Simultaneous protests took place on Saturday in Hifa, Tayibe and Jerusalem over Praver Bill — a plan to evict Bedouin communities in the Negev. The Bill has provoked a storm not only amid the Arab MKs who voted against it, but mainly among those it is aimed against, the Bedouin residents of southern Israel.
It seems as if Israel is testing the water examining the reaction to another mass expulsion of Palestinians. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said today “Nothing has changed since the Tower and Stockade days. We are fighting for the lands of the Jewish people and there are those …
This documentary 9/11 in the Academic Community by the producer and filmmaker Adnan Zuberi was bestowed with the “Documentary Achievement Award” at this year’s University of Toronto Film Festival. The documentary focuses on the surprising reluctance of the academic community to examine the events of September 11, 2001. Virtually the entire academic community adopted immediately and uncritically the official narrative about these events. Academics did not ask some of the most elementary questions: What happened on that day? Who planned and executed this complex operation? And who benefited from it?
First Nation divided as RCMP, government give order to vacate
by Meagan Wohlberg / November 30th, 2013
Eagle Watch rebukes the CBC for their failure to cover the unfolding events at Lubicon Lake. “We support the real leadership of Bernard Ominayak. We denounce the puppet regime of Joe Laboucan … Indigenous are fed up. We are fed up with the lies told about us and the white washed history. We are fed up with the destruction of our territories, our land, water and the very air we breathe. We are fed up with being the poorest in the land while foreigners take all the wealth … Jenn Tsun, Anishnaabe Nokomis
I am a graduate of Skidmore College. I majored in social work. I chose to major in social work because there was little else offered that I could relate to personally and politically. Most courses and majors prepared students ideologically and professionally to manage the affairs of US imperialism. By the time I had to declare a major, I was more interested in plotting and planning how to destroy this system rather then learning how to manage its affairs. It did not take very long in the social work program for me to realize social work’s historical and …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / November 29th, 2013
James S. Henry, a leading economist, attorney and investigative journalist who has written extensively about global issues: Sandinista National Liberation Front leader Daniel Ortega is accumulating power and giving tax breaks to the rich instead of addressing inequality.
The greatest danger to Israel is not the putative Iranian nuclear bomb. The greatest danger is the stupidity of our leaders.
This is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. A great many of the world’s leaders are plain stupid, and always have been. Enough to look at what happened in Europe in July 1914, when an incredible accumulation of stupid politicians and incompetent generals plunged humanity into World War I.
But lately, Binyamin Netanyahu and almost the entire Israeli political establishment have achieved a new record in foolishness.
Let us start from the end.
Iran is the great victor. It has been warmly welcomed back …
In recent years, many segments of the Left have adopted the politics of anti-consumerism. It perhaps becomes even more pronounced around this time of the year, firstly with the advent of what is known as ‘black Friday’ and then with the run up to Christmas. The Left however, should be celebrating the mass abundance of consumerism, and recognise that attacks on consumerism are elitist, and that consumerism itself is often a social act.
The Anti-consumerist generally views the purchase of consumer goods with thinly veiled contempt for the consumerist passions of the proles, who are supposedly tricked into buying stuff …
The Watertrough Children’s Alliance (WCA)–mainly mothers with students at schools near where yet another apple orchard is being converted into a chemical vineyard–filed a lawsuit on the afternoon of November 25 against the Paul Hobbs Winery. The next day Hobbs struck back with a press release, promising he “will aggressively fight.”
Hobbs is famous for being aggressive, fighting neighbors, and abusing land. Called “the wine industry’s bad boy,” he regularly breaks the rules and then pays paltry fines—“business as usual” for him. He plans to use toxic pesticides next to five schools with over 500 students, which would also hurt family …
It remains one of the most exquisite concerts ever filmed. My friend Rich and I fantasized about buying tickets when sales were announced in the early fall of 1976. We sat in his apartment near the University of Maryland’s College Park campus doing bong hits and running scenarios about getting to the show. Should we try and get a friend in San Francisco to buy us tickets, then buy a cheap plane ticket or should we just buy a beater car and drive across country hoping to find a reasonable scalper? There were no phone sales …
In his recent book Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase describes how Theodore Kaczynski, a 16-year-old Harvard student in 1958, suffered traumatizing abuse as an unwitting test-subject in a CIA-connected psychology experiment designed to manipulate human behavior under intensive isolation and harsh interrogation (and also ultimately: LSD and torture). This humiliating, formative experience, Chase argues, shaped Kaczynski’s dislike for the techno-scientific manipulation and control of human beings. But Chase also maintains that the Harvard Gen Ed. Curriculum itself—which included moral philosophy as well as critiques of modern civilization (Mumford, Veblen, etc.)—could only exacerbate despair about the state of the modern, …
Today we shall feast and drink and watch football and give thanks to the Machine for prompt dispatch and delivery of hecatombs of slaughtered fowl. Tomorrow, we must put our shoulders to the wheel and shop, shop till it hurts, shop till it delivers us from evil, shop for the good of those who otherwise could not afford to shop if not for the brief, temp-gigs that trickle down from Santa’s workshop in celebration of…of….the sacred something or other…and of course, time off work….
Following the interim agreement with Iran the next six months will tell us whether or not the American-led Zionist lobby and Zionism itself has played its last card and lost. If it does lose President Obama will be free to use the leverage he has to try to cause Israel to be serious about peace on terms almost all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept (and which would not pose any threat to the wellbeing and security of those Jews now living in Palestine that became Israel and who wanted to stay). The stakes could not …
Readers of this article will likely live to see climate change so disruptive and damaging that it will alter the Western world’s standard of living. In fact, the onset of radical climate change is already evident. It has already started. This article will examine the incipience of this far-reaching event, which will change the world forever.
Radical climate change is already upon us, and it will only get worse, decade-by-decade, because world governments refuse to address the issue in a meaningful and corrective manner. Climate talks amongst nations (19 meetings, so far) are merely gabfests where a bunch of dignitaries meet …
Anyone who clings to the belief that serving time in prison constitutes “paying one’s debt to society” has obviously never done time or tried to get a job after being released. Even if your crime was non-violent and non-invasive (e.g., drug possession) and your time in prison was relatively short, when you get out and apply for a job, you quickly learn (if you didn’t already suspect) that you now carry an ineradicable stigma.
There are simply too many people out of work, too many people without prison records, for an employer to take a chance on ex-cons. People with prison …
Do unto others before they do it to you… otherwise, you’re just asking for trouble. Do it to ’em even if they have no desire to do anything unto you. Let ’em know who’s Boss….
A Review of Lawrence Wittner’s What’s Going On at UAardvark?
by Joel Shatzky / November 27th, 2013
What’s Going on at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press, 2013) is in some respects within the tradition of satire on a political and social issue that goes back to Aristophanes, the Roman writings of Juvenal and Petronius, through Gulliver’s Travels to Catch-22. But Lawrence Wittner’s stinging critique of what is happening to the “Corpaversity” plunges the novel into farce. Although it has the bite of satire, the author goes over the top, or so it initially seemed to me, with a Marxist (Groucho) sense of the ridiculous. The plot hinges on a scheme by UAardvark President Dwight Hopkins III …
Their Battle to Persuade the Public to Accept GM Food
by Lesley Docksey / November 27th, 2013
The official UK government policy on genetically modified (GM) crops is “precautionary, evidence-based and sensitive to public concerns”. Who are they kidding?
My heart always sinks when, listening to the BBC’s Today programme, someone from the Department for International Development starts talking about the “international food crisis”, and the starving people in all those poor undeveloped countries (the ones we helped to pauper with our empire building). I know for sure that in the next day or two, in the top political slot on Today, I’ll be listening to Environment Minister Owen Paterson telling us that we must embrace GM technology …
Captive by the relentless train wreck called establishment politics, let us pause and consider potential breakthroughs. Scoff at my optimism, even fantasies, but doesn’t every epic calamity beget a perk or two, eventually? I trust the “gift in the wound” learned from poet Robert Bly. And my father’s best lesson, “If you don’t learn from failure, you suffer a double loss.”
Just for balance, isn’t it high time someone took on the gloom and doomsters? Compare the odds, over the next 100-500 years, of a new progressive era breaking out vs. the likelihood the world explodes, or implodes, with a bang …
The latest punishment of Gaza may seem like another familiar plot to humiliate the strip to the satisfaction of Israel, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, and the military-controlled Egyptian government. But something far more sinister is brewing.
This time, the collective punishment of Gaza arrives in the form of raw sewage that is flooding many neighborhoods across the impoverished and energy-chocked region of 360 km2 (139 sq mi) and 1.8 million inhabitants. Even before the latest crisis resulting from a severe shortage of electricity and diesel fuel that is usually smuggled through Egypt, Gaza was rendered gradually uninhabitable. A comprehensive UN report …
What is the worst Mother Agnes could have done to the anti-war conference?
Here’s what it looks like when a respected reporter tweets about his blackmail note to an established anti-war organization regarding the organization’s upcoming conference in a tweet on November 15:
“I’ve informed organizers of @STWuk that I will not participate in their conference if Mother Agnes is on the platform.”
The reporter is Jeremy Scahill, who was booked as the keynote speaker and to show his film Dirty Wars (based on his book Dirty Wars) at the November 30 International Anti-War …
Although TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has received the lion’s share of media attention, another key border-crossing pipeline benefitting tar sands producers was approved on November 19 by the U.S. State Department.
Enter Cochin, Kinder Morgan’s 1,900-mile proposed pipeline to transport gas produced via the controversial hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of the Eagle Ford Shale basin in Texas north through Kankakee, Illinois, and eventually into Alberta, Canada, the home of the tar sands.
Like Keystone XL, the pipeline proposal requires U.S. State Department approval because it crosses the U.S.-Canada border. Unlike Keystone XL – which would …
The devastation wreaked by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines has led to heart-wrenching scenes of human suffering, with the death toll now put at over 5,000 and likely to rise still further. Yeb Sano, the head of the Philippines climate delegation, gave a moving speech at the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, linking the typhoon to global warming, and then went on a hunger strike which would last, he said, ‘until we stop this madness’.
Sadly, the madness looks set to continue if we recognise that the corporate media is an integral part of the problem: pulverising us …
“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. ”Control food and you control the people.”
Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.
The man posing that question on my voicemail continued with a sharply critical comment about one of the essays I have written in recent years about the holocaust-denial that is at the heart of that U.S. holiday. My first reaction was not to argue but to amend: “I don’t hate Thanksgiving—I just think it’s appropriate to critique a celebration that obscures the reality of the European conquest of the Americas.”
That description is accurate, at one level—my rejection of Thanksgiving is more intellectual than emotional, a political decision to reject that distortion of history. Whatever …
Ardaga Widor has been a journalist, ship cook, one-man industrial assembling firm, teacher … in more than just four corners of Mother Earth. He quotes the Portuguese poet and pantheist Teixeira de Pascoais who said: “A man is everything he has seen and every person he has met in his life.” Ardaga is a thus a genuine One World man. Today he’s mostly engaged in the hands-on striving for (social) justice and the empowerment of cultural diversity. He also works in the field of tourism.
A part of the world Ardaga is well acquainted with is Brazil and the challenges …
Step one for everyone trying to make the world a better place should be listening to those they wish to help.
This is certainly true in the case of Haiti, a longtime target of Canadian ‘aid’. But, while Haitians continue to criticize Ottawa’s role in their country, few Canadians bother to pay attention.
After Uruguay announced it was withdrawing its 950 troops from the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti last month, Moise Jean-Charles, took aim at the countries he considers most responsible for undermining Haitian sovereignty. The popular senator from Haiti’s north recently told Haiti Liberté:
Diego Lopez, Guatemala. Presente!
Francisca Chavez, El Salvador. Presente!
We tearfully placed the man and the baby’s little wooden crosses into the cyclone fence, one of three barbed-wired steal barriers separating thousands of peace-makers from the war-makers at Fort Benning, Georgia.
School of the Americas (SOA) Watch Vigil, the 24th since 1990, drew me from Denmark, my friend James from Ensenada, Mexico, and upwards to 3000 others from across the United States, Canada, and Latin American countries to protest in front of this key US Army combat-counter-insurgency training base.
SOA is also known as the School of the Assassins by families and supporters of …
by Rosemary and Walter Brasch / November 26th, 2013
Segued into a 10-second afterthought, smothered by 60-second Christmas commercials, is the media acknowledgement of Thanksgiving, which nudges us into a realization of all we are thankful for.
But the usual litany, even with the omnipresent pictures of the less fortunate being fed by the more fortunate, doesn’t list well this year. Our thanks seem to be at best half-hearted or at least insensitive and shallow.
All of us might be thankful for peace if America still hadn’t been involved in two recent wars. The Iraq war lasted almost nine years; the other, in Afghanistan, has lasted more than 12 years and …
For an event that changed the course of world history, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy passed with barely a ripple. It featured the same sort of superficial solemnity and obligatory rehashing of canonical texts one expects at a religious observance.
At Easter, the clergy do not expect faithful Christians to question the absurdity of the Resurrection as they hearken unto ritualistic stories and watch the umpteenth depiction of the Crucifixion. The ritual is a time to reinforce official belief, not stimulate thoughtful discussion.
So it came to pass that the 50th commemoration of the Kennedy assassination …
Brain Busting Bombs — News (faux, sic, err, persona non grata)
This is an experiment. Quickly, in tsunami like fashion, riffing with the junk of the day, picked up from mainstream madness newspaper news, and from the feeds on NPR, National Pediatric News. Other polluted pipelines from the crapper, like HuffPost, all the junk on line, etc. etc.
Alas, the experiment failed. My goal was to get the detritus out of my head, quickly, stream of consciousness-style, any way, cathartic, with some fugue of heavy rumbling. Some process to eviscerate the pain of so much wrong news, wrong reporting, wrong people getting …
