Latest articles
by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall / March 15th, 2014
The subject of Craig Rosebraugh’s new documentary Greedy Lying Bastards is the billion dollar climate denial industry, which he blames for the failure of the global community to agree a new international climate treaty. The title roles are played by Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil; David and Charles Koch, who run Koch Energy; APCO, the same public relations firm that tried to convince us that championed smoking as a perfectly healthy activity; and Bonner and Associates, the astroturf ((The late senator Lloyd Bentson is credited with coining the term “astroturf lobbying” to describe the synthetic grassroots movements created …
by Walter C. Uhler / March 15th, 2014
During the mid-1980s, right-wing Americans loved to invoke President Reagan’s observation about the Soviet Union: “They reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat,” in order to attain a one-word Socialist or Communist state. The Soviet Union was the “Evil Empire.”
But, it was the Reagan Administration, you’ll recall, that ordered the execution of Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada in October 1983. Eleven of the twelve members of the United Nations Security Council called the invasion a “flagrant violation of international law.” The only Security Council member to veto the condemnation was the very …
Allies in the Medieval-Modern Struggle
by Harry Clark / March 15th, 2014
In his farewell address in 1796, George Washington warned the nation he had served as its first president against a “passionate attachment” or “inveterate hatred” toward any nation. Some Americans were impassioned about revolutionary France. Within a few years, agents of foreign minister Talleyrand would boast to American diplomats of French power within the United States, and demand large bribes and loans to advance relations. The correspondence was eventually published in the US, in the XYZ Affair, which embarrassed France and the French party in the US, and incited US opinion against France. The rupture was not permanent, and relations …
by Susan Rosenthal / March 15th, 2014
Marxist theories have stood the test of time: human beings create their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing; the history of class societies is shaped by class struggle; and labor creates all wealth. In her preface to Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Haymarket Books, 2014), Lise Vogel acknowledges the value of Marxist theory:
I remain convinced that the revival of Marxist theory, not the construction of some socialist-feminist synthesis, offers the best chance to provide theoretical guidance in the coming battles for the liberation of women. (p.ix)
At the same …
Exemplar or Bad Example?
by Arshad M. Khan / March 15th, 2014
This week Glenn Ford, the 144th person on death row to be exonerated, was released from Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison after spending almost 30 years in the shadow of death — staggering numbers in both the number of innocents released from death row and in the years spent in jail for a crime a man did not commit. Yes, a justice system can fail and it failed Mr. Ford; yet in his case it self-corrected. The real worry is: in how many instances was it unable to correct itself? To put it more bluntly: how …
by Bill Purkayastha / March 15th, 2014
by Ralph Nader / March 15th, 2014
Wall Street’s big banks and their financial networks that collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008-2009, were saved with huge bailouts by the taxpayers, but these Wall Street Gamblers are still paid huge money and are again creeping toward reckless misbehavior. Their corporate crime wave strip-mined the economy for young workers, threw them on the unemployment rolls and helped make possible a low-wage economy that is draining away their ability to afford basic housing, goods, and services.
Meanwhile, Wall Street is declaring huge bonuses for their executive plutocrats, none of whom have been prosecuted and sent to jail for these systemic devastations …
Spying on East Timor
by Binoy Kampmark / March 14th, 2014
The Australians are the underdressed Viceroys of the pacific, a vestige of past power. They are happy to be retained for various tasks – doing the bidding of the US, most of the time, and playing that rather distasteful game of bullying smaller neighbours when required. In 2013, the East Timorese government found that their cabinet rooms had been bugged by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). The incident itself had happened nine years previously.
Things got rather spicier when the domestic Australian intelligence service, ASIO, raided the office and house of lawyer Bernard Collaery, a lawyer acting for the East …
by Alexander Mezyaev / March 14th, 2014
On March 16 Crimea is to hold a referendum to define its fate. The decision has evoked an extremely nervous reaction in the West. US President Barack Obama said it violated international law but never adduced any legal arguments to support the statement. The same applies to other statements on this account; they all lack legal substantiations.
The United Nations International Court of Justice handed down an advisory opinion in 2010 saying unambiguously that the unilateral declaration of independence is in accordance with the international law.
A referendum based decision is not a “unilateral declaration of independence”. The Court’s …
by Todd Miller / March 14th, 2014
In desert camouflage and combat helmets, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents kneel behind a white truck. One agent has his pistol aimed at an unseen enemy. Another has a semi-automatic assault rifle. In the distance stretches the brown desert landscape, the mountains, the expansive sky.
(Flickr/Creative Commons)
At first glance, the agents are alert and ready as if in combat theater in the Middle-East. At the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and in the context of the persistent 30-year push of Mexico-U.S. border militarization, maybe this isn’t …
by Joel S. Hirschhorn / March 14th, 2014
Tuck away the many horror stories of the wrong limbs being amputated, things being left in surgery patients, terrible infections picked up in hospitals and totally wrong diagnoses. More relevant is a bureaucratic hospitalization horror that far too few Americans covered by Medicare are aware of.
Odds are that you do not know a key question to ask if you ever find yourself in a hospital for an overnight stay that could last from one or two days, or perhaps much more. What you and anyone accompanying you want to know is whether you are being classified as “under observation.” This …
by Bill Purkayastha / March 14th, 2014
Escape of the Cold War Warriors
by Dan Lieberman / March 13th, 2014
U.S. foreign policy from Vietnam to Afghanistan has mostly been counter-productive – enabling the happening of what policies were intended to prevent. The disturbing manner in which the crisis in Ukraine is unfolding — more and more provocative — demonstrates once again that U.S. policy is doomed to be counter-productive.
Because healthy thought opposes senseless speculation, analyzing the statements of the “movers” and “shakers” of the United States provides awareness to the U.S. agenda on the situation in Ukraine. If comments by U.S. government officials and media actors represent the thoughts that are guiding U.S. policy toward Ukraine, then its time …
Palast Aims at the Wrong Target
by Ellen Brown / March 13th, 2014
Investigative reporter Greg Palast is usually pretty good at peering behind the rhetoric and seeing what is really going on. But in tearing into Senator Elizabeth Warren’s support of postal financial services, he has done a serious disservice to the underdogs – both the underbanked and the US Postal Service itself.
In his February 27 article “Liz Warren Goes Postal,” Palast attacked her support of the USPS Inspector General’s proposal to add “non-bank” financial services to the US Postal Service, calling it “cruel, stupid and frightening” and equating it with the unethical payday lending practices it seeks to eliminate.
After “several …
by Medea Benjamin / March 13th, 2014
When I boarded the plane to Cairo, Egypt, to make sure everything was in place for the women’s delegation headed to Gaza, I had no reason to think I’d end up in a jail cell at the Cairo airport and then violently deported.
The trip was in response to a call from women in Gaza to CODEPINK and other groups asking us to bring 100 women from around the world to Gaza for March 8, International Women’s Day. They wanted us to see, first-hand, how the seven-year Israeli blockade had made their situation intolerable. They talked about being unable to …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 13th, 2014
Less than a month before the 11th anniversary of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, the near destruction of much of the country, heritage, culture, secularism, education, health services and all State institutions, the country is poised to revert “two thousand years” say campaigners.
On February 25th, Iraq’s Cabinet approved a draft law lowering the age of legal marriage for females to nine years old.
Iraq was, prior to the invasion, a fiercely secular country, with a broadly equal male, female workforce and with women benefiting from a National Personal Status Law, introduced in 1959, which remained “one of the …
by Robert Hunziker / March 12th, 2014
Recent developments up North are cause for concern. The Arctic “sea ice area” registered a record low on March 9, 2014 at 12.88 million square kilometers. ((Sam Carana, “Has the Descent Begun?” Arctic News, March 12, 2014.))
Further confirmation, according to reports from NSIDC (National Snow & Ice Data Center, Boulder) and Cryosphere Today (Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University or Illinois), Arctic sea ice area dropped to a record low of 12.95 million square kilometers on March 10 of 2014. It is a measure smaller than that seen during the late 1970s and breaking the previous record low, set just three years …
A Tale of the Internet Age
by Matt Reichel / March 12th, 2014
In one of a series of significant talks over the weekend by the world’s foremost Internet freedom activists, Julian Assange spoke on MSNBC about the central “battle” of the Information Age:
On the one hand, we are in many ways heading towards a transnational dystopian total surveillance society the likes of which the world has never seen . . . and on the other, people are coming together. Whenever people can communicate, they develop new values and a new consensus and a new polity. That is something that all young people are exposed to.
In other words, the Internet is the …
GMO Policy being Warped by Industry Groups Co-opting Language of the Left
by Jason Velázquez / March 12th, 2014
I remember seeing the bumper sticker “Coexist” for the first time sometime in the 90s. I thought then, and still do, that forging all the letters from spiritual symbols was pretty clever, while still being meaningful and respectful. You’ve seen the bumper sticker before, you know you have.
It’s often paired with the popular classic “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost,” or (on my Top 10 List) “You Cannot Simultaneously Prevent and Prepare for War.”
And I think that different faiths are fair examples of things that should be able to coexist. Faiths are abstractions by definition. They exist in the …
Lenin's State and Revolution: Chapter 2, Sections 1, 2, 3
by Thomas Riggins / March 12th, 2014
In Chapter Two of State and Revolution Lenin discusses the lessons of the European revolutionary movement of 1848-51. There are three sections to this chapter. The first section is entitled:
1. The Eve of the Revolution
Lenin points out that the first “mature” works of the Marxist world view were created on the “eve” of the 1848 upheaval — namely Marx’s 1847 work The Poverty of Philosophy, and Marx and Engel’s joint work The Communist Manifesto. Every educated person has read the latter work but the former may not be so well known.
It was composed by Marx to confute the ideas of …
by James Petras / March 12th, 2014
In the biggest power grab since George Bush seized Eastern Europe and converted it into a NATO bastion confronting Russia, the Obama regime, together with the EU, financed and organized a violent putsch in the Ukraine which established a puppet regime in Kiev. ((The pro EU-US putsch regime in Kiev is a product of nearly 25 years of planning and enormous funding by political agencies of the US government. According to William Blum (Anti-Empire Report#126, 03/07/2014), the self-styled National Endowment for Democracy bankrolled 65 projects involving political indoctrination and the formation of political action groups. Under-Secretary of …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 12th, 2014
Something sinister is brewing around and below al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, and it has the hallmark of a familiar Israeli campaign to strip the Mosque of its Muslim Arab identity. This time around, however, the stakes are much higher.
The status of al-Aqsa mosque is unparalleled within the context of Muslim heritage in Palestine itself. It is also the third holiest Muslim shrine anywhere. But equally as important, it is a symbol of faith, resistance and defiance. Its story of struggle and perseverance goes hand in hand with the very modern Palestinian struggle for rights, freedom and identity. Praying …
by Johan Galtung / March 12th, 2014
There is much in the name. Ukraine means borderland. And it is time to think about solutions instead of further confrontations.
Diagnosis
The position of the extreme West – like US neocons – is clear: Get all into NATO, encircling, containing, defeating Russia. Some in Ukraine and Georgia share that goal.
The less extreme West would focus on EU membership, both being European countries. Some of them, in turn, might focus on loans as there is much money to be made. Thus, Bosnia-Hercegovina had $9 billion debt before the EU take-over as “high authority”; now $107 billion. “Austerity” around the corner.
The position of …
by Michael Werbowski / March 11th, 2014
National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. Self determination is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action. . . .
— Woodrow Wilson with his famous self-determination speech on 11 February 1918 after he announced his Fourteen Points on 8 January 1918.
Secessionist movements are nothing new to history and have been endorsed in the past, by some great statesmen such as US president Woodrow Wilson. Yet the upcoming Crimean referendum is given much attention by the west, almost as if it were setting some dangerous …
Beyonce's Collaboration with Washington and her Ascendency into the Black Misleadership Class
by Danny Haiphong / March 11th, 2014
This month is “Women’s History Month”, but what exactly is the importance of shedding light on the oppression of women under US/Western imperialism? If we understand the oppression of women as a necessary precondition of patriarchy, racism, and class exploitation inherent in the “Western way of life”, than it is untenable to imagine a world free of sexism without a world free of racism and class exploitation as well. In this period, the US corporate media has mass advertised a mainstream “feminism” that promotes collaboration with the US ruling order. In recent years, the American corporate ruling class has anointed …
Egypt Stops International Women's Day Delegation to Gaza
by Cayman Kai / March 11th, 2014
On International Women’s Day, although I woke up in America, my heart was in Gaza. After having been detained for over 22 hours in the Cairo airport without explanation, I had been deported to London and ultimately sent back to America. I was the youngest American of an International Women’s Day Delegation bound for Gaza to answer the call of the women of Gaza issued to the women of the world to come and stand with them in solidarity.
We were “armed” with microscopes for hospitals, toys for children, chocolate gifts, and solar lamps as a gesture to give them light …
by Alexander Mezyaev / March 11th, 2014
A number of international organizations are in the process of studying the legal aspects of the situation in and around Ukraine from the point of view of international law. The United Nations, in particular the Security Council, is the main entity authorized to come up with priority assessments according to article 21 of UN Charter and the very fact of Ukraine’s membership in the organization.
For the last days the UN Security Council (UNSC) has had three times the issue on its agenda. The first time was on February 28. There was nothing but an official communique informing that a session …
US Nuclear Missiles Pea Shooter Distance From Moscow?
by Bo Filter / March 11th, 2014
The media is clamoring to get Russia for attacking Ukraine, as if the US has had no influence on events. Yet, the riot in Kiev has a striking resemblance to US-sponsored color revolutions and Arab spring riots.
The template shows US mercenaries hiding behind peaceful protestors, then, igniting violence. The idea is sinister: to co-opt peaceful protestor’s legitimate cause, granting some air of legitimacy, followed by a coup to super-impose western imperial demands.
In Kiev, it started, as usual, with peace protests, then, thugs soon joined in as heavily armed trained militia. Western private media, holding its usual bag of secrets, dodges …
Scenarios behind the End of MH 370
by Binoy Kampmark / March 11th, 2014
The fate of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared over the South China Sea on Saturday, continues to baffle the authorities of ten countries involved in the search and rescue missions. Some 40 ships and 34 aircraft have been involved in the effort so far (Business Insider, March 11). False alarms have been registered – the report of an oil slick, and the appearance of various objects (passenger life jackets; an airplane door). A salvaged object retrieved by a Vietnamese rescue helicopter provided false assurance – it was not a life raft from the plane. The Chinese authorities are seething …
by subMedia / March 11th, 2014
