WASHINGTON, May 6 2014 (IPS) — The head of the U.N. team that investigated the August 21, 2013 Sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, Ake Sellstrom, is doubtful about the number of victims of the attack reported immediately after the event.
Sellstrom has suggested that many people who claimed to have been seriously affected by Sarin merely imagined that they had suffered significant exposure to the chemical.
Despite the paucity of the most fundamental indicator of exposure to Sarin, 31 of the 36 were found to have a trace of Sarin in their blood samples.
Underlying Sellstrom’s doubts are data on symptoms from a …
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Unalienable Rights. Self-evident Rights. You might say the modern definition of Human Rights springs directly from that unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America. You probably wouldn’t be given much of an argument.
President Obama on healthcare. “Well, I think it should be a right for every American.” Obviously healthcare as a right isn’t self-evident to President Obama.
Why Jerry Brown’s Rainy Day Fund Is a Bad Idea for California
by Ellen Brown / May 6th, 2014
There is no need to sequester funds urgently needed by Main Street to pay for Wall Street’s malfeasance. Californians can have their cake and eat it too – with a state-owned bank.
Governor Jerry Brown is aggressively pushing a California state constitutional amendment requiring budget surpluses to be used to pay down municipal debt and create an emergency “rainy day” fund, in anticipation of the next economic crisis.
On the face of it, it is a sensible idea. As long as Wall Street controls America’s finances and our economy, another catastrophic bust is a good bet.
Getting off the Greyhound bus at the Port Authority Terminal, I immediately saw a man in his mid 50’s digging through a garbage can. With his right hand, he held a plastic tray on which were placed whatever edible scraps he could find. Lickable flecks clung to his ample brown beard. Chewing while scavenging, he was quite leisurely with his task and no one among the many people sitting or standing nearby paid him any attention. Done with one trash can, he moved to the next, and since there were so many in this huge building, I imagined his daily …
Sometimes it just takes one person with a creative mind to shake up the entire legal system. In the case of Costa Rica, that person is Luis Roberto Zamorra Bolaños, who was just a law student when he challenged the legality of his government’s support for George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He took the case all the way up to the Costa Rican Supreme Court—and won.
Today a practicing lawyer, Zamorra at 33 still looks like a wiry college student. And he continues to think outside the box and find creative ways to use the courts to fuel his passion for …
To ensure the Internet is open to all on an equal basis we must act now to prevent mega-corporations from destroying Internet Freedom
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 5th, 2014
Update: Actions every day starting on Wednesday, May 7th, at noon and 5 pm. To Save The Internet, we are building a People’s Firewall against the FCC’s proposed rule that will create a ‘pay to play’ Internet by ending net neutrality. The FCC is located at 445 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20554.
If we act NOW, we can ensure a free, open and equal Internet for the 21st Century. On Wednesday, May 15 the FCC will vote on a proposal to end net neutrality and impose class-based Internet discrimination, but we have the power to stop them.
MSNBC’s slogan, “Lean Forward,” does not encourage actually moving forward
The central argument of Michael’s Arria’s lively new book about America’s so-called “progressive network” is not that MSNBC is bad at what it does, but that, all too often, even what MSNBC does well doesn’t do much good for most Americans. As Arria puts it in the introduction of Medium Blue (a spring 2014 release by CounterPunch Books):
This book doesn’t possess a hidden agenda. It’s an attack on MSNBC from the left, an attempt to highlight and track the problematic ties between the …
Let me preface these new thoughts by stating that what another billionaire says or does because he feels ‘above the rest of we serfs‘ is never surprising to me. What Don Sterling, owner of the Clippers basketball team, said and implied is murmured to this writer many times by many people… always in either whispers or in secure settings. Racism is alive and well in Amerika, as it always has been since our founding. What cracks me up is how much television and radio time is reserved for this latest “major scandal”. One can understand the sports media jumping all …
The war and occupation of Afghanistan by US-led forces has gone on for almost thirteen years. The current war was preceded by another twenty-three or so years of war; first between the Soviets and US-funded mujahedin and then between the various mujahedin factions, with the final result of that episode of war being the triumph of the Taliban. That brings us up to October 2001 when US forces attacked Afghanistan for harboring Osama bin Laden. The Taliban were vanquished, with many being killed, many captured and most of the rest going back to their previous lives while Washington put its …
When Prime Minister David Cameron pulls a stunt or announces a “ground breaking” new policy, it is pretty well guaranteed to backfire. Indeed, his coalition government policy U-turns are heading for encyclopedic.
Is he opportunistic, spineless – a lethal combination of the two – or something less sinister? In opposition, to prove his “green credentials” he headed to the Arctic for a photo-op with Huskies, leaping “aboard a Husky-powered sled to visit a remote Norwegian glacier to see first hand the effects of global warming.” As the (UK) Telegraphput it at the time: “Cameron turns blue to prove …
by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan / May 2nd, 2014
Preamble
Over the past few years, we have written a series of articles about the global crisis. ((See, for example, Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2008. Contours of Crisis: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil? Dollars & Sense, December 29.
Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2009. Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality. Dollars & Sense, April 28.
Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2010. Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism. Monograph, Jerusalem and Montreal (July): 1-42.
Kliman, Andrew, Shimshon Bichler, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2011. Systemic Crisis, Systemic Fear: An Exchange. Special Issue on ‘Crisis’. Journal of Critical Globalization Studies (4, …
Washington has no intention of allowing the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved. Having failed to seize the country and evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Washington sees new opportunities in the crisis.
One is to restart the Cold War by forcing the Russian government to occupy the Russian-speaking areas of present day Ukraine where protesters are objecting to the stooge anti-Russian government installed in Kiev by the American coup. These areas of Ukraine are former constituent parts of Russia herself. They were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 20th century when both Ukraine and Russia were …
Over the last 25-30 years Sweden’s military, security and foreign policy elite has changed Sweden’s policy 180 degrees.
These fundamental changes were initiated by the Social Democratic government under Goran Persson and foreign minister Anna Lindh and have been carried through virtually without public debate.
The rapprochement with interventionism, militarism and US/NATO in all fields has been planned, incremental, furtive and dishonest; in short, unworthy of a democracy.
This elite is more loyal with Brussels and Washington than with the Swedes.
If your image of Sweden is that it is a progressive, innovative and peace-promoting country with a global mind-set …
As the fog of war descends, it is important to shout a few main points from the rooftops before they get lost in the details. A coup-appointed junta in Kiev, designed, engineered and controlled from Washington, has begun a massive armed assault on its citizens in the east. This supreme and original war crime, reinforced by the Nuremburg Tribunal, is no longer in doubt. Nor can there be any more doubt about who is pulling the strings. The illegitimate junta have pulled out all the stops, as their IMF masters demanded they do just the other day. Pointedly–and tellingly–the mafia …
We read a lot about a new Cold War, and I think there is truth in the words. Obama’s so-called “pivot” towards Asia is clearly directed at China’s emergence as a great power, at the notion of containing China, to use the very word, coined by the American State Department’s George F. Kennan and used for many years to characterize America’s policy towards the Soviet Union.
Obama’s talk of a “pivot” is extremely revealing. How does a former sandal-wearing lecturer in Constitutional Law come up with such language? It is unmistakably the language of America’s military-security establishment, that group of …
Recent times have witnessed a number of pseudo-revolutions like in Egypt, Tunisia, Philippines, and Indonesia where leaders of the old order were overthrown, but the corrupt system remained in place, and a new servant of the system was brought in. Cuba is an important anomaly; it is one of the few lands where a genuine revolution pulled down a capitalist system of oppression and replaced it with a people-centered system.
For daring to be a successful revolution, for daring to stand as a symbol that there is a viable alternative to the capitalist order, and for persisting as a reminder that …
Imagine if China were stationing large numbers of troops in the United States. Imagine that most of them were based in a small rural county in Mississippi. Imagine — this shouldn’t be hard — that their presence was problematic, that nations they threatened in Latin America resented the United States’ hospitality, and that the communities around the bases resented the noise and pollution and drinking and raping of local girls.
Now imagine a proposal by the Chinese government, with support from the federal government in Washington, to build another big new base in that same corner of Mississippi. Imagine the governor …
Readers of Time were recently treated to an absurd take on Ukraine, Putin, “the West” and a bunch of other stuff by journalist Robert D. Kaplan, “chief geopolitical analyst” of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., popularly known as Stratfor. Stratfor bills itself as a “private global-intelligence firm” that provides “strategic intelligence on global business, economic, security and geopolitical affairs.” Some bamboozled critics and fans call it “the shadow CIA.” Its mocking critics claim “Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive.”
In addition to having its interns use Google to “gather …
By the end of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, two key questions were on the table for those who not only are aware of rape but would like to end men’s violence against women.
First, do we live in a rape culture, or is rape perpetrated by a relatively small number of predatory men?
Second, is rape a clearly definable crime, or are there gray areas in sexual encounters that defy easy categorization as either consensual or non-consensual?
If those seem to be tricky, or trick, questions, don’t worry. There’s an easy answer to both: patriarchy (more on that shortly).
For more than a decade, radical analysis has provided reams of studies revealing the political and economic dominance of an increasingly narrow sector of the U.S. and European corporate and financial elite. However, the warnings and political implications of this domination have received little attention beyond radical and left circles. It took a study by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University – and the current best-selling book by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, – both emanating from liberal academia, for the warnings and some of the political questions associated with the …
On the occasion of May Day, union activists Bill Fletcher Jr. and Sam Ginden discuss the the weakening of the workers movement and what needs to happen next.
On May 6, Cleveland taxpayers will go to the polls to vote on Issue 7. A no vote will prevent an increase in taxpayer money to the already subsidized, big league sports arenas. A yes vote will reaffirm taxpayer servitude to arrogant corporatists and their cruel, twisted mistreatment of that struggling city.
When I was growing up, tax dollars for public works were used for serious public services. Taxpayers paid to build schools, highways, bridges, libraries, health clinics, public transit and other community needs. Tax dollars were not given over to the mega-rich’s profitable athletic playpens. To even suggest tax money …
The blogger quotes Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper: “Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukraine and provocative military activity remains a serious concern to the international community.” These words are proffered without analysis.
What occupation of Ukraine by Russia?
A partial and contradictory explanation follows when the blogger writes: “NATO is increasing its military footprint in Eastern Europe amid growing concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions in the region following his country’s annexation …
America’s Posture Toward Russia is Nothing if not Consistent—and Consistently Misrepresented
by Jason Hirthler / May 1st, 2014
During frantic post-Second World War planning sessions in the West, the British Foreign Office noted its fears of “ideological infiltration” from the Soviet Union, a terrifying possibility it described as “something very like aggression.” This near-hysterical fear of independent nationalism has been the hallmark of Western foreign policy ever since. Lately it has been restored to its natural fever pitch by the crisis in the Ukraine. Last week the venerable Economist, that heady rag that all financial fledglings and crusty mandarins fold beneath their arm on the way to lunch, headlined its April 19th issue with a map of …
A new study by psychologist David Budescu of Fordham University and his colleagues is actually the latest in a string of papers by these researchers showing that people systematically misunderstand what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) means when it uses phrases such as “likely” and “very likely” to describe the strength of its conclusions. Take, for instance, the IPCC’s famous finding, in 2007, that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [human-produced] greenhouse gas concentrations.” According to Budescu’s research, …
As expected, the so-called peace talks farce has ended in disarray with all parties utterly discredited again.Do they never learn? Expect more acrobatics and slapstick if the same circus clowns remain in the ring.
A new act is badly needed. Let this be the moment in history when world leaders finally stop talking poppycock about peace in relation to the Holy Land, and start talking justice.
A statement issued yesterday by Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat seemed to say there will be no more negotiations until Israel complies with the 1967 borders and ends its illegal occupation. He didn’t mention explicitly that …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / April 30th, 2014
On Reality Asserts Itself, TRNN’s Paul Jay interviews Alan Robock who is a climatologist, a climate scientist, and a meteorologist. Robock says his initial work led him to investigate the role of volcanoes in global warming, but years of reports convinced him that CO2 is the most likely cause.
A striking and provocative video has been brought to wider attention by the free thinker and humanist Gilad Atzmon who comments, “This is a must watch, Israel is way ahead of us in its treatment of this bizarre non-historical piece of history… (don’t let the Shoa’s hairy armpits put you off, remember the theatrical event takes place in Israel and bad taste is inherent to the Israeli vision of beauty).”
The video is accompanied by the following introduction: “For the first time in history! after a worldwide tour… The Holocaust came to visit Yad Vashem — the Holocaust Museum …
Through a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, the billionaire Koch brothers have helped advance a number of state laws that benefit corporate and right-wing interests. An internal document shows ALEC is tracking 131 bills which, among other issues, seek to roll back renewable energy standards, combat federal coal regulations and tout the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. ALEC’s efforts recently paid off in Oklahoma where Gov. Mary Fallin has signed a measure allowing utilities to charge customers who generate energy from solar panels or small wind turbines. ALEC’s victory in Oklahoma comes as a federal judge …
