Centuries ago, explorers, and economically charged navigators, firmly put to rout the idea of a “flat” world. Today, rather than equalizing development’s inborn global disparity, and rather than leveling the economic playing field, globalization has ushered into existence tremendous instances of developmental corrosion—especially among poorer states. Richer nations, and their ruling plutocracies, have grown incredibly wealthy as a direct result. Yet, just as today there is no reason to consider the world physically flat, no longer is there any reason to expect a forthcoming, economic leveling of the disparity in global development. Equitable development among rich and poor states alike …
The famous expression about the only things that will happen with absolute certainty, death and taxes, is actually missing one: the annual vote in which 99% of the world’s nations declare that the blockade against Cuba is illegal and must end. Yesterday, for the 23rd straight year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to end the U.S. blockade against Cuba by the astounding margin of 188 to 2. The annual resolution may seem like mere political theater meant to embarrass the U.S. government, but in reality it is a sincere objection to an inhumane policy.
The movement to prevent Israeli cargo ships from being unloaded or loaded is potentially one of the greatest challenges that Israel faces from ordinary citizens around the world. Amazingly, it doesn’t even require huge numbers or even very much unity of organization, only of purpose.
The August, 2014 picket of the Zim Piraeus in Oakland, California, is a case in point. It began with a massive demonstration of thousands that responded to a call from the Block the Boat coalition to picket the port on August 16 and 17. During that time, the ship chose to remain in a stationary position …
Do you want a mink coat? Or a seal coat which Prada, Gucci and Versace sell? Or a monkey fur garment offered by Salvatore Ferragamo? (Yes, you read that right.) Go to your local Goodwill or Salvation Army and you’ll find them next to the King Kong and Big Foot Halloween costumes.
Once upon a time, wearing fur meant you had money (or at least the man who bought you the coat did). But today fur is archaic and is seldom seen in Chicago, other parts of the US and a lot of Europe, except on people over 70. One woman …
Reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
by Christy Rodgers / October 29th, 2014
Autumn in the US is oddly bookmarked by the two holidays that celebrate the origins of European settler colonialism in the Americas: Columbus’ landfall on October 10, and that mythological encounter of multicultural good will, the first successful harvest of the Plymouth Colony on the fourth Thursday in November.
For those who would reflect on a fuller meaning of that history stripped of the hagiography of the victors, this period is a good one in which to be reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ new book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (from Beacon Press’ ReVisioning History series). The book has …
Sinai is both heaven and hell. This triangular desert boasts an arid landscape of hopeless horizons often interrupted by leftover military hardware from previous wars. The land is comprised of breathtaking beaches, incredible history, and a fusion of fascinating cultures that reach back into the past as far as ancient times can possibly go. This thrilling land of contradictions is amazing, yet lethal.
But Sinai is also a place where hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people struggle to survive against incredible odds. Although poverty and illiteracy in Egypt can reach exceptional heights, hardship in Sinai is especially worse.
This deceptively lighthearted video shines a light on the corporate greed that has co-opted our democracy, monopolizing representation, wealth and opportunity. Dear Mr. 1% is an animated video from the perspective of an innocent child desperately trying to understand why some grown-ups don’t play fair and share. The video contrasts the inherent morality of a child with and the insatiable greed and unscrupulous behavior of the corporate elite.
IPS — U.S. and Iranian negotiators are working on a compromise approach to the issue of Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities, which the Barack Obama administration has said in the past Iran was refusing to make concessions on.
The compromise now being seriously discussed would meet the Obama administration’s original requirement for limiting Iran’s “breakout capability” by a combination of limits on centrifuge numbers and reduction of Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium, rather than by cutting centrifuges alone.
That approach might permit Iran to maintain something close to its present level of operational centrifuges.
The key to the new approach is Iran’s willingness …
Context doesn’t matter with clever kitty videos, but politics is different
BuzzFeed, moving up from cute-cat-tricks to catty-Senator-tricks, caused a few ripples in the political swamp on October 22 with its belated, skewed reporting of Republican Senator John McCain calling U.S. Admiral John Kirby an “idiot” on a right wing radio show in North Carolina on October 15. OK, nobody really expects BuzzFeed News to publish honest news.
Less defensible, though hardly surprising, is the way the Washington Post and other less well known media outfits picked up the “idiot” story fragment and ran with it as if it were …
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has officially banned Palestinians from traveling on Israeli-run public transportation in the West Bank, according to a new report by Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent newspaper.
The new apartheid law dictates that Palestinians cannot take buses that go from central Israel to the West Bank. They must go out of their way, to the Eyal Crossing, near the city Qalqilyah, “far from populated settler areas.”
It is already difficult for Palestinians to enter Israel. Palestinian workers traveling into central Israel for their jobs have to go through high-security, militarized check points. Those who are allowed to …
Thinking through the binary oppositions of “have” and “have nots” is like segregating the homeless from the Paris Hiltons of the world in order to present a narrative that represents a ‘going America’s way’ kind of reality, a reality that uses finance, by way of speculation and specialisation, to foster advantages for elites and their hierarchical institutions for the sole purpose of amassing capital in order to leverage control of the social narrative through the commodification of culture itself.
With the advent of the consumerist economy, the hegemonic power of money soon became the ‘elephant in the room’… if not attaining the status of the mother …
Many authorities have said it: banks do not lend their deposits. They create the money they lend on their books.
Robert B. Anderson, Treasury Secretary under Eisenhower, said it in 1959:
When a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower’s deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else’s deposits; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It’s new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.
The Bank of England said it in the spring of 2014, writing in its quarterly …
It is astonishing that the reconstruction of Gaza, bombed into the Stone Age according to the explicit goals of an Israeli military doctrine known as “Dahiya”, has tentatively only just begun two months after the end of the fighting.According to the United Nations, 100,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, leaving 600,000 Palestinians – nearly one in three of Gaza’s population – homeless or in urgent need of humanitarian help.
Roads, schools and the electricity plant to power water and sewerage systems are in ruins. The cold and wet of winter are approaching. Aid agency Oxfam warns that at the current …
There exists the undying fear that a social, economic, and political revolution would fetch us Americans more harm than good. Still, some would ask to whom the word “us” even refers. A keen, and important query, the fear in question nonetheless persists, and it is important to entertain.
What might actually become of us if we abandon ourselves to radical change, casting our nets about a sea of anarchy and socialist endeavors? Might the benefits yet outweigh the costs? Revolution will have its doubters…
For centuries, thinkers and the disillusioned alike have doubted even their own existence; they have punished themselves with …
Here, I propose a unifying model of individual health. ((I have greatly benefited from interactions with graduate research students working in the area of public health theory. With one student, I had the benefit of discussions about her data from voluntary research participants, and its interpretation.)) My other exploratory reports about the causes of ill-health are many. ((Rancourt, Denis G., Two Authors that Medical Schools Avoid, Activist Teacher, September 22, 2013.)), ((Rancourt, Denis G., Do medical doctors improve health?, Activist Teacher, September 9, 2013.)), ((Rancourt, Denis G., On the individual psychology of food: Against calorie management, Activist …
the great equalizer, the War-Producing Democrats . . . Feel Good and Drink a Beer and Smoke a Fag President Obama . . . Hillary Calling for Your Vote Now
It’s not going to happen, that is, the Yes on 92 (GMO labeling initiative in Oregon). Not the win (sic) or the disposable income they are soliciting from me, a working class dissident slob, sob, intellectually cultured and cultivated “been around the block a few dozen times” kinda working class anarchist. Imagine, simple illogical PR spin — labeling genetically diseased modified organisms? Why? Labeling the wine, Not to be Consumed While …
There is no question that, in the immediate aftermath and for several years following US military conquests, wars, occupations and sanctions, US multi-national corporations lost out on profitable sites for investments. The biggest losses were in the exploitation of natural resources – in particular, gas and oil – in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and South Asia.
As a result some observers speculated that there were deep fissures and contradictory interests within the US ruling class. They argued that, on the one hand, political elites linked …
Recently, two cases concerning the constitutional rights of people in prison came to public light. They involve two U.S. political prisoners: Mumia Abu-Jamal who is serving a life sentence at a facility in Frackville, Pennsylvania and Jeremy Hammond, who is serving a ten year sentence at a federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky.
On Monday October 20, it was reported that Hammond, a young Chicago based computer programmer, had been held in solitary confinement for the last 10 days. In November 2013, he was sentenced after he plead guilty for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly revealing …
Whether or not the soul exists may depend entirely on how it’s being defined, and depending on the definition may also depend on faith, religious or otherwise. The human soul is thought by many as inherently good while the absence of a soul leaves open the possibility to commit and even delight in malicious or evil acts – these destructive actions are also interpreted in terms of being dark. Oddly enough, man’s ego enjoys taking credit for his goodness, while he regularly attributes responsibility for destructive behaviors to outside influences, including at times a supernatural consciousness of evil that influences …
Today at the Valdai International Discussion Club meeting in Sochi, Russia’s President Putin correctly and justifiably denounced Washington for destabilizing the world in order to serve its own narrow and selfish interest and the interests of the private interest groups that control Washington at the expense of the rest of the world. It is about time a world leader denounced the thuggish neocon regime in Washington. Putin described Washington’s double standards with the Roman phrase: “What is allowed for God [the US] is not allowed for cattle [the rest of …
What can be more important to save in a viable democracy than education and the assurance that it is easily accessible for all, whatever your skin color or financial means? Unfortunately the best vehicle for that endeavor, public education, has figured prominently in quick-profit schemes of private investors, some stemming from honest attempts to improve education, but many motivated by pure greed.
For the latter, it’s beginning to take the character of the Wall Street frenzy that passed off toxic securities as AAA rated, and sold them full price to unsuspecting buyers. For the most part, Wall Streeters, having a culture …
The UK government’s highly unpopular ‘pilot’ badger culls have just come to the end of the second year of a four-year programme. Even without the independent oversight, monitoring and auditing by an Independent Expert Panel (IEP), discarded by the government after last year’s slating by the IEP, the culling has been as much of a failure as last year, despite the National Farmers Union (NFU) hailing it as a ‘success’.
But the NFU has been steering this policy of slaughtering our badgers for years. Ever since the first bovine TB-infected badger was found in 1971, to the surprise of animal …
In a macho violation of common sense and the needs of hundreds of millions of people living in crushing poverty, the ruling elite of India (that’s the government and multinational corporations who own the country) recently launched a satellite that “after a journey of 300 days and 420 million miles…arrived to orbit around Mars,” reportedThe Guardian. The $74 million ‘Mars mission’ is “cheap by American (or Chinese) standards”, The Economistsays, but amounts to a fraction of a much more expensive – not to say insane space programme that drains US $1 billion a year from the …
This weekend, October 25 and 26, I will be joining leading critics from the United States and abroad, of corporate-controlled technologies, who are also proponents of appropriate technologies for the people (Vandana Shiva, Anuradha Mittal, Helen Caldicott, Wes Jackson, Bill McKibben), convening at the historic Cooper Union Great Hall on “Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of the Earth”.
The speakers are highly knowledgeable. Some of their prior warnings were ignored by policy makers. Unfortunately, many of these warnings were, in retrospect, understatements. The chief organizer of this gathering is Jerry Mander who heads the International Forum on Globalization (see IFG.org …
There is no shortage of men and women – but mostly men, typically white – willing to write 800- to 1,000-word editorials on the need for Decisive Action or Continued Resolve in Whereverthehellistan. Some of these people are historians, some are journalists, but all have attained material success in the field of arguing about war without ever once having to go through the trouble of being right. It is a full-time profession where it undeniably pays to be wrong and speak to power only what power wants to hear, with American advocates of mass killing from El Salvador to Iraq …
Do We Even Know the Story of Poverty Without the Poor Reporting, Writing and Broadcasting Our Stories?
No! A little note before DV readers get another magazine piece of mine to be published — in edited and redacted form (to be explained at a later date) — in November. Universality of a town like Spokane and any town. I repeat that if you live somewhere, know it, write about it, and make sure we all know that your town is our town. Detroit, where economic butchers shut off water. San Francisco where Google Eichmanns push working class folk out of historical …
In the 2013 BC provincial election, Christie Clark’s Liberals promised that exporting liquefied natural gas to Asia would provide jobs and expanding government revenues. A year and a half later this boom is nowhere to be seen. Fifteen liquefying plants and pipelines have been promoted. Six were reported to be on the verge of starting construction. But in early October, Petronas—the company closest to seeking regulatory approval—announced that it was considering shelving its proposal.
The Malaysian government-owned corporation wanted assurances that provincial and federal taxes and royalties would be kept low and that the company could bring in workers from abroad …
For the above reasons the Swedish military will soon call off the whole thing and the affair will have served its purpose – precisely by not stating what it was, who it was or why it was. Or if it was.
What the purpose of the event may be remains to be revealed at some point in the future. Or perhaps never if – the purpose was fearology for increased militarisation.
Abbas appears powerless as Jewish extremists seek to gain greater foothold at al-Aqsa Mosque
by Jonathan Cook / October 24th, 2014
With East Jerusalem already smouldering, it emerged this week that the Israeli parliament is to consider a bill that could set the region ablaze. The measure would lift limitations on Jews visiting the al-Aqsa mosque compound, the most sensitive site in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Details of the measure have yet to be published. But one possibility is that it will overturn a prohibition in Israeli law on Jews praying at the site, ending also a long-standing rabbinical injunction against such activities.
Other reports, however, suggested the bill would extend visiting times for Jews, possibly by forcing the Islamic authorities …
Occupy is back in London, UK, with a renewed focus on politics and an ambitious vision: to galvanise a mass movement for real democracy and establish a huge People’s Assembly to debate a list of specific demands for radical political reform.
This week, stalwarts of the Occupy Democracy campaign in Britain are continuing to stand their ground in Parliament Square. The heavy-handed police crackdown and evictions may have scuppered much of the plans for peaceful and creative demonstrations, but the re-emergence of the Occupy movement is a welcome sight in an increasingly unequal, stressed and disaffected city of London.
