When the demise of Nelson Mandela was proclaimed to the nation by South African president Jacob Zuma the streets were hushed, and in restaurants, bars and nightclubs, there was pin drop silence as people listened in utter despondency.
ANC described him as a large baobab tree that had fallen, whose roots would nourish the soil forever.
Mandela was one of the founding fathers of the South African struggle against apartheid, who dedicated his life to emancipating his people from political bondage. He led them during the darkest days of apartheid; always resolute and standing tall for his principles.
Mounting efforts by Israel to divide its large Palestinian minority along sectarian lines have heightened fears that the Biblical city of Nazareth may be about to return to the scenes of violent clashes witnessed 15 years ago.
Tensions in the city, the hometown of Jesus and a destination for hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, have risen sharply in recent months after the Israeli government unveiled plans to encourage Christian school leavers to serve in the military.
Although Nazareth and its surrounding villages are home to the bulk of Israel’s 130,000 Palestinian Christians, the city itself has a Muslim majority.
“To realize the great revival of the Chinese nation,” President Xi Jinping has told the people of the People’s Republic, “we must preserve the bond between a rich country and a strong military, and strive to build a consolidated national defense and a strong military.”
Some might find it slightly ironic that Xi Jinping’s slogan: “rich country and a strong military” is precisely the same slogan–fukoku-kyohei in Japanese–popularized by the Meiji oligarchs in Japan from 1868. These were the ex-samurai who humiliated China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and proceeded to colonize Taiwan, Korea, …
The blinkered members of the US Congress are confused. Not an unusual condition, but it is particularly evident in proposed legislation on how best to cope with Iran should it show bad faith on its nuclear program.
The American fist hovers above the Washington-Tehran negotiations, a constant reminder that sovereignty on matters nuclear tends to be qualified and held in deep storage. The question for those politicos in Washington, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is whether they would like to withdraw the fist, allowing negotiators to breathe a bit, or darken matters further.
It’s been a bit of a gap week or two, since pining in with this sort of catharsis, but some of us schmucks have to make some really lousy money and attend to some really rotten job hunting in a time of pure delusion, all the while that white noise buzzing, the white static noise of the mush of NPR and mainstream mindlessness and the BS of labor stats and economists who deserve what the SEALs and Obama said what happened to Osama (right, US punk prez, directs US amped-up murder incorporated to shoot to kill, ask no questions later, …
The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.
— Will Rogers
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…
— Jesus of Nazareth
During the 2012 presidential election, the principal debate was largely about debt and taxes, and most of that debate — as Paul Krugman, the Prophet of Princeton, pointed out at the time — was being conducted by the people who knew the least about either. But conspicuous by its absence, because no politician had the guts to mention it, was that manque emperor’s clothing, the billion-dollar churches of America and their blanket exemption from …
Since last December, Brazilian shopping malls ((The first rolezinhos happened in São Paulo. However, in light of the reactions to them and, particularly, the violent repression participants experienced, many rolezinhos are now being planned throughout the country.)) have become the stage for a new style of youth gathering: the rolezinho. Roughly translated as “little excursions” or outings, the rolezinhos can be characterized as planned meetings (via social network) of a large group of youth from poor neighborhoods, with the intent of seeing each other, flirting, eating and drinking at McDonald’s, taking pictures to post on Facebook, and simply having …
Recently there was an uproar of sorts concerning NPR, after they aired an interview with a white adoptive mother of black children. The main point of offense most stated by those commenting on this show was that in this report and on her blog, the woman interviewed claims for herself a voice which is basically not hers, and there was a perceived need for “balance”, which was to come from transracial adoptees. This was witnessed by the discussion that followed in various social media as well as at their web …
During the first half of the 20th century, socially conscious Jews in the United States organized a large network of solidarity and charity associations financed mostly through small donations, raffles, and dues by working and lower middle class supporters. Many of these associations dealt with the everyday needs of Jewish workers, immigrants, and families in need. Some were linked to labor unions, social democratic, and leftist parties. Their leaders were, in many cases, individuals who worked long hours engaged in resolving problems and intervening in local crises. They drew a modest paycheck – (when funding was available) – …
It will be a bitter pill for people to swallow–the idea of having less so that big business can have more. Nothing that this nation or any other nation has done in modern history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept the new reality.
— Business Week editorial, October 12, 1974
The “new reality” spoken of above was old capitalist private profit-public loss economics. It only seemed new to those raised in a time that averted total systemic collapse under what is now being called “unbridled capitalism”, by those who still seem to think a terminal …
Governor Jerry Brown and his staff are exchanging high-fives over balancing California’s budget, but the people on whose backs it was balanced are not rejoicing. The state’s high-wire act has been called “the ultimate in austerity budgets.”
Welfare payments, health care for the poor, and benefits for the elderly and disabled have been slashed. State workers have been downsized. School districts in need of cash have been reduced to borrowing through “capital appreciation bonds” bearing 300% interest. In one notorious case, the Santa Ana school district actually borrowed at 1,000% interest. And the governor acknowledges that California …
The death of former Israeli leader Ariel Sharon enlivened US media’s interest in the legacy of a man considered by many a war criminal, and by some a hero. In fact, the supposed heroism of Sharon was at the heart of CNN coverage of his death on January 11.
Sharon spent the last eight years prior to his death in a coma, but apparently not long enough for US corporate media to wake up from its own moral coma. CNN online’s coverage presented Sharon as a man of heroic stature, who was forced to make tough choices for the sake of …
At a critical time for Japan and the region, the country is undergoing a right-ward political shift under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was re-elected just over a year ago. As head of the Liberal Democratic Party, Abe is known as a conservative hawk who has pushed nationalistic and pro-nuclear policies. In December, he visited the controversial Yasukuni war shrine, which honors Japanese soldiers who died in battle, including several war criminals who were tried by the International Military Tribunal after World War II. The visit sparked outrage from China and South Korea, who consider the shrine a symbol of …
They came, they plundered and they left a country in ruins. Not that this narrative impressed itself upon the architects of the invasion of Iraq who cooked up and implemented a ghastly recipe of power that opened up new fronts for radical Islam. Iraq is now descending into something less than peace and more than civil strife. The term civil war, initially one as popular as leprosy, is now being used. Ever since the despotic Saddam was deposed, the country has been part of a song and dance with its occupiers and molesters.
As Israel buried Ariel Sharon amid eulogies from world figures, Tony Blair, a Butcher of Baghdad, paid a tribute to the Butcher of Beirut which included the line that Sharon “didn’t think of peace as a dreamer, but did dream of peace.” Also that “…he sought peace with the same iron determination” as he had fought (read slaughtered) across the Middle East. Re-writing history does not come more blatant, but Blair was ever good at fantasy, think “weapons of mass destruction” and “forty five minutes.”
Surgeon Dr Swee Chai Ang went to help the wounded of Beirut after the 1982 Israeli …
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
— Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967
King’s Riverside Church speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was delivered exactly one year before his April, 4, 1968 assassination in Memphis.
The people who heard that speech recognized it as one of the most powerful speeches ever given articulating the immorality of the Vietnam War and its destructive impact on social progress in …
I am a Capitalist. I am a Socialist and — hold on to your hats — I also believe in some circumstances Communism works great! I know this would be impossible for the “either/or” talking heads at Fox Noise to understand but let me explain.
I am a small business person myself. Part of my income is from family rental property. Hardly a more capitalist venture exists and occasionally I make some money writing and selling my “product” to others.
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest I have benefited from the lowest cost energy rates in the United States thanks to …
Cesar Chavez and the Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers
by Joseph Nevins / January 14th, 2014
About three months after Cesar Chavez died in April 1993, The Nation magazine published an essay by Frank Bardacke on the famed farmworker union leader-organizer. Entitled “Cesar’s Ghost: Decline and Fall of the UFW,” the article asserted that the United Farm Workers was no longer primarily a farm worker organization, but instead a “fundraising operation, run out of a deserted tuberculosis sanitarium,” one “staffed by members of Cesar’s extended family.”
Bardacke, a former farm worker and UFW member who later became an adult education teacher in Watsonville, California, offered a hard-hitting analysis of the union’s precipitous demise. While he emphasized …
It’s been 97 years since Lenin first wrote what has since become a “classic” of Marxism — The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, hereafter referred to as SR. I propose to discuss the significance of this work for today (the beginning of the 21st Century) and so will not spend a lot of time discussing its relevance to the world of 97 years ago.
Therefore, the tasks of the working class in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 will only be touched upon and I will concentrate …
What a shocker: our most pugnacious politician, who apes sneering TV tough guys, finds himself starring in his own reality-survivor drama. The only question remains: is he really a fool (the victimized micromanager who knows nothing) or a low-class knave (with an ex-prosecutor’s bag of trick decoys)? Whatever the final evidence, this scandal will devolve from snarling bridge traffic to the trollish character of our pudgiest of pugs.
Tripped by a willful, smack-down staff, the image of the most electable party “moderate” lurched with ease from “straight-talking pragmatist” to rogue pettiness. But what exactly new does the Fort Lee fiasco say …
Thomas Patterson’s Failed Technocratic Dream for Journalism
by Robert Jensen / January 14th, 2014
Thomas Patterson’s new book on the current crises in journalism is organized around six specific problems, starting with “The Information Problem” and moving through Source, Knowledge, Education, Audience, and Democracy problems.
All problems, indeed. But, unfortunately, there is no chapter on the most crippling affliction of mainstream journalism in the United States: “The Ideology Problem.” That missing chapter would help explain the routine failure of mainstream journalism at what should be its central task in a democratic society—to analyze and critique systems of power to help ordinary people take greater control over our lives. The fact that this subject is missing …
The below photo of my parents reveals much about their personalities (hers vivacious and outgoing, his withdrawn and closed off), their relationship (little real contact), and also the times (could be captioned Gender Roles in the 1950s: The Bathing Beauty and the Soldier).
The typicality of their lives reveals much about the USA. My mother was a farmer’s daughter whose father lost the farm to the banks, and they had to scrabble along in the slums of the big city, St. Louis. All her life she yearned for her bucolic childhood …
In a statement marking the death of Ariel Sharon, British prime minister David Cameron said he was “one of the most significant figures in Israeli history and as Prime Minister he took brave and controversial decisions in pursuit of peace, before he was so tragically incapacitated.”
This sickening tribute will not go down well outside Israel. Sharon, real name Scheinermann, was the child of immigrants fleeing Russia to the British mandate of Palestine in the 1920s. At the tender age of 10 the boy joined the Zionist youth movement Hassadeh. At 14 he was a member of a paramilitary youth …
For those who didn’t follow the Boeing story, here’s a thumbnail sketch. Boeing threatens IAM union members in Seattle with economic homicide by issuing an ultimatum: either re-open the current contract, which doesn’t expire until 2016, and let us ravage the health, pension, strike and wage provisions, or we move assembly of the 777X (its new airliner) to another state, and you’re all out of a job.
But the local union surprises everyone. By a 2 to 1 margin, they vote down the offer. Stunned by the rejection, Boeing pretends to follow through on its plan to pull up stakes and …
Until recently I thought Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had no rivals in the business of talking propaganda nonsense (Israel’s Jews in danger of annihilation etcetera, etcetera, etcetera). But if there was a Nobel Prize for talking nonsense it does now seem that there would be a number of contenders.
At the top of my list of them would be British Prime Minister David Cameron. In paying tribute to Sharon he praised him for his “brave and controversial decisions in pursuit of peace.”
In an article for the Nation under the headline How Ariel Sharon Shaped Israel’s Destiny, and which contains chilling quotes …
A “devastating” two hundred and fifty page document, “The Responsibility of UK Officials for War Crimes Involving Systematic Detainee Abuse in Iraq from 2003-2008”, has been “presented to the International Criminal Court, and could result in some of Britain’s leading defence figures facing prosecution for “systematic war crimes” the (London) Independent on Sunday has revealed.
The dossier charges that “those who bear the greatest responsibility” for alleged war crimes “include individuals at the highest levels” of the British Army and political system.
Among those named, states the Independent, are two former Defence Ministry supremos, Geoff Hoon and Adam Ingram, Defence Secretary and …
Here are the top ten examples of corporate welfare and welfare for the rich. There are actually thousands of tax breaks and subsidies for the rich and corporations provided by federal, state and local governments but these ten will give a taste.
(1) State and Local Subsidies to Corporations. An excellent New York Times study by Louise Story calculated that state and local government provide at least $80 billion in subsidies to corporations. Over 48 big corporations received over $100 million each. GM was the biggest at a total of $1.7 billion extracted from 16 different states but Shell, Ford and …
The American propaganda machine rolls on, superior to the paltry efforts of past American, British, and German public relations machinery. Then, it was enough to sketch terrifying cartoons of Huns or Jews or other ethnicities and fulminate nonsensically about racial purity. No more. We have evolved. Now the deception of the tirelessly distracted masses requires dissimulations of far greater sophistication.
Take, for instance, the recent news that, once again, for the umpteenth month in a row, the unemployment rate has dropped. This happy turn of events was accompanied by the heart-warming news that President Obama has launched “Promise Zones” …
This past Fall, Herman Wallace of the Angola 3 made news headlines around the world when his conviction was overturned and he was dramatically released from prison after 41 years in solitary confinement. At the time of his release on October 1, 2013 he had been fighting terminal liver cancer for several months. Three days later, on Oct. 4, Herman was surrounded by loved ones as he passed on at a friend’s house in New Orleans, Louisiana.
As reported by Democracy Now, one of the final things that Herman said was, “I am …
