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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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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?  …

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 …

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 …

American motorists have recently gone through a bipolar gasoline market. From the heights of a national average gas price of $3.49 per gallon on March 8th of 2014, $2.18, a month ago, to $2.45, today.  But such gyrations don’t reflect the huge difference in prices from state to state, especially in the last few weeks, California bearing the brunt of it.

California on March 8th topped off at $3.43 per gallon, with the national average at $2.45 and Wyoming’s tiny market spending a mere $2.14 a gallon. I believe that this disparity is no accident and primarily relates to price manipulation …

The documentary film Blue Gold: World Water Wars (Distributor: Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 2008) examines the implications of the planet’s dwindling fresh water supply.

Malcolm McDowell narrates the film by starting with a story about Pablo Valencia, who traveled on foot from Mexico to California in 1906, seeking gold. He survived seven days without water, enduring long enough to document his living hell.

Pablo’s story

His saliva thickened, and a permanent lump formed in his throat. His tongue swelled so large that it squeezed out past his jaws, and his swollen throat made it difficult to breath, creating a sense of drowning. Because …

Given Western civilization’s debt to Greek society, you might think haughty Berlin, itself not long removed from the days of marauding hordes descending on urbane Rome from the thicket of the Black Forest, might have it in them to declare a debt jubilee for the long-suffering Greeks. Sorry, say the neoliberal ideologues that peer down from the commanding heights of the world’s second largest economic zone. We forgave 100 billion euros in 2012 and look where it got us: nowhere. Instead, elite northerners sneer pitilessly at the southern Europeans, whose troubles, they say, are self-inflicted, induced by their apathy-infected …

News item: California’s Right to Rest Act would give homeless people the right to use public space without discrimination. It also describes the right to rest in public, to protect oneself from the elements in public, to eat in public and to occupy a legally parked car.

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I first became aware of the complex of societal problem related to poverty when — one winter in downtown Toronto — I was confronted by a homeless man. In fact, I had to step over …

They are asking for only $14,000, and their request greatly strengthens recognition of the Palestinian cause. THEY are a group of dedicated activists who are devoting time and energy to create an initial Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope within a building of the Adam’s Morgan neighborhood, Washington, D.C.

Total exposure to a world that is apathetic to the violence committed on the Palestinians will require a huge but not impossible sum from the wealth in the bank accounts of those who sympathize with the Palestinians, which is probably 90 percent of the world’s people. It is time to …

You know the safety net is in danger when lawmakers fire away and claim they’re trying to save it. On the first day of the new Congress, the House warned that Social Security benefits might need “saving”. The Congressional Budget Office twice ran the numbers on “saving” Medicare by raising the starting age from 65 to 67. It’s a shame, the story goes, but the money just isn’t there.

It isn’t? The far-sighted authors of the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act might beg to disagree. The bill created tax-deferred retirement savings accounts, a landmark win for workers—and, over the …

US policy toward Venezuela is a microcosm of its larger strategy toward Latin America. The intent is to reverse the region’s independent foreign policy and to restore US dominance; to curtail the diversification of trading and investment partners and re-center economic relations to the US; to replace regional integration pacts with US centered economic integration schemes; and to privatize firms partly or wholly nationalized.

The resort to military coups in Venezuela is a strategy designed to …

Apart from inadvertently making the case for equal time by his Israeli pre-election opposition, the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu’s wild diatribe at the joint session of Congress amidst the feral cheers of his congressional yahoos will be remembered as a textbook case of propaganda unhinged from reality.

Starting from his preposterous premise that Iran, a poor country of 77 million people with an economy nearly the size of Massachusetts’, is planning a caliphate to conquer the world, Mr. Netanyahu builds his case on belligerent words by Iranian leaders, who believe they are responding to Israeli belligerence backed by its ultra-modern, U.S. …