Latest articles
by Bill Quigley / July 4th, 2016
Voice of the Ex-Offender (VOTE) and 8 individuals filed a class action voting rights challenge for 70,000 people in Louisiana saying they are illegally prohibited from voting. The VOTE suit charges that the Louisiana legislature wrongfully and unconstitutionally passed a law disallowing people convicted of felonies from voting if they are on probation or parole.
VOTE’s suit points out that the Louisiana Constitution only prohibits people who are “under an order of imprisonment” from voting and that this was intended only to prohibit people actually in prison or escapees from voting. The VOTE suit further notes that the …
by Robert Hunziker / July 4th, 2016
Neoliberalism’s mantra of “privatizing everything in sight” and elimination, or cutbacks of governmental programs, a.k.a, austerity, especially public healthcare, is a death warrant for millions, maybe more than millions!
Sure-fire, whenever private interests take control, or cut funding for public welfare programs, similar to what Democratic and Republican neoliberal advocates have consistently advocated ever since the 1980s, all hell breaks lose.
For example, elimination of Glass-Steagall (Clinton administration, 1999) is only one of several examples of cutting a program that protected public interests gone bonkers (in 2007-08.) It only took a little over a decade to come apart at the seams. But, …
by Kenneth Eade / July 4th, 2016
“Perception Management” was pioneered in the 1980’s under the Reagan administration in order to avoid the public opposition to future wars that was seen during the Vietnam War.
The United States Department of Defense defines perception management as:
Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations, security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.
At the …
by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / July 4th, 2016
Last week, Bernie Sanders published an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Democrats Need to Wake Up”. He spoke to the current, “increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite”—the very capitalist system that has utterly failed us, the 99%.
Many of Sanders’ readers likely agreed it is, indeed, deeply troubling that the super-rich should enjoy unthinkable wealth and lux while, at the same time, “billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.”
And many of those sympathetic to the facts at hand likely agreed with the Democratic National …
by Gary Brumback / July 3rd, 2016
I will tell you why I have written this article. I told a friend recently that I was going to give him a copy of my book, America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. “Isn’t war just human nature” he asked? Dear readers, what is your answer? Mine can be found in this article.
Organized Violence: War
I define violence, organized or unorganized, as any violent action causing injury or death. War is a form of organized violence. War, said Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), a Prussian general and military theorist, “is the continuation of politics by other means.” I would define it differently. …
by Ahmed Amr / July 3rd, 2016
James Li has been on the run for eight years. His crime? Forging fake purchase orders to inflate his company’s sales and dumping 93 million worthless shares on the market.
How much did James Li and his partners take in? Over a billion dollars. Where is James Li now? You can find him but you can’t catch him. He was last seen in Taiwan but can’t be extradited and, in any case, the Attorney General never bothered to charge him with forgery.
Bloomberg had this story eight years ago. It was just a bad time to put it on the back page …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / July 3rd, 2016
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
— Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013, The Cure at Troy
In an astonishing revelation, the Daily Telegraph has established that Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague will examine the Chilcot Inquiry Report in to the Iraq invasion – due to be released on Wednesday 6th July: “… for evidence of abuse and torture by British soldiers but have already ruled out putting Tony Blair on trial for war crimes …”
Whilst the Report …
by John Andrews / July 3rd, 2016
How fitting. A hundred years after possibly the most grotesque of Britain’s many military disasters, known as the Battle of the Somme, the long-awaited Chilcot Report into yet another grotesque British military disaster is finally due to be published. Given that the British establishment is not well-known for confessing its many faults, I’m not expecting much.
The single most significant factor that permits these military catastrophes to endlessly recur year after year, decade after decade, is a complicit mainstream press. Far from “holding government to account”, as it often claims as justification for its existence, mainstream news media is used instead …
by Barry Mayhew / July 2nd, 2016
Like many undergraduate students who came from a working class background I went through a stage wherein I adopted many of the values espoused by my “left” leaning professors. I have to admit I was also profoundly influenced by a book titled Sweden: the Middle Way by Marquis Childs that was touted to be the way of the future by many leading intellectuals in the academic world.
I would have described myself as a “capitalist” until I was probably in my 50’s. Around that time I began to question some of the actions, developments and values that began to …
by James Hoover / July 2nd, 2016
A natural progression has arisen 40 years after billionaires laid plans for a cultural revolution, in large part by using fake organizations of philanthropy – replete with tax breaks – to fund it. It was a masterful — even outrageous — plan, to make American taxpayers help finance a campaign against us. Most of their political activities were then and still are written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.” With this bitter irony, I am sure a number of the corporate moguls “laugh their asses off,” to put it crudely.
In the late 1900s, it was Richard Mellon Scaife and later John …
by Ellen Brown / July 2nd, 2016
Brexit could trigger a $500 trillion derivatives meltdown, by forcing the EU to allow insolvent member governments and banks to write down debt. Italy is in financial crisis and is already petitioning for that concession. How to avoid collapse of the massive derivatives house of cards? Alternatives are considered.
Sovereign debt – the debt of national governments – has ballooned from $80 trillion to $100 trillion just since 2008. Squeezed governments have been driven to radical austerity measures, privatizing public assets, slashing public services, and downsizing work forces in a futile attempt to balance national budgets. But the debt overhang just …
A whole lot of armchair politico-ing going on, but it's still a million miles from justice
by Paul Haeder / July 1st, 2016
Daily, the job of a social worker is to inspire, to show the way, pave some sort of less bumpy path, enlighten, mentor, listen to, value, drive, serve, formulate, plan for, seek money with, engender kinship, provide case managing, and reflect upon the lives of some amazingly resilient survivors.
This is not for the faint of heart or weak in the head sort of person who believes in some magical Disney World of One-Day-I-Too-Will-Find-My-Fairy-Godmother story.
I have been working hard on all fronts, including writing my biography, or in my case, sort of a strange anti-memoir/multiple form story about what it is …
Once again European bigotry exposed
by Andre Vltchek / July 1st, 2016
Oh, that poor old United Kingdom! Armies of political commentators based on all continents are now feverishly trying to define to what extent the Brits got fooled, or how severely they will soon get punished for their ‘bold move’.
All over Europe, the neo-Nazis and other right-wingers are celebrating, while most of ‘liberals’ are panic-stricken, running around like a herd of headless chickens, or howling at the moon at night in despair. The Euro-left (as pathetic and bogus as “Euro business class” on domestic European flights) is trying to put the recent referendum into some sort of philosophical perspective, blabbering something …
by Stuart Littlewood / June 30th, 2016
A political beacon is about to be extinguished unless he breaks with the doomed Labour Party and sets up on his own.
Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight
I got the feeling that something ain’t right,
I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.
Yes I’m stuck in the middle with you,
And I’m wondering what it is I should do,
It’s so hard to keep this smile from my face,
Losing control, yeah, I’m all over the …
by Jonathan Cook / June 30th, 2016
This is way beyond a face-palm moment.
Jeremy Corbyn today launched a review into the Labour party’s supposed “anti-semitism crisis” – in fact, a crisis entirely confected by a toxic mix of the right, Israel supporters and the media. I have repeatedly pointed out that misleading claims of anti-semitism (along with much else) are being thrown at Corbyn to discredit him. You can read my criticisms of this campaign and Labour’s response here, here and here.
In his speech, Corbyn made an entirely fair point that Jews should not be blamed for the behaviour of Israel any more than Muslims should …
by James Petras / June 30th, 2016
Over the past fifty plus years, over 125 mass shootings/massacres have occurred within the United States but not one perpetrator has been identified as a trained member of an international Islamist terrorist organization.
A review of the massacres will shed considerable light on the political, cultural and socio-psychological features of US society. The frequent and intensely bloody nature of these mass shootings are a distinctly US phenomenon. The high proportion of fatalities over wounded survivors is a reflection of the availability of high-power weapons in the …
by Steve Church / June 30th, 2016
I’m still trying to figure out how what is called The Left, in the UK and elsewhere, can hold two seemingly contradictory positions in its condemnation of the Brexit. On the one hand, they laudably criticize the neo-liberal agenda of austerity, privatization of public resources, and all the rest of the retrograde policies that have returned Europe (and wherever else 21st century capital has managed to extend its tentacles) to a neo-feudal state. On the other, they criticize the Brexiteers of every political stripe of caving in to some minuscule but megaphoned far Right Wing racist agenda that will somehow …
by Jonathan Cook / June 29th, 2016
This 9-minute video, showing Israeli Jewish MPs’ reaction to a speech by Haneen Zoabi today, offers a very revealing insight into how Israel’s tribal democracy works. And it isn’t pretty.
Even in the British parliament, which is imploding at the moment, it is impossible to imagine scenes like these.
Zoabi made the speech after Israel agreed this week very belatedly to pay compensation to the families of nine humanitarian activists killed by Israeli commandos in 2010 on the Mavi Marmara, as it plied international waters on its way to deliver aid to Gaza. In fact, it would be more accurate to say Israel assassinated the activists, as a way to deter others from following …
by Yves Engler / June 29th, 2016
The campaign to revoke the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s charitable status is growing. In recent weeks it’s gained an important political endorsement, high profile intellectual backing and raised funds for a legal challenge.
Recently, Green Party leader Elizabeth May joined 28 other party members in sponsoring a resolution to the Party’s August convention calling on the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the JNF’s charitable status. The motion describes the JNF’s “discrimination against non-Jews in Israel through its bylaws which prohibit the lease or sale of its lands to non-Jews.” It also criticizes the JNF Canada financed Ayalon Canada …
by Paul Larudee / June 29th, 2016
The survivors of the 1948 massacres in and expulsions from Palestine are everywhere. Scattered to the four corners of the earth, we have only to look in our own communities to find them. Seven million Palestinians live outside Palestine, compared with five million inside. At least half a million live in Chile alone. Why, then, should we bring Palestinians from the refugee camps in Lebanon to tell their stories in North America?
Many have said that we should not. They say that these Palestinians are toxic, that they are hardliners, resistance fighters, fanatics and terrorists, and that there is no benefit …
by Media Lens / June 29th, 2016
The ‘Brexit’ referendum vote, split 52% to 48% in favour of leaving the European Union, has been exploited by the ‘mainstream’ media to launch yet another assault on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. ‘Impartial’ BBC News, directed by former Murdoch editor James Harding, has been one of the worst culprits.
Consider the wave of resignations of Labour shadow ministers which was heavily promoted in advance on the front page of the BBC News website: ‘ “Half” of Labour top team set to resign…the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg understands’. When the Labour resignations started to roll in, Kuenssberg could be heard …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 29th, 2016
Immigration, blood source of the United States, its motor of development, has been rocked by judicial pronouncements of late. The Obama administration had put much stock in reforming the general approach to immigration in 2014, ostensibly employing a wide reading of executive power against the possible deportation. It was always going to be haphazard, merely another periodic panacea in a continuing problem.
On November 20, 2014, the President announced that there would be a unilateral suspension of immigration laws applicable to 4 million of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
The reasons were simple enough, and reflect a …
by John R. Hall / June 28th, 2016
As if by osmosis, Mexican-Spanish is creeping into my daily language. My city of temporary residence is San Miguel de Allende, proudly proclaimed by locals to be “Mexico’s Corazon”. This is Mexico’s heart for at least two reasons. It is as near the geographical center as you can possibly estimate in an odd-shaped country like this, and it was the beating heart of The Mexican War of Independence, finally ending the occupation by the Spanish Empire nearly two centuries ago.
This article was inspired by last night. A long, sleepless night in which this entire neighborhood partied, children laughed and danced in the streets, and then, of course, there were …
An interview with Mohammed Mesbahi: Part I - A just transition through ‘fair shares’
by Adam W. Parsons / June 28th, 2016
It is now almost six months since the Paris climate deal was agreed—the first legally binding commitment on curbing carbon emissions by all 195 United Nations countries. Nearly 170 of these countries have now formally signed the deal, notwithstanding concerns that the UK’s decision to leave the EU may jeopardise its full ratification. But what are the longer term prospects of governments drastically ramping up their mitigation efforts in order to meet the ambitious 1.5°C emissions target and prevent runaway global warming? Can we realistically expect that wealthier industrialised nations, in particular, will embrace the necessity of implementing a fair …
by Aniqa Raihan / June 28th, 2016
Cluster bombs are some of the cruelest available weapons of war, banned in 119 countries and counting. This June, in a close vote of 204-216, the House of Representatives voted against an amendment to stop the sale of US made cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, which uses them to commit grievous human rights violations in Yemen. Now, as the bill moves on to the Senate, one of its major opponents is Democratic Senator Jack Reed, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees. While 164 Democrats in the House voted to stop the sale of …
Part 3: Saudi Arabia on the American Chessboard
by B.J. Sabri / June 28th, 2016
Previously I argued whether Saudi Arabia’s repeated involvements in U.S. interventions and wars stem from free national will or in response to a specific condition. For starters, in Saudi Arabia there is no national will. In Saudi Arabia, the national will is the will of the Al Saud clan. Still, when a major Arab state allies itself with a superpower that committed unspeakable crimes against humanity in almost every Arab country, then something is wrong. This fact alone should compel us to examine the U.S.-Saudi relation for one exceptional reason. As a result of the U.S.-Saudi wars, hundreds of thousands …
by John Andrews / June 28th, 2016
Like almost half British voters I voted “remain” in last week’s EU referendum, so I’m far from delighted with the outcome. But as the capitalists say, every disaster brings with it opportunity, so we must use this chance to call for some desperately-needed changes.
The main issues that were raised during the campaign were about immigration and sovereignty. To properly address the immigration question it’s essential to understand the main causes for it. There are two different but related reasons: Permanent War and Continual Growth.
The overwhelming majority of refugees and asylum seekers flooding Europe today are the direct result of Permanent …
by Yves Engler / June 27th, 2016
Built with public subsidies, a Montréal firm can shift its ‘head office’ to a tax haven and workforce abroad, but Ottawa will continue to use its diplomatic, economic and military might to advance the company’s reactionary international interests.
As part of its coverage of the Panama Papers, the Toronto Star recently reported that Gildan Activewear paid only a 2.8% tax rate on more than $1.3 billion US in declared income the last five years and it’s unclear if any of the apparel company’s measly $38 million in tax was paid in Canada.
After benefiting …
by Jonathan Cook / June 27th, 2016
There are some heads stuck deeply in the sand at the moment. Typical were the dismissive responses to my piece Brexit and the diseased liberal mind. I had focused on one exceptional piece by one Guardian writer, it was claimed.
I chose Zoe Williams’ article because it is fully representative of liberal reaction to Brexit in the British media. I could have cited hundreds of other examples – not least just about everything currently appearing on the BBC.
But Williams and the rest of the media are not making these arguments in a vacuum. After all, much of the Labour shadow cabinet has just resigned and …
by Steve Church / June 27th, 2016
Just to take one, admittedly small sample, this article, like so much of the MSM and their political lackeys, wants us to believe that The Left in the UK (and supposedly in Europe) are shocked!, dumbfounded! that something resembling a democratic process could have exposed its complicity with the neo-liberal agenda that is tearing the world apart.
They’re as busy as bankers (many of whom, I suspect, have done very well) trying to cover their losses in credibility as being bastions against the ravages of their covert allies.
How can a group like Left Unity criticize the Leavers for wanting nothing …
