Latest articles
by Jonathan Cook / December 8th, 2014
I am aware that there is a danger I sound churlish about George Monbiot. Usually when I have referred to him in these posts, it has been to criticise him, even while I agree with most of what he writes and recognise that he is a rare figure indeed in the corporate media: someone writing critically about the power of the corporations.
But the reason for my preoccupation with Monbiot is neatly illustrated in his column in today’s Guardian. Monbiot identifies the biggest democratic deficit facing modern western states: the insidious role of corporations, usurping power in non-accountable and often invisible ways.
Monbiot usefully …
by Ben Norton / December 7th, 2014
Sugar-coated fantasies about the United States of America as a “post-racial society” that guarantees equality before the law are and have always been precisely that: fantasies. Much like the “sugar high” induced by consuming copious amounts of physical sugar, voracious ingestion of this saccharine social delusion leads individuals to similar political and intellectual stupor.
Racism never went away. Signing a piece of paper that purports to guarantee equal rights to all citizens, regardless of race and ethnicity, does not magically whisk away the white supremacist accretions that have been embedded into the very substrata of the fundamental institutions upon which the …
America: I think big, therefore I am
by Denis A. Conroy / December 7th, 2014
Somewhere out there in space there are little green men who have labelled our planet a no-go zone by virtue of the sheer weight of evidence indicating the existence here on Planet Earth of a pathological condition known to them as ‘Warfare’. Historians among the little green people from somewhere, must have pondered throughout millennia, why humans have been so inhumane to their own kind. To have evolved from hunter-gatherers to lunatics committed to licentious acts of animus for the purpose of advancing group identity — in coded narratives, of course, that seek dominance of the resources of Planet Earth, is beyond comprehension. Therefore, Planet Earth must be avoided at …
by Bernard Marszalek / December 7th, 2014
Many summers ago, just freed from the enforced boredom of high school, I signed up for a course on Marxist economics. Andy, the teen I worked with, asked if I would accompany him. I envied him his dad, a transplanted Marxist Scotsman, and I relished the transgression I was invited to undertake, especially as a recent apostate from Catholicism.
The class was held at the Proletarian Party (PP) headquarters in a shabby, multi-story building in Chicago’s Loop. I realized as soon as we entered their small office and saw at the other end of the room “Lecture Hall” inscribed in …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 7th, 2014
Economist Richard Wolff says workers are returning to jobs with lower wages, fewer benefits, and less job security than they had before the financial crisis hit.
http://youtu.be/ilJaqQrbyLc
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 7th, 2014
Is the Egyption military behind the dropped charges against Mubarak? Maged Mandour, political analyst for Open Democracy, explains the political and economic power of the military in the Egyptian state.
http://youtu.be/42zxIXzvo6c
House Resolution 758
by Binoy Kampmark / December 7th, 2014
The US House of Representatives might have though it through a bit more, but House Resolution 758, the handiwork of Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill), passed with 98 percent of the vote. The text lasts a dreary 16 pages, but that is the least of it. It states, in the undusted, revised language of Cold War vitriol, the agenda of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, which the House accuses of using “a policy of aggression against neighbouring countries aimed at political and economic domination.” It makes reference to Russia’s purported violation of “each of the 10 principles of …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / December 7th, 2014
What’s the frequency level? What schematic vibration are you operating from? High or low? Middle ground? Flighty or dense? Kittenish or fierce? Extreme points of reference coalesce and burn at the edges. Houston, we have a disruptive problem arising in the form of allegorical metaphors running amok across the pages of literary diarrhea which are passed off as being purely ingenious, quizzical, fantastical and kaleidoscopic in their wide array of viewpoints from which to peek at the dirty little secrets kept tucked beneath the covers and the ugly old agendas swept under the …
by James Petras / December 6th, 2014
The principle Nazi ideological prop that secured massive financial and political support from Germany’s leading industrialists was the Communist and Soviet threat. The main Nazi military drive, absorbing two-thirds of its best troops, was directed eastward at conquering and destroying Russia. The ‘Russian Threat’ justified Nazi Germany’s conquest and occupation of the Ukraine, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, with the aid of a substantial proportion of local Nazi collaborators.
After Germany’s defeat, division, and disarmament, and with the extension of Soviet power, …
End of the “Team of Rivals” or More of the Same?
by Gary Leupp / December 6th, 2014
Somebody on CNN suggested the other day that the dismissal of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary spells the end of Barack Obama’s notion of a “team of rivals.” (Recall how that term was used after the 2008 election to refer to the new president’s decision to include former rivals, notably Hillary Clinton, in his administration. It was derived from the title of a book by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet formed in 1860 that included three former opponents.)
Obama wanted to be the great healer, the magnanimous reconciler of a bitterly divided nation. Thinking it would aid this …
Five Crucial Campaigns for Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / December 6th, 2014
This week tens of thousands of people in the United States flooded the streets to demand racial justice. It is one of many issues that has been building for years, reaching the tipping point and seeming to explode in a national awakening. We also saw that in the last two weeks with national protests for living wages.
Four years ago when we organized the occupation of Washington, DC at Freedom Plaza, we listed 15 crisis issues that the country needed to face, poverty wages and the injustice in criminal enforcement, including racially abusive police practices, were two of them. None of these …
New data illustrate the extent to which economists have stopped discussing each other’s work
by Joe Francis / December 6th, 2014
Once upon a time, economists regularly used to publicly criticise each other’s work in academic journals. But not any more.
In Figure 1 I have illustrated the degree to which economists have stopped debating. The data have been culled from Jstor, the online database of academic journals. To estimate the number of debating articles for each year, I searched for articles with “comment”, “reply”, and/or “rejoinder” in their titles, as these are the key words used to indicate a comment on someone else’s article and a reply to that comment. I did the search for the five most prestigious economics journals. I then used the total number …
Part 2: Early move to election designed to strengthen right’s hand by accentuating internal threats and casting the vote as one for Israel’s soul
by Jonathan Cook / December 6th, 2014
The collapse of Binyamin Netanyahu’s less than two-year-old government this week indicates the increasingly volatile nature of Israeli politics – and a trend towards ever greater extremism. Those who will pay the highest price are almost certainly Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens.
The changes are a direct result of a strengthening consensus among the Jewish public over the past five years that no resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible.
Few Israeli politicians ever took seriously the idea of reaching a meaningful peace agreement with the Palestinians, but for much of the past quarter century they did at least claim in …
Part 1: His chief rival, the centrist Yair Lapid, is at his lowest ebb, as the pair struggle over who Israel’s economy benefits
by Jonathan Cook / December 6th, 2014
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu held a press conference late on Tuesday at which he launched into a tirade against two centre-right ministers he had fired from his government earlier that day. Israel is almost certainly now heading into elections, expected in March, two years after Netanyahu formed his third government, widely seen as the most right wing in Israel’s history.
It was hard not to discern in Netanyahu’s fulminations against his colleagues, Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni, whom he accused of trying to mount a “putsch” against him, the accumulated grievances of months of petty squabbling inside the coalition.
That is …
by David Cantor / December 5th, 2014
Asked how human beings get the Ebola virus, National Institutes of Health infectious-disease director Anthony Fauci described, in a radio interview, the scenario of someone in Africa using a fruit bat “for protein nourishment.” The virus spills over to humans from nonhuman animals, to invoke David Quammen’s informative book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.
Most authorities share Dr. Fauci’s obliviousness to the needless and misguided animal abuse that gives humans just about every infectious disease we can name, whether acquired recently or in prehistoric times – AIDS, smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax, influenza … the list …
by Ralph Nader / December 5th, 2014
At a recent American Antitrust Institute (AAI) symposium in Washington, D.C., I asked the presenters about the ability of cash and checks to compete with the credit card industry and its strict controls on merchants. This obvious point becomes less obvious when one takes into account the expanding exclusion of cash/check payments due to the overwhelming expansion of goods and services that you cannot buy unless you have a credit card or a friend with one whom you can reimburse.
When sending some types of express mail, renting a car, or paying for the services of airlines/trains or hotels, you either …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 5th, 2014
It seems like dystopian mayhem: the US airspace, riddled with opportunistic drones, surveillance vehicles, hell fire missiles and other such lethal projectiles manned by ruthless, unhinged operators. There is also something far less intrusive or lethal: the delivery of purchased items, amateur filming, and the taking of aerial photos.
But the battle between the deployment of the drone, or unmanned vehicle, in its blissfully anarchic state, and one of regulations, continues on the Hill, and various state legislatures which find this technological nirvana a touch too much to handle. Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grants permission for the use of drones …
by Mateo Pimentel / December 5th, 2014
From 1948 to 1973, hourly compensation grew instep with the productivity of the typical American worker. This means that, for about a generation’s time, economic prosperity amongst workers in the United States virtually reflected productivity. In the ensuing forty years, however, inequality exploded. The Washington Post has reported that income for the bottom 90 percent of American households has only nominally grown since 1973, when this group commanded nearly 70 percent of national income. In her article entitled “The Capitalist Machine: Computerization, Workers’ Power, And The Decline In Labor’s Share Within U.S. Industries”, sociologist Tali Kristal evinces the dismal disconnect …
by Makia Freeman / December 5th, 2014
Organic food is more healthful than conventional food by a long way, many studies are now showing. There are two main reasons why: pesticides and nutrients. Conventionally produced food is sprayed with numerous forms of pesticides, from insecticides to herbicides to fungicides and more. In large scale agriculture, these pesticides are petrochemical derivatives. In other words, they are made from industrial chemicals which are powerful and dangerous enough to kill bugs and mold, but which can also cause you serious illness if they end up in your body – which they do, since most food which is sprayed absorbs the …
by Robert Hunziker / December 5th, 2014
Milton Freidman (1912-2006) labeled it the “Miracle of Chile,” as his “Chicago Boys,” a considerable group of Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago, established his neoliberal principles under the tutelage of General Augusto Pinochet from 1974-90.
The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.
Thereafter, Chilean economic policy “deregulated and privatized,” including the breakdown of state-controlled pension systems, state industries, and state banks (sound familiar, …
Pillage, Plunder, and Wealth
by James Petras / December 4th, 2014
Over the past 30 years, wealth has grown exponentially and has become increasingly concentrated foremost in the upper .01%, then the .1%, followed by the 1% and the upper 10%-20%.
The large scale, long-term concentration of wealth has continued through booms and busts of the real economy, the financial and IT crises. Wealth grew despite long-term economic recessions and stagnation because the so-called recovery programs imposed austerity on 80% of the households while transferring public revenues to the rich.
…
Yes it's us: y'all need to change, and that Right Soon
by Daniel Patrick Welch / December 4th, 2014
White Americans have essentially never internalized the Kenner Report. Assembled by Lyndon Johnson to address what was laughably referred to as the Negro Problem, the panel very quickly saw that this was a joke. There is no Negro Problem in the US, but rather a white people problem. FIFTY years ago (let that sink in), it opined, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white–separate and unequal… Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.” The report explained that the race riots were rooted in …
by Burkely Hermann / December 4th, 2014
History is like a flowing river whose motions can be interpreted from any angle, since it is not static. As social activist Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States, “the historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports…some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual…[the] inevitable taking of sides…comes from selection and emphasis in history.” Gerald Horne took the side of the oppressed in his recent books by challenging the traditional and conventional history of …
(The Red Summer of 1919; Destruction of Tulsa's 'Black Wall Street in 1921; and Decimation of Rosewood, Florida in 1923)
by Herb Dyer / December 4th, 2014
Author’s note: In light of the current so-called “riots” in Ferguson, Missouri, I thought it might be instructive to give some perspective as to what “race riot” really means. This is written especially for those legions of “holier than thou” white people who may be heard, seen and read as they rail against the “looters” and “rioters” in Ferguson in the aftermath of the murder of unarmed teen Michael Brown at the hands of now non-indicted white killer-cop, Darren Wilson.
And, this history is also meant to serve as an object lesson to black people, a reminder, a remembrance – …
U.S. Media Role is to Pacify the Nation
by John Stanton / December 4th, 2014
The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers… A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of news-writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.
— Thomas Jefferson
Freedom of the press is another of the principal slogans of pure democracy…The capitalists have always use the term freedom to mean freedom for the rich to …
Some people just can’t be trusted
by Jason Hirthler / December 4th, 2014
A recent New York Times article offered another textbook example of the spectacular bias the U.S. employs to undermine those that might pose a challenge to its global hegemony. It also nicely illustrated the willingness of the media to serve as little more than a relay station for state propaganda. Yet it was but the latest in the glossary of deceits that characterize America’s relationship with Iran.
The front-page article from two Saturdays covered the Iranian nuclear program negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1, which includes the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Russia. It was titled, …
“If we burn, you burn with us”
by Ramzy Baroud / December 3rd, 2014
Raed Mu’anis was my best friend. The small scar on top of his left eyebrow was my doing at the age of five. I urged him to quit hanging on a rope where my mother was drying our laundry. He wouldn’t listen, so I threw a rock at him.
I didn’t mean for the rock hit him, but it did. My father dragged to me to his house kicking and screaming, while carrying a colourful rubber ball and a doll for gifts. I was mostly embarrassed that I hurt my best friend.
Several years later, Raed, now 15, was shot by Israeli …
by John Andrews / December 3rd, 2014
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.
— Che Guevara ((“Che Guevara Reader” p. 383, Ocean Press; Second Edition; Edited by David Deutschmann)) To my children (1965)
I think Che must surely be spinning in his grave. The Cuba for which he risked his life has surely fallen short of his hopes and aspirations; and now, as time takes its inevitable toll on the Castros, I believe the country is in some danger of losing the few real advances it’s made and may join the competition with many other desperate third world countries …
by Anis Hamadeh / December 3rd, 2014
Those who claim the Nazi crimes were unique and beyond comparison hang those crimes so high that they get out of reach. How can anyone think or talk about something that cannot be compared; i.e., a virtually ahistorical singularity? Those, on the other hand, who want to repress German history in an attempt to draw a final stroke can comfortably hide behind the theory of uniqueness and content themselves with formulistic avowals instead of a necessary serious analysis. Avowals “against right-wing extremism”, “against anti-Semitism” and “for Israel” will suffice to show correctness. They don’t hurt and sound well, even if …
by Larry Everest / December 2nd, 2014
Sunday, November 30, Ferguson, Missouri. The governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency on November 17, and this is what’s been happening in Ferguson and St. Louis County, Missouri:
You drive past a major traffic and commercial intersection like Chambers and West Florissant and you see the cross-street barricaded by a half-dozen or so police cars with bubble lights flashing, crime scene tape, a military Humvee, armed soldiers, and more police in the Walgreen’s/mini-mall across the street. You often hear helicopters circling overhead, at night sometimes you can see their searchlights sweeping nearby. Meanwhile, the airspace has been closed off …
