Latest articles
by William Kaufman / January 11th, 2018
I have the feeling that Hollywood awards shows enjoy a robust secret life of viewership among radicals and assorted cultural snobs—it’s like that impulsive, furtive dash to McDonald’s in the dead of night, driving you almost without will or consciousness to line up for that Big Mac and fries, wracked with at least one evening’s worth of self-loathing in the aftermath of this crime against your and the planet’s well-being. With the Oscars and Golden Globes, it’s only two nights of malicious ogling and masochistic stupefaction per year, so you say, what the hell, and jump in, knowing that these …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 10th, 2018
There is a real – but largely concealed – war which is taking place throughout the African continent. It involves the United States, an invigorated Russia and a rising China. The outcome of the war is likely to define the future of the continent and its global outlook.
It is easy to pin the blame on US President Donald Trump, his erratic agenda and impulsive statements. But the truth is, the current US military expansion in Africa is just another step in the wrong direction. It is part of a strategy that had been implemented a decade ago, during the administration …
A Marxist review of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, edited by Bandy Lee, M.D., M. Div., St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2017
by Steven Strauss / January 10th, 2018
As a practicing neurologist, as well as a Marxist and socialist feminist, Dr. Bandy Lee’s best-selling anthology caught my eye. I have learned over many years how oblivious contemporary American psychiatry and psychology are, with some heartening exceptions, to the role capitalism plays in the production and circulation of mental illness. I wondered if this book would do better.
Sadly, it does not. In fact, if Donald Trump is as dangerous as the authors claim, then their volume is at least as dangerous, because both their analysis of and solution …
A Review: Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Mina Hamilton / January 8th, 2018
A few days into the New Year and iguanas are falling out of the sky in Florida. (They’re too numb to hang onto their perches.) Boston is recovering from flooding. Parts of Alabama are fighting hookworm. Trump wants $18 billion for THE WALL. And there’s Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, the just-released exposé of life down in the West Wing.
Some argue Wolff is not always reliable. Just how much was on or off the record? How much not fact checked?…
by Ken Hannaford-Ricardo / January 8th, 2018
Kabul — The number of visitors passing through the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ (APVs’) Borderfree Nonviolence Community Center in Kabul is incredible. Each afternoon, nearly sixty high-school-age students attend free classes to prepare them for the rigorous KanKor test, required of every Afghan desiring to attend public university. By 8:00 this morning, women from neighboring districts had begun arriving on foot, by taxi, or on bicycle, bringing hand-sewn duvets which the young APV’s will distribute to the city’s poor. There is no sign on the door; the address is not published; there is no central telephone number. And yet they come….
by Ali Mohsin / January 8th, 2018
Last week, the Pakistani government callously doubled down on its strategy of using Afghan refugees as pawns in its ongoing political dispute with Afghanistan when it refused to grant a long-term extension of their stay in Pakistan. Islamabad’s move will anger Kabul, which has struggled to absorb and reintegrate the massive influx of Afghans returning from Pakistan in recent years.
On December 31, the Proof of Registration (PoR) cards of 1.4 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan expired after the federal government refused to provide an extension on time. The PoR cards allow the refugees to live in Pakistan “legally” and avoid …
by John W. Whitehead / January 8th, 2018
The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.
— Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates,We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled: it will not hear the case of Young v. Borders.
Despite the fact that a 26-year-old man was gunned down by police who banged on the wrong door at 1:30 am, failed to identify themselves as police, and then repeatedly shot and killed the innocent homeowner who answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense, the justices of …
by Jonathan Cook / January 8th, 2018
Sixteen-year-old Ahed Tamimi may not be what Israelis had in mind when, over many years, they criticised Palestinians for not producing a Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela.
Eventually, colonised peoples bring to the fore a figure best suited to challenge the rotten values at the core of the society oppressing them. Ahed is well qualified for the task.
She was charged last week with assault and incitement after she slapped two heavily armed Israeli soldiers as they refused to leave the courtyard of her family home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah. Her mother, Nariman, is in detention …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 7th, 2018
The Trump Administration continues to plant more seeds for the coming era of transformation that we have written about in recent newsletters, Preparing for the Coming Age of Transformation and Ensuring Justice in the Coming Age of Transformation. It continues to put policies in place that go against national consensus on critical issues and is conducting a foreign policy that isolates the United States from the rest of the world.
With each of these actions, the spring that will create the boomerang of transformation gets compressed further. This week, we focus on three areas: allowing federal prosecution of marijuana …
The Anti-Empire Report #154
by William Blum / January 6th, 2018
2018 is going to be a fun fun year. And to better prepare yourself for all the merrymaking here is a calendar of some of the more delightful things to look forward to.
February 16: The United States bans entry to the country of all people except white Christian and Jewish citizens of Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel.
February 18: Congress passes a law that requires all new citizens to submit an essay – in excellent English – about how brilliant Donald J. Trump is, how devoted they are to him, what a huge success he’s been, how he’s …
by Ellen Brown / January 6th, 2018
This is the second in a two-part article on the debt burden America’s students face. Read Part 1 here.
The lending business is heavily stacked against student borrowers. Bigger players can borrow for almost nothing, and if their investments don’t work out, they can put their corporate shells through bankruptcy and walk away. Not so with students. Their loan rates are high and if they cannot pay, their debts are not normally dischargeable in bankruptcy. Rather, the debts compound and can dog them for life, compromising not only their own futures but the economy itself.
“Students should not be asked …
by Peter Koenig / January 6th, 2018
On 21 September 2017, the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, spoke to the head and the members of the Assembly of Experts with kind of a State of the Nation Speech.
He addressed many issues from internal affairs, competing factions within the Islamic Revolution, to external relations – and the economy. He also referred to The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly called the Iran Nuclear Deal, the international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, reached in Vienna, Austria, on 14 July 2015. The accord is barely two and half years old and already breached by one of the …
by David Penner / January 6th, 2018
Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Chicago, March 25, 1966.
It is the year 2018, and yet not a day goes by when a patient is unable to receive good care or a doctor questions their career choice. How have we arrived at this tragic state of affairs? The answer is that our for-profit health care system is the principal cause, not only of poor patient care, but also of physician burnout. Only with a single-payer system, …
by John W. Whitehead / January 6th, 2018
It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.
? Nelson Mandela
This is the tale of two Americas, where the rich get richer and the poor go to jail.
Aided and abetted by the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a man who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it smacked him in the face—the American dream has become the American scheme: the rich are getting richer and more powerful, while anyone who doesn’t belong to the power elite …
Being racist normally invites strong disapproval, a ban, perhaps criminal prosecution. So why is supporting a racist regime like Israel not only tolerated but actively encouraged in the West's corridors of power and often rewarded with high office?
by Stuart Littlewood / January 6th, 2018
If opposing Israel is anti-semitism then what do you call supporting a state that has been engaged in brutal ethnic cleansing for seven decades. What does that make you?
It’s a question posed by Miko Peled, an Israeli Jew and son of an Israeli general, former Israeli soldier and now a leading voice in the struggle for Palestinian freedom. You couldn’t find a more authentic insider.
What else has Peled been saying about Israel?
The name of the game: erasing Palestine, getting rid of the people and de-Arabizing the country…
As for talk about Israel giving up the West Bank for a Palestinian state:
If …
On Route to Belgrade
by Binoy Kampmark / January 5th, 2018
The stick insect with pale lips, a jaunty manner, and the sense of still being attached to mummy gave a definitive statement of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. “The plane cannot be located.” It had a name; it had an identity. It was even registered on the screens of Zurich airport. But everything else was, quite literally, up in the air. In this day and age, a multi-million dollar commercial aircraft doing its rounds is bound to turn up on some scene, to urge itself into commercial and tangible existence. Not so for Herr Stick Insect, who seemed determined to excite and …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 5th, 2018
The Israeli government is planning a series of measures aimed at fully denying Palestinians their legal rights in Jerusalem and precluding any future peace settlement based on sharing the city between Israel and a future Palestinian state.
One of the most aggressive measures to date is a bill that was approved by the Israeli Knesset on Tuesday, January 2.
The bill, which passed with the support of Israel’s ruling right wing and far-right coalition has several dangerous stipulations.
According to the bill, two thirds of the Knesset majority is required for Israel to relinquish sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem. International law …
by Margaret Flowers / January 5th, 2018
Photo by Erik McGregor
In the article linked below, The Road to Medicare for Everyone, Jacob Hacker is once again working to dissuade single payer healthcare supporters from demanding National Improved Medicare for All and use our language to send us down a false path. Once again, he comes up with a scheme to convince people to ask for less and calls those who disagree “purists”. Hacker calls his “Medicare Part E” “daring and doable,” I call it dumb and dumber. Here’s why.
Hacker makes the same assertions we witnessed …
by Edward Curtin / January 4th, 2018
Because he was not a partisan in the Cold War between the U.S./NATO and the U.S.S.R, Albert Camus was an oddball. As a result, he was criticized by the right, left, and center. His allegiance was to truth, not ideologies. He opposed state murder, terrorism, and warfare from all quarters. An artistic anarchist with a passionate spiritual hunger, an austere and moral Don Juan, this sensual man of conscience and honor earned his reputation by a lifelong literary meditation on death in all its guises: disease (he was constantly threatened by tuberculosis), murder, suicide, capital punishment, war, etc.; deaths both …
by Randy Shields / January 4th, 2018
I once had a girlfriend who thought it was a big waste of time and gas for me and my paisan Sam to drive around Philly eating tomato pies on our way to used record stores where we would waste even more time by buying, selling and trading movies and music. We were only 55 years old at the time. And a vegan Carlino or Corropolese pie has never been a waste of time. But my girlfriend pointed out that everything could be bought online, that things were so advanced that I could watch Lawrence of Arabia on my phone …
by Gary Brumback / January 4th, 2018
Most Americans recently polled reportedly seem to hold favorable opinions about America’s corporations. ((Maniam, S. Most Americans see labor unions, corporations favorably Pew Research Center, January 30, 2017.)) If true, it means that most Americans don’t know what I know and what they need to know. Trained as an organizational psychologist much of my research and consultative work during my career were for government agencies at the local, state and federal level. But I also have studied exhaustively the corporate side of organized life and have written more about it than the government side. ((See my books: Corporate Reckoning Ahead. …
by David Scott / January 4th, 2018
In times of the social and economic injustice, environmental degradation and fascist upheavals, it is easy to forget the resistance and mobilization this development nourishes. In the face of systemic injustices, which often entail the dominance of neoliberal ideals of economic growth and the exclusion of values such as solidarity and community, we can observe the growth of new forms of popular mobilization, such as self-sufficient collectives on the Portuguese countryside ((I am referring to the collective ”Tamera”, which, in the region of Alentejo in Portugal, has created a self-sufficient community with the aim of living in harmony with nature.)) …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 3rd, 2018
Two’s a company; three’s a crowd. More? This issue is preoccupying political and policing figures in the city considered by the Economist Intelligence Unit the most liveable in the world, bettering a whole host of other seemingly more appropriate candidates. So liveable, in fact, that it houses all sorts.
Having repeatedly boasted, self-congratulated and beamed at the idea that Australia is the most multicultural nation on earth, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been less cautious of late. He has been getting stroppy with the Victorian Government for not doing enough about what he considers Melbourne’s “growing gang violence and lawlessness”.
The straw …
by Robert Jensen / January 3rd, 2018
In a routinely delusional world, what is the most dangerous delusion?
Living in the United States, I’m tempted to focus on the delusion that the United States is the greatest nation in the history of the world — a claim repeated robotically by politicians of both parties.
In a mass-consumption capitalist society, there’s the delusion that if we only buy more, newer, better products we all will be happier — a claim repeated endlessly in commercial propaganda (commonly known as advertising and marketing).
I’m also white, and so it’s understandable to worry about the delusion that white people are superior to non-white people. And as a …
by John Andrews / January 3rd, 2018
When he began campaigning for the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn would cut through the dull trivia that routinely characterises these contests and suddenly say that it was time to address the elephant in the room. In the breathless hush that would always follow those words he would continue that it was time to discuss the illegal Iraq War of 2003. The point he was making was valid – the fact that the Labour Party had supported a monstrous and unlawful military adventure, a fact that no one wanted to mention. But it wasn’t the real elephant in …
by Ken Hannaford-Ricardo / January 2nd, 2018
It is a dream come true being back among friends in Kabul! Streams of dented Toyotas (They are all Toyotas!) with windscreens cracked like bolts of lightning still jockey for position on roads where traffic lights and common sense hold little sway. Carts of vegetables drawn by donkeys or dragged by men without dreams continue clotting the already stuttering traffic, forcing it almost to a standstill. Stucco houses remain stapled to mountainsides, one tripping over the other as they race to the top. And smog, as thick and foul-smelling as only winter in Kabul can conjure up. It felt wonderful being home!
As a …
World Events Ensure Major Transformations are on the Horizon. The Movement Must Ensure that Economic, Racial and Environmental Justice and Peace are Realized in the Transformational Era
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 2nd, 2018
In our last article, we predicted that the 2020s will be an era of transformation. We focused on the development of the movement since the “Take-Off” phase of the 2011 Occupy encampments, followed by Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15, Idle No More, carbon infrastructure protests, debt resistance, immigration protests and more. The 2020s will be a decade when the impacts of years of mismanagement of crisis situations, such as climate change, inequality and US militarism, become unavoidable requiring major transformations. What we do now to prepare will help determine the result.
…
by Robert Hunziker / January 1st, 2018
Nearly every American family has a cancer victim!
Chronic disease is the biggest epidemic ever faced. Yet, even though it touches almost every family, people are not tuned into this epidemic, as such, nor are the causes fully understood by the general public. It haunts society; it’s everywhere; it deforms, debilitates, and incapacitates. Is this the normal course of life or is something in the environment seriously amiss?
A recent Rand Corporation study says that 60% of Americans have one and 40% have multiple chronic conditions: “Nearly 150 million Americans are living with at least one chronic condition; around 100 million of …
by Jonathan Cook / January 1st, 2018
It is another anxious Christmas for the inhabitants of Bethlehem. This is the time of year when they have a chance to break out of an isolation enforced in concrete since Israel enclosed the town with a “separation wall” more than a decade ago.
On Christmas Eve, in a centuries-old tradition, Palestinian and foreign pilgrims rub shoulders as they throng into the ancient Church of the Nativity to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus at its reputed location two millennia ago.
Outside, in Manger Square, the lights and baubles on a huge Christmas tree provide some festive glitz, while hawkers …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 31st, 2017
The attempt to tease, weave and develop a narrative against President Donald J. Trump over a Russian connection began almost immediately after his victory in November last year. This was meant to be institutional oversight and probing, but in another sense, it was also intended to be an establishment’s cry of hope to haul the untenable and inconceivable before some process. No one could still fathom that Trump had actually won on his merits (or demerits). There had to be some other reason.
Central to the Trump-Bannon approach to US politics has been the fist of defiance against those entities of …
