Latest articles
by subMedia / March 11th, 2014
by Yves Engler / March 10th, 2014
When a plane carrying 239 people disappears and everyone is presumed dead, the world’s TV networks devote hours of coverage to the tragedy. Newspapers run long and detailed stories. Experts are interviewed to discuss probable causes and remedies.
Government safety boards investigate and produce reports. There seems a genuine attempt to learn from what happened in order to prevent the same death and destruction from ever occurring again.
Contrast that to the reaction of death by automobile.
The latest year for which we have statistics (2010) 1,240,000 people died in vehicle crashes across the globe. That’s 3,397 people per day or 142 per …
by Media Lens / March 10th, 2014
Exactly what is happening in Ukraine is not easy to disentangle from corporate news media reports. The current crisis began last November when the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, withdrew from a cooperation agreement with the European Union to forge closer ties with Russia. As Peter Oborne notes:
Up to that point, the West had concealed any distaste for Yanukovych. Thereafter, we [sic] started to ally ourselves with the protesters against his regime.
These included ‘a group of violent and unpleasant Right-wing parties’. Three months of violent protests followed in Kiev. On February 22, Yanukovych suddenly fled Kiev and the pro-Western opposition …
by Linh Dinh / March 10th, 2014
I’ve been coming to Chicago forever, but always just for a day or two. The first time was when I was only a teenager and visiting an aunt in St Louis. Another time, it was to take a physical exam for now-defunct Midway Airlines. I was trying to get a job as a baggage handler. The day before, though, I had been at a Philly party where someone handed me a joint. Never one to refuse heartfelt hospitality, I inhaled, but somehow this didn’t prevent me from being hired by Midway. Perhaps they used the same urinalyst, piss parser …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 10th, 2014
On Wednesday March 5th, Ukraine’s Putsch “Prime Minister” Arseniy Yatsenyuk, arbitrarily sacked three senior Defence Ministry politicians,
Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Oleynik, with Deputy Defense Ministers Vladimir Mozharovskiy and Arturo Francisco Babenko. According to Itar-Tass (March 6th) they had drawn Yatsenyuk’s ire by expressing “sharp criticism over giving the Right Sector militants the status of regular military units.”
A contact of the publication stated that one of the three had also “told Yatsenyuk that actions of today’s Kiev authorities in overtures with radical nationalist organizations would destroy national unity” and that it was simply “harmful to involve the state military agency in …
by Ken Meyercord / March 10th, 2014
Here’s a way environmentalists can capitalize on Secretary of State Kerry’s characterization of climate change as the “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction”, a hyperbole he used in a speech in Indonesia last week. Despite the current surfeit of light oil resulting from the shale oil boom, the wave of the future is likely to be increasing production of heavy oil, the stuff that will flow (sluggishly) through the Keystone XL pipeline if it is ever built. That that is where the future lies is demonstrated by our refiners betting hard money on it, having geared up their refineries to …
The Snowden Testimony
by Binoy Kampmark / March 10th, 2014
If you want to help me, help me by helping everyone: declare that the indiscriminate, bulk collection of private data by governments is a violation of our rights and must end.
— Edward Snowden, Testimony, March 7, 2014
The case of Edward Snowden is an object study about why whistleblowers have mountains to climb when it comes to revealing abuses within a system. Last Friday, Snowden detailed a series of answers to submitted questions from the European Parliament outlining what those mountains were.
One particularly troubling one is the pressure exerted by the US intelligence community to spread the web of surveillance …
by Robert Hunziker / March 10th, 2014
The American Museum of Natural History/NY (AMNH-NY) conducted a survey about the likelihood of a mass extinction event. The majority of the 400 scientists polled were convinced that a “mass extinction of plants and animals is underway,” posing a threat to humanity in the next century. According to that same poll, the public is “dimly aware” of this threat of an extinction event.
The AMNH-NY survey took place in the year 1998; thus, “the next century” that they referenced is here now. Also, since 1998, above and beyond additional loss of habitat for plants and animals, the state of the climate …
by Paul Haeder / March 9th, 2014
Jeff Drones for Dildos Bezos . . . The TakeOver . . . The End Times . . . Useless Collective Consumerism . . . The Empire is Daft and Dangerous!
Oh, hell, I’ve been challenged to write some positive stuff on the DV blog, like, what, five straight blogs in a row that are all hopeful, positive, about the real heroes and heroines and hard-working people who never get their day in the limelight, day in court, or 15 petrabytes of fame.
Seems like a good thing, really. Can you imagine the world of mass suicide media, the …
by Bill Purkayastha / March 9th, 2014
Putsch, Pillage, and Duplicity
by James Petras / March 8th, 2014
The Obama regime, in coordination with its allies and proxies, has re-launched a virulent world-wide campaign to destroy independent governments, encircle and ultimately, undermine global competitors, and establish a new US – EU centered world order.
We will proceed by identifying the recent ‘cycles’ of US empire-building; the advances and retreats; the methods and strategies; the results and perspectives. Our main focus is on the imperial dynamics driving the US toward greater military confrontations, up to and including conditions which can lead to a world war.
Recent Imperial Cycles
…
by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 8th, 2014
Another day, another stitch up. On March 6th, Syria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, the eloquent and elegant Mr. Bashar al-Ja’afari and the Syrian UN Mission had restrictions placed on them by the US State Department, limiting their travel to no further than 25 miles from New York’s Columbus Circle intersection.
The UN Secretary General — representing the world organization avowed “to practice tolerance and live together with one another as good neighbours … to develop friendly relations among nations … to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations …based on the principle of sovereign equality of all …
by Ann Wright / March 8th, 2014
Five years ago in March, 2009, only two months after the 22 day Israeli attack on Gaza, I was on an international delegation of sixty women organized by CODEPINK who traveled to Gaza for International Women’s Day. In the week in Gaza, we met with women where their homes used to be before they were destroyed by the Israeli attack that killed 1450, wounded 5,000 and left 50,000 homeless. We also met with women in 13 community centers throughout the country, to listen to their stories of life under attack and under siege.
Five years later, I joined an …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 8th, 2014
The journalistic credo is a difficult one. The line between corporate sponsored sycophancy and state sponsored guidance is an all too fine one. Little wonder that today’s news scape is awash with such experiments as those of WikiLeaks, or Glen Greenwald’s The Intercept, potent challenges to the numbing twenty-four hour news cycle.
The resignation of Russia Today (RT) America anchor Liz Wahl and the off-script outburst by RT employee Abby Martin on the program Breaking the Set have provided yet another example how the Cold War dynamics that lurk beneath the relations of West and East continue to pulsate …
by Walter Brasch / March 8th, 2014
The oil and gas industry, the nation’s chambers of commerce, and politicians who are dependent upon campaign contributions from the industry and the chambers, claim fracking is safe.
First, close your mind to the myriad scientific studies that show the health effects from fracking.
Close your mind to the well-documented evidence of the environmental impact.
Focus just upon the effects upon the workers.
The oil and gas industry has a fatality rate seven times higher than for all other workers, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control. (CDC). According to the CDC, the death rate in the oil and gas …
The Anti-Empire Report #126
by William Blum / March 8th, 2014
Ukraine
When it gets complicated and confusing, when you’re overwhelmed with too much information, changing daily; too many explanations, some contradictory … try putting it into some kind of context by stepping back and looking at the larger, long-term picture.
The United States strives for world domination, hegemony wherever possible, their main occupation for over a century, it’s what they do for a living. The United States, NATO and the European Union form The Holy Triumvirate. The Holy Triumvirate has subsidiaries, chiefly the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Criminal Court … all help to keep in line those …
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 8th, 2014
Over the decades various administrations, seeking to improve their economic record, monkeyed with economic statistics to the point that the statistics are no longer meaningful.
According to Friday’s (March 7) payroll jobs report, the US economy created 175,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have at a good price.
Even if 175,000 jobs were created in February–remember now, February was a cold month whose low temperatures are used to explain poor housing and retail sales performance, yet somehow created 40,000 more jobs than needed to keep …
by T. Mayheart Dardar / March 8th, 2014
In February the World Bank announced an ambitious plan to initiate a $1 billion fund to finance an effort to map the mineral resources of the African continent. Their plan is to use advanced satellite and surveillance technology to, in the words of a World Bank senior manager, “identify the areas with more profitability.” ((Roelf, Wendell, “World Bank eyes $1 billion African resource mapping fund in July.” Reuters, 5 Feb. 2014 (accessed 26 Feb. 2014).))
We are to believe that the World Bank’s efforts are designed to benefit …
No Truth Need Apply
by Daniel Patrick Welch / March 8th, 2014
The near total blackout of truth in the Western media makes this one of the most dangerous times in history, with coordinated “news” outlets acting collectively as a sort of Ministry of Government Lies. To try to escape this stranglehold, it is necessary to reach outside the echo chamber of massaged and approved opinion in which we are basted day in and day out. It’s not that difficult. I am perhaps one of the most hapless technophobes I know–my ten year old students have every new gadget possible, and their parents have even more. Yet somehow they can’t escape the …
by Bill Purkayastha / March 8th, 2014
The continuing mis-adventures of Raghead by DV’s favorite cartoonist-dentist.
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 7th, 2014
The White House Fool has repeatedly declared erroneously and foolishly that it is “against international law” for Crimea to exercise self-determination. Self-determination, as used by Washington, is a propaganda term that serves Washington’s empire but is not permissible for real people to exercise. On March 6 Obama telephoned Putin to tell the Russian President again that only Washington has the right to interfere in Ukraine and to insist against all logic that only the “government” in Kiev installed by the Washington-organized coup is “legitimate” and “democratic.”
In other words, the elected government in Crimea pushed by the people in Crimea to …
by Ralph Nader / March 7th, 2014
If you haven’t yet heard of Ron Unz, you may soon. The conservative, successful software developer, theoretical physicist from Harvard and former publisher of the American Conservative magazine is launching a California initiative that asks voters in November to raise the state minimum wage to $12 per hour (it is now $8 an hour and is going to $9 an hour by July, 2014).
In commencing this effort, Mr. Unz is uniting conservatives and liberals in supporting this initiative and is hopeful that Silicon Valley billionaires or megabillionaires will help fund this citizens’ campaign.
If this sounds quixotic, put that reaction on …
by David Swanson / March 7th, 2014
So now we (or at least the 0.03% of us who care to hunt for it) discover that U.S. military spending is not actually being cut at all, but increasing. Also going up: U.S. nuclear weapons spending. Some of the new nukes will violate treaties, but the entire program violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires disarmament, not increased armament. The U.S. policy of first-strike and the U.S. practice of informing other nations that “all options are on the table” also violate the U.N. Charter’s ban on threatening force.
But do nuclear weapons, by the nature of their …
by Bill Purkayastha / March 7th, 2014
Raghead is back with more mis-adventures.
Reflections on Robert Harris’ The Fear Index
by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan / March 7th, 2014
Alexander Hoffmann is a physicist-turned-financier, a refugee from the particle accelerator complex in CERN who now runs a $10-billion algorithmic hedge fund from nearby Geneva. The fund is managed by VIXAL, Hoffmann’s machine learning algorithm, and is incredibly successful. The company’s statistics boast a consistently huge Alfa – a measure indicating by how much the fund beats the average and exceeds the normal rate of return – and the world’s biggest oligarchs and financial institutions are salivating at the mere thought of being allowed to invest in it. Managing their money has made Hoffmann very rich. In just a few …
by Stephen Lendman / March 7th, 2014
They’re numerous, outspoken, and range from secular to orthodox to one group calling itself “True Torah Jews Against Zionism.”
They believe that “traditional” Jews don’t support Zionism, an ideology they call “contrary to Jewish law and beliefs and the teachings of the Holy Torah.” They say Zionism:
— advocates “a political and military end to the Jewish exile;”
— fosters “pseudo-Judaism” based on secular nationalism;
— coercively seeks “armed materialism” in place of “a Divine and Torah centered understanding;”
— endangers all Jews worldwide;
— wants to disassociate Jews and traditional Judaism from ideological Zionism; and
— calls Israel a “Zionist State,” not a Jewish one.
They:
— cite …
by Dylan Murphy / March 7th, 2014
Shortly after operations began, we started to experience extreme headaches, runny noses, sore/scratchy throats, muscle aches and a constant feeling of fatigue. Both of our children are experiencing nose bleeds and I’ve had dizziness, vomiting and vertigo to the point that I couldn’t stand and was taken to an emergency room. Our daughter has commented that she feels as though she has cement in her bones.
— Pam Judy 20 July 2011, Carmichaels, Pennsylvania resident
In 2006 Pam Judy and her family had a new home built on their farm. For three years Pam and her family enjoyed the peace and …
by Kim Petersen / March 7th, 2014
A Toronto Star article states, “It goes without saying that our next mayor should have integrity, be law-abiding and set a good example to our children. We also need an effective consensus builder and administrator. We need a mayor whom police will want to work with rather than tail.”
Au contraire. It does not go without saying that a city needs a mayor. This corporate media piece hinges on the presumption that the capitalism-steered state is the nadiral political societal paradigm. However, the reality is that the present paradigm is an abysmal failure, except for the 1%-ers.
The …
by Neve Gordon / March 7th, 2014
Without networks of collaborators conscripted from among the ranks of the insurgency, sustained military occupations are unthinkable. Yet, no one likes to talk about collaborators—it is an unpleasant subject because collaborators are about as loved by their handlers as they are by the communities they betray.
To be sure, collaborators under military occupation consider themselves as a beneficial screen, ameliorating the worst that might happen, and at times they even embrace the new order and think of themselves as brave emissaries of the future. But from the handler’s viewpoint, they are instruments of war and counterinsurgency only to be expunged …
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 6th, 2014
According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of Washington’s stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor. It is Greece all over again.
Before anything approaching stability and legitimacy has been obtained for the puppet government put in power by the Washington orchestrated coup against the legitimate, elected Ukraine government, the Western looters are already at work. Naive protesters who believed the …
