Latest articles
Another Device for Controlling the Masses
by Jack Balkwill / September 16th, 2015
Oh, Howard Hughes
Did your money make you better?
Are you waiting for the hour
When you can screw me?
‘Cause you’re big enough
To do the Wall Street Shuffle
Let your money hustle
Bet you’d sell your mother
You can buy another
– “The Wall Street Shuffle,” 10cc from their 1974 album Sheet Music
Of all the corporate media propaganda which warps reality in America, one echoed statement makes me wretch more than any other, and that’s “the jobs straw man” in defense of laissez faire capitalism, a commonly-used device to declare that greed is good despite the damning evidence.
The jobs straw man exists to convince the public …
by Ahmed E. Souaiaia / September 16th, 2015
Politics is the art of compromise. Successful politicians rarely give ultimatums because doing so would limit their ability to navigate complex issues. In 2012, President Obama misread the complexity of the crisis in Syria. He drew a “red line” for President Assad: the use of chemical weapons would have “enormous consequences” and would “change [his] calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A year later, someone used weaponized chemicals, killing hundreds of civilians. Although no investigation was conducted to identify the perpetrator at that time, the U.S., pressured by its regional allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, …
Schools of Violence
by Binoy Kampmark / September 16th, 2015
A few minutes into the class we heard these popping noises and we all went completely silent.
— Charlie King, Delta State University student, September 14, 2015
School instruction can be about many things. There is the expected tedium, the unanticipated intellectual rush. Generally speaking, it is mundane. But resolving conflict through mayhem and massacre should not normally fall within that ambit. The triple deaths surrounding Delta State University in Mississippi have added, not so much a chapter as a lengthy footnote in terms of campus gun culture in the United States.
The names of these ill-fated participants will vanish …
How Yarmouk Came About
by Ramzy Baroud / September 16th, 2015
When Zionist Haganah militias carried out Operation Yiftach, on May 19 1948, the aim was to drive Palestinians in the northern Safad District which had declared its independence a mere five days earlier, outside the border of Israel.
The ethnic cleansing of Safad and its many villages was not unique to that area. In fact, it was the modus operandi of Zionist militias throughout Palestine. Soon after Israel’s independence, and the conquering of historic Palestine, the militias were joined together to form the Israeli armed forces.
Not all villages, however, were completely depopulated. Some residents in …
Part 2: Mom, Is It War Yet?
by T.P. Wilkinson / September 16th, 2015
As a fifth-grader my history teacher gave me and one of my classmates an extra task, one might say a riddle. I believe the reason was that there was a certain kind of rivalry between us as to who “knew more” in class. In any case in the days before the Internet, anything we thought we knew came from class or books– remember them? The question was “what does ‘e = mc2’ mean? A couple of days later he asked us for our answers. My classmate, Richard, said he could not complete the task because he could not find the …
by Christy Rodgers / September 16th, 2015
The metaphors are too ripe. California, symbol of limitless abundance, material wealth, possibilities for personal transformation. California, the impossibly over-endowed beauty, who wins all the contests, to the bitter envy or sycophantic admiration of the average Joes and Janes. California, the consummate global destination for the millions of who are desperate for reinvention: sexual, political, economic. California – thanks to the limitless marketability of human desire, which built its gargantuan industry of dreams – the world’s avatar for the whole USA.
All this is now tinder in a planetary fireplace.
New York, financial capital of the uniquely nameless and stateless global empire …
by Yves Engler / September 16th, 2015
Over the weekend a memorial was unveiled to victims of British colonial violence in Kenya. Paid for by London, the monument in Nairobi grew out of London’s 2013 apology to the Mau Mau, which included some compensation to 5000 victims of British policy who pursued London court.
Britain’s small step towards atoning for its colonial past is an opportunity to explore Canada’s contribution to this brutal period, which was an offshoot Ottawa’s long-standing endorsement of colonialism Africa.
Image Mau Mau HistoryIn 1952, the Kikuyu, Kenya’s …
by Cécile Lawrence / September 16th, 2015
On the Monday in January 2015 marked in the U.S. by many to commemorate the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization called Healthcare-Now in the U.S. emailed its subscribers a message titled “Reader’s Guide to Racial Equity in Healthcare.” The message started with the still necessary reminder that no biological basis for race exists, then went on to point out that “[i]n the United States … segregationist politics in Congress blocked national healthcare for much of the 20th century – not, as is often claimed, the growth of employer-based insurance during WWII.” Their email said …
by Matt Peppe / September 15th, 2015
U.S. and Cuban delegations met in Havana Friday to “focus on setting priorities for the next steps in the normalization process,” according to the Miami Herald. They set up a “steering committee in the rapprochement process” expected to hold regular meetings. The process was laid out last month after the American flag was raised at the newly-opened U.S. embassy in Havana. Secretary of State John Kerry noted on the occasion that “the road of mutual isolation that the United States and Cuba have been travelling is not the right one, and that the time has come …
Jeremy Corbyn, quo vadis?
by T.P. Wilkinson / September 15th, 2015
Last week a new leader of the British Labour Party was chosen. Already the chimes can be heard from the belfries of thousands of Labour parishes, with coronation eulogies published in the journals of political dissent. The abdication of the Miliband dynasty would seem to herald the end of New Labour’s reign of terror begun when Thatcher acolyte, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair kissed hands in 1997. One commentator has already ventured the fantasy of the “special relationship” led after 2016 by one Rt Hon J Corbyn and President Sanders. ((Oliver Tickell, “Victory! Corbyn’s Political Earthquake Will Resound Long and Deep”, …
by David Swanson / September 14th, 2015
Senator Bernie Sanders taped a PBS show at the University of Virginia on Monday. I had corresponded with the host Doug Blackmon beforehand, and offered him ideas for questions on military spending and war, questions like these:
1. People want to tax the rich and cut military spending, which is 54% of federal discretionary spending according to National Priorities Project, but you only ever mention taxing the rich. Why not do both? What — give or take $100 billion — is an appropriate level of military spending?
2. Do you agree with Eisenhower that military spending creates wars?
3. Can you possibly …
Spokane County Conservation District works to fill the void of aging farmers with soldiers
by Paul Haeder / September 14th, 2015
He will judge between the nations, and will render verdicts for the benefit of many. They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nations will not raise swords against nations, and they will not learn warfare anymore.
– Isaiah 2:4
There definitely are some exciting studies that (show) horticulture, getting outside, working with plants, definitely has some healing effects on the cognitive and all the areas of brain function (and) recovering from brain damage.
— Michael O’Gorman founder of nonprofit Farmer-Veteran Coalition, based in Davis, California
Spokane, like big dog Seattle, or funky Portland – similar to almost …
by Myles Hoenig / September 14th, 2015
A lot of people are taking comfort in Jeremy Corbyn’s amazing victory in England for leader of the Labour Party as part of a leftist surge in Europe, coming to the USA. They’re right about Europe. We see it with Labour in Great Britain, Podemos in Spain, Syriza (before they folded) in Greece, and the Communists in Portugal, who stand to make enormous electoral gains on October 4. People in the US are making the connection to the Bernie Sanders campaign. If only it were true.
Without going into details, his policies are not like theirs. Perhaps in economic and …
by Robert Hunziker / September 14th, 2015
The movers and shakers in the Republican Party must be firmly convinced that Obama and the world community are finally willing to commit to climate change action in Paris at COP21 this November. Key Republican operatives have been spotted maneuvering in the gutters and the sewers covertly assuring foreign embassies that the Republican Party will “fight Obama’s climate agenda at every turn.”
In short, the Republicans are essentially telling the world community to relentlessly keep on pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere because climate change negotiations ultimately go nowhere.
The Republicans are thus breaking every rule and protocol of international diplomatic …
by T.J. Petrowski / September 12th, 2015
The widely circulated photo of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy whose body was found on a beach in Turkey and whose family was “making a final, desperate attempt to flee to relatives in Canada even though their asylum application had been rejected” by the Stephen Harper Government, has caused widespread outrage and forced Western leaders to acknowledge that there is a “refugee crisis”.
In Canada, the leaders of the Liberal and New Democratic parties have used the news of Kurdi’s tragic death, along with the deaths of his five-year-old brother and his mother, to criticize the Harper Government’s response to …
And in Portugal?
by Pedro Aibéo / September 12th, 2015
Despite disagreeing with the legitimacy of power and disillusioned with the constant shift of left wing politicians to the right wing careerism, let us all still vote for the one party which advocates new practical measures to limit such power, based on technology: the Pirate Party.
I was blessed by a meeting in Athens last week with several members of the Greek Pirate Party, including the Greek Minister of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Church, Vassilis Perantzakis. His Highness told me that the …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 12th, 2015
Jeremy Corbyn has done it. The agitation of the Left in a deflated, and to a large extent ruined British Labour Party, raised Corbyn from the status of the rank outsider to that of leader with a mighty 59.5 percent of the vote. The Times deemed him a “veteran backroom operative” who became prominent while working for “Red” Ken Livingstone over the course of 12 years, eight of which he did so as chief of staff.
Shocked out of their nonchalance, various contenders, and former leader Ed Milliband, immediately made it clear that they would be reluctant to …
by Keith Harmon Snow / September 12th, 2015
At 3:00 pm on 4 September 2015 five hostile U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stormed the Baltimore MD home of Rwandan asylum seeker Dr. Leopold Munyakazi in a surprise Gestapo-like raid. A man that international human rights experts believe to be the victim of a smear campaign by the criminal military regime in Rwanda, Dr. Munyakazi has 100% complied with all immigration reporting and monitoring requirements over the course of his six year struggle to regain his freedom.
…
by Alexandra Morton / September 12th, 2015
When the Province of British Columbia recently issued the biggest salmon farm expansion in over a decade, they knew the public were not onboard with the decision. A petition with over 110,000 signatures was recently delivered to the Premier.
However, the Norwegian-based companies each courted a First Nation chief and council and once they made their deals, the Province of BC felt it would be clear sailing to grant leases, despite the public demand that this industry get away from our wild fish. Four more salmon farms were given tenures to release tons of waste daily.
We can’t know what kind of …
by Thomas C. Mountain / September 12th, 2015
I first wrote about the assassination of American Rap Music superstar Tupac Shakur almost a decade ago. I used the title “The Hand of The Man in Tupac’s Assassination” and I use the term “assassination” for good reason.
Tupac was gunned down on the Los Vegas Strip in front of the mega gambling casino Circus Circus after a Mike Tyson boxing match. Hundreds of people witnessed the killing and it had to have been captured on multiple CCTV (close circuit television) systems used to monitor the front of the hotel. The killers had to have arrived and departed from the scene …
by Ralph Nader / September 12th, 2015
Socrates and Plato were not in a hurry. Neither was Aristotle nor Heraclitus. They took time to think deeply. As far back as twenty-four centuries ago, they offered insights and observations about the human condition, character, and personality that are as true today as they were then.
Fast forward to our fast-paced society. Many people think if they talk faster, people will think they’re smarter. Talking fast is not talking smart. Evening TV news interviews of individuals may average five or less seconds, called sound bites, while they averaged about eighteen seconds in the nineteen-seventies. Standardized tests put a premium on …
by Jack Balkwill / September 11th, 2015
Will all your money
Buy you forgiveness?
Keep you from sickness?
Or keep you from cold?
Will all your money
Keep you from sadness,
Or keep you from madness
When you’re down in the hole?
— “Down in the Hole“, the Rolling Stones, from their 1980 recording Emotional Rescue
President Franklin D. Roosevelt said:
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
Roosevelt’s …
by Gary Leupp / September 11th, 2015
First he bombed mercilessly, cruelly grinning throughout. Costumed in a flight suit, he proclaimed a “Mission Accomplished” after he had, with what they call “bipartisan support” (as though this lends some sort of legitimacy), destroyed the modern country of Iraq.
George W. Bush destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, its institutions, its ruling party and its army. Then he destroyed its social fabric, which had permitted widespread Sunni-Shiite intermarriage and religiously integrated neighborhoods.
Bush destroyed the law and order which had permitted girls to walk to school, heads uncovered, in modern western dress. He destroyed the freedom of physicians and other professionals to go about …
by Media Lens / September 10th, 2015
Anyone struggling to understand the violent upheaval in Yemen this year might be tempted to consult the country’s ‘most important source of news’ – the BBC. An online piece titled ‘Yemen crisis: Who is fighting whom?’ explains:
Yemen is in the grip of its most severe crisis in years, as competing forces fight for control of the country.
The article continues:
The main fight is between forces loyal to the beleaguered President, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, and those allied to Zaidi Shia rebels known as Houthis, who forced Mr Hadi to flee the capital Sanaa in February.
Both President Hadi and the Houthis …
by Paul Craig Roberts / September 10th, 2015
Millions of refugees from Washington’s wars are currently over-running Europe. Washington’s 14-year and ongoing slaughter of Muslims and destruction of their countries are war crimes for which the US government’s official 9/11 conspiracy theory was the catalyst. Factual evidence and science do not support Washington’s conspiracy theory. The 9/11 Commission did not conduct an investigation. It was not permitted to investigate. The Commission sat and listened to the government’s story and wrote it down. Afterwards, the chairman and co-chairman of the Commission said that the Commission “was set up to fail.” For a factual explanation of 9/11, watch …
by James Hoover / September 10th, 2015
I am re-watching the first episode of Ken Burn’s Civil War documentary on PBS. The documented history is composed of still pictures, historical quotes, letters written to family by combatants, all accompanied with haunting music and voices heavy with pathos. It takes us to a time a century and a half ago when families and friends fought one another for a cause.
Just before the Civil War, some 4 million men, women and children were owned, comprising nearly one-seventh of the total population. We fought a savage civil war for four years, the cause initially for the union, with the …
A Review of Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists
by Kim Petersen / September 10th, 2015
We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesize their experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them achieve liberation and happiness.
— Mao Zedong ((Mao Tse-tung “Get Organized!” 29 November 1943. Selected Works, Vol III, p. 158 from marxists.org)) (p. 106)
According to the above translation, it appears as though Mao sees himself and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) comrades as outside the masses. That, however, is inconsequential to the fact that …
by Maidhc Ó Cathail / September 10th, 2015
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
—Queen Gertrude, Hamlet
Whenever someone insists too strongly about something not being true, we tend to suspect that maybe it is. In their denials of involvement in 9/11, do Israel’s apologists “protest too much”?
While it would take a small book to adequately document the Israeli connection to 9/11—as Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo attempted to some extent in The Terror Enigma—let us briefly recall some of the more intriguing facts as reported in the mainstream media, involving dancing Israelis, Odigo warnings, and Zim’s timely move.
The story of the five Israelis who were seen celebrating and …
by Ben Schreiner / September 10th, 2015
From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.
– Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff, 2002
The best time to introduce a new product, as Card well understood, comes just after Labor Day. And when it comes to a new “product” to be marketed to the American public, there’s never been anything quite like a new war — that most prolific of American exports.
For the Bush neocons, the public campaign to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the American public was thus strategically launched in September 2002; an astute adherence to the same schedule …
by Lamont Lilly / September 9th, 2015
Over 800 gathered in the city of Charleston, S.C., September 5-6 for the Days of Grace Mass March and Strategy Conference against racism and for economic justice. Activists, organizers and attendees traveled from all over the United States. Guest speaker, Clarence Thomas, of the International Longshore Workers Union Local 10, came in from Oakland, Calif. Several of their Bay Area leading organizers all journeyed together from West to East, including dock workers all the way from Seattle.
National activist, DeRay McKesson came in from St. Louis, MO. Organizers with the Fight for $15 pressed their way from as far …
