Latest articles
by Paul Haeder / April 1st, 2017
People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.
? Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report, 1972, Basic Books
I write a lot about the punishment society, which is the hallmark of American capitalism, both conceptually and in practice. It bears repeating and repeating – ironically the punishers of late are also Zio-Cons, and we get ad nauseam the Jewish holocaust, the Jewish Reparations, the Single Moment in Eradication, but god forbid that we have common sense history about the destruction …
by Graham Peebles / March 31st, 2017
It is the one great certainty in life – the shared inevitability for all humanity, and yet death and dying is rarely discussed. In the west and Christian countries more broadly it’s largely feared, pushed away until the body falls into fragility, the urge to rest becomes overwhelming and we’re no longer bothered. Then death becomes a blessing, a ‘merciful release’ as a dear friend use to say.
Loss and Grief
There has recently been a death in the family. She had been ill with secondary lung cancer for over five years. It was said to be terminal and so it proved. …
by Jonathan Cook / March 31st, 2017
The ongoing Ken Livingstone (“Get Corbyn!”) saga grows yet more preposterous. After outrage that the former London mayor had said Hitler was a Zionist (when he clearly hadn’t, as I pointed out at the time here and here), Labour suspended Livingstone amid accusations that he had made anti-semitic, offensive and false historical claims.
Now as Livingstone fights to avoid expulsion before a closed hearing of the party’s national constitutional committee, it emerges that Labour’s general secretary, Iain McNicol, has written to Livingstone saying that the hearing is not interested in the historical accuracy of his statements or whether what …
by David Macaray / March 30th, 2017
Oddly, with Trump having come out against non-Anglo Saxons, Muslims, immigrants, people on welfare, foreign aid, government support of the Arts, environmentalists, ACA, media, civil rights groups, anti-nuke protesters, Meryl Streep, the progressive income tax, and Thomas Friedman, the neoliberals’ performing flea, he hasn’t attacked one of the Republicans’ favorite and time-worn whipping boys: organized labor.
Unless I missed it (while campaigning for Jill Stein), other than a couple of backhanded swipes at the AFL-CIO, an almost pitifully inviting punching bag, Trump has refrained from showering his crude invectives on America’s unions. And given Trump’s proclivity for indulging in the “blame …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 30th, 2017
The attack outside and inside London’s Westminster Parliament just before 4 pm local time on Wednesday 22nd March resulted in five deaths, including the assailant and forty injured. The confirmed British-born attacker, Adrian Elms – but with a number of alias’ including the much quoted Khalid Masood – drove a grey Hyundai SUV over Westminster Bridge, which spans the River Thames as it flows past Parliament, mounting the pavement and mowing down pedestrians crossing the great span, with it’s panoramic city views.
Some forty people were injured, twenty nine treated in hospital, with seven initially in a critical condition. Speaking in …
by John R. Hall / March 30th, 2017
I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.
— Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara
A birth certificate from somewhere between the beast’s belly and its beating heartland condemns me to the dubious distinction of being among the privileged 5% of humans who claim United States Citizenship. A population which demands the right to consume 25% of earth’s resources while billions of our fellow-humans go hungry. A shame it was wasted on me, for I’ve never been one to make my country proud. Basically, I’ve always …
Why Israel Detained Omar Barghouti
by Ramzy Baroud / March 29th, 2017
The Israeli state has violated international law more than any other country, yet has rarely, if ever, been held accountable for crimes and misconduct.
Israel’s successful public relation campaigns through the ever-willing western media partners, coupled with the relentless work and pressure carried out by its powerful backers in Washington DC, London, Paris and elsewhere, has borne stupendous results.
For a while, it seemed that Israel was capable of maintaining its occupation and denying Palestinians their rights indefinitely, while promoting itself as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’.
Those who dared challenge that skewed paradigm through resistance in Palestine …
by Jason Holland / March 29th, 2017
There is no political grey area. There is only feigned pragmatism. Wet noodle-ism.
The grey, the political middle in the American constituency, or what is considered moderate positions, has long been equivocating endorsers of the status quo. In today’s world these are corporate democrats, the Hillary voters who are still buying her shtick, the Republicans who are debating going to the left because Trump is a step too far even though he represents exactly what Republicans have been endorsing for years, and lastly the people still sincerely standing for the national anthem but aware America might just have some problems.
This is …
by Yves Engler / March 29th, 2017
We love our tales about how “Canada” offered sanctuary to US slaves for decades, but the unabridged version is it sustained African bondage for much longer.
In a recent Rabble.ca story titled “Canada’s earliest immigration policies made it a safe haven for escaped slaves”, Penney Kome ignores the fact that Africans were held in bondage here for 200 years and that the Atlantic provinces had important ties to the Caribbean plantation economies.
According to Kome, Canada’s relationship to slavery consisted of the oft-discussed Underground Railway that brought Africans in bondage north to freedom. But, she ignores the southbound “underground railroad” …
by Margaret Flowers / March 28th, 2017
This has been a tumultuous week for healthcare reform. First there was the pleasantly quick defeat of the American Health Care Act in the House of Representatives Friday afternoon. Then, that evening, Senator Sanders spoke at a town hall in Vermont with Senator Pat Leahy and Representative Peter Welch where he announced that he would introduce a Medicare for All bill. Medicare for All and Bernie supporters lit up social media with their excitement over the announcement. This should have been great news, but it wasn’t exactly.
Over the weekend, more information was revealed in a series of …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 28th, 2017
If the building starts to break up, protect yourself w[sic] mattresses, rugs etc under strong table or hold onto solid fixture.
— Queensland Ambulance, Twitter, March 28, 2017
Townsville, North Queensland — The eerie sense that something is about to happen, with unsolicited fulsome vicious force was hard to avoid. There is a pregnant sense in the air, the pre-moisture in the winds that tease the leaves, caress the branches with harshness, the palm leaves bending painfully in worship before a divine storm.
Whilst sultry, the air is dry enough to suggest that the cyclone is short of breath, free of moisture. No …
Regarding the McLaren Report and the Politicization of Doping in Sports
by Rick Sterling / March 27th, 2017
Russian track and field athletes, plus the entire Paralympics team, were banned from the Rio Games last summer. This was based on the first McLaren report commissioned by the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA).
The second McLaren Report was published in December 2016 and immediately accepted by the western media and political establishment as “proof” of the accusations about institutional corruption and doping conspiracy in Russia.
The following “open letter” is a critical review of the second McLaren Report and accusations of ‘state sponsored doping’ in Russia which have been promoted in the West.
*****
To: WADA President Sir Craig Reedie …
by Alex Anfruns / March 27th, 2017
Would the universal basic income (or universal allowance) be the miracle reform that reduces social inequalities and relieves millions of people from the threat of poverty? Both the right and left find things to like about the idea. Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon made the universal basic income a flagship proposal for his program for the upcoming presidential elections. Manuel Valls (ex-Prime Minister) and Marine Le Pen (extreme right and National Front candidate) are also in favor. Surprising? To better understand what the stakes of this apparently progressive proposal …
by Douglas Valentine / March 27th, 2017
The deceptive nature of the concept of a “deep state”; the state is knowable if enough time is spent studying it; 70 years of fake news; Central Intelligence operates illegally and unaccountably; how the CIA has corrupted the system; egregious crimes committed by Central Intelligence globally; did CIA initiate an intelligence coup against an elected president?; does the President of the United States run the CIA, or does the CIA run the President?; the Phoenix Program as a bureaucratic and structural model for Central Intelligence and Homeland Security; organizational …
by David Macaray / March 27th, 2017
On March 24, after two weeks of frustrating contract talks, negotiators for the WGA (Writers Guild of America) notified the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) that, because the talks were stalled, they had no choice but to ask their 12,000 members to give them strike authorization. It was a bold move.
As sparklingly glamorous and self-absorbed as Hollywood’s entertainment business is, when it comes to contract negotiations between the AMPTP and the WGA (or the DGA or SAG-AFTRA), they’re depressingly similar to those between, say, a group of pipefitters and welders and the IAM (International Association of Machinists).
The …
by Robert Hunziker / March 27th, 2017
Never before in the history of the human species has climate set so many spine-chilling new records as last year, 2016. That dire assessment comes via analysis of the World Meteorological Organization’s (“WMO”) annual report dated March 21, 2017, prompting a thought: Does a wildly out of control climate threaten lifestyle and/or life as we know it?
The answer is a resounding yes it does! It’s just a matter of time.
Still, nobody knows for certain, meaning 100%, whether an out of control climate is truly life-threatening or not (it is a new experience, so nobody knows what to expect), but on …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 26th, 2017
A strong tone of temperance has characterised discussions about Australian cricket of late. The tone got somewhat more excited with the announcement that Cricket Australia, after two decades, would end its relationship with Carlton and United Breweries, producer of Victoria Bitter.
A veritable whoop of delight could be noted through medical and activist circles: a chance to get a new sponsor, perhaps? An opportunity to get on the puritan water wagon? The Royal Australasian College of Physicians president Catherine Yelland was one of the gloomier preachers insisting that Cricket Australia do right by health and morality. “It is well and …
by James Petras / March 25th, 2017
The cross border flood of millions of immigrants provokes profound political divisions, violence and the rise of mass movements challenging the unity of the European Union (EU) and the survival of the dominant political parties in the US and Europe.
Both the progressive pro-immigrant and right-wing anti-immigration parties and movements propose easy answers and attack their adversaries with political invective.
Both left and right engage in a losing war, based on historical omissions, abstract and muddle-headed assumptions and …
by Andre Vltchek / March 23rd, 2017
I was recently told by an Asian friend of mine who is working in Paris:
Lately I stopped following almost all that is happening politically in the United States, in the UK and even here in France. It all feels suddenly so irrelevant, a waste of time.
Statements like this would be unimaginable only one decade ago. In the past, what came from Washington and (to a smaller extent) from London was monitored with great attentiveness and fear all over the world.
But all of a sudden, things have begun to change, rapidly. Despite the extremely violent nature of the Western-designed-and-manufactured global regime, …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 23rd, 2017
When Terry Holdbrooks Jr., converted to Islam in 2003, he was inundated with death threats and labeled a ‘race traitor.’
If a religious conversion ever deserves to be admired, Holdbrooks’ conversion does, and not because Islam has ‘won’ yet another convert, but because the new convert was assigned the very rule of subjugating his Muslim prisoners.
Yes, Terry Holdbrooks was a US army employee entrusted with guarding Guantanamo detainees.
The Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo, held for years and tortured without due process and in violation of the most basic tenants of human rights and international law, mostly subsisted on faith.
I had …
by James Petras / March 23rd, 2017
Introduction
From their dismal swamps, US academic and financial journal editorialists, the mass media and contemporary ‘Asia experts’, Western progressive and conservative politicians croak in unison about China’s environmental and impending collapse.
They have variably proclaimed (1) China’s economy is in decline; (2) the debt is overwhelming; a Chinese real estate bubble is ready to burst; (3) the country is rife with corruption and poisoned with pollution; and (4) Chinese workers are staging paralyzing strikes and protests amid growing repression – the result of exploitation and sharp class inequality. The financial frogs croak about China as an imminent military threat to the …
by Ajamu Nangwaya / March 23rd, 2017
March 21 was the 57th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre that was carried out by the South African apartheid regime against protesting Africans in 1960. This protest was organized by the liberation organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). It targeted the pass law of the settler-colonial regime that regulated the movement and residential pattern of the indigenous Africans. International opinion was so outraged by the murderous behaviour of the apartheid system that the United Nations’ General Assembly was inspired to declare March 21 the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (IDERD).
Whenever we …
by Yves Engler / March 23rd, 2017
Today the lives of over 10 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk due to a drought at least partly caused by climate change. A study by Britain’s Met Office concluded that human-induced climate disturbances sparked a famine in Somalia in 2011 in which over 50,000 died. For its part, the Climate Vulnerability Monitor estimated in 2012 that climate change was responsible for some 400,000 deaths per year, a number expected to hit one million by 2030.
To mitigate this downward spiral radical action is needed. Instead, here is what Justin Trudeau told oil …
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 22nd, 2017
March 20, 2017: Listening today to the broadcast of testimony by FBI Director Comey and National Security Agency Director Admiral Michael Rogers before the House Intelligence Committee (an oxymoron) made it clear that the Democrats, Comey, and Rogers intend conflict with Russia.
The Republicans, for the most part, were interested to know how security leaks targeted at Trump Republicans came from meetings at which only the CIA Director, NSA Director, and FBI director were present. Of course, they did not get an answer, which shows how powerless congressional oversight committees are. Comey repeatedly said that he could not tell the committee …
Review of David Macaray's book, How to Win Friends and Avoid Sacred Cows: Weird Adventures in India Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims - When the Peace Corps was New
by Kitty Thuermer / March 22nd, 2017
Every Peace Corps Volunteer has a near-death story. For David Macaray, supplementing his diet of curry and rice with a ball of opium did the trick.
But not to worry. Had he died, he wrote, “Our mothers and fathers would have received the obligatory telegram from the State Department: ‘Dear Parent: [stop] Your son ate opium, passed out, and set house on fire. [stop] He is deceased. [stop] Details to follow.”
Fifty years later, one wonders if Macaray, in a fit of nostalgia, ingested a bit of opium while organizing this sometimes heartbreaking but mostly hilarious book. Because it’s not really a …
by Gary Brumback / March 22nd, 2017
A dear lawyer friend of mine for nearly 60 years recently posted a Facebook comment lamenting President Trump’s new, tightened immigration policy, saying that “immigration made America great.” My wife and I will be visiting him and his wife not long after this essay is published. It is, in effect, a long response to his lament, but I am leaving out here any elaboration on what I will also say to him, “Jim, face it, America has never been great.”
The land yet named “America,” after first being set afoot by voluntary immigrants thousands of years earlier, was subsequently touched for …
This is What Democracy Looks Like
by Keith Harmon Snow / March 22nd, 2017
The United States and its allies have embarked on a dangerous path of aggression against the government of North Korea and its allies China and Russia.
As usual, the western propaganda system presents a near unified front showing how horrible and atrocious the North Korean government is purported to be, and how murderous and ruthless and amoral their intentions are purported to be, and how their military objectives and missile programs — now allegedly targeting the “free” world–are out to dominate the rest of the world, starting with their deadly missiles being launched against the United States and our ally Japan. …
'Just The Facts, Ma'am'
by Media Lens / March 21st, 2017
So what is objective, impartial journalism?
The standard view was offered in 2001 by the BBC’s then political editor, Andrew Marr:
When I joined the BBC, my Organs of Opinion were formally removed. ((Marr, The Independent, January 13, 2001.))
And by Nick Robinson describing his role as ITN political editor during the Iraq war:
It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do.’ ((Robinson, ‘”Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor, The Times, July 16, 2004.))
‘Just the facts, …
Part 2 of a 2-part series
by Ricardo Vaz / March 21st, 2017
Mural at the Communist Party headquarters in Lisbon
The European Union is in turmoil. Years of crisis and brutal austerity have had terrible social consequences, especially in peripheral countries. In Portugal a change of government after the 2015 legislative elections brought an end to the previous troika-imposed austerity and even a reversal of some policies. But structural problems persist due to the nature of the EU and its mechanisms, particularly the single currency. To discuss the political situation in Portugal, the consequences of entering the single market and …
by Kathy Kelly / March 20th, 2017
This week at the Voices for Creative Nonviolence office in Chicago, my colleague Sabia Rigby prepared a presentation for a local high school. She’ll team up with a young friend of ours, himself a refugee from Iraq, to talk about refugee crises driven by war. Sabia recently returned from Kabul where she helped document the young Afghan Peace Volunteers’ efforts to help bring warmth, food and education to internally displaced families living in makeshift camps, having fled the Afghan War when it raged near their former homes.
Last year Sabia had been visiting with refugees in “the Calais Jungle,” who …
