Latest articles
We are the enemy looking in the mirror ... no matter how many times we check out Twitter Trump
by Paul Haeder / January 15th, 2018
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the single most important characteristic of government is its willingness to use force, at home and abroad, to protect the interests of the property classes.
— Chris Hedges, “Corpses of Souls”
Here’s a thought experiment for social workers …
by Jonathan Cook / January 15th, 2018
It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one.
Turning a blind eye to his behaviour, or worse excusing it, as too often happens, has only encouraged him to intensify his attacks on dissident writers, those who – whether right or wrong on any specific issue – are slowly helping us all to develop more critical perspectives on western foreign policy goals than has ever been possible before.
I do not lightly use such strong language against Monbiot, someone I once admired. But his …
by Brian Terrell / January 15th, 2018
On Thursday, January 11, the sixteenth anniversary of the opening of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was marked by a coalition of 15 human rights organizations gathered in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House in Washington, DC. An interfaith prayer service was followed by a rally featuring song and poetry and addresses by activists from the sponsoring organizations, including attorneys for some of those detained at Guantanamo, few of these charged with any crime and some cleared for release years ago. Despite his declaration that “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and …
by Ted Glick / January 15th, 2018
I woke up this morning thinking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And then I began thinking about Ella Baker, whose model of “group-centered leadership” I have recently been meditating on and writing about.
I heard Dr. King speak in person twice during the 60’s, once at Grinnell College in Iowa a few months before he was assassinated. When he was killed 50 years ago, on April 4th, 1968, I began what became 50 years of progressive activism by posting a petition to Congress on the wall of the student mail room that night. About half the students had signed it …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 15th, 2018
Since coming to power, Emmanuel Macron has given the impression of forging ahead with new agendas and ideas crafted from a novel perspective. This has been far from the case. True, the man’s novelty has shone through in doing what seemed to be the undoable: establish a power base against traditional power-brokers and carve out a good slice of the electoral pie, all the time claiming to pursue an agenda shaped on radical reform. But Macron remains a creature cut from the cloth of establishment thinking.
So, when he paraded before the Chinese leadership at the invitation of Chinese President Xi …
(Any Labor Theory of Value, Bourgeois or Marxist, is completely Obsolete and Outmoded in Explaining the Corporate-Capitalist Reaction to the Recent Minimum Wage Increase in Ontario, Canada)
by Michel Luc Bellemare / January 15th, 2018
Recently, the Ontario Liberal government raised the minimum wage for workers to 14 dollars, with a further increase set for next year to 15 dollars. The idea was that the increase in the minimum wage would alleviate the financial stress of the majority of the workforce and enable the workforce to pay-off debt and ease its financial burden of subsisting within contemporary bourgeois society. The raise was brought into effect January 1st, 2018. And right on cue, a litany of corporate-enterprises raised their commodity-prices, across the board, almost unanimously, on January 1st, 2018, arguing that all the price increases were …
by Gary Olson / January 15th, 2018
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; the class which is the ruling material force in society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Setting aside the 3-4 percent of the U.S. population that can be classified as psychopaths (‘snakes in suits’ at the highest levels of government, business and the military) what can we say about an entire society that displays an anaesthetized conscience towards the suffering of others and towards the ecological commons itself?
We know that many hear the “cry of the people” but the moral …
by Kathy Kelly / January 14th, 2018
January 11, 2018 marked the 16th year that Guantanamo prison has exclusively imprisoned Muslim men, subjecting many of them to torture and arbitrary detention.
Witness Against Torture demonstrators marching to the White House (Credit: Justin Norman)
About thirty people gathered in Washington D.C., convened by Witness Against Torture, (WAT), for a week-long fast intended to close Guantanamo and abolish torture forever. Six days ago, Matt Daloisio arrived from New York City in a van carefully packed with twelve years’ worth of posters and banners, plus sleeping bags, winter …
Interview with Steve Hedley
by Ricardo Vaz / January 14th, 2018
RMT demonstration at King’s Cross Station in London (RMT Photo)
A broken-down consensus and a resurgence of socialist ideas – this is how Steve Hedley describes the current political landscape in the United Kingdom. Hedley is the Senior Assistant General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, the RMT. In this interview he guides us through the aftermath of the Brexit vote, the turmoil in the ruling Conservative government and the leftward steer of the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. …
by Daniel Borgström / January 14th, 2018
As an American of Norwegian descent, I deeply resent President Trump’s recent statement, calling Haiti a “shithole country” and then in the same breath saying he wants more immigrants from Norway. That is not a compliment to Norwegians; it’s just a disgusting way to talk.
But let’s look at what he said. By “shithole” I assume he means that Haiti is economically poor, and that’s certainly true. Nevertheless, Haitians have an inspiring tradition of fighting for liberty, one that we can all envy. In 1804 they held history’s only successful slave rebellion, freeing themselves from the French plantation owners. Unfortunately, it’s …
by Gary Brumback / January 14th, 2018
Browsing the Internet, one can find a deluge of entries on social justice and peace activists, but very little about their own introspections on how they see and feel themselves as activists.
Seeking to fill at least partially that void I aim to explore in this article what it is like to be an activist in America for social justice and peace. I will do this in four ways.
First, since this journal is read by activists with varying levels and types of activity I will ask them about their activism. How would you answer the following questions?
Your Activist Self Checklist
a) Type …
by Jonathan Cook / January 14th, 2018
One can be resolutely in favour of equal pay for men and women and still view the current debate about discriminatory salaries among senior BBC journalists as missing a much bigger point. That is neatly illustrated by the furore over comments by John Humphrys, who presents the BBC’s early morning current affairs programme Today on Radio 4.
In a leaked transcript of off-air comments, Humphrys tries to help out an old friend Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America editor – and one of those benefiting from the BBC’s higher-pay-for-men policy. In a pre-interview chat, he seeks to agree with Sopel how …
by Julian Vigo / January 14th, 2018
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!
— Donald J. Trump
Reading tweets like this from President Trump incites a mixture of humour and sadness in me. I can’t even tell which sentiment is stronger at this point. Since his exiting the US from the Paris Agreement last year it is difficult to take this person seriously about any utterance he makes on the …
by Paul Craig Roberts / January 13th, 2018
We need a political intervention to make this situation end. He (Assange) is the only political prisoner in Western Europe.
— Juan Branco
The persecution of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is now seven years old. Ecuador has protected Assange for the past half decade from being turned over to Washington by the corrupt Swedish and British for torture and prosecution as a spy by giving Assange political asylum inside the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Ecuador has now given citizenship to Assange and attempted to provide his safe transit out of England by giving him diplomatic status, but the British …
by Ajamu Baraka / January 12th, 2018
One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.”
This violent, lawless Pan-European colonial/capitalist project continues today under the hegemony of the U.S. empire. This then begs the …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 12th, 2018
Michael Wolff is laughing, if not gloating, all his way to the bank. Money bags are singing; bank accounts are being filled. Doubts about the free publicity his work on the Trump White House would receive would have abated with the tweeting complex that is the current and singular US president, one Donald J. Trump. Call something fake, and it’s bound to sell. “Wolff’s brand of journalism might be ugly,” observes Nausicaa Renner and Pete Vernon, “prioritizing access over accountability – but it’s the perfect match for the Trump era.”
It began with an excerpt in the New York …
by Robert Hunziker / January 12th, 2018
It’s January, yet methane hydrates in the Arctic are growling like an incensed monster on a scorching hot mid-summer day. But, it is January; it’s winter, not July!
On January 1st Arctic methane at 2,764 ppb spiked upwards into the atmosphere, which, according to Arctic News: “Was likely caused by methane hydrate destabilization in the sediments on the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.” ((“Unfolding Arctic Catastrophe”, Arctic News, January 2, 2018.)) Once again, with emphasis, it’s January; it’s winter, and there’s little or no sunshine above the Arctic Circle. So, what gives? Why are alarming levels of methane spewing into the …
Victims blame themselves
by Andre Vltchek / January 12th, 2018
Her name is Cinta, which in Bahasa Indonesia means simply Love.
Cinta in pink shirt
She lives in a tiny village near Sukadana town, in Indonesian West Kalimantan, otherwise known as Borneo – the biggest island in Asia, the second biggest in the world – now totally destroyed by unbridled logging, palm oil plantations and mining, perpetrated by countless, and due to corruption and savage capitalism, unregulated local and multi-national companies.
Nearby Sukadana there is a national park, Gunung Palung. It is vast and by Indonesian standards, well guarded, although …
by Graham Peebles / January 11th, 2018
Since November 2015 unprecedented protests have been taking place in Ethiopia: angry and frustrated at the widespread abuse of human rights and the centralization of power in the hands of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) tens of thousands have taken to the streets. The ruling party’s response to this democratic outpouring has been consistently violent; hundreds have been killed and beaten by security forces, tens of thousands arrested and imprisoned.
In an attempt to gag the people, a highly repressive State of Emergency was imposed in August 2016. It failed, the protests continued, the movement strengthened. The regime then tried …
by Phil Rockstroh / January 11th, 2018
I remember my first impression of the Reality Television program American Idol. I cringed at the thought, what if, a young Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, or the members of The Clash had been forced to have their talents appraised by the sort of shallow celebrities, supercilious moderators, and gallery of lowest common denominator-giddy cretins attendant to the hype-driven fare.
Yet now, there is serious talk among abjectly unserious people that the next presidential election might pit a billionaire, Reality Television grifter versus a billionaire, Reality Television grifter. All hail, The President of the United States Of Reality Television.
Oprah Winfrey is, …
by John V. Walsh / January 11th, 2018
Should progressives support the efforts of Trump and Putin to bring about rapprochement between Russia and the U.S.? Or to use Trump’s terminology, should progressives support the effort to “get along with Russia”?
This might seem like a no-brainer. After all Russia and the U.S. are the world’s major nuclear powers. A war or a mistake resulting in a nuclear exchange would reduce much of the planet to radioactive rubble, ending civilization as we know it, and perhaps even putting the continued existence of the human race at risk. And yet there are virtually no voices in the progressive community calling …
by Stansfield Smith / January 11th, 2018
Evo Morales will soon have been the president of Bolivia for 12 years, heralding the ascent of the indigenous social movements to governmental power. This ended the apartheid system against the indigenous that existed for 500 years in Bolivia. Morales won in 2005 with 53.7% of the vote, followed by re-elections in 2009 with 64.2% and 2014 with 61.3%.
The country has made great strides in economic development, national sovereignty, women’s and Original Peoples’ rights, respect for Mother Earth, raising the people’s standard of living, level of education, and health care.
His presidency, which has brought an era of relative social peace …
by Brett Redmayne-Titley / January 11th, 2018
So. The US economy is just fine. The post-recession 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation has cured all. Banks have lots of cash. Congress is your friend and that certain-to-pass Tax Cut and Jobs bill will finally allow you, your family and America to… MAGA.
Really?!
“I’m sorry, Sir. We are unable to cash this check,” were the ominous words delivered to me by a fresh-faced, none-too-friendly, Wells Fargo Bank manager. He had just kept me waiting ten minutes while in consultation about my requested transaction. Returning to his cubicle he sat down quickly, now looking at me intently through narrowed eyes.
Three feet away, between …
by Philip A. Farruggio / January 11th, 2018
Please go and watch the 2001 film Focus, directed by Neal Slavin and starring William H. Macy and Laura Dern. It is based on the great playwright Arthur Miller‘s novel of the same name.
The film takes place in the waning months of WW2 when a man and his new wife are mistakenly identified as Jews by their anti-Semitic Brooklyn, N.Y.C neighbors. They soon become victims of religious and racial persecution. Many of us may not realize just how bad things were for Jews and Blacks during the WW2 years.
We have this illusion that ‘All for one and one for all’ was the …
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 …
