Latest articles
by subMedia / March 8th, 2016
This week we take a look at the nefarious capitalist mechanism called free trade agreements, with a focus on world wide resistance to the TPP or Trans Pacific Partnership plus an update of anti-fascist resistance in Anaheim California.
On the music break, class war hip hop MC’s Emicia bring us Boa Esperança.
We continue with an in depth look at the student movement that has been rocking South Africa #FeesMustFall. To listen to my entire interview with Alex Hotz click here (mp3 20mb)
To help pay for legal and medical fees for the brave anti-fascists in California click here.
This week …
by Bo Filter / March 7th, 2016
U.S. Airforce A-10 Warthogs struck Allepo on February 9 when Russian planes were out of the area. Instantly, western propaganda went to work framing Russia, both for wonton aerial bombing of civilians and for destroying two hospitals. There’s nothing new with this.
Blaming a third party to avert responsibility for clearly criminal behavior is not just psychological warfare but standard psychopathic behavior. Framing Russia to provide political cover for U.S. military aggression is standard fare at the Pentagon’s Department of Psychological Warfare, and it’s been going on since its inception way back in 1943.
Worse, the heavily militarized corporate media neglected …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 7th, 2016
It’s true that Mrs. Reagan has an interest in astrology.
— Marlin Fitzwater, New York Times, May 4, 1988
What is expected of America’s first ladies? Having deposed the king as a suitable head of state, the American Revolutionaries decided to go for a pseudo-aristocratic option with all the spousal trimmings. After a brief flirt with the idea that George Washington might himself be crowned, the Republican model was embraced. The standard White American Male would come with a standard White American Female and inhabit what would, in due course, be the White House.
The curriculum vitae of such a first lady has …
by Bill Quigley / March 7th, 2016
Many see families in poverty and seek to help. Others see families in poverty and see opportunities for profit.
Here are six examples of billion dollar industries which are built on separating poor people, especially people of color, from their money, the reverse Robin Hood.
Check Cashing Businesses
Check cashing businesses. Cash a $100 check? At Walmart that will be $3. At TD bank non-customers pay $5 to cash a check from their bank.
Nearly 10 million households containing 25 million people do not have any bank account according to the FDIC. Most because they did not have enough money …
by William Boardman / March 7th, 2016
Black voters support a fantasy champion for black lives
Over 50 years ago, in a 1963 Chicago protest against school segregation, one of today’s Democratic candidates for president was chained to a black woman and then arrested for resisting arrest. Now that moment appears in an unofficial campaign poster emphasizing the candidate’s commitment to civil rights. That protestor for black rights in 1963 was not Chicago native Hillary Clinton, then a politically active …
by Medea Benjamin / March 7th, 2016
In March 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, about one hundred CODEPINK women dressed in pink slips weaved in and out of congressional offices demanding to meet with representatives. Those representatives who pledged to oppose going to war with Iraq were given hugs and pink badges of courage; those hell-bent on taking the US to war were given pink slips emblazoned with the words “YOU’RE FIRED.”
When we got to Hillary Clinton’s office, we sat down and refused to leave until we had a meeting with the Senator. Within an hour, Clinton appeared. “I like pink tulips around this …
by James Petras / March 7th, 2016
Mapping the emerging global economic, political and military configurations requires that we examine regions and countries along several dynamic policy axis:
1. Capitalist versus anti-capitalist
2. Neoliberal versus anti-neoliberal
3. Austerity versus anti-austerity
4. War command centers and war zones
5. Political change and socio-economic continuity
6. New Order and political decay
Though many of these dimensions overlap, they also highlight the complexity and influence of local and national versus global power relations.
We will first identify and classify the regimes and emerging movements, …
The words after the Fire of 1889, “We Will Build Spokane Bigger and Better!”
by Paul Haeder / March 7th, 2016
Dog eat dog?
Think of any number of all-American axioms: Survival of the fittest? Winner takes all? Those who have, rule; those who do not have are the reason for their own destitution and undoing? The meek shall inherit the earth?
I have the luxury of being 59, having had dozens of jobs inside and outside my skills sets, experience, and educational background. This 35,000-foot view has also been honed by living abroad in such places as Azores, Paris, Edinburgh, Germany, Vietnam, Mexico, Central America, Canada, and England. The perspectives I have also have been shaped by a career military father, grandparents …
by Clifton Ross / March 6th, 2016
A few days ago I talked to one of my best friends in Mérida, Venezuela. Jose, a former Chavista who, like most of the Chavistas I knew when I lived in that city, is now in opposition to the Bolivarian government without being in “the Opposition.” He’s quite clear the Bolivarian process was a failure, but he’s not sure the Opposition or the United Democratic Roundtable (MUD) is going to be able to do much better. Still, he also finds it a hopeful sign that three-quarters of Venezuela’s voters turned out December 6 last year to vote 2-1 to bring …
by Catherine Shakdam / March 6th, 2016
France claims to be a Republic espousing freedom, liberty and fraternity but it has become a police state and is clamping down hard on intellectuals that dare exercise freedom of expression.
George Washington once said, “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughterhouse.” ((George Washington, address to the officers of the army, Newburgh, New York (March 15, 1783); reported in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed, The Writings of George Washington (1938), vol. 26, p. 225.)) France it seems has pushed its intellectuals into silence to hasten the dumbing down of …
Coercive Engineered Migration: Zionism's War on Europe (Part 9 of an 11 Part Series)
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / March 6th, 2016
Is Russia Imperialist?
There is much confusion as to the nature of imperialism. Many analysts contend that there is only one form of imperialism in the world today, namely NATO and that countries such as Russia and China are the leaders of a global anti-imperialist front, resisting domination by the Western corporate elite. However, such as theory does not stand up to scrutiny. In his book Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Vladimir Lenin defined imperialism as monopoly capitalism. He writes:
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is …
by Leon Tressell / March 6th, 2016
Since the New Year there has been a lot of speculation in the mainstream and alternative media about Saudi Arabia and Turkey directly intervening into the war in Syria. Each week there have been threats, demands, and sabre rattling from Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Meanwhile, there is the growing momentum of the Syrian Armed Forces on the killings fields of Syria. To be blunt, the Saudi royal family and Erdogan’s Mafia clan are apoplectic about the series of defeats that their proxy forces are suffering at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies.
This sense of dismay …
by Eva Bartlett / March 5th, 2016
This month, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to Syria’s President. The methods used to undermine Shaaban’s message should come as no surprise.
The interview was typical of the infrequent times corporate media has bothered to interview Dr. Shaaban: loaded lexicon, pre-priming the audience with false allegations about the Syrian government, repeatedly cutting-off the high-ranking guest, and a notably rude and condescending demeanor not afforded to guests who tow the NATO narrative on Syria.
As with other top Syrian representatives, Shaaban is made out to be “non-credible” by corporate media pundits when they deign to …
by Andrea Bauer / March 5th, 2016
The anger, xenophobia, and polarization so sharply on view on Super Tuesday didn’t come about overnight, or even since the Great Recession began or since 9/11 in 2001. It’s been a long time brewing, a product of some 50 years of unfolding bipartisan crisis.
A lot gets blamed on Republicans by progressives and liberals. It’s easy to see why, given the mean-spirited politics of their current leading candidates – not just Donald Trump, but Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as well. However, since 1961, Democrats have held the presidency half the time and controlled the House and Senate 68 percent of …
by Frank Castro / March 5th, 2016
At its height the Roman Colosseum could hold some 50,000 spectators, truly a feat for its era. Even now, millennia after its prime, in a world of mountainous skyscrapers and sprawling stadiums, it remains a sight to behold. But just beyond its billowing arches and columns rests a nasty reminder of human cruelty: an arena atop a sea of imprisoned, sweat-soaked bodies, cut through with blood-rivers of men killing each other for the sound of applause. This is where, for centuries, Romans held gladiatorial games, deathmatches between competing slaves, so-called criminals, and, at times, ‘exotic’ wild animals. In the arena …
by Kim Petersen / March 4th, 2016
Does the long tradition of Japanese learners cleaning their own schools prove the Japanese educational system is much more community oriented rather than being self-oriented?
It is true that in Japan learners are responsible for cleaning the classrooms and rest of school. It is also true of Korea and China.
As far as Japan goes, this provokes two responses from me. First, the Japanese education system is more a reflection of the state and its designs for the wider Japanese society. Second, there is an ethos held in Japanese society, a reflection of …
Donald Trump and Torture
by Binoy Kampmark / March 4th, 2016
It might be torture. It might be immigration. It might be race. These issues only matter in the context of tactics and positioning for Donald Trump. To get elected, the man will literally say anything. It is a tactic that just might work.
He has no genuine, developed sense of the awareness about the topics he discusses. The reality television show reduces everything to just that: a show that sucks cerebral capacity as it turns the viewer into vegetable matter. The show is all consuming, and similarly reductionist.
…
by Andre Vltchek / March 4th, 2016
If raw, naked propaganda makes you sick, stay away from South Korea (ROK)!
While the Western brain-conditioning machine wants you to believe that it is actually the North that is successfully indoctrinating its citizens, those of us who have worked on both sides of the border (or on both sides of the “DMZ”) know much better. And if they don’t tell, they lie!
From the “art work” on both sides of the barbed wire fences, to the institutions designated to brainwash millions of common people, South Korea is leading; its regime’s propaganda (and the propaganda of its Western handlers) is much …
Twilight of the Idols
by James Petras / March 4th, 2016
Over the past three years Latin American leftist leaders, who presided over heterodox ‘free trade’ and commodity based welfare economies, lost presidential, legislative and municipal elections and referendums or faced impeachment. They fell because they lost competitive elections, not because of US invasions or military coups. These same leftist leaders, who had successfully defeated coups and withstood gross US political intervention via AID, NED, the DEA and other US government agencies, lost at the ballot box.
What accounts for the changing capacity of leftist presidents to retain …
by Eric Walberg / March 4th, 2016
What are the messages Iranians signaled by their robust election campaign and high turn out? Western nay-sayers say it shows discontent. But perhaps with a touch of envy, at a time when western politics is rife with discontent and yet elicits at best a yawn, or at worse, looks more like a circus. The Islamic revolution has had bad press in the West from the start, but the results show a level of freedom that contrasts favorably with the West, and puts paid to the mantra that the 2009 elections were stolen by the bad guys.
…
by Ralph Nader / March 4th, 2016
The hard-bitten, corporatist Democrats are moving Hillary Clinton through the presidential primaries. They are using “Republican-speak” to beat down Bernie Sanders as favoring Big Government and more taxes and they may unwittingly be setting the stage for a serious split in the Democratic Party.
What is emerging is the reaction of millions of Sanders supporters who will feel repudiated, not just left behind, as the Clintonites plan to celebrate at the Democratic Convention in July. The political experience gained by the Sanders workers, many of them young, helped Sanders register primary victories over Hillary in Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Vermont and New …
by Michael Howard / March 4th, 2016
It might be worthwhile for supporters of Hillary Clinton to consider that, as of the last week or two, they are bedfellows with members of the most odious U.S. political movement in recent memory: neoconservatism. That’s right—in a not-so-surprising twist, America’s most vocal and unapologetic war-lovers are starting to imply allegiance to the doyenne of the Democratic Party.
Eliot Cohen, former official of George W. Bush’s unholy State Department, called Hillary Clinton “the lesser evil, by a large margin.” The greater evil, of course, is Donald Trump, who in Cohen’s estimation would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy.” While …
by Rick Sterling / March 3rd, 2016
A 30 page investigative report on the “Caesar Torture Photos” has been released and is available online here. The following is a condensed version of the report. Readers who are especially interested are advised to get the full report which includes additional details, photographs, sources and recommendations.
Introduction
There is a pattern of sensational but untrue reports that lead to public acceptance of US and Western military intervention in countries around the world:
* In Gulf War 1, there were reports of Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwait, leaving babies to die on the cold floor. Relying on the testimony of a …
by Medea Benjamin and Rebecca Green / March 3rd, 2016
As Hillary Clinton emerges as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, she is receiving increased scrutiny for her years as Secretary of State. Many are criticizing her hawkish foreign policy, which is the best indication of what President Hillary’s foreign policy would be, with many focusing on her long relationship with Saudi Arabia.
On Christmas Eve in 2011, Hillary Clinton and her closest aides celebrated a $29.4 billion sale of over 80 F-15 fighter jets, manufactured by U.S.-based Boeing Corporation, to Saudi Arabia. In a chain of enthusiastic emails, an aide exclaimed that it was “not a bad …
Collapse of “The most dangerous dam in the world”
by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 3rd, 2016
It is hard to believe anything more catastrophic could befall Iraq with perhaps three million dead, between the strangulating 1990 onward embargo and the illegal 2003 invasion. Nearly five million displaced since 2003, destruction of the UNESCO Award winning education system, as well as access to electricity, safe water – access to normality.
Destroyed or damaged by ISIS have been the eye wateringly haunting ancient sites in or near Mosul (dating back to 25th century BC), 3rd or second century BC in Northern Iraq: Hatra, 3rd or 2nd century BC; Nineveh, the Assyrian Capital; Nimrud, founded 3,500 years ago; Khorsabad, built …
Part One of a Two Part Series
by Denis Rancourt / March 2nd, 2016
This article was prepared for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA). It is also posted on ocla.ca.
Overall Summary
Part 1: Defamation law in Canada is contrary to international law, in both design and practice. Under international law, the right to hold an opinion is absolute, and the right of freedom of expression can be restricted “for respect of the rights or reputations of others” solely using written laws that must conform to the “strict tests of necessity and proportionality”. With Canadian civil defamation law, the state has unfettered discretion from an unwritten common law that provides presumed falsity, presumed malice, …
The Journey of Social Justice Lawyer Luz Herrera
by Bill Quigley / March 2nd, 2016
Luz Herrera, social justice lawyer and UCLA law professor, was born in Tijuana to Mexican parents and grew up in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles. After graduating from Harvard Law, she ran a solo law practice in working class Compton for years. She was the only full-time Spanish speaking lawyer in a city of over 50,000 Latino residents. She says she learned to think like a lawyer at Harvard but learned how to be a lawyer in Compton. After seven years of practice in Compton she became a law school professor full-time. Her academic work is focused on …
by Denis Rancourt / March 2nd, 2016
Geopolitics determines domestic policy.
This is apparent in the client country “Canada”, where no sovereignty is allowed, and where domestic policy is entirely about preventing any emergence of actual democracy.
It is glaringly obvious, to anyone who escapes the constant institutional social-engineering restrictions and blaring propaganda amplified by all the media, that US-led geopolitics determines every aspect of state management in Canada.
That US-led geopolitics determines every aspect of state management in Canada is true in every area of state involvement:
regulation of politics
social policy
health policy
educational and student-debt policy
prison and police complex
domestic surveillance complex
slave banking and monetary policy
corporate tax and royalties policies
zero resistance against …
by Allen W. Smith / March 1st, 2016
The surplus Social Security revenue, generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, was supposed to be saved and invested in marketable U.S. Treasury bonds. If that had been done, the trust fund would today hold $2.8 trillion in “good-as-gold” marketable U.S. Treasury bonds. But, none of the surplus Social Security revenue was saved or invested in anything. Instead, all of the money was deposited directly into the general fund and used for such things as wars, tax cuts, and other government programs.
The fact that the trust fund has no real marketable bonds has been documented by many high-level government officials. …
by Eve Mykytyn / March 1st, 2016
Recollection, Kamal Aljafari’s mesmerizing film, is the dream of a cameraman, recapturing the city he loves. The dream veers from transcendental to nightmarish as the beautiful old buildings morph into concrete monstrosities. Carts become wildly veering cars, and plows become bulldozers. But none of this happens sequentially; we see the city and its changes as a dreamer does, in flashes without obvious narrative and in an order that is sporadic rather than chronological. In his description of his film, Aljafari writes, “As in a dream, the search for answers cannot provide any.” In making this film, Aljafari has …
