Latest articles
by Yves Engler / August 7th, 2018
Are they critical thinkers or cheerleaders pretending to be independent of the government that funds them? Given the title conference organizers chose — “Is Canada Back: delivering on good intentions?” — one would guess the latter. But, an independent researcher keeps an open mind.
Publicity for the mid-September conference organized by the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC) and the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID) notes: “Inspired by Justin Trudeau’s 2015 proclamation ‘Canada is Back’, we are presenting panels that illustrate or challenge Canada’s role in global leadership. Are we doing all that we could be …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 7th, 2018
It seems a distant reality, or nightmare now: a company that was near defunct in 1996, now finding itself at the imperial pinnacle of the corporate ladder. Then, publications were mournful and reflective about the corporation that gave us the Apple Computer. An icon had fallen into disrepair. Then came the renovations, the Steve Jobs retooling and sexed-up products of convenience.
Apple’s valuation last Thursday came in at $1 trillion and may well make it the first trillion dollar company on the planet. That its assets are worth more than a slew of countries is surely something to be questioned rather …
by Ralph Nader / August 7th, 2018
The New York Times screamed its Headline— “In 1997, Apple was 90 Days from Going Broke. On Thursday [Aug. 2, 2018], It Became the first publicly traded American company to be valued at…$1,000,000,000,000.” The first trillion dollar company!
The boosters and commentators cheered, adding, “How High Could it Go?” In CEO’s Tim Cook’s announcement, we learned that there were $20 billion more of the shareholders money spent on wasteful stock buybacks. Stock buybacks enable fatter compensation metrics for Apple’s bosses (see Steven Clifford’s The CEO Pay Machine). Corporate managers love stock buybacks.
Earlier this year Apple executives dictatorially announced …
by Chris Wright / August 7th, 2018
At a time when the American population is radicalizing, when popular movements are coalescing around “radical” demands—Medicare for All, the abolition of ICE, tuition-free college, in general the demand to make society livable for everyone—it can be useful to draw collective inspiration from the past. Irruptions of the popular will have on innumerable occasions reshaped history, remade the terrain of class struggle such that the ruling class was, at least for a moment, thrown on the defensive and forced to retreat. Especially when pundits and politicians are insisting on the virtues of centrism and the essential conservatism of …
by Jan Oberg / August 7th, 2018
The news came a few days ago: “UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned member states that the organization is facing “troubling funding issues as a result of delayed dues payments that will force reductions in non-staff costs.”
But who really cares? Any Trump tweet or football result is more important to our media and politicians. The members of the UN still give the world’s military about 340 times more than the UN for its core budget.
You often hear people raising doubts about the “the United Nations” and most people then think of the skyscraper in New York as “the UN”.
But there is …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 6th, 2018
Humans are a funny species. They create settlements along fault lines that, on moving, can create catastrophe, killing thousands. They construct homes facing rivers that will, at some point, break their banks, carrying of their precious property. Importantly, they return in the aftermath. Existence continues.
The same follows certain settlements of parts of the planet where hostile, environmental conditions discourage rather than endorse a certain form of living. Changes in weather have been vicious catalysts for the collapse of civilisations; extreme climactic variations prevent and retard stable and sustainable agriculture.
“The flourishing of human civilisation from about 10,000 years ago, and in …
by Peter Koenig / August 6th, 2018
The people of Kosovo were and still are cheering for joy. The European Commission (EC) recently decided that Kosovars won’t need visas any more to visit EU countries. Up to now, getting such visas was a horrendously complicated and bureaucratic procedure, especially hurtful, since Kosovo, with a population of about 1.8 million Kosovars living in Kosovo, has a diaspora estimated at 800,000 to a million, most of them in western Europe. For Kosovars, with close-knit families, 90+ percent Albanian Muslims, being able to visit their relatives and friends is a priority. So, this sudden EU opening up, was a great …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 6th, 2018
People have the power protest inside Ferguson City Hall protest October 13, 2014
The United States is going in the wrong direction on a wide range of social, economic and foreign policy issues and people are justifiably upset and angry. One question we are regularly asked is: “What should I do?” In our last two newsletters, we examined the stages of successful social movements to show how movements can progress toward victories. This week, we attempt to answer the question by describing the fifth class of …
by Swee Ang / August 6th, 2018
Events from 29 July when the Israeli Navy stormed the Freedom Flotilla al-Awda hijacked and diverted it from its intended course to Gaza to Israel.
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The last leg of the journey of al-Awda (the boat of return) was scheduled to reach Gaza on 29 July 2018. We were on target to reach Gaza that evening. There are 22 on board including crew with US $15,000 of antibiotics and bandages for Gaza. At 12.31 pm we received a missed call from a number beginning with +81… Mikkel was …
by Edward Curtin / August 6th, 2018
Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.
— C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters
American history can only …
by Robert Bohm / August 6th, 2018
A few weeks ago, one night a day or two after July 4th, I heard, as I had on a number of other days, the sound of a string of exploding firecrackers outside. For whatever reason, the sound triggered in my mind something that’s not too surprising since it’s been in the news a lot lately: the image of someone entering a school or church or workplace, then opening fire on people in order to kill as many of them as possible before the sideshow he’d started came to …
by San Jose Peace and Justice Center / August 5th, 2018
Sharat G. Lin, in addressing the International Anti-war Anti-nuke Rally in Hiroshima held on August 5, 2018, offered a resolute apology for the U.S. government’s dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. He called it a “monstrous war crime” that must never be allowed to happen again. He called for universal nuclear disarmament that must focus first on the U.S.A. and Russia.
Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome 5, Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima
On the 73rd anniversary of the infamous U.S. dropping of the atomic bomb …
by Gary Olson / August 5th, 2018
The Sun was shining as I was strolling
The wheat field waving the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice was chanting
This land was made for you and me
— Woody Guthrie
With socialism, even in a diluted and inchoate form, assuming a higher profile, I’m reminded of my early years in North Dakota during the 1950s. On the one hand, it wasn’t the Gestapo-like scenes from Standing Rock, today’s widespread sex trafficking in the booming oil fields in the western part of the state or the Trump-friendly votes of current Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. On the other hand, it was hardly idyllic …
by Maya Evans / August 5th, 2018
I have just arrived in Hiroshima with a group of Japanese “Okinawa to Hiroshima peace walkers” who had spent nearly two months walking Japanese roads protesting U.S. militarism. While we were walking, an Afghan peace march that had set off in May was enduring 700km of Afghan roadsides, poorly shod, from Helmand province to Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul. Our march watched the progress of theirs with interest and awe. The unusual Afghan group had started off as 6 individuals, emerging out of a sit-in protest and hunger strike in the Helmand provincial capital Lashkar Gah, after a suicide attack there …
by Gary Brumback / August 5th, 2018
To preserve and expand its power, America’s power elite, hugely outnumbered, must keep the massive but powerless, subjugated and exploited public at bay. It does so in myriad ways. One is to divide and conquer the public. Perhaps the oldest means of doing this was to have written the U.S. Constitution and then years later to have created multiple political parties to confuse and distract the public. Another is to impose a police state that takes no prisoners. Another is to spin the legacies of US presidents whose behavior was so odious and heinous that to leave it bare and …
by Eric Walberg / August 5th, 2018
Trump takes on the world
How to explain the welter of contradictions in US politics these days?
Trump’s enthusiasm for peace with Russia vs his acceptance of Cold War II with Russia, launched even as Trump declared victory in 2016.
Trump’s virtually declaration of war against the mouse, Canada, next door, with his cutting insult to Justin Trudeau as weak and dishonest, as he left the summit early and refused to endorse its free trade plea.
Trump’s original enthusiasm for pulling out of Syria and elsewhere, pursuing an …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 5th, 2018
Attempting to control rural areas in Afghanistan always eventually ends up boiling down to personal survival.
— Evan McAllister, former Marine staff sergeant, New York Times, July 28, 2018
It genuinely doesn’t matter how the security boffins within the Pentagon frame it: the Taliban have fought the United States, through sheer will of force and mania, to the negotiating table – at least in a fashion. Ever since a vengeful US took to the field in Afghanistan in an effort to redraw the political landscape in its favour, the country has been true to its historical record: drawing, draining and dispersing …
by Colin Todhunter / August 5th, 2018
Are you being lied to or misled? Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason certainly thinks so and has provided much supporting evidence. She has been campaigning against the agrochemical industry for many years (all her work can be accessed here) and has borne witness to the destruction of her own nature reserve in South Wales, which she argues is due to the widespread spraying of glyphosate in the area.
In 2016, she wrote an open letter to journalists at The Guardian newspaper in the UK outlining how the media is failing the public by not properly reporting on …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 3rd, 2018
Data is rarely inert. It moves, finds itself diverting, adjusting and adapting to users and distributors. Ultimately, as unspectacular and banal as it might be, data sells, pushing the price in various markets whoever wishes to access it. Medical data, given its abundance, can do very nicely in such domains as the Dark Web. With governments attempting to find the optimum level of storing, monitoring and identifying the medical health of citizens, the issue of security has become pressingly urgent.
Britain’s National Health Service is a case in point. Last year, that venerable, perennially criticised body of health provision, received the …
by Yves Engler / August 3rd, 2018
What to call someone who claims to oppose racism, except for that directed against Palestinians?
Judge someone by what they have done and continue to do. Consider the source. These thoughts ran through my mind as I struggled to write about Bernie Farber’s standing among some Left/liberals.
After Israel recently solidified its apartheid regime, a Facebook friend posted an opinion by illustrious pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim titled “Today, I Am Ashamed to Be an Israeli.” While expressing opposition to its recent entrenchment of Jewish supremacism, the story effectively denied the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by claiming, “the founding fathers …
by Graham Peebles / August 3rd, 2018
In December 2017 the New York Times (NYT) revealed details of a hitherto secret defense program set up to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was funded ($22m) by Congress and led by Luis Elizondo, a senior military intelligence officer. It ran from 2007 to 2012 when, the Pentagon claim it was closed down, but Mr. Elizondo, who resigned in 2007 said the program “carried on for another five years.”
Photographs and video recordings were studied, including one released in August 2017, “of a whitish oval object, about the size …
by Andre Vltchek / August 3rd, 2018
It has been happening for quite some time, but no one has been paying much attention: Western academia, mainstream media, and the most visible propagandists, were trying to convince the world that 1) ideology has died, or at least became irrelevant 2) in case it did not die, the Left is actually… hold your breath…right-wing!
Especially the Left that is holding power, particularly in Asia and in Latin America, is being ‘re-defined’ in London, Paris and Washington. The Western propaganda gurus are apparently rejuvenated lately, as there are great budgets available to them, in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere. …
Filmmaker Finds the Grit of Our Lives as Transformative Art
by Paul Haeder / August 3rd, 2018
I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.
I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa’s dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between “us” and “them” to arrive at a “we.”
—Brian Lindstrom, documentarian
I first had my real run-in’s with “the law,” in Tucson, Arizona. Pima County Sheriff’s deputies in three vehicles were chasing me on my Bultaco 360cc, as I was cutting through dirt roads and gullies as a 15-year-old unlicensed motocrosser. The mayhem those deputies created, going after me as if I was a mass …
by Gilbert Mercier / August 3rd, 2018
Composite by Daniel Arrhakis
Time is up! All humans, men and women, are guilty as charged! Guilty of abusing other species and the natural world we depend on; guilty, either by greed or ignorance, of abusing other species that sustain our own and driving them to expedient extinction. Wild life, big and small, is briskly moving towards a vanishing point. From the seas to the land and the skies, the global species disappearing act has reached a catastrophic and probably unstoppable …
by Robert Hunziker / August 3rd, 2018
The world of academia is starting to pick up on the concept that humanity is unknowingly cruising on a train ride to doomsday, a surefire encounter with collapse of society based upon climate crises brought on by exponential climate change. The depth of the problem: It’s inevitable and inescapable.
Nonetheless, people do not want to discuss and/or read about an impending disruption to society, especially on the scale of a collapse. Still, some academics consider it responsible and in fact necessary to communicate the issue on a pre-collapse basis in …
by Gilad Atzmon / August 3rd, 2018
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, some Jewish intellectuals and humanists expressed the thought that ‘after Auschwitz Jews have to locate themselves at the forefront of the battle for humanity and against all forms of oppression.’This is a principled and heroic ideal, but the reality on the ground has been somewhat different. Just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Jewish state ethnically cleansed the vast majority of indigenous Palestinians. Two years later, in 1950, Israel’s Knesset passed the Law of Return, a racist law that distinguishes between Jews who have the right to ‘return’ to someone …
And the list of monstrous crimes against human decency just got even longer
by Stuart Littlewood / August 3rd, 2018
How revealing! How ironic!
It is Jeremy Corbyn’s misfortune to be surrounded by witless blabbermouths whose unbridled remarks are a gift to Israel lobby propagandists. And while mainstream media in the UK were, as usual, whipping up an anti-Semitism ruckus orchestrated against the Labour Party leader, Israel was busy committing yet another outrage on the high seas against a humanitarian aid vessel peacefully carrying urgently-needed medical supplies for the desperate citizens of blockaded Gaza.
SOSjustfuture4Palestine issued a statement saying:
The Israeli Occupation Forces violently attacked our Norwegian flagged boat Al Awda (‘The Return’) as she was in international waters…. Armed, masked soldiers boarded …
by Dr. Hakim / August 2nd, 2018
Can Afghans convince us that the method of war doesn’t work?
Consider their thirst to end the war.
If we’re still quietly hoping that wars would end and people all over the world would get along peacefully, the dreams and demands of the Helmand Peace Convoy would give us courage and evidence.
When Amanullah Khateb joined the Convoy, now called the People’s Peace Movement ( PPM ), he didn’t know that he would not see his wife again. With poor access to healthcare services, she recently died of appendicitis, leaving behind Khateb and three children.
But Khateb wants peace so intensely that he rejoined …
by Roger D. Harris / August 2nd, 2018
The US has targeted Nicaragua for regime change. Some former supporters of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party echo the US talking points: Ortega’s “entire government has been, in essence, neoliberal. Then it becomes authoritarian, repressive.”
One would think that a neoliberal regime, especially if it were authoritarian and repressive, would be just the ticket to curry favor with Washington.
Threat of a Good Example
In Noam Chomsky’s words, Nicaragua poses a threat of a good example to the US empire. Since Ortega’s return election victory in 2006, Nicaragua had achieved the following, according to NSCAG, despite …
by Kevin Zeese / August 1st, 2018
South Korean ‘Youth Resistance’ protests at the US embassy in Seoul demanding a permanent peace treaty and normalizing relations with North Korea.
South Korean peace and justice activists have been writing to us at Popular Resistance complaining that the United States is not responding to the positive steps being taken by North Korea before and after the meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim. They have sent us information about protests they are organizing in South Korea against the United States as well as in Washington, DC.
Their …
