these arbitrary rules. Satan is God’s deniability. ((Plausible deniability is a concept attributed to the US national security policy to characterise the imperative of covert action. The principle is simply that any covert action should only be performed if, should it be exposed, it is possible to deny official responsibility for the action. Then CIA director …
by Gary Olson / August 13th, 2018
You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.
— Frans de Waal, “An Interview with Frans de Waal,” The Believer, September 1, 2007
My question is prompted by the recent Senate vote (unanimous as far as I can determine) for a $38-billion, ten year military aid package to Israel, the single largest in U.S. history, but it’s something I’ve pondered and written about for decades.
In the Israeli case, the best defense apologists can muster is that our spineless mollusks in Congress would do the right thing but for fear of AIPAC’s swift retaliation. While there is an …
by John W. Whitehead / August 12th, 2018
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
? Benjamin Franklin
What a mess.
As America has become ever more polarized, and those polarized factions have become more militant and less inclined to listen to—or even allow for the existence of—other viewpoints, we are fast becoming a nation of people who just can’t get along.
Here’s the thing: if Americans don’t learn how to get along—at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other’s right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different—then we’re going to soon …
by David Swanson / August 12th, 2018
I’m aware that Canada, unlike its southern neighbor in which I live, has just recently, ever so slightly, stood up to certain of the horrors of the Saudi government. I’m aware of the role Canada has played, albeit imperfectly, as refuge for people fleeing U.S. slavery and U.S. wars and general U.S. backwardness. I’m aware of how many times through history the United States has attacked Canada. I’m aware that just several yards in front of me as I sit in my outdoor office (the downtown mall of Charlottesville) …
by Yves Engler / August 12th, 2018
As every good poker player knows, sometimes the right move is to go all in.
Given his cards and the obvious over-the-top attempt by his opponent to scare him off a winning hand, Justin Trudeau’s next move should be to see Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s (aka MBS) diplomatic break and raise him a wide-ranging ethical challenge.
In response to Saudi Arabia suspending diplomatic ties, withdrawing medical students and selling off assets in Canada over an innocuous tweet, the Trudeau government should:
Demand an immediate end to Saudi airstrikes in Yemen. More than 15,000 Yemenis have been killed, including …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 11th, 2018
You have to give it to him: President Donald Trump loathes the Fourth Estate with a dedication verging on caricature. He splutters at the members and rails at their observations with adolescent rage. He sees some of its members, not without a few solid reasons, as enemies of his vision. (The Gray Lady is formidable in that regard.)
But it is hardly surprising that his loathing takes place at a time when that particular estate, which Thomas Carlyle saw a mighty force of oversight, has been smouldering and crumbling before the sallies of social media and a newly emergent Fifth Estate, …
by James Petras / August 11th, 2018
Few, if any, believe what they hear and read from leaders and media publicists. Most people choose to ignore the cacophony of voices, vices and virtues.
This paper provides a set of theses which purports to lay-out the basis for a dialogue between and among those who choose to abstain from elections with the intent to engage them in political struggle.
Thesis 1
US empire builders of all colors and persuasion practice donkey tactics; waving the carrot …
Imperial Mind Tricks
by Hiroyuki Hamada / August 10th, 2018
“Remember Pearl Harbor” was the mantra used to enlist the US population in the imperial war in the Pacific. When it became obvious that the interests of the Japanese empire collided with its own, the US triumphantly and successfully baited the Japanese imperial force into military conflict by squeezing Japan with a trade embargo, war propaganda and military provocations.
There were many common threads between the Japanese empire and the US empire. Both were vehemently anti-communist, colonial and militaristic. There just couldn’t be two capitalist empires in the Pacific. The immediate US actions after the war—the war which was supposed to …
by Kathy Kelly / August 10th, 2018
On August 9, a U.S.-supported Saudi airstrike bombed a bus carrying schoolchildren in Sa’ada, a city in northern Yemen. The New York Times reported that the students were on a recreational trip. According to the Sa’ada health department, the attack killed at least forty-three people.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, at least twenty-nine of those killed were children under the age of fifteen, and forty-eight people were wounded, including thirty children.
CNN aired horrifying, heartbreaking footage of children who survived the attack being treated in an emergency room. One of the children, carrying his …
by Robert Hunziker / August 10th, 2018
Scripps Institution of Oceanography (est. 1903) La Jolla, CA is the perfect location for meeting a world famous climate scientist. It is one of the most beautifully sculpted campuses on the face of the planet, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, an inviting scenario for serious surfers, but it also beckons top-notch scientists from around the world.
Every view from the architecturally rich campus opens to an endless panorama of gorgeous, blue-ocean waters and luscious, white surf for as far as the eye can see. However, that outward serenity belies a collapsing climate system that’s out of public view, one of the great …
by Shawgi Tell / August 10th, 2018
The Center for Education Reform (CER) may well be the most belligerent promoter of charter schools in the United States. Its main modus operandi rests on loud irrationalism and rendering everything upside down.
Irrationalism, the close cousin of voluntarism, pragmatism, and fideism, is all about distorting reality, perpetuating anticonsciousness, and blocking the new from arising. Irrationalism effectively crucifies science, facts, logic, coherence, objectivity, and laws governing thought, nature, and society. It warps the human senses, memory, and cognition, and assumes that only an individual’s blind purposeless will and “instincts” exist. In these and other ways, irrationalism obstructs the path of progress …
by Chris Wright / August 10th, 2018
Referring to cultural Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School, Noam Chomsky once said, “I don’t find that kind of work very illuminating… The ideas that seem useful also seem pretty simple, and I don’t understand what all the verbiage is for.” While I think there’s much of value in the so-called Western Marxist tradition—for instance, I’m partial to Georg Lukács (more so than to Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School)—I have to admit I strongly sympathize with Chomsky. But his criticism generalizes, and is even truer in other areas: since well before the mid-twentieth century, a …
by Colin Todhunter / August 9th, 2018
India celebrates its independence from Britain on 15 August. However, the system of British colonial dominance has been replaced by a new hegemony based on the systemic rule of transnational capital, enforced by global institutions like the World Bank and WTO. At the same time, global agribusiness corporations are stepping into the boots of the former East India Company.
The long-term goal of US capitalism has been to restructure indigenous agriculture across the world and tie it to an international system of trade underpinned by export-oriented mono-cropping, commodity production for the global market and debt. The result has been food surplus and …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 9th, 2018
He is treated as the bogeyman of conspiracy entertainment, and Alex Jones has become a prominent figure for advancing a host of unsavoury views. High on his list of incendiaries is the claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting never took place and was the work of paid fantasists, with the victims’ parents being “crisis actors”. “Sandy Hook,” went Jones in a January 2015 broadcast, “is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured.” The parents of two children killed at the school massacre are suing.
There are seemingly few limits to the Jones armoury of …
Review of Tamara Starblanket's Suffer the Little Children
by Kim Petersen / August 9th, 2018
Can Canada continue to commit what is an enumerated act of genocide by the UNGC [United Nations Genocide Convention] and excuse itself by continuing to say that it is not intending what the Genocide Treaty recognizes as the result of such an act… ?
— Tamara Starblanket[efn_note]In Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State (Clarity Press, 2018): p 208.[/efn_note]
Genocide is a heinous crime that fractures and dehumanizes humanity. Science tells us that we are all taxonomically Homo sapiens. Yet most of us tend to divide into Us and Them groupings, sometimes leading to in-group …
by Media Lens / August 9th, 2018
Elite power cannot abide a serious challenge to its established position. And that is what Labour under Jeremy Corbyn represents to the Tory government, the corporate, financial and banking sectors, and the ‘mainstream’ media. The manufactured ‘antisemitism crisis’ is the last throw of the dice for those desperate to prevent a progressive politician taking power in the UK: someone who supports Palestinians and genuine peace in the Middle East, a strong National Health Service and a secure Welfare State, a properly-funded education system, and an economy in which people matter; someone who rejects endless war and complicity with oppressive, war …
by Andre Vltchek / August 9th, 2018
Do you want to see perhaps the spookiest island on earth – Hashima (also known as Gunkanjima – the Battleship Island) – which is located just 30 minutes by speedboat from the historic Japanese port city of Nagasaki? Now you can. Just book online, pay the equivalent of US$40, and then hop on one of those shiny sleek vessels belonging to Gunkanjima Concierge or to some other company.
Gunkunjima – Battleship Island
Do it, and you will see the island which looks like an abandoned monstrous wreck; like a …
Confronted by Anti-Ortega Former Sandinistas and Contras
by Roger D. Harris / August 8th, 2018
August 3, 2018. San Francisco, CA. — Camilo Mejía prefaced his explanation of the seemingly inexplicable eruption of violence in his native Nicaragua with the admonition that no one should take his word, but should research the facts as he has.
Mejía spoke at an event co-sponsored by the Task Force on the Americas, a 32-year-old anti-imperialist human rights group with a long history of supporting the Nicaraguan Sandinistas against the US-backed Contra War. Gerry Condon, president of the other co-sponsor, Veterans for Peace, explained how the national organization was founded in 1985 by US veterans in response to …
Review of Rob Larson's book Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom
by Chris Wright / August 8th, 2018
Being run by business, American culture suffers from an overwhelming preponderance of stupidity. When a set of institutions as reactionary as big business has a virtual monopoly over government and the media, the kinds of information, entertainment, commentary, ideologies, and educational policies on offer will not conduce to rationality or social understanding. What you’ll end up with is, for instance, an electorate 25 percent of whose members are inclined to libertarianism. And the number is even higher among young people. That is to say, huge numbers of people will be exposed to and persuaded by the propaganda …
by Jonathan Cook / August 8th, 2018
If there is indeed an anti-semitism problem in the UK’s Labour party, it is not in the places where the British corporate media have been directing our attention. What can be said with even more certainty is that there is rampant hatred expressed towards Jews in the same British media that is currently decrying the supposed anti-semitism of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Here is a piece of what I hope is wisdom, earned the hard way as a reporter in Israel over nearly two decades. I offer it in case it helps to resolve the confusion felt by some still …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 8th, 2018
We have been seeing over the last few decades the birth of the non-university, an institution hollowed out of its seminal functions: teaching and scholarship. Such an institution emphasises the functions of commerce and branding not dissimilar to the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), dedicated to goods and services and the establishment of trading hubs. In 2007, the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University would note how 11 Australian universities “including my own have 5 or more campuses.”
Pedagogical instruction has become a matter of popularity contests, fuelled by giddy grade inflations on the part of academics who are, …
Transcript (slightly expanded) of a PressTV Skype Interview
by Peter Koenig / August 8th, 2018
(PressTV referring to the New Sanctions regime imposed by the US, as of 7 August 2018.)
PressTV: How do you see this?
Peter Koenig: First off, this is just another flagrant violation of international law, even of US law, after having ratified the Nuclear Deal. Any interference in another country’s economic affairs, including in a country’s trade sovereignty, is an international crime. That’s precisely what Trump, under the leadership of those who command him, is doing. For example, Netanyahu, is largely calling the shots in Washington.
The idea is weakening Iran to the point that a war would be easier. Although, I really …
by Ramzy Baroud / August 8th, 2018
The father of 11-year-old, Abdul Rahman Nofal contacted me, asking for help. His son was shot in the leg during Gaza’s ‘Great March of Return’ protests. The Strip’s dilapidated health care system could not save the little boy’s leg, as it was later amputated.
His father, Yamen, himself a young man from the Buraij Refugee Camp in central Gaza, only wants his child to receive a prosthetic leg so that he can walk to school. The Israelis are refusing the boy a permit to cross into Ramallah to receive treatment. Desperate, Yamen composed a video, where he pleads with …
