Latest articles
by Andre Vltchek / May 16th, 2014
Indonesians are no amateurs when it comes to mass murder and genocides. They managed to slaughter with their bare hands, between 1 and 3 million people in 1965/66, mainly those who belonged to the educated class, and of course the Communists, teachers, artists and members of the Chinese minority.
They butchered and tortured to death around 30 percent of the inhabitants of what is now Timor-Leste. And they have already exterminated at least 150,000 men, women and children in Papua, in an ongoing and totally hushed up genocide that allows Western countries to access its natural resources. 150,000 corpses is, of …
by Andrey Fomine / May 16th, 2014
The information provided below was obtained from an insider in one of Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. It is clear that there are people even within the interim administration in Kiev who are against what happened in Odessa on May 2 and throughout the whole country.
Scheming
After the loss of Crimea and the popular uprising in Mariupol, Odessa is now Ukraine’s only gateway to the sea, thus making it the most important city in the country after Kiev.
Ten days before the tragedy a secret meeting was held in Kiev, chaired by the …
by Robert Hunziker / May 15th, 2014
Now that the Obama administration has publicized their report, 2014 National Climate Assessment, about the dangers of global warming with concomitant climate change, the Republicans have decided to informally declare war on the planet.
As such, the thesis herein is that global warming and climate change are now so widely recognized and so well defined by science that opposition to the problem is tantamount to an act of war. Furthermore, as a matter of principle, purposeful acts that serve to perpetuate global warming are acts against all of humanity.
It’s worth noting that recent declarations of war by the Republicans have been …
by Paul Haeder / May 15th, 2014
Photo op below says it all, this Obama cretin amongst these elitists, superficial elite women, yammering away, yammering away. It’s chilling. The face of Obama the Demon, the faces of those white women, and then, Whoopi? OMG — Oh Mother Gaia!
Then, that National Jewish Radio, again, this morning, with Steve “Prozac Foolish Laugher on the Planet and Somebody No One Wants in their Foxhole When the Bullets Start Flying” Inskeep with his yammering against that other yammerer, Barbara Walters, about her career, about her significance to human and woman-kind. Silly story after silly story, and the breaking news of Barbara …
by Media Lens / May 15th, 2014
There are always convenient news-hooks on which corporate journalists can hang their power-friendly prejudices about the West being ‘the good guys’ in world affairs. Channel 4 News is not immune from this chauvinism. For example, Matt Frei introduced a report about last month’s elections in Iraq with this propaganda bullet:
Now, America once invaded Iraq so that, in large part, Iraqis could do what they did today – go to the polls. (Channel 4 News, April 30, 2014)
Frei was, in fact, diligently reading out the first line of a blog piece by his colleague Jonathan Rugman, C4 News foreign …
by Paul Haeder / May 15th, 2014
battle-weary soldiers get a mixed welcome back to the Inland Northwest
It’s always the things they carry into war: not just the survival gear and non-combat items they stuff into rucksacks, but also the fears, hopes, family narratives, broken and supposed whole selves they hold to when looking at themselves in the mirror at 4 a.m. right before heading out for a patrol . . . fire-fight . . . Apache helicopter run … or drone session. The really heavy things they haul into war aren’t M-60 machine guns and RPGs but memories and pasts, and for some, a big blank …
What the Media is Not Telling Us about Yemen
by Ramzy Baroud / May 15th, 2014
“In Yemen today, the US embassy is closed to the public. Officials telling CNN there is credible information of a threat against Western interests there,” a CNN news anchor read the news bulletin on May 08.
This is CNN’s Yemen. It is a Yemen that seems to exist for one single purpose, and nothing else: maintain Western, and by extension, US interests in that part of the world. When these interests are threatened, only then does Yemen matter.
Yemen of ‘Western Interests’
Every reference in that specifically-tailored discourse serves a purpose. It is as if al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) exists to …
by Ralph Nader / May 15th, 2014
The Republican Party establishment – read the corporatist U.S. Chamber of Commerce and their incumbent toadies controlling the Party in Congress – is in the process of vanquishing the Tea Party. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, predicted as much when he told the New York Times in March that his brand of corporate Republicanism is going to “crush” challengers that Republican incumbents will face in their primaries.
The plan to “crush” the Tea Party candidates is detailed, very well-funded and working. During the early primaries in North Carolina, big Republican money gave state legislator, Thom Tillis, a big victory …
by Medea Benjamin / May 15th, 2014
If you think that as a United States citizen you’re entitled to a trial by jury before the government can decide to kill you–– you’re wrong. During his stint as a lawyer at the Department of Justice, David Barron was able to manipulate constitutional law so as to legally justify killing American citizens with drone strikes. If you’re wondering what the justification for that is, that’s just too bad – the legal memos are classified. Sounds a little suspicious, doesn’t it? What’s even more suspicious is that now the Obama Administration wants to appoint the lawyer who wrote the legal …
Piketty: The Market and Private Property Should Be the Slave of Democracy
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / May 15th, 2014
by Gareth Porter / May 15th, 2014
IPS — As diplomats began drafting a comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme and Western sanctions in Vienna Tuesday, U.S. officials were poised to demand a drastic cut in Iran’s enrichment capabilities that is widely expected to deadlock the negotiations.
Iran is almost certain to reject the basic concept that it should reduce the number of its centrifuges to a fraction of its present total, and the resulting collapse of the talks could lead to a much higher level of tensions between the United States and Iran.
The Obama administration’s highly risky diplomatic gambit rests on the concept of “breakout time”, …
A riddle waiting to be solved
by Christos Kefalis / May 15th, 2014
The double Greek elections of May 18th and 25th – municipal and regional on 18th and the European Parliament elections together with the second round of municipal and regional ones where necessary on the 25th – will undoubtedly influence decisively the course of the country. They will reflect the evident as well as underground trends in Greek social and political life developed in the period after the elections of May and June 2012.
Given the specificity of the situation in Greece, which became during the last few years the workshop and test field for the most brutal neoliberal policies, forged by …
by Jonathan Cook / May 15th, 2014
For 66 years Israel’s founding generation has lived with the guilt of a secret, one it successfully concealed from the generations that followed. Forests were planted to hide war crimes. School textbooks mythologised the events surrounding Israel’s creation. The army was blindly venerated as the most moral in the world.
Once, “Nakba” – Arabic for “Catastrophe”, referring to the dispossession of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 – would have failed to register with any but a small number of Israeli Jews. Today, only those who never watch television or read a newspaper can plead ignorance.
As marches and festivals are …
by Medea Benjamin / May 14th, 2014
President José Mujica of Uruguay, a 78-year-old former Marxist guerrilla who spent 14 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, recently visited the United States to meet with President Obama and speak at a variety of venues. He told Obama that Americans should smoke less and learn more languages. He lectured a roomful of businessmen at the US Chamber of Commerce about the benefits of redistributing wealth and raising workers’ salaries. He told students at American University that there are no “just wars.” Whatever the audience, he spoke extemporaneously and with such brutal honesty that it was hard not to …
Global Power Project: Part 2 of 4 Part Series
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / May 14th, 2014
Last week, in Part 1 of the Global Power Project’s investigations into the machinery behind the International Monetary Conference, I examined the history and evolution of the IMC from its founding by the American Bankers Association in 1954 to the global financial and monetary disruptions of the late 1970s.
The IMC, happening June 1-3 in Munich, brings together hundreds of top bankers with leading finance officials and central bankers from the world’s industrial powers to discuss major economic, financial and monetary issues of the day – and to form a consensus on policies for managing the world economic order. In part 2 of …
by Gilad Atzmon / May 14th, 2014
The Jewish ADL (Anti Defamation League) revealed this week that more than ‘one in four adults are ‘anti-Semitic.’
Of some 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories around the world surveyed for the ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism, 26% were found to be ‘deeply infected’ with ‘anti-Semitic attitudes.’
I find both the ADL and its polls quite amusing. Can you think of another people on this planet who so spend so much time and energy measuring how much they are loved or hated? Do the Brits measure how despised they are in Moldovia? Do the Palestinians question …
by Martha Rosenberg / May 14th, 2014
It has been over ten years since Wisconsin endured a kind of deer holocaust. The terminal deer and elk disease, chronic wasting disease (CWD), descended upon its deer population with such vengeance officials declared “CWD eradication” zones in which fauns and does would be killed before bucks. Thousands of deer carcasses were stored in refrigerated trucks in La Crosse while their severed heads were tested for CWD. If the carcasses were disease-free they were safe to eat (any takers?); if not, they were too dangerous to even put in a landfill. Why? Because “prions” (which also cause mad …
by Alton C. Thompson / May 14th, 2014
Greenpeace recently released a report that details “how by 2050, renewable energy sources could be producing close to 97% of electricity in the U.S. and approximately 94% of the country’s needs for heating and cooling homes and businesses.” The report “presents the case for a radical and rapid energy transformation and a pathway for meeting the reduced emissions that the scientific community says is urgent.”
The “plan” would lead “to about 1.5 million energy-related jobs in 2030,” contribute to energy independence, and would enable citizens to gain more control over energy production.
To make this energy “[r]evolution” possible, it would …
by Paul Haeder / May 14th, 2014
Reading the words of Felicity Arbuthnot and the culture of murder by decree, by political affirmation, through the international bodies of the dead, the UN, the leaders who eat babies at birth, with the flick of a pen, and with the stealth of billion-dollar bombers, or the guided propaganda or hand-to-hand instruction of the School of Murder, Inc., and she puts it right in the bullseye of a warped world of sick awards and accolades.
These people are ruthless, war criminals, thugs in any sense of the word. Clintons, Bushes, Carter, LBJ, any number of the tens of thousands who …
(Not Satire)
by Felicity Arbuthnot / May 13th, 2014
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
— Voltaire, 1694-1778
It is impossible not to gain the impression that the criteria for being awarded prestigious honors for services to “peace”, “humanity” or “distinguished public service” is a candidate who is duplicitous, vicious, stone-hearted and above all prepared to kill, plan killings or rejoice in killing on an industrial scale as brutally as can be devised.
Moments after being informed of the horrific death of Libyan Leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary …
The Australian Border Force
by Binoy Kampmark / May 13th, 2014
The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
— James Madison, Constitutional Convention, June 29, 1787
The greatest dangers of totalitarianism – the variant that produced the European regimes of the 1920s and 1930s – is the sense of a permanent emergency that underpins its existence. The raison d’être of such states lies in the need to maintain the fear, precipitating dangers through the social body, and fostering a permanent sense of vigilance against looming threats. Australia’s Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has certainly borrowed from that historical legacy, attempting to make the angst and …
by Kim Petersen / May 13th, 2014
At one time most people referred to the Original Peoples of the western hemisphere as Indians, as though they were all a common ethnic group. In the Arctic they were called Eskimos. The Original Peoples, however, knew, and still know, themselves as Inuit, Innu, Haudenosaunee, Beothuk, Nuu-chah-nulth, Inka, Mapuche, etc. They all became known as Indians because Christopher Columbus landed somewhere in the Caribbean, likely the Bahamas, but he reckoned that he was in India. As a consequence, he called the Lucayan people Indians, and everyone else in the western hemisphere were called Indians by the Europeans, even after they …
by Kevin Zeese / May 13th, 2014
“Occupy the FCC” encampment gathers support from tech companies and advocacy groups as net neutrality protesters surround FCC headquarters with tents and banners
Unsatisfied with backpedaling and empty promises from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, activists are camped out day and night on the agency’s doorstep demanding the Internet be reclassified as a common carrier
*****
WASHINGTON, DC — This morning, and every morning since last Wednesday, FCC employees were greeted on their way in to work by a dedicated group of net neutrality activists who are camped out on the agency’s doorstep with tents, signs, and a giant banner reading, “Don’t …
Despite more damning insights, capitalist-fueled imperial violence marches on
by Jason Hirthler / May 13th, 2014
Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the Twenty First Century is all the rage, notably for its 700-page rationale of a very simple formulation: r >g. In this formula, “r” stands for return on capital and “g” stands for general economic growth. Having read a few fairly painless selections from the celebrated tome, and a host of reviews, here’s what I have gathered: the idea seems to be that capital gains, rents, and other forms of moneymaking in which you don’t have to break a sweat, all grow faster than the general economy. We are thus condemned, should the status …
Where almost every word of news isn't what it seems
by John Chuckman / May 13th, 2014
I think a description of the political space in which we live as a kind of twilight reality is not an exaggeration. Not only is a great deal of the news about the world we read and hear manipulated and even manufactured, but a great deal of genuine news is simply missing. People often do not know what is happening in the world, although they generally believe they do know after reading their newspapers or listening to news broadcasts. People receive the lulling sounds or words of most of this kind of news almost unconsciously just as they do to …
by subMedia / May 12th, 2014
by Ron Jacobs / May 12th, 2014
Despite objective evidence that hosting international sports events does not bring money into a metropolis, cities continue to battle each other for the ability to host such events. The Olympics, World Cup, and smaller extravaganzas are the cause of much courting of executives and extravagant promises. The city that wins usually spends several times more than expected, creates numerous edifices that are rarely used again, and taxes the local citizens above and beyond most can afford. In addition, there are the not-so-obvious expenses. These range from the neglect of normal infrastructure costs associated with day to day existence; roads, schools, …
Kiev Supporters Burn Opponents Alive in Odessa, Police Do Nothing
by William Boardman / May 12th, 2014
The acting president of Ukraine, Oleksandr Turchynov told regional governors on May 1 that the Kiev interim government was “helpless” to re-establish central government control in eastern Ukraine, where anti-Kiev forces (pro-independence and/or pro-Russian) have taken control of numerous cities in a manner imitating the way the Kiev government itself seized power in February.
“I will be frank. Today, security forces are unable to take the situation in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions quickly under control,” Turchynov said at the May Day meeting. He reported that numerous Ukrainian military and security personnel had defected to the rebels, taking their arms …
We're camping out day and night on the FCC's doorstep to defend net neutrality and keep the Internet free from discrimination and "slow lanes"
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 12th, 2014
Schedule at the FCC Camp This Week
– Monday: Dinner Provided by Golden Frog (Let us know you’re coming so there is enough food, gro.ecnatsiseRralupoPnull@ofni).
– Tuesday: Performance night, music and spoken word, bring your instruments.
– Wednesday: Art Build
– Thursday: Rally at 9 AM, Open Commission Meeting at 10:30
Last week we wrote about the importance of taking action to save the Net. The Chairman of the FCC Tom Wheeler is proposing new rules that will be great for Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, but terrible for the rest of us. The FCC has been surrounded by corporate lobbyists for too …
Lenin on State and Revolution: Chapter 3, Parts 2 - 5
by Thomas Riggins / May 11th, 2014
Chapter Three of State and Revolution is devoted to Lenin’s commentary on Marx’s analysis of the 1871 Paris Commune. It is divided into five parts. This article deals with parts 2 -5 of the chapter:
2. What Is To Replace The Smashed State Machine?
According to Lenin Marx and Engels had no answer to this question when they wrote the Manifesto. Marx thought the experience of the working class would provide the answer. He summed up that experience in his work The Civil War in France on the Paris Commune and, although Lenin says that experience was “meager”, came to conclusions thought …
