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by Greg Maybury / July 1st, 2017
It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.
— US Secretary of State John Hay, defining the Spanish-American War of 1898, in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, July 27 of that year, the war ushering in America’s Imperial era and unequivocally heralding its hegemonic ambitions.
…I’ve seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate [people]….[We’re there] to conquer, not to redeem. It should be our pleasure and duty to make people free, and let them deal with their own domestic …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 1st, 2017
Tom Price’s vacating of a Georgia congressional seat set the scene for exactly what is darkly wrong with US politics. In the sprawling kleptomanic entity known as USA Inc., with its distancing between the concept of representation and the money that backs it, a campaign for one congressional seat can cost tens of millions.
The Sixth Congressional District in Georgia was always set for an otherwise unwarranted degree of attention for its June 20 ballot. For one, it was a potential atmospheric “testing” of Trump-era politics, a taster as to how the administration had been going. Mid-term elections are scheduled for …
A 21st Century Conversation with Frederick Douglass
by Bruce Campbell / July 1st, 2017
In early February, my 7th grader and I took a walk to our local coffee shop for a conversation. About what, I had no idea. A father-and-son visit to our neighborhood coffee shop had been a tradition of ours since he was around 9 years old: every now and then, when our busy family schedule would permit, I would treat us both to a drink – a mocha for me usually, and for him a hot chocolate or, as he grew older, a chai – and we would talk about whatever was on his mind. A middle class parenting luxury …
by Randy Shields / June 30th, 2017
Can movies be made that attack the prejudices and cruelties of 95% of the human race — and be financially viable? Will the guilty party pay to see themselves raked over the coals? Are speciesist bigots so detached from their emotions and reality that they don’t even realize that they are being criticized?
In the South Korean/US 2017 release, Okja, the answer to the first two questions is: not without a lot of attempted humor, action, tokenism, cartoonish characters that undercut a serious message and a nonsensical happy ending. The answer to the last question is at the …
by Geraldine Perry / June 30th, 2017
Free trade, debt and war are all part of the same package, each feeding off the other. They are – each of them – rackets in their own right and they are all symptoms of the same problem. That problem has to do with the fact that our government – along with the rest of the world – has entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity.
The American colonists understood this in a very visceral way. For example, Benjamin Franklin once remarked that there are only three ways a nation can become …
by Graham Peebles / June 30th, 2017
In cities and towns from New Delhi to New York the socio-political policies that led to the Grenfell Tower disaster in west London are being repeated: redevelopment and gentrification, the influx of corporate money and the expelling of the poor, including families that have lived in an area for generations. To this, add austerity, the privatization of public services and the annihilation of social housing and a cocktail of interconnected causes takes shape. Communities break up, independent businesses gradually close down, diversity disappears and another neighbourhood is absorbed within the expensive homogenized collective.
People living in developed industrialized countries suffer most …
by Yves Engler / June 30th, 2017
When Justin Trudeau looks in the foreign policy mirror who does he see? Someone very much like Stephen Harper.
On the world stage Canada under Trudeau the Second has acted almost the same as when Harper was prime minister. The Liberals have followed the previous government’s posture on issues ranging from militarism to Russia, nuclear weapons to the Gulf monarchies.
Aping the ancien régime’s position, the Liberals recently voted against UN nuclear disarmament efforts supported by most countries of the world. As such, they’ve refused to attend the …
by Jonathan Cook / June 30th, 2017
If you wish to understand the degree to which a supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and docile, then there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hersh’s latest investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio silence on his revelations, even as over the …
by Paul Craig Roberts / June 29th, 2017
For sixteen years the US has been at war in the Middle East and North Africa, running up trillions of dollars in expenses, committing untold war crimes, and sending millions of war refugees to burden Europe, while simultaneously claiming that Washington cannot afford its Social Security and Medicare obligations or to fund a national health service like every civilized country has.Considering the enormous social needs that cannot be met because of the massive cost of these orchestrated wars, one would think that the American people would be asking questions about the purpose of these wars. What is being achieved at …
A Review: The Hotel Tacloban by Douglas Valentine
by Edward Curtin / June 29th, 2017
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
— Vergil, The Aeneid
Not since Edmund Gosse’s classic memoir, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, has an estranged son written more nobly of his father than Douglas Valentine. Nobly because, apart from a brief author’s note, the son is absent from the book, except as a faithful and creative amanuensis to his father’s chilling, dark, life-long secret of his WW II years as a prisoner of war of the …
by Margaret Flowers / June 29th, 2017
image from ATTN.com.
We thought that Senator Sanders was on track to introduce and advocate for a national improved Medicare for All bill, but Tuesday he stated publicly at a Planned Parenthood rally that his priorities are to first defeat the Republican health plan, then to improve the Affordable Care Act with a public option or allowing people to buy-in to Medicare, and then we can work for single payer.
This was confirmed by his deputy communications director Josh Miller-Lewis who said “[Sanders has] said many times over …
by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich / June 29th, 2017
In Egyptian mythology, gods were considered heroes. In more modern times, it is men who are the heroes. Without a doubt, General Gamal Abdul Nasser has secured his legacy as a hero – a revolutionary who fought for Egypt and strived for Arab unity against Israel and Western imperialism. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; a pre-planned war of aggression and expansion by Israel against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, aided by the US and Britain.
Israel’s cronies assisted in the planning and execution of the war which led to the seizure and occupation of East Jerusalem, …
by Paul Craig Roberts / June 29th, 2017
Unlike Oliver Stone, who knew how to interview Vladimir Putin, Megyn Kelly did not. Thus, she made a fool of herself, which is par for her course.
Now the entire Western media has joined Megyn in foolishness, or so it appears from a RT report. James O’Keefe has senior CNN producer John Bonifield on video telling O’Keefe that CNN’s anti Russian reporting is purely for ratings: “It’s mostly bullshit right now. Like, we don’t have any big giant proof.” CNN’s Bonifield is reported to go on to say that “our CIA is doing shit all the time, we’re out there …
by Randy Shields / June 29th, 2017
Looks like Mordor-on-the-Potomac is psyching itself up to attack Russia and Iran.
All-purpose ignoramus Sean Spicer is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “The United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children. The activities are similar to preparations the regime made before its April 4, 2017 chemical weapons attack. If Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price.”
Never to be out-neoconned, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley …
by Ramzy Baroud / June 29th, 2017
Mohammed Abed is a 28-year-old taxi driver from the village of Qarara, near the town of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. He has no teeth.
Lack of medical care and proper dentistry work cost him all of his teeth, which rotted and decayed at a very young age. Yet, his dire financial needs prevented him from acquiring dentures. His community eventually pitched in, collecting the few hundred dollars needed for Mohammed to finally being able to eat.
Mohammed is not unemployed. He works ten hours, sometimes more, every single day. The old taxi he drives between Khan Younis and Gaza City …
by Sophie Mangal / June 28th, 2017
It’s not a secret for anyone, how much hardship, how much grief and suffering people endure as they confront many various explosive devices, booby-traps and other deadly bombs especially on the territory of settlements. Aleppo, the largest city of Syria, was literally loaded and the fields strewn with all kinds of explosives and mines left by terrorists. Syrian sappers recently shared the first results of their activities on mine clearance in the territory of Aleppo and also their impressions and experience from the missions in a discussion moderated by Inside Syria Media Center’s military correspondents.
…
by Bashar Salame / June 28th, 2017
“Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free”. From a modern version of the Hippocratic Oath.
A hallmark achievement of Obamacare (ACA), recognized by advocates and detractors alike, the law provided 20 million previously uninsured Americans much needed healthcare coverage. With a simple majority vote, Senate Republicans can basically repeal Obamacare, in so doing eliminating all accompanying progress. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 22 million people will lose coverage by 2026, saving the …
by Shawgi Tell / June 28th, 2017
These are some of the news headlines that appeared when searching for “charter schools” in GoogleNews in June 2017:
Stop bashing charter schools. The Tennessean.
Charter school parents to Legislature: Hands off. The Sacramento Bee.
Here’s how charter schools ‘could’ succeed: Mac Gordon. The Clarion-Ledger.
Guest Essay: Charter school overcoming barriers. The Democrat & Chronicle.
Another success for the schools de Blasio detests. New York Post.
Such haughty headlines appear every day and reveal the intensification of charter school disinformation and desperation. Total irrationality has set in among charter school promoters.
Disinformation is …
A Brutal Part of Canada's Dark History in Africa
by Yves Engler / June 28th, 2017
Canada’s 150th anniversary offers a unique opportunity to shed light on some darker corners of Canadian history. One of the dustier chapters is our contribution to one of the most barbarous regimes of the last century and a half.
In a bid to extract rubber and other commodities from his personal colony, Belgian King Léopold II instituted a brutal system of forced labour in the late 1800s. Individuals and communities were given rubber collection quotas that were both hard to fulfill and punishable by death. To prove they killed someone who failed to fulfill a quota soldiers from the Force Publique, the …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 28th, 2017
It is also a story of deceit and lies, of institutional defensiveness defeating truth and justice. It is evidence of a culture of denial within South Yorkshire Police.
— Anne Burkett, BBC, April 27, 2016
It took 28 years for the tables to turn on the South Yorkshire police regarding the Hillsborough disaster that took the lives of 96 fans. The 1989 FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest saw a sporting catastrophe that was portrayed as less a matter of institutional accountability as the consequence of loutish, irresponsible fans.
The finger pointing began instantly, with the police arguing that the bad …
We Eat the Mad Cow Disease Meat of their Capitalism
by Paul Haeder / June 28th, 2017
And I love all people, rich or poor. But in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense? Does that make sense?
From the criminally insane leader to his insane captives, at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Wednesday [6/21/17], as Trump was stumping for the health (sic) care (sic-sic) death bill the Republicans are pushing with the blessings of the kleptocracy that is the millionaire-billionaire class (sic). That’s us, folks, poor people – looking at a cool 150 million of us in the USA, or maybe even more! He wants zero voice or self-agency from us poor, …
by Ellen Brown / June 28th, 2017
Japan has found a way to write off nearly half its national debt without creating inflation. We could do that too.
Let’s face it. There is no way the US government is ever going to pay back a $20 trillion federal debt. The taxpayers will just continue to pay interest on it, year after year.
A lot of interest.
If the Federal Reserve raises the fed funds rate to 3.5% and sells its federal securities into the market, as it is proposing to do, by 2026 the projected tab will be $830 billion annually. That’s nearly $1 trillion owed by the …
by John R. Hall / June 27th, 2017
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed…for lack of a better word… is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms…greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge…has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed…you mark my words…will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.
— Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) from the 1987 movie Wall Street
Their attitudes may taste like shit
But go real good with wine
Eat the rich
There is only one thing that they are good for
Eat the …
by Anna Jaunger / June 27th, 2017
Having ordered the attack on the al-Shayrat air field near the western Syrian city of Homs, U.S. President Donald Trump knew that the Syrian government hadn’t used any chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun. At the same time the current U.S. administration was making every effort to develop an information campaign against Damascus.
This was reported by Welt am Sonntag, a German Sunday newspaper. An American investigative journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh stressed that actually the Syrian Air Force had targeted a two-story building, where extremists from various terrorist groups held meetings. According to Hersh, a bomb, …
by Paul Larudee / June 27th, 2017
The United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime.
— Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary, June 26, 2017
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.
— George Bush, Sept. 17, 2002
The White House statement raises a number of questions. Who has identified the “potential preparations”? No reference is given, not even a source agency. Does the information come from intelligence sources? Apparently the Pentagon had not even been informed. What is “potential information” and how does it compare with real information?
Of course, the White House has its own …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 27th, 2017
Google’s practices have deprived millions of European consumers of the full benefits of competition, genuine choice and innovation.
— Margrethe Vestager, June 28, 2017
Google, for some time, has been the leviathan of the tech world. A KQED radio discussion on a Tuesday morning treats the company as a creator and dispenser: creator of transport infrastructure, funnelling employees from the city of San Francisco via shuttle service; dispenser of largesse to the people of California, if not the globe. It can provide affordable housing, suggest the discussants. It can supply services that would otherwise be the domain of government.
This troubling supremacy has …
by Jonathan Cook / June 27th, 2017
Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the man who exposed the Mai Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the US military’s abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004, is probably the most influential journalist of the modern era, with the possible exception of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the pair who exposed Watergate.
For decades, Hersh has drawn on his extensive contacts within the US security establishment to bring us the story behind the official story, and to disclose facts that have often proved deeply discomfiting to those in power and exploded the self-serving, fairy-tale narratives the public were …
by Jordan Flaherty / June 27th, 2017
Several days a week, columnist James Gill exemplifies the mediocre writing, faulty arguments, and ignorance of basic facts that too often pass for commentary in The New Orleans Advocate. Gill’s work is a symptom of a deeper prejudice from the management of our local media. New Orleans is still 60% African-American, but you wouldn’t know it from the mostly white staff and management of The New Orleans Advocate, or Gill’s former outlet, The Times-Picayune.
Gill was far out of his depth on June 1, when he attacked Norris Henderson, a passionate advocate and reformer who spent over 27 years behind bars for a crime …
by William Hawes and Jason Holland / June 27th, 2017
While supporters of our two-party system wring their hands over the sensationalist nonsense reported by the mainstream media, we thought it might be worth touching on the most dangerous lie of all-time: capitalism. It’s an all-encompassing delusion, including: the myth of continual technological progress, the mendacious assumptions of endless economic growth, the lie that constant bombardments of media and consumer goods make us happy, and the omissions of our involvement in the exploitation of the planet and the resources of distant, poorer nations, among other things.
We’ve taken the time to hash out some of the most pernicious mendacities we’ve come …
Plutocracy: Class War from Metanoia Films
by Kim Petersen / June 27th, 2017
In 2017 the United States finds itself with a billionaire president who defeated, as adjudged by electoral college votes, the multimillionaire Hillary Clinton. In fact, high political office in the US has become a stepping stone to personal enrichment. Barack Obama is cashing in now with exorbitant book deals and speaking fees.
It is highly illustrative of the divide between the working masses and the 1%-ers of Wall Street who effectively own the American political system. The politicians know the voters want change, but …
