Latest articles
Letter from Mexico: Part Four
by Christy Rodgers / May 29th, 2015
About an hour south of Mexico City, nestled in an extraordinary range of mountains called the Sierra del Tepozteco, whose fantastical rock formations studded with forest resemble those in ancient Chinese painted scrolls, an experiment in alternative living has been unfolding for more than 30 years now. The self-described “ecovillage” of Huehuecoyotl, where a group of itinerant artists from Mexico and elsewhere came to rest after traveling the world together for fifteen years, has become a kind of seedbed for visionary and transformative projects, particularly ecological ones. The multitude of such efforts, their persistence and success, is one of the …
by Medea Benjamin / May 29th, 2015
South Korea’s Jeju Island is a popular tourist destination full of spas, resorts, golf courses, sandy beaches, waterfalls and hiking trails. But if you really want to get rejuvenated, skip the tourist hotspots and go directly to the village of Gangjeong to support the extraordinary community that has been opposing the building of a naval base since 2007. You’ll get your morning exercise at 7am bowing 100 times facing the base, praying for an end to its construction. You’ll get spiritual nourishment from the noon mass outside the base (no religion necessary). And if you really want to feel …
Contact Your Senator NOW – An Important Victory is Within Sight
by John V. Walsh / May 29th, 2015
This Sunday, at midnight, the notorious Section 215 of the Patriot Act is set to expire. Section 215 has been the basis for the bulk collection of communications of all Americans, indeed of all the world. It was born under Bush in the wake of 9/11, and Obama kept it alive in beginning in 2010 – until now. But on Sunday a stake can be driven through its heart – if WE act NOW. This is not simply a possibility but a likelihood!
Obama and his co-conspirators, both Republican and Democratic Senate “leadership” are hell-bent on keeping this Frankenstein alive. If …
by Uri Avnery / May 29th, 2015
A former cabinet minister, an intelligent person (nonetheless) asked me the other day: “Let’s assume that your plan is realized. A Palestinian state will come into being side by side with Israel. Even some kind of federation. Then, in a few years, a violently anti-Israel party will come to power there and annul all the treaties. What then?”
My simple answer was: “Israel will always be powerful enough to forestall any threat.”
That is true, but that is not the real answer. The real answer lies in the lessons of history.
History shows us that there are (at least) two kinds of peace …
by Jonathan Cook / May 29th, 2015
Only a few weeks into Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government, the intense strain of trying to square its members’ zealotry with Israel’s need to improve its international standing is already starkly evident.
The conundrum was laid out clearly by Tzipi Hotovely, a young political ally of Netanyahu’s recently appointed to oversee the foreign ministry on his behalf.
She called together the country’s chief diplomats last week to cite rabbinical justifications for taking Palestinian land. Her broader message was that Israeli embassies abroad needed to stop worrying about being “smart” and concentrate instead on being “right”. Urging the country’s envoys into a headlong confrontation with …
Fourth in a Four Part Series: Anarchist Social Justice
by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / May 28th, 2015
In our last publication, we addressed some of the problems of the TPP. It endangers the planet, threatens labor, violates human rights, and it globalizes free trade into another form of neo-imperialism. This is further proof that the 1 percent, both in the United States and around the world, undermine democratic self-determination in the economic and political realms. We argue that free markets, as they manifest themselves today, destabilize the world economy, while fair markets stabilize. Most importantly, the global economy needs to move away from comparative advantage theory towards fair competitive advantage. Although it works for the plutocracy …
The UK Lurches Further to the Right
by Graham Peebles / May 28th, 2015
Friday, May 8th we woke to the depressing news that the Conservative party led by David Cameron had been re-elected as the UK national government. Depressing unless you’re living in a house worth £2 million or more – and didn’t want to pay higher property tax that is! The Conservatives took 37% of the vote and won a staggering 331 seats (650 seats make up the House of Commons): around 50 more than opinion polls had consistently suggested. Labour, frightened to be true to their socialist roots and offer a real alternative, ran an unprincipled campaign and collected only 232 …
by Jim McCluskey / May 28th, 2015
Armageddon avoided – just
The terrifying film The Man Who Saved The World has been showing in London. Stanislaw Petrov, who appears himself in the film, was the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Russian early warning system when the electronic alarms blared deafeningly and insistently in his command centre. All checks confirmed that there was no malfunction. They confirmed a nuclear attack from the US was on its way. It was not possible to wait for radar confirmation of the incoming ballistic missiles because by that time it would be too late to retaliate. Petrov knew that if he reported …
by Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri / May 28th, 2015
Gilad Atzmon has written a significant essay with no holds barred. He takes on the Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian cause and its implication for the Palestinian Resistance. With solidly constructed arguments, Atzmon opens the floodgates for attentive debates. After introducing his subject with three thematically connected arguments: The Nabil Test, Why Palestine?, Palestine Cause vs. Jewish Solidarity, he goes to the core of matter by identifying the terminology used by the solidarity movement, specifically: Jewish Solidarity; End Of The Occupation; Colonialism; Settler Colonialism; Apartheid; Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
The strength of Atzmon’s observations comes from his …
Marines to Central America and Diplomats to Cuba
by James Petras / May 28th, 2015
Everyone, from political pundits in Washington to the Pope in Rome, including most journalists in the mass media and in the alternative press, have focused on the US moves toward ending the economic blockade of Cuba and gradually opening diplomatic relations. Talk is rife of a ‘major shift’ in US policy toward Latin America with the emphasis on diplomacy and reconciliation. Even most progressive writers and journals have ceased writing about US imperialism.
However, there is mounting evidence that Washington’s negotiations with Cuba are merely one …
by Nizar Visram / May 27th, 2015
MORE than 800 migrants died on April 19 this year when their overcrowded boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast. The tragedy sent soaring this year’s Mediterranean death toll which was by then around 1,500 – 10 times the deaths during the same period last year.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), between 23,000 and 24,000 migrants had tried to cross over to Italy since the beginning of the year, while just under 21,000 migrants made the same journey between January and April 2014. While the number of migrants rose to some extent, migrants perishing at …
by Robert S. Becker / May 27th, 2015
What if billionaires hold fast to bullion as ferociously as those of modest means cling to God and guns? Assuming history survives, what if it turns out America’s permanent legacy comes down to 1) adoration of money and 2) avarice for stuff? No longer the progress that lifts humankind, not heroic confrontations with earth-shaking (climate) challenges, nary a Congressional vote for the greatest good for the greatest number. Nah, instead, our image a century or two out would depress the Founders, displaced by a tiny elite grasping for the global wealth sweepstakes, an illuminati lusting not for enlightenment but …
by Jonathan Cook / May 27th, 2015
Over many decades, Israel’s self-serving deceptions about the Nakba in 1948 have been exposed for the lies Palestinians already knew them to be.
It was long accepted in the west that, as Israel claimed, Palestinians left their homes because they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab leaders. The lie usefully distracted diplomats and scholars from the much more pertinent question of why Israel had refused to allow 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return to their homes after the war finished, as international law demanded.
The myth about the Arab leaders’ order, which had been steadily undermined by the work of the “new historians” of the late 1980s, was decisively punctured two years ago by an Israeli scholar who was given the …
by Ramzy Baroud / May 27th, 2015
“Nope, nope, nope,” was Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s answer to the question whether his country will take in any of the nearly 8,000 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea.
Abbott’s logic is as pitiless as his decision to abandon the world’s most persecuted minority in their darkest hour. “Don’t think that getting on a leaky boat at the behest of a people smuggler is going to do you or your family any good,” he said.
But Abbott is hardly the main party in the ongoing suffering of Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic group living in Myanmar, or Burma. The whole Southeast Asian …
Julian Assange on the TPP
by Democracy Now! / May 27th, 2015
As negotiations continue, WikiLeaks has published leaked chapters of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership — a global trade deal between the United States and 11 other countries. The TPP would cover 40 percent of the global economy, but details have been concealed from the public.
https://youtu.be/Y8bfcwiXl7k
Vietnam: a lesson on why America hates colored people who have resisted for 1,000 years
by Paul Haeder / May 27th, 2015
They have deranged smiles, hefty laughs, sometimes, like John McCain, seven homes, a cool twenty million in the bank, and that syphilitic grin.
I was in Vietnam, 1994, talking with people in Hanoi. Saw the photos of children all lined up in the courtyard of an orphanage. Oh, maybe 20 in one shot, 10 in another, and the story was repeated through narratives, both visual and oral.
These are corpses I am talking about, friends. Made in the USA, Murder, Inc., War Profiteering, Zionist and Gentile bombs and telemetry, napalm a la Dow, and that yellow-blue-titanium rain of paraquat, dioxins, Agent Orange.
McCain …
by Jonathan Cook / May 27th, 2015
FIFA, world football’s governing body, is due to meet this Friday in Zurich to decide whether to back a Palestinian motion to suspend Israel for its systematic violations of Palestinian footballers’ rights in the occupied territories, including preventing practice sessions and games, arresting players, denying entry to other teams, and bombing grounds, as well as for endemic racism towards non-Jewish players in Israeli football itself. I have written about this in the past: here and here.
Although a 75% majority is needed for the Palestinian motion to carry, there has been a growing sense that the mood at FIFA …
Resist Mass Surveillance
by John V. Walsh / May 27th, 2015
A struggle of some consequence is now being waged in Congress to keep on life support the NSA’s massive spying on the American people. And in this struggle the so-called progressives (more accurately referred to as liberals) are engaged in a massive betrayal of all they profess to believe in. Instead too many of them are scurrying about attacking Rand Paul, the libertarian, anti-interventionist, Republican Senator who is leading the charge against the Bush/Obama spying program. Among other things Senator Paul has engaged in a filibuster to stop this nefarious program. So far he has been successful.
Let us try …
by Denis Rancourt / May 26th, 2015
by James Hoover / May 26th, 2015
Maybe best characterizing the extreme in unmitigated industrial fossil frenzy is Texas (TX). North Dakota (ND) is the newcomer, but Texas is much larger and has for years been a boisterous, sometimes toxic free-for-all.
Texas prides itself in its largeness, its freedom from regulation, its low taxes, its independence, and its individualism. Outsiders see it differently. Perhaps the more simplistic see Texans in the caricature of cowboy boots and ten gallon hats, while many of the progressive-minded see Texas governors as outer-fringe and/or slow-witted, often citing governors like George W. Bush and Rick Perry for the latter.
Being spacious enough that most …
by Brian Terrell / May 25th, 2015
When President Barack Obama apologized on April 23 to the families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, an American and an Italian, both hostages killed in a drone attack in Pakistan in January, he blamed their tragic deaths on the “fog of war.”
“This operation was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region,” he said, and based on “hundreds of hours of surveillance, we believed that this (the building targeted and destroyed by drone launched missiles) was an al Qaeda compound; that no civilians were present.” Even with the best of intentions and …
Interview with Professor Guy McPherson
by Dylan Murphy / May 25th, 2015
Let’s be honest. The activities of our economic and social system are killing the planet. Even if we confine ourselves merely to humans, these activities are causing an unprecedented privation, as hundreds of millions of people-and today more than yesterday, with probably more tomorrow-go their entire lives with never enough to eat. Yet curiously, none of this seems to stir us to significant action. And when someone does too stridently point out these obvious injustices, the response by the mass of the people seems so often to be … a figurative if not physical blow to the gut, leading inevitably …
by Andre Vltchek / May 25th, 2015
As the government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to amend the country’s US-drafted constitution, granting the Tokyo’s military the power to wage war, some fear the return of old imperialistic tendencies.
Japan is ready to change its post-war pacifist constitution; it is rapidly arming itself to the teeth, building battleships and purchasing fighter jets. Recruitment posters are everywhere. Meanwhile, Japan is standing – obediently and loyally – by its occupier and closest ally, the United States….
"Thank you for your service"...on second thought -
by Rosemarie Jackowski / May 25th, 2015
It is Memorial Day again. Some will celebrate. Some will drink too much. Some will march in parades. Some will rally around the flag. Some will go shopping. Some will mourn. I am among the mourners.
I mourn mostly for those we have killed — and I mourn for those we haven’t killed yet, but will in the days ahead. I mourn for all of the mothers and fathers who put their children to bed at night and wonder if this will be the night that they are killed by a drone attack.
I mourn for the 500,000 Iraqi children – dead …
by Alton C. Thompson / May 25th, 2015
Unless you are a new arrival from another planet, you have probably heard or read at least one of the following claims (among other possibilities):
Global warming is occurring—or, conversely, is not occurring. (Presidential candidate Ted Cruz has, for example, referred to global warming believers as “alarmists,” and has “compared people who think that the climate is warming to ‘flat-Earthers’ and described himself as a modern-day Galileo in an interview with the Texas Tribune.”)
Global warming is occurring, and is human-caused (i.e., anthropogenic)—by our burning of fossil fuels and our deforestation activities especially.
The unusual weather that we have been experiencing during …
by Ron Forthofer / May 24th, 2015
Here in the US, we have been led to believe that we are an exceptional people and the indispensable nation. During our lifetime we have been exposed to lots of myths about the US, particularly about how we are always on the side of good. Below are insider comments challenging this key myth.
Before presenting the quotes, note that US crimes of stealing lands and resources and killing and exploiting people are, disturbingly, nothing new. Many other nations/empires have committed similar crimes throughout history. Morality, legality or altruism are not considerations that apply to the acts of powerful nations. The US …
by Peter Garcia-Webb / May 24th, 2015
There are three characters in Yemen. Each has a separate tale to tell.
The first lives in Aden. His house is bombed, his family slain.
The second is a Saudi fighter pilot who delights in bombing civilians’ houses.
The third is Barack Obama who puzzles over what to do next in Yemen.
The story explores the helplessness of civilians in the current conflict in Yemen. It demonstrates the mindless brutal violence of Saudi Arabia. And it exposes the fact that the whole event is set up to benefit US financial interests.
Yemen
Inside, I am alone. Outside people talk, walk, mingle, interact, perhaps even make love. …
The Anti-Empire Report #139
by William Blum / May 23rd, 2015
Their precious young minds and our precious young minds
She was a redheaded rebel, the singer in the family, a trash-talking, tattooed 21-year-old wrapped up in a hip-hop dream of becoming Holland’s Eminem. Then Betsy found Allah. After her sudden conversion to Islam last summer, Betsy began dressing in full Muslim robes. By January, the once-agnostic Dutch woman, raised in a home where the only sign of religion was a dusty Bible on a shelf, began defending homegrown terrorists. … Denis Cuspert, a German hip-hop artist known as Deso Dogg who converted in 2010 and later joined The Islamic State [ISIS], …
by Eoin Higgins / May 23rd, 2015
The cultural trope of the young black man as a fearsome criminal is almost as reductive and misleading as the trope about biker gangs in the US being American Ronin. Both are. of course, highly racialized perceptions, based on an imaginary reality. But they’ve come together in odd ways in the past few days.
When the average American thinks of a young black man in conflict with the police, it’s a safe bet the first image that comes to mind is a criminal element. It’s the result of insidious subtextual conditioning that pervades our culture from our news to our entertainment. …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 23rd, 2015
There is something grimly appropriate about the capture of the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra by a supposedly weakened ISIS. Accounts of history are being settled, unmade and reconstituted. The fundamentalist warriors have never made any secret of their hatred of idolatry – at least of the sort condemned by Quranic edict. Religions of the book have tended to fight wars over that very fact and craven worship of images was always deemed to be a vital point of difference.
What then, of Palmyra, that pearl and bride of the desert supposedly fortified by Solomon? It may …
