The Base Heather Stroud
Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism Sean Carleton and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair (Eds)
Wired for Authoritarianism: American Oligarchies and How to Re-Wire America for the People Charles Derber
The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace You–and How to Stop It Garrison Lovely
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Two items of interest have tickled the airwaves and triggered some commentary over the last few days. The first was an ABC Four Corners program covering the fate of refugees in the detention facility on Nauru, known euphemistically as a “processing centre” costing $35.3 million a year to the Australian tax payer.
The Four Corners program was, in turn, informed by a significant Amnesty International report, aptly titled Island of Despair, which was released on Monday night. That report examined the rather ghoulish extent the Australian government, with its Nauru satraps, has been going about the business of “processing” boat …
For one thing, the leaks show prohibitions on requiring foreign companies to employ local workers, says Deborah James, director of International Programs at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Smart hitters and dumb hitters
When I was growing up in Jamaica, Queens, New York, I played hardball in the sandlots with a pitcher who was small in size but more than made up for it with his determination to become a top-notch pitcher and lead-off hitter. It was only when I was about 18 years old (we played together for ten years) that Jesse told me about the techniques he used as a hitter and pitcher. Up until I was 18 we often played against each other so he had to keep his trade secrets to himself. As a lead-off …
This week we bring you a special sedition on the anniversary of one of the most bad-ass and sophisticated revolutionary organizations in the United Snakes… The Black Panther Party.
We kick things off by setting the stage in AmeriKKKa during a time of weekly riots in urban centers in response to police killings of black youth. After the break we look at the brutal repression unleashed on the Panthers by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI program COINTELPRO. We close things up with a special interview with former panthers JoNina Abron-Ervin and Lorenzo Komboa-Ervin about …
During most of the past two decades Washington has aggressively launched military and economic wars against at least nine countries, either directly or through its military aid to regional allies and proxies. US air and ground troops have bombed or invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.
More recently Washington has escalated its global economic war against major economic rivals as well as against weaker countries. The US no longer confines its aggressive impulses to peripheral economic countries in the Middle East, Latin America …
The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee has just issued its report ‘Antisemitism in the UK’ in response to concerns about “an increase in prejudice and violence against Jewish communities” and “an increase in far-right extremist activity”. It was also prompted by allegations of antisemitism in political parties and university campuses.
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The following observations are based on the report’s Conclusions and Recommendations, which is as far as most people will read.
Israel is an ally of the UK Government and is generally regarded as a liberal democracy.
Hardly. It is no friend of the British people. Nor is …
How California Can Save $10 Billion on a $9 Billion Loan
School districts are notoriously short of funding – so short that some California districts have succumbed to Capital Appreciation Bonds that will cost taxpayers as much is 10 to 15 times principal by the time they are paid off. By comparison, California’s Prop. 51, the school bond proposal currently on the ballot, looks like a good deal. It would allow the state to borrow an additional $9 billion for educational purposes by selling general obligation bonds to investors at an assumed interest rate of 5%, with the bonds issued over a five-year period and repaid over 30 years. …
It was a tough week for Romeo Dallaire, Louise Arbour, Gerald Caplan and other liberal Canadian cheerleaders of Africa’s most bloodstained dictator.
Last Tuesday’s Globe and Mail described two secret reports documenting Paul Kagame’s “direct involvement in the 1994 missile attack that killed former president Juvénal Habyarimana, leading to the genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people died.” In other words, the paper is accusing the Rwandan leader widely celebrated for ending the genocidal killings of having unleashed them.
Another front-page story the following day quoted Marie-Rose Habyarimana, who was studying here when her father was assassinated and …
A heroin epidemic is on fire all across America. Heroin deaths shot up from 1,779 in 2001 to 10,574 in 2014 as Afghan opium poppy fields metastasized from 7,600 hectares in 2001 (when the War in Afghanistan began) to 224,000 hectares currently.
The Taliban outlawed opium in Afghanistan in 2000 and within a year it was all but gone, demonstrating that Afghan opium can be eradicated quickly for any administration that chooses to do so. Afghanistan is, by far, the number one source globally of both opium and heroin.
In 2014, 7,554 tons of raw opium were produced worldwide, including 6,400 tons …
Reading the “liberal” press has become a truly Orwellian experience. What was true yesterday is a lie today. What was black today will be white tomorrow. Two reports on today’s front page of the Guardian could easily be savage satire straight from the pages of the novel 1984.
Report one: The Guardian provides supportive coverage of the beginning of a full-throttle assault by Iraqi forces, backed the US and UK, on Mosul to win it back from the jihadists of ISIS – an assault that will inevitably lead to massive casualties and humanitarian suffering among the civilian population.
Report two: The Guardian provides supportive coverage …
Rodrigo Duterte, the outspoken President of the Philippines, has by now most likely joined the concealed, prestigious and permanent hit list of the Empire.
The hit list is very long; it has already been long for several decades. One could easily lose count and get confused: how many personalities have been marked and secretly condemned to death? How many of them actually died?
It reads like a catalogue of illustrious world leaders: from Patrice Lumumba (Zaire), Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Sukarno (Indonesia), Juvénal Habyarimana (Rwanda), Salvador Allende (Chile) to Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Al-Basheer (Sudan) and Fidel Castro (Cuba), to name …
The South Australian Blackout
From the time when energy became a state ambition and the central, almost paranoid platform of security, its messiness became apparent. Energy reserves needed to be controlled; corrupt regimes with access to such resources needed to be placated, or, if not, overthrown and replaced by compliant puppet governments. The world of energy is one governed by invasion, acquisitive brutality and resistance.
Even within countries less susceptible to regime change via energy exploitation, the tendency to politicise the issues surrounding access and acquisition remain. Cleaner, more sustainable options are deemed unpatriotic, draining traditional industries and jobs. The sense that the climate change …
Each Forsaken
The first principle of the rule of law in a constitutional democracy is constitutional supremacy: when in conflict with federal or provincial legislation constitutional legislation is paramount and the other legislation is void.
Most determinatively section 109 of the Constitution Act, 1867, enacts that provincial Crown land remains subject to the Indian interest in such land as remains unceded by the Indians to the Crown, by nation-to-nation treaty.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 is constitutional legislation. It enacts that the Indian Nations live under our “Protection” and may not be “molested or disturbed” in the possession of any land whatsoever that has …
“What did he say?” not merely “When did he say it?”
What was the purpose of this whole thing (the war on Iraq)? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing. (Emphasis, JW)
— Donald Trump on Iraq War, August, 2004, reiterated verbatim, August, 2016.
Obviously I have thought about that a lot in the months since (her October 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq …
Catastrophe and Conflict in Aleppo
Tuesday’s House of Commons debate in Britain was filled with the hollow anguish of impotence, fresh with statements about Russian war criminality tossed about like freshly made blinis. Ever easy to point to, Russian support for a regime which Western powers wish to remove, at the expense of further catastrophe, has accelerated the ruthless disposition of the conflict. Peace talks have died in utero; the agents’ actions lack conviction and they pursue, instead, the moral outrage that only impotence engenders.
Hence the scenes of pent up indignation in the Commons, with members running up flags of desperation against a force …
A document produced last December by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, headed: “UK Non-Humanitarian Aid in Response to The Syria Conflict”, makes interesting reading. The British government, it states, has spent “over £100 million” since 2012, “working closely with a range of actors” to “find a political solution to the conflict and prepare to rebuild the country in the post Assad era.” (Emphasis added.)
“Our efforts … include providing more than £67 million of support to the Syrian opposition.”
One of the “actors” to benefit from hefty chunks of British taxpayers moneys is the Syrian National Coalition whose website …
As Western outrage erupts over the relentless destruction of Aleppo and its people, why is there no similar clamour for a halt to the more prolonged pulverising of Gaza and the continuing slaughter of civilians there?
The UK’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Matthew Rycroft, said the other day: “Russia’s actions in recent weeks have exposed just how hollow Russia’s commitment to the political process is. Today we have seen that commitment for what it really is; a sham….
“I echo the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury who described the destruction of Aleppo as the absolute contempt for the human …
In evaluating Walter Rodney one characteristic stands out. He was a scholar who recognised no distinction between academic concerns and service to society, between science and social commitment. He was concerned about people as well as archives, about the workplace as well as the classroom. He found time to be both a historian and a sensitive social reformer. ((Cited in Winston McGowan, “Walter Rodney the Historian” The Journal of Caribbean History, 39, 2 (2005): 129.))
— International Scientific Committee, UNESCO General History of Africa
Dr. Walter Rodney was a revolutionary intellectual, socialist, Pan-Africanist and organizer who made a significant contribution to the …
The desert town of Agadez in Niger is currently best known as a stop on the people-smuggling route between West Africa and Europe, but it is about to take its place in the geopolitical stage as the American military has announced it will build a drone base on its outskirts. Reportedly costing U.S. taxpayers as much of $100 million, the base is just the latest American play for military supremacy in Africa — Niger is the only country in that volatile region of the continent prepared to risk allowing Washington a base for its MQ-9 Reapers, the …
The word peacekeeping is like the word terrorism: it is meaningless on its own and able to be molded to serve the interests of a political clique. Like Alex P. Schmidt’s description of terrorism in The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, peacekeeping “is usually an instrument for the attempted realization of a political…project that perpetrators lacking mass support are seeking.” ((Schmidt, Alex P., p 39, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, 2011.))
Peacekeepers have never kept the peace in any conflict. On the contrary, peacekeepers themselves have been linked to an increase in violence and human rights abuses, particularly of a …
Normalising the Brutal
There is no getting away from the degradation that is taking place, on colossal scale, in US presidential politics. The sense of two dysfunctional candidates beating each other over the remains of the US republic as it suffers the last paroxysm of what might have been an interesting future are all too evident.
Sunday’s second presidential debate featured the depravity, the collapse, and a sense of oblivion in political debate. It made the bloodied sand of a violent kindergarten pit look respectable. It was a parade of indecency, with Hillary Clinton looking the part as the rag reminder …
(and the Need for Revolution)
The Illegality of the U.S. War on Iraq
One overlooked lesson of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is that international law–even the most fundamental one embodied in Article 2 of the UN Charter prohibiting use of force in international relations–can be violated with impunity, without legal ramifications or sanctions. Even Henry Kissinger–that embodiment of vicious amorality and imperialist aggression–noted in 2002 that the planned invasion would upset the structure of international relations existing since the Treaty of Westphalia 1648. Never mind, it happened anyway.
The U.S.-led assault on Iraq, in a war based entirely on lies–about Iraq’s 9/11 complicity; mobile chemical …
Few people can honestly dispute that Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) is the Queen of Flip-Floppery and that her flip-flop record is lengthy:
The North American Free Trade Agreement, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Cuban embargo, Keystone oil pipeline, sanctuary cities, same-sex marriage, charter schools, and more.
But HRC’s flip-flops on the most extreme form of mass murder — genocide — may be the most disturbing. In her case, it’s the proven genocide of 1.5 million Christian Armenians (as well as Hellenics and Assyrians) committed by Ottoman Turkey from 1915–23.
Evolution of a Flip-Flopper
HRC probably learned genocide flip-floppery as First Lady …
A Mont Order View of the New "Cold War"
With an all-but official declaration of a new “Cold War” on Russia by the United States, the journalistic atmosphere in the US, the EU and the exiting UK has become poisonous. Dissent is hardly permitted. All evils are now assumed to be the work of Moscow until proven otherwise, even by the most liberal of publications.
The US state has successfully pimped every hollow scribbler in the press and every brainless celebrity it can find to promote its foreign policy, word by word. The extent of such control is conspicuous and disturbing already.
Those of us who hold dissident perspectives towards our …
While British Prime Minister, Theresa May, keeps insisting that Brexit pathway will be a smooth, relatively painless process filled without dramatic compromise to lifestyle and outlook, the traders, stockbrokers and wolves of the City have gone about their own business. They, the suggestion goes, knew better, whereas the idiotic Brexiteer ventured to the ballot in total ignorance.
Central to the post-Brexit dark is discussion about the British pound, which has been accorded magical powers to reward, anoint or strip. Reading its fortunes is tantamount to consulting a wizened oracle, though the results are sometimes puzzling.
The last few days have seen the …
Personally, I like Gary Johnson. I got to know him in the 1990s when he was governor of New Mexico. I was working to end the drug war, legalize marijuana and treat hard drugs as a public health, not criminal issue. Johnson came out for marijuana legalization, so I spent some time in New Mexico helping that agenda.
But, the more I got to know him the less I liked his political views. He took money from the private prison industry and proudly supported private prisons. Making prisons into profit centers creates ongoing human rights violations. Prisons should be a function …
The Israeli official narrative regarding its conflict with the Palestinians is deliberately confounded because a muddled up discourse is a convenient one. It allows the narrator to pick and choose half-truths at will in order to create a falsified version of reality.
For instance, this is part of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the United Nations on September 22:
“Ladies and Gentlemen: Israel fights this fateful battle against the forces of militant Islam every day. We keep our borders safe from ISIS, we prevent the smuggling of game-changing weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, we thwart Palestinian terror attacks …
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office through a well-organized, carefully planned operation among the corrupt Brazilian political elite, closely linked to the stock-market, financial institutions and foreign energy companies. This ‘legislative coup d’état ’eliminated the democratically-elected ‘political intermediaries’ and installed a regime directly controlled by the CEOs of leading multi-nationals. The corporate composition of the post-coup regime insured there would be a radical restructuring of the Brazilian economy, with a massive shift from wage support, social spending and public ownership toward profits, a foreign capital take-over of strategic sectors and foreign-domestic elite dominance over the entire economy.
This paper …
What is it with this government and fracking? They seem to be obsessed with drilling; the proven safe and truly renewable wind and solar energies are not for them. They want the earth penetrated by drilling and the injection of high pressure water, laced with a cocktail of nasty chemicals and sand, to frack the hell out of the rocks beneath our beautiful countryside.
All of that is to release fossil fuel, in the form of natural gas (methane). It is true that natural gas, when burned, releases half the CO2 per unit …
I thoroughly recommend the new documentary Amanda Knox to anyone interested in either human nature or the role of the media – which should include most of us. Here is the chance to hear the main protagonists tell their stories. Don’t be put off by the lukewarm reviews. Journalists don’t much like this film because it reveals so much about how journalism works – and it isn’t pretty.
The man feeding the media monster in the Knox case was Giuliano Mignini, the local prosecutor. He shifts uneasily in his chair as he justifies a series of poor decisions that led to …
