Latest articles
Blowhard versus “Bullhorn”
by John V. Walsh / August 14th, 2014
In the wake of the U.S.-engineered coup in Ukraine, the Western Press warns us solemnly and relentlessly that Vladimir Putin is Beelzebub himself, the leader of a vicious and backward Russia. Such deceit is reckless in the extreme since it puts the U.S. at odds with a nuclear power, one that is far from the weak nation that a condescending and insulting Obama sought to depict in his recent interview with The Economist, debunked here. Of course such lies are not new. In our own lifetimes they have been generated to justify U.S. interventions in Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 14th, 2014
When the wind whispers sweet nothings into receptive open ears. When the water rushes over the falls and is gently caressed by the streaming river that gladly welcomes it home. When the rhythm of the peace drums can be heard beating in synchronized tune atop the hillock. When the sun peeks through the clouds and shines its golden rays down upon the world below. When the truth mounts a raging comeback and forces its way up from the core to break through the absurdity of lies that have played erstwhile king in its absence. When …
by Bill Quigley / August 13th, 2014
Like many cities in the South, New Orleans has a proud history of civil rights leadership—along with an equally grim history of civil rights violations. That history is repeating itself today. The African American community is again facing economic injustice and abuse from law enforcement. But, this time, the immigrant workers who rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are also the targets of brutal civil rights violations. And those same workers are showing extraordinary bravery in fighting to end them.
In November 2013, I was proud to stand alongside immigrant workers and community leaders engaging in peaceful civil disobedience in New Orleans to …
by Medea Benjamin / August 13th, 2014
It has been one year since the August 14, 2013 Rab’a Square massacre in Egypt, when the Egyptian police and army opened fire on demonstrators opposed to the military’s July 3 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. Using tanks, bulldozers, ground forces, helicopters and snipers, police and army personnel mercilessly attacked the makeshift protest encampment, where demonstrators, including women and children, had been camped out for over 45 days. The result was the worst mass killing in Egypt’s modern history.
The government’s systematic effort to obscure what took place, beginning with sealing off the square the next day, has made it difficult …
The Tragedy of Honduras
by Joseph Grosso / August 13th, 2014
When President Obama requested $3.7 billion from Congress in early July he returned the issue of border security to the forefront where it had faded since the days of large scale Mexican migration a few years ago. The exodus from Mexico stemmed from the signing of NAFTA in 1994 which pitted Mexican corn farms, long a staple of the Mexican economy, against an influx of heavily subsidized corn inputs from the U.S. Over two million Mexicans left agriculture and many headed north, drawn by the Sunbelt building boom. It is quite easy to recall the hysteria of that epoch: the …
Robin Williams and the Virtues of Suicide
by Binoy Kampmark / August 13th, 2014
Now let the reader’s own moral feelings decide as to whether or not suicide is a criminal act.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, On Suicide, in Studies in Pessimism
The Grim Reaper never runs out of converts. Put another way, death never gets his full due. Comedians do not figure well in this – they are particularly attractive targets in the business of death. Ironic, then, that clowns are sometimes hired to make the ill in hospitals laugh, to give the impression that the world is not as dark as all that.
The more one is engaged in the business of making one laugh, the …
by Gary Engler / August 13th, 2014
Capitalist corporations suffer from a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and are rewarded by shareholders for acting that way. If corporations could be sent to a criminal psychologist’s office, they’d be diagnosed as psychopaths and locked away forever.
Capitalism encourages greed. But greed is only good for capitalists. For normal people it is anti-social and soul destroying, not to mention very bad for our communities, which rely on altruism, compassion and a generalized concern for others.
Capitalism is a system of minority privilege and class rule based on the private ownership of means of livelihood. This …
A hospital known as "Emergency" provides free medical treatment in the war-torn country of Afghanistan
by Kathy Kelly / August 13th, 2014
Here in Afghanistan, Carmen, Hakim, Faiz and I went to Kabul’s Emergency Surgical Center for Victims of War to donate blood. “Emergency” isn’t just an apt description of the hospital’s cases; it’s also the name of the Italy-based charity that runs war hospitals and clinics across Afghanistan. Emanuele Nannini, the program coordinator, and Giacomo Menaldo, the chief logistician, spoke with us for several hours about the work done in their facilities and the desperate emergency in health care which Afghanistan faces. Besides its Kabul center, “Emergency” operates two other major hospitals in Afghanistan, one in Lashkar Gah and one in …
by Mathew Maavak / August 12th, 2014
Not a month goes by without the West invoking yet another affront to humanity, another crime against humanity, another wave of sanctions, or yet another UN Security Council resolution. This is what North Korea would be like if it is ever armed with social media.
Occasionally, we were treated to a new Weapons of Mass Destruction allegation with the proof lying not just in the pudding or in yellow cakes attested by Colin Powell at the UN, but in the delectable offerings of Twitter and Facebook as well. Reality is defined by the bold, new ethos of “I imagined it and …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 12th, 2014
The only way out is through. In order to establish a more orderly society, we will first have to endure the chaos that ensues when the current system breaks down. So be it. If we want freedom, we have to shake off those elements which are informed by tyranny. If we want liberty, we have to do away with the bureaucracy of the government apparatus which prevents such a natural, anarchic state from arising. We must tend to the garden of sovereignty and weed out the poisonous plants which deplete our soil. We must starve the Beast through acts of …
Fiscal Mismanagement, Odious Debt or Pillage?
by Ellen Brown / August 12th, 2014
Argentina has now taken the US to The Hague for blocking the country’s 2005 settlement with the bulk of its creditors. The issue underscores the need for an international mechanism for nations to go bankrupt. Better yet would be a sustainable global monetary scheme that avoids the need for sovereign bankruptcy.
Argentina was the richest country in Latin America before decades of neoliberal and IMF-imposed economic policies drowned it in debt. A severe crisis in 2001 plunged it into the largest sovereign debt default in history. In 2005, it renegotiated its debt with most of its creditors at a 70% …
by William Manson / August 12th, 2014
In early January 1998, aware of the soon-to-break story about the Clinton/Lewinsky trysts, the Project for a New American Century saw its “window of opportunism.” On January 16—the day before the story appeared in the press—PNAC publicized their “open letter” to President Clinton urging him to consider military action against the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein, who was again alleged to be evading UN inspections and stockpiling tons of lethal WMDs. By early February, Clinton, desperate to divert attention from his pathetic scandal, gave a speech to the nation enumerating in considerable detail the danger posed by these alleged stockpiles …
“No to wars!”
by Dr. Hakim / August 12th, 2014
“Her father was killed in Helmand amidst fighting between the Taliban and the Afghan/U.S.-NATO forces,” said a relative about Gul Jumma, who looked down, shy and full of angst, sensing a future that’s not promising.
Gul Jumma, together with the Afghan Peace Volunteers, expressed their opposition to wars in this video. Gul Jumma holds up the sign for ‘Ukraine’, indicating ‘No to wars in Ukraine’. She understands what it is like to be caught in the crossfire, as happened to her father when he was killed in battle.
…
by Ramzy Baroud / August 12th, 2014
My old family house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza was recently rebuilt by its new owner, into a beautiful three-story building with large windows adorned by red frames. In Israel’s most recent and deadliest war on Gaza, the house sustained significant damage. A large hole caused by Israeli missiles can be seen from afar, in a part of the house where our kitchen once stood.
It seems that the original target was not my house, however, but that of our kindly neighbor, who had spent his entire working-life toiling between manual jobs in Israel, and later in life as …
by Paul Haeder / August 11th, 2014
contains more wisdom than in all the bucket heads of the Ivy League/Stanford Class/Zionist Tower of Babel Combined
I’ve got to admit: Some of the most interesting stuff coming out of people’s mouths, versus the awful crap coming out of the droning digital internet, on TV, in books, anything we might call media, well, the most interesting stuff comes from regular folk, like our own Chuck O. (read below concerning my last post on why we need to call these cock-suckers cock-suckers whenever we can, instead of this patty-cake bullshit play nice and inside voice school marm lie this country has …
by Gareth Porter / August 11th, 2014
Washington, August 12, 2014 (IPS) — United Nations officials and human rights organisations have characterised Israeli attacks on civilian targets during the IDF war on Gaza as violations of the laws of war.
During the war, Israeli bombardment leveled whole urban neighbourhoods, leaving more than 10,000 houses destroyed and 30,000 damaged and killing 1,300 civilians, according to U.N. data. Israeli forces also struck six schools providing shelter to refugees under U.N. protection, killing at least 47 refugees and wounding more than 340.
The administration’s public stance in daily briefings in the early days of the war suggested little or no concern about …
The Anti-Empire Report #131
by William Blum / August 11th, 2014
During Cold War One those of us in the American radical left were often placed in the position where we had to defend the Soviet Union because the US government was using that country as a battering ram against us. Now we sometimes have to defend Russia because it may be the last best hope of stopping TETATW (The Empire That Ate The World). Yes, during Cold War One we knew enough about Stalin, the show trials, and the gulags. But we also knew about US foreign policy.
E-mail sent to the Washington Post July 23, 2014 about the destruction of …
by James Petras / August 11th, 2014
Outside of Israel and its organized supporters in the major Zionist organizations, world public opinion and most experts in international law see the Jewish State’s invasion of Gaza and its systematic attack on civilians and basic infrastructure as a crime against humanity.
The purpose of this essay is 4-fold: 1. To identify the nature of the crime – the genocidal character of the armed assault and the sequence leading up to it; 2. To identify the direct perpetrators of the war crimes and their domestic and international accomplices; …
by Robert Hunziker / August 11th, 2014
The evermore-dangerous-changing climate is not waiting for the climate denial contingency in Congress to come to their senses. Global warming/climate change is on a fast track with inconvertible evidence of its human-caused impact. It’s found everywhere. It’s almost impossible to miss it, especially in Europe where the glaciers in the Alps are relentlessly melting away, more than 32 feet of thickness, on average, over the past decade alone.
In that regard, The Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences jointly produced a video entitled: “Climate Change, Lines of Evidence,” which …
by T.P. Wilkinson / August 9th, 2014
Douglas Valentine explained the purpose or at least the subject of his study of the Vietnam Phoenix Program as “terror and its role in political warfare”. He is generous, like most Americans—even critical ones—when he writes “It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations—ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies—the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost?” ((Valentine alludes here to Malcolm X’s notorious reaction to the assassination of John F. …
by John Andrews / August 9th, 2014
When is a troll not a troll?
The word “troll” originated in Scandinavian folklore as a synonym for a demon. Today the word is more commonly understood to mean someone who maliciously interferes with discussions in open internet communications – such as in discussion groups and forums – through being abusive to others in the group, or by knowingly contributing misleading or distracting information.
It begs the question as to the sort of people who might do this. Who are they and why do they do it? Without doubt some of them are just ill people, or misanthropic computer nerds or bored …
Whatever happened to the US-Quartet Agreement , signed by Israel, 'to give the Palestinian people freedom to move, to trade, to live ordinary lives'?
by Stuart Littlewood / August 9th, 2014
What are the chances of anything good happening to the Palestinians after this latest carnage? Was their torment addressed on previous occasions? Were the wrongs against them righted?
Think back.
When Israel “disengaged” from Gaza in September 2005 (i.e., pulled out its ground troops and squatters) it signed an Agreement on Movement intended to maintain and develop Gaza’s economy and set the scene for a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.The Agreement was drawn up by the US, sponsored by the Quartet and launched by Condoleezza Rice (US Secretary of State) and Javier Solana (EU High Representative) in Jerusalem …
The Metadata Confusion in Oz
by Binoy Kampmark / August 8th, 2014
It is sometimes hard to know whether those in power adopt a policy of confusion purposely, or through grand design. When it comes to the flawed policy of data retention on a mass scale, a burden that is bound to fall on telecommunications companies, the problem is most acute of all. What is to be kept? What falls within that broad term metadata?
The Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, a somewhat challenged individual in twenty first century politics, is one such example. Here, dinosaur meets politician, and the result is far from pretty. It is less pretty for the fact that …
by Gilad Atzmon / August 8th, 2014
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the London Times refused to run an ad featuring Elie Wiesel speaking out against Hamas’ use of children as human shields.
The ad’s headline reads: “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn.” Wiesel’s statement is a blatant lie and the London Times knew it.
Jews have never stopped sacrificing their children. The Hannibal Protocol is an IDF directive that orders soldiers to take ‘necessary measures’ to prevent their comrades from being captured by enemy forces. ‘Necessary measures’ include risking the life of the Israeli soldier and anyone who happens to be in his vicinity. Similarly, …
by Paul Craig Roberts / August 8th, 2014
The consequence of Washington’s reckless and irresponsible political and military interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria has been to unleash evil. The various sects that lived in peace under the rule of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad are butchering one another, and a new group, ISIS, is in the process of creating a new state out of parts of Iraq and Syria.
The turmoil brought into the Middle East by the Bush and Obama regimes has meant death and displacement for millions and untold future deaths. As I write 40,000 Iraqis are stranded on a mountain top without water awaiting death …
The Schizophrenia of the Deep State
by William A. Blunden / August 8th, 2014
A few days ago Dan Geer, the chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, gave a keynote address at Black Hat USA. ((Kim Zetter, “CIA Insider: U.S. Should Buy All Security Exploits, Then Disclose Them,” Wired, August 6, 2014)) According to the company’s web site In-Q-Tel is a non-profit, but it’s a special sort of non-profit. It offers venture capital funding on behalf of the “intelligence community” (read government spies). During his presentation Geer proposed, among other things, that the U.S. government bolster internet security by dominating the market for zero-day vulnerabilities.
Zero-days are basically flaws, unpatched bugs, in software and …
by Haider Riaz / August 8th, 2014
Huron Historic Gaol was once a prison complex for the Huron County of Upper Canada. The prison was designed by Thomas Young and modeled after Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon, named after a hundred eyed giant watchman from Greek mythology called Panoptes, is an institutional structure where a watchman can observe all inhabitants anonymously. Although the Huron County Gaol Jail now serves only as a prison museum (and is a National Historic Site of Canada), the clandestine construction of a billion dollar headquarters in Ottawa for the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC), an obscure Canadian intelligence agency, is a …
by T. Mayheart Dardar / August 8th, 2014
Hawkeye: My father warned me about you…
Cora Munro: [interupting] Your Father?
Hawkeye: Chingachgook, he warned me about people like you.
Cora Munro: Oh, did he?
Hawkeye: He said “Do not try to understand them.”
Cora Munro: What?
Hawkeye: Yes, and, “do not try to make them understand you. That is because they are a breed apart and make no sense.”
— The Last of the Mohicans (Movie) 1992.
As an Indigenous person I really do struggle to understand what passes for political dialog in this country. While I long ago gave up on …
by Shepherd Bliss / August 8th, 2014
Village Building Convergence (VBC) activists and their supporters from Cittaslow Sebastopol, Transition, the Grange, Permaculture Skills Center, and other groups recently packed the City Council meeting of small town Sebastopol in semi-rural Sonoma County, Northern California. Testimony in support of VBC came from enthusiastic advocates from 3-years-old to 70-years-old.
After an hour-long discussion at its August 5 regular meeting, the Council voted unanimously to permit the VBC to occur on public property from Sept. 12 to Sept. 21. Some local merchants have welcomed VBC to beautify their places. In addition to art and natural building “place-making” projects, there will be …
Doing Itself in
by Ralph Nader / August 8th, 2014
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, just had her political consultants send out a mass mailing to women asking for money and responses to an enclosed survey of their opinions.
The mass mailing duly recites the truly horrible House Republican votes against a variety of women’s health, safety and family protections and seeks to survey women’s priorities for the Congressional Democrats’ legislative agenda. Under the category titled “Employment,” there is no mention of restoring the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, which Rep. Pelosi supports. The closest option to check was “inadequate/or …
