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Five years ago in March, 2009, only two months after the 22 day Israeli attack on Gaza, I was on an international delegation of sixty women organized by CODEPINK who traveled to Gaza for International Women’s Day. In the week in Gaza, we met with women where their homes used to be before they were destroyed by the Israeli attack that killed 1450, wounded 5,000 and left 50,000 homeless. We also met with women in 13 community centers throughout the country, to listen to their stories of life under attack and under siege.

Five years later, I joined an …

The oil and gas industry, the nation’s chambers of commerce, and politicians who are dependent upon campaign contributions from the industry and the chambers, claim fracking is safe.

First, close your mind to the myriad scientific studies that show the health effects from fracking.

Close your mind to the well-documented evidence of the environmental impact.

Focus just upon the effects upon the workers.

The oil and gas industry has a fatality rate seven times higher than for all other workers, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control. (CDC). According to the CDC, the death rate in the oil and gas …

Over the decades various administrations, seeking to improve their economic record, monkeyed with economic statistics to the point that the statistics are no longer meaningful.

According to Friday’s (March 7) payroll jobs report, the US economy created 175,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have at a good price.

Even if 175,000 jobs were created in February–remember now, February was a cold month whose low temperatures are used to explain poor housing and retail sales performance, yet somehow created 40,000 more jobs than needed to keep …

The near total blackout of truth in the Western media makes this one of the most dangerous times in history, with coordinated “news” outlets acting collectively as a sort of Ministry of Government Lies. To try to escape this stranglehold, it is necessary to reach outside the echo chamber of massaged and approved opinion in which we are basted day in and day out. It’s not that difficult. I am perhaps one of the most hapless technophobes I know–my ten year old students have every new gadget possible, and their parents have even more. Yet somehow they can’t escape the …

The White House Fool has repeatedly declared erroneously and foolishly that it is “against international law” for Crimea to exercise self-determination. Self-determination, as used by Washington, is a propaganda term that serves Washington’s empire but is not permissible for real people to exercise. On March 6 Obama telephoned Putin to tell the Russian President again that only Washington has the right to interfere in Ukraine and to insist against all logic that only the “government” in Kiev installed by the Washington-organized coup is “legitimate” and “democratic.”

In other words, the elected government in Crimea pushed by the people in Crimea to …

So now we (or at least the 0.03% of us who care to hunt for it) discover that U.S. military spending is not actually being cut at all, but increasing. Also going up: U.S. nuclear weapons spending.  Some of the new nukes will violate treaties, but the entire program violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires disarmament, not increased armament.  The U.S. policy of first-strike and the U.S. practice of informing other nations that “all options are on the table” also violate the U.N. Charter’s ban on threatening force.

But do nuclear weapons, by the nature of their …

Alexander Hoffmann is a physicist-turned-financier, a refugee from the particle accelerator complex in CERN who now runs a $10-billion algorithmic hedge fund from nearby Geneva. The fund is managed by VIXAL, Hoffmann’s machine learning algorithm, and is incredibly successful. The company’s statistics boast a consistently huge Alfa – a measure indicating by how much the fund beats the average and exceeds the normal rate of return – and the world’s biggest oligarchs and financial institutions are salivating at the mere thought of being allowed to invest in it. Managing their money has made Hoffmann very rich. In just a few …

Shortly after operations began, we started to experience extreme headaches, runny noses, sore/scratchy throats, muscle aches and a constant feeling of fatigue. Both of our children are experiencing nose bleeds and I’ve had dizziness, vomiting and vertigo to the point that I couldn’t stand and was taken to an emergency room. Our daughter has commented that she feels as though she has cement in her bones.

— Pam Judy 20 July 2011, Carmichaels, Pennsylvania resident

In 2006 Pam Judy and her family had a new home built on their farm. For three years Pam and her family enjoyed the peace and …

Without networks of collaborators conscripted from among the ranks of the insurgency, sustained military occupations are unthinkable. Yet, no one likes to talk about collaborators—it is an unpleasant subject because collaborators are about as loved by their handlers as they are by the communities they betray.

To be sure, collaborators under military occupation consider themselves as a beneficial screen, ameliorating the worst that might happen, and at times they even embrace the new order and think of themselves as brave emissaries of the future. But from the handler’s viewpoint, they are instruments of war and counterinsurgency only to be expunged …

It’s quite common to see western foreign policy labelled as “mistaken” or a “failure”. A recent article by the respected writer and professor of economics Rodrigue Tremblay, for example, was titled “US Policy of Isolating Russia and Expanding NATO Is a Dismal Failure,” and the equally respected historian Mark Curtis wrote this:

Anglo-American attempts to shape the Middle East in accordance with their interests have largely failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. ((Secret Affairs by Mark Curtis, p. 322))

It’s not unlike those well-meaning folk who sometimes talk about giving power “back to the people”. They don’t seem to realise that the …

Since the US-sponsored peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel recommenced last summer, Israeli forces have: authorised the approval of several thousand illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories; launched the construction of twice as many illegal housing units as in the previous year; forcibly dispersed a peaceful protest camp in the Jordan Valley; violently suppressed the nonviolent demonstrations that happen weekly throughout the occupied West Bank; demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes and structures, with demolitions now at an all time high, leaving entire families homeless and exposed to the cold; arrested hundreds of Palestinian children and thousands of …

If you can keep your head, when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”
— “If”, Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936

The delusional and mind-stretching hypocrisy of Western leaders and spokespeople regarding the outcome of external meddling in the Ukraine increasingly mirrors King George 111 whose “life and reign were marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdoms, much of the rest of Europe, and places farther afield in Africa, the Americas and Asia …”

He also, of course, lost America, accused of having “plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of …

As the Sharing Spring kicks off, more and more people are participating in localised forms of sharing in response to the failures of government and big business. While this is right and imperative, it is equally vital that citizens call upon their political representatives to integrate the principle of sharing into governmental policies on national and global levels. 
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As spring begins to bloom, the sharing economy movement is ramping up its activities with a series of events being planned in different cities and world regions. Pioneered by Shareable along with several partners – including OuiShare, the New Economy Coalition, the New …

Everywhere you look in the West, you find political pygmies rather than statesmen. In France, we see a pathetic man whose own people intensely dislike him, François Hollande, attempt to speak as though he were something other than a dry, pompous school teacher-like purveyor of American views. Almost forgotten are the strong, independent voices of a de Gaulle or a Chirac. In Britain, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, is a wishy-washy man of little integrity and less ability, again a purveyor of American views, and I’m sure he goes to sleep every night fantasizing about the last Prime Minister who …

We don’t see things as they are but how we are.
— Anais Nin (1903-1977)

How can we begin to understand the events in Ukraine? Who are the conflict parties and elements?

Here is a quick checklist of 13, just a selection:

1. Ukraine – government (earlier/present), opposition (split), people (19 ethnic groups + Ukrainians abroad). Crimea with its diversity and Ukraine’s relations to neighbours – enough for a doctoral dissertation.

2. Russia – the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia and Russia’s more or less strong partners such as Syria.

3. Europe – the EU and European non-EU countries such …