Latest articles
by William Hawes / April 21st, 2018
Oh, what fun it truly was to experience the “bomb cyclone” in January in New England: the snowfall gave a sense of peace and calm, the winds were less strong than predicted, and the snow, while heavy, was not dense enough to take down trees and power lines in most areas. The following period of intense cold through February and March in the eastern half of the US, on the other hand, seems a harbinger of climate instability which will most likely worsen in upcoming years. As the jet stream weakens and buckles due to climate change, storm intensity and …
by Yves Engler / April 20th, 2018
Independent Jewish Voices and the United Jewish People’s Order’s exclusion from an Anti-Racism Directorate committee has rightly been criticized. But, the Ontario government’s more appalling decision to appoint individuals tied to an explicitly racist organization has been ignored.
Two years ago the Liberals put forward a plan titled “A Better Way Forward: Ontario’s 3-Year Anti-Racism Strategic Plan, How we’re taking proactive steps to fight and prevent systemic racism in government decision-making, programs and services.” As part of the initiative, the government’s Anti-Racism Directorate set up four subcommittees last year to look at anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia …
by Manuel Garcia Jr. / April 20th, 2018
The Atlantic Overturning Current is part of a worldwide twisted loop of ocean water, called the thermohaline cycle (thermo = heat, haline = salt), which emerges very salty and warm out of the Gulf of Mexico, travels north as a surface current along the east coast of North America, veers east in the North Atlantic toward Europe, then loops back west to a region just south of Greenland where it cools and sinks to the ocean floor – because it has become denser than the surrounding and less salty …
by Thierry Meyssan / April 20th, 2018
By firing missiles on Syria with its French and British allies, the strange President Donald Trump has managed to force the Western powers to accept the end of their unilateral domination of the world. The insignificant result of this demonstration of force drags NATO back to reality. Without having made use of its weapons, Russia now succeeds the Soviet Union in the balance of world power.
Over the last few weeks, and for the first time in their history, the United States and Russia have mutually threatened one another …
by Edward C. Corrigan / April 20th, 2018
While militarily strong and facing no existential threats, Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians has been taking a beating in world opinion. ((See, for example, “Israel accuses U.N. rights forum of bias over Palestinians,” by Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters, January 19, 2018. See also “Israel gets flak over human rights record in Geneva,” by Barbara Bibbo, Aljazeera, January 23, 2018. The South African representative said “Israel is the only state in the world that can be called an apartheid state.”))
The UN passed six new resolutions against the Jewish state, including one denying Israeli sovereignty …
by Jonathan Cook / April 20th, 2018
Independence Day celebrations tomorrow should be a moment for Israelis – and the many Jews who identify with Israel – to reflect on what kind of state it has become after seven decades.
The vast majority of Israelis, however, are too busy flying blue-and-white flags from their cars, venerating their army as the “most moral in the world” and poring over the latest official statistics in the hope that more Israeli Jews than Palestinians were born over the past year.
The Zionist project was intended, so its founders claimed, to provide a sanctuary from persecution for all Jews around the world. But …
by Michel Luc Bellemare / April 20th, 2018
Post-modernism does not go far enough. It has not overturned all meta-narratives and fully established its essence, that is, a multiplicity of micro-narratives, achieved through a radical “incredulity toward metanarratives”. ((Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) p. xxiv.)) Consequently, post-modernism has yet to realize the post-modern society, that is, a patchwork federation of localized, decentralized and horizontalized micro-institutions, founded on a litany of microscopic, ideational-comprehensive-frameworks, where no-one fully dominates and terrorizes over the others. If post-modernism can be defined as a socio-economic framework where “there are no criteria”, ((Jean-Francois …
The Anti-Empire Report #157
by William Blum / April 19th, 2018
Unpersons
One reason it’s so easy to get an American administration, the mainstream media, and the American people to jump on an anti-Russian bandwagon is, of course, the legacy of the Soviet Union. To all the real crimes and shortcomings of that period the US regularly added many fictitious claims to agitate the American public against Moscow. That has not come to a halt. During a debate in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, candidate Ben Carson (now the head of the US Housing and Urban Development agency) allowed the following to pass his lips: “Joseph Stalin said if you want to …
by Jonathan Cook / April 18th, 2018
Here’s how a free press, one owned by a handful of corporations, uses its freedom. It simply tells you what it is good for its business interests, or more generally for the political and business environment it operates in. It’s not interested in truth or airing all sides, or even necessarily basic facts.
The only restraint preventing the corporate media from outright lying to promote its material interests is the fear of being found out, of readers starting to suspect that they are not being told the whole truth.
If that sounds like conspiratorial nonsense to …
by John Steppling / April 18th, 2018
Wealth maketh many friends; but the poor is separated from his neighbour.
— Proverbs 19:4?
James “Mad Dog” Mattis spoke this week, at a pentagon press briefing, saying, among other things, that it was a time for all civilized nations to unite. The use of this trope ‘civilized’ echoes colonial sensibility. It is part of general shifting of meaning in the rhetoric of Empire over the last, say, 80 years.
Never mind that the occasion of this speech, as seems increasingly the norm, was based on mostly propaganda. No evidence for a …
Israel benefits from a strong military and even stronger allies, but analysts warn the state faces major challenges
by Jonathan Cook / April 18th, 2018
It appears Israelis have every reason to be in festive mood this week as they celebrate the 70th anniversary of their state’s founding.
This “Independence Day”, which Israel marks according to the Hebrew calendar, on April 19, the regional, security and diplomatic environment looks to be the most favourable Israel has faced in its short history.
The Palestinians have been crushed, and Israel faces no international pressure to concede a two-state solution. The Arab states are in disarray, with growing signs that Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf states may be ready to normalise relations.
The Trump administration is little more than a …
A review of Scott Erickson’s History of the Decline and Fall of America’s Dystopian Future
by Robert Hunziker / April 18th, 2018
Imagine a privatized America where rugged individualism reigns supreme within a vast network of corporate America, Inc., similar to 19th century wild west lifestyle, no social security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no public law enforcement as individuals stand their own ground. Read all about it in Scott Erickson’s The History of the Decline and Fall of America’s Dystopian Future, (Azaria Press, 2018).
Erickson’s newly released semi-fictional satire of American history and subsequent decline into deepening pits of despair is a sure-fire treasure trove of Americana, at its best. It’s a …
Interview with Dario Azzellino
by Ricardo Vaz / April 18th, 2018
Workers’ assembly at Officine Zero, a former night train repair facility, in Rome (Photo: Officine Zero)
A common feature in every crisis situation, from the upheavals of the early 20th century to the neo-liberal re-structurings of the late 20th century, is the emergence of workers’ control – workers organising to take over their workplaces in order to defend their jobs and their communities. We interviewed Dario Azzellini* to talk about this issue in depth: the emergence of new values and social relations not just in the recuperated workplaces but …
by Frank Scott / April 18th, 2018
“Historically, reactionary forces on the verge of extinction invariably conduct a last desperate struggle against the revolutionary forces, and some revolutionaries are deluded for a time by this phenomenon of outward strength but inner weakness, failing to grasp the essential fact that the enemy is nearing extinction while they themselves are approaching victory.”
In the face of steadily deteriorating imperial power, the reactionary forces of global capital have pressed the panic button and are performing far worse than rats on a sinking ship, unless those rats were armed with nuclear weapons and were as deluded as the politburo of western capitalism. …
by Ramzy Baroud / April 17th, 2018
The term ‘media bias’ does not do justice to the western corporate media’s relationship with Israel and Palestine. The relationship is, indeed, far more profound than mere partiality. It is not ignorance, either. It is a calculated and long-term campaign, aimed at guarding Israel and demonizing Palestinians.
The current disgraceful coverage of Gaza’s popular protests indicates that the media’s position aims at suppressing the truth on Palestine, at any cost and by any means.
Political symbiosis, cultural affinity, Hollywood, the outreaching influence of pro-Israel and Zionist groups within the political and media circles, are some of the explanations many of us …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 16th, 2018
There is a certain bullishness in French circles these days, even if there was an initial attempt, with the Macron government, to calm matters down. The need to assert Gallic might in the face of brutality has again surfaced; and has a familiar ring to it. With Syria’s Bashar al-Assad getting more comfortable with military progress, officials in the United States, France and Britain are chewing finger nails and churning out policy papers of concern.
For them, Syria remains a chess piece they never quite controlled, an entity filled with failed “free” rebel fighters and packed with such agents of spoliation …
by Jonathan Cook / April 16th, 2018
It seems that many who supported the weekend’s air strikes on Syria are missing the significance of Robert Fisk’s report this morning from Douma, the site of a supposed chemical weapons attack last week.
Fisk is the first western journalist to reach the area and speak to people there. One is a senior doctor at the clinic that treated victims of what a video purported to show were chemical weapons used by the Syrian government.
That doctor says the video was real, but did not show the effects of a chemical weapons attack. It showed something else. This is what the …
by John W. Whitehead / April 16th, 2018
Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?
— James Russell Lowell, 19th century American poet/critic/editor/diplomat, in a 1876 letter to Joel Benton.
Let us not mince words.
We are living in an age of war profiteers.
We are living in an age of scoundrels, liars, brutes and thugs. Many of them work for the U.S. government.
We are living in an age of monsters.
Ask Donald Trump. He knows all about monsters.
Any government that leaves “mothers and fathers, infants and children, …
Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life
by Eric Walberg / April 15th, 2018
Over the past year, Jordan Peterson has shot into the public eye with his jihad against political correctness, using YouTube, the new medium for getting one’s beliefs broadcast without corporations, governments and media gatekeepers censuring and burying one’s new ideas. His ideas are radical, but more radically old than new. To him, cherished beliefs are mostly cherished because they’ve worked for millennia, some actually hardwired in us, and we abandon them at our peril.
He asserts what he argues is his male, rational energy, taking no prisoners as he fights to save the English language from attempts to substitute gender neutral …
by Dr. Hakim / April 15th, 2018
Political and business leaders have refined the art and science of lying about the economy. From their suites, chauffeur-driven limousines, private yachts and jets, they aren’t too concerned about whether the economy works for everyone, except in speeches and elections. As they tuck into their next fine dining experience, they know that it’s easier and more profitable to mummify the paralysis of spectacular inequality.
How grossly and mathematically unjust is this inequality? In 2017, Oxfam calculated that the world’s eight richest individuals has as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.
We need only simple math to see through …
by Yves Engler / April 14th, 2018
The US has once again flagrantly violated international law. Without UN approval, they launched dozens of airstrikes on Syria.
Ottawa immediately supported the US bombing. In a statement Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “Canada supports the decision by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to take action to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to launch chemical weapons attacks against its own people.”
Over the past week the Trudeau government has helped lay the foundation for the US led attack. Twenty-four hours after the alleged April 7 attack foreign minister Chrystia Freeland put out a statement claiming:
The repeated and …
by Andre Vltchek / April 14th, 2018
The attack against Syria – this proud and independent country – has just taken place.
Three countries with zero moral mandate to judge or punish anybody; three countries already responsible for hundreds of millions of human lives lost on all continents for centuries, showered Syria with their missiles.
They tried to scare to death Syria, and to break its determination, but they failed. Most of the Syrian people stood proudly by their government.
71 out of 103 of the Western missiles were shot down, and the rest fell on the empty facilities, which have nothing to do with a ‘production or …
by Jason Holland / April 14th, 2018
While we were once given a savior who was known as supply side Jesus, sadly it seems the people have again forgotten the holy word. More youth than ever are becoming heretics to the sacred economic texts, but despite these frightening developments not all is lost, for imbued within me is light of understanding from our holy lord, the one true capitalist god; Praise be!In a revelatory dream state I made blessed communion with the divine father, our money bags authoritarian sky daddy. Twas made known I was to be the chosen one; the supreme messenger …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 14th, 2018
Feeling that some display of force was needed, US president Donald Trump issued orders on Friday to demonstrate some form of muscle, albeit exercised some thousands of miles away. “A short time ago, I ordered the United States Armed Forces to launch precision strikes on targets associated with the chemical weapons capabilities of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.” The United Kingdom and France also mucked in.
What was it all in aid of? There would be no redrawing of borders, no toppling of Assad, and even a possible aggravation of the security tangle that exists in a beleaguered country. It all pointed …
by Jonathan Cook / April 14th, 2018
1. The United States, the UK and France launched air strikes on Syria this morning just as inspectors from the UN chemical weapons agency, the OPCW, had arrived to investigate whether a chemical weapons attack – the official justfication for the strikes – had taken place in Douma last week and, if so, who was responsible.
It looks suspiciously like the strikes were timed to pre-empt, and foil, the UN investigation. That has to raise concerns that we are being hoodwinked by our leaders, as we were in Iraq and Libya, as they seek to actively stoke yet another “humanitarian war” …
A review of Black '47 a soon to be released film about the famine in Ireland
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / April 13th, 2018
Weary men, what reap ye?—Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?— human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger–stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
There’s a proud array of soldiers — what do they round your door?
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping— would to God that we were dead;
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.”
— “Speranza” (Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde)
Last Wednesday I attended a preview for a forthcoming Irish film, Black 47 (Director …
a further word to my Westminster MP
by Stuart Littlewood / April 13th, 2018
It is disturbing to hear on the news this morning that the Cabinet have agreed in principle to join the US-led coalition for a military attack on Syria and decided Cabinet approval is all that’s necessary.
In other words, parliamentary democracy will be by-passed in a matter with potentially fatal consequences for millions. Blair in 2003 at least was bright enough to get gullible MPs from across the House to give him political cover for his illegal game.
I have just come across the following remarks by an eminent US law expert, Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University …
by Brett Redmayne-Titley / April 12th, 2018
… When Darkness and Disorder Began to Reign in a Kingdom…
There Appeared the Loyal Ministers.
— The Tao Teh Ching
Eighteen more Palestinians were unapologetically murdered this past “Good Friday” by the Israeli military. They were unarmed. They were on their own land. They were desperate. They screamed their desperation as they marched. Then, they shouted their daily reality of personal horrors too close to Israel’s attention. So, they were killed.
These innocents were shot like fish in a barrel: No place to hide, no place to run, no chance of escape. The hunters all around them. Easy targets. In what now seems …
by Peter Koenig / April 12th, 2018
Poison gas is not only deadly, it often provokes a slow suffocating death. That, perpetrated on innocent children, is particularly cruel. But when such poison gas attacks are mere false flags, or by the new term, “false news”, and are used to provoke war, perhaps an all annihilating war, then humanity has turned to what it never should have become – a lowly-lowly herd of brainless zombies. Is that what we have become – brainless, greedy, selfish beings, no sense of solidarity, no respect for other beings; I am not even talking about humans, but any living being.
Poison gas, the …
by John W. Whitehead / April 12th, 2018
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
— Benjamin Franklin
The ease with which Americans are prepared to welcome boots on the ground, regional lockdowns, routine invasions of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses is beyond unnerving.
I am referring at this particular moment in time to President Trump’s decision to deploy military forces to the border in a supposed bid to protect the country from invading bands of illegal immigrants.
This latest attempt to bamboozle the citizenry into relinquishing even …
