Latest articles
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.
*****
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 …
by Norman Solomon / February 15th, 2014
President Obama is now considering whether to order the Central Intelligence Agency to kill a U.S. citizen in Pakistan. That’s big news this week. But hidden in plain sight is the fact that Amazon would be an accessory to the assassination.
Amazon has a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide the agency with “cloud” computing services. After final confirmation of the deal several months ago, Amazon declared: “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.”
The relationship means that Amazon — logoed with a smiley-face arrow from A to Z, selling products to millions of people every …
by Arshad M. Khan / February 15th, 2014
This week Comcast, which is fast becoming a monolith, purchased Time-Warner Cable. Comcast claims the deal does not reduce competition because the two companies serve different areas of the country. (In another decade, the argument was used by oil giants claiming the gas stations of purchased companies did not overlap with the buyer’s). For Comcast, Time-Warner brings with it the very important New York, Los Angeles and Dallas markets. Is not size by itself power?
We are already suffering the effects of the concentration of power: Access to the internet is the fastest with fiber-optic cable all the way to …
by Shepherd Bliss / February 15th, 2014
“I have an appointment with death this evening,” I explained, smiling to friends upon leaving them. Their startled faces revealed feelings such as fear and a lack of understanding.
While living in Mexico, their Day of the Dead became my favorite holiday. I especially liked celebrating it in traditional villages, like Tepotzlan. The whole town seemed to go to the cemetery that night. Morbid? Not really, more like fun–feeding and dancing with one’s ancestors, remembering them in gratitude, teaching children to accept death and not be so afraid of it. But I was not on my way to a Day …
by Ron Jacobs / February 15th, 2014
Some books exemplify the moment they are written about. These books, through the power of their narrative, provide a contextual ambience so real the reader becomes a part of the tale being told. Some such texts that come to mind are Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The engrossed reader of these two novels cannot separate themselves from the surf or the ship of Ishmael, Queegeeq and Captain Ahab. Nor can they view Kurtz’s jungle nightmare from a distance that might allow a dispassionate response. We are with Marlow in his …
by Ellen Brown / February 15th, 2014
The credit card business is now the banking industry’s biggest cash cow, and it’s largely due to lucrative hidden fees.
You pay off your credit card balance every month, thinking you are taking advantage of the “interest-free grace period” and getting free credit. You may even use your credit card when you could have used cash, just to get the free frequent flier or cash-back rewards. But those popular features are misleading. Even when the balance is paid on time every month, credit card use imposes a huge hidden cost on users—hidden because the cost is deducted from what the merchant …
by Alan Wieder / February 14th, 2014
“The white is hit harder by apartheid than we are. It narrows his life. In not regarding us as human, he becomes less than human. I do pity him,” said African National Congress president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Albert Luthuli when Studs Terkel met with him in South Africa in 1963. It was almost twenty years before Studs published his book, Race: How Blacks & Whites Think & Feel About the American Obsession, but Terkels’ meetings with South Africans had a tone that was similar to his 1992 book. His journey preceded the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against …
by Gary G. Kohls / February 14th, 2014
When people ask me about what motivates me to occasionally blow the whistle on certain ethical issues, I sometimes say that I am just being true to the Hippocratic Oath that I took when I graduated from medical school. My 40 year medical career began as a board certified rural family physician and ended by practicing holistic mental health care for a decade. During that time I have often found myself, usually unconsciously, invoking the primum non nocere (latin for “first do no harm” ) standard while recommending a treatment for a patient. The Oath has served me well …
by Paul Craig Roberts / February 14th, 2014
In a number of my articles I have explained that the Soviet Union served as a constraint on US power. The Soviet collapse unleashed the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony. Russia under Putin, China, and Iran are the only constraints on the neoconservative agenda.
Russia’s nuclear missiles and military technology make Russia the strongest military obstacle to US hegemony. To neutralize Russia, Washington broke the Reagan-Gorbachev agreements and expanded NATO into former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire and now intends to bring former constituent parts of Russia herself–Georgia and Ukraine–into NATO. Washington withdrew from the treaty that banned anti-ballistic …
by Andre Vltchek / February 14th, 2014
Recently, my Italian translator, Giuseppe, wrote me an email. It was not a typical exchange, but quite an extraordinary personal query:
Many see you as a very courageous person. They would like to imitate you at that, at least a little bit, but they feel they are not courageous, say, ‘by nature’ and they cannot learn courage. What do you think about that? Can people train themselves to be courageous?
I do not know how to answer this question in brief, and definitely not in the body of an email, not in just a few words. But the question is important, maybe …
by Paul Haeder / February 13th, 2014
It’s an old axiom – “If an extraterrestrial (we used to say ‘Martian’ but we know what is in store for Mars – terraforming, toxic bombs of sulfur, microbes and viral, self-replicating bots, Avatars of purple epidermis and femurs as long as an NBA star’s jump shot) were to just drop into a city or plop right down in the middle of a Congressional hearing … or land into a football stadium two minutes before halftime … or light into some Lazy Boy with the nuclear family watching TV, well, you get the idea – that Martian or extra-galaxy being …
by Medea Benjamin / February 13th, 2014
After 10 years of this remote-control killing, the Obama administration should seek effective solutions that adhere to international law.
Senior Obama administration officials say our government is sharply scaling back its drone strikes in Pakistan. That’s a step in the right direction. It would be even better if the entire U.S. program of targeted killings in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia were scrapped.
By embracing drones as a primary foreign policy tool, President Barack Obama has taken on the role of prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.
Without declaring a war there, U.S. forces have hit Pakistan with more than 350 drones strikes since 2004. These …
