Latest articles
by Gary Engler / August 26th, 2014
For the numerous readers who asked: “But what can we do?” after reading my Top 10 Reasons to Hate Capitalism published here on Dissident Voice:
10. We can elect governments that represent people rather than corporations. This will require serious electoral reform and include laws to make it clear corporations are not people and therefore cannot participate in the political process. A government representing all the people would regulate corporations to ensure socially responsible behaviour and transform psychopathic capitalist monstrosities into democratic, social enterprises that benefit all.
9. We can build communities and organizations that encourage solidarity, compassion and altruism. These …
The High-stakes Chess Match for Argentina
by Ellen Brown / August 26th, 2014
If Argentina were in a high-stakes chess match, the country’s actions this week would be the equivalent of flipping over all the pieces on the board.
– David Dayen, Fiscal Times, August 22, 2014
Argentina is playing hardball with the vulture funds, which have been trying to force it into an involuntary bankruptcy. The vultures are demanding what amounts to a 600% return on bonds bought for pennies on the dollar, defeating a 2005 settlement in which 92% of creditors agreed to accept a 70% haircut on their bonds. A US court has backed the vulture funds; but last week, Argentina …
by Kathy Kelly / August 25th, 2014
Here in Kabul, one of my finest friends is Zekerullah, who has gone back to school in the 8th grade although he is an18-year old young man who has already had to learn far too many of life’s harsh lessons.
Years ago and miles from here, when he was a child in the province of Bamiyan, and before he ran away from school, Zekerullah led a double life, earning income for his family each night as a construction crew laborer, and then attempting to attend school in the daytime. In between these tasks the need to provide his family with fuel …
by L'Ordre / August 25th, 2014
A move for the restoration of the Mont Order to its former status as a club of progressive thinkers and students has been successfully made. The Zero State, a techno-progressive activist group centered on the ideas of M. Amon Twyman, is now associated with the Mont Order.
While it is only a formative step, this change cannot be underestimated. It marks the first move towards the restoration of the Mont Order to an actual association of groups and churches since its original disintegration in 1999.
My negotiations with M. Amon Twyman, head of the WAVE think tank responsible over …
by Brian J. Trautman / August 24th, 2014
The police response to public protests in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the deadly August 9 shooting of Michael Brown, Jr., an unarmed eighteen-year-old black man killed by a white police officer, was a prime illustration of the hyper-aggressive nature of policing in America today. The residents of Ferguson fed up with hostile and abusive police behavior continue to flood the streets to demand justice for Mike Brown and other victims of police brutality. They have been joined in solidarity by people of conscience in other cities (e.g., Oakland, NYC). Their anger and frustration was exacerbated by the heavy-handed …
by Ken Meyercord / August 24th, 2014
As if events in Iraq weren’t confusing enough, media coverage of what’s going on seems to leave out a critical part of the story. To hear the media tell it, a quick sweep of cities and towns from Mosul south was spearheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/al Shams (hence the dual acronyms ISIL and ISIS in reference to the same group). Now, al-Da’ish (yet another name for the group based on their name in Arabic) is portrayed as a threat to the central government in Baghdad and hence subject to American military action (i.e., bombing).
But a …
by Yves Engler / August 24th, 2014
When is a Canadian who leaves this country to join a foreign military force and participate in the killing of innocent civilians, including children, called a terror tourist and sent to jail?
a) Always;
b) Never;
c) Only when that person joins a military force the Conservative government disagrees with.
Numerous ministers in the current federal government have loudly denounced the radicalization of Canadian youth in foreign wars. Last year, the Conservatives passed a law that further criminalizes “leaving or attempting to leave Canada” to commit terrorism. Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney recently said the government is “try[ing] to monitor networks that recruit and radicalize …
by Philip A. Farruggio / August 24th, 2014
For that minority of us who reject both this Military Industrial Empire and its ‘Two Party One Party’ system, we are marginalized and ostracized. For that smaller segment of our grouping that holds to most of the conspiracy theories of empire… Wow!! We are just simply crazy! Factor out the way out theories of aliens inside the Illuminati, the shape shifting reptilians, the One World Socialist government of the Fabian Society, or the Jews behind all our world wars etc. That is not what this writer is speaking about. No, I and others who study history and truth (which our …
by Paul Haeder / August 24th, 2014
Easy as easy-bake Monsanto pie. The blogsphere, well, I respect some of it, DV being one venue. But really, what spineless, neutered digital tigers are out there, paper tigers mouthing off, total comfort, really not asking for that ultimate solution to the crony capitalism, totalitarianism and fascism of the coin of the realm mixed up in military-drug-money-media-education madness? That solution is annihilation, but if we whisper those words, if we call for a real fight, throwing fire at fire, well, we will be labeled as flipped out or anti-American/Jew/Capitalism.
If capitalism and fascism and One Percenters and the hedge funders and …
by Gary Leupp / August 23rd, 2014
About a week into the Ferguson crisis, cable TV anchors like Chris Cuomo and Anderson Cooper began to decry the presence of “outside agitators” in the community. This was after SWAT teams with MRAP trucks and M-16 assault rifles came from outside in response to crimes against property (window-smashing and looting) prompted by outrage at the police killing of an unarmed black 18-year-old boy.
There are 53 members of the Ferguson police force, 50 of them white in a town that is almost 70% black. One in four people lives below the federal poverty line in Ferguson, and most black residents …
Why Black Rage is Conscious, Justified, and Long Overdue
by Colin Jenkins / August 23rd, 2014
On a crisp, Fall evening in 1992, while I was a freshman at a SUNY (State University of New York) school, the campus erupted after a white, male student assaulted a black, female student. Being an associate of the African American Student Union Body Association (AASUBA) at the time, I attended an emergency meeting that was called in order to discuss the incident and consider potential responses. The meeting ensued, but there was little discussion. Instead, the room was a hotbed of rage. As one of only two white students among over fifty members and associates, some of the fury …
by Alton C. Thompson / August 23rd, 2014
It has been said (in the Gale Encyclopedia of U. S. History) of colonial America that:
In colonial America, feudalism began as an extension of the English manorial system. In addition to the Puritans and the Protestants, who came from England to the New World seeking religious freedom, some early colonists came to expand their estates by establishing feudal domains. While the Puritans and the Protestants established colonies in New England, the Anglicans established the proprietary colonies of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Delaware, and the Dutch brought similar systems to New Amsterdam (later New York) and New Jersey. Similar …
Western leaders 'nobble' the International Criminal Court
by Stuart Littlewood / August 23rd, 2014
Was anyone surprised to hear that the International Criminal Court is under pressure not to investigate Israel’s war crimes in Gaza?
The British government wouldn’t even vote for the UN Human Rights Council’s proposal to launch an inquiry and, along with France, abstained. The US, as expected, voted against. Even Ireland, Germany and Italy abstained in an extraordinary show of collective political cowardice. The enemy within had revealed itself.
As The Guardian reported, “at stake is the future of the ICC itself, an experiment in international justice that occupies a fragile position with no superpower backing. Russia, China and India have …
by Al Engler / August 22nd, 2014
Prevailing neo-liberal dogma holds that private capital is responsible for most economic innovation and that governments stand in the way. In The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs, Private Sector Myths, Mariana Mazzucato points out that most research is funded by governments and that current anti-government policies not only widen disparities but threaten future innovation, especially the mobilization of resources necessary to rapidly shift away from dependence on carbon-spewing fossil fuels.
Mazzucato—professor of The Economics of Innovation at Sussex University in the UK—argues that capitalists are not the visionary risk-takers that free-market economists, the corporate media and politicians would have …
U.S. takes little responsibility, offers little protection
by William Boardman / August 22nd, 2014
Ferguson, Gaza, and Luhansk bleed all the time these days and the United States does nothing very useful for any of them. Not in out “national interest.” Simpler and easier to blame the victims. Can’t waste our precious resources.
Ferguson, Gaza, and Luhansk have been bleeding for days, for weeks, for years, forever in current and chronic crisis, and what does the United States do to help any of them?
Faced with these and other huge humanitarian challenges, the United States puts its big-hearted humanitarian effort into a renewed war in Iraq, acting as if it was only a mission to rescue …
by Eva Bartlett / August 22nd, 2014
In June, 2014, I met with Dr. Ali Haidar, Syria’s Minister of National Reconciliation, in his Damascus office. An eye surgeon and leader of the SSNP (Syrian Social Nationalist Party, an opposition party within Syria), Dr. Haidar assumed position as Minister of Reconciliation in June 2012.
Photograph by Eva Bartlett
Eva Bartlett: What is ‘Mussalaha’ (‘Reconciliation’)? How did it begin?
Dr. Ali Haidar: In February, 2012, the Syrian government changed the constitution, and in May Syria held Parliamentary elections. We, as an opposition party, joined the elections, because we believe that the …
The family cannot rely on the grand jury system or Attorney General Holder
by Kevin Zeese / August 22nd, 2014
The grand jury process in the United States is rigged for the prosecutor. There is an old saying among lawyers “A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.” Of course, the reverse is also true; the prosecutor can also prevent an indictment. The prosecutor controls the grand jury process which is conducted in secret without even a judge present. The prosecutor decides what witnesses to call and there is no opportunity for a defense lawyer or attorney for the family to participate.
Further, the make-up of the grand jury which comes from St. Louis County (not the city of St. Louis) where …
by Medea Benjamin / August 22nd, 2014
In a brilliant August 17 segment of Last Week Tonight, HBO host John Oliver ripped into small towns that have equipped their police with war-like military equipment. One town was Keene, New Hampshire, where their military-grade armored personnel truck was acquired to protect critical targets –– like the annual Pumpkin Festival. Another was Doraville, Georgia. Oliver showed a wild video clip from the Doraville Police Department’s website, with a Ninja-dressed SWAT team going for a joyride in a souped-up armored personnel carrier, all set to a heavy metal song called “Die MotherF***er Die.”
In a visit to Doraville last week, …
by Robert Wilbur and Martha Rosenberg / August 22nd, 2014
As the nation was horrified by another botched execution this summer, a capital defense lawyer in Texas, legal scholar in New York and the former warden of San Quentin work against capital punishment.
There were only three people in the room: Jeanne Woodford, the chaplain and the man strapped to a gurney with tubes coming out of his arms. After hearing the man’s last words, Woodford signaled the corrections officer who was “working the chemicals,” which means in prison argot that he started infusions of lethal chemicals that flowed into the man on the gurney. As warden of California’s San Quentin, …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 21st, 2014
The dominant visual aspect of the story, however, has been the sight of overpowering police forces confronting unarmed protesters who are seen waving signs or just their hands.
Walter Olson, Cato at Liberty, August 13, 2014
A terrible vision of what happens when authority goes wrong. This is Ferguson, Mo. in August 2014. Even if the person killed by police, a certain Michael Brown, was a black man; even given the automatic response by authorities that it was a case of justified armed violence, we are left with the same nasty taste: policing in the US has become a beast of terrifying …
by Robert Hunziker / August 21st, 2014
Sir David Attenborough (b. 1926) has been the face and the voice of natural history for 60 years. Some of his public television specials include: Life in Cold Blood (2008), Life on Earth (1979), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Mammals (2002), and Planet Earth (2006).
As well, he is more than just the face and the voice of nature because he travels to the locations and endures the rigors of climbing up to the top of the canopy of the Rain Forest and diving to the depths of the sea beds to bring life on Earth, in …
The Limitations of the Capitalist System in a Finite World
by Mark Weiser / August 21st, 2014
Capitalism has always been sold as the best way for the greatest number of people to benefit from their own labor. I would agree that was true enough over most of our U.S. history for men of European decent. The real question today is whether or not our unregulated “capitalistic-democracy” is actually working as we’ve been promised it should. Can we really call it a “democracy” where political candidates are voted in by corporate big buck$ to serve only their own financial interests? Can we really call it a capitalist society if the larger majority who, although ideologically may side …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 21st, 2014
Blistering sirens sound off in the night as the hurricane symphony of nuclear intimidation tactics blare boisterously across the airwaves, signaling to all citizens that the war is, indeed, officially hot. Game on. But the strange rules of this situation deem that there shall be no victor, only losers. Total annihilation is what the bat shit crazy elitists are seeking this time. All the marbles have been thrown. All the cards are on the table. They are gambling with house money and our lives. Two things they don’t really give a hot steaming pile about. It’s a filthy mess.
But who’s …
by Paul Haeder / August 21st, 2014
when the language of Nixon, Chicago’s mayor, NFL-ers, Generals works for the 80 Percent — time to take off the play-nice gloves as murderers take to the streets, airwaves, Ivy Tower
There is no compunction to call a mother f-er a mother hucker. You know, PC, clean surface America, never allowed to really use the language of George Carlin to express the outrage of each nanosecond in Amerika. So, for the record, “mother hucker,” well, will replace that other epithet or expletive all great presidents and generals and coaches and cops use all the time. Oh, I know, all those Facebook …
by Jack A. Smith / August 21st, 2014
We are tirelessly dedicated to the Obama Administration’s campaign to stop the fighting between oppressors and oppressed and convince them to accept their present status instead of disturbing the peace and making frightening noises on the streets. This goes not only for our own Ferguson, Mo., but by odd coincidence, in Gaza as well. Funny, but its like both events are taking place in the West Bank.
We’re about to investigate an aspect of these wars. That’s the pros and cons of the decision made by the Ferguson Police Dept. to don the garb, the weapons and other accouterments of warfare …
Things Cannot Stay the Same after Israeli Genocide in Gaza
by Ramzy Baroud / August 21st, 2014
After every bloody episode of violence perpetrated by Israel, media spin doctors are often deployed with one grand mission: to absolve Israel of any responsibility in their acts of carnage.
Not only do these apologists demonize Palestinians, but anyone who dares to take a stand on their behalf. The main staple of this Israeli strategy has been blaming the victim. Such a tactic is nothing new in the way the so-called “Arab-Israeli conflict” has been presented in Western media, whose narrative has been much closer to that of Israeli official and media discourses than that of Palestinians. This continued despite the …
by Walter Brasch / August 21st, 2014
It’s 3 p.m., and you’re cruising down a rural road, doing about 50.
A quarter mile away is a sign, with flashing yellow lights, alerting you to slow down to 15. It’s a school zone.
But, you don’t see any children. Besides, you’re going to be late to your racquetball match. So, you just slide on past.
You’re an independent long-haul trucker. You get paid by the number of miles you drive. If you work just a couple of hours longer every day than the limits set by the federal government—and if you can drive 75 or 80 instead of 65, you can …
From Missouri to Ukraine
by John Stanton / August 19th, 2014
…in what manner does tyranny arise? –that it has a democratic origin is evident…But when [the tyrant] has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader…Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?: Clearly….And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of …
Why not now?
by Paul Larudee / August 19th, 2014
In August, 2008, I and forty-three other participants motored into Gaza by sea in two converted fishing boats, becoming the first to openly succeed in doing so since 1967. The entry stamp in our passports reads “Gaza port” and was created for the occasion. We carried a modest cargo of hearing aids for the children of the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children.
Israel tried multiple means of preventing us from succeeding, including threats, jamming of communications, and pressure on the Greek and Cypriot governments, but it did not send naval or coast guard vessels to intercept us, and did not attack …
by David Connor / August 19th, 2014
For most of us, being funny, especially extremely so, leaves us looking like a shaded relief map: The funny part juts out, while the rest falls into shadow. When we make another laugh, the catharsis the listener experiences is realized viscerally, like twitching funny bones. Even when comedy takes darkness as a subject (such as Williams’ musings on the Grim Rapper), the listeners see the pain inherent to their lives decontextualized enough to hold close to the heart, and from it, they heartily guffaw, feeling recalibrated. They are healed, if but for a moment. What lies underneath the surface is …
