Latest articles
by Binoy Kampmark / December 14th, 2017
The overthrow of iniquitous power relations is a point many would celebrate. But such overthrows are themselves marked by the contradiction of their origins. Any revolution must, by its very nature, suffer inconsistency, defeats and weaknesses.
In the United States, a different sort of sexual revolution is taking place. It is not linked to liberation in the way sex was linked to the emancipation of the body in previous decades. There is something distinctly sombre, calculating, and determinedly forceful about the movement to wrest control from men who generally have had it good in the power stakes. Cloaks and covers are …
by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich / December 13th, 2017
In 1995, a few short years after the official end of the Cold War when hope-filled nations were focusing on peace and prosperity, the United States Congress unanimously passed the “Jerusalem Embassy Act” into law. The law recognized “Jerusalem” as the official capital of Israel. The passage of this law was left unnoticed by most. Few objected to a law passed by the preeminent power of the new unilateral world order. Fewer still understood the consequences of the law.
On December 6, Donald Trump reminded the world of the decision made years ago. There was outrage, but the true implications …
Digital Capitalism and Global Police State
by Willam I. Robinson / December 12th, 2017
The transnational capitalist class is pouring billions of dollars into the rapid digitalization of global capitalism as the latest outlet for its surplus accumulated capital and hedging its bets on new investment opportunities in a global police state. But will these ballooning sectors of the global economy allow the world capitalist system to avoid another catastrophic crisis?
There is good reason to believe that recovery will be ephemeral and that another crisis looms on the horizon. The underlying structural conditions that triggered the Great Depression of 2008 remain in place and a new round of restructuring in the global economy now …
by Robert Jensen / December 12th, 2017
“I’m not surprised,” women say, in response to the flood of revelations of sexual “misconduct” by men, especially men in positions of power.
But none of us—women or men—should be surprised, because the United States is a patriarchal society and in patriarchy men routinely claim the right to own or control women’s bodies for reproduction and sexual pleasure. Men—liberal and conservative—know that just as well as women.
In such a society, conservative and liberal men will often disagree in public about the conditions under which they can rightly claim ownership. Conservative men argue for control of women within the heterosexual …
by Rick Sterling / December 12th, 2017
For seven months in 1969 I hitch-hiked around the US, Mexico and Central America with my best friend from high school. Some class-mates from our school in Vancouver Canada saved their money then travelled to Europe or Australia but Ollie and I headed south. It was an eye-opening experience for two middle class Canadians. We had a lot of learning experiences in the US but today I want to talk about Honduras because it is in crisis as I write this: the Honduran election took place on 26 November yet the results are still in contention. Will the current right …
Surveillance That Never Ends
by John W. Whitehead / December 12th, 2017
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
— “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
Just in time for Christmas, the Deep State wants to give America the gift that keeps on giving: never-ending mass surveillance.
I’m not referring to the kind of surveillance carried out by that all-knowing and all-seeing Jolly Old St. Nick and his informant the Elf on the Shelf (although, to be fair, they have helped to acclimate us to a world in which we’re always being watched and judged by …
by Patrick Bobilin / December 12th, 2017
On Thursday, December 7th, around 11:30 am, Senator Al Franken announced his resignation that will be coming in the following weeks. As a long-respected writer, his speech was unsurprisingly powerful and emotionally charged.
It was both historic and difficult to hear a strong progressive (who still voted for an inflated military budget) taking a leadership role (after much hedging) by claiming that public officials have a responsibility to their constituents.
Sort of.
Throughout the course of the allegations, he has claimed he doesn’t remember the events as unfolding the same way that his accusers claim. Franken also made sure to take …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 11th, 2017
Should US drone operators and the officers responsible for them be concerned by the latest sentiments from the Pakistani Ministry of Defence? The head of the Pakistan Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Sohail Aman, made the most pointed remarks yet that the defence forces are not pleased.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Air Tech Conference and Techno Show in Islamabad on Thursday, Aman seemed spiky and unequivocal. “We will protect the sovereignty of the country at any cost.”
That protection entailed a prohibition against the drones from any state operating in Pakistani airspace. “We will not allow anyone to violate …
by Adnan Al-Daini / December 11th, 2017
The rallying cry of the Brexiteers prior to the European Union membership referendum was “take back control”. This slogan resonated with those who felt ignored, not listened to and struggling to pay for the necessities of life. They wanted to deliver a slap in the face to the country’s elite who were urging them to vote remain. The leave campaigners managed to convince enough people that being in the EU is the reason for their misery.
With that, plus the promise of £350 million a week for the NHS if we left the EU, the Brexiteers won. However, the latest …
by Ramzy Baroud / December 11th, 2017
When I learned of the death of Kamal al-Assar, a few years ago, I was baffled. He was only in his 40s. I remember him in his prime, a young rebel, leading the neighborhood youth, armed with rocks and slingshots, in a hopeless battle against the Israeli army. Understandably, we lost, but we won something far more valuable than a military victory. We reclaimed our identity.
Kamal al-Assar’s mother, Nuseirat Refugee Camp
At every anniversary of the First Palestinian Intifada, a popular uprising that placed the Palestinian people firmly …
by Robert Hunziker / December 11th, 2017
Earth’s ecosystems support all life, though collapsed ecosystems would be like stepping outside of the international space station not wearing a space suit. Pop! Bam! Gone!
A recent academic study about signals of ecosystem collapse throughout history fits the space suit analogy. Terrifying truth is exposed: The all-important biosphere is sending out warning signals of impending crises… worldwide. It does not seem possible that ecosystems collapse and life dies off. That’s too hard to believe… but, what if it does collapse?
The Earth’s biodiversity is under attack. We would need to travel back over 65 million years to find rates of species …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 10th, 2017
It barely registered a murmur across the Australian press, though it caused the traditional ripples over the protester fraternity. Christian activists, collectively known as the Pine Gap Pilgrims, had received sentences pursuant to the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952 (Cth), a cold war relic used by the Australian government to conceal the nature of Canberra’s association with the joint US-Australian signals facility.
The prosecution of Margaret Pestorius, Paul Christie, Jim Dowling, Franz Dowling, Andy Paine and Tim Webb centred on their entering of the clandestine base in September 2016 had been obstinate and typical.
The grounds advanced by Michael McHugh SC for …
by John Andrews / December 10th, 2017
“The truth, carefully crafted, is the biggest lie of all.”
One of the most important lessons to be learned from the Brexit fiasco has scarcely been picked up on, and that lesson is this: the mainstream media are not only wholly unfit for purpose, they are primarily responsible for this unfolding slow-motion catastrophe. It’s not just the misinformation that was widely pedalled at the time of the UK referendum on Britain quitting the EU, it was the years, and years, and years of misinformation before that which did the real damage.
This issue about our mainstream media is desperately serious. People cannot …
by Jonathan Cook / December 10th, 2017
Donald Trump’s recognition this week of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, overturning seven decades of US policy in the region and effectively ending hopes of a two-state solution, has provoked dire warnings.
But the focus by commentators on Palestinian reactions, rather than the effect on the Israeli public and leadership, might have underestimated the longer-term fallout from Trump’s move, analysts say.
Predictions have included the threat of renewed violence – even an uprising – from Palestinians; the possible collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting, and its diplomatic strategy for two states; and the demise of Washington’s claim to be serving as …
by Adam Denker / December 10th, 2017
Hell is everything that Christian mythology paints it as. Hell is pain, death, suffering, bleakness, and fire. But it isn’t some mystical dimension where rapists and Hitler are suffering for eternity. Hell is right here on earth, war is hell; it’s not made to punish evil people, it’s made by evil people and it’s the innocent who suffer. It’s children, parents, brothers, sisters, people just trying to live their lives, all being tortured and killed, brutalized and raped. The innocent are the ones left weeping while the evil ones reap rewards. War is indeed hell in ways that no one …
by Radmilo Bozinovic / December 10th, 2017
“The Balkans” – this notion that signifies more a state of mind than geographic location, usually derisively associated with powder kegs, ancient hatreds and “Asiatic” primitivism “in the heart of Europe” – has long ceased to occupy the headline pole position of the Clinton era. Used since the 1990s mostly as code for the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the various spillover effects regionally and beyond – the term and its theme have been since displaced by waves of other real (and some imaginary) news, only occasionally to briefly flash back through mainstream Western media. The recent flare with …
by Ramzy Baroud / December 9th, 2017
Now that US President Donald Trump has fully adopted the Israeli right wing political discourse on Palestine, the Palestinian Authority is in a very tough spot.
“I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” Trump said in Washington on Wednesday. The embattled president has done what many had asked him not to do. But the truth is, US foreign policy has been bankrupt for years. It was never fair, nor did it ever intend to be so.
Trump merely pulled the plug, not only on the so-called peace process, two-state solution, ‘land-for-peace formula’ but …
by Gary Olson / December 9th, 2017
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Bannon, used him as his ventriloquist’s dummy. A few months after the election, Bannon was banished from the White House by the unelected real power in Washington because his isolationist brand of capitalism clashed with their global one. But according recent reports, Trump remains in close contact with Bannon, speaking to him by phone several times a week. Because White House Chief of Staff John Kelly monitors incoming calls, Trump calls Bannon from his personal phone out of Kelly’s earshot. Trump’s ringing endorsement of Judge Moore may have followed one recent …
by Alex Anfruns / December 9th, 2017
What happened to the democratic rights of the Hondurans who voted in the presidential elections on November 26th? The country is now in the hands of the armed forces. Human rights groups on the ground speak of murders, disappearances and many wounded as a result of the brutal repression at the hands of the police and the military.
*****
The first results published by the Electoral Court on Monday, November 27, gave a clear lead to opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla. Then a second count radically inverted this tendency, putting incumbent …
by Graham Peebles / December 9th, 2017
The natural instinct of human beings is towards cooperation and sharing, but, distorted by competition, personal ambition and nationalism, self-interest and greed have become pre-eminent motivating forces, distorting action and corrupting the policies of governments.
Competition is a pervasive element within all aspects of contemporary society. It is thought by many to be a positive and natural part of the human condition, and one that drives innovation and change. Loyal Believers in Competition assert that in the world of business it serves the consumer by driving down prices and creating virtually unlimited material choice, and will, some claim, be the driving …
by Frank Scott / December 8th, 2017
The unbalanced relations and divisions of labor between the sexes dates back to long before patriarchy and had as much to do with nature, originally, as it has to do with power relations of money, at present. In the earliest societies men did not hunt and women gather due to any political dominance but to the physical realities that enabled men to run after and hunt animals for sustenance while women carried new life within them and had to stay closer to the nest gathering while developing what would become agricultural skills. It’s also likely that matriarchy existed due to …
by Peter Koenig / December 8th, 2017
Uzbekistan is a peaceful friendly country, smiling faces, many of them struggling to make a living, but still smiling. Uzbekistan is a double landlocked nation, meaning she is surrounded by other landlocked countries; i.e., Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Landlocked countries have no access to the sea. They are economically more challenged than are those with access to the seas. Exports to and from distant destinations are more complicated and more expensive.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbeks are trying to find their bearings in defining and paying for their own social services, health, education, water and sanitation, as …
From Mad Men to a Mad Society
by Julian Vigo / December 8th, 2017
Living on the canals and rivers of London for many years, I came within close quarters of some of that city’s most desperate inhabitants, namely those who live on narrowboats because living in London has, in recent years, become horrifically expensive and beyond the means of most, even when flat sharing. Yet, reading the media reports from the BBC, a media corporation which is obligatorily funded by British residents, it would be easy to think that there is no economic inequality in the country, that homelessness is not rising at record rates, and that all the British are …
Off-their-rockers Hollywood Creeps and Pols get all men painted with the same smear
by Paul Haeder / December 8th, 2017
Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel
And this old world is a new world
And a bold world
For me
And I’m feeling good
I’m feeling good
— Nina Simone, Feeling Good, 1965
The idiocy of our times – those tick-tick-tock-tock empty cranial caverns of the American collective delusion – have us clear thinkers and revolutionaries at heart on the ropes. How do we even sleep walk through the carnival that is Facebook, Saturday Night Live, endless Black Fridays, malls and movies, the spectacle that is un-news and the infantile …
by Manuel Garcia Jr. / December 8th, 2017
I find Al Franken’s greatest transgression to be his vote as a super-delegate (in the Dems’ July 2016 national convention) for H. Clinton (and thus for Wall Street and the neocons), instead of Bernie Sanders, who was favored by the voters of Franken’s state (Minnesota) in their Democratic Primary. When questioned about it he arrogantly stated that he knew better than the voters he was supposed to represent. This was an anti-democratic transgression, a misuse of power he had over the regular citizens. Entertaining troops (during the Iraq War) and pontificating over the radiowaves (on Air America) could be transgressions …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 8th, 2017
To what limit protest? Naturally, this was exactly what colourful agitator and former senior editor for Breitbart News Milo Yiannopolous wanted: outrage, insensible anger, and heady adoration. Without any of these, he would vanish, a figure charged on a narcissism that would otherwise vanquish him. Left alone, and the shallowness would be overwhelming.
His visit to Australia triggered the usual fanfare over the credentials of controversy. Australian authorities tend to prefer their visitors to be of a milder sort, but Milo has touched a vein. He has shown himself, rather artificially, to be radical, contrarian, different. He is Right wing impulse …
by Ricardo Vaz / December 7th, 2017
In October 2016 Saudi Arabia struck a funeral hall in Sanaa twice in a space of minutes, killing over 150 people.
Almost three years have passed since Saudi Arabia announced it was intervening militarily, with its allies, in Yemen, to remove the Houthis (officially called Ansar Allah) from power after they had taken over the capital. Western analysts saw it as a bold move from recently-empowered (deputy) crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS), weapons manufacturers and their political representatives were delighted. But what had been predicted as a …
...giving away what isn't his to give
by Stuart Littlewood / December 7th, 2017
Here’s what an Early Day Motion, tabled by several prominent British MPs in the House of Commons, says about Trump’s statement on Jerusalem:
That this House notes with dismay that Donald Trump, President of the USA, has declared that the US has formally recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and that the US Embassy in Israel will relocate from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; further notes that no other country currently has an embassy in Jerusalem, and the international community, including the US until now, does not recognise Israel’s jurisdiction over and ownership of the Eastern part of that city; …
by Deir Yassin Remembered / December 7th, 2017
Remember the days of poking fun at Pravda, the Russian government-owned press? We asked: how could anyone rely on the truthfulness of reports that were filtered by agenda-driven government agents? Aren’t we Americans lucky to live in a land where our news isn’t filtered, where we — unlike our Russian counterparts — enjoy a “free” press?
We have witnessed how Jewish Power persuaded at least a half dozen billboard companies to refuse our attempts to run billboards with the simple message:
America First Not Israel (latest example …
At All Levels, Government Is Still the Problem
by John W. Whitehead / December 7th, 2017
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.
— Ronald Reagan
Corruption. Graft. Intolerance. Greed. Incompetence. Ineptitude. Militarism. Lawlessness. Ignorance. Brutality. Deceit. Collusion. Corpulence. Bureaucracy. Immorality. Depravity. Censorship. Cruelty. Violence. Mediocrity. Tyranny.
These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.
What you smell is the stench of a dying republic. Our dying republic.
The American experiment in freedom is failing fast.
Through every fault of our own—our apathy, our ignorance, our intolerance, our disinclination to do the hard work of holding government leaders accountable to the rule of law, our inclination to let …
