Today the Guardian offers decisive confirmation that it is only too willing to serve as an establishment mouthpiece. It proudly announces that it is the venue selected by Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain’s FBI, to receive the agency’s first-ever newspaper interview.
If the Guardian were a proper independent newspaper, it would regard this interview as a stain. Instead it bills it as a front-page “exclusive”. Exclusively, the Guardian has been given the chance to regurgitate MI5’s propaganda – propaganda designed to help stoke a new Cold War with Russia.
In fact, this is not an “interview” as the Guardian claims, …
November 2 marks the centenary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which began the still-ongoing colonisation of Palestine and sowed the seeds of an endless nightmare for the Palestinian people, both those who were forced to flee at gunpoint and those who have managed to remain in the shredded remains of their homeland under Israel’s brutal military occupation.
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A movement called the Balfour Declaration Centenary Campaign is urging action and wants an apology.
“We call on the international community and all peace and justice loving people to join the campaign to call on the Government and Parliament of the …
The anarchist political observer Noam Chomsky has over the years espoused a strategy of voting for the Democrat in swing states. Recently Chomsky, with John Halle, propounded “An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting).”
Chomsky questions the ethical/moral principle rejecting LEV since lesser evil voting is designed to minimize evil. As futile as lesser evilism is, it is also futile to discuss there being a lesser evilism between the two utterly dominant rightist political parties in the United States. LEV, in fact, is an …
It is literally impossible for the world community to get a clear understanding of, and truth about, the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This statement is based upon the Feature article in Columbia Journalism Review (“CJR”) dated October 25, 2016 entitled: “Sinking a Bold Foray Into Watchdog Journalism in Japan” by Martin Fackler.
The scandalous subject matter of the article is frightening to its core. Essentially, it paints a picture of upending and abolishing a 3-year attempt by one of Japan’s oldest and most liberal/intellectual newspapers, The Asahi Shimbun (circ. 6.6 mln) in its effort of “watchdog journalism” of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. …
In its 10 years of existence, WikiLeaks has been at the center of controversy. Ever since its global debut with the 2010 Apache helicopter gun-sight video depicting the killing of civilians in Baghdad, the whistleblowing site has consistently exposed the naked power of empire for the world to see. As a result, the organization has been subject to relentless retaliation. With banking blockades, a secret grand jury and constant character assassination of its founder Julian Assange, who remains arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian embassy, the U.S. government’s efforts to divert public attention from evidence of its own crimes have quickly …
Mysticism does not necessarily lead to despotism, but many despots frequent mystics: to obtain a psychic safety net for high wire acts of political violence, to prescribe emotional narcotics to put the conscience to sleep, and in the final act, as karmic adjusters to insure against retribution from the bloodshed and suffering they unleash.
The Italians under Mussolini grew their own fascist mysticism, the Nazis were mired in occult symbolism, rituals, and mythology, and the Showa Era Japanese Empire, and Shinzo Abe’s current gang of unreconstructed, revisionist, ultra-nationalist militarists are also mystical and religious fundamentalists to a one.
On his return from attempting to stop the terrible slaughter of Rwandans there was no official to welcome home Canada’s General Romeo Dallaire. In his recent memoir, Waiting For First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD, ((“Inside Roméo Dallaire’s brutally revealing new memoir,” Brian Bethune, October 21, 2016, Maclean’s.)) Dallaire reveals that his return also began a pattern of suicide attempts, blamed on PTSD, perhaps survivor’s guilt, but which these years later might be traced more accurately to his reluctance to understand that the people who sent him to Rwanda did not care for humanity. ((My “The ‘Third …
I would never vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and therefore have no dog in this fight. That said, I am an interested spectator, and clearly see that Ms. Clinton is playing a very dangerous game by using the Russians as an election issue and blaming them for everything. When asked about her leaked e-mails in the last debate, she skillfully avoided the damaging content of the e-mails, and turned the table on the Russians, claiming they are the danger. She argued we should all be alarmed at the attempt by Russia to manipulate our election, a charge …
Next week the Fraser Institute’s newly established Peter Munk Centre for Free Enterprise will offer a day long “Introduction to Economic Reasoning” seminar for Grade 10-12 students in Scarborough. Launched in June with $5 million from the founder of Barrick Gold, the Centre for Free Enterprise cements Munk’s position as leading contributor to right-wing ideas. But, the ideologue’s biggest contribution has been to a venerable public institution.
The Munk School of Global Affairs reveals much about the state of foreign-policy debate in this country. Among 35 million Canadians, the University of Toronto would be hard pressed to find a less credible …
The boat, along with other means of travel, is often undertaken as a matter of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt, such movement altogether.
Since the last decade, extreme measures have been implemented that effectively qualify Australian sovereignty while singling out a particular breed of asylum seeker. The former aspect of that policy was specifically undertaken to excise the entire mainland from being qualified as territorially valid to arrive in.
The entire policy effectively assumed a military character, …
Better watch out, Vlad. When Western propaganda throws an “-ism” at you, the gloves have come off. Think Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, communism, socialism, extremism and “Islamic” terrorism, for starters. After all, behind the Great Western Firewall, they are all the same thing, right?
A recent cover and main article in the Economist, pictured left, reminds me of just how hyperbolic and ideological is the West’s propaganda against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While maybe good polemical fodder as a cartoon on the editorial page, the fact that this demonic caricature merits …
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 …
