In Part 1 I asserted that there is a new globalised Fascist movement that has gradually, in fits and starts, insinuated itself as a new normal in Western regimes and in many “developing” regimes. A central claim of the article is that the differences between old Fascism and new Fascism are almost entirely due to the fact that the original Fascism was a nationalistic creed with imperialist ambitions, while the new Fascism is an imperialist ideology and mode of governance.
I also distinguish between the banal Fascism of governance and the dramatic Fascism of rhetoric. Fascists …
Enabling Saudi militancy is an irrational US policy
The Saudi mass beheadings on January 2 proved nothing new to a world that well knows Saudi Arabia is still a tribal police state with a moral code of medieval barbarity. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-Muslim country that executes people for witchcraft, adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality (among other things). And the Saudi regime is perfectly willing to torture and kill a Shi’a-Muslim cleric for the crime of speaking truth to power, knowing that that judicial murder will inflame his followers and drive the …
by Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri / January 7th, 2016
I cannot help asking those who have forced that situation: Do you realize what you have done?
— Russian President Vladimir Putin pointing to the US policy in the Middle East, address to the United Nations General Assembly, 2015, excerpts on CNBC.
Is it best for the world to remain on the sidelines or engage in nugatory “peace” negotiations while the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Israel, and their terrorist groups destroy Syria with fire and violence? How would the entry of Russia at the side of …
As the American Historical Association (AHA) prepares to vote this week on a symbolic resolution that affirms support for the right to education in the occupied Palestinian territories, apologists for the Israeli regime’s policies against Palestinians are putting forward nonsensical rationalizations for their opposition to the measure. Writing in History News Network, University of Maryland History Professor Jeffrey Herf essentially argues that his profession has no practical value: “as historians we have neither the knowledge nor expertise to evaluate conflicting factual assertions about events in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.”
If historians should not evaluate the veracity of …
The Martian is a very expensive piece of Hollywood trash, in short an international blockbuster. But it has one revealing and interesting brief segment. For those fortunate enough to have missed the movie, it recounts the survival and rescue of an American astronaut abandoned by accident on a mission to Mars. It is an altogether predictable story of Yankee ingenuity and derring-do with nary a trace of the character development or the superb photography of its predecessor and inspiration, Gravity.
As the rescue operation proceeds the Americans find themselves short a rocket booster. The obvious …
Kevin Zeese has long amazed me because of the number of things he does to make a better world. Mondays he does a radio program with Margaret Flowers called Clearing the FOG, which is one of the best alternative programs in the world, informing people of what is happening beyond the narrow scope of the corporate media.
Months before the Occupy Movement began, he was organizing activists in the City of Washington to occupy Freedom Plaza there.
Daily he puts out Popular Resistance, informing people of the latest news around the corporate media and organizing activists across the nation.
Although intended to inspire his Fatah Party followers, a televised speech by Mahmoud Abbas on the 51st Anniversary of the group’s launch highlighted, instead, the unprecedented crisis that continues to wreak havoc on the Palestinian people. Not only did Abbas sound defensive and lacking in any serious or new initiatives, but his ultimate intention appeared as if it was about his political survival, and nothing else.
In his speech on December 31, he tossed in many of the old clichés, chastising Israel at times, although in carefully-worded language, and insisted that any vital decisions concerned with “the future of …
The armed militia members occupying a federally owned wildlife outpost in eastern Oregon have demanded that the land be “returned” to them. But who really has claim to this forest? We speak with Jacqueline Keeler, a writer and activist of Dineh and Yankton Dakota heritage who wrote about the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff for The Nation and is now working on a new piece which in part examines the history of the Paiute tribe’s treaty rights to the forest currently occupied by the nearly all-white militia.
There is more confusion about Social Security today than ever before. We are hearing contradictory claims from individuals, organizations, and government, and nobody knows who to believe.
There is no official watchdog agency to monitor the Social Security system and provide objective information to the public. Many people think that the Social Security trustees are a nonpartisan group of fair-minded public servants who can be trusted to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; But the trustees are political appointees, subject to dismissal, and they don’t always tell the whole …
My work documenting how the law was lost began about a quarter of a century ago. A close friend and distinguished attorney, Dean Booth, first brought to my attention the erosion of the legal principles on which rests the rule of law in the United States. My columns on the subject got the attention of an educational institution that invited me to give a lecture on the subject. Subsequently, I was invited to give a lecture on “How The Law Was Lost” at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
With New Year celebrations barely in the rear view mirror, foreboding storm clouds are once again forming along the horizon. The blackening skies are casting a dour mood over 2016, which in its mere infancy seems all but assured to see deepening global tumult, conflict, and crisis.
At the root of this palpable disquiet lies the still fragile state of the global economy, coming up on eight years after the financial collapse of 2008.
Writing in the German newspaper Handelsblatt last week, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde pointed to “rising interest rates in the United States and an economic …
Gender and social justice do not make strange bedfellows. Any injustice wrought on the basis of gender is fundamentally at odds with the belief that all people have dignity by virtue of the fact that they are human. By the same token, human dignity is fully compatible with the notion of “equal worth,” which necessitates a respect for the inherent value of all people. Equal worth moreover precludes any abridgement of the value of human beings on the basis of gender, and it takes root in the democratic ideals of freedom and opportunity. Yet, to …
As 2016 dawns and we contemplate our personal goals and expectations it is important to review them in the context of the geopolitical reality we currently inhabit. Here in the United States we find ourselves in the midst of what appears to be one of the most interesting and\or disturbing presidential campaigns in recent memory.
What was billed to be a hierarchal contest between two opposing but familiar political dynasties quickly became overshadowed by what can best be described as a carnival side show. Party insiders quickly dismissed it as the summer of Trump only to be confronted with a Trump …
Nothing justifies killing of innocent people.
— Tony Blair, CNN, January 15th, 2015
A little over three months short of the thirteenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq (March 20th, 2003) now widely accepted as unlawful even by the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, it has emerged that the Unit in the British Ministry of Defence established to investigate “allegations of torture and unlawful killings” by members of the 46,000 UK armed forces originally deployed has been “overwhelmed” with cases.
Common Sense for the Working Vermonter: A Libertarian-Socialist Manifesto
Third Revised Decade Edition
by Green Mountain Anarchist Collective / January 3rd, 2016
As Vermonters we are perhaps the most weather conscious people in North America. We feel the winter winds through the drafts of old farm houses, smell the melting snow when collecting our sap buckets, hear the birds of summer while tending our farms and gardens, and see the beauty of fall written across the hills in oranges, reds, and yellows. Many of us still work with our hands, be it as loggers, farmers, carpenters, midwives, or crafts-people. When the leaves fall we still hunt deer, and many of us still …
Here in Kabul, last week, at the Afghan Peace Volunteer (APV) community home that hosts me, I watched Abdulhai and visiting activist Aaron Hughes work out ways to secure the greenhouse which they had partially assembled that morning. Warmed by the effort and with the sun beaming down on all of us, they sat on the garden ledge in their shirtsleeves although it is a quite cold winter here, talking about the greenhouse perched on an uneven garden plot before them.
I had watched Aaron, Abdulhai, Ron and Hakim maneuver the partly assembled greenhouse from a neighbor’s storage area, over a …
Day and night, for years, an overwhelming force has been battering this quiet nation, one of the cradles of human civilization.
Hundreds of thousands have died, and millions have been forced to flee abroad or have been internally displaced. In many cities and villages, not one house is left intact.
But Syria is, against all odds, still standing.
During the last 3 years I worked in almost all of Syria’s perimeters, exposing the birth of ISIS in the NATO-run camps built in Turkey and Jordan. I worked in the occupied Golan Heights and …
Mark Weisbrot, a co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has written an enlightening book that pulls together many of the analyses that CEPR has been producing over the past several decades. The book, Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong about the Global Economy, is important and useful because it provides an alternative framework of analysis to the one used by establishment experts, media and policy-makers. What is more, this alternative framework and description of reality is well supported by empirical evidence and is …
The defeated ogre, licking his wounds, finds little comfort from his hawkish “best friend”, despite his love for Israeli birds for whom he helped raise more than ten million Canadian dollars to build a bird sanctuary in the Promised Land. This was in preference to Canadian birds, who along with almost all other Canadians, had their funding slashed.
He did this with the help of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an innocuous sounding organization, one which operates worldwide, but one which was founded to ‘disappear’ Palestinians and their homes, building bland pine …
Resolution severely criticises the "Occupying Power"
by Stuart Littlewood / January 1st, 2016
Can this be true?
Something important and, freedom lovers may think, rather wonderful seems to have happened at the United Nations, and it went largely unreported in mainstream media. The UN General Assembly approved a draft resolution ‘Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources’ (document A/70/480).
It was adopted by 164 to 5 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States), with 10 abstentions (Australia, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Honduras, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, South Sudan, Togo, Tonga, …
If graded in terms of encouraging and developing a well-rounded and informed citizenry in a democratic country, the best most public schools I am familiar with would be a “D”. Put simply and bluntly, our public primary and secondary schools, our community colleges and universities are bureaucratic institutions whose main social and intellectual aim and achievement is the indoctrination of students in the prevailing corporatist-consumerist-racist-sexist social norms and whose primary institutional interest is self-preservation.
Certainly some of the worst effects of this system have been leavened by imaginative and deeply dedicated teachers who have been fighting worthwhile and, too often, losing …
They have descended from homes built on the mountainside. Women sit together in the cemetery not to mourn but to wait for the duvet distribution to begin. When I approach them, each woman extends a hand in greeting. Some have the needed small stamped pieces of paper to receive two duvets but most don’t. One of the women tells me about the pain in her chest, her legs. She talks about the war. I listen to all the manifestations of her suffering. I understand only a handful of words but as …
Much has been made of the ‘fact’ that the top 20 donors to the Sanders campaign are all unions and the top 20 donors to the Clinton campaign are corporations or law firms. This is probably true as far as it goes. Various leftish wing sites go on to explore that the corporations give far more money to Clinton than the unions can supposedly afford to give to Sanders.
Information such as this fits nicely into the idea that Sanders is a left wing candidate who will, at a minimum, help to define Clinton’s somewhat obscure politics. The problem is that …
Plutocracy is the first documentary to comprehensively examine early American history through the lens of class. A multi-part series by filmmaker Scott Noble, Part I focuses on the the ways in which the American people have historically been divided on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex and skill level.
Plutocracy: Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule) includes sections on Mother Jones, the American Constitution; the Civil War draft riots; Reconstruction; Industrialization; the evolution of the police; the robber barons; early American labor unions; and major mid-to-late 19th Century labor events including the uprising of 1877, the Haymarket Affair, the Homestead strike and the New Orleans General Strike. The introduction examines the …
Recently, a teacher at a school in Augusta County, Virginia handed out a homework assignment. The homework, part of the Geography curriculum, dealt with world religions. Among other exercises, it included a question asking students to copy Arabic calligraphy (in order to help them understand the complexity of calligraphy in the Arabic language).
Here is the question:
The result?
It led to an angry backlash by parents of several students, as …
One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.
The fresh American machine gun and barbed wire fodder weakened the German position, and an armistice …
I seem to have lost my way said Alice.
What do you mean,’your way?’ asked the Red Queen.
Round here all ways belong to me.
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
In the famous myth, Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Although this didn’t, in fact, happen, Nero was documented to have been a tyrant who was insensitive to the needs of the common people, and it wouldn’t have been out of character.
Nero was said to have had Christians doused in oil and set on fire to light his gardens. Among those he executed was his own mother.
Declaring that the Mont Order is a global group of dissident thinkers, the code of Mont states in its fourth point, “the Order can relate to the Islamic world and hopes that it will overcome Wahhabism and Takfiri sectarianism, which are plots sown against Muslims to attack their unity.”
The real threat is unfortunately even broader in scope, and threatens not only the lives of Muslims with chaos and the miseries of civil war but threatens everyone. No society could be immune to a power that finds comfort in dividing everyone else to make itself feel strong. What it needs …
While the mass media focus on ISIS extremists, a threat that has gone virtually unreported is that your life savings could be wiped out in a massive derivatives collapse. Bank bail-ins have begun in Europe, and the infrastructure is in place in the US. Poverty also kills.
At the end of November, an Italian pensioner hanged himself after his entire €100,000 savings were confiscated in a bank “rescue” scheme. He left a suicide note blaming the bank, where he had been a customer for 50 years and had invested in bank-issued bonds. But he might better have blamed the …
