Latest articles
by Rodrigue Tremblay / November 7th, 2014
[There] is a memo [at the Pentagon] that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.
— General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO (1997-2000), (March 2, 2007)
I don’t want to just end the [Iraq] war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.
— Presidential candidate Barack Obama, (January 31, 2008)
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
— Abraham Lincoln (1809—1865), 16th President of …
by Sam Husseini / November 6th, 2014
In perhaps the best mainstream report during the election season, the typically firmly D.C.-based Steve Inskeep went knocking on doors in Colorado and came across a woman, Ili Bennett, who told him she’s felt some excitement from both Elizabeth Warren — and in the past, the Tea Party.
Said Inskeep: “I think you’ve hit on something insightful here. And I want you to help me with this a little bit because the Tea Party, those are some very conservative people — Elizabeth Warren, very liberal person. But they both represent deep unhappiness with the way things are. And …
by Alborz Ghandehari, David McCleary, Kumars Salehi, and Tory Webster / November 6th, 2014
“We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel.” This call for solidarity was issued in July 2005 by hundreds of Palestinian organizations, including all major trade unions. Systematic land confiscation, mass incarceration, house demolition, and routine attacks that leave hundreds of civilians dead have become part and parcel of daily life in Israel-occupied Palestine. The US-sponsored “peace talks” merely readjusted Israel’s occupation strategy: instead of deploying its army inside Palestinian cities and towns, Israel now surrounds …
by Matt Peppe / November 6th, 2014
The Israeli conquest of Palestine has always been a difficult issue for Western mainstream media to cover. The difficulty lies not in the task of reporting the facts on the ground and transmitting an accurate depiction of them to the public, but in refraining from doing so.
The journalistic mission, to provide citizens with factual information that enables them to be informed participants in democratic decision making, conflicts with the corporate mission, to maximize profits and influence.
The role of U.S. mass media — and Western media in general — as a tool for disseminating propaganda was first argued by Edward Herman …
The Rule of Lawlessness and Jungle Law
by Mark Weiser / November 6th, 2014
Instinct for survival is genetically coded in our DNA, and it’s likely few, if any of us, would be here without it. Until the advent of agriculture some 12,000 years ago, humans were foraging and scavenging hunters while population growth, was and still is, automatically limited by the amount of resources in any geographic area. This inevitably brought competition between ancient clans and tribes as populations grew. The competitive spirit is no doubt tied to our survival instincts which seek advantages for continuing our bloodline into the future. As the population grew in ancient times, it would have been natural …
by Paul Haeder / November 6th, 2014
Democrats cry in their civet-defecated coffee beans while prostitution ring of Republicans drink more swill . . . .while the elite and chosen few and masses of non-profit types let the drones and IT and shyster armies roll
Two-third’s of electorate stay home or are being worked to death and have no time for 4 Billion $ Prostitution Ring
Oh, no, the piece of work Obama, his turn coat democrats, unwilling to tell bumbling media “things” called journalists who they voted for during the presidential elections. Imagine, democrats who were Obama delegates fearing their own shadows in their legislative elections. Won’t tell …
by John Andrews / November 6th, 2014
A typically excellent piece by Greg Palast recently exposed some more about the now almost routine cynicism of the US government. His article revealed how a piece of software is being used to carry out a huge purge of mainly non-white people from the US electoral role – apparently most non-white people in the US usually vote Democrat. Then just yesterday we learn that in the US mid-term elections the Republicans won control of Congress.
Greg Palast wrote with his usual mix of biting sarcasm and pent-up rage. Obviously the point he made is pretty important; but by the time …
Freedoms not enjoyed by Americans, Brits, Canadians, and Australians
by Wei Ling Chua / November 5th, 2014
In a recent international human rights forum at Oslo where Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and other jailed Occupy Wall Street protesters such as Cecily McMillan were not invited, a BBC report (21 Oct 2014) revealed that, “it is an open secret at this meeting that plans were hatched for the demonstrations (in Hong Kong) nearly two years ago, perhaps more than 1,000 of them have been given specific training to help make the campaign as effective as possible.” The forum is filled exclusively by well funded non-western “dissidents” demonstrating no interest in echoing …
by subMedia / November 5th, 2014
This week, we look at the fierce militant protests against Columbus Day by the indigenous Mapuche nation in so called Chile. Also the uncompromising resistance of Normalista students who have nearly brought the Mexican government to its knees, as they demand the safe return of their 43 kidnapped comrades. In Kobane we learn how an anarchist inspired Kurdish liberation movement has kicked out ISIS out of their liberated zone, and it was done with the efforts of the women’s brigade of the YPJ. On the music break Philippino MC Bambu with Rocky Rivera with their working class anthem, “Rent Money.” …
The Santos Regime’s Dual Strategy
by James Petras / November 5th, 2014
There are many fabrications and false assumptions underlying the Colombia peace negotiations between the Santos regime and FARC – EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Peoples Army). The first and most egregious is that Colombia is a democracy. The second is that the Santos regime pursues policies which enhance non-violent social and political activity conducive to integrating the armed insurgency into the political system.
There is sufficient evidence to call into question both assumptions. Over the past two decades and a half nearly three thousand …
by Ramzy Baroud / November 5th, 2014
Israel’s decision to shut down al-Aqsa Mosque on Thursday, 30 October, is not just a gross violation of the religious rights of Palestinian Muslims.
In fact, the rights of Palestinian Muslims and Christians have been routinely violated under the Israeli occupation for decades, especially in Jerusalem, and more recently in Gaza. During the 51-day war on the Gaza Strip, a reported 73 mosques were destroyed, while 205 were partially destroyed, according to a Palestinian government report.
The Noble Sanctuary located in Jerusalem’s Old City, is known as Haram al-Sharif in Arabic and is home to the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome …
by James Hoover / November 5th, 2014
In light of yesterday’s election, which will undoubtedly draw our moderate nation more to the cusp of extremism and oligarchy, you might evaluate what your representative in Washington is doing, relative to your own wishes. I find researching your candidate a better voting guide, much better than being guided by robocalls, avalanches of mailers, offensive 30-second-bomb-your-opponent TV ads by rich vested interests, and the wholesale buying of votes by billionaires in critical races – in all, $4 billion spent in midterm, more than 25% dark money and by groups outside the voting area.
Perhaps with the next two years under a …
by Ron Jacobs / November 5th, 2014
Religion and left revolution may seem like opposite ends of an insurmountable spectrum. After all, today’s media reminds us constantly of religion’s intolerance regarding the lives of women and its various justifications for war whether it’s waging holy war or justifying imperial ones. Realistically, though, religion is not always reactionary. Indeed, if one looks at history, it has often been used to justify liberation and social justice. From the revolutionary writings of Thomas Muntzer and the actions of his followers during the radical reformation of medieval Europe to Gustav Gutierrez and his Catholic theology of liberation, religion has proven its …
by Dylan and Jo Murphy / November 5th, 2014
The parliamentary elections in Ukraine has been lavished with praise by Western politicians and the mainstream media as confirmation of the country’s turn towards democracy and a rejection of Putin’s evil Russian empire. What the media drones and corporate politicians won’t tell you is that these elections represent a disaster for the ordinary people of Ukraine.
Ukraine is bankrupt and its economy is rapidly collapsing. It has been promised billions in aid from the IMF and EU in return for the most vicious austerity measures that will make Greece look like a picnic. Industry and agriculture are suffering steep …
by Martha Rosenberg / November 4th, 2014
Did you or your children use the blockbuster asthma drug Singulair? World sales of Merck’s drug were about $5 billion a year until 2012 when its patent expired and it was the U.S.’s seventh best-selling drug. But last month, data from an FDA committee were presented that acknowledge “safety concerns” about “neuropsychiatric adverse events, including suicide and suicide attempts” with the drug. Singulair was used by almost 9 million patients, many under 16, in less than two years according to FDA data and four deaths are linked to it. Like Vioxx, Fosamax, Paxil and Ambien, now that the …
by Bill Quigley / November 4th, 2014
I used to live and work in the Irish Channel at Hope House in New Orleans. I worked with families who lived in the St. Thomas Housing Development. Over 1500 families lived in brick buildings stretched three blocks by four blocks in the area which is now the River Garden apartments.
Some Catholic Sisters who were living in the St. Thomas asked me to join them in serving the poor and I agreed. One of the sisters received a small stipend for teaching religion at Mercy Academy. She told me she would give me her stipend of $250 per month if …
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson / November 4th, 2014
On October 1, 2014, a remarkable event occurred in Britain. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s BBC 2’s This World telecast Rwanda’s Untold Story, a documentary produced by Jane Corbin and John Conroy that offered a critical view of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and of his and the British and U.S. roles in the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda and beyond. ((Jane Corbin and John Conroy, Rwanda’s Untold Story, BBC 2, October 1, 2014. Whenever we cite the time-stamp for something that we take from the documentary (e.g., 51:19), we are referring to the copy of the documentary as posted to the …
Rule of Law and Democracy: Two Brazilian Euphemisms
by Ardaga Widor / November 3rd, 2014
The Brazilian media landscape has long been as monotonous as the real landscape of this geographic giant is becoming now. Atlantic and Amazon Rainforests, Cerrado and Pampas (Savannah and Natural Grassland), Caatinga (Dry Thorn Bush)…, everything fits the insatiable profit-hunger of agribusiness and the (their) serving political caste. No wonder therefore that I have been seeing rapidly expanding monocultures from horizon to horizon for the most part whenever I have been traveling over the last quarter of a century, commonly for a few thousand kilometers through one or more of the above-mentioned biotopes, in order to get to the pressured …
by David Swanson / November 3rd, 2014
Is it worse to put into Congress or the White House someone who wants to end wars and dismantle much of the military but also wants to abolish Social Security and Medicare and the Department of Education and several other departments they have trouble remembering the names of, OR someone who just wants to slightly trim all of those departments around the edges while waging countless wars all over the world in the name of every heretofore imagined human right other than the right not to get blown up with a missile?
Can dismantling the military without investing in diplomacy and …
by Kathy Kelly / November 3rd, 2014
Yesterday, in the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ (APVs’) “Borderfree Center” here in Kabul, I heard someone banging on the front gate and hurried downstairs to open it. As it happened, I was the only one at the Center that morning. Outside the gate stood two women with their burkas pushed back.
They had come a long way on foot. Reza Gul, the younger of the two, told me, as they stepped into our front yard, that they had walked for an hour and a half through Kabul to reach us. Zahro, the older woman, smiled and asked that I please put …
You Can’t Have Wars and Public Health
by James Petras / November 2nd, 2014
Washington escalates its military interventions abroad, launching simultaneous air and ground attacks in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan; multiplying drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; training, arming, and financing proxy mercenaries in Jordan, the Gulf States, and Iraq; and dispatching National Guard battalions to West Africa, ostensibly to combat the Ebola epidemic, though they lack the most elementary public health capabilities. All in all the US spent $3.5 trillion for military invasions over 6 years.
At the same time, the US domestic public health services have deteriorated. …
by Paul Haeder / November 2nd, 2014
I like this from Black Agenda Report, “How to Pay for a Free, Non-Racist Higher Education,” on the for-profit shysters like U of Phoenix and other bizarre manifestations of neo-liberalism, charter school sickness and the American adage that nothing can be sold for something, for a lot of somethings in the case of this Media-Pharma-Ag-Penitentiary-Military-Energy-Financial-IT-Academic complex, on steroids, thanks to the founding fathers’ slave complex New Eden shit project for a new place to make money off the masses. These legal-financial-patent-pending schemes are being run by the exceptional ones, the chosen people in many cases. Read the Jerusalem Post below …
Unfree in Palestine
by Denis Rancourt / November 2nd, 2014
The new book by academics Nadia Abu-Zahra and Adah Kay — Unfree in Palestine: Registration, Documentation and Movement Restrictions (PlutoPress, 2013) — is a brilliant achievement, and a landmark in the study of both the ongoing Israel genocide in Palestine, ((Note: The authors of Unfree do not qualify Israel colonialism as a “genocide”. It is not their goal to establish any legal judgements, but rather solely to factually describe the historic realities on the ground.)) and national liberation struggles in general.
At first look the book is simply a well-researched academic treatise, with 693 endnotes, about administrative controls imposed …
An Update
by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan / November 2nd, 2014
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new phenomenon that we called ‘energy conflicts’ and showed that these conflicts were intimately linked to the differential profitability of the leading oil companies. Figure 1 below, which was first published in 1995, adds new data to bring this connection up to date. (( The figure appeared in Nitzan and Bichler (1995: 499).))
The chart displays the differential return on equity of the ‘Petro?Core’, a group consisting of the world’s …
by Abdul-Haq al-Ani / November 1st, 2014
The problem with most writings on the conflict in the Muslim world today revolves around two facts. Firstly, it is almost impossible to find Muslim writers who have enough objectivity to present faithfully what is happening to enable the reader to make his own conclusion. Secondly, and invariably, the best of the Orientalists lack a true understanding of political Islam. It is not surprising in view of the above two facts that people in the world find it difficult to follow and understand what is happening in the Muslim/Arab world today.
I do not intend to take the reader …
The Rise and Fall of Gamergate
by Binoy Kampmark / November 1st, 2014
There seems to be a small yet vocal core of maniacs bafflingly resistant to the notion that women should have any say in the games industry at all.
— Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, October 20, 2014
Those playing computer games are a special breed. Not perhaps pedigree, but certainly special. The Gamergate drive has been bristling and firing with misogynistic venom for some months now, but already, Chris Plante of The Verge can claim that the movement “is dead”. Are such announcements, as they always tend to be, premature? The “remainders represent a hate group and its banner, associated with bigotry …
by James Petras / October 31st, 2014
The principal reason why Washington engages in military wars, sanctions and clandestine operations to secure power abroad is because its chosen clients cannot, and do not, win free and open elections.
A brief survey of recent election outcomes testify to the electoral unattractiveness of Washington-backed clients. The majority of democratic electorates rejects candidates and parties which back the US global agenda: neo-liberal economic policies; a highly militarized foreign policy; Israeli colonization and annexation of Palestine; the concentration of wealth in the financial sector; the military escalation against China and Russia. While the US policy attempts to re-impose the pillage and dominance …
Cyber Security Is a Magic Act
by William A. Blunden / October 31st, 2014
Encryption has gained the attention of actors on both sides of the mass surveillance debate. For example, in a speech at the Brookings Institution FBI Director James Comey complained that strong encryption was causing U.S. security services to “go dark.” Comey described encrypted data as follows:
It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened, a safe deposit box that can’t be opened, a safe that can’t ever be cracked.
Got that? Comey essentially says that encryption is a sure bet. Likewise during an interview with James Bamford whistleblower Ed Snowden confidently announced that:
We have the means and we …
by Robert Hunziker / October 31st, 2014
Every time a frigid blast of Arctic air, or an extraordinarily heavy snowfall, or a devastating ice storm hits the Northern Hemisphere, especially off season, all sorts of commentators, principally in America, hit the news wires and blogs with: Uh-Oh! Global Warming?
Predictably, those headlines confuse the public about the reality of global warming, and that is understandable as it conveniently fits into a well thought out, well orchestrated game plan, which is confusion, confusion, confusion, keep’em confused. As for the upshot of this strategy of the denial camp, America will never have a clear vision to get off fossil fuels.
For …
by John Stanton / October 31st, 2014
Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed …
