Latest articles
by Andre Vltchek / March 20th, 2018
“How many years have you been living in Beirut?” I asked my barber, Eyad, after he told me, beaming, that in three months from now, he will be returning home, to Damascus.
Even one year ago, such conversations would not be easy to commence. But now, everything has been changing, rapidly and, one wants to believe, irreversibly.
Although nothing is truly irreversible, the better things are on the ground in Syria, the more threatening the West is becoming, particularly the United States. Now it is, once again, intimidating Damascus, ready to attack the Syrian army, something that could easily drag Russia and …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 20th, 2018
On March 13, while on his way to the besieged Gaza Strip, two 33-pounds bombs targeted the convoy of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah.
Hamdallah was visiting Gaza, through the Israeli border checkpoint, Erez, to open a large sewage treatment plant that, if allowed to operate regularly, will make life easier for hundreds of thousands of Gazans, who have endured a perpetual Israeli siege since 2006.
The Prime Minister’s visit was also seen as another important step in the reconciliation efforts between the two main Palestinian factions, Fatah – led by PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, in the Occupied West Bank …
by Gregory Barrett / March 20th, 2018
Europe is suffering the tortures of the damned as it struggles with split-personality psychosis.
Here in the center of Western Europe one can tune in Germany’s national public broadcasting networks any day of the week and hear scornful diatribes against Trump, outrage over his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, shock and anger regarding his threats against our German automobile industry in his incipient trade war, calls for more EU independence and self-sufficiency.
Every Washington Post CIA-funded-Big-Breaking-News-Report about Mueller’s latest move to impeach and bring down the Orange Menace is always the top headline here: “The Washington Post reports that …” No …
by John Andrews / March 20th, 2018
Never forget the Dodgy Dossier. That was the supposed evidence claiming in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could be used against Britain within forty minutes. The Dodgy Dossier was presented in Britain’s House of Parliament as the truth – and was unchallenged by the mainstream media. It was included in the case for war presented to the UN by the United States, and became the given reason for Britain then joining forces with the US in the illegal war that followed, a war which, in addition to costing almost two hundred British lives, killed tens …
by John V. Walsh / March 20th, 2018
“Public Troubled by Deep State” is the headline that the Monmouth University Polling Institute tags to its recent poll.
Polling about the term “Deep State” is problematical, because as the polling report says:
Few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term “Deep State;” another 24% are somewhat familiar, while 63% say they are not familiar with this term.
So the careful pollsters at Monmouth defined the term as follows for their interviewees:
The term Deep State refers to the possible existence of a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy.
Then they asked whether such a …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 19th, 2018
Let’s put it out there with suitable portions of provocation: free trade has never actually taken place. There is an uncomfortable, skirmish-ridden middle ground, where states compete for primacy over surplus and deficits, where the notion of prosperity is language deferred, not to citizens, but corporations who are often backed for pursuing technological remits.
The debate about US President Donald Trump’s tariffs belies a fundamental point: the surrender of the state to non-elected entities which claim privileges over and above citizens and electors; the illusion that lifting citizens out of poverty demands an absence of government interference in favour of corporate …
by John Steppling / March 19th, 2018
The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit. … The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue.
— Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, 2009
The manufacturing of Russia as the arch enemy of not just the U.S. but mankind in general has reached levels of absurdity and …
by Dan Lieberman / March 18th, 2018
Military strength is one pillar of Israel’s strategy to incorporate all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and possibly beyond, into its territorial borders. Other pillars are a strong economy to finance the adventure and a worldwide deception plan that confuses those who aid Israel and, if they had all the facts, may object to Israel’s illegal tactics. Because Israel devotes excessive resources in a worldwide plan of public relations and deception, its government must sense an importance to that battleground.
The economy is robust but vulnerable, depending upon satisfying imports, armaments exports, tourism, US military assistance, limited contributions from the Jewish community, and providing …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / March 18th, 2018
US empire is in decline. Reports of the end of the US being the unitary power in world affairs are common, as are predictions of the end of US empire. China surpassed the United States as the world economic leader according to Purchasing Power Parity Gross National Product, and Russia announced new weapons that can overcome the US’ defense systems.
What is happening in the United States, in response, is to do more of what has been causing the decline. As the Pentagon outlined in its post-primacy report, the US’ plan is more money, more aggression and more …
by Peter Koenig / March 18th, 2018
The onslaught of western Russia bashing in the past days, particularly since the alleged poison attack by a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok (the inventor of which, by the way, lives in the US), on a Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, has been just horrifying. Especially by the UK. Starting with PM May, who outright accused Russia of using chemical weapons (CW) on UK grounds, without delivering any evidence. Strangely, there is no indication where Skripal and his daughter are, in which hospital the pair is being treated, no poison analysis is being published, they cannot be …
by Jonathan Cook / March 18th, 2018
Seemingly unrelated events all point to a tectonic shift in which Israel has begun preparing the ground to annex the occupied Palestinian territories.
Last week, during an address to students in New York, Israel’s education minister Naftali Bennett publicly disavowed even the notion of a Palestinian state. “We are done with that,” he said. “They have a Palestinian state in Gaza.”
Later in Washington, Mr Bennett, who heads Israel’s settler movement, said Israel would manage the fallout from annexing the West Bank, just as it had with its annexation of the Syrian Golan in 1980.
International opposition would dissipate, he said. “After two …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 18th, 2018
It has been the great misfit Australian policy since the 1990s: a refugee and immigration policy that shows itself to be scrupulously fair, calculable and clean. Nothing shall be permitted to sully this presumption. Even as refugees and asylum seekers gather dampness, decay and depression in Pacific camps, the Australian immigration policy shall remain, like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.
The comments of Australia’s Peter Dutton who resembles, with each passing day, a plumed and emboldened commissar, have given political figures pause for thought. Openly, and without reservation, the Home Affairs Minister decided to bank for a particular racial group in the …
Is Canada a Metis Civilization? (Part 3 of a 3 part series)
by Eric Walberg / March 17th, 2018
Transition from the Indian Act to Aboriginal self-government
The debate about the Indian Act and how to reconcile the elected councils and the traditionals over the past 40 years has been shaped by the sweeping intent of the White Paper of 1969, issued as Pierre Trudeau began his career as prime minister. It set out a liberal, multicultural challenge, an attempt to supersede the Indian Act by eliminating any special status for natives altogether. This galvanized the natives towards a defence of their special status, above and prior to the colonial settlers. It is a nice historical touch that Prime Minister …
by Ellen Brown / March 17th, 2018
The US Postal Service, under attack from a manufactured crisis designed to force its privatization, needs a new source of funding to survive. Postal banking could fill that need.
*****
The US banking establishment has been at war with the post office since at least 1910, when the Postal Savings Bank Act established a public savings alternative to a private banking system that had crashed the economy in the Bank Panic of 1907. The American Bankers Association was quick to respond, forming a Special Committee on Postal Savings Legislation to block any extension of the new service. According to …
by Randy Shields / March 17th, 2018
Neocon Max Boot now says it’s better for the Syrian people if Assad stays in power. But we still can’t get the American Left to come to its senses about Syria.
Louis Proyect says in Counterpunch that the suffering coming out of East Ghouta is “on a massive scale reminiscent of Leningrad in 1941.”
According to Wiki, a million and a half people died during the Leningrad siege. According to the authoritative-sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — one anti-Assad guy in a Coventry flat, relying mostly on reports …
by Robert J. Burrowes / March 17th, 2018
Anyone reading the scientific literature (or the progressive news outlets that truthfully report this literature) knows that homo sapiens is on the fast track to extinction, most likely some time between 2025 and 2040.
For a taste of the evidence in this regard focusing on the climate, see here; here; here; and here.
Unfortunately, of course, the climate is not the only imminent threat to human survival. With an insane leadership in the White House in the United States, we are faced with the prospect of nuclear war. And even if the climate and nuclear threats to …
Hundreds of Umm al-Fahm’s streets remain nameless as Israel refuses to allow the town’s Palestinians to honour their national icons
by Jonathan Cook / March 17th, 2018
In the town of Umm al-Fahm, more than a third of all letters never reach their destination. Identity cards, passports and drivers’ licences go missing, welfare cheques are lost, appointments expire, and penalties mount up over unpaid fines.
GPS navigation apps like Waze fail, taxis struggle to find customers, and private delivery companies have to be met at the town’s entrance and escorted in.
It is scene of administrative chaos more appropriate for a village in remotest rural Africa than a town of 60,000 residents in central Israel, one of the wealthiest and most developed countries in the world.
For decades Umm al-Fahm’s …
by Jonathan Cook / March 17th, 2018
After seven years of delays, the Israeli governing parties have agreed the final terms of controversial new legislation that would define Israel exclusively as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”.
The bill is now expected to be fast-tracked through the Israeli parliament and on to the statute books in the coming weeks.
Approval by the parliament’s justice committee this week of the Basic Law, which carries much greater weight than normal legislation, marks a dangerous turning-point for Palestinians, according to analysts.
Amir Ohana, the committee’s chair, called it the “law of all laws”, while a government minister termed it “Zionism’s …
by Graham Peebles / March 17th, 2018
Tadesse is a 28-year-old Ethiopian from the capital, Addis Ababa. Like thousands of others he took part in demonstrations over the last three years, and together with family members, refused to pledge support for the Ethiopian government. Such displays of political dissent led to him being repeatedly imprisoned, tortured and cruelly mistreated. Now safe in Europe, he is in physical pain and psychological anguish as a result of the barbaric way he was treated in prison.
His experience is typical of contemporary Ethiopia where state violence and human rights abuses are commonplace. For the last 27 years the country has been …
by Hiroyuki Hamada / March 16th, 2018
For every immigrant, speaking about his or her home country can be somewhat emotional and personal. For us immigrants, the experiences of leaving former identities framed in memories of the land, people, smells, tastes, smiles, laughter, tears and other feelings wrapped in the native tongues and rebuilding our own personhoods in foreign words, foreign-scapes, foreign frameworks held together with the values, beliefs and norms of others gives us a special opportunity to see our world dimensionally. Some of us recognize the mechanisms carefully hidden by the very machination of the social structure. The revelation, at the same time, reveals our essential beings hidden in our former-selves.
When I …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 16th, 2018
It takes much to make a figure like Rex Tillerson seem not merely sane but competent. The Trump administration, with its almost paranormal sense of revisionism and fantasy, has managed to make old Rex seem mildly credible. His sacking, inflicted with adolescent petulance, was bound to happen.
At stages, Tillerson came across with clues and cues about what would happen, for instance, with the North Korean nuclear imbroglio. In December 2017, he suggested the possibility of talking, without conditions, to North Korean leaders, quipping that they could even talk about the shape of the table they might wish to sit at.
It …
by Adnan Al-Daini / March 16th, 2018
Following the economic crash of 2008, Tory governments have put cutting the budget deficit (the difference between what the government receives in taxes and what it spends) and reducing the national debt at the centre of their economic policy. Austerity, principally, was their method of doing that. That is cutting government spending on our vital services and additionally freezing public sector pay. Austerity has caused untold misery to millions of our citizens; meanwhile Britain’s national debt now stands at 86% of GDP, an increase from 40% just before the economic crash.
Cutting government spending as a way of reducing …
by Andrey Fomine / March 16th, 2018
Yesterday’s sharply-worded joint statement on the Skripal case issued by Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Theresa May, which included the latest reiteration of the strange accusations leveled against Russia, threatens to push the row between Russia and the West to a new, much more serious level. Why is this happening and and what is motivating these Western leaders?
The tone and content of the statement leave no doubt that the West holds Russia responsible for the attempt on Skripal’s life and that it has no intention of listening to any objections or rebuttals. The demand that Moscow provide …
by Othello / March 16th, 2018
History will remember that a Gulf state had a role in expelling the foreign minister of a superpower and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
— Abdulkhalez Abdullaa, UAE Political Science Professor
Tweet by prominent UAE political science professor, Abdulkhalez Abdullaa, as quoted in a recent article on The American Conservative.
As the US continues to writhe in the throes of Russiagate, it is amazing to see the victory laps being taken for Rex Tillerson’s removal as Secretary of State by those who are admittedly agents of foreign states. As the above-mentioned article makes clear, certain Middle East countries and their …
by Craig Murray / March 16th, 2018
I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the “Novichok” programme a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilisers. This substance is …
by Peter Koenig / March 16th, 2018
Hilarious! Fired by Twitter. Apparently, that’s how Rex Tillerson learned about his dismissal, while he was talking to Chinese diplomats about a possible rapprochement between Pyongyang and Washington. Frankly, Tillerson is no loss to humanity. The only point in his favor is that he disagreed with Trump on the Iran Nuclear Deal. Trump wants to abolish it (following like a poodle Netanyahu’s orders), but Tillerson doesn’t. As former Exxon CEO and oil mogul, he may have personal and corporate interests in Iran, and especially in not destroying Iran. But these have nothing to do with a human approach; this is …
by Ralph Nader / March 16th, 2018
Trump Imitation Day will take place online on April 1, this April Fools’ Day, 2018—a day driven by the vast and varied online networks of America with all of their imagination and organizational capability.
Here is the rationale behind this special style of giving Trump a reverse dose of Trumpism. Trump has proven repeatedly that he is a serial prevaricator, bully, cheater, boaster, malicious myth-maker, racist, abuser of women, slanderer, violator of laws and the Constitution and emerging war-monger.
Openly, through his appointees, he is destroying crucial, …
by Shepherd Bliss / March 16th, 2018
Sonoma County, California — Driving through small-town Sebastopol on March 14 toward the Senior Center, this 73-year-old noticed groups of young students with signs gathering on downtown street corners and waving to motorists. These active participants in direct democracy joined thousands who walked out of schools across the U.S. and the world, organized by the Women’s March Youth branch.
As I got closer to the students, a variety of feelings, thoughts, and memories emerged. Tears of appreciation began to drip from my eyes, as I learned why they were protesting.
Then I smiled at them and flashed the peace sign, as I …
Metis Civilization or Canada Syndrome: (Part 2 of a 3 part series)
by Eric Walberg / March 15th, 2018
Six Nations, southwest of Hamilton, Ontario, is the largest reserve in Canada, with 27,000 members, though only 12,000 live on the reserve. It is a mini-multicultural nation, the only reserve in North America that has all six Haudenosaunee nations living together.
The Haldimand Proclamation, negotiated by Joseph Brant on behalf of the Six Nations in 1784 in gratitude for native support of Britain against the American revolutionaries, was, until 1924, governed by the traditional native government, now called the The Haldimand Proclamation. It promised the lands “six miles deep from each …
Anti-Empire Report #156
by William Blum / March 15th, 2018
Much ado about nothing.
That’s the “Russian interference” in the 2016 American election.
A group of Russians operating from a building in St. Petersburg, we are told in a February 16 US government indictment, sent out tweets, Facebook and YouTube postings, etc. to gain support for Trump and hurt Clinton even though most of these messages did not even mention Trump or Clinton; and many were sent out before Trump was even a candidate.
The Russian-interference indictment is predicated, apparently, on the idea that the United States is a backward, Third-World, Banana Republic, easily manipulated.
If the Democrats think it’s so easy and …
