Latest articles
by William Hawes / July 19th, 2016
Richard Oxman is an educator living in Santa Cruz, California. After talking both on the phone and by email with him the past few months, he has already become a dear friend to me. As someone interested in revolutionary politics, peace, and in providing a livable world for our children, I grew more and more interested as he began to share his plan for social change in his home state, which he calls Transforming our State of California (TOSCA). The following are excerpts from our ongoing (never-ending!) conversations.
William Hawes: Hey Richard, can you start by telling us a little bit …
The Gülen Factor
by Binoy Kampmark / July 19th, 2016
Engaged in his dirty spate of housecleaning under the auspices of protecting the constitution and the Turkish state, President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an continues to insist on one vital scalp in his enterprise.
Thus far, the cleric Fethullah Gülen has eluded Ankara from his abode in Pennsylvania. From his base, something of a global network has been constructed, one discernable through foundations and an assortment of endeavours pursued under the guise of a faith movement. These do not attest to the spirit of a pacifist warrior, averse to revolution. They suggest influence, and the markings of power.
…
by J.B. Gerald / July 19th, 2016
In part, the rapacious ugliness of ISIS is a reflection of the policies which formed it. We flinch at recognizing in ISIS atrocities the embodiment of the cruelty in NATO’s policies, the callousness of Madeleine Albright evaluating the lives of Iraqi children, the swagger and glee of Hilary Clinton at Gaddafi‘s murder, the effects on millions of insisting on regime change in someone else’s country and the Euro-American refusal to accept Syria’s democratically elected president. Assad has been demonized by the corporate/state press and alleged to be responsible for war crimes, as was done to Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, and Gaddafi. …
Scandinavia on the Skids: The Failure of Social Democracy
(Part 2 of a 7 part series on Scandinavia’s “Socialism”)
by Ron Ridenour / July 18th, 2016
This series sprang from discussions I’ve had with several people regarding the Danish/Scandinavian model of social democracy, or socialism as Bernie Sanders contends. Some well intentioned persons view the Nordic Model as a solution to greedy capitalism, while others view its role as a seditious savior of exploitative capitalism. Many Cubans I knew when living there (1988-96) and visiting since see the Nordic Model as a way out for their failing revolution, gone the way of a bureaucratic state. Some Spaniards backing Podemos hope to emulate Scandinavia, whose social democracy is also failing, unbeknownst to many foreign admirers.
I have been …
by Chris Time Steele / July 18th, 2016
Time and Ephelant’s “The New Scum” has been released as the first song from our upcoming album How To Sew Wounds With Words. The album, itself, will be released on July 26, 2016.
Seth Tobocman, a political comic book artist known for his books such as War in the Neighborhood, World War 3, and Disaster and Resistance made the album cover. Seth’s latest book “Len, A Lawyer in History” comes out August 2016.
The album is written like a diary entry confronting issues such as creativity, depression, anti-homeless legislation, inequality, …
by Stuart Littlewood / July 18th, 2016
This should be a joyous time for the UK when efforts turn towards throwing off EU bondage and exploring the sunny uplands of free will and expanded world trade. Unfortunately a big, dark storm-cloud looms over the celebrations…. Scotland’s political ‘élite’ are about to piss on us.
People like me were brought up in the belief that anyone threatening the safety or integrity of the realm would be for the chop – quite literally.
So I watch in amazement as Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Strugeon, dishonestly claims time and again that in the recent EU referendum Scots voted for Scotland to stay …
by Ian Keenan / July 18th, 2016
As general election polls tighten, with a majority of voters disapproving of the Democratic nominee and believing that she should be criminally indicted, the season of columnists blaming a Democratic loss on Green Party supporters has begun. But the question this year is clearer than ever: if you’re trying to win, why nominate Hillary Clinton? Why, when for months Bernie Sanders was running decisively ahead of Hillary in head-to-head polls against Republicans, did an almost unanimous roster of top Democratic legislators, governors, and their compliant media scribes endorse the weaker general election candidate?
The conventional wisdom has said winning meant moving …
by Paul Craig Roberts / July 18th, 2016
Commentators who have learned to distrust official explanations, such as Peter Koenig and Stephen Lendman have raised questions about the Nice attack.
It does seem odd that a lone person driving a large truck can gain access to blocked off areas where French people have assembled to watch the fireworks of Bastille Day. It also seems odd that the event is branded a terrorist one when the alleged perpetrator’s family says that he was not at all religious and had no religious motivation.
We will never know. Once again the alleged perpetrator is dead and conveniently left behind …
by Ralph Nader / July 18th, 2016
Lawlessness, the kind that is considered as factual non-compliance with existing law, is often far more widespread than the studied phenomenon known as compliance.
I am reminded of the long history of this duality by in a 1932 review by Daniel James of The Modern Corporation and Private Property – a famous book by Adolf A Berle, Jr. and Gardiner C. Means that documented the split between ownership (the shareholders) and control (by the corporate executives). He wrote then what is worse now, that “There is a paper government for corporations and there is an actual government. The one is embodied in Constitutional provisions, statutes, charters, by-laws, …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 18th, 2016
He was the kingpin of the whole affair by suggesting it. In December 2015, the US Republican presumptive nominee for President, Donald Trump, came up with that daft suggestion which seems so utterly devoid of informed meaning. Ban Muslims from entering the United States and the phenomenon of terrorism would somehow be abated.
His prepared statement was characteristically dramatic in the manner of reality television, envisaging a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
The recent shootings of US police officers, inflicted by disgruntled former black American soldiers, …
Long-in-the-tooth Aging Hippies, 60-to-70-Somethings Living the Lie About Their Party
by Paul Haeder / July 18th, 2016
I think that it’s morally obscene and spiritually profane to spend $6 billion on an election, $2 billion on a presidential election, and not have any serious discussion—poverty, trade unions being pushed against the wall dealing with stagnating and declining wages when profits are still up and the 1 percent are doing very well, no talk about drones dropping bombs on innocent people. So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse, as the major problems— ecological catastrophe, climate change, global warming. So it’s very sad. I mean, I’m glad there was not a right-wing takeover, but we …
Newly passed Transparency Law compels rights groups to divulge foreign funding in all official statements
by Jonathan Cook / July 18th, 2016
The Israeli government stands accused of waging a campaign of incitement against human rights groups as it tries to hamper efforts by the international community to monitor abuses of Palestinians under occupation.
A so-called Transparency Law, passed by the Israeli parliament last week, compels some two dozen Israeli rights organisations to declare publicly that they receive a majority of their funding from foreign governments.
In future, they will have to divulge such funding – mostly from individual European states or the European Union – every time they appear in the media, issue publicity material, make statements online, and deal with …
by Dan Lieberman / July 17th, 2016
Having candidates for president, whom a majority of the voters apparently reject, demeans faith in democracy, reduces confidence in the political system, and shatters trust in the major Political Parties. In the upcoming presidential election, no matter who wins the public loses. What can be done to repair the damage?
A practical solution for re-invigorating a moribund Democratic Party and renewing faith in a broken political system is to have Hillary Clinton release her delegates and open the convention floor. It is mainly the political capital, invested in her for many years by close associates, that steered Secretary of State Clinton …
by Steve Church / July 16th, 2016
We suspected it was a scam all along. The whole money and debt thing. I mean, how much sense does it make for any government to hand over money creation to a group of private individuals who then lend it back to their own government and earn interest (in other words, do nothing other than collect a kind of rent) on something that, more or less, doesn’t even exist? Dire Straits got it right about the “Money for nothin’ ” thing.
Ellen Brown’s recent piece on DissidentVoice throws around some pretty impressive figures: 500 trillion …
by Ahmed Amr / July 16th, 2016
Let’s start with some stats. The District of Columbia has the densest concentration of lawyers in the world. If you factor in the fact that 88% of lawyers are white and 60% of the capital’s population are minorities, you end up with some really mind warping numbers.
The population of the District is 672,000 (2015 census) and the number of households is slightly over 250,000. With 52,000 lawyers running around – it means that you can find a lawyer by randomly knocking on five doors. If you happen to be looking for a lawyer in Georgetown, a couple of knocks …
by Denis A. Conroy / July 16th, 2016
BREXIT might be what one-hand-clapping sounds like. It might also be the reappearance of concerns relating to, “where have all the flowers gone”, where have all the manufacturing jobs disappeared to, where has all the untaxed wealth stashed itself, where have regulations protecting public interest gone to, or, a falling out of love with the Brussels techno-oligarchs and their boots-on-the-ground Mighty Mouse NATO Military. Most of all, it’s likely to be the sound of suffering humanity scraping itself off the canvas after its initial stoush with the counterrevolutionary protocols of neoconservative privatisation. But best of all, it is a public …
Denmark: SOS Save Our Sovereignty
(Part 1 of a 7 Part Series on Scandinavia's "Socialism")
by Ron Ridenour / July 15th, 2016
I first met Denmark’s last truly Social Democratic Prime Minister, Anker Joergensen, in his state office, unannounced, in late 1980.
Grethe and I had just been married. We had met the year before in Los Angeles where I had been a “participatory journalist”, and activist for social/racial/gender equality and against the Vietnam War. I wanted to start a new life with Grethe in her peaceful, social democratic land.
I took odd jobs and did freelance writing for some Danish media, and for progressive media in the US and England. As such, I often walked from Grethe’s centrally located Copenhagen apartment to Christiansborg. …
by Kim Petersen / July 15th, 2016
But if they incline to peace, you (also) incline to it, and (put your) trust in Allah. Verily, He is the All-Hearer, the All-Knower.
— The Noble Qur’an, Al-Anfal, 8.61
Jihad
The most excellent Jihad is that for the conquest of self.
The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.
– Sayings of the Prophet
Respected writer William Blum understands US hegemony and imperialism on a global scale. In his important book Rogue State, he provided a comprehensive account of US imperialism around the world.
Recently, Blum wrote a trenchant article that compellingly …
You do your your time behind bars and enter a panoply of bars and prison time out here in the normal world
by Paul Haeder / July 15th, 2016
To initiate a war of aggression…, said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Interestingly, working the social worker circuit of assisting the homeless, near homeless, all victims of police brutality, police overreach, judicial overkill, flogged by fines-levies-warrants-garnishments-taxes-fees-debts-interest-PayDay usury, I have to see that Nuremberg Tribunal statement key to what is occurring within the borders of the United States of Assassination.
The gentrification, the displacement, the stop and frisks, the toxins-chemicals-pollutants warfare in …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 15th, 2016
British politics has seen it before: a good deal of political bloodletting in a dramatic Cabinet reshuffle. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan did so on July 13, 1962 in what became known as Britain’s own variant of the much cruder and bloodier German event of 1934.
Similarly, the new Prime Minister Theresa May, was intent on going a bit deeper than the surface after coming to power, removing such old Tory hands as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and replacing him with former foreign secretary Philip Hammond. The ideologically charged Michael Gove, who has made his irreparably damaging …
Israel's apologists would call the BDS campaign "immoral", but the slander is laughably false.
by Stanley Cohen / July 15th, 2016
Israeli think-tank fellow Yossi Klein Halevi, writing recently in the Los Angeles Times, would have American readers believe that the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement is “immoral” and threatens the peace of “the region’s only intact society”, while simultaneously boasting it can’t touch Israel’s health and global economic integration.
Yet his reasoning from “morals” rings hollow, and amounts to little more than the shilling of the professional apologist industry deployed on Israel’s behalf throughout the Western media, in the never-ending defence of the oppressive status quo in Palestine.
Halevi excoriates BDS, disingenuously, for making the Jewish state “the world’s most pressing problem” today, …
by K.J. Noh / July 15th, 2016
A car is stolen. It’s a car that has been in the family for generations: picnics, road trips, weddings, funerals, accidents. There are pictures, memories, indelible life events. There is a huge robbery of the entire house, in the confusion, mayhem, and distraction, the car also disappears.
A few days later, a neighbor turns up with the car. The neighbor claims it’s their car. They say that they bought it–for a single dollar from someone, a Tomas, a well-known car thief, who is arrested. Alternatively, they say they found it on their property, and that …
by Ken Meyercord / July 15th, 2016
It’s ironic that the country most vocal in calling on China to abide by the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the case brought by the Philippines under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) itself refuses to sign on to the convention. Adding to the irony is the fact that the court’s ruling, met by our China-bashers with unconcealed glee, makes it even more unlikely that we will ratify the convention.
While we are not a signatory to the convention, we assert that we support its provisions. Daniel J. Kritenbrink, Senior Director for Asian …
by Zarefah Baroud / July 15th, 2016
In the early morning of July 5th, 37 year-old father of five, Alton Sterling, was shot in both his chest and his back by law enforcement officers outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Following this tragedy, on the night of July 6th, a 32 year-old father, Philando Castile, was brutally slain with 4 to 5 shots by a law enforcement officer outside St. Paul, Minnesota, after being pulled over for a minor traffic violation – a faulty tail-light. Witnessing the murder was his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and his 4-year-old daughter. His daughter attempted to comfort her distressed mother, while …
by John V. Walsh / July 15th, 2016
Norman Solomon betwixt the political sheets with Robert Kagan? How could that be? Has our political world turned upside down?
Driving south to Mountain View in my new home state of California, I tuned into KPFA, the Pacifica outlet in the Bay Area. Norman Solomon, longtime prominent figure in Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and co-founder of “Roots Action” was being interviewed on a program called “Talkies.” Just a few hours earlier Bernie Sanders had endorsed Hillary Clinton, betraying the millions who voted for him (and voted against her) and losing the respect of many millions more.
On air Solomon …
by James Petras / July 14th, 2016
The European Union is controlled by an oligarchy, which dictates socio-economic and political decisions according to the interests of bankers and multi-national business. The central organs of power, the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have systematically imposed austerity programs that have degraded working conditions, welfare programs, and wages and salaries.
EU policies demanding the free immigration of non-unionized workers to compete with native workers have undermined wage and workplace protections, union membership and class solidarity. EU financial policies have enhanced the power of finance capital and eroded public ownership of …
by Mateo Pimentel / July 14th, 2016
Tom approached me in the parking lot and asked if I could spare some change.
“Honestly,” he said, “I just want to get out of the heat for awhile and sit in some air conditioning.”
Anyone caught in the Phoenix summer could relate. By midday, the heat can easily work its way up into “the teens” with temperatures outside exceeding 110 degrees. When Tom said air conditioning was his priority, I knew he meant it.
I had seen from a distance that he was dripping with sweat, starting at the top of his tanned head and working down over …
by Jay Janson / July 14th, 2016
When this writer first heard of the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ he winced. Sounded ignominious, humiliating, undignified, embarrassing, pleading, definitely not noble, not appropriate to repeated murdering of innocent folks and children and other inhuman behavior.
Who the hell thought up such a slogan? Martin Luther King or Malcolm would never have made up such a wimpish slogan. Strikes one as beggarly, deplorable like ‘Hey, Blacks are People Too,’ or ‘Please Stop Killing Black People.’ No, centuries long internationally institutionalized racist crime against humanity deserves a stronger slogan.
Muhammad Ali put …
by Yves Engler / July 14th, 2016
56 years ago today the United Nations launched a peacekeeping force that contributed to one of the worst post-independence imperial crimes in Africa. The Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) delivered a major blow to Congolese aspirations by undermining elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Canada played a significant role in ONUC and Lumumba’s assassination, which should be studied by progressives demanding Ottawa increase its participation in UN “peacekeeping”.
After seven decades of brutal rule, Belgium organized a hasty independence in the hopes of maintaining control over the Congo’s vast natural resources. When Lumumba was elected to pursue a genuine de-colonization, …
by Rick Sterling / July 14th, 2016
Recently I went on a 15 day visit to Russia organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives. The group visited Moscow, the Crimean peninsula, Krasnodar (southern Russia) and St. Petersburg. In each location we met many locals and heard diverse viewpoints. CCI has a long history promoting friendship and trying to overcome false assumptions between citizens of the USA and Russia. The founder Sharon Tennison has focused on making people-people connections including the business community, Rotary clubs, etc.. This delegation was organized because of concern about escalating international tensions and the danger of a drift toward world threatening military …
