On April 30, Jonathan Cohn provided a perfect example of what America’s media get wrong about the meaning of “socialism” — and about the meaning of the new U.S. Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders.
Cohn said that “Socialism, as commonly understood by Americans, means widespread government ownership of business,” but Cohn said that, “that’s not the agenda Sanders has actually been promoting.”
We should all welcome the news of charges being brought against the six police officers in Baltimore for the death of Freddie Gray. At the very least, the Baltimore Police Department’s culpability in Gray’s death is uncontroversial.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, those of us not on the ground in Baltimore, anyway, in considering this matter resolved, either locally or nationally. Because it isn’t.
The idea that the “system” is “working” because of these charges is completely false. On the morning of May 1, soon after the charges were brought, Al Sharpton spoke to Tamron …
The war and its results have turned Yemen back a hundred years, due to the destruction of infrastructure … especially in the provinces of Oden, Dhalea, and Taiz.
— Izzedine al-Asbali, Yemeni Human Rights Minister
Yemen is devastated. There are no roads, water, or electricity. Nobody’s left but thieves.
— a resident of Sanaa, Yemen
The Euro-American and Japanese ruling classes, as well as their collaborators in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries, have accumulated vast profit. This has occurred through a complex stratified system re-concentrating the world’s wealth through: 1. The exploitation of labor in the First World (North America and Western …
First of all, spare me any #notallwhites vitriol because you haven’t personally lynched any black people today. (Incidentally, it may be a frivolous aside, but can there be any more depressing harbinger of non-change that this–Lynch–is the last name of the newly installed Attorney General?) If that is your initial reaction, you have already missed the points I haven’t even made yet. You might want to stop reading here (though you in particular should probably read the whole thing). It is a thing of sheer beauty–terrible, evil beauty to be sure. But beauty nonetheless in the way that a near …
A lane, a narrow passage to Jallianwala Bagh Garden inside the old city of Amritsar, in the state of Punjab. It is a monument now, one of the testaments to madness and crimes committed by the British Empire during its colonial reign over Sub-Continent.
This is where, on April 13 1919, thousands of people gathered, demanding release of two of their detained leaders, Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Saifuddin. It was right before the day of Baisakhi, the main Sikh festival, and the pilgrims came to the city, in multitudes, from all corners of Punjab.
The British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer brought fifty Gurkha …
I see my old friends, Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel, are still flogging their dead horse of a Holy Roman-Leninist Empire in their latest DV article, “The Future of Solidarity.”
My previous DV article, “No Marx Again,” criticised them for pushing the notion of a ‘Leninist Socialist State’; where workers who supposedly ‘owned the means of production’ could ‘go on strike’ presumably against themselves for better pay and conditions!
In their latest article, they now admit that their future ‘Marxist’ society would also incorporate both State and Government. This is strange! Doesn’t a ‘Government’ imply the existence of those …
Last week’s drownings in the Mediterranean were the foreseeable, and indeed deliberate, a result of the anti-human policies of strategic violence by a dying neo-colonial empire. They were the consequence, firstly, of a series of wars of aggression that have made life intolerable across vast swathes of Africa and West Asia, and, secondly, of the fateful EU decision last November to end Italy’s search-and-rescue programme, Mare Nostrum. This much has been admitted by politicians and commentators from across the entire British political establishment, from Nigel Farage and the Daily Telegraph to David Cameron and Ed Miliband. Whilst these admissions have often been …
“As you resume or take office, you will recognise one of the heaviest and most important burdens on your desk will be your responsibility for Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. That deterrent exists, as you will know, not as a military weapon but as a political one whose very purpose is for it never to be used in anger. It is there to deter aggression against this country and our allies and to counter any nuclear blackmail which would threaten Britain’s essential interests or survival.”
So, with just days to go before the UK general election, starts the letter in the …
Part Three: Wear jeans, millions of flies can’t be wrong.
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 30th, 2015
Colonel, later Major General, Edward Lansdale began his professional career in advertising. In other words, Lansdale was a corporate propagandist. He is credited with the campaign that made Levi’s Jeans into a “national craze” and converted plain working clothes into what has become the standard clothing item of the American empire. ((Douglas Valentine, “Whatever Happened to the CIA? Dirty Wars and the Cinema of Self-Indulgence”, Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, June 7-9, 2013))
Lansdale went to the Philippines in 1950 where he became infamous for his contributions to the development of US political warfare tactics. ((Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire (2009) …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / April 30th, 2015
TRNN’s Eddie Conway and Megan Sherman and Baltimore City firefighter Gary Nelson give the real account of the encounter between Baltimore youth and police on Monday and discuss the underlying conditions that produced it.
Report: Up to 75 House Republicans Oppose Fast Track, Almost All Democrats Oppose, Fast Track is Dozens of Votes Short of a Majority
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 30th, 2015
Opponents of fast track trade authority from Popular Resistance, Public Citizen, Communication Workers of America and Friends of the Earth rallied on Capitol Hill to welcome Japanese Prime Minister Shinz? Abe as he came to speak to a Joint Session of Congress with a three story tall Trojan Horse. The theme of the protest was ‘No Fast Track for Secret Corporate Trade Deals’. Banners read “No Fast Track for Secret Trojan Treaties” and “Stop the TPP: Transparency Release the Text.” There were also signs in Japanese which said: “U.S. citizens stand in solidarity with Japanese citizens against the TPP” and “TPP = Trojan …
The corporate media keeps churning out good news stories about the booming shale oil and gas industry in the United States. Apparently, the fracking industry is going to lead to America becoming the next Saudi Arabia with a hundred years of oil and natural gas. It will provide cheap energy supplies that will boost U.S. Industry and give a major boost to consumers and help the so-called economic recovery. Yet all of the over inflated claims for shale oil and gas are based upon a fantasy. The geological evidence ((See the exhaustive studies by University of Texas and by the …
…[G]enocide is a new technique of occupation aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost.
– Raphäel Lemkin, 1944
In 2008 I wrote a post-graduate research paper about the “Vietnam War”. I believe I showed quite clearly that Viet Nam lost its war with the United States by any reasonable criteria apart from the most obvious surface events. We are now at the 40th anniversary of the time when North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. Christian Appy has just published a piece criticising a popular revisionism that misrepresents the events of 40 years ago as an uncontextualised …
Once upon a time, the famous criminal Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, and his response was simple, eloquent, and humorous: “Because that’s where the money is.”Well, soon that adage may be proven untrue. What exactly is the meaning of legal tender? In order to place money in its proper perspective, examine what the U.S. Treasury says.
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled “Legal tender,” which states: “United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) …
Chiapas, Mexico — In May of last year, José Luis Solís López, a teacher in the Zapatista community of La Realidad (one of five affiliated communities of the now 20-year-old Zapatista experiment in autonomy and self-governance) was killed by paramilitaries during an ambush in which several other unarmed Zapatistas were also injured. The paramilitaries proceeded to destroy the community’s clinic and seriously damage its school. Such tensions have been a constant part of life in Zapatista territory in the remote south of Mexico. Failing to dislodge the Zapatistas by force after their initial uprising in 1994, the Mexican government, wealthy …
Social Security and Medicare are under attack from Wall Street, conservatives, and free market economists. The claims are that these programs are unaffordable and that the programs can be run more efficiently and at less cost if privatized.
The programs are disparaged as “entitlements.” The word has come to imply that entitled people are getting something at great cost to everyone else. Indeed, entitlements have become conflated with welfare.
In fact, Social Security and Medicare are financed by an earmarked payroll tax paid by employees. (Economists regard the part of the payroll tax that is paid by employers as part of the …
If all of us rolled down our car windows at 5 pm on weekdays, we would hear a single great voice booming out across the land as if God himself were thundering from the heavens. In reality it would be countless car radios beaming out in unison All Things Considered, sometimes known as “Small Things Considered,” so stunted is its coverage of the news. Such jokes abound, “Boring Edition” at morning commute time, with the whole operation labeled “National Propaganda Radio” or “National Pentagon Radio.” My contribution: “National Pablum Radio.”
It’s hard for me to celebrate on Mother’s Day. I feel the absence of my 23-year-old son Sean Elijah Bell, who was killed on November 25, 2006. He was out celebrating at his own bachelor party with his friends in New York City. It was only a matter of a hours before his wedding, and I was so thrilled.
Sean and his friends were enjoying their night at a club where there happened to be three undercover police officers present, conducting an investigation of the club. A confrontation between patrons erupted outside. One of the undercover officer’s, Isnora, said …
The year 2015 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first comical novel in the Western world, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The first part of the irreverent work, published in Madrid in 1605, introduced the world to the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and its definitive sequel of 1615 furthered their misbegotten quest to reactivate knight errantry while doubling down on the pranks and misfortunes they suffered at the hands of fellow Spaniards eager for a laugh. It was doubtless the humorous quality of these pranks and misfortunes that was partly responsible …
The reason the dispossessed turn to violence is because violence is the only thing power understands.
Baltimore is burning, embroiled in riots and protest against the city’s horrifically racist and oppressive police. That it took the death of Freddy Gray, a young man whose spine was severed in police custody, to spark the violence is perhaps less important than the fact that the explosion was inevitable.
Whenever protests against institutional injustice occur, there is the possibility for violence. People do not join in actions against the power of the state without some understanding that their safety may be compromised. The possibility of …
In what appears to be another attempt to suppress criticism of Israel, the Canadian government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Israel which makes the claim that “the selective targeting of Israel is the new face of anti-Semitism” and declares that Canada will oppose those who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Shortly after the MOU was signed, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney announced to the UN General Assembly that the Canadian government would exercise “zero tolerance” toward “all forms of discrimination including rhetoric towards Israel, and …
Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
— Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
It was almost three years ago, that red letter day for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In huge red letters, as a matter of fact. (1) Jerry Sandusky, an erstwhile football coach and inspirational leader and advocate of disadvantaged youth, was jailed for life several times over. (If you had at that time picked up a newspaper, watched television news or attended a water-cooler conversation during the previous six months, you needn’t having been told …
A student group recently asked me to address socialism in the Arab world, with the assumption that there is indeed such a movement that is capable of overhauling inherently incompetent and utterly corrupt regimes across the region. But, of course, no such group, or configuration of socialist groups exist today, but in name.
I recall a talk I delivered in London soon after Hamas was placed under siege in Gaza in 2007. “Hamas is the largest and most effective socialist movement in Palestine,” I said to the surprise of some and the agreeing nods of others. Of course, I was not …
What if they played a professional baseball game, but excluded the public? Sound Kafkaesque? Welcome to Baltimore, 2015!
To close a baseball game to the public and lock the fans out is representative of the state of “democracy” in the United States today. The Baseball Czars decided that playing to rows of empty seats was more important and consistent with “American values” than having an actual baseball game. First, Baltimore issued a curfew for the citizens of the city; then they closed their schools; and then they closed the ballpark.
Well, who is baseball for, anyway? Certainly not for the fans. The …
Anti-Black racism, always just beneath the surface of polite racial discourse in the U.S., has exploded in reaction to the resistance of black youth to another brutal murder by the agents of this racist, settler-colonialist state. With the resistance, the focus shifted from the brutal murder of Freddie Gray and the systematic state violence that historically has been deployed to control and contain the black population in the colonized urban zones of North America, to the forms of resistance by African Americans to the trauma of ongoing state violence.
The narrative being advanced by corporate media spokespeople gives the impression that …
It’s very reassuring that more people are slowly learning how our monetary system really works: if you want to fix something, you need to know a bit about it. The indefatigable Ellen Brown has been hugely helpful in this regard with her regular well-informed and easy-to-read articles that relentlessly confront the myths of capitalist monetary theory. Her early work Web of Debt is an authoritative account of something that everyone should know about and understand; and if everyone were to read just one book on the subject that should be it: if everyone clearly understood the lessons of Ellen’s work …
Established decades ago to "Judaise" the Galilee, Upper Nazareth fights back as Arabs from surrounding communities try to buy homes
by Jonathan Cook / April 28th, 2015
For nearly 60 years, the historic city of Nazareth has been living with an unwelcome neighbour.
Upper Nazareth was built on Nazareth’s confiscated lands on the orders of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. It was part of an official campaign to “Judaise” the only Palestinian city to survive relatively unscathed from the 1948 war.
But if Upper Nazareth and its Jewish residents were supposed to overwhelm the Galilee city that, according to the Bib`le, was home to Jesus, it has largely failed.
A far greater danger, admit Upper Nazareth’s officials, is that their small city now risks being overrun by the …
The unique approach of Boston School Bus Union, Steelworkers Local 8751 offers a much needed new blueprint for building power within poor and working class communities. This particular union marks the spot where organized labor meets oppressed and marginalized people where they are. During my travels there, it was quite inspiring to see a local union work hand in hand with neighborhood youth against police brutality. It was quite encouraging to see the rank-and-file of the Boston school bus drivers work with parents and community members to organize against school closings and badly timed budget cuts to public …
SONOMA COUNTY — in the heart of California’s Redwood Empire — California Governor Jerry Brown spent this year’s Earth Day at the elite Iron Horse Winery in the Sebastopol countryside. It was a great photo opportunity and promotion for the winery. Iron Horse is known for donations to President Bill Clinton and other politicians, with whom it has cozy relationships, and from whom it receives favors, such as these visits. I operate a small berry and apple farm nearby and teach sustainable agriculture, mainly to college students.
“Hope Amid Drought” headlined the April 20 pro-wine industry daily Press Democrat’s (PD) …
“Affirmative action” means imposing positive discrimination or quotas for members of disadvantaged groups. In the case of a university department, it means imposing a hiring practice designed to select more candidates from disadvantaged groups.
One view is that the tenured professors of the academic department should have total professional independence to select the most qualified candidates in their area of knowledge, without government or administrative interference. The idea here is that they have the knowledge and experience to best select candidates, and that it is most desirable for society that the most talented teachers and researchers be selected.
