by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 2nd, 2018
The eruption of youth protests over gun violence in schools and other issues is another indicator that the 2020s could be a decade of transformation where people demand economic, racial and environmental justice as well as peace. Students who are in their teens now will be in their twenties then. They will have experience in how protests can change political culture.
Some view the youth awakening in these protests as reminiscent of youth movements in previous generations, others are less optimistic. We cannot predict the role this generation will play, but throughout the history of mass movements, youth have been a key …
Is there no voice in Parliament willing to denounce Canadian interference in another country’s electoral process?
The Trudeau government is engaged in a wide-ranging campaign to weaken Venezuela’s elected government. In a bid to elicit “regime change,” Ottawa has worked to isolate Caracas, imposed sanctions, and supported the country’s opposition.
Recently, foreign minister Chrystia Freeland endorsed Peru’s decision to block Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from attending the mid-April Summit of the Americas in Lima. “As Venezuela slides deeper into dictatorship, and as Venezuelans continue to suffer, Maduro’s participation at a hemispheric leaders’ summit would have been farcical,” Freeland noted. But, Freeland …
Haiti, battered by natural disasters, is reeling from a scandal around the revelations of abuse by international aid workers. How will it affect the humanitarian efforts of NGOs and the UN in the country? We ask Ezili Danto, Haitian human rights lawyer.
Rim Banna passed away at the age of 51. Her death on March 24, after a decade-long battle with cancer, brought grief to Palestinians everywhere.
Rim, a Palestinian Christian from Nazareth, united the Palestinian people across political and geographic divides.
When she sang for the Homeland, nothing mattered but Palestine. Christians and Muslims, Fatah and Hamas, Gaza and Ramallah, all became one.
Through her soulful and warm voice, she imparted sorrow, yet celebrated life. Her songs ‘Fares Odeh’ and ‘Sarah’ were poetic interpretation of precious young Palestinian lives cut short by Israeli soldiers.
The butterfly will carry you to the back of a cloud
The …
Fukushima is full of nasty surprises, similar to John Carpenter’s classic film The Thing (1982), which held audiences to the edge of their seats in anticipation of creepy monsters leaping out from “somebody, anybody, nobody knows for sure,” but unlike Hollywood films, Fukushima’s consequences are real and dire and deathly. It’s an on-going horror show that just won’t quit.
Only recently, a team of international researchers, including a group of scientists from the University of Manchester/UK and Kyushu University/Japan made a startling discovery. Within the nuclear exclusion zone in paddy soils and at an aquaculture center located several miles from the …
In 2014 I wrote an article titled “The Global Elite is Insane.” I want to elaborate what I explained in the earlier article so that people have a clearer sense of what we are up against in our struggle to create a world of peace, justice and ecological sustainability.
Of course, as I explained previously, it is not just the global elite that is insane. All those individuals – politicians, business people, academics, corporate media editors and journalists, judges and lawyers, bureaucrats…. – who serve the elite, including by not exposing and resisting it, are also insane. And it is …
US Presidents, European leaders and their academic spokespeople have attributed China’s growing market shares, trade surpluses and technological power to its “theft” of western technology, “unfair” or non-reciprocal trade and restrictive investment practices. President Trump has launched a ‘trade war’ – raising stiff tariffs, especially targeting Chinese exports – designed to pursue a protectionist economic regime.
The China-bashers of the western world ignore the developmental experiences of the past two hundred and fifty years, starting with the …
One belonged to the establishment; the other hung out on the fringes. One preached to presidents; the other led a tiny cult. Both left their mark on the 20th century and lived on into the 21st. Rev. Billy Graham died in February at the age of 99, and Charles Manson passed away last November in his 80s. Thus ended the lives of two prominent gurus of the 20th century; both of them had been named by the Smithsonian Magazine as among “the 100 Most Significant Americans of all time.”
“The GREAT Billy Graham is dead,” tweeted President Donald Trump, “There …
Among liberals and the different types of socialists, when the subject of the Democratic Party comes up, there are at least two variations. One is the familiar liberal argument that the Democratic Party is the “lesser of two evils”. For them, the Republican Party is the source of most, if not all, problems while the Democratic Party is presented as shortsighted, weak and/or incompetent bumblers. Among some of the more compromising members of the Green Party, the lesser of two …
With due respect to the citizens of Pisa and their landmark bell tower, I am using it loosely as a metaphor for the permanent tilting of America’s institutions of higher learning to the corrupting influences of America’s corpocracy ever since the beginning of those institutions.
While I have written several times about the corruption of American education, this article limits itself to an overview of the corruption of America’s post-secondary education by America’s corpocracy. ((See, e.g., pp. 143-151 of my book, America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. 2015; also, my article, “The Militarization of American Education”, OpEdNews, August 17, 2014.))
The murder of six worshippers in January 2017 reached a dramatic conclusion in March when Alexandre Bissonnette pleaded guilty, avoiding a lengthy trial.
I’d like to ask for your forgiveness for all the harm I caused you, even though I know what I did is unforgivable. In spite of everything that was said, I am not a terrorist, nor Islamophobic … [I am] more a person who was carried away by fear and a horrible form of despair.
‘Semites’ and imperialism
Quebec has a long history of racial and religious problems, going back to the British conquest in 1763. The French were forced …
Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and professor of Creative Writing at Texas State. Her father was Palestinian and a refugee journalist. In one of her poems after 9/11, entitled “Blood,” she writes:
I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?
I myself tried to write something for the 15 year “commemoration” of the US war against Iraq, but wasn’t able to complete …
Here is a good example of pure, unadulterated western propaganda from the Guardian, written by one of their most senior journalists, Julian Borger. This could be straight out of of the old Soviet mouth-piece Pravda.
According to the Guardian:
China and Russia are leading a stealthy and increasingly successful effort at the United Nations to weaken UN efforts to protect human rights around the world, according to diplomats and activists.
The article continues in similar vein, blaming the two official enemies of the west for the increasingly degraded status of human rights at the UN.
Fake news has not merely become a business but a designation. It is a way of silencing dissent, and questioning accounts. For the authoritarian, this is not merely a delight, but a necessity. News accounts are deemed the stuff and dreams of the inventive, and those inventors deserve punishment.
Denial becomes a state of mind, and a very convinced one at that. President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an of Turkey can say with confidence that the casualties of any military action against the Kurds have been exaggerated. US accounts of the bloody surge in Afrin in February made him seethe. “You don’t …
I would just like to express my sincere dismay at the way my government reacted to the alleged recent poisoning of two people in Salisbury.
I recall very well the events that occurred fifteen years ago, when the British parliament was lied to about alleged weapons of mass destruction, supposedly held by Iraq, and which supposedly could strike at Britain within forty minutes. These allegations went almost completely unchallenged by the mainstream media, and our country was subsequently tricked into supporting an illegal war in Iraq. Although many people never believed the propaganda – as evidenced by the …
By now the West – the US, Canada, Australia and the super-puppets of Europe, overall more than 25 countries – has expelled more than 130 Russian diplomats. All as punishment for Russia’s alleged nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian/MI6 double-agent, Sergei Skripal (66) and his daughter Yulia (33), who was visiting her father from Moscow. Sergei Skripal lived in the UK for the last seven years, ever since President Putin lifted his prison sentence in 2010 in a spy swap with the UK. The pair, father and daughter, was allegedly discovered on 4 March slumped on a park bench …
“In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime — the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps …the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Just as police states have arisen throughout history, there have also been individuals or groups of individuals who have risen up to challenge the injustices …
The existent, the body, disappears. We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks….Nobodies and no Necessity – for Necessity is the condition of the existent. It is what makes reality real.
— John Berger, “Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible”.
The real body. To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten. The humiliation in incarnation; to become bread. To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death.
— Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 1966, Re-issued by University of California Press, September 1990.
In yesterday’s New York Times, regular op-ed contributor David Brooks heaped effusive praise on last Saturday’s March for Our Lives. Brooks wrote:
I have to say, I loved the gun-control march I observed last Saturday in Washington. The crowd was good-hearted, gracious, diverse and welcoming… Everybody kept underlining their faith in our democratic system, that voting is the way to make change…Of course some of the student speakers were grandiose and pretentious. Most of us were like that when we were 18.
Brooks is sometimes described as ‘the liberals’ favorite conservative,” perhaps because of his erudition and seeming reasonableness. In truth, Brooks …
Lamenting Germany’s WW1 defeat at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, Joseph Goebbels acknowledges a hard lesson learned:
While the enemy states produced unprecedented atrocity propaganda aimed at Germany throughout the whole world, we did nothing and were completely defenseless against it…Just as we were militarily and economically unprepared for the war, so also with propaganda. We lost the war in this area more than in any other. The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of …
The UK government’s presentation on the Salisbury incident, which was repeatedly cited in recent days as an “ultimate proof” of Russia’s involvement into Skripal’s assassination attempt, was made public earlier today.
This 6-paged PDF is a powerful evidence of another intellectual low of the British propaganda machine. Open it and you can tell that substantially it makes only two assertions on the Skripal case, and both are false:
First. Novichok is a group of agents developed only by Russia and not declared …
Israeli town freezes new housing project to stop entry of Palestinian citizens. But the mayor insists he’s not racist
by Jonathan Cook / March 29th, 2018
How would you describe a white town in a southern state in the United States that froze the tender for plots of land in a new neighbourhood because it risked allowing blacks to move in? As racist?
What would you think of the town’s mayor for claiming the decision was taken in the interests of preserving the “white character” of his community? That he was a bigot?
And how would you characterise the policy of the state in which this town was located if it enforced almost complete segregation between whites and blacks, ghettoising the black population? As apartheid, or maybe Jim …
How gloriously brave it seemed, some 23 nations coming together like a zombie collective to initiate a fairly ineffectual action in of itself: the expulsion of Russian diplomats or, as they preferred to term it, intelligence operatives.
It all began in celebratory fashion in Britain, when Prime Minister Theresa May decided to push the issue with the expulsion of 23 in the wake of the poisonings of Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia, and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. Russia, in a reciprocal effort, retorted in kind.
Since then, the number of states similarly inclined to reduce Russia’s diplomatic set has grown.
Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are enriched beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change, we are going to have to change the system.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967
The murder of Dr. King on April 4, 1968, marked a sea change in black America’s long, tortuous sojourn in this nation-state. Of course, assassination of black leaders and sympathizers has been a mainstay of American life from …
Do you support humanity and livability? Or the “right” of people to use private cars?
This question is aimed particularly at the left end of the political spectrum, to that part of the public who should know better.
It’s been dispiriting to see progressives echo a right wing municipal party/dominant media campaign against curtailing car traffic through Montréal’s mountain park. Anyone concerned with humanity’s fate should avoid amplifying the reactionary backlash to a move that would mitigate Québec and Canada blowing past unambitious carbon targets for 2020 and probably 2030.
Recently Montréal’s new city government announced a five-month pilot project that …
Being a netizen, to use that popular term of sociological derivation, can be a difficult business. It presumes digital engagement, often of the sharper sort. To become a fully-fledged member of such citizenry, however, presumes access, a degree of Internet speed and appropriate platforms. Absent those, then different forms of activism must be sought.
Governments and authorities the world over have come to appreciate that either the activity itself is controlled (limiting internet access, for one), or the content made available on the Internet (the Great Firewall of China). The resonant cliché there is that the one who controls the …
Roxbury climate necessity defendants. (By Peter Bowden)
Massachusetts – On March 27, 13 defendants went into the West Roxbury District courthouse to answer charges related to their arrests protesting the West Roxbury Massachusetts Lateral Pipeline. They expected to have charges against them reduced to civil infractions — the equivalent of a parking ticket. While finding no grounds to deny that motion from the prosecution, the judge chose to let each defendant testify briefly on the necessity of their actions.
The defendants collectively presented a powerful and comprehensive argument for …
They called in [Roy] Wilkins; they called in [A. Philip] Randolph; they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, ‘Call it off.’ Kennedy said, ‘Look, you all are letting this thing go too far.’ And Old Tom said, ‘Boss, I can’t stop it, because I didn’t start it.’… And that old shrewd fox, he said, ‘If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it.’…
— Malcolm X on the 1963 “Farce on Washington”)
Liberals and Democrat party connected organizations and networks have been quite adept at getting …
The ‘deal of the century’ is a farce. We suspected that, of course, but, upon his return from Washington, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, revealed in more detail why the long-anticipated plan of the administration of US President Donald Trump has no basis in reality.
Netanyahu told his cabinet that there are “no concrete details” to report on the US peace plan. One has to suspect that the ‘plan’ was, all along, the US disavowal of the so-called peace process and the dropping of the ‘honest peace broker’ act.
In fact, that much has been achieved, especially with the US decision …
It is often the case that police shootings, incidents where law enforcement officers pull the trigger on civilians, are left out of the conversation on gun violence. But a police officer shooting a civilian counts as gun violence. Every time an officer uses a gun against an innocent or an unarmed person contributes to the culture of gun violence in this country.
— Celisa Calacal, Journalist
Enough is enough.
That was the refrain chanted over and over by the thousands of demonstrators who gathered to protest gun violence in America.
Enough is enough.
We need to do something about the violence that is …
