Latest articles
by Glen Barry / June 5th, 2016
The global ecological system is collapsing and dying as humanity overruns natural ecosystems and the climate. We are entering an age of unrelenting violence and suffering, prior to biosphere collapse and the end of being, unless dramatic social change based upon a global ecology ethic arises quickly.
Ecosystem loss is biosphere collapse
Humans evolved within a lush and vibrant Eden teaming with life, which until just a few generations ago provided for natural abundance and the prospect of perpetual human existence. We are one of many species utterly dependent …
by Ajamu Nangwaya / June 4th, 2016
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). It is arguably the most revolutionary and impactful organization created by the African-American liberation struggle. There is much that may be learned from the legacy of the BPP in advancing today’s struggle for freedom, justice and a world that is free of capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and racism.
The BPP’s explicit commitment to revolutionary socialism was a notable development, which serves as a contrast to the failure of many current activists and social justice organizations to openly embrace socialism. Well, we are not …
by Sheri Heller / June 4th, 2016
In the aftermath of the Paris massacre I found myself pondering the surreal state of the world and the myriad humanitarian disasters and violations of international law infiltrating the globe. War crimes in Iraq, Gaza, Syria and Libya accompanied by air strikes, bombing raids and regime changes have become routine. The genocide in Yemen, albeit a humanitarian catastrophe, receives little media attention. U.S. led propaganda and harsh sanctions have economically destabilized Venezuela, conceivably as a prelude to invasion. Governmental looting of pensions and savings has begun, devastating retirees and their surviving spouses while corporate moguls earn 380x more than the …
by Dennis Rahkonen / June 4th, 2016
In harsh places around the formerly colonial Third World, where poverty born of foreign exploitation left many millions living wretched lives in unrelenting misery, a reason to believe in better tomorrows inspiringly arose during the first decades of the second half of the 20th Century.
Word spread of a champion from across the sea who, like them, didn’t possess a European skin shade. That champion took on and defeated all comers, doing so while extending solidarity to this planet’s hewers of wood, drawers of water, and the sweatshop workers who toiled for the smallest imaginable remuneration each tiring day.
He defied the …
by Eric Walberg / June 4th, 2016
Why do I find the transgender bathroom debate so irritating? While Obama daily launches drones, killing dozens of innocent foreigners (or militants, it doesn’t matter – both drone deaths are crimes against humanity), we are fed self-righteous nostrums, showing what a great liberal he is (soon to be joined, no doubt, by the Supreme Court).
Dress is mostly unisex now — women wear pants, so what’s the problem? If you must wear make-up and act like a woman, just dress down if you are out in public. In the interests of public courtesy, bite the bullet and use ‘the men’s’ if …
by Rajesh Makwana / June 4th, 2016
For how much longer do we want to witness the annual palaver of these global conferences on poverty and undernutrition, while nothing is done on an adequate scale to help these tragically neglected people? Is it not true that all the millions of dollars spent on organising such recurring high-level summits over several decades could instead have been used to save many such lives already? Meanwhile, we—the minority privileged who take the human rights of Article 25 for granted—continue to overconsume and waste the world’s food and other essential commodities, instead of demanding that our governments redistribute our nation’s surplus …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 4th, 2016
Censoring climate change and its reporting is a big business, notably among fossil fuel obsessives and those in denial. It continues to fulfil a role in the policies of Australia’s Turnbull government. Even after the demise of Tony Abbott last year, his successor continues to scrub his own environmental credentials from his profile. As he does so, an assortment of weasel words have found their way into the political argot: “innovation”, “growth” and a host of other empty treats.
Despite lauding various efforts to pursue “clean energy” (PM Malcolm Turnbull decided to reverse the previous leader’s decision to scrap the Clean …
by Andre Vltchek / June 3rd, 2016
They were marching shoulder-to-shoulder, young and old, in absolute silence. Some were carrying small placards with names and photos of their loved ones, who disappeared four decades ago, during the pro-Western dictatorship here in Uruguay.
The entire center of Montevideo came to a standstill. Blocks and blocks of this marvelous city were literally inundated by the river consisting of human bodies.
Then, in front of the municipality, the silence was broken. A huge screen above the square lit up, and photographs of each man and woman who disappeared, suddenly emerged, one …
by Robert Hunziker / June 3rd, 2016
There have been 21 presidential debates, which, by and large, skirted the biggest issue affecting the most people, back-to-back, back-to-back, and back-to-back, and on and on record-setting planetary heat!
Nowadays, rather than hitting yearly heat records, the planet is hitting monthly heat records (maybe global warming’s accelerating): e.g.:
March was also the 11th consecutive month to set a record high for temperatures, which agencies started tracking in the 1800s. With the release on Tuesday of its global climate report, NOAA is the third independent agency — along with NASA and the Japan Meteorological Association — to reach similar findings, each using slightly …
Part 2 of a 2 Part Series
by Felicity Arbuthnot / June 3rd, 2016
With the publication date of the Chilcot Inquiry into the illegal invasion of Iraq just weeks away (July 6th) reportedly set to “savage” former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair he has made a rare return to the UK and gone in to manic diversionary tactic overdrive.
It seems no radio, television news or current affairs programme is without Blair giving his opinion on the upcoming UK referendum on whether to stay in the European Union, making near libelous comments on the current courteous, dignified, non-warmongering leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn (who was implacably against Blair’s foreign interventions.) He …
The State of the Inland Empire's (and USA's) Health is All Up To Us
by Paul Haeder / June 2nd, 2016
I can’t take a budget that eliminates marketing, outreach and in-person assistors seriously.
— Teresa Mosqueda, member of the Washington State Health Benefit Exchange board.
You can’t afford to get sick, and you can’t depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It’s up to you to protect and maintain your body’s innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live.
— Dr. Andrew Weil, an American physician, author, spokesperson, and sort of guru for holistic health and integrative medicine.
Docs and Nurses Everywhere You Look
I grew up around doctors and nurses, and while my surgeon …
by Gary Brumback / June 2nd, 2016
I was prompted to write this article when a twitter contact of mine wondered whether some of my writings about the corpocracy amounted to a conspiracy theory. Having been a behavioral scientist most of my adult life I know a thing or two about what’s theory and what’s not. I don’t know how anyone, scientist or lay person, could mistake the corpocracy for a theory. I doubt if any readers of articles published in the alternative news media would confuse the two. Nevertheless, I want to tell you what I have learned over the years.
A Tacit Conspiracy, Not a Public …
A few final lies
by Jason Hirthler / June 1st, 2016
The late “rhetorical pugilist” Christopher Hitchens sub-titled his book God Is Not Great with “How Religion Poisons Everything.” He might have added, and perhaps did in his leftist days, that propaganda poisons everything, too. It certainly feels like its ideological signature is everywhere these days. Not least on President Obama’s final tour of Asia, including stops in Vietnam and Japan as highlights of his farewell junket.
Memories of Mayhem
Perhaps no leg of this absurd journey is more disorienting than the stopover in Obama demanding Vietnam make new human rights commitments–the USA telling Vietnam this after committing genocide across Southeast Asia …
A response by the Syria Solidarity Movement®
by Paul Larudee / June 1st, 2016
The short sentence in the illustration contains so many lies. What then of the entire article, attacking the Syria Solidarity Movement® and its members? Here is some deconstruction:
(1) The Syria Solidarity Movement® is not “pro-Assad”. We are pro-Syria and pro-international law. While the violent opposition and their allies say “Assad must go”, we do not say “Assad must stay”. We say “It’s up to the Syrian people.” The US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other countries are trying to dictate who can or cannot be the leader of Syria, …
by James McEnteer / June 1st, 2016
On September 11, 2001, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al, were either negligent about, or complicit in, the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans. There is no third alternative. We require a thorough judicial proceeding to determine which it was. Fifteen years later we still need to know.
Which presidential campaign will promise to find the truth?
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Sharks are attacking humans in unprecedented numbers around the world. What’s pissing them off? Has our wanton pollution of the seas literally come back to bite us?
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Antonin Scalia’s death leaves Justice Clarence Thomas the undisputed …
by Medea Benjamin / June 1st, 2016
Memorial Day weekend was replete with parades, American flags, and tributes to our war dead, but little reflection on war, particularly the tragic fact that the United States has fallen into the death trap that President Eisenhower warned us about: the military-industrial complex.
Instead of defending our nation as the Constitution stipulates, since the 9/11 attacks the U.S. military, CIA, and military contractors have been waging aggressive wars or interfering by proxy in other nations’ internal affairs.
Looking at our national budget, you can see the overwhelming power of the military. The $600 billion price tag, way over $1 billion a day, …
by Joseph Grosso / June 1st, 2016
On April 20th New York’s City Council overwhelming and unsurprisingly approved Mayor de Blasio’s controversial plan for the rezoning of the Brooklyn neighborhood East New York. The final tally was 45-1-0. Unsurprisingly since a month earlier the council had already approved de Blasio’s $41 billion housing plan that aims to create and preserve (a distinction that shouldn’t be glossed over) 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade.
De Blasio’s housing plan, classified under the banner of ‘mandatory inclusionary housing’, targets 15 neighborhoods beginning with East New York, proposes changes in local zoning that would allow developers the right to …
From Tehran to Atlanta, Fighting for Human Rights
by Bill Quigley / June 1st, 2016
Azadeh Shahshahani is a practicing human rights lawyer who has worked for over a decade in the US South. She was the first woman of color to lead the National Lawyers Guild and has been deeply involved in the movements for immigrants’ rights including shutting down the Stewart Detention Center and repealing the discriminatory educational bans affecting undocumented students in Georgia, dignity for Muslim-Americans, a just US foreign policy, and Free Palestine.
Azadeh Shahshahani
Azadeh Shahshahani was born in Tehran, Iran, four days after the 1979 Iranian revolution. …
Part 2 of 2 Part Series: (Brazil, Namibia, Canada, India)
by Eric Walberg / May 31st, 2016
Founded in 1986, the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) is the international NGO that promotes BIG around the world. It held its last conference “Re-democratizing the Economy” at McGill’s Faculty of Law in 2014. A North American congress is being held in Winnipeg in May 2016 and its 16th congress in July in Seoul, South Korea. Its credo is that some sort of economic right based upon citizenship rather than upon one’s relationship to the production process or one’s family status is called for as part of the just solution to social problems in advanced societies.
We are half way there …
by Debbie Metke / May 31st, 2016
Weaving through our never-ending obsession with U.S. politics is a skeletal finger tapping our shoulders, though we nervously whistle past it and avert our eyes. From the UN to NASA, scientists around the world are alarmed by the speed of our environment’s dissolution. Those paying attention have even increasingly been hearing the words “near term human extinction”, brought about by our heat engine civilization as it burns through the atmosphere on our small planet.
Is it too late? Is it a fact that humans can better imagine full-on world death than consider simplifying our lives, living closer to the earth, and …
Part 1 of a 2 Part Series
by Eric Walberg / May 31st, 2016
About 10% of Canadians live in poverty. That figure is even higher in major cities, such as Toronto where the number of children living below the line is nearly 25%. In India, 22% of the people live in poverty. A “guaranteed annual income” (GAI) could wipe out this poverty at a stroke.
GAI (also BIG — basic income guarantee) has been quietly mooted by both left and right since the 1960s. Economist Milton Friedman called it (approvingly) “helicopter money”. What could be easier to administer, to end the most obvious source of social injustice, and which is welcomed even by …
by Ramzy Baroud / May 31st, 2016
Israeli society is constantly swerving to the Right and, by doing so, the country’s entire political paradigm is redefined regularly. Israel is now ‘ruled by the most extreme right wing government in its history’ has grown from being an informed assessment to a dull cliché over the course of only a few years.
In fact, that exact line was used in May 2015, when right wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, formed his thin majority government of like-minded right-wingers, religious zealots and ultra-nationalists. The same sentiment, with almost the exact wording, is being infused again, as Netanyahu has expanded his coalition …
Capitalism in Retrospect and Prospect and Elite Politics Today
by Bruce Lerro / May 31st, 2016
Paddy Chayefsky’s extraordinary movie Network was made 40 years ago in 1976, just as the United States began its long economic descent. It may seem far-fetched to draw inspiration from a movie made about capitalism so long ago and, like any powerful film, some of Chayefsky’s predictions have been realized or even intensified since then, while others have been proven wrong. However, the boldness of the movie is more important than being right in all or even most of its predictions. As one scientist said about Julian Jaynes’ now discredited book, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the …
by James Petras / May 31st, 2016
What does it mean when the US and British financial systems launder hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit funds stolen by world leaders while their governments turn a ‘blind eye’, and yet the very same Anglo-American officials investigate, prosecute, fine and arrest officials from rival governments, rival banks and political leaders for corruption?
What does it mean when the US government expands a world-wide network of nuclear missiles on bases stretching from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Gulf States to Japan, surrounding Russia, Iran and China, while the very …
by Robert Hunziker / May 31st, 2016
Robocop is not only a movie. It’s real life in Chile where grown men, disturbingly silly, dress up in armored uniforms, similar to the movie Robocop (Orion Pictures, 1987) bashing peaceful demonstrations of students wearing blue jeans.
A student demonstration in Chile turned violent
Yes, they beat up and intimidate kids, which is a glaring example of a world gone mad! Ruled by horrifying neoliberal principles of financial domination, controlled by elitist, kicking the daylights out of teenagers. The whole affaire is simply one more example of the …
by Kristin Christman / May 30th, 2016
Josef Beno didn’t want to go to war. A Czech, he didn’t want to kill his fellow Slavs, the Russians. A father, he didn’t want to leave his starving family unprotected.
But the year was 1915 and Austria-Hungary was rounding up men and boys to serve in the war. Those who resisted were shot. After hiding for a year, Josef was captured for conscription. He escaped, only to be captured by Russians and marched to Siberia.
As the story goes, troops received injections by needle to make them aggressive. Perhaps it was merely a tale to explain a father’s changed temper, for …
by Matt Peppe / May 30th, 2016
Two and a half months ago, asked by award-winning playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda about imprisoned Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera – whose only crime, according to Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is “conspiracy to free his people from the shackles of imperial justice” – President Barack Obama told the Hamilton creator that he “had [the case] on his desk.” Miranda, whose parents hail from Puerto Rico, used his invitation to the White House to bring up the issue of López Rivera’s continued incarceration, which is of tremendous importance to Puerto Ricans. Both on the island and in …
The treachery of Tony Blair
by John Andrews / May 29th, 2016
It’s always very difficult having to admit you’re wrong, and the more you believe something is right the harder it is accepting it might be wrong. Tom Paine expressed it beautifully a couple of hundred years ago, as he often did: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.” (( “Common Sense” by Tom Paine – Introduction.))
Many people in the Labour Party have this problem – an inability to accept they’re wrong about the so-called “New Labour” years, because electoral …
by John Pilger / May 29th, 2016
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word …
by Matt Peppe / May 28th, 2016
Barack Obama became the first U.S. President to visit Hiroshima on Friday, more than seven decades after the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a 10,000-pound atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” on the city whose military value was far less than that of Tampa to the United States. More than 70,000 people were instantly killed, and virtually the entire city was flattened. Many survivors would suffer prolonged and unimaginably painful aftereffects of radiation, which would cost at least 100,000 more people their lives. The effects of radiation would harm people for years and decades after the initial explosion.
Obama stood at …
