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As the world watches the rapid transformation of Qatar from wealthy trusted ally in the West’s War on Terror and host to US CENTCOM, the most important US overseas military installation, to having President Trump declare Qatar “… historically being a funder of terrorism at a very high level”, the bigger question is whether Saudi Arabia is next.

All the elements are there. Qatar, for all its pretensions, is small potatoes. Saudi Arabia has for decades provided the ideological foundation and generous funding for terrorism. When President Trump accused Qatar of supporting “extremist ideology” and funding for terrorism he …

Bush appeared on television to praise the invading troops and to say his cowardly vision – all that a wimp with an inferiority complex could be capable of.

— Manuel Noriega on George H. W. Bush

The late General Manuel Antonio Noriega has done more to demonstrate the bipolar nature of US foreign policy in the Americas than any single, historically anointed individual. In its tendency to veer between outraged morality and cynical cold steel Realpolitik, US foreign policy found in Noriega a thermometer of sorts, though the temperature readings were often confused.

When it suited Washington, Noriega was the CIA’s man in …

Question:  What do the most “successful” countries in the world—i.e., the “happiest,” fairest, most enlightened, most optimistic, and most generous—have in common?  Answer:  The majority of them have quasi-socialist governments/economies, and highly unionized labor forces.

Actually, there’s a third commonality as well.  Unlike the U.S., they are unburdened by a bloated and debilitating military budget—an advantage that permits them to treat medical care as a “right” rather than a “privilege,” and to offer free college tuition to those who wish to attend, working off the premise that an educated electorate is an “investment,” not a “luxury.”

In the 2016 Democratic Primary, when …

What is inescapable in the Australian landscape is its cosmic character, one that mixes suggestively astral dust with the brilliance of the blinding sun. Desolate, parched earth becomes poetic affirmation, though it is the poetry of death and distraction, its stanzas luring the life from you.

Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971), based on the Kenneth Cook novel of the same name, still retains that grim sense of the life that is drawn out in such spaces, and left to expire, slowly.  Its importance has been given another airing this year with the efforts of Australian film critic David Stratton …

Imagine a country run along truly democratic lines. In such a mythical land, what would be the role of the politician, and the nature of his or her relationship with that amorphous group paraded under the banner: ‘the people’?

We in pseudo-democratic countries hear a lot about politicians serving and honouring the ‘will of the people’ – in Britain this nauseating slogan of appeasement has been repeated ad infinitum since the disastrous European referendum vote – but from where does the supposed conviction of the masses arise? Does it evolve from independent minds tussling with questions of justice and freedom, debating and …

Eight months ago I wrote an article on Dissident Voice entitled “The Corbyn Effect: A British Democratic Revolution in the Making” in which I argued the case for my optimism as follows:

Jeremy Corbyn has transformed the Labour Party and politics in Britain. He has made it acceptable to be anti-austerity and to demand investments, not cuts, to revive the economy. He has articulated an alternative to neo-liberal economics, that has been the only game in town for so long. The Green Party has advocated such policies prior to the last general election, and I am delighted that, thanks to …

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After more than two decades at the Guardian, George Monbiot has finally written a column in which he concedes that the entire British media has a problem, including its supposedly left-liberal elements like the Guardian. After years of cheerleading for his employer, that is a momentous, though not entirely surprising, turn-around. It would, after all, be hard for a serious commentator to overlook the media’s wretched failings over the past two years in maligning Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and failing to grasp until the very last minute how powerfully his message resonated with much of the public.

Monbiot observes:

They …

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Former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne, now editor of the London Evening Standard, calls Theresa May “dead woman walking”. Another former minister Anna Soubry says: “She is in a desperate position. It is untenable….”, while according to former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan she cannot lead us into another election and a leadership challenge is possible during the summer.

While stunned Conservatives try to recover their composure, the rest of us can amuse ourselves speculating on whether it’ll be messed-up May or her nemesis the charismatic lefty Jeremy Corbyn who’ll be leading the UK to the sunny uplands of post-Brexit opportunity in three …

Colin Kaepernick took a courageous and principled stand last season by kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games. This was done in response to a society that continues to systematically, culturally, and institutionally devalue Black lives. This devaluation is played out in many areas, including politics, economics, housing, employment, and perhaps most notably, within the criminal punishment system. Black lives are routinely extinguished by police in the streets without recourse, in the courts without pause, and in the prisons without hesitation. Entire generations of Black Americans have essentially been destroyed through the “school-to-prison pipeline” and a system of mass …

According to Karl Marx, the basic datum-bit of the capitalist mode of production and/or capitalist society in general, is the commodity, in the sense that “the individual commodity appears as its elementary form”. ((Karl Marx, Capital (Volume One), Trans. Ben Fowkes (London Eng.: Penguin, 1990) p. 125.))   And due to this nucleus of the capitalist mode of production, Marx begins his analysis of Capital (Volume One) by specifically analyzing the commodity in its most elementary form as “an object with a dual character, possessing both use-value and exchange-value” ((Ibid, p. 131.)), inherent in its structure. Foremost, Marx states that …

It should hardly be controversial anymore to say we’re embarking on the “end times” of…something. Maybe it’s corporate capitalism, maybe it’s civilization, maybe it’s humanity. Whatever it is, the unsustainability of the contemporary ancien régime, on the global level, has become obvious. Economically, socially, politically, and environmentally, the next fifty years will see major upheavals, which may end up dwarfing those even of the 1930s and 1940s—the Great Depression and World War II.

In this moment of crisis and uncertainty, as we wonder what might come next and if in the long run there is any hope for a positive resolution …

Despite a vicious smear campaign to denigrate Britain’s Labour leader as a “terrorist sympathizer,” Jeremy Corbyn still pulled off an amazing achievement in the general election.

Hardly has a politician in any Western state been so vilified with character assassination, and yet he has proven to be most popular Labour leader in Britain since the Second World War.

After weeks of trailing his Conservative rival Theresa May in the polls, Corbyn’s socialist manifesto appealed to a record number of voters – closing the gap between the parties to only two percentage points behind the Tories.

This was in spite of a concerted media campaign to destroy Corbyn in the eyes of the British public as a “terrorist stooge.” The irony here …

“It was an amazing own goal. We didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot, we shot ourselves in the head.”

That’s how one long-established backbench Conservative MP summed up the unnecessary snap election called by Theresa May which has left the UK almost ungovernable at a key moment in its history.

The Conservatives already had a 17-seat majority in the House of Commons. They were riding high in the opinion polls but May wanted more in order to strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations. She needed 326 seats for a majority. Thanks to her cack-handed campaign and a surprise surge in …

The shocking election result in the United Kingdom – the Conservatives losing their majority and the creation of a hung Parliament; and Jeremy Corbyn being more successful than any recent Labor candidate – cutting a 20 point Theresa May lead down to a near tie – gives hope to many that the global shift to the right, fueled by the failures of governments to meet the basic needs of their population and growing economic insecurity, may be ending.

Corbyn is a lifelong activist whose message and actions have been consistent. He presented a platform directed at ending austerity and the wealth …

Until now… men were living both dispersed and at the same time, closed in on themselves, like passengers in a ship who have met by chance below decks with no idea of its mobile character and its motion. They could, accordingly think of nothing to do… but to quarrel or amuse themselves… Hitherto, in spite of external forces whose influence is to bring them together, the relations between spiritual atoms seem to be governed by an inflexible internal repulsion…. The more planetary ties tend to force us together, the more do we feel the need to disengage ourselves from one …

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