Latest articles
by Kevin Annett / February 20th, 2014
The fat cats’ media never reported it, naturally, so I heard about Pete’s passing from another folk singer. And that’s as it should be.
Pete was 94 when he died last month, but I first met him when I was barely thirteen.
I was sunning myself one afternoon in our back yard to avoid doing my homework when a banjo-plucked tune began wafting my way from my brother’s open bedroom window. The sound was pure magic. But it was the words of that first of many Pete Seeger songs that went straight through my heart and lodged in there somewhere, setting the …
by Kanika Mishra / February 20th, 2014
Karnika Kahen, the cartoon character was born when I was feeling very angry after reading the news about Godman Asaram Bapu, a high-profile guru who remarked that the 2012 Delhi gang rape victim, Nirbhaya, (( Indian laws forbid the publishing of a rape victim’s name, Nirbhaya means “fearless” in Hindi; it is the name used by the media.)) was equally guilty with those who raped, tortured, and killed her. In 2013, Asaram was accused of sexual assault against a 16-year old girl himself. He raped her on the pretext of exorcising her from evil spirits. …
Whose Body Is It?: Part 3 of 3
by Kim Petersen / February 20th, 2014
Part 3 of the three-part series “Whose Body is It?” takes on the controversial topic of the right to end one’s life. (Read Part 1 and Part 2.)
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Melinda had never seen anyone die or even seen a dead body, and she had only been to one funeral in her 43 years on the planet. Her view of death had come mainly from television and shows she downloaded from online.
However, now she was face-to-face with the specter of dying. Her best friend Peter had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and he was severely afflicted by dementia as a result. They said that …
by Kevin Coleman / February 20th, 2014
New Artificial Frontiers and Uncharted Territories from the Synthetic Biologists
Ingredients produced using synthetic biology to be put into cosmetics from one of the world’s biggest cosmetics companies.
Synthetic biology and the cosmetics industry?
You know what will happen there. These overpriced and extremely dangerous vanity products will be seized upon by the masses who have become, through years of hard training, indoctrination and manipulation, turned to believing all the bull crap from these cosmetics giants.
‘You too can be youthful to the bitter end!’
But in all fairness to the cosmetics industry they are no better (nor worse) than the rest of the …
Back to basics
by The Saker / February 19th, 2014
As the dramatic events in the Ukraine are unfolding the topic of what President Yanukovich can, or can not do, regularly comes up and I think that this is a good time to go back to basics and look at what a government — any government, regardless of its political orientation — can and even must do when confronted with an urban armed insurrection.
First, a head of state, any head of state, has an obligation to uphold the Constitution, the law and order, to protect its citizens from abuse and violence against their persons and their property. Sounds …
Australia, Indonesia and the Law of the Sea
by Binoy Kampmark / February 19th, 2014
To seek to tow the boats back on to the high seas or to the Indonesian exclusive economic zone well exceeds Australia’s legal rights under the 1982 UN Convention of the Law of the Sea.
— Donald Rothwell, The Australian, Mar 10, 2012
Australia’s refugee policy, specifically with regards Indonesia, can be summed up as calculatingly brazen or breathtakingly incompetent. Having admitted that Australian vessels entered Indonesia waters six times during the months of December and January, an internal report found that such incidents are the result of challenged calculations on the part of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN).
In so doing, the …
General Hifter, the CIA and the Unfinished Coup
by Ramzy Baroud / February 19th, 2014
On Friday, February 14, 92 prisoners escaped from their prison in the Libyan town of Zliten. Nineteen of them were eventually recaptured, two of whom were wounded in clashes with the guards. It was just another daily episode highlighting the utter chaos which has engulfed Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Much of this is often reported with cliché explanations as in the country’s ‘security vacuum’, or Libya’s lack of a true national identity. Indeed, tribe and region seem to supersede any other affiliation, but it is hardly that simple.
On that same Friday, February 14, Maj. Gen. Khalifa …
Chaos, Corruption, Grand Theft, and an Experiment
by Felicity Arbuthnot / February 19th, 2014
On September 12, 2013, Syria’s President al-Assad committed to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons, with the caveats that the United States must stop threatening his country and supplying weapons to the terrorists. He has been as good as his word. The same cannot be said for the US and its boot licking allies.
Three days earlier US Secretary of State John Kerry – who had been killing Vietnamese in the US onslaught on Vietnam as American ‘planes rained down 388,000 tons of chemical weapons on the Vietnamese people – had threatened Syria with a military strike if the weapons stocks were …
by Jim McCluskey / February 19th, 2014
The US, the UK, Russia, China and France are rebuilding or upgrading their arsenals of nuclear weapons. The other four nuclear states too are ‘improving’ their arsenals. As we discuss the statistics and strategies of ‘nuclear arsenals’ and ‘nuclear deterrence’ it can be hard to keep in mind the reality underlying the abstract discussions. The nine nuclear states have over 10,000 nuclear weapons in their stockpiles. This is enough to wipe out the entire population of the planet many times over together with all other life forms. Is this sane? Has the human race lost its senses? A single …
Lenin on the "Withering Away'' of the State and Violent Revolution, Chapter 1, Section 4
by Thomas Riggins / February 18th, 2014
Lenin discusses these two topics in section four of chapter one of The State and Revolution (1917). This section begins with a long quote from Engels’ 1870’s work Anti-Dühring. The quote begins with “The proletariat seizes state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms and abolishes the state as state.”
There is a problem with this formulation. Article 11 of the Soviet Constitution (1977) clearly stated “State property, i.e. the common property of the Soviet people, is the principal form of socialist property.” …
Why it is Driving the World Towards Madness
by John Chuckman / February 18th, 2014
Nothing that Israel does in its affairs would be of quite such great concern to the world were it not for the fact that Israel drags along, willy-nilly, the world’s greatest power, much like some impressive-looking but feeble-willed, dazed parent stumbling along behind a screaming toddler demanding yet another goody. The threat of serious wars has grown exponentially in recent decades precisely owing to this fact, and not just wars but wars reflecting neither justice nor principle, the aggressive reordering of other people’s affairs by sweeping them into the pit of hell. The so-called war on terror is just part …
by William A. Cook / February 18th, 2014
In 2010 I edited The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction, a collection of articles by world renowned writers who unveil the genocide taking place in Palestine by the occupying power in this “advanced” civilization of 2014, a slow water torture of constant humiliation, destruction and death as the world watches and nothing is done to bring justice to the people of Palestine. In that text, Dr. Jeff Halper details the quest for “peace” that has been crippled by the state of Israel, the intentional, calculated and indifferent response to the conditions facing the …
Whose Body Is It?: Part 2 of 3
by Kim Petersen / February 18th, 2014
Part 1 of “Whose Body is It?” probed whether the government has a right to outlaw the commerce of sexuality. Part 2 of this three-part series focuses on the issue of whether the government has the right to determine what citizens may consume, specifically drugs.
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Frank passed the joint to his raven-haired partner Tarte. She drew in a drag and coughed. Then she complained, “I don’t feel anything.” It was her first time trying weed. As a curious, exploratory type she felt she had to try.
“I didn’t feel anything my first few times either, and then suddenly one time I …
by Steve Ahlquist / February 18th, 2014
In early February, Providence mayoral candidate Brett Smiley, who is running in the Democratic primary but currently holds no elected position, submitted a bill to the Rhode Island General Assembly with the help of State Senator Gayle Goldin and State Representative Maria Cimini that, if passed, would impose a ten percent sales tax on all guns and ammo sold in Rhode Island. The projected $2 million raised is to be allocated to “every town and city police department based proportionally on the prevalence of crime in each area, and then each police department will further allocate the money to non-profits …
by David Swanson / February 17th, 2014
I had a heck of a time making sense of the U.S. Navy’s new motto “A Global Force for Good” until I realized that it meant “We are a global force, and wherever we go we’re never leaving.”
For three years now people in the little island nation of Bahrain have been nonviolently protesting and demanding democratic reforms.
For three years now the king of Bahrain and his royal thugs have been shooting, kidnapping, torturing, imprisoning, and terrorizing nonviolent opponents. An opponent includes anyone speaking up for human rights or even “insulting” the …
by Brian J. Trautman / February 17th, 2014
In one of his most famous writings, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of injustice, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” In other words, the very existence of injustice has implications for us all. Thus, we each have a responsibility to actively challenge unjust power structures wherever they should surface. According to the United Nations, “the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have never been more relevant than …
Journalism, Floods And Climate Silence
by Media Lens / February 17th, 2014
The key to what is precisely wrong with corporate journalism is explained in this nutshell by the US commentator Michael Parenti:
Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for “objectivity”. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.
Examples of bias towards the orthodoxy of Western power are legion every day of the week. On January 30 this year, David Loyn reported for BBC News at Ten from Bagram airbase in Afghanistan as US troops prepared to withdraw from a blood-strewn occupation. Standing beside a large US military plane, he intoned:
For all of the lives lost …
by William Boardman / February 17th, 2014
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
— Mark Twain, circa 1890
Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I’ll throw you off this f**king balcony.
— Congressman Michael Grimm, R-NY, January 28, 2014
Let’s grant that Mark Twain was using hyperbole while committing a verbal insult against a widely despised class of American citizens. But that’s not a crime. At least not yet.
Republican Grimm, by contrast, was using hyperbole (presumably) while committing a verbal assault against a lone, non-threatening American citizen. That is a …
by David Macaray / February 17th, 2014
By now everyone has heard the disappointing news (among the adjectives used to describe it are “devastating” and “disastrous” and “crushing”) out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where workers at a Volkswagen plant voted, by a margin of 712-626, to reject membership in the United Auto Workers (UAW). Volkswagen management remained neutral throughout the organizing campaign.
Granted, because hopes were running so high, no one is going to tell you this wasn’t a bitter defeat. Prior to the vote, Bob King, president of the UAW, had gone on record as saying that the key to the UAW’s continued existence (having once had 1.5 …
Whose Body Is It?: Part 1 of 3
by Kim Petersen / February 17th, 2014
For most people, it is probably taken for granted that what they decide to eat; if they have a beer with dinner and relax with a cigarette or a reefer afterwards; whether they exercise, engage in sports, or live like a couch potato; whether they ride a bike to work or drive a car; and whether they will undergo invasive medical procedures or opt for homeopathy is a matter of choice. People will assert that they have sovereignty over their corporeal selves. Right-wingers should have few qualms with such as a notion, as it is in line with their ideal …
by Jonathan Cook / February 17th, 2014
Fadi al-Qatshan is one of the latest casualties of a war taking place in Gaza’s shadows, as Israel seeks ever more desperate ways to recruit collaborators while Hamas, the Islamic movement ruling Gaza, enforces tough counter-measures.
The 26-year-old graduate died in November. He was killed not by a bullet or in a missile strike, but when a simple piece of medical hardware – an implant in his heart – failed. His repeated requests to the Israeli authorities over more than a year to be allowed out of Gaza for medical treatment had gone unheeded.
According to his family, Israeli security services knew …
by Paul Craig Roberts / February 17th, 2014
A number of confirmations have come in from readers that Washington is fueling the violent protests in Ukraine with our taxpayer dollars. Washington has no money for food stamps or to prevent home foreclosures, but it has plenty of money with which to subvert Ukraine.
One reader wrote: “My wife, who is of Ukrainian nationality, has weekly contact to her parents and friends in Zhytomyr [NW Ukraine]. According to them, most protesters get an average payment of 200-300 grivna, corresponding to about 15-25 euro. As I additionally heard, one of the most active agencies and ‘payment outlets’ on EU side is …
by Richard Silverstein / February 17th, 2014
Canadian media offers a shocking new development in the intelligence wars. This involves a honeypot security officer working for Canadian immigration. Her assignment was to romance an alleged Iranian spy. Sometime during their year-long romance, one night after having a few drinks too many, she told him an amazing story: that one of the 27 Mossad agents who assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabouh escaped from Dubai to Canada:
Passport Canada secretly supplied a new identity and passport to a Mossad agent living in Canada after the Israeli spy participated in the 2010 plot to kill a leader of terrorist group Hamas in …
by William Boardman / February 16th, 2014
Bureaucrats saw threat from 5th grader miming imaginary weapon
Remember that flurry of news reports in December 2013 about a middle school with a zero tolerance weapons policy suspending two fifth grade boys, one for pretending to use a book as a “gun” and the other for responding with a wholly imaginary bow and arrow? It really happened. And now the school district has acted to remedy a mistake that it has not admitted, and for which none of the school authorities apparently face any accountability.
The initial incident lasted a few seconds in mid-October, in the South …
by Robert Hunziker / February 16th, 2014
Something is out of kilter in the ocean.
The problem is found throughout the marine food chain from the base, plankton (showing early signs of reproductive and maturation complications) to the largest fish species in the water, the whale shark (on the endangered species list.)
The ocean is not functioning properly. It’s a festering problem that will not go away. It’s called acidification, and as long as fossil fuels predominate, it will methodically, and assuredly, over time, kill the ocean.
Scientists already have evidence of trouble in the sea water.
The use of fossil fuel, in large measure, is the primary pathway behind this …
by Christy Rodgers / February 16th, 2014
[W]ith the weight of Magna Carta, the [British Film Institute] proclaimed Hitchcock’s 46th feature the greatest film ever made, displacing Citizen Kane’s 50-year reign at the top.
– The Guardian, August 2012
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 critical and commercial flop, Vertigo, is a film about obsession that is itself an object of obsession. Those whom it does not leave indifferent it tends to haunt, and as its subject is also a haunting (or several, at different levels of narrative reality), there’s an appropriately vertiginous dynamic between the film’s story and its reception.
The story is an adaptation of a French crime novel …
by Ludwig Watzal / February 16th, 2014
“Today no American is safe from his own government”, writes Paul Craig Roberts in his introduction to his new book on How America was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Warfare State (Clarity Press, 2014). To anticipate the essence of the book: The greatest threat to the freedom of the American people comes from their own government and not from an imaginary terrorist threat. This alarmist rhetoric serves as a pretext for America’s wars of aggression.
In his anthology, Roberts provides convincing arguments that the US has become a rogue state. According to him, “America’s fate was sealed when the public …
by Bill Annett / February 15th, 2014
Some time ago, Al Gore’s television network, Current TV, ran an hour-long feature billed as a hard-hitting bit of investigative journalism. It wasn’t. It was amateurish, poorly paced with incompetent interviews, a lack of continuity and excess repetition. Nevertheless, “Under the Knife Abroad,” in spite of itself, succeeded in making a strong statement that has escaped our gridlocked politicians, preoccupied with the meaningless debate about our disgraceful health care system. The simple fact is that Medical Tourism is a burgeoning industry, to our national shame.
Here in the United States, for the past 50 years …
Not Through With Big Things
by Debbie Metke / February 15th, 2014
The day he died, my organization got a hand-written letter from Pete Seeger, the 94-year-old iconic folksinger who departed last month after decades of inspiring us onward with his peace and justice ballads.
Now with his loss, we realize it is quite a gap to fill. Indeed, one political cartoon showed a hapless banjo player reading his paper’s page: “JOB OPPORTUNITY: New Pete Seeger needed. Must start immediately.”
What were his final messages to us? In an article last week entitled, “I’m Through With Big Things,” Seeger was quoted as saying, “Be …
Resolute Dignity
by William Manson / February 15th, 2014
In the mid-20th century, writers and filmmakers who had experienced the Depression first-hand were keenly sensitive to the individual’s paramount concern for independence and dignity. In 1942, inspired by the New Deal speeches of then progressive-populist Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, composer Aaron Copland wrote his famous “Fanfare for the Common Man”—a musical piece entirely reflective of the renewed populism of the time.
Think of fictional characters such as the Joad family, whose relentless struggle against overwhelming economic forces was unforgettably depicted by Steinbeck in his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. Such characters—with their stubborn sense of independence, quiet …
