Latest articles
by Ron Jacobs / August 16th, 2014
What is clear about the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is that the cop murdered Michael Brown pretty much in cold blood. What is also clear is that if Michael Brown was a suspect in this shoplifting case and regular procedures were followed, then he should have been arrested and gone to court. What is less clear is whether or not this killer cop will ever see justice. Indeed, whether he will even go to court. I bet many people reading this have shoplifted. I bet some have even been arrested for shoplifting. …
by Gary G. Kohls / August 16th, 2014
The Big Oil cartels have, for decades, been poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf and many other ocean floors with millions of gallons of toxic crude oil via their risky, and very leaky deep water oil wells. It wasn’t just the crime against the planet that British Petroleum and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton perpetrated in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. There are many other things that have contributed to the mortal wounding of the Gulf. A good example of the damage done to the Gulf by corporate entities includes the Mississippi River delta’s massive dead zone that has …
How liberal media shape reality to fit a preferred narrative
by Jason Hirthler / August 15th, 2014
Few groups can massage a dubious forecast into a decidedly optimistic one more readily than liberal Democrats, whose role in the American doctrinal system is to play the lesser of two dire and terminal evils. This banal, tepid, pulseless kind of faux-activism is perfectly suited to the habitués of this giant demographic, many of who exhausted their political passions cheering civil rights and picketing Vietnam in the Sixties. But they inhabit a curious and inviting place along the register of U.S. politics. Liberals know they will always be marginally better than the Republican right, which is caught in a nasty, …
by Walter Brasch / August 15th, 2014
The House Select Committee on Intelligence, following almost a two-year intense investigation, unanimously determined there is no basis for what has become known as the Benghazi Scandal.
The Committee consists of 12 Republicans and 9 Democrats.
The pretend-scandal began Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorists raided the U.S. consulate, and killed the ambassador and three others.
Although there was confusion, and the Obama administration didn’t have all the facts when it began to inform the American people about the events and the causes, there was no evidence of anything even remotely linked to a scandal. However, as expected, the blathering mouths …
If Shoe Were on the Other Foot
by Rick Sterling / August 15th, 2014
The Palestinian enclave known as Gaza is approximately 25 miles long by 5 miles wide. It is about the same area as the East Bay from Oakland in the north to Fremont in the south. To the west is open water; to the east are the hills (heavily-reinforced razor wire fence for Gaza).
What would life be like if the East Bay of San Francisco was Gaza?
Imagine that is where you were born, where you will spend all your years, where you will die. Your world will be confined to that narrow …
Forgetting Cypherpunk History
by William A. Blunden / August 15th, 2014
Ed Snowden recently gave fellow NSA whistleblower James Bamford an “extended cut” interview in Moscow. ((Jame Bamford, “The Most Wanted Man In The World,” Wired, August 13, 2014.)) While Snowden offered up a few morsels of headline-worthy information, like how he purposefully left forensic artifacts for investigators or details on the NSA’s automated cyber-attack system called MonsterMind, Bamford’s piece ends with Snowden describing what he views as the answer to the NSA’s global surveillance program:
We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes… By basically …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 15th, 2014
Two hundred pounds dropped from the artillery plane. A beast of a bomb calcified in the heart with naught but devastation roaring through its ugly mind. Nuclear holocaust teetering on the brink of apocalypse in the form of a hair point trigger. Too many maniacs with itchy fingers. Sweaty palms and ravaged agendas. Ready and overly willing to release the poisonous payload. How soon before it smashes? How many will be left standing? Mutation city. Radiation break away. Don’t take the candy when the stranger offers a sweet taste of …
by William Manson / August 14th, 2014
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?
— Macbeth
I heard an odd story the other day. It’s about a man down in Texas, and I’d like to share it with you. It seems this fellow is retired, not very active, and was looking for a hobby to pass the time. After a day spent pondering the sun-drenched, desolate landscape around him, he found that he enjoyed relaxing in a hot bath. And, as he reclined soaking, he developed the habit of scribbling on a sketchpad, making drawings of his legs and feet and so forth. He …
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 …
