Saeb Erekat is an enigmatic character. Despite minimal popularity among Palestinians, he is omnipresent, appears regularly on television and speaks with the moral authority of an accomplished leader whose legacy is rife with accolades and an astute, unwavering vision.
When Palestinians were polled by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) in August, just prior to the current Intifada, only 3 percent approved of his leadership – compared with the still meagre approval rating of 16 percent of his boss, Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas. Even those who are often cast as alternative leaders – Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, and …
This past weekend the CyberBerkut team revealed another story, shocking in its extraordinary cynism even for today’s Ukraine. It turned out that the top Ukrainian Interior Ministry officials are abusing Western military assistance, designated to reequip and strengthen the Ukrainian National Guard (internal police forces). They organized an international traders’ chain to secretly reexport these arms to the Middle East where they would most likely appear in the hands of Saudi-linked radical groups operating in Syria and other hot spots.
According to the hacked documents, on April 14, 2015 the president of the Polish weapons trader Level II …
In his hearing with Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board on October 23 in Vancouver Canty said, “I’m in fear of my life because I’m black.”
Canty maintained, “This is a well-founded fear.”
Does Canty believe that police in Canada are “racially” color blind or just that it can’t be any worse than in the US? ((Certainly in Canada, if one is a darker …
Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.
— Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1935
On November 3rd, the US government will again run out of money due to a debt ceiling artificially imposed by Congress. This is the third time in four years that a radical faction has taken the country to the brink of default to extort concessions that are at best only marginally related to the budget.
The sword inspires the romance of war in those who haven't seen it slice open bellies
by Jack Balkwill / October 27th, 2015
That night, almost fifty years ago, I remember something wet hitting my cheek, so I reached up and wiped it off, noticing it was a bloody piece of flesh. It was then that I turned to see that the man sitting next to me in the ditch had just had his face blown off. This thought came to me often decades ago, and I strained to remember who the man was, but my memories always went dark at that point. I would push my memories day after day, but nothing came. I finally gave up, developing a theory that one’s …
Former RAF Pilot Gives His View of US Bombing of MSF Hospital in Kunduz
by Media Lens / October 27th, 2015
In our previous media alert, ‘Sick Sophistry,’ we examined media coverage of the deliberate US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 3. In particular, we exposed the BBC’s Pentagon-friendly reporting of the hospital as having been ‘mistakenly‘ bombed.
On October 24, MSF announced that 30 people had now tragically died, up from the initial toll of 22. The humanitarian organisation, also known as Doctors Without Borders, continued to call for an independent international investigation into what it has called a ‘war crime.’ Associated Press has just reported new evidence ‘that …
The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.
— J. Edgar Hoover, 1895-1972
Just five days after it was revealed that former British Prime Minster Tony Blair and then President George W. Bush had made a pact to attack Iraq and overthrow the country’s sovereign government a full year before the invasion took place – as Blair continued to mislead government and populace stating that diplomacy was being pursued and no decisions made – another snake has slithered from under the hay (as the Arab saying goes) in the form …
If the U.S. is to ever change its foreign policy based on dominance and aggression to a foreign policy based on diplomacy and respect for international law, there needs to be a foundation of realistic assessments. Foreign policy decisions need to be based on reality not fantasy and propaganda.
Unfortunately, dysfunction, deception and propaganda extend across the spectrum from Congressional Republicans to Hillary Clinton to the White House to Bernie Sanders. The following are recent examples:
Benghazi Hearings in Congress ignore important issues to focus on superficial
Congress recently held hearings on what happened in Benghazi Libya leading up to the death of …
As if Americans didn’t already have enough to worry about in regards to the recently resurrected Red Menace, we can now add the fear that those devious Russians are threatening to–horror of horrors–bring down the Internet.
As the New York Times‘ David Sanger and Eric Schmitt report, “Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of conflict.”
As Navy spokesman Cmdr. William Marks adds, “It would be a concern to …
Over the past eighteen months two of the world’s largest automakers have been found responsible for deadly conspiracies. But, recent revelations can’t compete with the industry’s previous scandals.
Last month Volkswagen was caught rigging millions of its cars’ emissions testing systems to meet regulatory standards. The German company programmed its turbocharged direct injection diesel engines to activate emissions controls during laboratory testing while in real-world driving the vehicles produced up to 40 times more nitrogen oxide (NO). Hundreds, probably thousands, of people will be afflicted with asthma, lung disease and other ailments as a result.
It is fair to say that the affairs of the Republic of Guatemala don’t register all that much in the minds, nor in the media, of Americans. This probably shouldn’t be taken as surprising. The same can be said for most, if not all, small impoverished countries. Still in recent weeks very astute readers of newspapers would have come across a small smattering of stories, all of which it goes without saying would have received sprawling headlines if they involved a larger, non-impoverished country:
Months of mass demonstrations leading to the resignation and arrest of president Otto Perez Molina for his …
A Review of Diliorah Chukwurah’s Last Train to Biafra
by Chuks Iloegbunam / October 26th, 2015
Many books have been written on the Nigerian civil war, which has turned out to be the greatest impetus to national literary creativity. The factual and fictional accounts of the war are in the hundreds. Established authors wrote some. Others are the works of those who never thought circumstances would force them into the drastic action of putting pen on paper.
Two of the best known Nigerian writers, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, wrote profusely on the war; Achebe as an instant participant, and Soyinka as a distant but no less interested party. It’s difficult to fully appreciate Nigeria’s civil …
Canadians assess the aftermath of Harper’s political demise
by Eric Walberg / October 25th, 2015
Canada’s prime minister for the past nine years, Stephen Harper, led a charmed life until the 19 October federal election. Canada’s first-past-the-post elector system, where three parties — two left-liberal and one conservative — have split the vote election after election, allowed him to hold power with a third of the popular vote.
The traditional source of political power in Canada is the Liberal Party, but they lost power after a string of scandals and weak leadership a decade ago, and Harper, having captured the traditionally moderate Progressive Conservatives and inserted his radical right wing followers, used the electoral split to …
Arabesque$: Enquête sur le rôle des États-Unis dans les révoltes arabes(Investigation into the US Role in the Arab Uprisings) is an update of Ahmed Bensaada’s 2011 book L’Arabesque Américaine. It concerns the US government role in instigating, funding and coordinating the Arab Spring “revolutions.” Obviously most of this history has been carefully suppressed by the western media.The new book devotes much more attention to the personalities leading the 2011 uprisings. Some openly admitted to receiving CIA funding. Others had no idea because it was deliberately concealed from them. A …
The national news media—and their sidekicks, the cackling pundits—had been asking the same questions the past six months. “Will he? Won’t he? Should he? Shouldn’t he? Can he? Can’t he?”
The “he” is Joe Biden. The vice-president said numerous times he was still thinking about running for president, but hadn’t made up his mind. The Biden question kept the media busy speculating about an issue that even Mr. Biden couldn’t answer, nor should he have been forced to make a commitment in the media’s time frame.
This past week, he decided not to run for the presidency.
These are people who had been working hard for months, non-stop for the past week. They had not gone home, they had not seen their families, they had just been working in the hospital to help people… and now they are dead. These people are friends, close friends. I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable.
The hospital, it has been my workplace and home for several months. Yes, it is just a building. But it is so much more than that. It is healthcare for Kunduz. Now it is gone.
It's OK America, pop pills and watch TV. Don't worry about abrupt climate change, environmental collapse, or perma-war blowback from your oil addiction.
by Glen Barry / October 24th, 2015
Only a couple centuries ago California was mostly covered in lush naturally evolving ecosystems that surrounded and provided ecological habitat for relatively small settlements of Native Americans. Grizzly bears roamed and redwood forests towered. Now the heavily industrialized state is an over-populated ecologically collapsing mess. Natural ecosystems are surrounded by an endless sprawl of human filth, and the very climate is abruptly changing.
California’s recent drought and wildfire outbreak is an exemplar of what surpassing a bioregion’s carrying capacity and resultant ecological collapse looks like. For decades naturally evolved ecosystems which make …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 24th, 2015
At its root, the TPP is about modern colonialism. It is the way that Western governments and their transnational corporations, including Wall Street banks, can dominate the economies of developing nations. And it’s not too late to stop it.
Washington — After nearly six years of negotiations, trade ministers recently announced they had reached agreement on the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This does not mean the TPP is a done deal. The next hurdle for this rigged corporate power grab is to convince the participating governments, including Congress, to ratify it. In the United States, the trade justice movement, which has …
Critics have labeled the current Israeli Likudnik government that is comprised of right-wing as well as religious parties, as the most extreme in that nation’s history. It features a Justice Minister (sic), Ayelet Shaked, a Deputy Foreign Minister, Tzipi Hotovely and a Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev who are all far out of step/out of line with international law and in fact the international consensus essentially of what should be the “rules of the road” for the long, arduous, and likewise seemingly neverending Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, all of these personages/individuals that occupy these positions in the …
Democratic critics of military seizures of power commonly refer to them as military coups. They adopt a very narrow and misleading conception of what is taking place.
Likewise, human rights activists and progressive analysts who conceptualize the reign of violence which follows, a ‘coup’ as state terror fail to take account of the systemic forces – the capitalist social order and class relations – which determine the classes which wield state power. They ignore the specific classes and groups which are targeted and which classes direct and …
Fifty years ago this month Indonesian Major General Suharto began a wave of terror that left hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and landless peasants dead. Did Canada try to stop the killing or at least protest the massive human rights violation? No, Lester Pearson’s Liberal government largely backed Suharto’s terror campaign and overthrow of elected president Sukarno.
Between October 1965 and March 1966 approximately one million “communists” were massacred by the Indonesian military and religious forces they supported. During this slaughter, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), one of the world’s largest, was all but wiped out as a …
In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the allocation of scarce resources. “Abundance” was always a pretty word with an idyllic connotation for Professor Samuelson. I often wonder why there weren’t a few classes about the real-life consequences of abundance, along with scarcity and people’s material welfare.The present generation of internet technology is a proper subject of study within an economic framework. It might help us understand what is happening to …
With Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at US $ 2.94 trillion (2014), the UK has the fifth largest economy in the world after Germany and Japan. It also suffers from acute income and wealth inequality and, according to Oxfam, who know all about poverty, “one in five [or 20%] of the population live below our official poverty line, meaning that they experience life as a daily struggle.”
The Conservative government repeatedly proclaims that the bitter medicine of economic austerity, so badly needed to ‘balance the nations wobbly books’, is the ‘right thing to do’ – yes, it’s painful, but ‘we’re all …
Right now, you’re probably asking yourself, “What does Jack think of Hillary Clinton?” Well, I’m glad you asked.
In fact, Madam Hillary, the leading candidate for CEO of the United States of Corporate Empire, is being buried in money by environmental polluters, defense cheats, banksters, and other oligarchs and plutocrats because she’s shown unwavering loyalty to these scum of the earth all her life. Shall we …
The Dodd-Frank regulations are so lethal to community banks that some say the intent was to force them to sell out to the megabanks. Community banks are rapidly disappearing – except in North Dakota, where they are thriving.
At over 2,300 pages, the Dodd Frank Act is the longest and most complicated bill ever passed by the US legislature. It was supposed to end “too big to fail” and “bailouts,” and to “promote financial stability.” But Dodd-Frank’s “orderly liquidation authority” has replaced bailouts with bail-ins, meaning that in the event of insolvency, big banks are to recapitalize themselves with the savings …
Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.
The few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite …
While most Canadians proudly recognize the beaver, the hockey player and the curling broom as symbols of this country, some of us would be made uncomfortable by another enduring emblem of the Great White North: a businessman wearing a Maple Leaf lapel pin discretely passing a plain manila envelope stuffed with cash to a foreign official.
Two weeks ago SNC-Lavalin agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a corruption case brought against it by the African Development Bank. Accused of bribing officials in Uganda and Mozambique, the Montréal-based company also accepted a number of other non-monetary conditions on its …
by Robert S. McIntyre and Gerald E. Scorse / October 21st, 2015
Meretricious means “based on pretense, deception, or insincerity.” That makes it the perfect word to describe the creation and spread of Roth individual retirement accounts (IRAs), especially the claim that they’re a plus for the Treasury. Just the opposite: the initial boost from Roths is largely a ruse, and the accounts in fact are a fiscal train wreck.
Let’s see what gives the myth a veneer of truth, why it persists, and what needs to happen to stem the losses that Roths are inflicting on the Treasury—and will be inflicting for decades.
The deception began at the beginning. When lawmakers created Roths …
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has attracted criticism for an incendiary speech in which he accused the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, of “inspiring the Holocaust”. Critics accuse Netanyahu of trivialising the Holocaust by attributing the impetus for Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe to the grand mufti.
In his speech Netanyahu described a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come …
My first stop, after living for 22 years in a refugee camp in Gaza, was the city of Seattle, a pleasant, green city, where people drink too much coffee to cope with the long, cold, grey winters. There, for the first time, I stood before an audience outside Palestine, to speak about Palestine.
Here, I learned, too, of the limits imposed on the Palestinian right to speak, of what I could or should not say. Platforms for an impartial Palestinian discourse were extremely narrow to begin with, and when any was available, Palestinians hardly took center stage.
