Latest articles
Mass Incarceration, Prison Labor in the United States
by John Stanton / June 20th, 2017
The Federal Prison Industries (FPI) under the brand UNICORE operates approximately 52 factories (prisons) across the United States. Prisoners manufacture or assemble a number of products for the US military, homeland security, and federal agencies according to the UNICORE/FPI website. They produce furniture, clothing and circuit boards in addition to providing computer aided design services and call center support for private companies.
UNICORE/FPI makes its pitch for employing call center support personnel to firms thinking about off-shoring their call center functions. The logic is that, hey!, they may be prisoners, but it’s keeping the jobs in the USA that matters. …
Please Ask a Yemeni Child
by Kathy Kelly / June 20th, 2017
This week, in New York City, representatives from more than100 countries will begin collaborating on an international treaty, first proposed in 2016, to ban nuclear weapons forever. It makes sense for every country in the world to seek a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons. It would make even more sense to immediately deactivate all nuclear weapons. But, by boycotting and disparaging the process now underway, the U.S. and other nuclear armed nations have sent a chilling signal. They have no intention of giving up the power to explode, burn and annihilate planetary life. “The United States is spending $1 …
A review of Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Robert Jensen / June 20th, 2017
Naomi Klein understands that President Donald J. Trump is a problem, but he is not the problem.
In her new book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trumps Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Klein reminds us to pay attention not only to the style in which Trump governs (a multi-ring circus so routinely corrupt and corrosive that anti-democratic practices seem normal) but in whose interests he governs (the wealthy, those he believes to be the rightful winners in the capitalist cage match), while recognizing the historical forces that make …
The Hotel Tacloban by Douglas Valentine
by T.P. Wilkinson / June 19th, 2017
“I’ll never forget that day—it was the day of his mother’s funeral. I’d heard the news of Kennedy’s death on the TV and I’d gone into the living room, where the adults were consoling one another, to let everyone know. I was fourteen at the time and the first person I told was my grandfather, who didn’t hear a word I said, and who, when I repeated myself, pulled away from me and said, ‘I don’t care.’ Next I told my father the awful news, ‘Dad’ I said excitedly, ‘The President’s been shot and they got the guy who did …
by John Andrews / June 19th, 2017
Although I voted for the Labour Party in the recent general election, I’m not disappointed they didn’t win the thing. The explanation for this apparent contradiction is easy to see.
Britain is a mess – the inevitable consequence of almost forty years of capitalist “austerity”. And as a direct consequence of thirty years of craven, mostly illegal warmongering in the Middle East and North Africa, we have helped the US create the worst global refugee crisis since WW2, and fashion a monster in the shape of Islamic terrorism that now stalks the streets of Britain. Add to all this the fact …
by Othello / June 18th, 2017
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 …
by Jonathan Cook / June 17th, 2017
Guardian columnist John Harris, like a lot of liberal journalists at the moment, is moving rapidly out of a brief interlude of atonement for so badly misjudging the outcome of the UK’s recent election to a sense of resentment. Those of us who held firm against the media doomsayers over the past two years – rejecting their predictions of a Labour rout under its leader Jeremy Corbyn – are being accused of triumphalism.
In Harris’ words:
Haters, doubters and sceptics have been rounded on. Journalists with any history of disbelief or hostility should apparently resign or be sacked. Labour …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 17th, 2017
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 …
by Gary Brumback / June 17th, 2017
Slightly over a year ago I went on record claiming that America was an “endangering and endangered ruination” with ruinous domestic conditions and destructive and deadly international interventions all stemming from her “corpocracy,” the “Devil’s Marriage” between big corporations and government. ((Brumback, GB. “Real America, an Endangering and Endangered Ruination“. Dissident Voice. March 28; OpEdNews, March 29; PopularResistance.Org Daily Digest, March 31; Greenville Post, April 2; Transmedia Service, April 6; Uncommon Thought Journal, April 8; 2016.))
America remains on course for oblivion and taking the rest of the world with her sometime later this century unless her corpocracy is ended …
by David Macaray / June 16th, 2017
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 …
by Yves Engler / June 16th, 2017
Lies, distortions and self-serving obfuscations are to be expected when political and business leaders discuss far away places.
In a recent Toronto Star column Rick Salutin observed that “foreign policy is a truth-free, fact-free zone. When leaders speak on domestic issues, citizens at least have points of reference to check them against. On foreign affairs they blather freely.”
Salutin vividly captures an important dynamic of political life. What do most Canadians know about our government’s actions in Afghanistan or Haiti? Most of us have never been to those countries and …
A film review
by Binoy Kampmark / June 16th, 2017
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 …
by Kathy Kelly / June 16th, 2017
On June 15, 2017, the New York Times reported that the government of Saudi Arabia aims to ease the concerns of some U.S. legislators over U.S. weapon sales to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis plan to engage in “a $750 million multiyear training program through the American military to help prevent the accidental killing of civilians in the Saudi-led air campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen.” Since entering the war in Yemen, in March of 2015, the Saudi coalition’s airstrikes, with U.S. assistance, have destroyed bridges, roads, factories, farms, food trucks, animals, water infrastructure, and agricultural banks across …
by Graham Peebles / June 15th, 2017
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 …
by Media Lens / June 15th, 2017
Last week, Jeremy Corbyn humbled the entire political and corporate media commentariat. With a little help from Britain’s student population. And with a little help from thousands of media activists.
Without doubt this was one of the most astonishing results in UK political history. Dismissed by all corporate political pundits, including the clutch of withered fig leaves at the Guardian, reviled by scores of his own Blairite MPs (see here), Corbyn ‘increased Labour’s share of the vote by more than any other of the party’s election leaders since 1945′ …
I Predicted It 8 Months Ago
by Adnan Al-Daini / June 15th, 2017
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 …
The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: Book Review
by Roger D. Harris / June 14th, 2017
Accused of being a “Useful Idiot or Propagandist for Russia,” labor and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik is anything but. His book, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia, rather, holds the US to the same level of scrutiny as the Russophobes insist we examine Russia. Kovalik’s careful dissection of the US record makes Russia’s transgressions pale in comparison.
American exceptionalism – the conviction that our excrement smells like perfume and everyone else’s stinks – is deconstructed. Kovalik documents how the US “has fought against nearly every war of liberation …
by Jonathan Cook / June 14th, 2017
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 …
Living in a stop and frisk nightmare, fifty years of Rip Van Winkle bedtime
by Paul Haeder / June 14th, 2017
Police state, corporate state, denuded duncery state — a blistery bunch of 80 percenters lost in a carnival of debt, malignant food, maladjusted education and the folly of a full-throttle powerfully propagandist media like a proverbial copper girdle wire around our collective consciousness. That So Called Liberal (sic) Press (sic) playing triple dirges for the death of any emaciated version of democracy with a capital D for dollar.
Feeding frenzy of the old and new rich class, and a …
by Stuart Littlewood / June 14th, 2017
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 …
by John Andrews / June 14th, 2017
Unsurprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn is walking around with a permanent grin on his face. He is rightly delighted with the achievement of the Labour Party in Britain’s recent general election. Given the two years of relentless abuse and ridicule that’s been heaped upon him by the mainstream media, together with the appalling treachery of most of his fellow Labour MPs who tried, but failed miserably, to oust him as leader, the result of the June 8 ballot was a ringing endorsement and validation of his remarkable accomplishment.
The victory of the Conservative Party over Labour was so marginal that they are compelled …
by Colin Jenkins / June 13th, 2017
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 …
by Andre Vltchek / June 13th, 2017
“America first” and “to hell with the rest of the world”! One single stroke of hand, one signature, and over 1,000 hardworking people in Bali, Indonesia, suddenly ended up on the pavement. No second thoughts, no mercy. American savage capitalist ways met and embraced that fabled Indonesian feudalism, which was implanted into this country several decades ago, precisely after the 1965 military coup sponsored by the West.
U.S. President Donald Trump, always on the lookout for some great business opportunities, finally found one in Bali (and one more in West Java), a tropical, once paradise-like Indonesian island. And not just somewhere …
(Exchange-Value as the Receptacle/Mirror of Conceptual-Perception Within the General Commodity-Form)
by Michel Luc Bellemare / June 13th, 2017
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 …
by Ramzy Baroud / June 13th, 2017
The typical newsroom set-up, where journalists chase after news headlines dictated by some centralized news gathering agency – often based in some western capital – does not suffice any more.
In the case of the Middle East, the news narrative has been defined by others and dictated on Arab journalists and audiences for far too long.
This hardly worked in the past but, in the last a few years, it has become even more irrelevant and dangerous.
There are millions of victims throughout the Middle East region, numerous bereaved families, constant streams of refugees and a human toll that cannot be understood or …
by Chris Wright / June 13th, 2017
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 …
by John R. Hall / June 13th, 2017
Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
— Henry A. Kissinger
Ouch! Blindsided by an epiphany. Once upon a time I believed that the U.S. Government looked after the best interests of its own citizens to at least some small degree. It doesn’t. Of course, I’ve long been aware of all the wars waged for fossil fuel. The millions of dead and many more millions wounded and displaced in the name of U.S. control of world trade and resources. All the bombs and rockets that have rained down upon those unfortunate enough to be standing in …
by Finian Cunningham / June 12th, 2017
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 …
by David Macaray / June 12th, 2017
An early sign that Trump’s cabinet appointments reeked of unprofessionalism was when organized labor and congressional Democrats gave tentative approval to naming Elaine Chao (former Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush) as President Trump’s Secretary of Transportation. The Senate confirmed her by a vote of 93-6.
Not that unions and Democrats were impressed with the hyper-ambitious Chao, because, clearly, they weren’t. Elaine Chao (wife of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell) is a “climber,” one of those turbo-charged resume-builders who obsessively jump from one high-profile job to another. Like a shark, they must keep moving to survive.
Ms. Chao has done everything. …
Conservatives lose majority
by Stuart Littlewood / June 12th, 2017
“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 …
