Latest articles
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 …
by Judith Bello / June 27th, 2014
Earlier this month, I traveled with seven other westerners to Syria where we joined with thirty plus activists, journalists and politicians from Asia, Africa and South America to observe the Syria Presidential election. Bashar. Assad won 88% of the vote. Though some people in opposition areas boycotted the election, and others could not get to a polling station, 73% of the entire population of Syria eligible to vote did vote. The 73% turnout was more significant than the votes for Assad. I had heard a detailed report back from the electoral commission, and spent voting day touring …
by Jan Oberg / June 27th, 2014
Both NATO and the EU has just announced that their members will now invest more in the military. It’s indicative of the lack of creativity in both organisations. It is self-defeating and counter-productive.
But have you seen it put on top of any agenda and debated? You haven’t, it is so normal – and the argument is that we are threatened. That’s called fearology: Making tax payers pay even more by making them scared.
The military sector is a parasite on society
The military sector produces much less employment than the civilian per invested dollar. It’s a huge burden on the economy because …
by Uri Avnery / June 27th, 2014
One side’s terrorists are the other side’s freedom fighters. That is not simply a matter of terminology. It is a difference of perception, which has far-reaching practical consequences.
Take prisoners, for example.
For the freedom fighter, achieving the release of imprisoned comrades is a sacred duty, for which he is ready to sacrifice his life. One of the most daring exploits of the Irgun underground (of which I was for a time a very junior member) was to attack in force the British prison in the Crusader’s castle in Acre and release hundreds of prisoners. For our colonial masters, this was considered …
by Graham Peebles / June 26th, 2014
The mode of contemporary living is in many ways dysfunctional. There are the obvious and painful daily signs that affirm this: the thirteen or so wars taking place; the fact that half the world’s population live impoverished lives on less than $2 a day, 80% on under $10 a day. Most of us live with financial anxiety and job uncertainty; 22,000 children die every day of poverty related illnesses; 900,000 people in desperation commit suicide every year and 360 million people are known to be suffering from depression (more in acutely materialistic countries – average 20% in America for example), …
The Most Important Debate of Our Time?
by Adam W. Parsons / June 26th, 2014
The implications of moving towards a global sharing economy are immense, but there are many reasons to embrace this simple concept – which is far more radical and urgent than it may at first seem. As a primer from STWR makes clear, the necessity of sharing the world’s resources is central to the most critical issues that face humanity in the 21st century.
Almost everywhere we look, there is an emerging debate on the importance of sharing in relation to the grave challenges of our time. This conversation is most apparent in the sharing economy movement that has now taken the …
Part 2: Inequality, Injustice, and the Coming Unrest
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / June 26th, 2014
In Part 1 of the World of Resistance (WoR) Report, I examined today’s global order – or disorder – through the eyes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National Security Adviser and long-time influential figure in foreign policy circles. Brzezinski articulated what he refers to as humanity’s “global political awakening,” spurred by access to education, technology and communications among much of the world’s population.
Brzezinski has written and spoken extensively to elites at American and Western think tanks and journals, warning that this awakening poses the “central challenge” for the U.S. and other powerful countries, explaining that “most people know what …
by William Boardman / June 26th, 2014
Only the Americans can help the Iraqis….
– Paul Bremer, June 16, 2014
Really?
Really?!
That sounds like American exceptionalism in its pathological form. That’s largely because it IS American exceptionalism in its most arrogant pathological form.
Remember Paul Bremer, 73, the Bush family caporegime who was the occupastion’s Presidential Envoy to Iraq? He was the American Saddam Hussein in 2003 when he had near-dictatorial power and thought it would be a good idea to get rid of virtually every experienced Sunni military officer and every high-ranking Sunni government official so that, as President Bush put it over and over, “as the Iraqis stand …
by James McEnteer / June 25th, 2014
Once upon a time, Hillary Rodham, the 1969 Wellesley valedictorian, studied the organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky and backed Eugene McCarthy’s presidential run. At commencement, she spoke of a conservative strain in New Left protests that harked back to old values and ideals, and she dared to challenge the United States Senator who preceded her on the podium.
Were she still among us, that passionate young woman would surely oppose the nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) for the U.S. presidency.
The former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State no doubt concurs with the nineteenth century French politician who said (more …
Who is the "Angry Muslim" and Why
by Ramzy Baroud / June 25th, 2014
“Brother, brother,” a young man called on me as I hurriedly left a lecture hall in some community center in Durban, South Africa. This happened at the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when all efforts at stopping the ferocious US-western military drives against these two countries terribly failed.
The young man was dressed in traditional Afghani Pashtun attire, and accompanied by a friend of his. With palpable nervousness, he asked a question that seemed completely extraneous to my lecture on the use of people history to understand protracted historical phenomena using Palestine as a model.
“Brother, do you believe that …
by Mateo Pimentel / June 25th, 2014
José Martí, a Cuban poet and a revolutionary hero, once remarked how “the nation that buys, commands,” and “the nation that sells, serves.” Martí’s perspicacious observation holds especially true for oil-producing nations in Latin America today. Consumers in the United States constitute such an indispensible milieu for the consumption of international oil, and oil products, that competing in US markets seems a must for would-be suppliers. To that end, US consumption lends itself to private firms that largely dictate trade terms with developing world governments. Such dealings seldom benefit poor nations in earnest.
Regularly, the governments of Latin American nations that …
A Remedy for White Collar Crime?
by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall / June 24th, 2014
Another great thing about living in New Zealand is the ease of bringing a private prosecution against wealthy and powerful sociopaths that the police decline to prosecute. ((The New Zealand police, which are employed by central government, are responsible for prosecuting most lawbreakers)) A particular odious scumbag named John Banks recently resigned from Parliament after being found guilty of electoral fraud. As Commissioner of Police in the 1990s, Banks became extremely cozy with the New Zealand police when he helped cover up a series of gang rapes, by police officers, of women in their custody.
Thus in 2012, it was …
And the Soaring Costs of Military Casualties
by James Petras / June 24th, 2014
There are two major beneficiaries of the two major wars launched by the US government: one domestic and one foreign. The three major domestic arms manufacturers, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have delivered record-shattering returns to their investors, CEOs and investment banks during the past decade and a half. The Israeli regime is the overwhelming foreign beneficiary of the war, expanding its territory through its dispossession of Palestinians and positioning itself as the regional hegemon. Israel benefited from the US invasion which destroyed Iraq, a major ally of the Palestinians; the invasion provided cover for massive …
by Jonathan Cook / June 24th, 2014
For more than a month Israel sought to wriggle off a hook that should have snared it from the start. Two children, 17 and 16, were shot dead during Nakba Day protests near Ramallah, in which youths threw stones ineffectually at well-protected and distant Israeli military position.
Hundreds of Palestinian children have lost their lives over the years at the end of a sharpshooter’s sights, but the deaths of Nadim Nuwara and Mohammed Abu Al Thahir in Beitunia were not easily forgotten. Israel was quickly cornered by an accumulation of physical and visual evidence.
Israel’s usual denials – the deaths were faked, …
ISIS and the New History
by Binoy Kampmark / June 24th, 2014
Liam Fox, the former UK Secretary for Defence, is a dangerous man. Within his inchoate Tory babble lies an authoritarian message, one fuming with a distorting kind of madness. Like every authoritarian message, an enemy hewn from a quarry of decent reserves is required. The state is on guard, and her majesty’s government must be both aware and wary.
The latest, fashioned monster Fox has in mind is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a creature so specific to a particular political and religious context he should hardly be surprised. His ignorance, however, is the mask of gratitude. He …
by Robert Hunziker / June 24th, 2014
The climate change/global warming issue has been in the mainstream for decades, but it still lacks the resonance required to turn heads. Maybe, in part, because it is doubtful the average American could name more than one climate change advocate (it’s all about leadership) other than Al Gore, and in large measure that’s because of his academy award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount, 2006).
The climate change issue, even though ubiquitous, does not carry enough pizzazz to sufficiently influence public perception to tackle the problem. The issue needs national leadership, with charisma, not charts, not graphs, not scientific lingo. Climate …
by Paul Haeder / June 23rd, 2014
bought, sold, snookered, sneering cultural snobs & ennui….
Look at this controlled opposition shit – it is mindless how many email blasts go out and end up in my anarchist’s box, as if I am some weak-in-the-knee democratic party putz . . . . Or some fair-weather anti-Capitalist-99 Percenter.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch just dropped George Will’s column because of his outrageous statement that being raped is a “coveted status that confers privileges.” Can you chip in $5 to urge other papers to follow its lead?
This isn’t the first time George Will has used his enormous platform to say something this …
by Roshan Bliss / June 23rd, 2014
Resistance to the global corporate education reform movement gained momentum last month as nearly 200 educators, students, and community allies from Mexico, Canada, and the US gathered in Chicago for the 11th Trinational Conference in Defense of Public Education. The conference was primarily attended by delegates from some of the most militant teacher unions from each of the three countries – all of whom have been fighting similar battles to defend against attacks on public education – but conference organizers also invited student leaders from each country to participate in the conference, as well as teacher union leaders from Puerto …
by Victor M. Rodriguez Domínguez / June 23rd, 2014
During the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, members of the United States press were surprised when President Obama was photographed shaking the hand of Cuba’s President Raul Castro. The handshake, which was purely formal and ceremonial, did not have any meaning beyond what the protocol for such occasions demands. In 2000 President Bill Clinton shook the hand of President Fidel Castro which also led to all sorts of idle speculation about the meaning of that gesture. Unfortunately, there is a blind spot in the U.S. media and a terrible lack of understanding of the context of the historical …
