Latest articles
by Edward S. Herman / February 27th, 2016
Diana Johnstone recently published a very good book on Hillary Clinton entitled Queen of Chaos (Counterpunch Books, 2015). Johnstone justifies the title through her convincing critical examination of Clinton’s performance as Secretary of State as well as her broader record of opinions and actions. But Clinton served under President Barack Obama, and the policies which she pushed while in office were of necessity approved by her superior, who worked with her in “a credible partnership”. ((Mark Landler and Helene Cooper, “From Bitter Campaign to Strong Alliance,” New York Times, March 19, 2010.))
And after Mrs. Clinton’s exit from office Mr. Obama …
by Nauman Sadiq / February 27th, 2016
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to April 2013, Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front were a single organization that chose the banner of “Jabhat al Nusra.” Although, the current Al-Nusra Front is led by Abu Mohammad al Julani but he was appointed as the Emir of Al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, in January 2012. The current Al-Nusra Front is only a splinter group of Islamic State which split away from its parent organization in April 2013 over a dispute between the leaders of two organizations. Al Qaeda Central’s …
by Richard Hugus / February 27th, 2016
There is an interesting kind of inversion in Zionist propaganda whereby the thing the Zionist accuses his enemy of doing, he is doing himself. Sometimes it is called projection, but in this case it is not a psychological flaw; it is done consciously for the purpose of deceit. So another word seems appropriate. Here is a case in point.
On February 22, 2016 a group called Americans for Peace and Tolerance held a news conference at the State House in Providence, in which they urged Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo to take back an offer she made last November welcoming Syrian …
by Joseph Grosso / February 27th, 2016
Spend any time within the tedious realm of New York punditry and one is bound to come across the phrase ‘the bad old days’. Though endemic in discourse for two decades the phrase has been even more bandied about since the election of the ostensibly progressive mayor Bill de Blasio two years ago. Indeed the words have become so common it’s not always clear to what days the chorus is referring. Their usefulness depends on their fluidity.
One reference would be to the high crime years of the early 1990s crack epidemic. The reasons …
by Voices for Creative Nonviolence / February 27th, 2016
Camp Douglas, WI — On February 23rd, two peace activists with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Brian Terrell and Kathy Kelly, were arrested when they attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to drone operators at Volk Field, an Air National Guard Base in Wisconsin, which trains pilots to operate Shadow Drones over other countries. Voices activists have lived alongside ordinary people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Gaza. People who can’t flee from drone surveillance and attacks have good reason to fear people from the U.S., but instead they have broken bread with Kelly and Terrell and have welcomed …
The Reawakening of Tribal Consciousness
by William Hawes / February 27th, 2016
When we learn to come together we are whole
when we learn to recognize the enemy
we will know what we need to know
to learn to come together
to learn to weave and mend.
— Anne Cameron, Daughters of Copper Woman
I am the guardian of life
and death
all my children come back to me
I call you
conjure you
hide you in my breast
you nourish me with your bones
and live again.
I am your Mother Earth
your dark Mother Earth.
If you insist on destroying me
you will destroy yourselves.
Wake up
my children
listen to my cry.
— Claribel Alegría, “Gaia’s Cry”
Recent world events are playing out a drama unseen since the mid-17th century. When …
by Eric Walberg / February 27th, 2016
Just a few months into his reign, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finds himself embroiled in Middle East politics. New to the heady world of governance, he jumped into the Syrian refugee crisis with a generous offer of asylum for 25,000 victims of the civil war, to praise from all except a few malcontents at home pepper spraying some refugees in protest. But more serious protests have arisen over two other government policies — the $15 billion sale of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, and government attempts to quash …
by Robert Hunziker / February 26th, 2016
March 11th is the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Japan’s NHK broadcaster recently conducted a poll of how citizens feel about nuclear power. According to NHK’s poll results, over 70% are in favor of completely or partially abandoning nuclear power plants. Nothing too surprising about that, but on the other side of the spectrum, the Abe administration is pushing real hard to re-open closed nuclear power plants. In fact, some are already splitting atoms like crazy.
Here’s what the March 1st 2016 issue of Scientific American says about the prospects for Fukushima/TEPCO on its 5th anniversary: “Today the disaster …
by Ralph Nader / February 26th, 2016
Deadly invisible pathogens are on the march. Ebola, and now the Zika virus, the ongoing cholera epidemics and the enormous casualties from tuberculosis, malaria and varieties of avian Influenza—all of these should be waking us up to the global spread of disease and the public health challenges when it comes to dealing with mutational virulence. Millions die every year. But the political leaders of nations don’t seem to respect the warnings from our scientists. Pandemic, the important book by Sonia Shah, is a jeremiad, and should spark policy makers’ public concern. Unfortunately, basketball and March Madness occupy more public attention …
Neo-tribalism or old tribes can be the only way to saving the world, us, before consumption by the way of Ouroboros
by Paul Haeder / February 26th, 2016
Charles Manson is Donald Trump is Donald Sterling is . . .
Helter skelter, the street is an open wound. Those All-American cul-de-sac suburbs full of $9.99 empties of Cabernet and tasty flavored vodka endgames, spun out and 9 to 5 consumed. Separate those recyclables, rule-following white folk, that $99 a month for garbage pick-up, private shysters dumping those green bins in landfills. Follow all the rules of Empire and Money Elites, every breath you take, Sting, is monetized, broken down in .0001 cents, but boy do those chosen few make multiple millions on the exhales and inhales, snotting children and …
by Rajesh Makwana / February 26th, 2016
As the illicit trade in nuclear weapons escalates alongside the risk of geopolitical conflict, it’s high time governments decisively prioritised nuclear disarmament – and that means scrapping Trident, the UK’s inordinately expensive nuclear deterrent, which would also facilitate the redistribution of scarce public resources to fund essential services.
As geopolitical tensions escalate in the Middle East and the world teeters on the brink of a new Cold War, it’s clear that the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear warfare is for governments to fulfil their long-held commitment to the “general and complete disarmament” of nuclear weapons – …
Another Lesser-of-Evils Myth Dies
by Steve Breyman / February 26th, 2016
Since their arrival on the American political scene in the eighties and nineties, Green activists and voters have been tagged by Democrats as spoilers and reckless idealists. In each and every election in which a Green has run, Democrats warned that the interloper would throw the election to the Republican candidate. The barrage was heaviest in 2000 when Democrats falsely claimed Ralph Nader caused Al Gore to lose to George W. Bush.
When all else fails to convince a Green to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, Democrats deploy their nuclear option: the composition of the Supreme Court hangs in the …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / February 26th, 2016
Only days after Prime Minister David Cameron’s embarrassing Little Englander strut around the European Parliament attempting to dictate – sorry, “negotiate” – new terms for Britain’s membership of the European Union, the EU Parliament has delivered a backhanded, but unmistakable, blow to the UK and its partner in crime, Saudi Arabia.
As Saudi decimates Yemen with British made bombs and missiles, dropped from British aircraft, advised by British military experts based in the Saudi Command and Control Centre, the European Parliament voted on Thursday, February 25th, for an EU-wide arms embargo against Saudi in protest at its assault on its southern …
by Matt Peppe / February 26th, 2016
When asked by Wolf Blitzer in January if she was “the establishment,” Hillary Clinton replied: “I just don’t understand what that means. He’s been in Congress, he’s been elected to office a lot longer than I have.” Several weeks later, her Democratic primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders made the case in a debate that the issue was who enjoyed the support of more powerful elected officials, arguing that “more governors, mayors, members of the House” back Clinton.
Clinton framed the notion of “the establishment” as consisting solely of political bodies of elected officials. Sanders simply argued that a better indicator …
by Linn Washington, Jr. / February 26th, 2016
Hollywood honchos told a big lie 74-years ago.
That lie told in 1942 is a link in the sordid chain of perceptions and practices that have produced the present brouhaha surrounding the 2016 Oscar awards featuring an all-white bevy of acting category nominations.
That lie is part of a legacy the stretches to the very founding of the United States of America: a persistent refusal to forthrightly tackle racism, particularly insidious institutional racism.
The fact that so few have no clue about this Hollywood lie evidences the need for better understandings about facets of American history that are purposely forgotten yet have a …
by Denis A. Conroy / February 26th, 2016
Mankind, it seems, likes to get behind a banner as a way of defining collective identity. This season it is the election of a new authority figure to occupy the White House that ineluctably sucks us up into the dizzy heights of a form of American pantomime that flashes itself to all and sundry. The Barnum & Bailey Circus spin-doctoring pitch to the audience (native and global) is a dynamo unto itself that can banish all insouciance, and does, in order to bring us ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ per supposedly democratic means. ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ is also America incarnate, embracing the myth of ‘The …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 25th, 2016
He always had a rough deal. He strayed as a young man, a situation that would have been perfectly acceptable if he had picked the approved rogue group or terrorist collective to vent his adolescent angst. Al Qaeda, and their Taliban hosts, were not on that list. Having fallen out of favour with the Oscar equivalent of good terrorist nominees, Australia’s David Hicks found himself in the dark, picked up in Afghanistan in November 2001 and conveyed to that terrestrial nightmare known as Guantánamo Bay soon after.
From January 2002 to March 2007, he was detained at the US Naval Base …
Corporate Media shrugs and remains silent
by Eva Bartlett / February 25th, 2016
The terror-ravaged neighbourhood of al-Zahra’a, in Homs, has again mercilessly been hit by western and Saudi-backed terrorists’ bombings. Local journalists put the number of murdered at 57 now, some hours after the double-vehicle bombing earlier today. Russia Today reports:
The explosions at a traffic light at al-Siteen Street in the al-Zahra neighborhood happened within minutes of each other, witnesses said. …Witnesses said at least one of the two blasts was triggered by a suicide bomber driving a car.
A follow-up bombing after an initial blast is a common terrorist tactic, which allows them to hit first responders, who rush to …
by Bill Quigley / February 25th, 2016
Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate in the country, no longer provides public defenders to all its people accused of crimes; within months over half its public defender offices are expected to become insolvent.
“It’s a nightmare,” according to James Dixon, the chief Louisiana Public Defender. “You have people in jail that don’t have lawyers. It’s that basic.” In Louisiana, public defenders are appointed to represent nearly 250,000 people each year. Dixon has been warning of a constitutional crisis for years due to inadequate funding. His office has recently been sued in a federal …
by K.J. Noh / February 24th, 2016
The following is a leaked transcript of Hillary Clinton’s 1st speech to Goldman Sachs delivered on 6/04/2013. Two other speeches are also rumored to be in circulation. This is the full transcript. Secretary Clinton received $225,000 for this speech.
HILLARY CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Lloyd [Blankfein], and thanks to everyone at Goldman Sachs for welcoming me today. I’m delighted to be back among friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, kindred spirits…
Let me jump right in. You know, over the past few months, there have been popular concerns about an economy that still isn’t delivering for the …
by James Petras / February 24th, 2016
The presidential elections of 2016 have several unique characteristics that defy common wisdom about political practices in 21st century America.
Clearly the established political machinery — party elites and their corporate backers — have (in part) lost control of the nomination process and confront ‘unwanted’ candidates who are campaigning with programs and pronouncements that polarize the electorate.
But there are other more specific factors, which have energized the electorate and speak to recent US history. These …
Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialism, and The Other America (Part Three of a Five Part Series)
by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / February 24th, 2016
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology
Capitalism, Michael Harrington argued, is characterized by a never-ending struggle between labor on one hand and the capitalists and their allies (co-opted government and legal system) on the other. For Harrington this constituted class struggle, a struggle waged over the cost of labor, safety and conditions at work, health care, education, living-wage work, public transport, etc. The conflict is created when workers are paid less than the value they produce. This is exacerbated by the fact that capitalists are locked into competition with each other …
The Middle East in US Foreign Policy
by Ramzy Baroud / February 24th, 2016
As US liberals and some leftists are pulling up their sleeves in anticipation of a prolonged battle for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, the tussle becomes particularly ugly whenever the candidates’ foreign policy agendas are evoked.
Of the two main contenders, Hillary Clinton is the obvious target. She is an interventionist, uncompromisingly, and her term as Secretary of State (2009-2013) is a testament to her role in sustaining the country’s foreign policy agenda under George W. Bush (as a Senator, she had voted for the Iraq war in 2002 and advocating regime change in her own right. Her aggressive …
by Yves Engler / February 23rd, 2016
In violation of international law two major Canadian companies are buying the non-renewable resources of Africa’s last remaining colony.
Saskatoon’s PotashCorp and Calgary’s Agrium have partnered with Morocco’s state-owned OCP to export phosphate mined in Western Sahara, a sparsely populated territory in northwestern Africa that was ruled by Spain until 1975. When the Spanish departed, Moroccan troops moved in and a bloody 15-year war drove tens of thousands of Sahrawi into neighboring Algeria, where they still live in camps.
No country officially recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. The UN calls it “occupied” and the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as the …
by subMedia / February 23rd, 2016
In this sedition of ITEOTWAWKIAIFF we look at the growing class unrest in Hong Kong that kicked off a massive rebellion in the lunar new year. Also street battles in Athens, where anarchists and farmers stormed the Greek capital in reaction to Syriza’s structural adjustment policies. On the music break we drop the now classic Dead Prez track: Malcolm Garvey Huey. We continue with an examination on how white supremacy plays a role in the mass starvation of people in the African continent and we wrap things up with Ajamu Nangwaya, an anarchist, educator and writer from Toronto, …
by Joseph Hickey / February 23rd, 2016
Correctness is a set of rules and mores constraining the form of public discourse and social behaviour. There is no place in a democratic society for “correctness” of any sort, least of all a correctness regarding politics: political ideas, speech and other expression. Let us reject standards of form in our debates, exchanges, interventions and criticisms.
The goal of political life is to influence society and be influenced by it. This can only happen through free exchange between individuals, where the form and content of the expression is decided by the speaker, for the speaker’s own purposes as an individual. For …
by Roger D. Harris and Chuck Kaufman / February 23rd, 2016
We find much to agree with in Clifton Ross’s rebuttal of us in Dissident Voice, “The Two Lefts and Venezuela,” as long as you take an extremely broad view of what constitutes the “left.”
Ross’s “left” for sure is not socialist as he colorfully sums up in the final sentence of his article, where he says “the hangman…more often than not, he’s dressed as a socialist.” No need then to expose Ross as masquerading as a socialist. He doesn’t bother to give his “left” a socialist gloss.
The key philosophical foundation of Ross’s ideology is his “belief that there are as …
by Robert Hunziker / February 22nd, 2016
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster may go down as one of history’s boundless tragedies and not just because of a nuclear meltdown, but rather the tragic loss of a nation’s soul.
Imagine the following scenario: 207 million cardboard book boxes, end-to-end, circumnavigating Earth, like railroad tracks, going all the way around the planet. That’s a lot of book boxes. Now, fill the boxes with radioactive waste. Forthwith, that’s the amount of radioactive waste stored unsheltered in one-tonne black bags throughout Fukushima Prefecture, amounting to 9,000,000 cubic metres
But wait! There’s more to come. Another 13,000,000 cubic metres of radioactive soil …
by William A. Blunden / February 22nd, 2016
The media is erupting over the FBI’s demand that Apple help it decrypt an iPhone belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the attackers involved in the assault in San Bernardino this past December. Originally Apple wanted the FBI to keep things on the down low, asking the Feds to present their application for access under seal. But for whatever reason the FBI decided to go public. Apple then put on a big show of resistance and now there are legislators threatening to change the law in favor of the FBI. Yet concealed amid this unfolding drama …
Part 3 of 3
by Kim Petersen / February 22nd, 2016
Read Part 1 and 2.
… Indigenous peoples are not typically respected, even at the level of text, never mind at the level of geo-politics, as possessing ‘true’ sovereignty.
— T’uu’tuk ((Robin R. R. Gray (T’uu’tuk), “Ts’msyen Revolution: The Poetics and Politics of Reclaiming,” PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2015, p. 182.))
[I]t seems unfair that the coastal Indian, who had little or no opportunity of entry into other industries, and who still depends in large measure upon the salmon for his winter food supply should have to bear the privation which results from the white man’s …
