Latest articles
by Eric Walberg / July 1st, 2014
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 …
by Medea Benjamin and Pam Bailey / July 1st, 2014
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 …
by Bill Quigley / July 1st, 2014
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 …
Part 1
by Kim Petersen / July 1st, 2014
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 …
by Adam Engel / July 1st, 2014
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 …
by Robert Hunziker / July 1st, 2014
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 …
by Gareth Porter / June 30th, 2014
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 …
An English View of the Scottish Referendum
by Lesley Docksey / June 30th, 2014
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, …
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 …
