Latest articles
Book Review: Why Don't The Poor Rise Up?: Organizing The Twenty-First Century Resistance. (Editors: Truscello, M., And Nangwaya, A.)
by Lloyd McCarthy / September 29th, 2017
When academics and activists, drawn from differing ideological persuasions and dissimilar social milieu, from around the world collaborate in the compilation of a book on the topical issue of social uprising in a time of relative calm, it begs the question, what is the state of the social order? Is it less desirable than its opposite? The question, “Why don’t the poor rise up?” is addressed by twenty (20) academics, labor organizers, and community activists in a book of the same title, Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up?: Organizing The Twenty-First Century Resistance.
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by Binoy Kampmark / September 28th, 2017
Unauthorized disclosures of classified information have become a cancer which undermines presidential authority to conduct foreign policy, our national security process, and our intelligence capabilities.
— William J. Casey, Director of the CIA, Nov 14, 1986
It’s the perfect dream in a nightmarish context: how do intelligence services get around the problem, in a liberal democracy, of punishing outlets that reveal classified information? The issue, when it reaches the stiff, paranoid official in a home ministry (domestically sounding, if British; more stately, if American) drives the establishment to distraction.
Laws, having being put in place to supposedly protect and encourage the dissemination of …
A report from the refugee camps of Lebanon
by Heather Stroud / September 28th, 2017
It is hard to reconcile how a government that sold out the civilian population of Palestine can celebrate the shameful letter Lord Balfour sent to Lord Rothschild. Although termed in language that presented itself as only offering a homeland to the Jewish people, with no discrimination to be brought against the indigenous Palestinian population, it is evident the agreement was always intended as a precursor to the establishment of Jewish Statehood in Palestine. It is documented that Lord Balfour stated that he had no intention of consulting the Palestinians when he effectively gave their homeland away. This initial …
by John W. Whitehead / September 28th, 2017
by Jonathan Cook / September 28th, 2017
The state-corporate media must be in trouble if a BBC veteran like Nick Robinson is getting dirty in the trenches, taking up arms against the “guerilla war” he claims people like me are waging. In a new commentary piece for the Guardian, he argues that media critics – from the right and the left – are taking to social media in an organised campaign to discredit what Robinson calls the “mainstream media”. Predictably, his article strikes the self-satisfied tone of those who claim to be right because they have come under attack from both sides.
Let me delay …
by John Steppling / September 28th, 2017
I don’t live in the U.S. any longer. I did, for over forty years, but left for good almost twenty years ago. But I return, often, and I even returned and stayed for a year. I returned again this last week as an invitee of the Buffalo/Niagara Falls Film Festival (more on that below).
So, I wanted to talk about the America I found this time through. I changed planes in Washington D.C., at Dulles Airport (yes, named after cold war reactionary John Foster Dulles). I could not but think of that fascist loving arch elitist and racist as I sat …
by Anna Jaunger / September 28th, 2017
Recently, mass media is actively emerging new evidence of cooperation between the U.S. and ISIS terrorists.
This time, Warfare Worldwide organization tweeted a video, where an ISIS fighter from Deir Ezzor had told some shocking details about U.S.-ISIS collusion.
According to Mohammed Moussa al-Shawwakh, the U.S. and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) guaranteed to protect them from the SAA and its allies in exchange for entering gas and oil fields in the region in order to make propaganda videos. Al-Shawwakh said that such kind of cooperation had acted in the Conoco gas field, allegedly captured by the SDF. The fighter added that according …
by Manuel Garcia Jr. / September 27th, 2017
The island of Puerto Rico has been destroyed by Hurricane Maria and remains in ruins with little outside assistance for about a week now. What should be done?
The U.S. could (if it wanted to) send an aircraft carrier (or two or three) to Puerto Rico, and use its nuclear reactor as a power source for basic needs in San Juan (where it would most likely dock). It could offload mobile hospital units (MASH) and truck and/or helicopter such units to more remote locations; such units would include gasoline/diesel generators. Additionally, there are Marine units designed to set up helicopter landing …
He must go
by Stuart Littlewood / September 27th, 2017
I’ve been writing about the plight of the amiable Palestinian people under Israel’s jackboot for the same length of time that Mahmoud Abbas has been Palestinian president. And that’s far too long. Abbas has also been chairman of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation, which describes itself as the sole representative of the Palestinian people) for even longer.
A recent poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that the Palestinians have had enough. Two-thirds want Abbas out.
A majority are also dissatisfied with the decision at Fatah’s latest Convention to keep Abbas as head of Fatah for another …
When Trump and Obama Sounded the Same
by Ramzy Baroud / September 27th, 2017
The nature of the rhetoric in Donald Trump’s first speech at the United Nations General Assembly was largely predictable. Even his bizarre threat to “totally destroy North Korea” was consistent with his overall style and previous warnings.
But how different was his speech, if compared with the first and last UN speeches of President Barack Obama?
A 19th Century English author, John Ruskin, once wrote, “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.”
Soon after former US President Barack Obama’s arrival in the …
by Adnan Al-Daini / September 27th, 2017
What is happening to our society? How and when did we lose the joy of just being alive? Increasing numbers of our children are depressed, anxious and in need of urgent medical help. Researchers from UCL Institute of Education and the University of Liverpool have found that 25% of girls and 9% of boys are depressed at age 14.
I am no psychologist but here are my thoughts. Girls are bombarded from an early age by images on social media and television of doctored professionally made up images of celebrities exhibiting the perfect body shape, the perfect skin etc. only …
by Robert J. Burrowes / September 27th, 2017
Gandhi Jayanti – 2 October, the date of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s birth in 1869 and the International Day of Nonviolence – offers an opportunity to reflect on human violence and to ponder ways to end it. There may be a fast way to end human violence but, if there is, Gandhi did not know it. Nor do I. Nor does anyone else that I have read or asked either. But this does not mean there is no way to end human violence.
Human violence has a cause. See Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice. …
by Edward Curtin / September 27th, 2017
So I wish you well, Sarge, give ’em Hell!
Kill me a thousand or so
And if you ever get a war without blood and gore
I’ll be the first to go
— Phil Ochs, The Draft Dodger’s Rag
Guess that makes me a proud bitch.
— Teresa Kaepernick, Colin Kaepernick’s mother’s in response to Trump’s comment about her son
In the true spirit of patriotic opposition, Colin Kaepernick took a courageous knee when he protested the current and historical treatment of black Americans and people of color during the playing of the National Anthem. For his patriotism, the NFL has made sure he remains unemployed, and now, …
by Jason Holland / September 26th, 2017
Since its inception the war on drugs has psycho-actively altered the global perception of drugs and even the definition of what drugs are. The mental fog over American minds was induced via decades of freebasing anti-drug government propaganda, however people seem to be awakening from the haze of misinformation. Still, there remains plenty of misconceptions around fugitive substances like MDMA, marijuana, and psychedelics. Many of these drugs are showing immense psychological benefits in studies (when they are allowed) and throngs of people willing to cite the good these substances can do with almost none of the side effects of …
Anti-Empire Report 151
by William Blum / September 26th, 2017
Cold War then. Cold War now.
The anti-Russian/anti-Soviet bias in the American media appears to have no limit. You would think that they would have enough self-awareness and enough journalistic integrity -– just enough -– to be concerned about their image. But it keeps on coming, piled higher and deeper.
One of the latest cases in point is a review of a new biography of Mikhail Gorbachev in the New York Times Book Review (September 10). The review says that Gorbachev “was no hero to his own people” because he was “the destroyer of their empire”. This is how the New York …
by John Pilger / September 26th, 2017
The lone survivor of an all-women anti-aircraft battery near Hanoi. Most were teenagers. (Photo: John Pilger 1975)
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”.
In a society often bereft …
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / September 26th, 2017
A trip to Palestine resulted in deportations and harassment by security as the Israel authorities step up attempts to intimidate or frighten future travelers to the area. During our trip we experienced CS gas, checkpoints, apartheid in action and military harassment of Palestinians.
Departure
I joined the group in Dublin airport on the morning of September 8th and we flew out to Istanbul where we waited in a transit area cafe for a couple of hours. As it turned out our flight departure lounge for Tel Aviv was next to the cafe where we were sitting and we noticed that an extra …
by Shepherd Bliss / September 26th, 2017
Sonoma County, California — Readers of this reporter’s August local and national articles on unpermitted cannabis growing expressed both appreciations and appropriate criticisms. Their feedback has made me aware of how complicated this issue is.
I am a patient at Peace in Medicine, a dispensary here in Sebastopol, California, and appreciate its CBD cannabis. It is essential to this 73-years-old person, as it is to other elders and those with a wide variety of health issues for which cannabis is an appropriate plant medicine.
Cannabis can be more healthy than some of the chemical medications to which people get addicted; it is …
by Gregory Barrett / September 25th, 2017
Following Sunday’s nationwide parliamentary election here in Germany I can hear the mocking laughter of 1989’s ghost, echoing throughout Europe and around the world. The great victory march of the “Free Market” Religion, which featured pompous, self-righteous politicians, pundits, and other worshippers at the altar of Big Finance strutting and crowing in the years following the fall of the Wall about the final demise and alleged failure of the supposedly evil and misguided socialist idea, has come to a grinding halt.
The rapid growth of the anti-immigrant, anti-EU party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany – which received almost 13% of …
by Othello / September 25th, 2017
In the recent rhetoric over tensions in the Korean Peninsula, US President Trump called North Korean Chairman Kim “Rocket Man” and Chairman Kim responded by calling Trump a “Dotard”. The exchange has plumbed the depths of statesmanship, with the greater offender being President Dotard. Language threatening Fire and Fury, national annihilation and extreme personal insults have been exchanged between two nuclear armed states…it makes you positively pine for the old days of a Cuban Missile Crisis presided over by President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev.
Promises of genocide are thrown around casually by the “Leader of the Free World” as …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 25th, 2017
The recipe for her success, which she has only latterly discovered, is that she’s been able to develop an image as someone who is tuned in to the German soul.
— Oskar Niedermayer, September 22, 2017
Modular furniture divinities, or corporations, may not be the best points of comparison for a politician, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel has invited it. She is stable, reliable, self-assembled from history. But more to the point, she has managed to forge a workshop of political viewpoints, angles, and perspectives, a tent so vast it has neutralised opponents within and without her political base. Her capacity to …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / September 24th, 2017
With just a week left before Congress’ budget reconciliation process ends, the Senate is once again peddling a poorly-thought out plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). If Senators vote before the September 30 deadline, they only need 50 votes instead of the filibuster-proof 60 votes to pass amendments. And once again, people are rising up in opposition to the plan, making it unpopular and unlikely to pass.
At the same time, support for a National Improved Medicare for All single payer healthcare system is increasing and there are bills in …
by Emmy Bee / September 24th, 2017
Let me preface what I am about to say by stating that I have the utmost esteem for mainstream medicine’s skill in emergency situations — the do or die surgeries, the dispensing of powerful life-saving drugs necessary in that setting are second to none; and its mastery of cosmetic surgery in cases of deformities and the advances made in prosthetics are nothing less than spectacular. These are what make mainstream medicine great.
I would also like to add that I am not an expert of any kind. I hold no degrees or certifications, and neither do I represent, belong to, or …
by Andre Vltchek / September 24th, 2017
It is all done in a fully barefaced manner. Those who are not part of this world could never even dream about such a ‘perfect’ design.
You come to your club, in my case to The Foreign Correspondent Club of Thailand (FCCT), and immediately the long arm of indoctrination begins stretching towards you.
US filmmakers of Neighbour at FCCT Bangkok
You place yourself on a comfortable couch, and soon after get fully serviced. You get instructed, told what to think and how to formulate or modify your ideas.
You are periodically …
by Yves Engler / September 24th, 2017
Alongside Washington and Venezuela’s elite, the Trudeau government is seeking to oust President Nicolás Maduro. While Ottawa’s campaign has recently grown, official Canada has long opposed the pro-poor, pro-working class Bolivarian Revolution, which has won 19 of 21 elections since 1998.
Following a similar move by the Trump Administration, Global Affairs Canada sanctioned 40 Venezuelans on Friday. In a move that probably violates the UN charter, the elected president, vice president and 38 other officials had their assets in Canada frozen and Canadians are barred from having financial relations with these individuals.
In recent months foreign minister Chrystia Freeland …
by Kim Petersen / September 23rd, 2017
An AP report described as “a rare if not unprecedented move,” a purported statement ((Corporate media reporting of statements made by political leaders from states demonized in the West must be regarded with extreme skepticism until verified.)) by Kim Jong-un, the chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic Republic of Korea, in response to United States president Donald Trump’s bullying speech to the United Nations earlier this week. The response was relayed by DPRK’s state news agency KCNA.
Of …
by Bob Anschuetz / September 23rd, 2017
While war is perceived by many as an inherent institution of the nation state, few people fail to recognize and regret the horror, death, destruction, suffering, and misery it inflicts. Another consequence of war, however, is less often considered, though it is in the long run even more damaging to the cause of human well-being. That is the waste of resources in preparing for, and waging, war that could otherwise be used to help meet the physical, economic, social, and cultural needs of ordinary people.
According to a reliable online information source, the U.S. accounted for 37 percent, or about …
by Alton C. Thompson / September 23rd, 2017
Forty-five years ago the late Gregory Bateson [1904 – 1980] wrote these ominous words:
If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against …
by Stuart Littlewood / September 23rd, 2017
As Prime Minister, I am proud to say that I support Israel. And it is absolutely right that we should mark the vital role that Britain played a century ago in helping to create a homeland for the Jewish people.
Thus spake Theresa May the other day as she welcomed members of the Jewish community to 10 Downing Street. But by focusing on creating a homeland for the Jewish people she’s also celebrating the hell that Balfour’s Declaration created for the gentle Palestinians and for the rest of the region. “Born of that letter, the pen of Balfour, and of …
by Jonathan Cook / September 22nd, 2017
Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over.
The policy, which only recently came to light, is being implemented by Israel’s population registry, a department of the interior ministry. The registry has been regularly criticized for secrecy about its rules for determining residency and citizenship.
According to government data, some 2,600 Palestinian Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.
The future …
