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Early in my progressive activist/organizer life, begun in 1968, I was a big believer in the need for a “third party.” A primary reason was the prosecution of the Vietnam War by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. As I studied in college in 1967 about the history of that war, I learned that the USA had taken over from France the role of imperialist colonizer in the mid-50’s after the French were defeated by the Vietnamese independence forces.

US imperialism in Vietnam was not benign. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese by 1968 had been killed as the US supported a series of …

Twice in the last year, Israel and its Big Brother have started a war to crush Iran. Without success. But if at first you don’t succeed… So Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still trying to sell the leader of the dwindling superpower on the idea of destroying Iran.

Netanyahu is obsessed, because — in his view — Iran is the only sworn enemy of Israel that is powerful enough to prevent his aim of complete domination in West Asia. The destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria were stepping stones on the path to his vision, but he calculates that only …

Leaders to See the Mirror

History exists on facts of life and shallowness of a nation’s history are the inept and egoistic leaders. In wars, logic fails to define foes and friends. India and Pakistan have an enriched history to blame games for their failure to preserve freedom, security and the ideological foundation of their existence.

Insecurity and injustice stem from corruption and failed political leadership. India opted for institutional development to avoid military interventions, Pakistanis got derailed for change and national development by continuous military coups and foreign alliance to maintain its survival. British colonialism lasting a few centuries divided and …

On February 11,1990, Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison in South Africa after having been incarcerated for twenty-seven years.

On that same day I was trying, not very successfully, to recover from a slew of personal hardships. My partner had died, too young, not long before. After nursing him over four painful years, I fell into incapacity myself, utterly drained and dispirited. My relatively privileged North American life had not well prepared me—by my mid-twenties– for oncology wards and hospice care. The aftermath of his illness left me seeing life …

The Middle East stands at a crossroads between endless war and comprehensive peace. A framework for peace does exist. Will the US finally seize it?

History occasionally presents moments when the truth about a conflict is stated plainly enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s February 7 address in Doha, Qatar (transcript here) should prove to be such a moment. His important and constructive remarks responded to the US call for comprehensive negotiations, and he laid out a sound proposal for peace across the Middle East.

Last …

A carpenter does not craft chairs only to hide them under a bed. A tailor does not sew garments just to store them away. So, then—does America manufacture military weapons and war machines only to keep them in the White House’s military depo ? No. They must be sold. And how? Through war. The more human blood spills like the Hudson River, the more the so‑called American Dream is realized. War fuels profit, and profit fuels power.

This is not metaphor. It is the economic theology of the United States.

For decades, America has perfected a system in which the suffering of distant …

Born in South Africa just a few years after the end of World War II and reared by activists in the anti-apartheid movement, I witnessed my parents’ struggle against fascism and its accompanying racism in both my country of birth and Europe. This created in me a sense of the fragility of democracy and fear of losing civil rights and collective values. The wave of brutal ICE raids and the Trump administration’s assault on political and legal norms prove this fear well-founded.

At the age of five, my father told me, “We fought fascism in Europe and then came home to …

“Zionist Imperial Mafia” — Antisemitic? Nah.

Nah,  it is NOT so-called, “antisemitic” (antispetic?) to point things out, man oh man.

Sam Altman, who has been awarded a one-year military contract worth $200 million from the Trump administration, has invested in technology to allow parents to gene edit their children before conception to produce “designer babies.”

Epstein, anyone?

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s teen accusers alleged she was used as a “human incubator” to have the late pedophile’s baby — and the newborn was …

We are at a crossroads of civilization, facing contradictions that cannot be solved by the same logic that created them. We are attempting to answer the future of humanity with a mindset inherited from the past.

“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” — John Lennon

We live in the most materialistic epoch in history. Everything revolves around production—the making of objects. Factories, warehouses, housing developments, cars, films, videos, data centers. Even churches are increasingly objectified: they manufacture faith. Schools become factories for tomorrow’s workers and their bosses.

Political parties have become the marketing arm of these materialist structures. …

Imagine telling someone who has experienced the most apocalyptic conditions known to man to give their perpetrators a “chance.” That’s exactly what it felt like when I opened my phone the other day and saw headlines from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal talking about Trump’s sham “Board of Peace,” which is supposed to govern Gaza.

Not only is it tone deaf, but it’s also downright racist. Palestinians have spent decades being strung along like puppets, being told what’s going to happen to our land instead of letting us have it. We have been raped, maimed, starved, displaced, imprisoned, tortured, …

Recognizing that some parents investigate charter schools before approaching them, while many others do not, charter school advocates have long sought to attract parents and students by aggressively promoting themselves as innovative and creative in curriculum, instruction, methods, and pedagogy.

Indeed, many deregulated charter schools claim to operate according to a distinctive pedagogy intended to appeal to those interested in it. Thus, there exist privately operated charter schools that focus primarily on music and art, science and technology, military training, agriculture and farming, college preparation, and more.

Charter school proponents claim that this educational innovation and experimentation are possible due to the …

Normally, when one develops all the symptoms of a disease, the response ought not to be exacerbating the disease, but seeking to cure it. Approaches to healthcare in the United States have gone off the rails, of course, but think about the disease of military spending.

What are some of the symptoms we’ve suffered recently? Wars, bombings, threats of wars, kidnappings of foreign presidents, arming of distant genocides, attempts to take over or control various countries, hatred, resentment, terrorism, wounded veterans, militarized police, militarized culture, militarized borders, militarized occupations …

Writing an article that references the murders of innocent people is difficult. Concerns of invading privacy, of not being sufficiently empathetic to the tragedy, and of clumsily using the deceased for undeserved purposes hampers the narrative. By treading softly and expounding sincerely, the screams of anguish heard at the Bondi Beach massacre diminish, the reverberations to its aftermath increase, and the aftermath emerges as a turning point in history.

Bondi Beach is not new to the American public. Bondi Rescue, an Australian television program, which follows the daily lives and routines of the professional lifeguards who patrol Bondi Beach, has been …

Why are we experiencing a period  of such crisis in international relations in Britain, Europe, the Americas and across the world?

So many responses to this question fail to locate it in what the international communist movement has long called the “general crisis of capitalism.”

At its base, capitalism cannot resolve the cyclical and structural crises that produce instability, shocks, slowdowns, recessions and slumps. As a system of class exploitation reinforced by oppression, it generates inequality and social crisis which, likewise, cannot be fully and permanently abolished without abolishing capitalism itself.

The march of the monopoly corporations to dominate economic and political life …

We used to have legions. Now we have the military-industrial complex.

We don’t really see war anymore; not up close. It happens thousands of miles away, outsourced, managed. An all-volunteer army made up of farm kids, inner-city kids, a lot of Hispanics. Plenty of them did the math on tuition and decided this was the fastest way.

Disease doesn’t move through towns the way it used to, at least not here. My aunt goes home from the hospital always exhausted, talks about infections that don’t respond the way they’re supposed to.

Food is strange now. There’s always plenty of it, but the prices …