Latest articles
by Steven Strauss / February 10th, 2016
French President François Hollande lost no time declaring a state of emergency following the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in Paris this past November, which killed 130 people. Within hours the ink was dry. Two days later, French pilots were bombing ISIS targets in Raqqa, Syria.
“We must face up to a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam,” declared Prime Minister Manuel Valls. This is the alleged rationale behind France’s moves.
…
by Frank Scott / February 10th, 2016
As the incumbent occupier of subsidized housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue works on his legacy by fending off mad dogs of the neo-zio-con right and still bringing us closer to provoking war with Russia, a seemingly eternal presidential race for the next tenant continues while the nation passes through a critical period of confusion, disinformation and social-economic disorder. All this is part of the divide and rule politics to reinforce the weakening foundation of a political economic structure that threatens a global as well as national population if it ever collapses.
Bernie Sanders’ candidacy offers some hope for reform that will …
or Why US Politics Turns Ordinary People into Drooling Morons
by Kieran Kelly / February 10th, 2016
The problem, in a nutshell, is this: when people decide to support a prospective candidate in the US primary races they are putting themselves in the position of defending the indefensible. The very nature of this politico-Darwinist death match means that once you pick your chosen leader you must reject all criticism and suppress all doubt. You must become aggressively defensive and you must, above all, prevent your own wayward brain from thinking those bad thoughts that weaken the image of the immaculate leader. Any chink in their armour will be exploited by the enemies that surround them. Loyalty must …
Luke Mogelson’s These Heroic, Happy Dead: Stories
by Christy Rodgers / February 9th, 2016
I think it was Anthony Swofford, author of the memoir Jarhead, who said there is no such thing as an anti-war war movie. Any film that portrays combat, however horrifically, he averred, still inevitably whets the appetite for it of young men who have never experienced it.
Literary fiction is in a different category, particularly when you can probably just about guarantee that few budding recruits will read any more of it than the rest of the US population does – maybe one book a year. It’s unlikely that any literary portrayal of war (possibly excluding comics and graphic novels), positive …
Why the Status Quo Is a Precursor for War
by Ramzy Baroud / February 9th, 2016
It is not true that only three wars have taken place since Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Other wars that were deemed insignificant or ‘skirmishes’ also took place. Operation Returning Echo in March 2012, for example, killed and wounded over 100 people. But since the death toll, relative to the other major onslaughts seemed trivial, it was not cited as ‘war’, per se.
According to this logic, so-called operations Cast Lead (2008-9), Pillar of Defense (2012) and the deadliest of them all, Protective Edge (2014) were serious enough to be included in any relevant discussion, …
by subMedia / February 9th, 2016
This week we look at the growing fascist movement in Europe and what the antifa are doing to fight back. On the break we have Sindicato Latino, a hip hop collective based in Europe and made up of Latinx migrants. We wrap things up with an anti-election rant and an interview with American anarchist Scott Crow. TRIGGER WARNING: cursing, street fighting, blood, politicians
Click here to download an extended interview with Scott Crow.
This week we stole footage from Power (watch this!), Groundhog Day, House of Cards, Why we Fight, Bowling for Columbine, Stranger than fiction
On the ones …
The politics of deflection’ (shoot the messenger, ignore the message) exposed
by Stuart Littlewood / February 9th, 2016
With obvious relish Richard Falk, former professor of international law at Princeton and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine, has issued a well deserved slap on the wrist to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for his naivety. It follows Israel’s furious reaction to Ban’s remark to the Security Council that “Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half-century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process”.
The usually timid Ban, suddenly emboldened, also called Israel’s illegal settlement building “an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community”. He added: “Security measures alone will …
by Fran Quigley / February 9th, 2016
Jessica Reznicek, 34, an Iowa peace activist, was arraigned yesterday and charged with two felonies for breaking three windows with a sledgehammer at the Northrup Grumman facility outside the Omaha Nebraska Strategic Air Command at Offut Air Force base. After her court appearance she was returned to the Sarpy County Jail where she has remained on $100,000 bond since her action on December 27. Reznicek, who has no plans to post a cash bond, is facing up to twenty years in prison if convicted on both counts. Her trial is set for May 24.
Writing from her jail cell, Reznicek, …
by Dissident Voice Communications / February 8th, 2016
by Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson / February 8th, 2016
Two years ago, Russian officials discussed plans to privatize a group of national enterprises headed by the oil producer Rosneft, the VTB Bank, Aeroflot, and Russian Railways. The stated objective was to streamline management of these companies, and also to induce oligarchs to begin bringing their two decades of capital flight back to invest in the Russia economy. Foreign participation was sought in cases where Western technology transfer and management techniques would be likely to help the economy.
However, the Russian economic outlook deteriorated as the United States pushed Western governments to impose economic sanctions against Russia and oil prices declined. …
Did Hillary's Machine Rig Iowa?
by John V. Walsh / February 7th, 2016
Hillary Clinton “won” the Iowa caucuses, in part because of 6 coin tosses all of which she won! Six precincts, at least, ended up with a dead tie between the two candidates. The tie was broken and a winner declared based on a coin toss in each case.
What are the odds of one of two candidates winning all six coin tosses if the outcomes are random, that is, if the tosses are fair, unbiased and with honest coins?
The calculation is so simple that a schoolboy or schoolgirl can do it. The formula is simply 1/2 raised to the power of …
by Jonathan Cook / February 7th, 2016
Something extremely dangerous is happening before our eyes as we watch British officials and the corporate media respond to the February 6, 2016 ruling of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which found that Julian Assange is being arbitrarily detained in the UK.
A major international institution upholding the rights of political dissidents around the world as they face illegal detention, abuse and torture is being turned into a laughing stock with the enthusiastic connivance of supposedly liberal media outlets like the Guardian and the BBC.
Reporters, columnists and comedians are pouring scorn on the UN group, legal experts who until yesterday …
by Ken Meyercord / February 6th, 2016
As Galileo engaged in his examination of the solar system with the aid of a newly invented scientific instrument, the telescope, he must have known his heliocentric theory of the solar system, if accepted, would destroy many Christians’ belief system. Was that the purpose of his investigations? We can never know for sure, but I don’t think so. He simply wanted to arrive at the facts, to understand the world around him.
Nonetheless, should he have stopped his investigations, or at least kept quiet about his findings, so as not to shatter people’s faith and thus cast aspersions on the …
Zika, GMO’s, the Pentagon and Wall Street
by John Stanton / February 6th, 2016
Synthetic biology also appears likely to open up opportunities in the human performance modification field through the potential to make regulatory molecules in laboratories or, more directly, inside the body. For example, bacteria that live in the human digestive system already convert food into neurotransmitters and other molecules that influence performance; by engineering these organisms to sense the levels of compounds in the body and to supplement or counteract them when needed, it may be possible to enhance physical, cognitive, and socioemotional (or interpersonal) performance.
— DOD Office of Technical Intelligence
The mainstream media, the public and financiers are agog over the …
by Jonathan Cook / February 5th, 2016
At what point do we cry foul when we witness the abuse of a political dissident, one who dares to take on mighty vested interests?
When his own state, the local legal system and the media all turn on him? When he is forced to seek sanctuary in a foreign embassy for many years, surrounded by state security forces threatening to arrest him if he leaves? When the world’s highest arbiter on the matter of his confinement, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, supports his case? When the state, legal authorities and the media ignore the ruling and continue to …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 5th, 2016
Should the UN announce tomorrow that I have lost my case against the United Kingdom and Sweden I shall exist the embassy at noon on Friday to accept arrest by British police as there is no meaningful prospect of further appeal.
— Julian Assange, Twitter, Feb 4, 2016
LONDON — The UN is a funny old thing. It has provided, historically, the strangest collective of bedfellows, fed on a good staple diet of hypocrisy and political jousting. It has more panels than Italian pasta varieties, more working committees than French cheese. At times, its workings reek of private school understandings …
by Franklin Lamb / February 5th, 2016
DAMASCUS — Among these patriots are regular citizens as well as the stellar nationalist employees of Syria’s Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) who this observer has interviewed extensively over the past nearly three years as they elucidate why ISIS destroys and loots our irreplaceable antiquities. This observer’s research has been augmented by other eyewitnesses, some who are themselves former jihadists or their victims, to ISIS looting and its distribution of franchises to sell off our shared cultural heritage give witness.
Heretofore, three varying but cogent explanations for ISIS’ rabid destruction of our shared cultural heritage have been commonplace.
The first …
by Ralph Nader / February 5th, 2016
Steve Leone, editor of the Concord Monitor—the second largest newspaper in New Hampshire—makes me long for the good old days of old-fashioned communications. He actually, personally, answers his own phone.
I know this because when I called him I actually got right through, despite the media’s frenetic immersion in the week before the state’s presidential primary.
“You answer your own phone?” I asked him incredulously, saying to myself, no voicemail, no screening secretary? “Yes,” he said calmly, “I pick up my phone right away.” The result: from our conversation, he suggested that I write an op-ed. In 24 …
Moots International Inquiry into Alleged International Law Abuses
by Felicity Arbuthnot / February 5th, 2016
Mercurial: “Subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind.”
In a woefully belated but welcome initiative the UK Parliament’s International Development Committee, the influential cross party oversight body which scrutinizes the Department for International Development, has called for a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
In context, the reason for the Committee’s stance is related to the black farce of one arm of the UK government providing aid to Yemen, as other arms are providing the advice, aircraft and weaponry to Saudi Arabia to assist in the destruction of the ancient nation whose shores are lapped by the Red …
by Uri Avnery / February 5th, 2016
So now we have another anti-Semite. Mazal Tov (“good luck”) as we say in Hebrew.
His name is Ban Ki-moon, and he is the Secretary General of the UN. In practice, the highest international official, a kind of World Prime Minister.
He has dared to criticize the Israeli government, as well as the Palestinian Authority, for sabotaging the peace process, and thereby making Israeli-Palestinian peace almost impossible. He emphasized that there is a world-wide consensus about the “Two-state Solution” being the only possible one.
The formulation sounded neutral, but Ban made it quite clear that almost the entire fault lies with the Israeli …
by Graham Peebles / February 5th, 2016
Imagine you wake one fine morning and find you are living in a war zone, aerial bombardments are a weekly occurrence, family members have been killed, tortured or imprisoned and the children’s school destroyed. You love your country, but frightened and desperate you decide to leave in search of a new home, in a peaceful place, where you can study, work and have a chance to live out your days happily.
Or you live in a country where you are persecuted for your religious beliefs, like Mizrak (not her real name) from Eritrea: arrested and imprisoned aged 16 for being Pentecostal …
The Anti-Empire Report #143
by William Blum / February 5th, 2016
Is Bernie Sanders a socialist?
“Self-described socialist” … How many times have we all read that term in regard to Vermont senator Bernie Sanders? But is he really a socialist? Or is he a “social democrat”, which is what he’d be called in Europe? Or is he a “democratic socialist”, which is the American party he has been a member of (DSA – Democratic Socialists of America)? And does it really matter which one he is? They’re all socialists, are they not?
Why does a person raised in a capitalist society become a socialist? It could be because of a parent or …
Coercive Engineered Migration: Zionism's War on Europe (Part 7 of an 11 Part Series)
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / February 5th, 2016
In order to fully comprehend the implications of the US/Israeli strategy of weakening Europe through a divide and rule policy of artificial mass migrations, the questions of race and demography need to be looked at more closely. For Israel is a racist nation-state. It is the world’s only nation state based on a strict interpretation of racial identity. Yet it is a state, which, through its myriad lobbies and think tanks across the world, has managed to direct US foreign policy in its interests for many decades, in spite of the fact that the US is a multiracial, multicultural federal …
by Ludwig Watzal / February 5th, 2016
Apartheid in Palestine (University of Alberta Press, 2016) is a valuable guide in the struggle for justice in Palestine. Editor Ghada Ageel gathered activists, indigenous Palestinians and scholars, which do not represent the worn-out media views that the public is tired of hearing. The authors believe that peace to the region can only come if justice is done to Palestinians and if their rights, denied for decades by Israel and the international community, are met.
Ghada Ageel is a visiting professor in the …
My speech in Rome at the Italian Parliament on January 29, 2016.
by Andre Vltchek / February 5th, 2016
Friends and Comrades, it is a great honor to be standing here – at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament.
*****
One year ago I was driving through the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, monitoring the situation in the refugee camps there. Winter was approaching and the mountains on the Lebanese–Syrian border were covered by snow. It was cold, very cold.
Some 20 minutes, after leaving Baalbek, I spotted an extremely humble makeshift refugee camp, growing literally from the road, in the middle of nowhere.
I stopped. Together with my interpreter, I walked inside and engaged several people in conversation.
The situation was desperate. …
Attack on Israeli soldiers by PA guard exposes split between Netanyahu and army over how to respond
by Jonathan Cook / February 4th, 2016
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has described his security forces’ cooperation with the Israeli military as “sacred”. But an armed attack on an Israeli checkpoint last weekend by a Palestinian security official, which left three Israeli soldiers injured, suggests that Abbas’ view may not be widely shared among Palestinians.
Amjad Sukari, aged 34, a driver and bodyguard in Ramallah for the Palestinian attorney general, was shot dead on Sunday after he opened fire at Israeli soldiers stationed at a “VIP crossing” near Ramallah.
It was the second time in recent months that a PA security officer has opened fire on …
The private automobile gets a free pass
by Yves Engler / February 4th, 2016
At their finest labour unions are class conscious organizations that check the corporate elite’s influence over public policy. But, even the best Canadian unions have largely failed to provide an alternative vision to the existing system and challenge the power of big business over important areas of our lives.
Alongside collective-bargaining activities, unions have spearheaded efforts to expand the Canadian Pension Plan and Employment Insurance coverage, to raise minimum wages and to improve labour laws. While these campaigns have directly benefited all workers, unions have also been heavily involved in fights for Medicare and public daycare, programs that serve a wider …
by Greg Palast / February 4th, 2016
The big boys are confident that Sen. Marco Rubio has locked up the Republican nomination.
But who’s locked up Rubio?
I called my bookie in London. The betting professionals were not surprised at Marco Rubio’s big Iowa showing. The smart money has been on Rubio since October 31–despite the fact that Rubio was polling at just 9%.
Paul Krishnamurty, politics odds analyst at Betfair.com, told me that, among professional betters, over just two days, Rubio soared from zero to odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination.
Why would the guys …
by John Pilger / February 4th, 2016
Assange is now closer to justice and vindication, and perhaps freedom, than at any time since he was arrested.
One of the epic miscarriages of justice of our time is unravelling. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention – an international tribunal that adjudicates and decides whether governments comply with their human rights obligations – has ruled that Julian Assange has been detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden.
After five years of fighting to clear his name – having been smeared relentlessly yet charged with no crime – Assange is closer to justice and vindication, and perhaps freedom, than …
Part 4: Denmark, Decency, and Decay
by Jan Oberg / February 4th, 2016
Read Part 1, 2, and 3.
Sweden
Permit a digression to neighbouring Sweden.
Sweden has – shamefully – not only closed its borders for people without valid documents, scrapped the right to asylum embedded in the Human Rights Declaration. It has declared (January 28, 2016) that it intends to deport 60,000-80,000 refugees already inside Sweden.
It was Sweden’s ambassador, the courageous Harald Edelstam, who in 1973 stood at the stadium in Santiago after the Pinochet coup and murder of president Allende and told thousands that they would always be welcome in Sweden. Thousands came and made a good …
