The other day I learned that Gerald Clark, pretty much an unfamiliar name to me, was about to launch a Jazz suite dedicated to the Nakba and the Palestinian people. I was intrigued, I contacted Gerald and offered my help. A day later, the album found its way to my letterbox.
I am usually bored by ‘political music.’ Occasionally it lacks the necessary wit let alone a musical edge. But Clark’s Nakba is a masterpiece — music in its purest and most genuine form. It’s probably best described …
It bears repeating what George Orwell said about propaganda, that what is left out is often more telling than what is left in. To take a sampling of two recent mainstream articles on Syria, it’s painfully obvious that Orwell had a point. A piece for CNN by Geneive Abdo, a fellow at the Brookings Institute and Middle East specialist, called, “Why Sunni-Shia conflict is worsening”; and an article for the New York Times by Robin Wright of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center, entitled, “Imagining a Remapped Middle East.”
You’d think, reading essays from two “distinguished” …
Part 2: The Kennedy Tax Cuts, GATT, and International Capital
by Burkely Hermann / November 1st, 2013
Part One of this series discussed how power and privilege are integral to JFK’s presidential cabinet. Part 2 will address the Kennedy Tax Cuts which are loved by the right-wing, international capital and the precursor to the WTO: GATT.
After all, as linguist and professor Noam Chomsky says, the Kennedy and Reagan administrations aren’t that different: ((Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel), New York: The New Press, 2002.))
…compare two Presidential administrations in the 1960s and the 1980s, the Kennedy administration and the Reagan administration. Now, in a sense they had a lot in …
Nearly 500 people marched into the Burlington, Vt., City Council meeting on October 28 to testify for or against the basing of the boondoggle F-35 warplane at Burlington International Airport.
The City Council planned to hear testimony before voting on two resolutions initiated by the Stop the F-35 Coalition that would bar the plane. One would have banned the plane outright — the other would have imposed noise and crash rate regulations that would have effectively kept the plane out as well.
The movement against the warplane had reached such a critical mass that just two weeks ago, activists were optimistic they …
Taking No Chances, The Empire Strikes Back With the BBC
“Russell Brand, who are you to edit a political magazine?” asks BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) interviewer Jeremy Paxman with all the arrogant irrelevance required of an establishment shill at the beginning of an eleven-minute interview on the BBC’s October 23 edition of Newsnight. Posted on the BBC Newsnight channel on Youtube, the interview had almost 6 million views in its first three days
Disappointingly, Brand does not immediately respond to the insult with something like, “Well who are you to decide who does or doesn’t get to edit anything in a …
Mediastanis a documentary film that follows the journey of a small group of WikiLeaks’ associates in their quest for media outlets to publish secret US diplomatic cables. These young journalists travel through Central Asia and interview editors of local media organizations with the goal of offering cables relevant to their country. In their Press Release, WikiLeaks calls the 94 minute raw film “Operation Cablerun…the world’s first truly global media event”. Julian Assange describes the Central Asia region as “the most fascinating geopolitical region in the world… ; on the top, Russia, on the bottom, China; in the middle, …
While the American Empire – and much of the policies being pursued – did not begin under President Obama, the focus of “Empire Under Obama” is to bring awareness about the nature of empire to those who may have – or continue – to support Barack Obama and who may believe in the empty promises of “hope” and “change.” Empire is institutional, not individual. My focus on the imperial structure during the Obama administration is not to suggest that it does not predate Obama, but rather, that Obama represents ‘continuity’ in imperialism, not “change.” This part examines the concept of …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / October 31st, 2013
Robin Hood tax supporters National Nurses United, economist Jeffrey Sachs, and European Parliament VP tell Congress to support “no brainer” tax on Wall Street.
In April, Jeffrey M. Jones of Gallupwrote that “…Americans rate John F. Kennedy [JFK], Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan much more positively in retrospect than they did while the men were president.” This positive rating has continued for years, with Americans rating JFK as the highest rated President in 2010. It is no surprise that this love for the royal Camelot dynasty has translated into the many conspiracy theories about his assassination in 1963, whomever they deem the culprit, which mainly circulate around the idea that the Vietnam war would have ended and the …
Third lesson: Being a US ally is not a guarantee of a country’s information sovereignty being respected. The cyberspace control is not an end in itself. The real objective is carrying out the traditional strategic mission of gaining geopolitical dominance over large spaces. It would be naïve to expect that the US cyber interference overseas could be suspended as a result of some concessions or friendly persuasions.
The evidence adduced by Snowden proves that the United States closely monitors the European Union’s central structures as well as the communications of its closest allies among the EU member states that stay beyond …
Sartre once remarked that the attempt to construct a philosophy that goes beyond Marxism simply recreates a pre-Marxist view that is no longer relevant to current understanding. In a recent issue of the London Review of Books (9-26-2013) I believe the philosopher Galen Strawson guilty of just such an attempt in his article “Real Naturalism.”
Engels long ago pointed out that there are basically two trends in modern philosophy — one which leads to idealism and myth making, and one which leads to materialism and the correct scientific approach to understanding the nature of reality. I hope to show in this …
In Part 1 of the Global Power Project exposé on the Institute of International Finance, I examined the origins and evolution of an organization representing the interests of global banks. In Part 2, I looked at the role played by the IIF and its leadership during the European debt crisis. In this third and final part in the series, I examine the relationship between the IIF and global central bankers.
Since the early 1990s, the IIF has been heavily involved working with central bankers, particularly through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, where private bankers have been granted a …
Throughout the years, Lebanon’s demographics have experienced periodic influx. But particularly in the last two years, the demographic shift has been so overwhelming due to the flood of Syrian refugees in desperate need for shelter. The situation is highly charged, if not perilous, considering Lebanon’s unmanageable sectarian balances, let alone the direct involvement of Lebanese parties in the brutal Syrian war. If not treated with utter sensitivity and political wisdom, Lebanon’s vastly changing demographics will not bode well in a country of exceedingly fractious sectarian politics.
The numbers speak for themselves. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 790,000 …
When someone with interesting things to say is granted a high-profile media platform, it is wise to listen to what is being said and ask why they have been given such a platform. Comedian and actor Russell Brand’s 10-minute interview by Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight last week was given considerable advance publicity and generated enormous reaction on social media and in the press, just as those media gatekeepers who selected Brand to appear would have wished.
The interview was hung on the hook of Brand’s guest-editing of a special edition of New Statesman, the ‘leftwing’ weekly magazine owned by the multimillionaire Mike …
So, how do I say this? I went to Vacations International last night with my special education partner. She just got off work at 7 p.m., a day that, well, started at 7 a.m. You know, children, abused some of them, bad homes, bad things in their lives, and the developmental delays, the challenges of autism, etc. I got that goofy American huckster phone call that I had won a prize. I tracked it down — the total surveillance and sharing all personal information part — to the Clark County Fair when I took some of my clients there two …
As a rule the discussions related to what has been revealed by Edward Snowden about US global electronic surveillance boil down to violations of human rights and illegal interference into the private lives of millions in different parts of the world. If it were all about it, then the White House would not set so much store by the case and raise the issue of Snowden’s extradition to the top level of interstate discussions and even go as far as to cancel summits. Barack Obama was scared enough to cancel his appearance at international forums, which was the …
The new film Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars should be required viewing in all schools and homes in the United States, including the home of the U.S. president who could not be bothered to meet with the child victims of his drones who spoke in Congress this week.
One could even speculate what the appropriate fantasized outcome might be if, Clockwork Orange-style, Obama were compelled to view Unmanned. But fantasies are what got us into this. Former drone pilot Brandon Bryant opens this beautifully made, fast-moving film by describing his childhood comic book-induced fantasies …
One week we learn the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant has contaminated the entire North Pacific with via the daily discharge of 300 tons of radioactive water into the ocean. The following week we learn that Britain has approved the first new, “totally safe” nuclear power plant in 35 years, at Hinkley Point in Somerset. The snow job being perpetrated on the unsuspecting British public is that nuclear energy creates electricity without emitting carbon dioxide and that it’s cheaper than renewable energy. Neither is true.
Where Do You Put the Nuclear Waste?
Nuclear energy only looks cheap and carbon neutral if …
You don’t have to search the internet for the truth. Sometimes it is right in front of you… inside the mainstream newspapers:
The Friday, October 18, USA Today main section, page 4A ran this story: “Army warns of trouble handling even a single war”.It goes on to say that “budget restrictions could render the Army at high risk to meet even one major war, a warning the Army is sounding because it sees another war as inevitable before long.” Did you catch that last part? The masters of this Military Industrial Empire are not only doing their best to scare the …
Whatever happened to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? You could be forgiven for thinking everyone packed up shop a while ago and forgot to inform you. There’s been barely a peep about it since the revival of talks was greeted with great fanfare back in July.
The negotiations, which have been conducted in a fug of secrecy, flitted briefly back on the radar last week when the US secretary of state, John Kerry, met Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what the media called an “unusually long”, seven-hour meeting in Rome.
Much of the conversation was held in private, with not even officials …
If you are a minority, the Republican Party would really rather you didn’t vote. Last week, Don Yelton, precinct chair in the Buncombe County, North Carolina Republican Party revealed on the Daily Show that voter suppression laws are meant to “kick the Democrats in the butt.” Said Yelton, “If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything, so be it.”
My painting “Voter Fraud” — a 40″ x 30″ oil painting depicting a sign painter finishing up a sign reading “Whites Only!” hanging over an e-voting machine — reflects the hard hitting reality that …
Ahh, the beauty of our screen-screed – how the world is just loving being tethered to junk, screen birds, those angry little apps, the You Tube generation, everyone is connected, nothing is more important than Tweets, Texts and Triumphant Trilogies of Self-Aggrandizement on Flickr. What a pathetic mess the world has become, and as I work on my alternative sentencing story for the magazine gig I get paid for, the real fabric being “no new jails” groups – since, in Spokane (and it’s the same in other jurisdictions) the city-county taxpayer ends up spending 70 cents of every tax dollar …
The Fukushima nuclear disaster is getting worse by the day, poisoning the Pacific Ocean and threatening a nuclear holocaust of some unknown dimension. You will not outlive this disaster.
This is a question that transcends being anti-nuclear. The fate of the earth is at stake here and the whole world must be watching every move at that site from now on. With 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the place, as a ceaseless flow of contaminated water poisoning our oceans, our very survival is on the line.
The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
— Art. 49, Fourth Geneva Convention
American news agencies (AP, Reuters, any major news organization or outlet) in reference to Israeli settlements (which could more accurately be termed “colonies”), routinely comment that these settlements are “considered illegal by most nations.” This is dishonest, as it creates the impression that the legality of settlement activity is murky and subject to debate. When I encounter this phrase I often ask the source to identify which nations consider settlement building on occupied territory …
NDP stakes out a spot on the Right of the political continuum
by Yves Engler / October 28th, 2013
This past week may come to be seen as a watershed moment in the NDP’s capitulation to neoliberal capitalism. The nominally social democratic party effectively supported a major corporate ‘trade’ accord all the while opposing an International Monetary Fund call for a more progressive tax code.
Last week the NDP basically endorsed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) the Harper Conservatives have negotiated with the European Union. The accord will greatly expand the power of multinational corporations. By extending Canada’s patent protections, CETA will drive up already high pharmaceutical drug costs. It also weakens provincial and municipal agencies ability to …
It’s all too customary for those analyzing the crises humanity faces to associate climate change, aka global warming, with whatever proximate cause they postulate for our imminent demise. John Tirman, for instance, in his book 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World lists as the first way “Altering the Earth’s Climate”. Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute includes Climate along with Energy and Debt as the three problem areas which threaten our future. Nafez Mossadeq Ahmed, author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, integrates climate change with the other crises he believes civilization faces: the …
Yes, I know. Uri Avnery has achieved many great things as a journalist and a peace activist. He has probably done more to educate people around the world about the terrible situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, and for longer, than any other single human being. And, to boot, he’s celebrating his 90th birthday this week. So best wishes to him.
Nonetheless, it is important to challenge the many fallacious claims Avnery makes to bolster the arguments in his latest article, dismissing the growing comparisons being made between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
“Guns are not toys,” my military father taught me as a youngster, as hunter parents also tend to teach their children. “Toys are not guns,” police and sheriff deputies should learn. Confusing them can be deadly.
Officers sworn to serve, protect, and keep the peace should not show off their guns to children and put them in their eager hands. This happened in August of 2011 here in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, Northern California. The community was not happy about that, and it is even more angered now.
An article in the daily Press Democrat of 2011 shows a photo of a …
Ann Jones’ new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story, is devastating, and almost incomprehensibly so when one considers that virtually all of the death and destruction in U.S. wars is on the other side. Statistically, what happens to U.S. troops is almost nothing. In human terms, it’s overwhelming.
Know a young person considering joining the military? Give them this book.
Know a person not working to end war? Give them this book.
Jones presents the choice before us in the clearest terms in the introduction:
