Latest articles
by Robert Hunziker / March 17th, 2015
What if the following headline comes true, as stated by Jay Famigliette, Ph.D. senior water scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech, “California has about one year of water left”? LA Times, March 12, 2015.
Well, maybe, maybe not, depending upon the depth of aquifers, assuming they are not polluted. More on this later.
On the other hand, what if a mega drought has set in?
According to Dr. Famigliette’s article, California’s 2014-15 rainy season and snowfall have done “almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions.” January 2015 was “the driest since 1895.”
In the Central Valley, farmers are pumping ground water like there is …
by Bill Quigley / March 16th, 2015
One. Seven Nobel Laureates in Economics endorse the higher minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016, saying it does not lead to lower fewer jobs.
Two. Job losses from raising the minimum wage are negligible. Minimum wage has already been raised 23 times. Every time it was raised it was opposed by some few who said “it is going to lose jobs and wreck the economy” which is factually untrue as study after study has proven.
Three. It is a myth that small business owners can’t afford to pay their workers more, and therefore don’t support an increase in the …
by William T. Hathaway / March 16th, 2015
What will it take to end this ghastly cycle of violence and bring lasting peace, not just end this current war but create a peaceful society in which humanity lives cooperatively and harmoniously? The socialist answer is we must overthrow capitalism, a system that inevitably generates conflict and inequality. And overthrowing it will require a revolution.
What will it take to make a revolution? The socialist answer is the majority of people must realize that capitalism can’t provide them a decent life. Then a militant party based in the international working class must lead them in transferring the means of production …
by Eric Walberg / March 16th, 2015
Slaying the Euro monitaur is not easy. Greeks have been suffering for years now, having learned the hard way that prosperity with shiny euros in their hands was not miraculously just waiting around the corner. What was waiting was a hoard of German bankers, eager to buy up Greek islands for winter vacations, sleazy banks eager to syphon Greek earnings into offshore accounts, and more schemes by high financiers.The poor are mere pawns in this game, and even when they elect a radical anti-Euro government, their politicians are strong-armed into acceding to bailout plans, in hopes that the anger will …
by Eva Bartlett / March 16th, 2015
While the Western-led, anti-Assad bloc mind-blowingly speaks of arming non-existent “moderates” to fight in Syria, they also continue to demonize and silence the very voices that offer a true means of bringing peace and stability back to the region.
Two of these voices are: Political and Media Adviser to President al-Assad, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban; and Syria’s highest Muslim official and scholar, Grand Mufti Dr. Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun. Both are highly-educated and convey messages of dialogue, understanding, and peace. And both seemingly terrify the West, which has been quick to sanction and deny them visas, lest the anti-Syria lies and propaganda …
by Rachneet Sethi / March 16th, 2015
We are incessantly confiscating ourselves into a world of unavoidable, sun-blaring big data. Our landscape, the environment, even outer space — all are inspirations of our very sci-fi existence; here clouds echo first of data centers proliferating far beyond the real clouds’ pouring; here our world wishes to lose touch with indolence, that moving forward and disrupting any inconsistency, is the key. After all, the ultimate fight remains against death; it’s a fight for remembrance through perennial interruption — against an otherwise ephemeral legacy. Only if our sci-fi existence came with an app for immortality!
But to counteract this impossibility, or …
by Matt Peppe / March 16th, 2015
“Last July, shortly after the outbreak of war in Gaza, President Barack Obama declared that “Israel has the right to defend itself against what I consider to be inexcusable attacks from Hamas.” To demonstrate the general moral applicability of this position, he said that “no country can accept rocket [sic] fired indiscriminately at citizens.” Obama’s claims provided ideological cover for Israel to carry out wholesale slaughter over the next six weeks in which nearly 2,200 Palestinians were killed.
Obama also conveniently turned reality on its head by ignoring the fact that it wasIsrael that was responsible …
Oil, Presidents, Congress, and Cocaine
by Mateo Pimentel / March 16th, 2015
U.S. support for the Government of Colombia (GOC) is designed to attack every element of the drug trade and to assist the GOC to re-establish government control and the rule of law in areas threatened by drug-related violence.
– Fact Sheet, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, US Department of State, Washington, DC, August 12, 2002
The experience that we have gathered through Plan Colombia together with the United States is something that we have the obligation of sharing with our brothers in Central America who are going through difficult times. So that is the reason why we have decided …
by Robert S. Becker / March 16th, 2015
Putting aside the Civil War era, what else in American history matches the remorseless nullification doctrine dished out by today’s grandstanding, right wing diehards? Could this pattern of reckless disruption by extremists, aghast they don’t control all three branches, be any more transparent? Can’t win the White House? Scapegoat both president and executive authority. As usual, Democrats seem powerless to resist in kind.
Calculated contempt for the White House, spanning Iranian nuclear talks, outside agitation in speeches, immigration, EPA rules, etc., qualifies as serial Congressional censures, though revealingly without any honest debate or voting. When not overtly seditious, as with Iran, …
by Robert Hunziker / March 16th, 2015
Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap (alt. 17,950 ft.), the world’s largest tropical ice cap, will likely lose another 400-600 feet of ice before the final presidential nominating debates in March/April 2016. All of which brings to mind, wouldn’t it be interesting to ask the prospective presidential nominees this question: What are the implications of Antarctica suddenly becoming “ground zero” for global warming?
Apart from dumbfounded stares, their boilerplate answer will likely be: “I am not a scientist, the climate always changes, blah, blah, blah.” Rumor has it Republican operatives came up with these clever rejoinders at one of their confabs in ultra-secretive …
by James Petras / March 15th, 2015
Why did Obama declare a ‘national emergency’, claim that Venezuela represents a threat to US national security and foreign policy, assume executive prerogatives and decree sanctions against top Venezuelan officials in charge of national security, at this time?
Venezuela’s Support of Latin America Integration is Obama’s Great Fear
To answer this question it is essential to begin by addressing Obama’s specious and unsubstantiated charges of a Venezuelan ‘threat to national security and foreign policy’.
First, the White …
by Gilad Atzmon / March 14th, 2015
The Jewish Chronicle reported 11 March that Benjamin Netanyahu enjoys huge support amongst UK Jews.
Israeli polls predict that Netanyahu’s Likud party will be wiped out in the upcoming Israeli election, with only about 20 mandates out of 120; but British Jews are all for Netanyahu and his hawkish party.
An exclusive poll for the JC this weekend revealed that two thirds of British Jews who have a view on the Israeli election would vote for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Asked who they would support if they could vote in next week’s ballot, 67 per cent of those with an opinion …
by subMedia / March 14th, 2015
In this week’s show an homage to women everywhere, a look at the trolls from the Men’s Rights Movements and how the Gulabi Gang in India are beating down rapists with big ass sticks. On the music break, Bambu with “The Queen is Dead.” Our featured guest is journalist Dawn Paley, talking about her book Drug War Capitalism.
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 14th, 2015
President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, Condi Rice, warned Americans that Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction could result in a mushroom cloud going up over an American city. No such threat existed. But today a very real threat exists over all American cities, and the national security advisor does not notice.
The threat issues from Washington and arises from the demonization of Russia and its leadership.
Wolf Blitzer (CNN, March 13) used the cover of a news program to broadcast a propaganda performance straight out of the Third Reich or perhaps from George Orwell’s 1984. The orchestration presented Russia …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 13th, 2015
Iraq may soon end up with no history.
— Archeologist Joanna Farchakh, quoted in Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, Pluto Press, 2010
In his indispensible book From Sumer to Saddam, Geoff Simons writes:
The region of the world that the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia (land between the rivers) … was a fount of civilization – a veritable crucible … cradle, womb of cultural progress … Here it was the first cities were born, writing began and the first codified legal systems were established. Here, through such ancient lands as Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria that the vital cultural brew was stirred, the quite …
by Elliot Scott / March 13th, 2015
Dardanelle, AR — Adding fire to the controversy of Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, evidence has surfaced that in addition to treason, the senator may also be guilty of self-plagiarism. Spanky Walton, retired principal of Dardanelle High School, read the text of the Senator’s letter yesterday and was beset by an uncomfortable feeling that he had read the letter before.
Reviewing some of his old files, Mr. Walton came across the following letter from a young Tom Cotton:
An Open Letter to the Principal of Dardanelle High School
It has come …
by Ralph Nader / March 13th, 2015
Self-made billionaire (meaning he didn’t inherit it), Nick Hanauer is not one to mince words, especially when they are backed by facts and principles of fairness. The Seattle entrepreneur, author and venture capitalist (he was the first non-family investor in Amazon), is known for vocally championing Seattle’s staggered increase of its minimum wage to $15 an hour as good for workers and the economy. Any contrary corporatist to debate him on this subject would lose big.
Mr. Hanauer is speaking before business and political groups, including the Democratic senators at their recent Baltimore retreat, about a favorite cause of mine—the utterly …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 13th, 2015
The gods destroy those they call promising. In this case, there may well be a firming agenda from various circles of praise that seem to be haloing the new, hip shooting Arkansas Senator. Much of this admiration stems from the simplicity of it all – Tom Cotton, for one, doesn’t want the implications of international diplomacy to be too troubling for US interests. For that reason, he has left his diplomacy text books at home. Embrace the inner brute, and feel more comfortable with things.
Media outlets are feverish with praise, while the sponsors are getting excited about how far Senator …
by Ajamu Nangwaya / March 13th, 2015
As a member of the Afrikan-Canadian community in the city of Toronto, I am quite puzzled by the exuberant display of irrationality and misplaced expectations over the possibility of the appointment of either Deputy Chief Peter Sloly or Deputy Chief Mark Saunders as the next police chief of the Toronto Police Service (TPS). These two cops are both Afrikan-Canadians.
Peter Sloly’s candidacy for the top position on the policing food chain recently received a ringing and enthusiastic endorsement from the Share newspaper, the weekly publication with the highest circulation in Toronto’s Afrikan-Canadian community.
Share’s publisher and senior editor Arnold Auguste makes …
by Eric Walberg / March 13th, 2015
Fans of both musicals and Stephen Harper will find pleasure in Ed Mirvishes “The Heart Of Robin Hood” where the doughty defender of the poor goes after the nasty imperialist interlopers of the legitimate king.
Much as I mourn the unnecessary deaths of Canadian soldiers Richelieu and Doiron last week, I am angered not by Iraqis, who are doing whatever they do to drive the unwelcome guests out of their country. It is Harper, seeing a political fillip in the making that is the cause of their deaths. A beheading would not be inappropriate.
After Canada’s post-invasion Iraqi fiascos, including a NATO …
by Norman Ball / March 13th, 2015
Wealth is on a skyward sprint—to meaninglessness. How good was Sartre with a buck? We’ll soon find out as the entirety of the planet’s wealth is headed for the very deep pocket of the top 0.000000000142857143%. (Odds of winning? 1 in 7 billion.) In short, we’re converging on the Omega Man Wealth Syndrome where one tight bastard will own everything.
Will Smith did dystopian-chic proud in I Am Legend. However old-timers will fondly recall Charlton Heston’s off-handed abandonment of snazzy late-year models whenever the gas gauge hit ‘E’. There’s nothing like a post-apocalyptic landscape to crater the Peak Oil thesis and …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 13th, 2015
This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle.
Hasanat was buried among the refugees of the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in the central Gaza Strip. He died on March 2nd, at the age of 80.
“Hammad al-Hasanat co-founded the terrorist group (Hamas) on …
The GOP, Iran, and Diplomatic Sabotage
by Binoy Kampmark / March 12th, 2015
They’re [the Republicans] contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war. It’s a damn bad mistake.
— President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968
War is addictive. It is also sweet to those who do not know it. There is always someone else who fights it on their behalves. The GOP is better at that than most – their desperation to keep seats in Congress and win others has propelled them to lunatic belligerence. Middle Eastern states have been removable furniture for some time – at least when it comes to their regimes – and the GOP strategists seem …
by Medea Benjamin / March 11th, 2015
Early in the morning of March 3, on AIPAC’s national lobby day and just hours before Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was set to address the joint session of Congress, AIPAC President Robert Cohen, along with the group’s Policy Director and two associates, briskly approached the Congressional office of Speaker of the House John Boehner. To their horror, they found the office locked and surrounded by crowd of CODEPINK activists staging a sit-in to protest the Netanyahu speech. After trying unsuccessfully to get in a side door, the AIPAC officials scurried away. But a CODEPINK swarm followed through the maze of …
by T.P. Wilkinson / March 11th, 2015
Since American Sniper has become one of the “top grossing films of all time”, garnering a few Academy Award nominations and at least one, if trivial, award, there have been even more reviews written about this insidious and insipid strip of celluloid. Unsurprisingly all of them contain the same swill. I had to return to my own review just to see if I had perhaps omitted anything essential or if anyone might have thought in an at least similar direction.
The defensive focus of vocal support for the film is equally and unsurprisingly the condition of “veterans”. In fact, this …
Police-state challenge could nurture democracy and an American Spring
by William Boardman / March 11th, 2015
Chicago’s mayoral election may look like a local event, and the media mostly cover it as a local event, but the presence of a large, diverse, and energized opposition demanding change on basic issues of fairness and justice gives the city’s local result a potentially important, totemic meaning for the country. The winner of the April 7 runoff election may signify whether peaceful change is possible, or whether the suffocating status quo will grow more stifling.
There is another way of gauging the April vote: is Chicago yet ready to reject the police state practices of its local government? …
by Syria Support Movement / March 11th, 2015
Putting its hypocritical and biased nature on full display once again, the alleged human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, was recently caught in an attempt to fabricate “evidence” of Assad’s use of barrel bombs in civilian areas for the purposes of further demonizing the secular Syrian government.
On February 25, HRW posted a photo of a devastated civilian area in Syria with the tagline “Syria dropped barrel bombs despite ban.” The “ban” HRW is referring to is the ban on bombing civilian areas that applies to both sides in Aleppo after the …
How Central Banks Harness Governments
by Ellen Brown / March 11th, 2015
Remember when the infamous Goldman Sachs delivered a thinly-veiled threat to the Greek Parliament in December, warning them to elect a pro-austerity prime minister or risk having central bank liquidity cut off to their banks? (See January 6th post here.) It seems the European Central Bank (headed by Mario Draghi, former managing director of Goldman Sachs International) has now made good on the threat.
The week after the leftwing Syriza candidate Alexis Tsipras was sworn in as prime minister, the ECB announced that it would no longer accept Greek government bonds and government-guaranteed debts as collateral for central bank loans …
by Kathy Kelly / March 11th, 2015
That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, not to speak, not to see those people, the invisible ones, those who live on the other side of the border.
— Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
It was a little over two weeks ago that Marlo entered Atwood Hall, here in Lexington federal prison. Nearly …
by Mateo Pimentel / March 10th, 2015
Rage Against the Machine!
Why does the American government continue to ignore the popular plight at home, to decimate the country’s marginalized, to etch away at liberties and withhold them, to amplify its fascism abroad, to hemorrhage public funds for the sake of corporate welfare, and to lay waste to one geopolitically “strategic” land after another?
In 1991, a band of musicians by the name of Rage Against the Machine (RATM) put out their self-titled album. Track six of the album, entitled “Know Your Enemy”, featured a strong message for listeners. Almost twenty-five years ago, in fact, this song lyricized the hypocritical …
