Latest articles
America cannot "lead the world" without a valid election
by L'Ordre / August 31st, 2016
When confronted on his alleged foreign interference in the US election by leaking emails discrediting Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Julian Assange rightly pointed out that he doesn’t get a chance to vote in the US election. He should have that chance, he implied, due to his own country of Australia being an involuntary member of the US “alliance”.
This argument is more powerful than the mere quip Assange intended it to be. If America is a democracy, and America believes in its responsibility to “lead the world” as President Obama loves to repeat in his speeches, should it not validate this mandate …
by Paul Larudee / August 31st, 2016
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
— Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna 1:45
If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes US President, she will be the first neoconservative to actually occupy that office. The neoconservatives have been an ascendant force in policymaking since the Reagan administration, and remained (through Vice President Dick Cheney) an unsteady heartbeat from the presidency in the G.W. Bush administration. Now possession of the highest office in the land is within their grasp.
This is important because the neoconservatives are wedded to war, death and destruction. It is the foundation of their policy and it dominates the culture that they …
by John Pilger / August 30th, 2016
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing”, opposed …
by Medea Benjamin / August 30th, 2016
If I told you that Democratic Party lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose brother John Podesta chairs Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is a registered foreign agent on the Saudi government’s payroll, you’d probably think I was a Trump-thumping, conspiratorial nutcase. But it’s true.
The lobby firm created by both Tony and John Podesta in 1988 receives $140,000 a month from the Saudi government, a government that beheads nonviolent dissidents, uses torture to extract forced confessions, doesn’t allow women to drive, and bombs schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods in neighboring Yemen.
The Podesta Group’s March 2016 filing, required under the Foreign Agents …
by William Hawes / August 30th, 2016
The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns
So long, farewell, goodbye
— Modest Mouse, “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine”
We all know that our money will be worthless soon, yes? Our national debt is over 19 trillion and counting, gaining approximately one trillion dollars per year.
Do you know that our government, …
by Nozomi Hayase / August 30th, 2016
With the rigged Democratic presidential nomination behind us, the US election reality show continues. The mass media is creating sensations around what has become a national embarrassment with this contest of the lesser of the two crazies. On the one hand we have Donald Trump, depicted as a quintessential narcissist and on the other, Hillary Clinton who is often portrayed as a sociopath. Hype is created by putting these labels on the candidates, pitting one personality disorder against the other.
This is a corporate sponsored election charade doing business as usual and distracting people from the real power behind …
Political Suicide
by Dan Lieberman / August 30th, 2016
The media battle between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has sidetracked the impact of an unusual congressional campaign and diluted its essential meaning — voter dissatisfaction. In the democratic primary race for Washington’s 7th congressional district, State Senator Pramila Jayapal’s victory relates an important story of this election year — the public favors a new Democratic Party, which is partially guided by the objectives and politics of Senator Bernie Sanders. State Senator Jayapal, founder and executive director of OneAmerica, a pro-immigration advocacy group, was one of the first 2016 congressional candidates to earn an endorsement from …
by Kieran Kelly / August 29th, 2016
Yemen is being destroyed. A US-backed “Saudi Coalition” has been bombing and shelling Yemen for 16 months. The UN puts the civilian death toll at 3700, but (aside from the question of why combatants’ lives apparently only count if they are Western soldiers) this probably vastly under-represents the death toll by both direct violence and by the indirect effects of the war. Most of the country has no reliable access to clean water and people, particularly young children, are dying of disease and deprivation.
On August 22nd, two eminent commentators gave interviews on Yemen. Harper’s magazine editor Andrew Cockburn …
by Denis A. Conroy / August 29th, 2016
Donald Trump, in a speech given in Charlotte on Thursday, August 18, cast himself as the truth teller for forgotten Americans and a champion of those who feel that the best is behind them. He was clearly presenting himself as a guy who fundamentally calls it as he sees it…in contrast to Clinton’s politically correct doublespeak. “I am running to be the vote for every forgotten part of this country that has been waiting and hoping for a better future” he said. “The insiders fighting for the insiders…I am fighting for you” was his pitch.
Putting the cat among the pigeons …
by James Petras / August 28th, 2016
The Financial Times editorial page carries a logo that proclaims: “Without fear and without favour”. Indeed the editors have shown no fear when it comes to… fabricating lies, promoting imperial wars decimating countries and impoverishing millions, whether in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and now Venezuela. The fearless “Lies of Our Times” have been at the forefront forging pretexts for inciting imperial armies to crush independent governments.
Despite its pretentious scribblers and prestigious claims, the FT is seen by the Anglo-American financial class …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 28th, 2016
For as long as women have gone to the beach to try to enjoy themselves, it seems, people have followed them there to pester them about their clothes.
— Selina Cheng, Quartz, August 24, 2016
Revolutions are often sparked by folly driven ideas about regulating human behaviour. Banning the worship of symbols renders them more sacred than not; prohibiting certain items that would otherwise be embraced with general enthusiasm adds unintended zest.
Women have never been allowed much truck when it comes to fashion, even in areas of life where relaxation has been assumed. The beach as a place of relaxation became, in time, …
by Yves Engler / August 27th, 2016
Elizabeth May’s response to Green Party members voting to oppose Canadian support for Israeli colonialism has been wildly anti-democratic. She has not simply disagreed with a majority of members, which could reflect healthy internal processes, but publicly derided the party’s procedures and members’ clearly expressed opinions. After diluting a resolution about revoking the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s charitable status strongly endorsed by members in an online poll, May threatened to resign if the party didn’t organize another vote on a BDS resolution members strongly backed in a pre-convention online poll, convention caucus and full convention vote.
The possibility of the …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 26th, 2016
The loathsome two are moving into full view, mustering weapons and taking aim at each other in a US election campaign that continues to be filled with colourful missives. But the one to lose most is Hillary Clinton, whose nasty appropriation of the high ground of propriety seems more contemptible by the day.
On Thursday, Clinton pushed further into the field of righteous indignation, traducing extremists all over as the bane of politics. Trotting out of her stable of suggestions was the testy problem of race, that permanent malady of US political and cultural history.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, she claimed, …
by Mateo Pimentel / August 26th, 2016
There is a pressing issue in American health care that warrants at least a modicum of airtime from radio talk show pundits—a softheaded lot that continues to spin the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as a textbook failure of state meddling in the marketplace.
Though they do not earnestly care, the free market mouthpieces on talk radio – who shamelessly misinform their listeners about the government’s role in economics – continue to wrongly attribute the turmoil surrounding Obamacare (in states like Arizona and Tennessee) to a much larger failure of government.
It is always the same old story that floods the airwaves: …
Part 4: Saudi Arabia on the American Chessboard
by B.J. Sabri / August 26th, 2016
Uncovering the extent and details of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the U.S. wars against selected Arab and non-Arab states is somewhat complicated, and the reason is shortage of reliable information. Even if such information were available, we may have to sieve through a huge amount of data searching for patterns, relations, and critical values. For instance, how to search for the methods the U.S. employs to enforce Saudi involvement in its plans and polices? What drives the Arab and regional policy (and wars) of the Saudi regime?
We can answer these and other related questions by mixing facts with speculations. But …
by William Boardman / August 26th, 2016
Nuremberg: “a war of aggression … is the supreme international crime”
Waging genocidal war on a defenseless country was never so baldly and honestly put on any agenda for talks among US secretary of state John Kerry, representatives of Saudi Arabia’s dictatorship, and their mutual allies, even though they are all engaged in an endless genocidal war on Yemen. This war is a war of aggression, started by Saudi Arabia in March 2015, with crucial US blessing, participation, personnel, and ordnance. The US has been a willing, guilty partner and enabler in 18 months …
by James Hoover / August 26th, 2016
Isn’t it about time that American corporate leaders who lie, cheat, mislead, and defraud the public be held accountable? Wall Street was the high-water mark of corporate fraud, a fraud that government institutions let happen, hurting millions of investors, consumers, and workers – actually global citizens who trusted the banking industry and the government to keep them safe from common thieves in the financial industries.
Public officials, in effect, made it easy for Wall Street to exploit an unregulated financial system for their own gain. Then when they defrauded and nearly broke the system, government bailed them out and excused their …
by Ramzy Baroud / August 25th, 2016
“You deserve to see your loved ones suffer and die. But, maybe, you would be hurt before them,” was part of a threatening message received by a staff member at ‘Al-Mezan’, a Gaza-based human rights group. The photo attached to the email was of the exterior of the activist’s home. The gist of the message: ‘we are coming for you.’
‘Al-Mezan’, along with three other Palestinian rights groups – ‘Al-Haq’, ‘Al Mezan’, ‘Aldameer’ and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – are actively pushing a case against Israel in the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing it of war crimes …
by Andre Vltchek / August 25th, 2016
If the West in general, and the United States in particular, left the Arab and Muslim world alone and in peace, we would most likely never see all those terrorist attacks, which are rocking the world from Indonesia to France. There would be no Mujahedeen and its mutation into al-Qaida; in Afghanistan or elsewhere. There would be no traces of the ISIS (or ISIL or I.S. or Daesh or however you choose to call it), in Syria, Iraq, Libya or anywhere else.
Part of the Saudi Royal mafia. …
by Yves Engler / August 25th, 2016
Sticks and stone may break my bones, but names will never hurt me — and they may come back to haunt the name-callers.
In finding anti-Semites behind every challenge to Canadian complicity with Israeli colonialism, mainstream Jewish organizations are emptying the term “anti-Semitism” of its historical weight.
“The Green Party of Canada’s vote in favour of the anti-Semitic boycott campaign against Israel shows the party has been infected by a vicious strain of anti-Jewish hate,” said the President of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies Avi Benlolo. In case anyone missed his point the head of the …
but in a "liberal world" we can pine over 109 days before Christmas
by Paul Haeder / August 23rd, 2016
I can’t believe it, but then I can believe it, or I must believe it. These are compliant times, where people in the US workforce are kowtowed and then for years these multiple generations in the workforce have thrown in the towel and been so bullied by the Politically Crap Corrective Collective Group-Think that they are not even human — they can’t even rage against the injustice befalling them. I have both taught and worked alongside people who just believe deep down there’s no sense in fighting the powers that be, and that’s it, too bad, sure, but what can …
by Harvey Lothian / August 23rd, 2016
The world is in bad shape. Every reasonably intelligent, aware, objective person in the world knows, if only intuitively, that something is very, very wrong. There should not be this many armed conflicts, this much anger, this much violence, this much unemployment and underemployment, this much debt, this much homelessness, hunger, poverty, this ever widening gap between the income and wealth of the super rich and everyone else, and this much distrust in government and politicians. The future does not look good; a financial crisis and a socioeconomic collapse are just around the corner. Another World War or innumerable smaller …
by subMedia / August 23rd, 2016
In this sedition we bring you an exclusive interview with prison inmate Melvin Ray, secretly filmed inside Holman Prison in Alabama. Melvin is a member of the Free Alabama Movement, a national organization against mass Incarceration and prison slavery. They have teamed up with the IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, to organize the largest prison strike in history, set to kick off on September 9th. Read more about the actions leading up to the strike at It’s Going Down.
You can listen to our entire interview with Melvin Ray …
A Poetry Review: I Remember My Name
by Hatim Kanaaneh / August 23rd, 2016
In penning this review, the primacy of Israel in North America’s hegemonic cultural circles limits my expectation of a sympathetic Western readership. The recent furor in Israeli government circles over the public broadcasting of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem is only a warning signal. Thugs and war criminals take on the mantel of literary critics to attack Palestine’s national poet and ascribe to him their own internalized fascist values. Judging from experience the malicious smear is bound to gain traction in Zionist-aligned literary circles at home and abroad. Our lead Palestinian politician in Israel, Ayman Odeh, explains well the Israeli officials’ …
by Rick Sterling / August 22nd, 2016
The Syria Propaganda Campaign
Neocons and Clintonites have launched a major campaign with the goal of direct US military intervention and aggression against Syria, potentially leading to war with Iran and Russia. An early indication emerged as soon as it was clear the Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic Party nominee. Following the California primary, the NY Times reported on State Department diplomats issuing an internal memo “urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al Assad.”
In early August Dennis Ross and Andrew Tabler opined in the NY Times about “…
by Medea Benjamin / August 22nd, 2016
Last week, the Pentagon announced the approval of the sale of an additional $1.15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia. The callousness of this announcement – just days after Saudi Arabia rebooted its devastating bombing campaign in Yemen – is breathtaking. The Saudi-led coalition has used American-made fighter jets, bombs and other munitions in a relentless onslaught against Yemen that has left thousands of innocent civilians dead and created a humanitarian crisis that the United Nations characterizes as a “catastrophe.” In just the last few days, the Saudi-led coalition has killed at least 35 people – most of them …
by Shawgi Tell / August 22nd, 2016
Every day, more than a few news items, journal articles, books, and blogs expose a range of scandals, crimes, fraud, and corruption associated with charter schools—schools that barely make up seven percent of the nation’s schools. There are arrests, fugitives, government investigations, embezzlement, lawsuits, lies, mismanagement, Enron-style accounting, shell games, nefarious links between millionaires, legal loopholes of all kinds, little accountability, and rampant arrogance, anticonsciousness, and impunity, making a reckless “Wild West” atmosphere seem civilized, stable, and virtuous in comparison.
The charter school sector has taken all the antisocial, antipublic, and antipeople practices of medieval autocrats and opportunists to new extremes. …
by Paul Craig Roberts / August 22nd, 2016
News services abroad ask me if President Erdogan of Turkey will, as a result of the coup attempt, realign Turkey with Russia. At this time, there is not enough information for me to answer. Speculation in advance of information is not my forte.
Moreover, I do not know if it is true that Moscow warned the President of Turkey of the coup, and I do not know if Washington was behind the coup. Therefore, I do not know how to weigh the scales. As I see it, whether Turkey stays with Washington or realigns with Moscow depends first of all …
by Robert Hunziker / August 21st, 2016
As of August 17th U.S. Naval Research Lab measurements of Arctic sea ice over a 30-day period “shows that the multi-year sea ice has now virtually disappeared.” ((“Storms over Arctic Ocean”, Arctic News, August 19, 2016.)) This means the Arctic has lost its infrastructure. It’s gone.
That means no more 20’-25’ multi-year thick ice, leaving two-dimensional “ice extent” with little thickness and no substantial mass, which charlatans use to prey upon the public’s climate science ignorance by crowing about how far and wide the “ice extent” is during freeze-over so that anthropogenic global warming is made to appear as a hoax. …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / August 21st, 2016
And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
Tis that I may not weep.
— Lord Byron, 1788-1824
Back in “I cannot believe what I am reading” land, the Daily Telegraph reports that the US has warned Syrian Air Force ‘planes flying over Hasakah – capital city of Al-Hasakah Governorate in the far north-east of the country, eighty km south of the Turkish border – “against any new strikes that might endanger its military advisers …”
Said “advisors” are illegally in the country to aid the US-backed Kurdish forces as well as the varying Al-Qaeda spawned, organ eating head choppers who change names …
