There is no question that over the past decade and a half, Europe, the US, and Israel have engaged in a series of bloody wars, inequalities have increased throughout the globe, economic crisis has become endemic and, more recently, right-wing military and civilian regimes have swept to power throughout Asia, North Africa, Europe and Canada.
Yet, despite this generally gloomy picture, important positive developments have emerged raising the possibility of fundamental changes to reverse the current reactionary wave. I will proceed by outlining these positive developments, taking account …
In a recent article, “On Israel-Palestine and BDS,” renowned anarchist professor Noam Chomsky describes the misery caused by Israel’s actions in the Occupied Territories. He says “the United States should also be condemned and punished for providing the decisive military, economic, diplomatic and even ideological support for these crimes. So long as it continues to do so, there is little reason to expect Israel to relent in its brutal policies.”
Yes, the US is the preponderant enabler of Zionist slow-motion genocide, oppression, and dispossession. However, the US is not to be condemned alone for supporting Israel. Canada, among other …
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1935
I always have contradictory feelings about July 4th. On the one hand, it is the day that the 1776 Declaration of Independence was issued, an essentially anti-colonial call to action against the British Empire. It is a revolutionary …
Recently, Kyrgyzstan commemorated the fourth anniversary of the violence that shook its southern part back in 2010. Back then, over 100,000 Uzbeks had to leave Kyrgyzstan and seek refuge in Uzbekistan in the aftermath of the riots.
It all started as a simple brawl between groups of Kyrgyz and Uzbek youngsters in a casino in the city of Osh. Shortly thereafter, it took the form of a full-fledged ethnic violence. A lot many issues were highlighted by the incidents of 2010: Kyrgyzstan’s ever-subtle struggle for power and resources between the elites of Bishkek and their southern counterparts from Osh and …
Given how a new breed of corporate elites are dictating our lives, I think it is appropriate to gauge which forces act as the most effective agents of these overlords, and what relief we might find, and when.
Since agents at the state levels hold sway only over chunks of territory – though banded together they dictate terms in almost half the states, we’ll confine our attention to actions or inaction that affect the whole country. Tossing aside media sources which attack whole segments of our population, albeit indirectly through our President and Democrats, like Fox News, hate radio, and pseudo-neutral …
A few days ago, I published a comment on Dr Ilan Pappe’s performance on BBC Hardtalk. In my comment, I argued that Pappe’s struggle to make his point was not because of his opponent’s bulldozer tactics and certainly not because Dr Pappe’s lacked either scholarship or courage but simply because Ilan Pappe, in his desperation to conceal Jewish shame, is completely and utterly unable to utter the J word. In effect, this means that he was unable to give voice to the blatantly obvious fact that Israeli barbarism is, unfortunately, totally consistent with a certain yet common interpretations of …
In the United States “capitalism” is often equated with “Americanism,” so that to criticize capitalism is to be unpatriotic. One suspects that such an attitude has not arisen “naturally” but, rather, has become widespread as a result of promotional efforts by those having a vested interest in the status quo—a consequence of such promotion being that even many of those not having such a vested interest have become staunch supporters of capitalism. The fact that so many have an almost “religious” commitment to capitalism means, of course, not only that (a) few are brave enough to offer negative comments regarding …
Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic: The rights and freedoms that we celebrate on the Fourth of July are the product of vast human struggle that remains unfinished
One $100 million Air Force plane leaks oil, another bursts into flame
Troubles never seem to end for the F-35 Strike Fighter. Not yet fully operational, the nuclear-capable fighter-bomber recently had different test versions either leak oil in flight or burst into flames on takeoff.
The F-35 is the world’s most expensive weapons system – $400 billion and counting. The estimated lifetime cost of this military-industrial project is $1.5 trillion. The F-35 is already close to a decade behind schedule and its cost is already more than twice the original estimate. The Pentagon has lowered its performance specs and it’s still years from …
On BBC’s news program Hardtalk, historian Dr Ilan Pappe answers questions from interviewer Stephen Sackur which begins with Mr Sackur describing Ilan Pappe as maintaining that the Jewish state is racist, born of a deliberate program of ethnic cleansing.
This very interesting discussion, which takes the form of an adversarial debate.
In response, Mr Gilad Atzmon, author of the book, The Wandering Who, has the following to say:
the history professor is afraid to utter the ‘J word’ [implying cowardice], he fails to analyze Zionism and Israeli’s action within the appropriate ideological, historical and cultural context and he refuses to question …
Since 2011, from the Arab Spring and Spanish Revolution to Occupy, waves of global uprisings have been erupting as never before. The crisis of representation helped spawn decentralized movements as a manifestation of people’s aspiration to take the reins of their own destinies. For many, the presumption of legitimacy of their governments has been crumbling. What triggered this widespread global crisis?
Journalist Phillip Dorling traced the impulse behind the Occupy movement back to the release of the U.S. Army helicopter gunship Collateral Murder video and noted how it was strongly based on the work of the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Amnesty International pointed to the role …
Phoenix was far worse than the things attributed to it.
— Ed Murphy, former member of the Phoenix program
There’s a reason the CIA wanted to prevent the publication of Douglas Valentine’s 1986 book, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam. This masterwork is more than an exposé of the US pacification program in Vietnam the book is titled after. It is an indictment of a cynical and bloody plan to kill Vietnamese. In his book The Family Jewels, author John Prado wrote, “When a (CIA) Publications Review Board lawyer checked to see whether Phoenix was …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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; …
Chua paints a very favorable picture of the Chinese Communist party. Certainly I have noticed great development having taken place in China since I first was there in 2002. It is my anecdotal experience that there is at least mild discontent among ordinary Chinese people toward the Communist Party, contrary to polls cited …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
