In Jaffa: Land of Oranges, Ghassan Kanafani described his exile from the Palestinian coastal city of Yafa.
As a 12-year-old boy, he struggled to understand, but “on that night, though, certain threads of that story became clearer .. a big truck was standing in front of our door. Light things, mainly sleeping items, were being chucked into the truck swiftly and hysterically.”
A few decades after Kanafai wrote about his exile, I, an 8-year-old boy from a Gaza refugee camp, pondered on my own. When I stood at the borders of Yafa, the line of what was real and imagined suddenly became …
On May 15, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed rules that would threaten net neutrality.
As stated by Michael Copps at the Common Cause grassroots organisation, “This is an alarming day for anyone who treasures a free and open Internet – which should be all of us”. Many are still unfamiliar with this subject, but they should take the time to learn what it means. Not simply US citizens should be concerned about a threat to net neutrality. US hegemony over the Internet means everyone should be concerned.
According to an analysis from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), rules …
As an extension of the North American Leaders Summit which was held in February, the defense ministers from the U.S., Canada and Mexico quietly met last month to discuss continental security issues. During the conference, they addressed shared defense and security challenges. This includes threats posed by cyber attacks and transnational criminal organizations. The North American security relationship has evolved with Mexico being increasingly viewed as a valued part of the continental defense team. The U.S., Canada and Mexico are building the framework for greater cooperation on common security issues. They are expanding security arrangements and are further establishing new …
Martha Rosenberg: Your recent book takes MSNBC to task for many reporting and moral failures. One of the book’s most scathing chapters is its analysis of MSNBC’s coverage of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
Michael Arria: Yes, the Manning and Snowden coverage shows how truncated liberal media can be. The leaks call into question the very objectives of our national security policies and domestic policies. While there was coverage of the collateral murder video [in which shows Americans shoot and kill …
On the Side of the Road is a documentary with a cathartic difference about the Palestinian Nakba; the 1948 catastrophe of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of over 500 Palestine villages and cities and the forced expulsion of 750,000 indigenous residents and its ongoing dispossession through illegal settlement expansion.
The difference factor is metanoia, μηταοια, meaning a profound moral and intellectual change of mind. A conversion. Lia Tarachansky offers a simple weapon to slay Israel’s enemy within; not Palestinian Israelis nor Palestinians in general, but, the real enemy within is the hasbaric (propaganda) cruel brainwashing of Israelis from the moment of …
Darren J. Mulloy is an Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University and the author of American Extremism: History, Politics and the Militia Movement and The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War. In the following interview, Darren Mulloy speaks about the danger of American extremism, the Christian Right, and right-wing terrorism.
*****
John Wisniewski: Could you name some books and writings used by militiamen, and other extremists that attempt to establish separate homelands in the USA?
Darren Mulloy: Unlike certain white supremacist groups, the idea …
And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us a secret memo that gets us out of the bit about Thou-shalt-not-kill.
And, lo, as I was driving home from the committee hearing I was pulled over for speeding, and I said unto the officer, “I’ve got a memo that lets me speed. Would you like to see it?” and he said, “No thank you, and not your grocery list or your diary either.”
Transparency in drone murders has been a demand pushed …
Here’s today’s essay topic: The Paper of Record Does In-depth Profile of White Guy Environmentalist
Subtopic: Where’s the story?
Key discussion questions: 1) Is despair just a “White Male Thing?” 2) What is the role of art in times of ecocide?
First of all, it should be a subject of some bemusement that our contemporary media culture is so Talmudic that an entire essay can be a commentary on a single brief passage in our infinitely scrolling Torah of news; i.e., an interview in the New York Times – but so it is.
Do people exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve people?
This question came to me as the left side of my brain was reading Thomas Piketty’s important new book Capital in the 21st Century while the right side of my brain watched the news.
There was an item about the B.C. government chopping money from university arts’ programs to fund apprenticeships because it would produce more taxpayers, which would be good for the economy, followed by a commercial touting the Northern Gateway pipeline, which also would be good the economy. As my right brain soaked in the …
A year ago, on May 23, 2013, I was in the audience at the National Defense University when President Barack Obama gave his major foreign policy address. Having worked for years trying to close the Guantanamo prison and stop US drone attacks, I was crushed to realize that the president’s speech was ending and he had not announced any significant change of course on either policy. My heart was pounding with fear—it’s not an easy thing to interrupt a president, but I decided to speak up.
I tried to channel the anguish of Guantanamo prisoners like Moath al-Alwi, …
It began late Tuesday night and, if we are fortunate, will last at least a week.
But it will return. We have no illusions that there will be continued quiet.
That’s because we are in the middle of yet another election cycle.
It’s not as bad as it was in 2008 or 2012 when we were getting five to ten robocalls every day from Democrats, Republicans, Friends of Democrats, Friends of Republicans, Chambers of Commerce, and unions.
During those years, almost every TV ad was someone praising his own political legacy or attacking her opponent for something that …
Hypocrisy, the most protected of vices.
— Moliere, 1672-1673
On Sunday May 11th, Ukraine’s referenda in the country’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk provinces were met with verbal condemnation from the US – accusations of the electorate voting “at the barrel of a gun”, in reportedly a near 90% turn out, nearly 90% in Donetsk voting for political independence from Kiev and 96.2% in Luhansk in favour of self rule.
Many did indeed vote at the barrels of guns – held by those sent by the US-UK-EU-NATO allies in the $5 Billion US coup in the capitol, Kiev, which replaced the elected government. Their …
In the first part of this Global Power Project series, I examined the origins and early evolution of the International Monetary Conference, an annual meeting (to be held June 1-3 in Munich) of several hundred of the world’s most influential bankers who gather in secrecy with the finance ministers, regulators and central bankers of the world’s most powerful nations. The second part looked at the role of the IMC in the lead-up to the 1980s debt crisis. Now, in Part 3, we examine the role the IMC played throughout that debt crisis which began in August of 1982.
I knew a torturer. I liked him. The man loved his dog, you have to give him that. A Mongolian shepherd. He’d trained it so that if you pointed a gun or even just made bang-bang fingers, the dog would run and jump and push your arm aside with its paws, so he could take out his own gun and shoot you first. He was heartbroken when that dog died.
Keith wasn’t much good at torture. Overall, he was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. When I was in the wild east he was there too, looking for black-market Soviet …
War is America‘s main export. Without it, the USA is nothing. It’s economy depends on it.
Let’s take a look at the tip of a very deep iceberg.
For example, the US spending on its military in the year 2012 was the colossal amount of $684 billion. To get a perspective of just how high this spending is, this figure is less than what all the rest of the next 10 “military high spenders” countries of the world spent on defense put together. China, Russia, UK, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil together spent $654 billion on their military …
A Somewhat Incendiary Reply to a Ludicrous Question
by T.P. Wilkinson / May 19th, 2014
This question is asked repeatedly in the English-language media—probably the most heavily censored data streams in the world (a point to which I will return). Why should anyone worry about a new “cold war”? Perhaps it would be more relevant to worry about the extent of current and future “hot” ones?
The “old cold war” was an invention of the US regime. Bernard Baruch, one of two prominent South Carolina banksters (the other being James Byrnes) introduced the term into American political discourse with inter alia the aid of the dean of political propaganda, Walter Lippman, as the US Empire was …
Occupy activist Cecily McMillan, convicted on May 5 of second-degree felony assault of a New York cop whom she and witnesses claimed had grabbed her breast from behind, bruising it, stood her ground before her sentence was rendered, refusing the judge’s insistence that she should “take responsibility for her conduct.”
Risking the possibility that Judge Ronald Zwiebel might sentence her to the maximum seven years for the charge she was convicted of, McMillan would only apologize for what she termed “the accident” of involuntarily throwing back her elbow when grabbed by behind from someone she could not even see. Insisting to …
Public banks, on the other hand, pose no problem with the Constitution.
by Ellen Brown / May 19th, 2014
The movement to break away from Wall Street and form publicly-owned banks continues to gain momentum. But enthusiasts are deterred by claims that a state-owned bank would violate constitutional prohibitions against “lending the credit of the state.”
California’s constitution is typical. It states in Section 17: “The State shall not in any manner loan its credit, nor shall it subscribe to, or be interested in the stock of any company, association, or corporation . . . .”
The language sounds prohibitive, but what does it mean? Hundreds of state and local government entities extend the credit of the state. State agencies make …
In its German inaugural edition, this novel was titled September: Fata Morgana. Wonderfully translated by Mike Mitchell, the novel adapts the concept of a fata morgana (an unusual and complex form of superior mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon that distorts the view) to describe the world we live in after the events of 9-11, the attack on Afghanistan and the Bush-Blair war on Iraq. A Fata Morgana comprises several inverted and erect images that are stacked on top of one another. Told through the eyes of two men and their …
Think about the last time you reached the top of a mountain one mile high. Now think about descending that distance below the surface of the earth, foot by dark foot, far below all life, light or oxygen. You go down there to dig.
What you’re digging for, deep in the hot, fetid bowels of the earth is carbonized life forms, millions of years in the making, turned to a type of rock that ignites and burns; one that your prime minister and energy analysts tell you will help the economic future of your country.
Stop the War Against the Poor
— Sydney resident’s placard, May 18, 2014
The Australian voter, as a political species, remains alien to ideology. There is a certain cavalier ruthlessness with which governments can be dispatched at the ballot box. Being one of the most electioneered, if not over-electioneered, countries on the planet, there is much room for such removals ‘down under’. These are not necessarily done on the basis of cerebral revelations or snappy policies. The chat here is always structural and mechanical – budget cuts, and more budget cuts; the fantasy of a “bottom line”; commodities markets; interest rates; mortgage …
As the West’s assault on Ukraine gets ever bloodier, the “news” on National Public Radio (NPR) is teeming with anti-Russian propaganda, interspersed with the usual pieces declaiming on one’s senior prom and other matters of equal import. All in all it is a pretty dismal substitute for news and analysis.
But even at the Diane Rehm Show, very near the bottom of the dung heap that is NPR, a few scraps of truth can be scavenged on occasion – usually uncovered by a caller’s question. Such was the case on March 27 when Rehm’s guests were Richard Haass, president of …
Thursday, May 15 marked Nakba Day, Yawm an-Nakba, “Day of Catastrophe”, the onset of the displacement of up to 800,000 Palestinians, at the time 67% of the population, followed by the destruction of over 500 villages since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, under the commitment agreed to by the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, in November 1917.
This week: “Figures released by the Ramallah-based Central Bureau of Statistics … put the number of registered Palestinian refugees at 5.3 million. Those refugees live in 58 United Nations-run camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 18th, 2014
The campaign has pushed the door open, now we all have to go through it and raise our voices louder than Comcast’s lobbyists to save the people’s internet.
The next four months are going to determine the future of the Internet. Will it remain free and open with equal access to all? There are powerful corporate interests that want to profit even more than they already do from the Internet at the expense of …
In 1947, the first Levittown was built in New York State, then in 1952, an even bigger one was erected in Pennsylvania. Marketed as “THE MOST PERFECTLY PLANNED COMMUNITY IN AMERICA,” Levittown was the prototypical American suburb. For only $10,990, or $100 down then $67 a month, you could own three bedrooms, two bathrooms, front lawn, back yard and garage, plus access to five Olympic-sized pools, with free swimming and diving lessons thrown in. Most soothingly, you no longer had to deal with strangers above, below or abutting you, or dark skinned neighbors who may alarm or irk you …
Internationally ignored, life in Eritrea is brutal and shrouded in secrecy. The world is indifferent. The regime trusts nobody – even the UN’s special rapporteur on Eritrea, Sheila Keetharuth, has been denied a visa. Last year she stated: “basic tenets of the rule of law are not respected.” Following this, the Council “strongly condemned” Eritrea’s “continued widespread and systematic violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” ((Report: Eritrea Human Rights Watch.)) Violations include forced and child labor, “arbitrary detention, and severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and religion,” also violence against women, gender inequality, gender-based violence, female …
What would you expect from powerful people, personal courage?
The American Condoleezza Rice, 60, Iraq War architect, and the French Christine Lagarde, 58, International Monetary Fund managing director, have little in common beyond being women of power who have contributed to the misery of millions of people they never cared to meet. And now they have another quality in common, cowardice under fire, albeit only verbal fire after they were invited to speak at college commencements.
Rutgers University invited Rice to speak (for $35,000 and an honorary degree) and Smith College invited Lagarde (compensation undisclosed).
Student and faculty objections …
Early results from the largest election in the world show India’s opposition leader Narendra Modi has won a landslide victory to become the country’s new prime minister. Modi is the leader of the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party. “This is the result that the corporations in India wanted,” says Siddhartha Deb, Indian author and journalist, noting that Modi “is very a pro-development politician, which basically means pro-business.” Deb adds that Modi served as the chief minister of Gujarat, where anti-Muslim riots in 2002 left at least a thousand people dead. After the bloodshed, the U.S. State Department revoked Modi’s visa. …
