Latest articles
Why are some people in Massachusetts suddenly Flying it?
by Keith Harmon Snow / July 24th, 2015
Some neighbors in our predominantly white western rural Massachusetts town of Williamsburg have hoisted the confederate battle flag up their flag pole and displayed it on the wall of their business. Why would some Yankee from rural western Massachusetts choose to fly this symbol of divisiveness and hatred? And why now, after it has been further tarnished by the egregious hate crimes committed in South Carolina and the resurgence of church burnings in the southern United States?
*****
For many years I have seen the confederate battle flag …
by Andre Vltchek / July 24th, 2015
I have always liked this country of red earth, mighty rivers and rough cobblestone streets. I have liked its bougainvillea, its long silent nights, and its endless open spaces.
But almost everything that could went wrong for the Paraguayan people, or at least for its indigenous majority.
Before Evo Morales became the President, Bolivia had been the most destitute country in South America. Paraguay was slightly “above it” – the second poorest nation. Now, most likely, it is the most deprived.
*****
It is pitch dark outside, and the road is flooded. As in other extreme right wing countries worldwide, from Indonesia to Kenya, …
by T.P. Wilkinson / July 24th, 2015
At this site I have already reviewed scholarship and recent history with which I would otherwise seek to illustrate my position. For the sake of brevity I will refrain here from submitting the entire indictment again.
However, the “Greatest Show on Earth” is starting to roll into a town near you — thankfully not one near me — and with it the usual battalions of charlatans and hypocrites will also come, those waving what George Carlin so poignantly called “America’s greatest theatrical prop” (aka as Bible, Holy Scripture etc.)
I’m not talking about the Fundamentalists or those of the Jerry Falwell generation …
by Robert Hunziker / July 23rd, 2015
All across America, from West Quoddy Head, Maine, the easternmost point, to Cape Wrangell, Alaska, the westernmost point, a distance of 3,625 miles, people are confronted by politics, Democrats and Republicans, but do they know the two parties merged into a neoliberal juggernaut some time ago? It’s Purple Politics, a de facto single party.
America’s illusory two-party system is so badly corrupted and perverted with such lowly debauchery, undermining any semblance of democracy, it is like a reign of terror that has emerged right underneath people’s noses. There is no election when both parties are one. Similar to the Communist Party …
by Graham Peebles / July 23rd, 2015
Given the catalogue of calamities raging round the world, one could be forgiven for concluding that we are a civilisation in terminal decline. The socio-economic system, which promotes negative divisive ideals, dominates all areas of life and is the cause of much of our difficulties. It is an outworn, unjust way of organising society; does not serve the majority of people – the 99.9%; and is causing far-reaching damage to the planet that, unless radical action is taken, may well prove irreparable.
The environmental crisis is the greatest of a range of interconnected problems facing humanity, the answers to which are …
by James Hoover / July 23rd, 2015
It seems that Republicans would rather cut their throats than to offer affirmation to anything that President Obama might do or favor. It’s not just a personal thing. It’s political. It’s spiteful, and in some cases, it’s racist.
Don’t tell me ideological. They have rejected Obama policies that they themselves favored the day before Obama proposed them. Even, Mitt Romney, the architect of Romney Care, which Obamacare was patterned after, rejected/demonized/vilified the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) in 2012, along with every other Republican. It’s not ideological.
So now it is a nuclear deal with Iran. None of the eyes, sporting the baying …
by J.B. Gerald / July 22nd, 2015
On November 12, 2014 the American Psychological Association commissioned a study of the organization’s relationship with its own ethics guidelines, the national security establishment’s interrogation practices, and torture. Now released, the report by David H. Hoffman and others ((David H. Hoffman et al, “Report to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association: Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture,” Sidley Austin LLP, July 2, 2015.)) confirms the APA’s complicity in Department of Defense programs and the APA’s intentional misrepresentation of its role, deluding its membership and the American people. David …
by Manuel Garcia Jr. / July 22nd, 2015
Why has Donald Trump surged in popularity with Republican Party partisans?
The two stout legs on which the Republican Party firmly stands are bigotry and greed. In order to grasp control of American public attention to meet the demands of its two core principles, the Republican Party reaches out with a left hand of lying and a right hand of hypocrisy.
The candidates seeking to be the Republican Party’s nominee for the presidency of the United States in the 2016 election are competing with one another to win the affections of like-minded and cash-contributing voters (euphemistically called “conservatives”) by projecting what they …
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / July 22nd, 2015
From the outbreak of Europe’s debt crisis in 2010, Germany and the Troika institutions of the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF have come to wield immense influence over the continent and the populations within it. This video examines the individuals and institutions of power in Europe.
https://youtu.be/ro8WOFSgmOo
by Dru Oja Day and Yves Engler / July 21st, 2015
Election season can be the worst time to be a radical. Which is to say, it’s tough to be someone who believes that fundamental systemic change is needed when the parties that have our democratic imagination in a sleeper hold are sucking the air out of the living rooms of the nation pitching their tweaks to the status quo.
There’s not much to do for those who believe in dealing with environmental destruction, colonial pillage, alienation and inequality: the fundamental features of capitalism. If you see radicals out and about during election season, they’re either eating ballots or sporting a cynical …
by Barb Weir / July 21st, 2015
As many of you already know, Alison Weir (no relation, and she pronounces her name WEER while mine is pronounced WAH-YER) and her organization, If Americans Knew (IAK), have been expelled from the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (USCEIO). I decided to get to the bottom of this important development, so I got in touch with Rube Joshner at the USCEIO, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.
Barb Weir: For our readers who may not know, could you please explain why the USCEIO expelled IAK and Alison Weir from your organization?
Rube Joshner: Alison Weir violated our …
But Does Anyone Hear Pope Francis?
by John Stanton / July 21st, 2015
Though not explicitly stated, America’s most powerful instrument of national power is Capitalism. The pistons that power Neoliberal American Capitalism are: Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Law Enforcement, Intelligence and Human Capital/People. The clearest exposition of the instruments of national power on record can be found in the US Army’s 2008 Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare Manual.
No assessment of American political, economic, international, cultural or military strategy/action can be stamped “legitimate” without reference to, and understanding of, these Olympian tools of power that America’s leaders have at their disposal. Combined they are the elements that form the spear and …
by James Hoover / July 21st, 2015
Are we special? Scientists have been asking that question for perhaps centuries. In various philosophical and religious ways, we have too.
The truth is that we don’t really know. Politicians, more assuredly, American politicians, feel obligated to say that America and Americans are special. The GOP, especially, bases its politics on a version of America having jingoistic trump (not with a big T) cards, one seen especially with the George W. Bush administration.
Americans justified an imperialistic vault into the West based on what we called “Manifest Destiny,” the belief that we are so special that displacing “inferiors,” more primitive than us, …
by Roshan Kissoon / July 21st, 2015
The recent celebration of two hundred years of Gurkha recruitment into the British Army in London, at the Royal Chelsea Hospital on the 11th of June, attended by the Queen and various dignitaries and celebrities, was not really a cause of celebration. In fact, it is disgraceful and a should be a source of shame for the British, the Nepalese, the Indians, and any country that has ever been invaded by the British Army and was ever part of the British Empire. Its time to call for an end to this outdated colonial practice.
The Gurkhas were first recruited by …
Email to the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
by Free Palestine Movement / July 21st, 2015
Please be advised that the Free Palestine Movement resigns from the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, effective immediately.
We resign because of the disgraceful, disrespectful and unjust treatment of Alison Weir and her organization, If Americans Knew, in the procedures to expel her from the Campaign on the spurious grounds of insufficient avoidance of anti-Semitic persons and institutions.
We resign because it is clear that the decision had been made to expel IAK before the proceedings to do so had ever begun.
We resign because, in defiance of the most basic principles of justice, Ms. Weir was not given the …
by Alton C. Thompson / July 21st, 2015
In her This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), Naomi Klein states:
What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. (p. 16)
By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I …
by Chris Wright / July 21st, 2015
One doesn’t have to be a brilliant social analyst to see that the contemporary world order is doomed, destined to start visibly crumbling within the next decade or two at the latest. The neoliberal system, in fact the corporate capitalist system, is radically unsustainable. It is too unstable, too universally rapacious, too humanly exploitative and environmentally destructive, too demoniacally self-consuming–for capitalism can profit from its self-immolation!–to last much longer.
Is it even necessary anymore to argue for these claims?
Capitalism means self-sabotage. Its profit-making interest lies in paying wage-earners as little as possible, and ideally in mechanizing and automating them out …
by Eric Walberg / July 21st, 2015
Kevin Barrett has become known in the US as a fearless journalist who cuts to the quick, his political and analytic skills leading to provocative, truthful explanations of our mostly inexplicable reality. He has written several books dealing with 9/11, and is currently an editor at Veterans Today, and pundit at Press TV, Russia Today, al-Etejah and other international channels. His website is TruthJihad.com. He builds on a well-established American journalistic tradition of brave exposers of government misdoings. Bill Blum and Seymour Hirsh are best known, but there are hundreds more.
Great American tradition
Blum is a legend from the 1960s, as …
by David Swanson / July 21st, 2015
Behind John Rawls’ veil of ignorance, an American ethics professor would imagine himself or herself choosing a society of wonderful economic and social justice, unheard of equality and liberty, and the “right” to “defend” itself through the counterproductive and self-destructive instrument of military empire and war. Peace isn’t permitted even in utopia, in U.S. academe. Why? Because John Rawls murdered Japanese people “in defense” and occupied their nation as philanthropy.
And why do others support other wars? Principally because of where they happen to have been born and what flavor of fairy tales they have been told as children. Which ancient …
by Herb Dyer / July 21st, 2015
You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.
– George Wallace, after winning Alabama’s governor’s office in 1962
After losing his first run for governor in 1958, George Wallace famously told his campaign finance chief Seymore Trammell that he had been “out-niggered” by his opponent. There was no viable Republican Party in Alabama in the 1960s. Thus, winning the Democratic Party primary – any Democratic primary — was tantamount to …
by Matt Peppe / July 21st, 2015
A recent New York Times profile of Marco Rubio accurately describes the junior Senator from Florida, and member of the three-ring circus that is the Republican Presidential primary field, as Cuba’s “least favorite son.” The piece quoted a Havana resident as saying Rubio is “against Cuba in every possible way… Rubio and these Republicans, they are still stuck in 1959.” Presumably this view was representative of others that Times writer Jason Horowitz encountered while conducting his research in Cuba. This should not come as a surprise. Rubio is a reactionary fanatic who demagogues incessantly about the evils of the Cuban …
by Peter Phillips / July 20th, 2015
July 18th 2015 was the first day of this year’s summer camp for the world’s business and political aristocracy and their invited guests. 2,000 to 3,000 men, mostly from the wealthiest global one percent, gather at Bohemian Grove, 70 miles north of San Francisco in California’s Sonoma County—to sit around the campfire and chew the fat—off-the-record—with ex-presidents, corporate leaders and global financiers.
Speakers this year giving “Lakeside Chats” include past Secretary of Defense and the CIA Leon Panetta, Paul Volcker Jr. former Federal Reserve Chairman, retired Admiral Mike Mullen former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NYU Law Professor Bryan …
by Shepherd Bliss / July 20th, 2015
Sonoma County Winegrowers bought an expensive, full-page, color ad, using tax dollars, in the July 12 daily Santa Rosa Press Democrat and in various weeklies, such as the North Bay Bohemian and Sonoma West. The ad ignited a firestorm of protest with angry letters to editors and online comments from the community storming local publications that ran the ad.
As someone who practices, writes about, and teaches college students at Sonoma State and Dominican Universities about what “sustainable” really means, the ad offends me. It is blatant propaganda of false advertising to hoodwink readers.
Winegrowers received a $377,282 federal grant in 2014 …
by Robert Hunziker / July 19th, 2015
Year-over-year, America sets new prison records. No other nation on Earth comes close to America’s “lock’em up” ethos.
Therefore, assuming that imprisonment records are accurate, the U.S. is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. How else explain the enormous “lock’em up” numbers? What’s going on? Is America riddled with criminals? Jeez, it’s a wonder that tourists come to America with so many criminals on every street corner.
Not to worry! Tourists feel safe because the jails are bulging, overflowing, thus, criminals must be off every street corner and already locked up. That’s what they presume to be true. Why …
by John R. Hall / July 19th, 2015
Somewhere in Washington, D.C. in the labyrinth of congressional offices there lurks a nearly unknown congressman. Unknown because he carefully avoids high profile or controversial issues. A veritable deaf-mute when it comes to voicing his opinion on vital matters. Considering the herd of loud-mouth miscreants with whom he shares those hallowed halls, you might even call him a breath of fresh air. And his name shall remain unspoken here, for this isn’t about him. When it all comes down to dust this public servant who appears to possess few personal opinions will be remembered for one sentence. A sentence so insightful and thought provoking that it will likely …
Government orders TV channel closed for links to Palestinian Authority, while Israel’s culture minister vows to "censor" critics
by Jonathan Cook / July 19th, 2015
The Israeli government has declared war on a Palestinian TV channel that launched last month from a mobile studio-truck near the city of Nazareth in Israel.
The station, which broadcasts six hours a day to Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian Arab citizens, focuses on news, arts, food and celebrities, as well as offering children’s programmes and quiz shows.
Despite the channel’s modest budget and ambitions, however, Israel’s public security minister, Gilad Erdan, ordered its closure last week, describing its operations as a “breach of Israel’s sovereignty”.
The satellite channel – called Palestine ’48 – is the first to serve Israel’s Palestinian minority that is …
Free Kindle Book Download
by Dissident Voice Communications / July 19th, 2015
DV contributor Gary Brumback’s newest book, Corporate Reckoning Ahead, is available to DV readers as a free Kindle download from 20 July to 24 July.
Palestinian groups and individuals in the occupied homeland, refugee camps and the diaspora are speaking out
by Syria Support Movement / July 19th, 2015
We are Palestinians and Palestinian organizations that declare our solidarity with the Syrian people in their historic struggle for survival, now in its fifth year. We are in a unique position to understand and appreciate the challenges facing our Syrian brothers and sisters, because we face the same challenges.
We understand what it means to have our lands and our property taken by foreign usurpers. We understand what it means for millions of our people to be driven out of their homes and to be unable to return. We understand what it means for our interests and our national rights to …
by Andre Vltchek / July 18th, 2015
One of the mightiest South American waterways – Rio Paraguay – is forming a national frontier between Argentina and Paraguay, two countries with similar cultures but diametrically different political systems.
Argentina is socialist, with free medical care and mostly free education. It has a progressive government. It sent its creditors, the World Bank and IMF, packing. It defaulted its debt, which was accumulated during the right-wing and pro-Western governments (Greece should study and follow Argentina’s model). It is increasingly close to other socialist Latin American countries, and also to non-Western powers like Russia and China.
Paraguay is a divided country. Even …
It's Time for a Real Investigation
by Jack Balkwill / July 18th, 2015
There appears to be a bigger lie than “weapons of mass destruction.” It’s not simply that the illegal invasion of Iraq was based on lies, but that the entire “war on terrorism” is likely based on lies.
We were told by our government that Afghanistan was invaded for giving shelter to Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Mainstream press have pushed this so repeatedly that “9/11” and “Osama bin Laden” have become interchangeable.
While working on this piece I asked the first three people I ran into at my local grocery store “Who was responsible for the 9/11 …
