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A complex class system exists in the United States, but the mass media and political rhetoric generally reduces it to three components — one middle class, and two economic generalizations — rich and the poor. Indeed the term “class” itself, as a means of defining the economic and social status of the population, has been fading away. There are, of course, a number of other classes, particularly the all-important capitalist class.

Virtually the only class ever mentioned these days is the middle class, and now that seems on the way out, at least until the next election if not longer. The …

Washington DC is presently the converging point for some of the world’s most oppressive regimes. On May 13th and 14th, President Obama is hosting a billionaire conglomerate known as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which consists of the Middle Eastern countries of Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Oman. The cozy US-GCC relationship exemplifies the twisted nature of US foreign policy, especially in regards to one particular monarchy: Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has been accused of human rights violations against its own citizens, including political activists, journalists, and women. The Saudi king has decided to …

Author/jazz artist Gilad Atzmon has combined with cartoonist Enzo Apicella to produce, as it is entitled, The Definitive Israeli Lexicon: A to Zion. And true to its title, provided are the definition of words from A to Z — from a Jewish-Israeli standpoint.

As the book’s composers make clear, it is a “truthful yet satirical book.” They also unashamedly state that it “is probably the ultimate toilet book.” In a sense this is very true because it is full of shit which is a euphemistic way to describe the belief that …

When the NDP party triumphed in the Alberta provincial election last week, there were three primary responses: conservatives inside the province declared that they no longer recognized Alberta and were going to move to Saskatchewan, such was their collective shock at the end of a 44-year conservative dynasty; progressives in Alberta and across the country seemed ecstatic by the NDP victory, convinced, apparently, that a progressive government had conquered the conservative heartland of Canada, despite winning only 41% of the popular vote with a moderate election platform; and finally, environmentalists inside Alberta and anti-Keystone XL pipeline liberals in the United …

Computers, unlike flesh-and-blood creatures, entirely lack the charms of spontaneity, playfulness, affection, sensuality, passionate attachment, and so forth.  Yet recent films, to my continued bafflement, offer bizarre scenarios of “intimate relatedness” between humans and synthetic sentients (for instance, “Her,” “Ex Machina”–and even more sickeningly, the human clones of “Never Let Me Go.”)  Two hundred years ago, the 19-year-old Mary Shelley showed more acute insight than today’s technophiles–by conjuring up a startlingly ironic contract between the coldly grandiose Dr. Frankenstein and his suffering and emotionally sensitive “monster.”

Whence this fascination with “artificial intelligence”—(dis)embodied, calculating ratiocinators which are presumed to be somehow superior …

The Palestinian Embassy in London recently released a statement by President Mahmoud Abbas telling the world ‘It’s Time for Palestine’.

He starts by saying:

The Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom and national independence has reached a decisive moment. The two-state formula is under serious threat, due to systematic Israeli policies and practices that have seriously undermined the solution, threatening to make it impracticable in the very near future.

Abbas reminds us that in 1988, Palestine unilaterally recognized Israel over 78 percent of historic Palestine, in addition to accepting United Nations resolutions as the framework for a peaceful solution to the conflict.

But, he …

Recently, the news hit social media that comedian and actor Russell Brand is embracing cryptocurrency. Well known for his political activism, Brand has now teamed up with Max Keiser, host of a popular financial program on RT to help fund his ideas for changing the world. Keiser, together with UK based entrepreneur Jamie Scott, co-founded StartJOIN, a crowdfunding website that combines the platform with its own unique currency called StartCOIN. Calling it a “currency of revolution”, he predicted that “cryptocoins such as Bitcoin or StartCOIN will put all central banks …

Michael Blake died last week.

You probably don’t know the name.

You probably don’t know about his life.

You probably don’t know most of what he wrote. That’s probably because he didn’t write diet and exercise books. Or cookbooks. Or “feel good” books. Or books about celebrities. Or books that advanced junk science or conspiracy theories.

Michael Blake fused history and social issues, writing about social justice. Writing books that mattered. Writing screenplays that were never produced and then discarded.

He was born in Fort Bragg, N.C.; his father was in the Army, and later became a telephone executive. But it was his mother, Sally, …

The good news is that an appellate judge in Canada has had the courage and good sense to uphold the release from jail on bail of Omar Khadr, a native of Canada who was captured as a child soldier at the age of 15 in Afghanistan by US forces back in 2002 and shipped off to Guantanamo, where he became one of the children held in captivity there illegally.

The bad news is that Khadr, who spent 13 years in captivity, most of them in America’s Guantanamo hellhole, should never have been imprisoned in the first place. Brought along at the …

V-E Day, or Victory in Europe Day, is celebrated every May 8th in Western Europe and the United States, but is celebrated as Victory Day every May 9th in Russia. Why? Because the Soviet Union’s representative had no authority to sign the German document of surrender at Reims, France, on 7 May 1945, but also because, on 8 May, Soviet forces were still shelling German units in Czechoslovakia that had refused to surrender. Thus, when the surrender ceremony was repeated in Berlin on 8 May, it already was 9 May in the Soviet Union.

Recently, the Ukrainian Prime Minister told German …

May 8. Today’s payroll jobs report is more of the same. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that 223,000 new jobs were created in April. Let’s accept the claim and see where the jobs are.

Specialty trade contractors are credited with 41,000 jobs equally split between residential and nonresidential. I believe these are home and building repairs and remodeling.

The rest of the jobs, 182,000, are in domestic services.

Despite store closings and weak retail sales, 12,000 people were hired in retail trade.

Despite negative first quarter GDP growth, 62,000 people were hired in professional and business services, 67% of which are in administrative …

Suddenly, the mass media is writing about or televising the conditions in West Baltimore. Conditions that Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, summarized as decades long “suffocating poverty, dysfunction and despair.”

Suddenly, reporters and camera teams are discovering Baltimore’s inner city—crumbling or abandoned housing; mass unemployment; too many merchants gouging the locals (the poor pay more); too many drug dealers; schools, roads and sidewalks in serious disrepair; debris everywhere; lack of municipal services (which are provided to the wealthier areas of the city); and, as always, grinding poverty and its many vicious circle consequences.

Suddenly, media highlights a report by Harvard economists putting …

It is wrong to believe that postwar American suburbanization prevailed because the public chose it… Suburbanization prevailed because of the decisions of large operators and powerful economic institutions supported by federal government programmes… ordinary consumers had little real choice in the basic pattern that resulted… Essentially city planners saw the atomic threat as a means to accelerate the trend of suburbanization. Plans to circle American cities with open spaces, highways and circumferential life belts was long overdue…The federal government played a more effective role in reducing urban vulnerability [to atomic attack] in future residential development by working through the Federal …

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Trust between the West and Russia is broken. It has been for quite some time, but now it is broken irreversibly. A good thing, because what kind of trust there could be between fascist imperialism and the forces that are fighting for the freedom of mankind?

It is really easy to trick the Russian people. It takes very little to gain their trust; sometimes only a kind smile, a handful of loving words, a few sincerely sounding pledges and promises. Russians can be easily ‘bought’ with kindness. They are very trusting, vulnerable people.

When approached with tenderness and sympathy, they soon open …

While congress ponders the merits of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, a bill which revises the business records provisions of the Patriot Act, a panel of judges in a federal appeals court has just thrown a clump of sand into the gears of the global panopticon. Overturning an earlier ruling, where federal judges dismissed a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata is illegal.

The Good News

In their ruling the judges focused heavily on the scope of …