Latest articles
by Jay Knott / March 21st, 2014
by Ludwig Watzal / March 21st, 2014
Since the early 1990s, Israel, US, and their submissive European allies, supported by their uncritical and subservient media, have been peddling allegations, fabrications, accusations, and lies that the government of Iran was pursuing a secret, military adjunct to its regularly inspected civilian nuclear program. The main thrust of Gareth Porter’s book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014), is to demonstrate that this crisis was “manufactured” and the accusations were bogus, i.e., Iran never had a military nuclear program. For over 20 years Israeli politicians have been claiming that Iran’s nuclear device …
by Vacy Vlazna / March 20th, 2014
In popular idiom, doppelgänger hails from the German, meaning “look-alike” in behaviour or physical appearance.
The frontline of Palestinian non-violent resistance in the West Bank of the State of Palestine, is not in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the PLO and the Palestinian National Council (PNC), but in the many villages, like Bill’in, Nil’ilin, Nabi Saleh, Kufr Kaddum, Al Maasara, Hizma, Al Walaja, Bab Al Shams, Burin, Budrus, that the PA supposedly is meant to represent and protect.
Village heroes and heroines courageously and willingly battle, in the name of justice and freedom, toxic fumes from high velocity Israeli …
by Paul Haeder / March 20th, 2014
Shoot, yeah, ending another quarter teaching at another college, here in WA state, and, whew, of course the Chomsky’s and Giroux’s and Hedges of the world DO NOT get it.
Think of faculty in the trenches, working with youth, in my case, a whole load of high school students in a community college swap program called Running Start. We take juniors and seniors out of their high schools, they take college courses, and they get high school credit AND college credit.
You think it works well, uh? You think getting these young folk out of the high schools and into college classes …
by Brian Ward / March 20th, 2014
Earlier this month nearly 400 students were arrested in front of the White House protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline. The next group of people to head to Washington, D.C. will be the Cowboy Indian Alliance, farmers and ranchers and American Indian communities living along the proposed northern part of the Keystone XL pipeline, mostly based in Nebraska and South Dakota. They will camp out near the White House for a week beginning April 22 (Earth Day), ending with a mass demonstration on April 27th.
The Alliance is representing people more …
Cooking with Clarissa Dickson Wright
by Binoy Kampmark / March 20th, 2014
Just in case you think [lard] is unhealthy, don’t be put off by that.
— Clarissa Dickson Wright
The last half of the duo known as The Two Fat Ladies has left the cooking world. Clarissa Dickson Wright came across as the sharper one in the outfit which stormed to television culinary stardom in the 1990s. Jennifer Paterson fronted as the other half, the driver of the celebrated Triumph Thunderbird which took both of them across Britain in a cheery hunt for food. The overwhelming effect of their presence lead to parodies, resentment and a good deal of affection. They were quite …
by Walter Brasch / March 20th, 2014
Vera Scroggins of Susquehanna County, Pa., will be in court Monday morning.
This time, she will have lawyers and hundreds of thousands of supporters throughout the country. Representing Scroggins to vacate an injunction limiting her travel will be lawyers from the ACLU and Public Citizen, and a private attorney.
The last time Scroggins appeared in the Common Pleas Court in October, she didn’t have lawyers. That’s because Judge Kenneth W. Seamans refused to grant her a continuance.
When she was served papers to appear in court, it was a Friday. On Monday, she faced four lawyers representing Cabot Oil and Gas Corp., one …
by Andy Best / March 20th, 2014
The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.
— Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume One: The Problem of Civilization
We can find the state of the environment through a quick survey of facts: Satellite photos tracking declining ice sheets, emissions monitoring showing the passing of the 400 p.p.m. tipping point ((Global carbon dioxide in atmosphere passes milestone level, The Guardian)); the actual decline and near disappearance of key species like bees ((Bees in Decline, full PDF report from Greenpeace)); deforestization ((European Commission Report on deforestization)); overfishing ((90% of …
What Really Happened?
by Yves Engler / March 19th, 2014
The Rwandan genocide — think you know the story? Deep-seated ethic enmity erupted in a 100-day genocidal rampage by Hutus killing Tutsis, which was only stopped by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). A noble Canadian general tried to end the bloodletting but a dysfunctional UN refused resources. Washington was caught off guard by the slaughter, but it has apologized for failing to intervene and has committed to never again avoid its responsibility to protect.
In Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, Robin Philpot demolishes this version of history.
Philpot points out that while the official story begins April 6, 1994, any …
Britain’s Departure from Afghanistan
by Binoy Kampmark / March 19th, 2014
Farewell to the British, as they leave the country that took their soldiers, and more than a sense of dignity. Forces are being withdraw (the popular term is drawn down, as if they were blinds) and it is hard to see the mission in Afghanistan as anything but another intervention that did not quite pan out well for the invader. At one point, 137 bases dotted Helmand province. In an operational sense, only two bases remain: Camp Bastion, the main base for UK personnel, and Observation Post Sterga 2. Lashkar Gah and Patrol Base Lashkar Gah Durai now find themselves …
by Sheila Velazquez / March 19th, 2014
In California, where most of the food eaten in this country is grown, the painful drought is being addressed in a number of ways. One is that waste treatment water is being turned into drinking water.
As noted in the Mother Jones article “It Takes How Much Water to Grow an Almond?!”, according to 2010 figures, the average daily water use, not including for farming, of one person living in Palm Springs is more than 700 gallons a day.
I’m guessing that while the repurposed toilet water is not going to families in Palm Springs, others drink what they flush–water from which the pesticides, …
by Media Lens / March 19th, 2014
News that 2015 might turn out to be the first year since 1914 when British troops will not be fighting a war somewhere in the world appeared to come as a shock to many. But, in fact, the British record of Permanent War stretches back much further. Seumas Milne commented in the Guardian that empire forces “were involved in violent suppression of anti-colonial rebellions every year from at least the 1760s for the next 200 years, quite apart from multiple other full-scale wars”.
One might think a rational society would try to identify and counter the institutional forces responsible for …
by Robert Hunziker / March 19th, 2014
Elements are found everywhere, all across the solar system, beyond the stars to the very tip of infinity. Elements make up the universe, and because they are compatible at large, the universe works in harmony.
But, if the elements do not harmonize, then, there are problems. As such, this article explores the elements of neoliberalism clashing with the elements of the earth.
As for a backgrounder on neoliberalism, regardless of whether one is a Marxist, a socialist, or a capitalist, the case can be made that Adam Smith’s capitalism (circa 1776) worked reasonably well for 200 years, giving rise to a vast …
by Nicola Nasser / March 19th, 2014
Writing in The Washington Post on February 27, 2011, Rachel Bronson asked: “Could the next Mideast uprising happen in Saudi Arabia?” Her answer was: “The notion of a revolution in the Saudi kingdom seems unthinkable.”
However, on September 30 the next year, the senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Bruce Riedel, concluded that the “revolution in Saudi Arabia is no longer unthinkable.”
To preempt such a possibility, the kingdom in March 2011, in a “military” move to curb the tide of the Arab popular uprisings which raged across the Arab world from sweeping to its doorsteps, …
by Medea Benjamin and Allison McCracken / March 18th, 2014
Back in November, the CODEPINK DC office hosted a movie screening about drone warfare on the side of Jeh Johnson’s elegant home in Georgetown. Jeh Johnson was chief counsel at the Department of Defense from 2009-2013 and wrote the legal memos that justified the targeted killing of people overseas by drones. He had just been nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and we decided to do a creative protest at this house because we didn’t think that one of the architects of the US drone program—a program that kills so many innocents and makes us so hated …
The British Warrior Who "Matured with Age"
by Ramzy Baroud / March 18th, 2014
Long before the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign inched slowly from the fringes of global solidarity with Palestinians to take center stage, Tony Benn had been advocating a boycott of Israel with unrestricted conviction, for years.
“Britain should offer its support for this strategy by stopping all arms sales to Israel, introducing trade sanctions and a ban on all investment there together with a boycott of Israeli goods here and make it a condition for the lifting of these measures that Israel complies with these demands at once,” Benn wrote in his blog on April 19, 2002, under the title “A …
by William Boardman / March 18th, 2014
Seven Democratic dwarves prefer police state veto to due process of law
When the United States Senate voted against the United States Constitution on March 5, 2014, the anti-constitutional majority included, as expected, all the Republican Senators voting, but also, more unexpectedly, seven principle-free Democrats.
The majority vote represents an affirmation of imaginary guilt by association, with deep racial overtones, in what amounted to a Senatorial lynching of an attorney who dared participate in the constitutionally-mandated legal defense of a pre-judged black man long since found guilty and still in prison after thirty years. These Senators were less persuaded the Supreme …
Of Philandering Philosophers and Sexual Misconduct
by Harvey E. Whitney, Jr. / March 18th, 2014
I look upon some of the recent scandals in American academic philosophy programs with great intrigue (I used to study philosophy at the graduate level) because these scandals provide case studies of what ails that discipline in particular, and what makes the humanities disciplines in general a laughingstock to the public and those concerned about the role the university should have in society.
Recently, a prominent philosopher at the University of Miami resigned over allegations that he sent sexually suggestive emails to a female graduate student; another prominent philosopher recently resigned his tenured position decrying the sexism …
Apostle of Autonomy
by William Manson / March 18th, 2014
One may without exaggeration now speak of technological compulsiveness: a condition under which society meekly submits to every new technological demand and utilizes without question every new product….
— Lewis Mumford (1970)
Over several decades, I’ve managed to hold on to my worn, battered copies of Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine (two volumes: 1967, 1970). And a few nights ago, haunted by the wide-awake nightmares we are now forced to “live,” I found myself fascinated once again by his monumental, tragic vision of the technologically-enabled “power-systems” called civilizations.
How did Mumford differ from other major critics of technology? First and foremost, …
by Kim Petersen / March 18th, 2014
Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist and author from Virginia. His books include How Nonviolence Protects the State, Consensus, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Nonviolence, the travel narrative To Get to the Other Side, and the collection of short stories Sousa in the Echo Chamber. He currently lives in Barcelona, where he takes part in ongoing social struggles.
In his book Anarchy Works (Ardent Press, 2010) Gelderloss argues that “free societies are not possible so long as governments try to crush any pocket of independence, corporations fund genocide in order to manufacture cell phones, and supposedly sympathetic people are more interested …
by Jan Oberg / March 17th, 2014
Of course, it is illegal and, of course, it will be rigged, that referendum in Crimea today. And, of course, it is a ploy and comes only in the wake of Russia’s (read Putin’s) unprovoked aggression, used as a pretext to build a new Greater Russia.
That is, if you browse the mainstream Western media the last week and on this Sunday morning.
Referendum means referring an issue back to the people. It is – or should be – an important instrument in democracies. And it’s a much better instrument than war and other violence to settle complex conflicts.
Generally, citizens-decided conflict-resolution is likely …
by Burkely Hermann / March 17th, 2014
The progressive media is abuzz about New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is seen by some as the new front of the American left. This idea is misguided, however, and should be discarded to the dust bin. I write here as a concerned citizen who wants to peel back the truth for everyone to examine themselves.
Deconstructing de Blasio’s progressive perception
Before providing constructive criticism and a critique of Bill de Blasio, it is important to discuss his “progressive” perception. Democratic blogger and writer Brent Budowsky opined in The Hill that de Blasio was “the FDR mayor of …
by Ron Jacobs / March 17th, 2014
The infrastructure of surveillance present in decades past was never dismantled. Indeed, that infrastructure is enhanced, modernized, insidious and more intrusive than ever. The targets of the agencies doing the eavesdropping have expanded beyond their original focus but the intent remains the same—to infiltrate, intimidate and disrupt those elements in the nation opposed to government and corporate plans. Given the open-endedness of this intention, the net cast by the surveillance machinery and its operators is broad and not very discriminatory. When left unchecked, it becomes a threat to democracy as great as any potential threat it claims to be protecting …
by Martha Rosenberg / March 17th, 2014
Got milk allergy? Many people including Native Americans and people of Asian, African and South American descent are lactose intolerant and can’t and don’t drink milk. That is the way nature made them over epochs and no one ever died of a dairy deficiency.
But there is money in dairy. That is why American fast food companies try to bring the love of dairy to cultures where it traditionally hasn’t existed. And that is why the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board in the US disseminate “educational” materials that address “misconceptions about …
by Allen W. Smith / March 17th, 2014
Most Americans have supported Social Security ever since it was enacted into law in 1935. Republican presidential nominee, Alf Landon, made the repeal of Social Security the main issue in the 1936 election, thus making the election a referendum on whether the American people wanted to keep or repeal Social Security. The response of the electorate was a massive vote in favor of keeping Social Security.
In 1983, conservatives launched a two-front war against Social Security, which has proven far more successful than anyone anticipated. The code name of the first assault was “Achieving a Leninist Strategy.” The co-authors of the …
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 16th, 2014
In an unprecedented turnout unmatched by any Western election, Crimeans voted 95.7% to join Russia. As I pointed out earlier today, under the twisted logic of Washington Crimea has never been a part of Ukraine as Russians were not allowed to vote when the Soviet dictator Khrushchev stuck the Russian province of Crimea into Ukraine in 1954.
While Crimeans celebrate in the streets and international observers declare the referendum to be totally fair and free of all interference and threat, the neo-Nazi White House declared that “we don’t recognize no stinking vote.” The moronic White House spokesperson said that the White …
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 16th, 2014
In his March 6 Executive Order, “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Ukraine,” Obama declares that support for Crimean self-determination constitutes “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”
Obama and the lawyers who drafted his executive order did not notice that the way the order is drafted it applies to Obama, to the unelected coup government in Kiev, and to the Washington and EU regimes. The order says that any person “responsible for or …
by Tanner Stening / March 16th, 2014
An article appeared in the The Nation not long ago offering a defense of the so-called “sex industry”—which includes, as the author notes, a number of services ranging “escorting, street hustling, hostessing, stripping, preforming sex for videos and webcams.” Rather fortuitously, there’s no mention of sex trafficking, which is a substantial part of the industry. Nevertheless, ostensibly the article endorses the view that we ought to dignify sex workers without “sanitizing or elevating” the work itself by simply acknowledging that sex workers are out for a check in much the same way we all are, hence we should promote …
by Bill Purkayastha / March 16th, 2014
Raghead identifies the connection with Ukraine.
Feinstein and the CIA
by Binoy Kampmark / March 15th, 2014
Senator Dianne Feinstein’s blistering attack on the CIA’s conduct in searching the computers used by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was deemed a remarkable salvo. The search was engendered by the Committee’s official request for a final version of the named “Internal Panetta Review”. The Review had been created for internal use by the CIA as a record of assessing what documents should be turned over to the Committee in connection with its investigation of the torture program. Once the CIA got wind that their precious internal documentation was finding its way into the hands of the committee, the …
