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The tragedy that is America has deepened with the news that several people on Thursday organized a military-style sniper attack targeting police in Dallas during a protest march and rally against police brutality and killings of black people in that city.

The murder of anybody, whether it’s a police officer or someone who is simply stopped by a cop for a minor traffic violation and is then shot because a jumpy officer mistakes reaching for a wallet to be reaching for a gun, as happened just two days ago in Minnesota, is a dreadful thing.

But it has to be said that, …

Russia and NATO have offensive capacities and MIMACs (Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex) but NATO’s is a much larger potential threat to Russia than the other way around

Why does an alliance with such an overwhelming superiority shout and scream and see ghosts on the horizon when, in reality, there are none?

Why does it seem to be intellectually unable to see things from the side of its opponent? Is the show of strength in reality a sign of weakness?

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A threat consists of two main things: An intention to do something negative to you + a capability to actually carry it through – thus I …

Earlier this year, I predicted that Sunday’s Pride Parade would take the form of a wrestling match between the activist and establishment sides of queerness. With the activist side, represented by Black Lives Matter-Toronto marshaling and others, and the establishment side represented by Justin Trudeau, Toronto Police and the usual orgy of corporate sponsorship under the guise of “social responsibility, I expected that the previous years’ tensions would be heightened.

But I didn’t think that they would shut down the parade.

I’d expected a possible fight for loudness and space. I also expected to encounter the typically odd sight of droves of …

Had American racism occurred in exact reverse, with whites being the victims of slavery, terrible Jim Crow abuses, and the soul-devouring hopelessness of festering ghettos and barren reservations where jobs are rare or nonexistent, wouldn’t many of us have turned to crime or drug dealing to survive?

In fact, in circumstances lacking a racial factor, as in economically devastated Appalachia,  mass dysfunction associated with heroin use has reached epidemic proportions.

So let’s stop using the broad-brush “thug” characterization as a basis for believing that a decades-long pattern of police murders of young blacks is just “those people” getting what they supposedly deserve.

If …

Amid raging corruption, social pathologies and outright political thuggery, a new gang of vassal regimes has taken-over Latin America. The new rulers are strictly recruited as the protégé’s of US financial and banking institutions. Hence the financial press refers to them as the “new managers” – of Wall Street.

The US financial media has once again provided a political cover for the vilest crimes committed by the ‘new managers’ as they launch their offensive against labor and in favor of the foreign and domestic financiers.

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This week we unpack the historic #Brexit vote in the UK, which has sparked a political crisis and generalized a populist anti-immigrant sentiment.

For the musical break, we’ve got Caxton Press, with Broken Dreams.

We then shift our attention to the United Snakes, where the long-standing effects of neoliberalism and disillusionment with the traditional political establishment is leading many down the path of right-wing reaction and conspiracy theories.  We end things off with an interview with anti-racist organizer Brazo, who fills us in on the June 26th clashes in Sacramento between anti-fascist and anti-racist militants, and members of the Traditionalist Workers …

Two major news stories here in the U.S., both chilling, point out how readily U.S. authorities will murder people based on race and the slightest possibility of a threat to those in places of power.

On July 5th Baton Rouge police killed Anton Sterling in a Louisiana parking lot. Sterling was a 37-year-old Black father of five selling CDs outside of a local storege. As captured on widely seen cellphone video, two officers tased him, held him with their hands and knees down on the ground and then shot him multiple times at close range. The officers pulled a gun …

It will be no surprise to readers of this blog that I believe Tony Blair should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for assisting George Bush in attacking Iraq in 2003. The Chilcot inquiry, however compromised its members were by their establishment ties and however cautious they were in their use of language, have very belatedly reached the same conclusion.

If “military action at that time was not a last resort” and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein “posed no imminent threat”, then Bush and Blair launched a war of aggression. And that, according to the definition laid out by the …

The much-edited Chilcot Report finally arrived and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has issued a pretty-sounding apology for his party’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. He called it the most serious foreign policy calamity of the last 60 years and “a stain on our party and country”.

It’s unfortunate that he dignifies the evil Iraq war conspiracy by suggesting it had anything to do with policy of the British people. It was a private venture, pledged in secret, by a Labour prime minister and his closest henchmen, and backed by the Cabinet. Those across the parties who …

Information Clearing House — Bernie Sanders has played all his cards and has nothing to show except for a frustrated generation of populists trying to figure out what they should do. Sanders argued he would fight the Democratic bureaucracy at the convention, but his fight is already over. Last week the Democrats held their Platform Committee meeting in DC, and while Sanders had nominated five great populists and progressives, they were steamrolled by the stacked delegates of the corporatists candidate Hillary Clinton. The results of the meeting received very little corporate media attention in a usual attempt to …

Tactics of minimisation have been central to Hillary Clinton’s political career. When stumbling takes place, go for the established book of deflective rules.  When violations of the law take place, explain that it was normal at the time.  Suggest that others had engaged in a form of conduct only subsequently frowned upon.

Such tactics should be kept in the dustbin of history. For the Clintons, they have consistently worked, giving that particular not so holy family a particularly nasty sense of political entitlement. They remain the ghouls of the US political establishment, paying (or rather withholding) tribute to the dead ideas …

It must have been clear from the very beginning on September 12, 2015, when cheers lifted the roof and people across the land stood up, punched the air and shouted “Yes!” as the results of the Labour Party leadership elections were read out, that Jeremy Corbyn’s victory would be quickly followed by determined efforts to unseat him.  And so it was.

At regular intervals mainstream media kept issuing reports of unhappiness with Corbyn’s leadership among the Labour MPs, said reports always coming from ‘unnamed MPs’.  Everyone else called them the Blairite MPs who were seeing Tony Blair’s precious New Labour disappear.

One …

Shack fires are a constant danger. But that danger becomes more serious in winter. This is because during winter people who are living in shacks are trying to keep warm. As a result people resort to making fires which increases the risk of their homes being burnt. There was a serious fire in the Foreman Road settlement in Durban in the past month leaving hundreds of people destitute. On Sunday five people lost their lives in the fire that burnt down the Plastic View settlement in Pretoria. On the same day another fire broke out in the Kenville settlement in …

Bill Clinton waits in his plane on the Phoenix tarmac for over half an hour until Loretta Lynch lands. He quickly gets off his plane and goes over to Loretta Lynch’s jet. She greets him.

Bill (whispering): Loretta, they may have bugged your plane. Let’s use a simple code. I will call the FBI team working on the indictment, “your grandchildren.” And I will call Hill’s campaign “my second grandchild.”

Loretta nods in agreement and gives him a wink. They enter Lynch’s plane and sit down.

Bill: Nice to see you, Loretta. You certainly have come …

The  tenure of  Margaret Sullivan as Public Editor of the New York Times (NYT) ended on April 16, 2016, with her column “Public Editor No. 5 Is Yesterday’s News.” This followed four years of  challenging work and the 691 columns and blogs she produced in carrying out her role, which she describes as  “spokesperson for readers.” Sullivan was the fifth and best of the paper’s public editors, but there were serious limits to what she did or could do in that position, and she must have known and accepted them in advance. The Times officials who hired her would have …