The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed to ‘personalize’ and ‘adapt’ learning for students in public school districts across the United States.
Financialization involves a highly disciplined neoliberal landscape where state power structures and private technologies facilitate and protect the activities and interests of finance capitalism over all else. Within this insulated environment, financialization occurs via securitization, which simply described, is a process where financial institutions bundle together (illiquid) financial assets – primarily loans – and transform them into (liquid) tradable securities that can be expeditiously bought and sold …
Report Back on Militarized Police Raid of DAPL Resistance Camp
by Democracy Now! / October 29th, 2016
We go to Standing Rock, North Dakota, for an update on how hundreds of police with military equipment raided a resistance camp Thursday that was established by Native American water protectors in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. More than 100 officers in riot gear with automatic rifles lined up across a highway, flanked by multiple MRAPs, an LRAD sound cannon, Humvees driven by National Guardsmen, an armored police truck and a bulldozer. Water protectors say police deployed tear gas, mace, pepper spray and flash-bang grenades and bean bag rounds against the Indigenous peoples and shot …
For all those Facebook friends out there who are determined to explain to me the virtues of their particular candidate for president or the immorality of their opponent please take a good long look at this picture. I’m sure you’ve seen it once or twice since it became a viral image last September. The picture is of a three year old Syrian boy whose name was Alan Kurdi. Alan, his brother and his mother all drowned of the coast of Turkey, the end of their desperate attempt to escape …
Playing off of John Reed’s classic work about the Russian Revolution, I picked my title because of something that was whispered to me today by folks on the inside, who claim that the Justice Department’s new focus on Hillary’s past faux past with emails did not rear its troubling (for the Clinton candidacy) head by chance.
With ten days left until election day the fresh furor concerning Clinton is seemingly guaranteed to create any number of unwelcome scenarios for the Democrats, but the powers that be in the Democratic inner circle — my contacts say — have orchestrated the whole shebang for intensely interesting …
The greatest objective of mankind in this century should be to eradicate imperialism and capitalism as models for society.
— Evo Morales
As we approach the end of our most recent contamination of the ideal of national democracy with possibly its worst example we would do well to consider the words of a democratically elected leader of a nation that could teach us about the word’s meaning.
A representative of the real majority of his people, a former farm worker who rose to the presidency on the shoulders of ordinary Bolivians and not the bank books of his nation’s rich, Evo Morales and …
Every presidential vote, like every other vote, demands that one set priorities, for it is a rare voter indeed who will agree 100% with a given candidate. And surely in the coming presidential election survival must top the list of priorities. What can be more important than survival of human civilization and perhaps humanity itself?
Here is a brief primer on the subject – suitable for printing out for liberal friends.
No Fly Zone over Syria
“I personally would be advocating now for a no-fly zone (inside Syria)….”
Hillary Clinton interview, October 1, 2015, the day after Russia began air operations over Syria. …
On October 19, 2016, a convoy of buses left the besieged al-Nusra dominated eastern enclave in Aleppo, Syria, and made its way through the government-controlled portions of the city. Hundreds of Syrian soldiers lined both sides of the street as they passed. The windows of at least some of the buses were blacked out.
Who were in the buses? Although many residents of Aleppo reported seeing the convoy, no information was forthcoming from official sources on either side. Some speculated that they were covert advisors from the US and other NATO countries, Saudi Arabia, and possibly even Israel. The …
Owned and operated by the one percent, the mainstream media (MSM) is now in the closing stages of a multi-media character assassination of Donald Trump. In effect, it is a backhanded promotional campaign to elect Hillary Clinton. It had to be this way because Hillary has no marketable assets other than her gender. Where Barack Obama could be positively marketed as racial progress and charismatic change, Clinton must be backdoored into office using a variety of calculated attacks on a deeply flawed opponent. The Clinton camp has long understood that Clinton could only win a presidential election by being perceived …
Global warming/climate change is one of the most potent agents of political and economic change in history. Its impact is like Atilla the Hun in modern times, who back in the day struck terror into the hearts of the Roman Empire.
As of recent, Europe has been inundated with refugees from Middle Eastern wars as well as refugees from ecosystem collapse all across the southern Mediterranean region. The refugee impact is felt far and wide, including Brexit and a concomitant rise of xenophobia throughout the West whilst altering politics towards antagonism, hatred, and malevolence. The world is turning mad, and madness …
John Pilger: The Coming War on China is my 60th film and perhaps one of the most urgent. It continues the theme of illuminating the imposition of great power behind a facade of propaganda as news. In 2011, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’ of US forces: almost two-thirds of American naval power would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020.
The undeclared rationale for this was the ‘threat’ from China, by some measure now the greatest economic power. The Secretary of …
There is probably no other historical era more misunderstood by Americans than the 1960s and 1970s. From the political assassinations of major political figures and political assassinations of ordinary civil rights and antiwar activists to the emergence of government secret intelligence programs designed to monitor and ultimately crush dissent in the United States, most Americans remain vaguely, if at all, aware of how this hidden history impacts our lives today. And this lack of awareness has unfortunately allowed for these same forces to deal some crushing blows to our “democracy.”
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: How do you explain the long history of US interventionism? What is your analysis?
Dr. Gary Brumback: “Interventionism” is a very appropriate term. It covers a lot of territory, and that is exactly what America has been doing even before she became a nation 240 years ago. The US is a habitual interventionist. Domestically it is in the form of fascism, or a police state, that treads on human rights. Internationally, it is in the form of militaristic imperialism. In either form the intervention is always exploitative of the weak and powerless, often violent, destructive, and deadly (countless millions …
An Interview with YesCalifornia's Marcus Ruiz Evans
by William Hawes / October 28th, 2016
Marcus Ruiz Evans is author of California’s Next Century 2.0: Economic Renaissance, a leader of the YesCalifornia campaign for independence, and has lived throughout California including in LA, the Bay Area, Sacramento, the Inland Empire, the Central Valley, and is a Fresno, CA native.
***** William Hawes: Thanks for taking the time to do this, Marcus. For those that don’t know, YesCalifornia is a budding movement for secession in the Golden State, with a rally on November 9th in Sacramento. Can you give readers some of your most compelling reasons why and how California …
Here is a list of the noteworthy, ongoing results of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq beginning in March 2003. (Recall that that invasion was denounced by the UN as illegal, based entirely on lies, and — given the U.S.’s hegemonic position in the world, allowing it to act with impunity — the crime’s architects have never punished.)
The principal achievement of the war and occupation was the dramatic expansion of the al-Qaeda network that had attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001. An al-Qaeda franchise was established in Iraq for the first time, playing a key role in the Sunni …
No one likes being lectured, and when it comes in the form of Gallic smugness delivered from literally the left of centre, it can grate. The equally smug social engineers and commentators who see their society as an exemplar to emulate find that hardest to stomach.
Thomas Piketty, repeatedly introduced as a “rock star” economist by those short of words, is certainly full of advice for the places he visits. For Australia, he has specific observations about rising inequality, being at a historic high since the post-war period. Such points are noted with specific sensitivity by the myth makers who believe …
We don’t know yet where we are going, but it will obviously be better than the Jungle, which was made for animals, not humans.
— Wahid, Afghan refugee, PRI, October 24, 2016
It grew out as an organic consequence of failure – a failure on the part of Europe’s authorities to come to some measure of proportionate and even handed procedures to assess and process desperate refugees who have very little intention of returning back to their countries.
Calais’ informal camp, which came to be known as the Jungle, had 7,000 residents from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other countries, living in squalid …
Al-Aqsa Mosque is Palestinian and East Jerusalem is Illegally Occupied
by Ramzy Baroud / October 26th, 2016
Did Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, actually read the full text of the UNESCO resolution on Palestine and Israel, before he raved with anger?
“I think this is a mistaken, inconceivable resolution,” he said.
“It is not possible to continue with these resolutions at the UN and UNESCO that aim to attack Israel. It is shocking and I have ordered that we stop taking this position (his country’s abstention) even if it means diverging from the position taken by the rest of Europe,” he added.
Renzi, who became Prime Minister in 2014 at the relatively young age of 39 knows exactly how …
“I was in jail with a Libyan man, his friends came and broke into the jail and let us go, too. There was fighting everywhere. You pray to be in jail with Libyans, because they do not recognize the current government, they will do what they want.” (spoken by a refugee in “the Jungle”)
Forty-two percent of the people who came to the Jungle are from warring parts of Sudan and South Sudan; thirty-two percent are from Afghanistan. Others are from Syria, Yemen, Iraqi Kurdistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Egypt, and more; they have crossed between 6 and 13 countries …
Should social scientists seek the truth regardless of whose toes may be stepped on and cite, up front, possible conflicts of interest regarding matters they study?
All academic disciplines claim independence of thought and transparency are principles that guide good research. So, what to make of a Canadian foreign policy discussion dominated by individuals with ties to the decision-making structures they study?
The highly regarded Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) is a prime example. The oldest global affairs school in Canada, Carleton University’s graduate program was established in 1965 with $400,000 ($5 million today) from long-time Senator Norman Paterson, a …
To be white and from money is to live a life of largely unrecognized privilege, bequeathed as it is from one’s first wet, howling breath. In the affluent socio-economically partitioned town of Saratoga Springs, NY where I’m from there was actually a railroad track serving as the demarcation line between affluent whites residing on one side and the other side of which nothing was known because you just didn’t go there, ever. It was literally the “wrong side of the tracks”.
Raised in that remarkable state of incurious joy and suffering within narrow undiluted lines of stratified suburban sameness, I could …
In 2012 President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter launched a new chapter in their quest for global dominance: a realignment of policies designed to shift priorities from the Middle East to Asia. Dubbed the ‘pivot to Asia’, it suggested that the US would concentrate its economic, military and diplomatic resources toward strengthening its dominant position and undercutting China’s rising influence in the region.
The ‘pivot to Asia’ did not shift existing resources from the Middle East, it added military commitments to …
Most Americans must be getting accustomed to hearing lie after lie from the two presidential candidates. According to fact checkers, Clinton lies on average 28 percent of the time and Trump lies 80 percent of the time. This is a sad commentary on how low our political parties and candidates have sunken. But lies from government officials and agencies has become commonplace in our treasured American way of life.
All lies are bad, but some lies do more harm to the livelihood of American civilians than others. Probably, the biggest lie, which most severely hurts millions of Americans, involves the true …
The collapse of the Grenadian Revolution on 19 October 1983 ((The violent seizure of power by a faction of the New Jewel Movement and disarming of the labouring classes provided the pretext for the invasion and destruction of the Grenadian Revolution by the United States on 25 October 1983.)) should be carefully examined for the lessons that it might offer to organizers in the Caribbean who are currently organizing with the labouring classes. If the working-class shall be the architect of its liberation, the process of revolution-making should enable them to fulfill that role. Fundamental change should not be the …
The missile attack on a US ship off the coast of Yemen was a major news event, but the subsequent follow up story, that it may never have happened, was either ignored by mainstream media or intentionally covered up. The whole thing has the same odor as the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never occurred.
Does history repeat itself? Sure does seem like it. That is if you compare America’s entry into the Vietnam civil war, with America’s latest entry into the war in Yemen.
Don’t be mistaken. We have been at war with Yemen for a year now. America sided with …
What do today’s right wing Quebec and Israeli nationalists share in common? A claim to victimhood that enables them to deny their role in oppressing others.
This commonality became clear when a prominent right-wing Québec nationalist politician cited the French language and Jewish sensibilities to criticize immigration and the veil. It also reflected a historic reversal in Québecois/Jewish relations. More significantly, it highlighted the dangers of an ‘empowered sense of vulnerability’, a psychological state many Quebeckers and Jews seem to share.
(I admit, up front, that generalizations about large groups of people most often reflect …
In January 2016, a medical doctor noted his surgery, the Brighton Homeless Healthcare centre, had seen 21 deaths last year alone. His figures also include 15 deaths in 2013 and 15 in 2014. Winter is fast approaching and preventive actions need to be explored. In July 2016, doctors have claimed the state of emergency accommodation in the city could contribute to a rise in homeless deaths. The doctor noted all the deaths were preventable.
The doctor said: “It’s a tragedy really that we have people dying on our streets. It’s looking like homelessness is only going to get worse over the …
We live in a country where the Hamburglar can freely walk down the street, but Ronald McDonald can’t.
— Twitter post by ‘BH’, Oct 12, 2016
They were always perfect as a foil to the criminal and dysfunctional outsider, with smile grotesque, garish mask, and nose obscenely red. The clown, in history, has often proved to be a fairly revolting creature, acting as both channel and code.
Through history, a vicious clown is an external manifestation of broader ill, a figure whose smile is discomforting rather than reassuring. Fun, in short, had nothing to do with it. What mattered was …
Ding-dong the witch is dead. Take, as evidence, Donald Trump’s profanity-laden celebration of rape, the tape of which has just surfaced (and is already being followed by more of the same) If that won’t drive a stake through his genuinely iniquitous heart, nothing will. How dead? Metaphorically, he’s as dead as Moammar Gaddafi whom Hillary gleefully dispatched with the words, “we came, we saw, he died.” Judged by the rather manic look on her face she sure got a kick out of it. But when the thrill was gone, Hillary left behind a dangerous, leaderless mess, rife with violence and terrorism. …
(Why and How These Theories thrive within Post-Industrial Post-Modern Bourgeois-State-Capitalism)
by Michel Luc Bellemare / October 21st, 2016
The theory of conceptual-commodity-value-management is the theory that prices, values and wages are based on what an individual, an entity and/or an enterprising alliance can get away with. That is, the arbitrary price, value and wage that these controlling individuals, entities and/or enterprising alliances are able to command and realize on the open market through various network exclusionary and collusionary practices. In fact, a market by definition is the product of an enclosure or privatization of a commodity, service and/or profession in the hands of a select few so as to manufacture an artificial demand in order to manufacture a …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / October 21st, 2016
Madison Common Council Alderperson Rebecca Kemble speaks out after her arrest while working as a legal observer during the growing resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
