Latest articles
A Moral Threshold to Combat Racism in Israel
by Ramzy Baroud / March 16th, 2016
A foray of condemnations of the boycott of Israel seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Calls from Western governments, originating from the UK, the US, Canada and others, to criminalize the boycott of Israel have hardly slowed down the momentum of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). On the contrary, it has accelerated.
It is as if history is repeating itself. Western governments took on the pro-South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, fighting it at every corner and branding its leaders. Nelson Mandela and many of his comrades were called terrorists.
Once he passed away in 2013, top US politicians vied …
by Ariel Gold / March 16th, 2016
On Wednesday March 9 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) announced that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has accepted an invitation to speak at their March 20-22 annual policy conference in Washington DC. Two days later they announced that Republican candidate, Donald Trump has also accepted their invitation to speak. AIPAC relishes its ability to trot out leading politicians who then jostle to outdo each other in proving their “pro-Israel” credentials. But AIPAC’s unquestioning support for Israeli policies that undermine any hope of peace in the region and that undercut even the modest pressure the Obama Administration has brought …
by John Stanton / March 16th, 2016
In 2007 I wrote and presented a conceptual paper to an international studies group in Portugal. The subject matter was, generally, the use of Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (ECN) to manage humanity. That paper would eventually finds its way, remarkably, into Rebecca Costa’s seminal The Watchman’s Rattle.
I said back in 2007 that America’s ongoing obsession with national security and the enormous funding necessary to soothe a national psyche of fear and war was a key driver for enhancing security thereby eliminating the uncertainty of daily living. I suggested that ECN could generate predictive and diagnostic biotechnologies to reduce tension. Such …
Reflections on a Life Cut Short 13 Years On
by Eoin Higgins / March 16th, 2016
Wednesday, March 16, 2016, will mark 13 years since American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by the Israeli military in the Palestinian city of Rafah.
When Corrie stood in front of a Caterpillar bulldozer that was preparing to demolish the home of her host family, she thought her American citizenship could protect her and, by extension, the home, from the Israeli military. She was wrong.
For Rochelle Gause and Serena Becker, the event would change and reshape their lives. I talked to the two women to get their perspectives on …
Humanity's Last Call for a Culture of Sharing and Cooperation
by Rajesh Makwana / March 16th, 2016
The real crisis is not the influx of refugees to Europe, per se, but a toxic combination of destabilising foreign policy agendas, economic austerity and the rise of right-wing nationalism, which is likely to push the world further into social and political chaos in the months ahead.
Razor-wire fences, detention centres, xenophobic rhetoric and political disarray; nothing illustrates the tendency of governments to aggressively pursue nationalistic interests more starkly than their inhumane response to refugees fleeing conflict and war. With record numbers of asylum seekers predicted to reach Europe this year and a morally acceptable humanitarian response nowhere in sight, the …
The anti-Viet Nam speech that wasn't
by Yves Engler / March 15th, 2016
While coverage of Justin Trudeau’s recent visit to Washington was embarrassingly banal in its emphasis on “bromance” between Obama and the Canadian PM, at least it was accurate (in the limited sense valued by the dominant media), except for the 60 Minutes feature that comically confused a photo of Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall for Margaret Trudeau. However, one aspect of the reporting did stand out as both a lie and dangerous nationalist mythology.
A number of media outlets discussed Lester Pearson visiting Lyndon Johnson the day after he reportedly gave a “scathing speech on American involvement in …
Methane Threatens as Scientists Censor
by Robert Hunziker / March 15th, 2016
The question of whether methane (CH4) in the atmosphere is a threat to life is extraordinarily complex and generally not well understood. But, yes, it is a serious threat, very serious and horribly real.
Okay, but don’t scientists understand this, and why aren’t they speaking out?
They are speaking out but only a very few.
Here’s the “speaking out” problem: Leading climate scientists are not willing to honestly expose their greatest fears, as discovered by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! whilst at COP21 in Paris this past December, interviewing one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Kevin Anderson (University of Manchester) of Tyndall …
Coercive Engineered Migration: Zionism's War on Europe (Part 10 of an 11 Part Series)
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / March 15th, 2016
Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as a ‘puzzle wrapped inside an enigma’. The same could be said for Russian President Vladimir Putin today. From the intricate and sometimes unpredictable diplomatic maneuvers of his foreign policy to his contradictory and sometimes ambiguous pronouncements on the legacy of the USSR, enigmatic is perhaps one of the most apposite words to describe him. This enigma is particularly evident in his approach to the politics of the Middle East and Israel in particular.
A further complication in the notion of a contemporary Russian bourgeois state representing some form of ‘anti-imperialist’ resistance is the …
by James Hoover / March 14th, 2016
In the steamy summer of 2012, at the Irving, Texas, megachurch that helped elect Ted Cruz to the U.S. Senate, Rafael Cruz summoned followers to take dominion over leadership of our country. He named his son, Ted Cruz, as one of the anointed. Ted, he said, is one among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as “kings” to take control of all sectors of society and “bring the spoils of war to the priests,” in this way bringing about a prophesied “great transfer of wealth” from the “wicked” to righteous gentile believers.
This Dominionism, in its extreme form, would create …
by Ellen Brown / March 13th, 2016
Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.
The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the …
by John R. Hall / March 13th, 2016
Eons before our forefathers climbed down from trees, shed vestigial tails, discovered their thumbs, and began walking upright, the fire goddess Pele was hard at work on the bottom of earth’s mightiest ocean. There, four miles beneath the turbulent salty surface, she toiled. Building Islands of white-hot, molten basalt, pushing them far into the sky, then watching as rock, buffeted by wind and rain, wore down to soil, as birds dropped seeds from faraway lands, as lush forests grew, as the ancestors of parrot-fish gobbled coral and crapped golden sand beaches which, in turn, became home to ancient species of crabs, turtles, and seals, then smiling knowingly …
by Matt Peppe / March 13th, 2016
Last month Cuban baseball stars and brothers Lourdes and Yulieski Gourriel left the national team in the Dominican Republic in order to pursue careers in Major League Baseball. It was reported widely from the official Communist Party newspaper Granma to regional and national news outlets. The coverage certainly represents a change from some years ago, when the issue would have been considered taboo, but was unremarkable considering the progression of Cuban society and media since then. But for New York Times editorial writer Ernesto Londoño the incident represented a dramatic emergence of free …
by Michael Howard / March 13th, 2016
Donald Trump is occurring. He’s no longer merely a punchline. Only a fool can say that his antics are not worth talking about (my line during the first few months of his campaign). Despite the GOP establishment’s best efforts, which were necessarily lame (we’re talking about the GOP here), Trump is the probable Republican nominee. Unless the “true” conservatives like Mitt Romney can manage to swing a brokered convention, The Donald’s got this in the bag. His opposition tells us a lot about how this happened.
There are two principal forces working against Trump. First is the Republican establishment—the Bush’s and …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 12th, 2016
Subservience is a terrible state, not merely because of its indignities, but its distortions. Speech from the main political centre is garbled and marred, ever mediated by the higher power. Media releases from departments from the vassal or satrap state tend to be coloured by the broader interests of the larger power. For years, that has been characteristic of US-Australian relations.
The Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was again sallying forth with a whitewashing measure, hoping that no one would notice that Australia was again offering itself up for conspicuous targeting in the event of any future conflict. In February, the …
by Norman Ball / March 12th, 2016
Chicago is the Circus. TPP steals the bread. America, TV’s not showing you all the pictures again. As a bonus Trump-Sanders give you a pass on WW3. Make FDR proud!
by William Boardman / March 12th, 2016
I’m not here to announce my candidacy for office…. America will remain, as it is today, the envy of the world….
If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished….
A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president….
I understand the anger Americans feel today…. Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes…. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.
— Mitt Romney, Hinckley Institute of Politics, Salt Lake City
Mitt Romney, former Republican candidate for …
by Graham Vanbergen / March 12th, 2016
When it comes to The City of London, the term ‘tax haven’ is not describing all that it should. It doesn’t just shield the mega-wealthy from paying their fair dues it goes further and offers a departure from the rule of law as you would know it. Secrecy is its raison d’être. These secrecy laws do not benefit the local people living in its jurisdiction but only those individuals and corporations with enough money and with something to hide.
The reality is that the City of London caters for those above the law, it operates on the basis of bypassing democratic society as …
by Clifton Ross / March 11th, 2016
Today is a big media day in Venezuela. Today, Friday, March 11, 2016, the news is all about the news and it’s as if the Bolivarian government was taking a page out of President Obama’s playbook to make a whole movie. Yet while the U.S. president can only go after individual whistleblowers (and boy does he ever! with more whistleblowers serving more jail time under Obama than all previous presidents combined) in Venezuela the government shuts down whole newspapers.
There are, of course, other differences between a capitalist national security state like the U.S. where some checks and balances remain …
Open Letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo
by Mina Hamilton / March 11th, 2016
One of the stupidest schemes on the planet has just hit a snag.
The plan is for natural-gas giant, Spectra Energy, to construct a new high-pressure, 42-inch gas pipeline in the immediate vicinity of the Indian Point nuclear power plants. The pipeline would carry fracked-gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale wells up into New England and then to LNG terminals in Canada. From there the gas would be exported to India, Japan and elsewhere around the planet.
The proposed new pipeline has been bitterly opposed for over two years.
The Spectra project, known as the Alconquin Market (AIM) project, has been opposed by local …
Anti-Empire Report #144
by William Blum / March 11th, 2016
American exceptionalism presents an election made in hell
If the American presidential election winds up with Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, and my passport is confiscated, and I’m somehow FORCED to choose one or the other, or I’m PAID to do so, paid well … I would vote for Trump.
My main concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy is the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity, and the environment. And when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster. From Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras the world is a much worse place because of her; so …
by Ralph Nader / March 11th, 2016
That’s a question currently being asked by legislators in the halls of Congress. Without a muscular pushback from the public, the big airlines could claim the American airspace as their own to tax and regulate, without any significant compensation to the American taxpayer and no oversight from elected officials. Talk about getting skyjacked!
An amendment in the 273-page FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) reauthorization bill? H.R. 4441 ?currently moving through Congress means to remove air traffic control from the authority of the FAA and hand it over to a private, not-for-profit corporation. This new corporate-controlled body would be responsible for the over …
The Gates Foundation, Arnie Duncan, and Bruce Rauner
by John Klyczek / March 11th, 2016
For over twenty years, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, has been warning us about the coming corporatization of education through fascistic charter school privatization that will be subsidized by public finances. Iserbyt, author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, has described the charter school takeover, otherwise known as the “school choice” movement, as “[c]ollusion between neoconservatives, corporations, and leftists in education, including former ‘conservative’ Secretaries of Education and the NEA, [which] enabled corporations to take control of American education.”
As a …
by Robert Hunziker / March 10th, 2016
What was happening inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant?
It is nearly impossible to think about the disaster of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant without wondering what it must have been like inside the control center. The first 88 hours after the reactors went out of control were the most critical. It’s when the workers of Fukushima Daiichi met the devil of cataclysm face-to-face.
Now for the first time ever, the public will be able to go inside the control room of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in a documentary drama, Meltdown – The Fateful 88 Hours (“Meltdown”), a NHK Documentary premiering …
Inland Northwest's tree experts rate the state of the region's urban forests
by Paul Haeder / March 10th, 2016
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
? John Muir
Tree Dialogues
Talking trees with the typical Spokane (Washington) “tree surgeon/arboriculturalist” is like speaking to a philosopher/doctor/medicine man/geek all in one breath. These men and women have a passion for trees because they see each community’s health, resilience and psychological well being tied to robust and plentiful trees.
Emblematic of how a community or even family should thrive, a city’s vast mosaic of trees and runs of forests turns our ecosystem into a fully connected biological living history – past, present and future.
Some sentiments can be dry – urban forests …
by Media Lens / March 10th, 2016
On February 28, Hillary Clinton told an audience from the pulpit of a Memphis church: ‘we need more love and kindness in America’. This was something she felt ‘from the bottom of my heart’.
These benevolent sentiments recalled the national ‘purpose’ identified by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, shortly before he flattened Iraq. It was, he said, ‘to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world’.
Clinton, of course, meant North America, specifically the United States. But other places in America are short on love and kindness, too. Consider Honduras, for example.
On June …
by Roger D. Harris and Allan Miller / March 10th, 2016
Where to Invade Next riffs off of the idea of critiquing the US war without end. Despite the title, documentarian Michael Moore is not going there in his first film in six years. Rather, Moore adroitly shows positive examples from abroad of what he believes might be done at home if there were the political will this election year.
With Old Glory in tow, Moore’s “one-man army…invades” Western Europe, plus stops in Slovenia and Tunisia, to “steal” good eye-opening ideas to take home:
Gourmet public school lunches in France
Free higher education for citizens and foreigners alike in Slovenia
Decriminalization of drugs and attendant …
by Anonymous / March 10th, 2016
https://youtu.be/FI4HagtgTPQ
by Harvey Lothian / March 10th, 2016
That, of course, is not true. The Crazies are here and have been in power since Ronald Reagan was elected President of the USA. Their craziness became obvious when Reagan ignored his personal beliefs and the beliefs of all conservatives and began spending federal money like there was no tomorrow. Fiscal prudence was totally ignored because the USA and the Western World were in the severest economic downturn since the Great Depression and things were getting worse by the day. Workers were getting angry, very, very angry, they wanted jobs and would not stand in soup lines, sell apples on …
by Rebecca Green / March 10th, 2016
The 2016 presidential elections are proving pivotal in U.S. history, although not just for the self-proclaimed socialist-democrat Bernie Sanders, the feminist squabble unfolding around Hillary Clinton, or the larger-than-life wild card Donald Trump.
The elections are revealing more dramatically than ever the corrosive effect of big money on the U.S.’s decayed democracy. In a country founded on the principle that every citizen has an equal voice and an equal vote, how is money stealing center stage in U.S. elections?
Following Citizens United v. FEC, SpeechNow.org vs. FEC, and McCutcheson v. FEC, corporations and the wealthiest in society have been granted the legal right to …
What Happens When You Merge a Psychopath with a Killer?
by Kim Petersen / March 9th, 2016
The United States is, indisputably, the world’s foremost killing entity, and it has been since its genocidal inception., The killing is relentless — in more recent times wreaking destruction in Iraq,Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, Genocide …
