Latest articles
Fighting Fascism
by Andre Vltchek / January 2nd, 2015
One more step, one more explosion of insanity, and all that humanity fought for, what it labored for and has been aiming at for years, centuries and millennia, may disappear in a monstrous series of blasts. Our planet might break into pieces, or it may get poisoned and become uninhabitable, forever.
Hyperbolic? Not at all, given the track record of the Empire: war after war, invasion after invasion, with hundreds of destabilized countries, murdered leaders, and overthrown governments.
The storyline may be similar to that of the famous novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We can foresee what …
by Matt Peppe / January 2nd, 2015
When the U.N. Security Council resolution to end the Israeli military occupation of the occupied territories and establish a Palestinian state by 2017 was defeated, not a single human with a pulse was surprised. The resolution received eight votes in favor, with the United States and Australia against and five countries abstaining. Even though the measure was one vote shy of adoption, the United States decided to exercise its veto power anyway just to make its rejectionist stance abundantly clear. But the bill would not have lead to a fair settlement anyway. If it led to a settlement at all …
by William Hanna / January 2nd, 2015
A stinging defeat for Abbas, but no great victory for Israel … Netanyahu persuaded Nigeria to abstain as UN Security Council rejected Palestinian statehood, but could only muster US and Australian opposition, and the French let Israel down.
— Times of Israel
Had the UN Security Council voted for Palestinian statehood it would still have made no difference because the resolution would have been vetoed by Israel’s superpower lapdog — that principled and supreme upholder of democracy and international law — the United States of America. But even before this latest amoral rejection, the Palestinian people had already been forewarned that …
by 12345 / January 2nd, 2015
Nothing is more central to the American Dream than equality of opportunity. In today’s world, that usually means a college education—and, for most families, the challenge of paying for it. Congress could help meet that challenge. It could pass a financial transaction tax (FTT), and dedicate the proceeds to providing equal opportunity for college.
The midterms showed a country in a sour mood. They also showed a country hungry for a sense of purpose. In 1961, heralding a New Frontier, President Kennedy called on the nation to send a man to the moon. In 2015, pointing to The Dream, President Obama …
by Uri Avnery / January 2nd, 2015
(Keynote speech at the Kinneret College conference on “the Rock of our Existence – the connection between Archeology and Ideology”.)
First of all, let me thank you for inviting me to address this important conference. I am neither a professor nor a doctor. Indeed, the highest academic title I ever achieved was SEC (Seventh Elementary Class).
But like many members of my generation, from early youth I took a profound interest in archeology.
I shall try to explain why.
When asking themselves about my connection with archeology, some of you will think about Moshe Dayan.
After the June 1967 war, Dayan was a …
Praying will definitely not improve anything!
by Andre Vltchek / January 2nd, 2015
For many years and decades and in the most vulgar manner, plane crashes have been exploited by mass media. As if lives lost at 30.000 feet above the ground or the surface of oceans were more valuable than those that were interrupted ‘on the surface’ by calamities, misery, hunger or preventable diseases, especially in the poor neighborhoods and in the slums.
Air Asia flight QZ-8501, lost en route from Indonesia’s second largest city, Surabaya, to Singapore, brought unprecedented outpouring of sorrow in all corners of this sprawling and socially collapsed archipelago.
Like in a soap opera, even those who could never afford …
by Tar / January 1st, 2015
We bid Farewell to 2014 and Welcome the New Year with a different kind of festive mood. All videos have been shot by @kinimatini and Tar in Athens, during December 2014, except the “flying” Santa at the end, that has been shot by AgitPropULA.
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We bid farewell to the year 2014 with flashbacks of collective resistance, imprinted in our memories and engraved in the story of this world, to be reminded of our past, so that we keep on fighting in the future, to turn our dreams of a self-organized society without rulers, from Utopia to Reality.
Wherever you …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 1st, 2015
Writing and reporting about the Middle East is not an easy task, especially during these years of turmoil and upheaval. Following and reporting on these constant changes without a deep and compassionate understanding of the region will achieve little but predictable and lackluster content that offers nothing original, but recycled old ideas and stereotypes.
From my humble experience in the region, I share these “dos” and “don’ts” as to how the Middle East should be approached in writing and reporting.
Question Terminology
To start with, the term “Middle East” is itself highly questionable. It is arbitrary, and can only be …
The President of Israel
by Gilad Atzmon / January 1st, 2015
Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s prime Hasbara mouthpiece, praised Israeli President Reuven ‘Ruvi’ Rivlin yesterday. Freedland wrote that that in spite of being a “lifelong member of Israel’s Likud party, and on the right of that rightwing bloc… ever since his elevation to Israel’s largely ceremonial presidency in June he (President Rivlin) has acted as something like his country’s conscience.”
Let’s examine how Freedland justifies his dubious choice for 2014’s hero.
In November the Israeli cabinet backed a Jewish state bill that would enshrine discrimination against Israel’s 1.7 million Arab citizens, denying them the full rights of citizenship accorded to Jews. …
by Jack A. Smith / December 31st, 2014
Militarily, the U.S. is entering 2015 with its hands full.
1. The U.S. war in Afghanistan is supposed to have ended after 13 years on December 31, 2014, but it’s still going on and thousands of American troops are continuing the fight.
2. The U.S. war against Iraq ended officially December 31, 2011, but it has now metamorphosed into Washington’s air war against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. There are increasing hints U.S. ground troops may be sent in this year. (3,000 American military advisers are already there and 1,500 allied troops are expected soon.)
3. The U.S., …
by Daniel Borgström / December 31st, 2014
Practicing freedom of assembly is an ongoing struggle, and it can get scary, as was our experience in Oakland on Saturday, December 13th, on the evening of which six or seven hundred of us gathered at the Oscar Grant Plaza for a march, setting out shortly before dark. Notebook in hand, I jotted down that it was 4:59 p.m. and joined in, scribbling a timeline as we marched out on 14th, then south on Jackson towards the freeway, chanting “Black lives matter!” and “Shut it down! Shut it down!” Arriving at the on ramp, we found that the police …
An Open Letter to Obama, Holder, and Chris Christie
by Herb Dyer / December 31st, 2014
I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color.
– Assata Shakur
It was forty-one years ago, when a 25-year-old Joanne Deborah Chesimard (nee’ Assata Shakur) allegedly shot and killed New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike. She was later convicted by an all-white New Jersey jury, but escaped from prison in 1979.
In ’84, she escaped again – from this nation-state’s jurisdiction and into Cuba …
A Fantasy Speech on Cuba: A Speech Obama Should Give on Cuba
by Scott D. Morris / December 31st, 2014
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon.
Today the United States is changing its relationship with Cuba and the rest of the world, and we are beginning a project to lift the veil on the reality of our brutal and audacious imperial arrogance that has brought so much misery and suffering to Cuba, the hemisphere, and the world.
We have come to recognize that it is not Cuba that is stuck in the past, quite the contrary, Cuba is living and working toward a better and livable future; it is U.S. power that is stuck in the past, a past and present of …
by Maryam Sakeenah / December 31st, 2014
Tragedies like the one in Peshawar are litmus tests for any nation- either bringing out the best, or exposing the bare bones. Pakistan’s response is curiously similar to the U.S response to 9/11. The fact that the U.S.’s counter-terror strategy accounts for the genesis of a much more brutal TTP and ISIS is lost to us. In the same manner as the US filled up prisons contravening law and depriving suspects and inmates of fair judicial process in its paranoia after 9/11, Pakistan is all set to establish special military courts in contravention of constitutional procedure, for swift conviction of …
by John Chuckman / December 31st, 2014
The Palestinians are seeking a vote in the United Nations’ Security Council on a resolution favoring their statehood, unquestionably a reasonable proposal in the minds of most of the world’s people. Of course, the United States, a permanent member of the Security Council, would automatically veto such a resolution, as it vetoes all efforts to restore order to the chaos of the Middle East. And of course, were such a resolution somehow miraculously to pass, Israel would simply ignore it, as it has ignored a long list of binding UN resolutions. But a veto and certain contempt are not enough …
by Ted Glick / December 30th, 2014
O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a lot to feel good about as far as the U.S. climate movement and what we did and accomplished in 2014. Without question, we are heading into 2015 with some wind at our back and, to continue the relevant metaphor, the sun to light our way forward.
In the order that I think were most important, here they are:
1) September 21st People’s Climate March: How could anything else be more important than this? Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in NYC for …
How one party politics and multiple lesser conspiracies add up to an insidious Master Plan
by Mark Weiser / December 30th, 2014
Historic outcomes of pivotal events often dangled on threads of various possibilities. As they were outnumbered by more than two to one, an early morning fog enabled America’s future first President, George Washington with his command, to escape death or capture by British troops on Long Island, New York in 1776. As the last of 9000 men to board one of the transport boats, it’s unlikely Washington would have safely made the East River crossing without the fog’s appearance. Subsequent U.S. history along with the world’s entire geopolitical scene could be something entirely different than it is today. America went …
by Dana Gabriel / December 30th, 2014
The globalist plan to incrementally merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico into a North American Union has been ongoing for years. While at times, the agenda appears to have seemingly stalled, current efforts to expand the trilateral partnership show that it is alive and once again gaining steam. With NAFTA as the foundation, the renewed push for deeper North American integration continues on many different fronts.
The Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), recently issued the report, Made in North America: a new agenda to sharpen our competitive edge. The CCCE is one of Canada’s most influential corporate lobby groups, …
by Jonathan Power / December 30th, 2014
The vote last week in the Ukrainian parliament was a seriously disturbing move — it has made reconciliation with Russia near impossible.
The parliament voted to work for Ukraine’s membership of Nato, a red rag to a bear.
The truth is this whole Russian-Ukrainian-Western confrontation could be largely solved if the Ukrainian and Western sides wrote on paper that they don’t want to see Ukraine in Nato.
This is the key issue for Russia. But it must be written down. Moscow no longer trusts verbal understandings that can be broken, as when the Reagan Administration gave President Mikhail Gorbachev the …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 30th, 2014
As European flights lay freezing in airports across the capitals, with various de-icing procedures being implemented, the news about missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 began to makes its own way through the various channels. That sent a different sort of chill through discussions about air safety. The flight in question, with its 162 passengers, lost contact with air traffic control after take off on Saturday over the Java Sea heading to Singapore from Surabaya.
It has been a tragic year for air travel, and its promoters. The body count relative to other accidents or incidents in travel is always negligible …
by Christy Rodgers / December 29th, 2014
Who will remember what this age was like? And how will it be remembered? For the abyss of silence at the center of all the noise? The fierce shadow cast by all the blazing lights that never went off, that shone night and day?
The one terminal war foreshadowed endlessly in the last century shattered into a dozen endless wars all going on simultaneously, fought only by the poorest people in the most degraded landscapes? (Where there was nothing but oil. Nothing but diamonds. Nothing but cobalt.) Two towers coming down, a hundred towers going up. The slums stretching as far …
by Harry Clark / December 29th, 2014
The Establishment
In pre-modern times, European Jews lived in separate communities, governed by their religious authorities, with corporate rights and obligations, determined by the state. The Enlightenment and the growth of liberal rights and freedoms led to the end of Judaic temporal authority, dissolution of the corporate community and its legal status, and subjection of Jews to civil authority like all citizens, former denizens of other estates. The modern period of Jewish history began, symbolically, with the French revolution of 1789, which led to the emancipation of French Jewry, building on earlier advances in the …
by Medea Benjamin / December 29th, 2014
It’s been a year of fervent activism on police accountability, living wages, climate change, personal freedoms, immigrant rights, an open internet and diplomacy over war. The electoral beating the Democrats received has prompted both the Administration and some spineless congresspeople to realize that support for progressive issues could reinvigorate their base —a realization that has already led to Obama’s executive action on immigration and the opening to Cuba.
So here are some of the 2014 highlights.
1. Uprising for police accountability. The movement for police accountability has swept the nation, spawning brilliant new leaders from communities most affected, …
US-Backed Repression
by Linn Washington, Jr. / December 29th, 2014
TINDUF, ALGERIA — News about the historic change of relations between the United States and Cuba triggered cheers across the five Sahrawi refugee camps located near this Sahara Desert city located 1,100-miles southwest of Algeria’s capital of Algiers on the Mediterranean Sea.
That news elevated hopes among many Sahrawi that the major changes in relations between the U.S. and its longtime, bitter enemy Cuba would lead to the U.S. pushing for changes with its longtime ally – Morocco.
Morocco is the country that has illegally occupied the Western Sahara, the ancestral homeland of …
by David Swanson / December 29th, 2014
The U.S.-led NATO war on Afghanistan has lasted so long they’ve decided to rename it, declare the old war over, and announce a brand new war they’re just sure you’re going to love.
The war thus far has lasted as long as U.S. participation in World War II plus U.S. participation in World War I, plus the Korean War, plus the Spanish American War, plus the full length of the U.S. war on the Philippines, combined with the whole duration of the Mexican American War.
Now, some of those other wars accomplished things, I will admit — such as stealing half of …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 28th, 2014
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the target of low oil prices is Russia and Iran, throwing their economies into turmoil and opening their doors to sovereign raiders.
http://youtu.be/fux6lsz9HU8
by Matt Peppe / December 28th, 2014
Despite being disproven as a strategy for reducing crime, the broken windows policing theory is still utilized in New York and throughout in the United States to crack down on disorder and nonviolent crime. To think that harsh enforcement of this type of “crime” would prevent serious crime like homicide and assault is patently absurd on its face. If you want to rid society of the most serious crimes, you should be enforcing the most serious crimes, like aggressive war. Call it broken countries policing.
In the United States in 2014, you may be arrested for selling loose cigarettes, jumping …
by Gilad Atzmon / December 27th, 2014
Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, the Iranian army’s chief commander of ground forces, described today the new Iranian drone as a ‘mobile bomb.’ According to Iranian state media, ‘Yasir’ is a flying bomb, designed to strike air, ground and naval targets.
AP photoI am delighted by the news and congratulate the Iranian engineers and military industry. Iranian advanced technology is needed in order to deter Israel from celebrating its genocidal inclinations.
However, the Israelis label the new Iranian bomb a “suicidal drone,” no less no more. I would like …
by Dave Fryett / December 27th, 2014
Regime change in Cuba? Che rolling in his grave? The first shriek comes from a liberal, the latter a Marxist. With all due respect to both, I think the former quite confused if he thinks that Castroite Cuba more closely reflects his own Keynesian delusions, and the latter seems not to understand Che’s significant contribution to the normalization of relations between Cuba and the US (even though it occurs long after his death). Che was the Beard’s partner in the charade that was Cuban socialism, and his ally in the effort to rid that island of all forms …
Security geeks reveal government disinformation
by Gary Leupp / December 27th, 2014
In January 2013 Google CEO Eric Schmidt visited North Korea with an aide and his daughter, as well as frequent DPRK visitor, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. He was of course given VIP treatment by his hosts in Pyongyang, and taken to Kim Il-song University to view students studying on the Internet. It was a private visit and the U.S. State Department did not endorse it any more than it endorsed Dennis Rodman’s trip the following month.
In April in a Wall Street Journal interview Schmidt questioned whether those he had viewed at the university were really students (as opposed …
