Most western Middle East experts see Islam as a problem for the West — a source of terrorism, religious fanaticism, unwanted immigrants — and they see their job as helping to change the Middle East so it’s no longer a problem for us. Eric Walberg, however, recognizes that this is another instance of the Big Lie.
The actual problem is the multifaceted aggression the West has been inflicting on the Middle East for decades and is determined to continue, no matter what the cost to them and us will be. His books and articles present the empirical evidence for this with …
An interview with Cynthia Kaufman on Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope
by Robert Jensen / February 4th, 2014
I’m fond of books that don’t claim to have The Answer but instead are useful guides in our search for answers.
Such a volume is Cynthia Kaufman’s Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope, which expresses in clear, concise language thoughts that likely have been bumping around in the minds of many of us who reject capitalism. The book is particularly powerful because of its modesty; Kaufman promises no new grand theory and instead offers insights that we all can use in our daily lives.
The only thing I didn’t like about the book when I first read it …
Here’s a question: if you had to choose, what’s more important to you, your personal wealth or the welfare of your country?
For the overwhelming majority of us — the 99% — the question is pretty much one and the same, because what little wealth we have is entirely tied up in our country one way or another. So most of us would answer, the welfare of our country. But what about the 1%? How might they respond?
I was inspired to ask this question and write this piece by an article that recently appeared in something called Money Week, which I’d …
The Associated Press called it, “The Budweiser Ad That Made You Cry During The Super Bowl.” There was Lieutenant Chuck Nadd returning home from Afghanistan only to be thrown a surprise “welcome home” parade by the good people at Budweiser. He and his wife even traveled through the celebration pulled by Clydesdales “aboard the famously-red Budweiser beer wagon.”
Then, after the ad ended, there was Lt. Chuck Nadd, in the stands at Met Life Stadium watching the Super Bowl. (Hopefully, he did not have to take public transportation there. The Clydesdales would have been a faster ride.)
National Guard Poised to Attack from Des Moines Airport
by Brian Terrell / February 3rd, 2014
The F-16 jets of the Iowa Air National Guard that formerly buzzed the city of Des Moines have disappeared and we are told that their base at the Des Moines International Airport is in the process of refitting into a command center for unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, commonly called drones. The MQ-9 Reaper drones themselves will not be coming to Iowa but will be based in and launched overseas. When airborne, these unmanned planes will be flown by remote control via satellite link from Des Moines. Classified by the military as a “Hunter-Killer platform,” the MQ-9 Reaper is armed with …
After centuries of Indigenous resistance, a breakthrough in obtaining justice for Indigenous peoples may be edging closer. A human rights organ of the Organization of American States — The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) — has adopted as a case the petition brought by a Lil’wat mother, Loni Edmonds, against Canada.
The seeking of legal redress for/by Original Peoples for the genocide, dispossession, and assorted injustices wreaked upon them has proven up to now, for the greatest part, of little or no avail. Given that the Original Peoples are struggling within the system set up and enforced by the genocidaires/dispossessors …
Do world leaders today even know the underlying causes of the Holy Land’s misery?
Hansard is the official verbatim report of proceedings in the UK Parliament. You’d expect powerful intellectual stimulation, especially from the House of Lords, but too often the record reads like pulp fiction, punctuated as always with antique language, flowery manners and a pinch of pompous poppycock. But from behind it all emerge some uncomfortable truths.
For example, in the House of Lords on 27 January we were presented with this:
Baroness Falkner of Margravine: To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assistance they have given to the people of …
David Cronin’s book Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War (Pluto Press) is based on his years as a journalist in Brussels looking at the way in which the European Union’s institutions really work. I also spent thirteen years in Brussels, working at the European Parliament and, before that, five years working as an advisor to the late Tom Megahy, an EU-critical left Labour Euro-MP, back in the North of England. Cronin and I have come to very much the same conclusions. The European Community may have been founded, in …
From Egypt, Ukraine, the Turkish-Syrian border, Cuba and Thailand
by Andre Vltchek / February 3rd, 2014
Government buildings are being trashed, ransacked. It is happening in Kiev and Bangkok, and in both cities, the governments appear to be toothless, too scared to intervene.
What is going on? Are popularly elected administrations all over the world becoming irrelevant; as the Western regime creates and then supports thuggish ‘opposition movements’ designed to destabilize any state that stands in the way of its desire to fully control the planet?
*****
They are shouting and intimidating those who want to vote for the moderately progressive government that is presently leading Thailand. There is no dispute over the electoral process – voting is generally …
“The premise of democracy, if it’s to be taken seriously, has to focus on youth, which become the ultimate symbol of the future.” H. Giroux
A tale of two destinies. I ran into a fellow, around 28 or 30, in the man-made wetlands in our housing development north of Vancouver. We were forced to buy the place here because the state-of- shit-on-all-of-us usury America has turned a blind eye against people who want to live, rent, and have security without putting down loads of money into the financial services zombie hole or add to the Koch Brothers a la …
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?
– Tom Perkins, January 24, 2014, in the Wall Street Journal
Thomas James Perkins was born in 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler came to Power in Germany and six years before the Nazis escalated their persecution of the Jews to mass murder during Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, the Night of Broken Glass, so-called after the array of broken glass from Jewish synagogues, storefronts, and homes), November 9-10, 1938.
Let him be. Give him a cigarette if he comes to. So he’s dying of lung-cancer, so what? It’s a terminal case. Dose him with morphine whenever he asks for it, whether for analgesic or recreational satisfaction. I know, I know: “We’re gonna do something, something serious and huge, we’re gonna fix stuff.” No yer not. You’re just gonna talk about stuff on the Information-overloaded Dirt Road of Surveillance and Road Pizza.
Everything you say — and write — will be held against you. Not that that matters either. What are They …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / February 2nd, 2014
Michael Ratner: President Obama and New York mayor de Blasio’s statements in blanket support of Israel enables it’s violations of Palestinians’ rights.
If you really want to understand the world we are living in, you better stick with the Zionist media. The Jerusalem Post will provide you with the names of the Jews who own the planet. The British Jewish Chronicle will teach you about arch pedophile Jimmy Seville’s ties with Israel. Haaretz will even let me speak about all those topics The Guardian (Of Zion) is there to shamelessly suppress.
Yesterday I came across a text by Dave Rich, a Hasbara mouthpiece operating within the UK ultra-Zionist Community Security Trust. Rich suggested that making a common cause “between Holocaust deniers, neo-fascists, the pro-Palestinian …
Pathetic heartbreaking photos of tiny Afghani children in rags freezing without enough food to survive, every winter of US occupation. Sports distracted Americans pay no mind, as they didn’t to photos of dead Korean babies or Vietnamese napalmed children running naked down burning village streets, or piles of Iraqi dead — children’s cadavers without heads arms.
Ignorant criminal patriotism is displayed at these sporting events.
Over the last thirteen years, the New York Times, though supporting the US occupation of Afghanistan, has headlined, nearly every year, usually with pathetic heartbreaking photos of tiny children in rags freezing without enough food to survive, …
Last November I wrote a piece entitled “Is a new revolution quietly brewing in France?” in which I described the struggle which was taking place between the French people and the Zionist plutocracy which has ruled France over the past decades (roughly since 1969) and today I am returning to this topic as events have rapidly accelerated and taken a sharp turn for the worse. A number of most interesting things have happened and the French “Resistance” (I will use this collective designator when speaking of the entire Dieudonné/Soral movement) is now being attacked on three levels.
A recurrent theme in this administration is often spellbinding rhetoric followed by … well, very little in the way of follow-through programs. Lately, there has been the inequality issue. Taken up once more in the State of the Union (SOTU) address, the remedy proposed was an increase in the minimum wage. Yes, it needs to be raised but to focus on it alone simply evades the complexities to be navigated to confront the challenges of inequality.
One major cause is the export of well-paid manufacturing jobs and with them proprietary technology and skills. Higher and higher level …
I have wondered this over the past few years as the government of the United States has stumbled, bumbled and fumbled legislation on everything from healthcare to immigration. They have disrupted scientific progress, hamstringed our military and stunted the growth of entire economic sectors because of the complaints of a few. They have completely ignored the long term growth, security and stability of our nation for the short term gain they personally could abuse. So, why do we need representatives?
Historically the founders of this nation instituted a Constitutional Republic because of the legal protection afforded citizens, the necessity of …
The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.
— Former US Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, 1927 – Present
On February 10th, 2003, German Green MP Joschka Fischer, then Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor, stunned an international security conference that was discussing the proposed invasion of Iraq in Munich’s opulent 19th century Bayerischer Hof hotel, by banging on the table, switching to English to guarantee Donald Rumsfeld understood, and shouted of the US arguments for war: “… I am not convinced.” As he spoke, he gazed at the then US Defence Secretary over his silver, half framed spectacles, concluding: …
Salah Sawaid remembers when this huddle of shacks was surrounded by open fields. Today, his views from the grassy uplands of the central Galilee are blocked on all sides by luxury apartments – a new neighbourhood of the ever-expanding city of Karmiel, here in northern Israel.
“We are being choked to death,” said Sawaid, Ramya’s village leader. “They are building on top of us as though we don’t exist. Are we invisible to them?”
His fears for the future have grown rapidly in the past few months, after a court ruled that the Bedouin village must be bulldozed to make way for …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / January 31st, 2014
Dr. Elizabeth Cochran, a seismologist with the US Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, discusses research showing that injection wells from fracking and gas and oil production is likely causing an uptick in U.S. earthquakes.
Recently I have rediscovered the Stone page of the New York Times editorial section where guests philosophers are invited to write on important issues of our time. That a philosopher’s opinion today would actually have importance for the public at large is somewhat of a mystery, largely because the role of the philosopher as cultural critic or “public intellectual” has largely been usurped by the technological class: individuals whose inventions have largely transformed the way in which we interact as social beings. Hence, we care more about what, for example, Mark Zuckerberg or the late Steve Jobs has had to …
After 94 years, on January 27, 2014, the world lost Pete Seeger. The world is the lesser for that loss. The accolades for this giant of folk songs and herald of all causes just, are pouring in from around the world. He is celebrated for regularly showing up at mass protests, for singing songs so transcendent (“This Land is Your Land,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”) they are sung in many foreign languages all over the earth and for his mentoring and motivating of millions of people and children.
In the midst of bipartisan bashing of Edward Snowden in a Senate intelligence hearing on January 29, some stood up for truth in the face of repeated lies and evasion from head intelligence chiefs.
Before the hearing began, activists from CODEPINK stood up holding signs reading ‘Stop – Killing, Lying, Spying’ and called for the firing of James Clapper, Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, Director of the CIA, and James Comey, Director of the FBI.
A number of senators, including Barbara Mikulski (D – MD), and Susan Collins (R – ME), participated in slamming Snowden. They claimed Snowden has done “great …
Criminal trials, notably notorious ones, play themselves out beyond court rooms. Often, the court room is a tragic amphitheatre, featuring battles which involve loss and gain. The discussion about rights outside the courtroom becomes secondary to the discussion about fortune, favour and good, plain mannered prejudice.
The response to the interminably long Amanda Knox saga is one such case. Forget the lawyers there, those mere puppets of a system – they are merely background information to a press war, puffed by a good deal of vox pops, over whether Knox, along, with ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were guilty …
(A speech given at the One World Week Forum at the University of Warwick on January 30, 2014 on the topic of Capitalism and Sustainability: Can We Have It All?)
Can capitalism solve the problems of global warming and growing inequality?
It seems to me this is like discussing the issue of inappropriate hypersexual imagery bombarding 11-year olds and then asking: Can Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga fix the problem?
Real capitalism, not the theoretical version taught in school, is a system of minority rule in which a few people profit at the expense of others.
Still basing himself on Engel’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Lenin points out that the state is the first form of society exclusively to base itself on a given territory as opposed to tribal societies and bands which can move about and change locations while searching for food and shelter. This is the first innovation of the state.
The second is that the state sets up a source of power independent of the general population. The Roman state, for example, maintained an army as opposed to tribal societies such as the …
Valdez, Alaska carries the moniker: the “snowiest place in the United States,” receiving on average 300-to-600 inches per year. Additionally, Valdez is the end of the line for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that carries oil from the Alaska North Slope. It’s a beautiful setting ensconced in the midst of eye-catching pristine wilderness. As, for example, the view from the Port of Valdez is richly appointed with alluring nature and nestled amongst a backdrop of snow-capped mountains reflected in the icy cold still waters of its serene seaport.
But, nowadays, wintry Valdez is different. It’s warm!
This is the first in a four part series leading up to the 10th anniversary of the February 29, 2004, overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government in Haiti. One aim of this series is to prod major media outlets to mark the anniversary by covering a story they’ve largely ignored.
Eleven years ago this weekend Canada organized an international gathering to discuss overthrowing Haiti’s elected government. The conference was reported in a major magazine at the time, but since the coup actually happened the dominant media has refused to investigate or even mention the meeting.
On January 31 and February 1, 2003, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal …
