Latest articles
by Matt Peppe / October 18th, 2015
Fair-and-balanced Fox News reported on Wednesday that “Cuban military operatives reportedly have been spotted in Syria, where sources believe they are advising President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers and may be preparing to man Russian-made tanks to aid Damascus in fighting rebel forces backed by the U.S.” Fox’s claim of an imaginary enemy alliance relies on two sources: the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies and an anonymous U.S. official.
The source at the Miami Institute indicated, “An Arab military officer at the Damascus airport reportedly witnessed two Russian planes arrive there with Cuban military …
by James Petras / October 18th, 2015
In 1975 the people of Vietnam successfully ended one of the longest and bloodiest anti-colonial wars in world-history – defeating the US, the world’s biggest imperial power, after 20 years of struggle.
Barely forty years later the Vietnamese regime signed off on the US-Japanese dominated Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement (TPFTA), which essentially converted Vietnam into a vassal state.
Vietnam has gone full circle: From a neo-colony ruled by puppet dictators backed by an American occupation army involving …
by Gary Leupp / October 17th, 2015
CNN and Facebook co-sponsored last week’s Democratic presidential frontrunners’ “debate.” After the event, CNN conducted a poll. “Who won the debate?” it asked. The result: 83% Bernie Sanders; 12% Hillary Clinton.
Facebook also took a poll. “Who do you think won?” Over 79% responded, “Bernie Sanders.”
The CNN editors’ take? “CLINTON’S CONFIDANT SWEEP.”
Slate conducted a poll. “Who won the presidential debate?” asked the magazine. 75% of respondents said Bernie Sanders; 18% gave it to Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary Clinton won,” reported Slate “senior writer” Josh Vorhees exuberantly. “She just needed to be solid in the debate. Instead, she was spectacular.”
Spectacular! with 18% of Slate’s …
by John R. Hall / October 17th, 2015
Blasting down highway 95 through the Mohave Desert on a northerly course toward Las Vegas Broken Dreams International Airport, my thoughts turn to the distant past. This seems to happen every time I travel to Mexico. Deja vu all over again as Yogi would say. Growing up a long stone’s throw from the southern border, I became a Mexicophile at an early age. This evening my wife and I will board a late night flight into the tropical central highlands. About 8 hours including air time and a layover at War Criminal International Airport in Houston, and we’ll be on …
A reply to Michael Neumann et al: Symptoms of structural illiteracy, racism and eroticism in the US-European Empire
by T.P. Wilkinson / October 17th, 2015
On 16 July 1964, at the San Francisco Republican Convention—where Ms Clinton began her career of political opportunism—Senator Barry Goldwater accepted his nomination for the presidency by declaring:
I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. ((US Senator Barry Goldwater, Acceptance speech for the Republican nomination at the 28th National Convention in 1964.))
This was his defence of the political faction who defended him against “moderate” Republicans—like Nelson Rockefeller—so that Goldwater – Miller could be a “choice, not an …
Trans-Atlantic abuses and protests
by Linn Washington, Jr. / October 17th, 2015
Protests against rampant police brutality occurred recently in the respective capitals of France and the United States – two nations that proclaim strict fidelity to the rule of law yet two professed democracy-loving nations where officials routinely condone rampant lawlessness by law enforcers.
The 20th Anniversary of the 1995 Million Man March – captioned “Justice Or Else” – took place in Washington, DCk with a core complaint being police brutality. During that protest rally held outside the U.S. Capitol building and along the National Mall relatives of police brutality victims were invited speakers. Those relatives included the father of Michael Brown, …
The Turnbull Government, Nauru, and Frustrating Due Process
by Binoy Kampmark / October 17th, 2015
Institutionalised brutality is a rather easy thing to replicate. It begins with a selected language, and ends up justifying monstrous conduct. It pardons behaviour, and it condemns victims. The global debate on refugees is characterised by its distinct lack of humanity, and Australia, leading the charge, knows no limits on how far that lack of humanity can go.
The response to the claims that a Somali woman was raped, and then brought back to Australia for an abortion from Nauru, only to then have her returned back to the offshore prison camp, is yet another inglorious tale. Canberra’s response was …
by Chris Driscoll / October 16th, 2015
Unlike the Republican carnival sideshows masquerading as debates, the first Democrat Party presidential nomination candidates debate was actually significant and historic (yes, yes, you’re right, it was a highly choreographed, staged event and it was in no sense a real debate, but it was historic nonetheless). All the five candidates presented themselves a social-liberals, the first time that has happened in more than four decades.
In fact, since the late 70s, the average Democrat candidate for the nomination has been a traditional liberal, that is, an open, fervent supporter of Wall Street, the billionaire class, imperialism and capitalism. Of course …
by Jonathan Cook / October 16th, 2015
It has been called the “smartphone intifada”. After a sharp escalation in violence between Palestinians and Israelis in recent weeks, shocking scenes captured on video have spread across social media.
According to Israeli human rights organisations, several such videos challenge the accuracy of official Israeli accounts of the circumstances in which police have killed or injured Palestinians.
The footage, the nine groups said in a statement this week, provided concrete evidence that police were “quick to shoot to kill” rather than arrest Palestinians in Jerusalem and Israel who were suspected of involvement in attacks on Israelis Jews.
The shootings, …
by Yves Engler / October 16th, 2015
Why would the Green Party take a more environmentally regressive position on an important issue than Stephen Harper?
During a recent visit to Montreal, Elizabeth May added her voice to the main opposition parties telling suburbanites they should expect the federal government to continue aggressively subsidizing the most costly, unhealthy and ecologically destructive form of land transport.
May told Le Devoir that her party didn’t necessarily support the Harper government’s plan to implement a toll when the Champlain Bridge is rebuilt at a projected cost of over $4 billion.
“The Green Party doesn’t have a rigid position on the issue,” May said. “Before …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / October 16th, 2015
Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terrorism.
— Barack Obama, February 15, 2013.
Even to those who do not watch closely it has to be apparent that Washington’s vast disinformation machine is finally out of control, seriously awry, or desperate.
The latest foray in apparent media manipulation was the claim by US “anonymous sources” that four Russian missiles targeting terrorist groups in Syria, landed in Iran.
US Administrations are serial repeaters of untruths. However, talking of stray missiles after bombing a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan under a week before – when coordinates …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 16th, 2015
He brought to Ottowa an oilman’s attitude to climate change and a sheriff’s approach to law and order.
— The Economist on Stephen Harper, October 17, 2015
Everything about Canada’s long time serving Prime Minister is supposedly counterintuitive to the country’s spirit. This, at least, is the casual response from those who have a very specific view of Canada, one infuriatingly courteous, and soporifically relaxed. But the very fact that Stephen Harper has stayed in power for this length of time, including three election victories, suggests a refutation of that view.
Harper’s playbook is one that sees politics as an endeavour for its …
A harmonious, healing, sometimes home-bound setting brings closure
by Paul Haeder / October 15th, 2015
We live in a very particular death-denying society. We isolate both the dying and the old, and it serves a purpose. They are reminders of our own mortality. We should not institutionalize people. We can give families more help with home care and visiting nurses, giving the families and the patients the spiritual, emotional, and financial help in order to facilitate the final care at home.
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969
Quantity or Quality of Life
We have an aversion around our own mortality and dying and death, but one adage is so apropos today – Nothing is certain in …
by Adrian Kuzminski / October 15th, 2015
You say you got a real solution,
Well, you know we’d all love to see the plan, oh yeah …
— John Lennon, 1968
Nearly a half-century later, there is still no plan. The current radical critics of “the system”–who mostly take a holistic rather than piecemeal approach–have yet to put forth a coherent public policy agenda to get us to a sustainable American and global future.
These critics are very good at analyzing our problems—peak oil, the long emergency, the stages of collapse, global warming and climate change, the financialization of the economy, the impossible debt burden, the maldistribution of wealth, the corruption …
Marco Rossi and the Ladder of Progress
by Eoin Higgins / October 14th, 2015
In Olympia, Washington, Marco Rossaire Rossi is running for mayor, but he is running as much to change the culture of electoral politics in Olympia as he is for office.
Rossi is running as an independent candidate. His campaign is part of a municipal movement in Olympia called “An Olympia For All.” The political movement seeks to use local government to change regressive economic policies to policies that will work for the betterment of the people of the city.
The electoral process in the city of Olympia works like this: There is a primary in August before the …
by William Manson / October 14th, 2015
Sorry I’m so irritable. It’s just my back again—kind of twinges, you know—especially if I bend over or sometimes when I drink too much. Doctor sent me for a CT scan—nothing. Waste of time and money. What do they know about pain?
Sorry to go on like this. It’s just nice to have you here, listening to me when I hurt. It hasn’t been easy, what with this aching back and my anxiety disorder. Oh, I know, I shouldn’t worry so much. But how would you feel? Prescriptions, painkillers—but that’s no panacea. But still, sorry to obsess like this—you’re a real …
Israeli prime minister targets Palestinian leaders in Israel as his ‘Mr Security’ image takes a beating
by Jonathan Cook / October 14th, 2015
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a crackdown on Palestinian political leaders in Israel, blaming them for the current unrest, in what appeared to be an attempt to bolster his severely dented image as ‘Mr Security’.
After a lengthy meeting of the security cabinet on Sunday, Netanyahu directed officials to assemble the evidence to make possible the outlawing of the northern wing of the Islamic movement.
Led by Sheikh Raed Salah, the organisation is generally regarded as the most popular Islamic party among Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population.
Over the past two decades …
by Michael Keefer / October 14th, 2015
Stephen Harper has been talking recently about “old stock” Canadians — and at the same time stirring up fear and loathing against more recent arrivals in this country, notably those of Muslim faith, in order to mobilize electoral support for his Conservative Party.
I think it’s time “old stock” Canadians shared their opinion of these antics. Perhaps I qualify for the job, since my ancestors arrived here two and a quarter centuries ago. (That’s a blink of the eye by native standards, but we may have preceded the Harpers.)
The first thing to say is that my family — the widow and …
Iran Has Been Transparent and Accountable Over its Nuclear Program: Andre Vltchek
by Kourosh Ziabari / October 14th, 2015
An acclaimed philosopher and journalist who has recently visited Iran tells Fars News Agency that the reality of Iran is absolutely different from the way it’s being illustrated in the mainstream media.
Andre Vltchek says: “Iran that you see when visiting the country has nothing in common with that imaginary, terrible and cruel Iran that the West’s mass media has created.”
Commenting on Iran’s nuclear program and the international responses to it, Andre Vltchek says the majority of the Middle East nations and the global public don’t have any objections to Iran developing nuclear technology, considering Iran’s peaceful nature and its long …
by James Hoover / October 13th, 2015
America is pretty much a corporate state (a whimsical view): take your pick — a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or a corporatocracy. By just stating this, our job is not ended. In fact, we have stood by so long and let it happen, almost to the extent that its entrenchment is so complete that a social democracy is perhaps, not recoverable.
This culture has seeped into our pores like an infection you have difficulty getting rid of. All institutions have been drawn into the cultural mix but one element, a branch of government we forget, drastically affects our lives — the …
by Ramzy Baroud / October 13th, 2015
When my book Searching Jenin was published soon after the Israeli massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, I was quizzed repeatedly by the media and many readers for conferring the word ‘massacre’ on what Israel has depicted as a legitimate battle against camp-based ‘terrorists’.
The interrogative questions were aimed at relocating the narrative from a discussion regarding possible war crimes into a technical dispute over the application of language. For them, the evidence of Israel’s violations of human rights mattered little.
This kind of reductionism has often served as the prelude to any discussion concerning the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict: events …
by Ludwig Watzal / October 13th, 2015
BONN, GERMANY — Not many people have the guts to question the official narrative of the attacks committed on 9/11 in the United States of America, in London, Madrid, Mumbai or elsewhere, which governments attribute to Islamic terrorists. Elias Davidsson is one of those, who in 2002 became skeptical of the official account on 9/11 and later more generally of the widely held belief that Islamic terrorism exists as a real and distinct threat.
Elias Davidsson was born in Palestine in 1941. His parents left Germany due to the persecution of Jews. He lived in Jerusalem in his childhood and …
The deliberate torturous death of a once proud nation
by Andre Vltchek / October 13th, 2015
Last year, I stopped travelling to Indonesia. I simply did… I just could not bear being there anymore. It was making me unwell. I felt psychologically and physically sick.
Indonesia has matured into perhaps the most corrupt country on Earth, and possibly into the most indoctrinated and compassionless place anywhere under the sun. Here, even the victims were not aware of their own conditions anymore. The victims felt shame, while the mass murderers were proudly bragging about all those horrendous killings and rapes they had committed. Genocidal cadres are all over the government.
Don’t get me wrong: there is really nothing wrong …
Unrest grows among Palestinian citizens of Israel, outraged by restrictions on access to al-Aqsa and causalities in the occupied territories
by Jonathan Cook / October 13th, 2015
The violence rocking the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and now Gaza is on the verge of spilling into Israel, Palestinian leaders in Israel warned.
A wave of unrest has swept Palestinian towns in Israel over recent days, with repeated clashes with Israeli police in Nazareth, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle, Taibeh, Sakhnin, Rahat, Kfar Qassem and elsewhere. Dozens of protesters have been arrested.
On Thursday, as Palestinians declared a day of rage, police fired tear gas and stun grenades and led baton charges against several hundred protesters in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel. Sixteen demonstrators, five of them minors, were arrested.
“We want …
by Stanley Cohen / October 13th, 2015
In its first full week of a “new” get tough policy, almost 500 young Palestinian demonstrators were injured, shot and maimed, and at least three teens murdered in response to what Israel sees as a rising tide of “militant” resistance against the illegally occupied and, by now, almost completely annexed West Bank. At the same time, the IOF has not only increased its already frequent bombing runs in the embattled, largely defenseless Gaza Strip, but tightened it’s concentration-camp like grip on 1.8 million civilians, reducing even further the trickle of essential goods, food shipments and medicines permitted into the beleaguered …
Is the revolution any closer?
by Denis Rancourt / October 12th, 2015
Author and social scientist Stuart Tannock has recently published a historical and critical overview of the practice of grading in education, in which he concludes:
This article uses the example of assessment to argue that if the public university is to perform the role of fostering critical, reflexive, independent and democratically minded thinkers – a role that has been universally embraced by its promoters – then the use of grading in higher education assessment needs to be strongly contested. ((Tannock, Stuart, “No grades in higher education now! Revisiting the place of graded assessment in the reimagination of the public …
I will take the punishment, the torture, the injustice with a fat happy consumer smile on my face
by Paul Haeder / October 12th, 2015
Here I go again – the at-will piece of human detritus that I am, according to Oregon’s great employers, twice now, non-profits, sacking me because I pushed the state’s vocational rehabilitation careerists outside their pathetic Little Eichmann lives by pushing for my clients – adults with developmental-intellectual-psychological disabilities – to get as much out of the state’s bureaucracies that are filled with middling folk who do not give a shit about people.
At-fucking-will means No Rights in the Workplace. That’s what these doublethink folk call it – right to work states. Making 18 bucks an hour, driving my ass off daily …
by Jack Balkwill / October 11th, 2015
The boy lived in New York City,
They chased the boy right through the park
In a case of mistaken identity
They put a bullet through his heart
Heartbreakers, with your forty four,
I wanna tear your world apart,
Heartbreakers, with your forty four,
I’m gonna tear that world apart”
– Mick Jagger, “Heartbreaker“, released August 1973
Last year, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, Tamir Rice, a 12 year old African American boy, was shot down in cold blooded murder by police in Cleveland, Ohio.
The boy had been reported by an onlooker as carrying a pistol, but the caller reporting it said it might be a …
by Ali Kazak / October 11th, 2015
For years Israel and its lobby around the world have been trying to normalise their relations with Arabs and Muslims without solving the Palestine Question.
One of the methods they resorted to in the last few years is using human rights and community organizations such as interfaith dialogue and Multiculturalism to achieve this objective and to: isolate the Palestinians, marginalise the Palestine question, end Israel’s isolation, and prevent criticism of Israel, knowing that these organisations will be the first to stand against Israel’s violations, racial and religious discrimination.
The group responsible for this task in Australia is The Australia/Israel & …
Save Children from War!
by Dr. Hakim / October 11th, 2015
I felt empty when I heard that to the north of where I work in Kabul, bombs were dropped on a ‘Doctors Without Borders’ Hospital in #Kunduz, for a full hour.
12 hospital staff and 10 patients were killed, three of them Afghan children. 33 persons are still missing.
Borderfree Afghan Street Kids say that the three Afghan children shouldn’t have been killed by a U.S. airstrike on a Doctor Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
I wondered if it was mainly medical personnel like myself who felt sad.
So, together with Ali, an Afghan Peace Volunteer, I asked the Borderfree Afghan Street Kids, …
