Latest articles
by Jack A. Smith / October 23rd, 2014
A quarter century after the Cold War ended, the people of the world are now entering a dangerous era of improved and more accurate nuclear weapons and faster, more precise delivery systems at a time of growing antagonism between Washington and Moscow and potential antipathy between the U.S. and China.
All nine nuclear countries are upgrading their atomic weaponry, led by the United States and Russia — the two main nuclear states by far with 7,300 and 8,000 warheads of all kinds between them respectively, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The actually deployed weapons, long-range and strategic, …
by Rajesh Makwana / October 23rd, 2014
A full six years after the global financial crisis, not only have governments failed to rethink the way we organise our economic systems, but politicians across the world have pressed forward with an obsolete political agenda that has paved the way for yet more financial chaos. The failure of our elected representatives to adopt a just and sustainable alternative to neoliberal capitalism has also set the scene for years of increased hardship and popular unrest that will inevitably follow any future economic crash.
The very real prospect of a repeat of the 2008 meltdown is now widely accepted in the mainstream …
by William Manson / October 23rd, 2014
First, a disclaimer: I know virtually nothing about “the stock market.” Nor have I—for moral (and aesthetic) reasons—wanted to know. Still, as Karl Marx explained so long ago, those who have Capital will invariably seek to maximize “share-value”: increasing revenues (and net profits), reducing competition (through mergers), and reducing labor-costs (through automation, union-busting, offshoring). For those able to moderate their wealth-addiction, it becomes sickeningly easy for the “savvy investor” to “make a killing”: “buy low and sell high,” for starters–but also keep in-step with the various mechanisms which inflate share-prices (manipulative business “news,” for instance).
These days, of course, the Dow …
by Ajamu Nangwaya / October 23rd, 2014
In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint Domingue [Haiti] only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are many and they are deep.
— Toussaint L’Ouverture
The people of Haiti have been living under a military occupation for over ten years by way of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). However, this military imposition has not generated sustained organizing and mobilizing of resources from anti-war, Pan-Afrikanist/nationalist, socialist, trade unions, international solidarity activists, organizations or movements located in the imperialist centres of Europe and North America.
It is critically important for …
by Z.C. Dutka / October 23rd, 2014
On the heels of Columbus Day, known since 2002 in Venezuela as the Day of Indigenous Resistance, President Nicolas Maduro handed over ‘collective property titles’ encompassing 8,382 hectares (21,000 acres) to six different indigenous ethnic groups in the eastern state of Anzoátegui.
During last week’s honorary ceremony, representatives of Venezuelan indigenous groups met in Miraflores presidential palace in ceremonial dress; looking quite comfortable in minimalist loincloths and beaded necklaces amid plush red carpets and gilded portraits of the country’s (white) 19th century independence leaders.
The thirty-four representatives, elected by their respective communities by popular vote, will make up a presidential council whose …
by Lesley Docksey / October 23rd, 2014
While people are fighting to protect the badgers from the UK government’s infamous culls, they are also working to protect the badgers from bovine TB by vaccinating them. The season for vaccinating badgers against bovine TB has finished for this year, and for those people wanting to help protect badgers from disease, it is time to think about volunteering for next year’s vaccinating. What does this involve?
All is quiet in the wood. Light is slowly seeping through the leaves but it will be some time yet before sunrise. Barely enough light to see when I have to duck to avoid …
by Jan Oberg / October 22nd, 2014
You have heard that Sweden is hunting a ”submarine” and that it is ”presumed to be Russian”. Here is an example, Financial Times of October 21 – which incidentally also announces that the Swedish Prime Minister vows to increase defence spending.
Not the slightest evidence
There are only three problems with this:
1) There is not the slightest evidence of there being anything military, neither that it is a submarine nor that, whatever the object might be, it is Russian.
2) Even with CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera this is nothing but speculative low-grade yellow press journalism. This is possible in the field …
“Symbolic” Vote on Palestine
by Ramzy Baroud / October 22nd, 2014
The text of the letter was short and precise, leaving no room for any misinterpretation in the “promise” made by Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour to a powerful representative of the Jewish community in Britain, Lord Rothschild on a fateful day of 2 November 1917.
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.
The spirit of that declaration …
by Philip A. Farruggio / October 21st, 2014
For all you out there reading this who already reject our current ‘Two Party, One Party‘ political con job, and understand that our nation is a Military Industrial Empire, the title above is not about YOU. However, this small (too small) group of us still has many friends and loved ones who are lost with no moral compass. We have associates, acquaintances, employers, coworkers and people we run into at the store or gas station who not only have no moral compass, but many are passionate defenders of this empire. The Why to this is most interesting and frightening.
A week …
by Paul Haeder / October 21st, 2014
Note — I have been busier than hell, slave waging, running science and outings for Adults with Developmental Disabilities. Whew, slave wager, and I can hardly contain myself in this prefatory section! Which Zionist and racist and ageist and cultural fascist do we want to deny breathing life after so many weeks away listening to Jewish Radio and The Controlled Opposition. Can you imagine, Social Security, disabilities section, has a million people in the USA waiting and squirming and dying to get a measly $1000 a month for survival money because of disabilities. A country that throws billions up the …
by Mateo Pimentel / October 21st, 2014
Fidel Castro, 88-year-old revolutionary hero and anti-imperialist icon, recently published in the Cuban daily Granma that his island nation would readily cooperate with the US to wrestle Ebola. This is not the first gesture of goodwill that Cuba has made toward the US regarding cooperation, either; rather, it is one of many invitations to solidarity that happen to echo across an icy political tundra spanning years of embargo. Perhaps the newest aspect of Cuba’s long-lived medical internationalism is that, in 2014, it yet defies decades of imperial embargo. Cuba’s international medical mission yet survives Yankee economic terrorism, and does so with an …
by Martha Rosenberg / October 21st, 2014
At least seven women’s bodies have been found in Indiana since Friday in what appear to be serial, sex-related murders of women in high-risk lifestyles. Hammond police are holding Darren Vann, a convicted sex offender, in connection with the murders and say charges are possible in at least six other murders still under investigation.
Many in the Chicago and northern Indiana area remember similar killings in the 1990s which produced a veritable reign of terror for women in high-risk lifestyles and their families. At least four men arrested in Chicago during that time — Gregory Clepper, Geoffrey Griffin, Hubert Geralds and …
by James Hoover / October 21st, 2014
Republicans have no positive policies to hang their hats on. So what does such a political party do?
Scare you senseless.
The Halloween scene is not real, but the GOP “be afraid” scenes are meant to be, just in time for midterm elections. When a political party’s accomplishments only represent obstruction, doing nothing in Congress, staging negative attacks on opponents, shutting down government and threatening its solvency, then how do you get people to vote for you?
Combine two fearful images, Ebola and ISIS, into a Halloween-like ghoul caper.
What better image than a dark, ISIS-robed figure carrying the Ebola virus across our border? …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 21st, 2014
The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.
— Gough Whitlam, Daily Telegraph, October 19, 1989
Hagiography is the curse of the Australian Labor movement. It is a movement that searches for, and craves, mythical figures and myths. Such a phenomenon might be termed mummification, and detracts from closer examination. There is no greater mythic hero for that tradition than Gough Whitlam, who died at 98. In his brief period as Prime Minister, between 1972 and the infamous dismissal by the Governor-General in 1975, Australia nudged its …
by Dr. Hakim / October 20th, 2014
Imal, a 7 year old Afghan student in the 2nd grade, came to visit us in Kabul.
As Imal grew up, he kept asking his mother where his father was. His mother finally told Imal that his father had been killed by a drone when he was still a baby.
If you could see Imal in this video, you would want to hug him immediately.
http://youtu.be/WYD5yFqANzw
If Imal were a white American kid, this tragedy would not have befallen his father. Which American would allow any U.S. citizen to be killed by a foreign drone?
Suppose the UK wanted to hunt ‘terrorists’ in the …
by Ludwig Watzal / October 20th, 2014
The Israeli military went again on a rampage against the ghettoized people in the Gaza strip. The last time, they “visited” the walled-in strip at the turn of the year 2008/09, they slaughtered 1400 Palestinians. In 2014, they killed over 2100 Palestinians, 80 per cent civilians, injured over 10 000, made over 300 000 homeless and ravaged the infrastructure. Israel’s patron, the US Empire, did not lift a finger in 2008/09; neither did it this time. This one-sided relationship is analyzed by James Petras, an award-winning author and Professor Emeritus, in The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel …
by Kathy Kelly / October 19th, 2014
On August 9, 1983, three people dressed as U.S. soldiers saluted their way onto a U.S. military base and climbed a pine tree. The base contained a school training elite Salvadoran and other foreign troops to serve dictatorships back home, with a record of nightmarish brutality following graduation. That night, once the base’s lights went out, the students of this school heard, coming down from on high, the voice of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers …
by Robert Hunziker / October 19th, 2014
It is worse than we thought!
New studies about the warming of the planet and the risk of massive release of methane from the Arctic are “worse than we thought.”
As it goes, the danger to human existence; i.e., to a nice long life on the planet, is obscured from the public by innocence of happenstance, as follows: The climate change issue, as it is embodied within public discourse, masks the true impact of the problem because of the amplitude of public discussion. This, therefore, inadvertently makes the climate change issue seem ordinary, not at all out of the ordinary. As it …
by William A. Blunden / October 19th, 2014
Recently 60 Minutes aired a segment where FBI Director James Comey described how he threatened to quit as acting Attorney General back in 2004 rather than reauthorize warrantless wiretapping programs. He also described an old Hoover-era memo that he keeps on his desk as a reminder of what not to do. The memo is a request by J. Edgar Hoover to conduct “technical surveillance” on Martin Luther King Jr. The basic impression that 60 Minutes viewers come away with is that James Comey is a man who is “deeply skeptical of government power.”
This 20-minute biopic was likely timed in …
From FDIC to bail-ins
by Bill Annett / October 19th, 2014
You’re not going to believe this, but there was a time – actually about 65 years ago – when the financial world, at least the securities-trading world, the world we call Wall Street, was actually dependent on a foundational principle of honesty and integrity. Now I’ll just pause for a moment and allow the laughter, whistling and foot-stomping to subside before continuing. There. Everybody finished now?
Okay. I said foundational. If you think about it, it had to be that way and it was. Oh, I know all …
by Jeff Schmidt / October 18th, 2014
To understand Denis Rancourt and his book, Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism, you have to know the difference between critical thinking and independent thinking.
Critical thinking is nothing special. Every college student is taught to do it, to prepare for employment fielding matters for employers. On the job, critical thinking amounts to little more than the ability to say, “The boss isn’t going to like this.” You don’t need your own ideology to say that. You need only understand the boss’s ideology and use it to guide your work.
The safest way to …
by Ralph Nader / October 18th, 2014
Ebola! Ebola! Ebola! The word is everywhere—the name of the deadly virus from West Africa with a seventy percent fatality rate. A sense of dread and dismay is beginning to spread through our country. Asking vital questions will shed light on how to stop the spread of the current outbreak as well as prevent future outbreaks. Policies impacting both infectious diseases and those institutions that focus on treating, curing and stemming outbreaks need to be reworked to offer stronger support for nations with almost no public health facilities.
Since Ebola was first detected in the Congo by the Ebola River in …
by Frank Scott / October 18th, 2014
The defining economic challenge of our time is secular stagnation. It is the risk of inadequate growth, leading to inadequate potential, leading to inadequate growth.
— Lawrence H. Summers, former U. S. Treasury secretary, now teaching at Harvard
Summers uses jargon familiar to those who make financial policy, teach at Harvard, and are in the process of destroying more of the earth and its people for short-term private profits that guarantee long-term public loss.
Did you know that the signs of systemic breakdown we are experiencing were due to “secular stagnation”? You would have if you majored in the theological economics that …
by Ron Ridenour / October 18th, 2014
This month of October presents us with 13 years of permanent war for profit or, as the warmongers call it, the “war against terror”. This “operation” is killing and maiming millions of people especially in the oil rich Middle East. Simultaneously these Juggernaut nations “of the willing” are choking Mother Earth to death—polluting the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil that spawns our food, and eradicating millions of species.
Most people are clearly aware that the main cause of climate change, which is destroying the planet, is human motivated. And many are acting against this. But most environmental …
by Gareth Porter / October 17th, 2014
Washington, October 17, 2014 (IPS) — Western diplomats have reportedly faulted Iran in recent weeks for failing to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency with information on experiments on high explosives intended to produce a nuclear weapon, according to an intelligence document the IAEA is investigating.
But the document not only remains unverified but can only be linked to Iran by a far-fetched official account marked by a series of coincidences related to a foreign scientist that that are highly suspicious.
The original appearance of the document in early 2008, moreover, was not only conveniently timed to support Israel’s attack on a …
The Anti-Empire Report #133
by William Blum / October 17th, 2014
The Islamist State
You can’t believe a word the United States or its mainstream media say about the current conflict involving The Islamic State (ISIS).
You can’t believe a word France or the United Kingdom say about ISIS.
You can’t believe a word Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, or the United Arab Emirates say about ISIS. Can you say for sure which side of the conflict any of these mideast countries actually finances, arms, or trains, if, in fact, it’s only one side? Why do they allow their angry young men to join Islamic extremists? Why has NATO-member Turkey allowed so many …
by Ben Norton / October 17th, 2014
A new phase is developing in the US Palestinian solidarity movement: Block the Boat.
In organizing theory, activists often emphasize the importance of formulating what they call an “escalation plan.” When pushing for social change, they explain, it is important that one’s methods of exerting pressure on power slowly grow in strength, not remain stagnant.
Block the Boat is the next step in the escalation plan of US Palestinian solidarity activists. The idea of Block the Boat is quite simple: Hundreds of activists organize a protest in a local dock and prevent Israeli ships from unloading cargo.
The action has its origins in …
by Denis A. Conroy / October 17th, 2014
Is America’s folk image of itself derived from a cinematic narrative that defines its national character as one representing a ‘can-do-force’ fostering trade in the world for the common good? To date, American settler culture has tried to mould the rest of the world — unsuccessfully — into this ‘productive’ image of itself via hard power. The more the American Empire Enterprise garrisons the globe with military bases, the more skeptical the world community becomes. The time has come, it seems, for the spirit and energy of the American people to address itself more diplomatically to the world community. The task of creating a whole new soft power for the purpose of defining …
by Mark Weiser / October 16th, 2014
The average natural born citizen in any country is continuously indoctrinated into the national culture starting about the time they begin understanding the meaning of words. There’s one country in particular where reality is staring the public in the face, but the truth has been grossly distorted for decades by government, and mass media, bias and propaganda. If the citizens would suddenly see the truth, instead of what they’ve been conditioned to believe, they would find themselves in a strange and bizarre foreign land that’s contrary in many ways to their personal beliefs regarding home. For those who experience this …
by Ron Jacobs / October 16th, 2014
In 1771 in the North Carolina colony, Justice Martin Howard condemned a grand jury that refused to consider a murder charge after a white man was accused of the murder of his African slave. Apparently, the grand jury did not consider the killing by a white man of a Negro slave to be murder. In 2012, the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman followed by Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal of the crime took much of white United States by surprise. These Americans had convinced themselves that Black men were treated the same as every other resident of the United States …
