Latest articles
by Al Engler / July 4th, 2014
Thomas Piketty’s, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a sensation–an economics textbook, translated from the French, that has been on the New York Times best-seller list. It is an important work. If you ignore more than one hundred pages of notes, it is still a long but easy read.
Piketty, a prominent French economist and social scientist, uses rigorous logic and reputable statistics to dismiss the mainstream claim that capitalist markets are based on individual equality, and that great wealth is a fair reward for individual contributions to general well-being. He shows that capitalism in its logic …
by A.D. Hemming and Bati Ahmed / July 4th, 2014
Celebrations will be coming up to “celebrate” the Fourth of July across the USA the fourth day of this month with bands playing, militarism glorified and implicitly the imperialism never mentioned at such parades. What’s wrong with this picture? Everything!
The Fourth of July marks the presentation and signing of the Declaration of Independence to pressing for the creation of this new country out of the 13 British colonies along the Eastern seaboard of North America with same document inveighing against the monarch on the throne in London for making “military power superior to civil power” as well as not …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 4th, 2014
I think the 1978 World Cup is one of the deep wounds of Argentine society.
— Norberto Liwski, former political prisoner, ESPN, Jun 9, 2014
As the elimination phase of the Football World Cup unfolds in Brazil, the political slant on such events is hard to resist. Sporting events on such a scale are political promotions and projections. Brazil’s own government was thrilled about obtaining the tournament, so much so that it ran up the bills, raised the cost of transportation, and imposed a series of near draconian measures for population control.
The return of the World Cup to South America …
by Paul Craig Roberts / July 3rd, 2014
Having Murdered Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and the US Constitution, Washington is now Murdering Ukraine.
Thanks to Op-Ed News contributor Eric Zuesse, I can bring to your attention these photographs (URL below) of what the Nazi Government in Washington is doing to Ukrainians who protest the Washington Nazis’ theft of their country. On this Fourth of July Americans need to ask themselves just how much horror, how much evil, and how many lies they can accept from a government in Washington that has established itself independently of any input from citizens to which government in the US is allegedly accountable. Before …
by Survival International / July 3rd, 2014
The survivors of a South American tribe which was decimated during the 1950s and 60s are taking Paraguay’s government to court over the genocide they suffered.
The case of the hunter-gatherer Aché tribe, who roamed the hilly forests of eastern Paraguay until being brutally forced out, became notorious in the 1970s.
As the agricultural expansion into eastern Paraguay gathered pace from the 1950s, the Aché found themselves forced to defend their land from an ever-increasing colonist population. These colonists soon started to mount raiding parties to kill the male Aché: women and children were usually captured and sold as slaves.
One of the …
by Walter Brasch / July 3rd, 2014
Unless your life is centered upon an iPhone, an iPad, and an iEverything else, there is a possibility you may have actually bought a postage stamp, written a letter, and mailed it.
Contrary to popular opinion, snail-mail isn’t dead. Every day, the U.S. Postal Service handles about 660 million pieces of mail, and delivers them to about 140 million homes, businesses, and government offices.
However, there are a lot of people who wish the Postal Service was a dead letter. Here’s some of their claims—and the truth.
They claim the Postal Service is a burden upon us hard-working taxpayers.
Here’s the truth. The Postal …
by Alfredo Lopez / July 2nd, 2014
How does the news on the Internet make you feel?
What sounds like a frivolous question, the kind you might be asked in a bar after a few drinks, is actually a profound and powerful one. If the Internet’s content can affect your feelings, the manipulation of that content can exert powerful social control.
So for a week in 2012, Facebook, in collaboration with Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco, set out to explore that possibility. It edited the content seen by a select 689,000 of its users, overloading its news feed content with positive news for …
by Ramzy Baroud / July 2nd, 2014
When I was a child, I obsessed with socialism. It was not only because my father was a self-proclaimed socialist who read every book that a good socialist should read, but also because we lived in a refugee camp in Gaza under the harshest of conditions. Tanks roamed the dusty streets and every aspect of our lives was governed by a most intricate Israeli ‘civil administration’ system – a less distressing phrase for describing military occupation.
Socialism was then an escape to an utopian world where people were treated fairly; where children were not shot and killed on a daily basis; …
by Kim Petersen / July 2nd, 2014
by Bruce Clark / July 1st, 2014
By the year 1897 the constitutional law was settled in Canada based upon the interpretation in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of section 109 of the Constitution Act, 1867. It was held in the case In re Indian Claims that the constitutionally binding Royal Proclamation of 1763 confirmed the previously established case law, all of which recognized that North America is reserved under the sovereignty of the indigenous race for its occupation, until such time as the particular group claiming control should, by nation to nation treaty, transfer its sovereignty over its land to the British crown or …
by Eric Walberg / July 1st, 2014
On June 16, Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially approved Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project to the Pacific coast to export tar sands oil, just days before Canada’s Supreme Court wrapped up its deliberations on the Tsilhqot’in Nation land claim. Coincidence? Or attempted arm twisting?
The government insists that the pipeline project is of vital national import and is environmentally sound (read: overriding any native sovereignty complaints). The hope was that the Supreme Court justices would soft-pedal native claims and leave room for the government to use its majority to push through its tar sands agenda before the next federal election, leaving …
by Medea Benjamin and Pam Bailey / July 1st, 2014
With the news that the bodies of three missing Israeli teens had been found in a field not far from the stretch of road where they disappeared June 12, people everywhere reacted rightly with sorrow and anger.
Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, also 16, were students who lived with their families in a Jewish-only settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank. The settlement and others like it have been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice because they are located in occupied territory and impede Palestinians’ liberty of movement and right to …
by Bill Quigley / July 1st, 2014
Over sixty five million people in the US, perhaps a fifth of our sisters and brothers, are not enjoying the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised when the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. They are about twenty percent of our US population. This July 4 can be an opportunity to remember them and rededicate ourselves and our country to making these promises real for all people in the US.
More than two million people are in our jails and prisons making the US the world leader in incarceration, according to the Sentencing …
Part 1
by Kim Petersen / July 1st, 2014
After reading Wei Ling Chua’s second book, Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? and its startling revelations of a western disinformation against the Chinese government, I was eager to read his first book, Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China. His analysis is thought provoking and at stark odds with the preponderent western mass media narrative.
Chua quickly gets to the crux of his thesis:
As winning an election is the primary objective [in western political systems]; the welfare of the people is secondary. In sharp contrast to the West, the Chinese culture is basically a corrective one. People who are able …
by Adam Engel / July 1st, 2014
I was subject to ‘yeah’ awhile for willing sounds stray, a bit too far left, or maybe right, of Standard Operating Music Arrangement (SOMA), than even the liberal interpreter of SOMA can silently suffer. She must sing.
Idiots wanted, the proverbial want-ads read, Sons of suffering to be put through worse. Qualified applicants assume Marketable position. Bite. Hard. Bite that bullet hard son bite hard….
“Can’t you see that? Can’t you open your eyes for one goddamned minute and just see that? Or at least see something if not ‘that’ specifically.”
She said this several times throughout the evening, but I couldn’t …
by Robert Hunziker / July 1st, 2014
It is a fair statement that no American has influenced the modern world as much as Milton Friedman (American economist, 1912-2006).
Freidman, as one of the founders of neoliberal thought, and theory, in the late 1940s, became synonymous with “monetarism” and eventually with “neoliberalism,” and as follows, significantly, very significantly, his theory spread all across the earth from the shores of Melbourne to Sri Lanka to Cape Town to Cape Horn to Tokyo; it’s a neoliberal world.
Socialism and collectivism are dead.
Thus, as a way forward for society at large, nation-states have become increasingly subservient to the forces of neoliberalism as the …
by Gareth Porter / June 30th, 2014
WASHINGTON, July 1, 2014 (IPS) — With only a few weeks remaining before the July 20 deadline, the Barack Obama administration issued a warning to Iran that it must accept deep cuts in the number of its centrifuges in order to demonstrate that its nuclear programme is only for peaceful purposes.
U.S. officials have argued that such cuts are necessary to increase the “breakout” time – the time it would take Iran to enrich enough uranium to weapons grade level to build a single bomb – from what is said to be two to three months at present to as long as …
An English View of the Scottish Referendum
by Lesley Docksey / June 30th, 2014
As if Prime Minister David Cameron hasn’t got enough problems, the promised referendum allowing Scotland to vote on whether people want independence from the rest of the United Kingdom looms ever closer, and some polls show that the gap between the Yes and No camps is closing. It will be a tight race come September. While staying within the UK still leads in the polls, over 50% of people believe an independent Scotland could be successful.
One reason for the increasing number of once-independent areas seeking to regain that independence is that people also want to recover their character, …
by Ron Ridenour / June 29th, 2014
People before Profit—the slogan for production cooperatives—is an option even in the United States. Within the past decade, three forms of worker-owned and/or managed types of organizing work places are now functioning. The most democratic structure, one that could potentially transform the economy from profiteering greed to meeting everyone’s needs, is the worker-ownership cooperative.
Out of 5.7 million firms in the United States, the Census Bureau considers that fewer than 300 are worker-owned cooperatives, but they are growing.The major coalition of worker-owner cooperatives is the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, which just celebrated its first 10-years. The USFWC has 100 …
Safeguarding Religious Tolerance
by L'Ordre / June 29th, 2014
For the most part, the Digital Age has transformed communication and understanding in spiritual matters for the better. As acknowledged by Pope Francis, the internet has increased the potential for “communication and encounter” around the world. Despite this, there has also been a growth in intolerance and hate on the internet. It is this misfortune that I seek to sensitively respond to.
One of the most challenging manifestations of intolerance is the spread of hurtful conspiracy theories targeting communities. There is already an abundance of this hurtful material on the internet targeting the faiths of Islam, Judaism and other beliefs. In …
by Edward S. Herman / June 29th, 2014
It is enlightening to see how pugnacious the U.S. establishment, led by the Peace Laureate, has been in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. The crisis arguably began when the Yanukovich government rejected an EU bailout program in favor of one offered by Russia. The mainstream media (MSM) have virtually suppressed the fact that the EU proposal was not only less generous than the one offered by Russia, but that whereas the Russian plan did not preclude further Ukrainian deals with the EU the EU plan would have required a cut-off of further Russian arrangements. And whereas the Russian deal had …
A Fresh Spate of Wealthy Summits Promises to Change…Very Little
by Jason Hirthler / June 29th, 2014
If you’ve been reading the financial news lately, you may have noticed that two much-celebrated summits have taken place on either side of the Atlantic. A California conference organized by the Koch brothers was held in the secured enclave of St. Regis Monarch Bay luxury resort. The conference was called, “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” featured a half-dozen Congressmen and an overtly political agenda, namely taking Congress for the right and stonewalling another Clinton presidency. One comical session was entitled, “Over-Criminalization: Removing Legal Barriers to Opportunity.” One doubts this was about the numberless minorities collared in …
by Paul Craig Roberts / June 28th, 2014
The Cold War made a lot of money for the military/security complex for four decades dating from Churchill’s March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri declaring a Soviet “Iron Curtain” until Reagan and Gorbachev ended the Cold War in the late 1980s. During the Cold War Americans heard endlessly about “the Captive Nations.” The Captive Nations were the Baltics and the Soviet bloc, usually summarized as “Eastern Europe.”
These nations were captive because their foreign policies were dictated by Moscow, just as these same Captive Nations, plus the UK, Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 28th, 2014
by Adam Engel / June 28th, 2014
That was it? I know I got in for free, but…
by Frank Scott / June 27th, 2014
Modern marketing changes language and machinery but not its material foundation, which existed long before the industrial age. An allegedly “new” economy of information technology (IT) is just an update with different jargon and tools but the profit and loss substance remain exactly what they’ve always been: great for some, nice for many, and terrible for the earth and most of its people.
Consuming at the market is the same whether walking, riding a horse or driving a car to get there, ordering on a phone or tapping a keyboard. Fewer and cheaper workers result in more profits from new forms …
by Walter C. Uhler / June 27th, 2014
During the early 1950s American warplanes dropped some 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea. In April 1961, the U.S. bombed targets in Cuba. During the 1960s and early 1970s the U.S. devastated Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with approximately 6,000,000 tons of bombs.
In December 1983, America bombed Beirut in response to terrorist attacks there that killed 299 American and French soldiers. To demonstrate America’s strength and resolve in the wake of the Beirut bombings, President Reagan ordered U.S. forces to invaded tiny Grenada. The U.S. dropped yet more bombs, including one that killed at least a dozen people in a hospital. …
by Scott Campbell / June 27th, 2014
Surveillance. It’s in the headlines and on the tips of tongues. As technology offers new possibilities for connection, it also offers new means to keep tabs on people. Surveillance has become seemingly ubiquitous, from the NSA reading emails to drones in the skies. As a nation that has for 66 years been ruling over an indigenous population by force, one of the main countries practicing surveillance is Israel. And it is the Israeli defense industry that has been reaping the profits off of the oppression and surveillance of the Palestinian people.
One of the top occupation profiteers in Israel is the …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 27th, 2014
Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple – get a warrant.
— Chief Justice John Roberts in Riley v California (US Supreme Court, June 2014).
The US Supreme Court has not been the most enlightened body when considering the rights and liberties of citizens in the digital age. Its Wednesday ruling in Riley v California and United States v Wurie bucked the trend, doing a good deal of dabbling with digital rights in a ruling that police must obtain a warrant in searching a suspect’s cell phone. …
by Mateo Pimentel / June 27th, 2014
The US does not celebrate or even welcome the independence of other nations; it only countenances servitude. Indeed, the nation that wins its sovereignty—only to prostitute its resources for the sake of American empire—is the nation that gets the green light from Washington. Yet, if America does not receive a warm, economic, post-independence welcome, its war hawks invariably circle. Sometimes they circle anyway! Then bombs drop. Or, embargos facilitate economic terrorism. Pick a country, any country. This blueprint gets redrawn everywhere, and this is precisely the protocol, the behavioral norm, for maintaining global hegemony 90 miles off the coast of …
