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by Ralph Nader / August 2nd, 2014
Dear President Obama:
Abraham Lincoln once said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Presumably, he meant Presidential action on popular issues can and should overcome influential interests.
At long last, the “public sentiment” seems to be aligning with some causes you are advancing.
First, support is increasing for restoring the federal minimum wage to account for the inflation that, since 1968, has greatly diminished its purchasing power. The federal minimum wage is presently stagnant at $7.25 per hour. You are supporting the Harkin-Miller bill (H.R.1010 and S.2223), which would raise it to $10.10 per hour over three …
While the Deep State and Its Lies Unwind Democracy
by William A. Blunden / August 1st, 2014
One evening over drinks in Ethiopia, during his tour as a CIA officer back in the 1960s, John Stockwell expressed reservations about covert operations to a senior fellow officer named Larry Devlin. Stockwell worried that the CIA was infiltrating governments and corrupting leaders to no useful end. Devlin, well-known in spy circles for his work in the Congo, berated Stockwell: ((John Stockwell, THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: part I, lecture given in October, 1987))
You’re trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what’s going on in the …
by Anis Hamadeh / August 1st, 2014
The researcher Alice Miller became worldwide known because of her investigations of childhood traumas. A dozen of her books is translated into thirty languages. Miller shows the mechanisms, with which victims can turn to perpetrators, and she shows the ubiquity, even the inevitability of this danger. The big hits the small who in turn will transmit it to their own children if the circle does not get interrupted. Miller (a Jewish victim herself) also examined the Nazi generation in Germany in order to understand how Germany could develop such a genocidal racism. Today, Miller’s findings are standard knowledge, and nobody …
by Peter Breschard / August 1st, 2014
Imagine owning warehouses full of second rate bootleg hooch at the very moment Prohibition is repealed.
Imagine still owning a buggy whip factory.
Imagine possessing billions of gallons of oil, just as renewable energy sources begin chopping major chunks out of your market share. Watching as the worth of your reserves decreases day after day after day.
With every advance by alternative energy industries, the potential price of the world’s oil reserves decreases.
Today, 30% of Germany’s electric power is being produced by alternative sources. How do Germany’s new power producers effect the value of known oil reserves? Replacing …
by Denis Rancourt / August 1st, 2014
Several misguided commentators have advanced that Canada’s unconditional support for Israel is the result of Christian Zionist ideology.
This is flat wrong, and inexcusably naive. Harper’s unconditional support for Israel is not from right-wing or religious ideology. Nor is this the case in the US itself.
Canada’s unconditional support for Israel started under former-Prime-Minister Paul Martin after he took over (and destroyed) the Liberal Party of Canada. And the take-over was one additional step from some degree of Canadian sovereignty to complete alignment with the US master.
That Canada has become a vassal to the US Empire — and subservient to the Empire’s …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 1st, 2014
Can’t be stopped. Won’t be stopped. Shall not be encumbered along the path toward transcendent evolutionary enlightenment.
Nothing can slow down the steamboat intensity of a reckless abandon once all the marbles have been intricately placed in the same basket alongside a nest full of painted eggs. Baker’s dozen. Scrambled to perfection. Who’s to say it’s reckless anyway? What judge would dare make such a presumptuously preposterous proclamation? There could be no worthier aspiration than to seek the most highly elevated levels …
by Mateo Pimentel / August 1st, 2014
Two short weeks ago, art students from an Offenbach university located in the heart of Germany occupied every floor of a closed-down, multi-tier soap factory building. They used the space to excitedly display their art to the public. Considered by a few of these students to be the ‘Detroit’ of Germany, Offenbach itself is situated on the outskirts of Frankfurt—the German banking city responsible for maintaining most of Germany’s wealth. Many of the young artists signaled nearby Frankfurt as the undeniable European economic hub, while at the same time poking fun at the poorer economic status of Offenbach in particular. …
by Jonathan Cook / August 1st, 2014
Today’s Guardian includes an article that appears to be excusing Israel of responsibility for the massive death toll it has inflicted on Palestinian civilians. But, more significantly, it includes a lot of useful – and damning – information about just how “indiscriminate” Israel’s weapons really are.
This interests me a great deal because I have been warning about problems with the interpretation of international law used by leading human rights groups on this very point since the 2006 Lebanon War.
At that time I got into a dispute with Human Rights Watch’s Middle East policy director, Sarah Leah Whitson. Her organisation …
by William James Martin / August 1st, 2014
It is important to understand the genesis of the present round of violence between Israel and Hamas, really between Israel and the people of Gaza.
Both President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and the American news media have consistently described the conflict as Israel justifiably responding to the firing or rockets into Israel by Hamas and protecting their citizens, as if world history only began at this moment and that prior context did not exists.
More thoughtful and better informed observers than Obama and Kerry have more correctly noted that the present waves of Hamas rockets was preceded by a sequence of events which …
by William Hanna / August 1st, 2014
Differentiating between Zionism and Judaism requires recognition of certain basic facts. To begin with, Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism) was an atheist whose personal awareness of Jewishness appears to have been awakened during the 1894 trial, wrongful conviction, and imprisonment on Devil’s Island of Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent accused of spying for Germany. In his diaries, Herzl makes no secret of his intention to use Jewish suffering as a means of furthering Zionist ideology. His vision for a Jewish state had nothing to do with “ … I will also bring them back …
WikiLeaks, Corruption and the Super Injunction
by Binoy Kampmark / July 31st, 2014
With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public.
— Julian Assange, July 29, 2014
The Westminster system has always been seen, in some select circles, as a model for freedom and expression. It has been everything but. In Australia, whose institutions do still pride themselves on an antiquated obsession with aspects of English gagging, suppression orders do retain a certain mystique. They certainly do in the Australian state of Victoria, which is said to throw “suppression orders around like confetti”.
The absurdity of its application has …
by William Manson / July 31st, 2014
Ordinarily, I completely ignore contemporary U.S. movies—which manage, from year-to-year, to attain new lows of infantilism, incoherent nihilism, and sheer vapidity (cf. my previous article “Reviving Radical Populism in Films”). Yet lately, I found myself disturbed by the uniformly ecstatic reviews of Linklater’s latest film, Boyhood. The premise of the film seems boring enough, unexceptional, barely even a “concept”: every year the cast and director got together, made up a “script” as they went along, and traced a boy’s growing-up, from ages 6 to 18.
Morbidly curious, I forced myself to watch the usual clips available on Youtube, etc.; and …
by Frank Scott / July 31st, 2014
For a shamefully bloody example of how little single issue identity politics can mean, check out the unity of supporters and opponents of same sex marriage, supporters and opponents of abortion, and supporters and opponents of every other divisive issue clouding the minds of a population kept from acting as a democratic majority, we need look no further than the disgrace of this government’s congress voting to approve and finance the current Israeli slaughter in Gaza.
Note that all our taxes, without exception for straight, gay, people of color, people of no color, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Baptists, agnostics, atheists and those …
...while the global community gives Israel all the elbow-room it needs to crush Gaza and its 'nuisance' inhabitants permanently
by Stuart Littlewood / July 31st, 2014
As Gaza and its lovely people were being blown to smithereens by Israel’s state-of-the-art weaponry, paid for by the grotesquely unlovely US administration, I put what I thought was a simple enough question to Dr Hanan Ashrawi on Palestine’s accession to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court (ICC) after her remarks in this TV interview.
Ashrawi is an executive member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), head of information and culture, and a wonderfully articulate ambassador for the Palestinian cause. From what she was saying, only the decision to accede to the Statute had been made so far, …
by Jonathan Cook / July 31st, 2014
Israel’s effective loss of its only international airport for a couple of days last week—and the cloud of uncertainty that continues to hang over its operation in the future—has deeply unsettled Israelis.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banned American carriers from flying to Israel, a move soon followed by many European airlines, after a rocket from Gaza landed close to Ben Gurion airport, near Tel Aviv, on July 22. The FAA and the airlines seemed especially jittery after the downing of a Malaysian passenger jet over war-torn Ukraine a few days earlier, killing 298.
The suspension of flights was overturned barely …
Pipe Dream, Meet Fool’s Errand
by Robert S. Becker / July 31st, 2014
As left and right partisans fold Chicken Little into the Boy Who Cried Wolf, high time to label our latest national derangement: Impeachment Addiction Affliction. One day militant Tea Partiers sound the alarm, capping off laughable threats to “sue the White House” with the primal scream, “impeach the anti-American devil president.” Next day contrite House leadership demurs, “No, no, not on the agenda,” sweeping “off the table” a true nuclear option. Yet, weeks later, rising like an untreated infection, the House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise (R-La.), bluntly refuses to take “off the table” the time-bomb his own party denies …
by Paul Haeder / July 31st, 2014
Drinking Soda Stream and Eating Kosher While Bombs Belly-up Kids, Women, Grandparents, and UN Workers and Journalists
So you get free tuition, Tel Aviv U, if you have your child-woman-old man murder passport stamped by IDF, JDL, Israel star of David Mafioso clearly inked blue and white and Nazi-all-over-again!
Really, these Jewish thugs, these immoral thieves, give the punks of SWAT and Airborne and Drone killing free books, tuition and soda-stream for a year, after joy-sticking and white phosphorus-ing people who their ancestors thugged and murdered into submission, to a point.
Nadim Nashif, the director of Baladna – the Association for Arab …
by Anthony Lawson / July 31st, 2014
The blood of the thousands of Palestinians who have been killed by the so-called Israel Defence Forces since the beginning of the siege of Gaza, stains the hands of each and every politician who has done nothing to censure Israel for this cruel and illegal act of virtual imprisonment, or who has taken any kind of bribe to bolster his or her election-campaign coffers, in return for turning their backs on the quite obvious fact that Apartheid Israel has never had any intention other than to genocide the Palestinian people.
http://youtu.be/hSPAm-ZWBAQ
Pay No Attention to That Man Behind The Curtain
by William A. Blunden / July 30th, 2014
A few days back the Economist published an essay which dismissed the idea of fascists in Kiev as an illusory product of Russian propaganda. This is a narrative which the editors at the Economist have put forth on a number of occasions. Of course, they’re not alone. A less flagrant article published by the New York Times editorial board used a weird double negative to assert that “Russian leaders prefer not to accept that the C.I.A. did not engineer the preference of many Ukrainians for what they see in the West.”
All the world’s a stage wrote Shakespeare. Are readers supposed …
by Kathy Kelly / July 30th, 2014
Kabul — Last week, here in Kabul, the Afghan Peace Volunteers welcomed activist Carmen Trotta, from New York, who has lived in close community with impoverished people in his city for the past 25 years, serving meals, sharing housing, and offering hospitality to the best of his ability. Put simply and in its own words, his community, founded by Dorothy Day, exists to practice “the works of mercy” and to “end the works of war.” We wanted to hear Carmen’s first impressions of traveling the streets of Kabul on his way from the airport to the working class neighborhood where he’ll be …
by Yves Engler / July 30th, 2014
From a left-wing community once at the forefront of struggles against racism, unconditional support for Israel has turned a significant proportion of Toronto Jews into promoters of hatred against “Arabs” and into allies of right wing, bigoted, homophobic Christian Bible literalists.
During 15 years of activism in Montréal, Ottawa and Vancouver I haven’t seen anything equivalent to the racist, militarist pro-Israel movement experienced recently in Toronto. And sadly the quasi-fascistic organization driving the charge seems increasingly enmeshed within a community that once led the fight against racism and fascism in the city.
On Saturday at Queen’s Park (the grounds of the Ontario …
by Adam Engel / July 30th, 2014
…or so said The Phantom of /dev/null before he hit the road. Didn’t say where he was going. Just mumbled something about not being able to obtain a Visa. Something about his Birth Certificate having been invalidated by his Death Certificate or some such bureaucratic nonsense.
/dev/null is in the process of being gentrified. Everyone split. No one around but Raghead (wisely posting from an ‘undisclosed location;’ then again, he’s a professional…).
Well, only a matter of time before the Hipsters, so-called, occupy /dev/null upon college graduation to pursue their musical careers — after …
by Gilad Atzmon / July 30th, 2014
IDF’s colossal defeat in Gaza this week leaves Israel and Israelis with just three political and personal options:
1. Mass expulsion – ethnic cleansing of the entire Palestinian population from territories controlled by Israel. Such action may sound unreasonable or even phantasmic, but it is actually consistent with Zionist ideology and has many supporters within Israel and within the current Israeli cabinet. Moreover, oppression and brutality are embedded within Jewish political culture and even within the culture of the Jewish Left. ((It was Stalin’s ‘willing executioners’ who wiped out millions of Ukrainians in the name …
by Ramzy Baroud / July 30th, 2014
To some, US secretary of state John Kerry may have appeared to be a genuine peacemaker as he floated around ideas during a Cairo visit on 25 July about a ceasefire between Israel and resisting Palestinian fighters in Gaza. But behind his measured diplomatic language, there is a truth not even America’s top diplomat can easily hide. His country is very much involved in fighting this dirty war on Gaza that has killed over 1,050, injured thousands more, and destroyed much of an already poor, dilapidated space that is barely inhabitable to begin with.
US economic and military aid …
The Moral Failure Of The West
by Paul Craig Roberts / July 29th, 2014
Readers are asking for my take on the Israel-Gaza situation, and, believe it or not, Oxford University’s famous debating society, the Oxford Union, invited me to debate the issue.
I replied to the Oxford Union that I was unprepared to take responsibility for the Palestinians without undergoing the extensive preparation that an Oxford Union debate deserves and requires. Unless things have changed since my time at Oxford, one prevails in a Union debate by anticipating every argument of one’s opponent and smashing the arguments with humor and wit. Facts seldom, if ever, carry the day, and sometimes not even wit and …
by Kim Petersen / July 29th, 2014
by Roger Tucker / July 29th, 2014
It is only right and fitting that a proper response be made to the OpEd written by Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, and head of the Manhigut Yehudit (“Jewish Leadership”) faction of Israel’s governing Likud party, entitled “My Outline for a Solution in Gaza” and published in Arutz Sheva on July 15th, 2014.
1. An international commission should be established to bring Israel and its supporters to account for its ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, dating back to the first terrorist attacks on Palestinian and British targets in Palestine by the Irgun and other Jewish terrorist organizations …
by Jonathan Cook / July 29th, 2014
I really wonder what it says about the Guardian or its readers that it publishes an article like this one by Yuli Novak, a former Israeli air force officer. The discourse, even on the left, is still so degraded on the issue of Israel-Palestine that this seems to pass for progressive thought.
I am also appalled that I almost find myself pleased that this former soldier, an insider, is telling us that Israel is acting immorally in its current attack on Gaza. But in doing so she bolsters a patently ridiculous mythology that, for most of its history, Israel had a moral army – the …
An interview with Nicolas Krameyer of Amnesty International France
by Angola 3 News / July 29th, 2014
Amnesty International France and La Boîte à Bulles have published a 128-page French language graphic novel entitled Panthers in the Hole. The book’s co-authors David Cénou and Bruno Cénou present with visual art what Amnesty France describes as “la tragique histoire des Trois d’Angola” (the tragic story of the Angola 3).
Robert H. King, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox are the trio of Black Panther political prisoners known collectively as the Angola 3. On October 1, 2013 Herman Wallace was dramatically released from prison after 41 years in solitary confinement. At the time of his release, he had …
In the mainstream media, silence
by Kate Bond / July 28th, 2014
Most people know Geneva as the hub of the UN. Slick and cosmopolitan, it is Switzerland’s second most populous city, with a population of 200,000 and a patchwork of nationalities. A massive forty per cent of its inhabitants are foreigners. Understandably, given its central role in international affairs, it is no stranger to the world stage, but on Saturday you’d have been forgiven for overlooking it. Why? Because, like millions, Genevans turned out in their thousands to condemn Israel’s attacks on Gaza and the mainstream media ignored them.
I came across the protest by accident as I made my way home. …
