Susie Abulhawa, Palestinian poet, author of Mornings in Jenin, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, exile, mother, lover, friend, stands naked in My Voice Sought the Wind (Just World Books); her collection of trenchant and beautiful poems replete with honesties and literary seductions.
Reading her poems is akin to being in conversation with a lyrically intelligent and passionate woman; a conversation that is at once intimate and universal shifting vividly in place and time, in emotion and insight, in self and the people of her poetic landscape.
There are many reasons why we should feel rage, if not actual hatred, towards most of our trusted leaders. They have, after all, ruined our country and now, having realised that the ship is going down, are presiding over the final plundering of whatever meagre pickings are left before the bandits finally ride out of town for the no-doubt sunnier climes of whichever tax-havens they’re using to stash their ill-gotten loot. But in addition to that there are also their unspeakably repulsive foreign policies which are more than enough to deserve every bit of bile we’re capable of flinging in …
Haiti and Syria are victims of their rescuers. The two nations are now sites of major disease outbreaks. Cholera in Haiti and polio in Syria didn’t just happen. Through negligence, those who claim to rescue the people imported the disease entities and fostered the conditions for wider outbreaks.
680,000 cases of cholera in Haiti since UN rescue mission
The 7.0 Mw earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010 collapsed an already fragile society and infrastructure. The United States and major European powers sprung into action. Bill Clinton was the front man for the relief effort. The United Nations provided the vehicle to deliver …
Part 3: Assassinations, Anti-communism, Interventionism and Right-wing Dictators
by Burkely Hermann / November 2nd, 2013
Part One of this series discussed how power and privilege are integral to JFK’s presidential cabinet. Part Two addressed the Kennedy Tax Cuts, the influence of international capital and how Kennedy pushed forward ‘free trade’ through increased negotiations at GATT. Part Three will talk about JFK’s foreign policy specifically relating to assassinations, support for right-wing dictators, how all revolved around his quest to fight communism or what he thought was communism.
President Kennedy was not following the views against military intervention expressed by the American public before WWI and during the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, he liked to use …
The Irish have a long history of being tyrannized, exploited, and oppressed—from the forced conversion to Christianity in the Dark Ages, to slave trading of the natives in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the mid-nineteenth century “potato famine” that was really a holocaust. The British got Ireland’s food exports, while at least one million Irish died from starvation and related diseases, and another million or more emigrated.
Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika—the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up …
Pro-Israel Policy groups such as AIPAC work with unlimited funding to divert US policy in the region (Middle East).
— Jack Straw, Member of Parliament and former Foreign Secretary of the British Labor Party
The United States should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran to spur the country to end its nuclear program.
— Sheldon Adelson, biggest donor to the Republican Party and major fundraiser for pro-Israel political action committees, speech at Yeshiva University, New York City, October 22, 2013
The question of war or peace with Iran rests with the policies adopted by the White House and the US Congress. The …
On August 24, 2013 tens of thousands of people gathered to celebrate a protest fifty years ago when hundreds of thousands of other people marched and rallied in Washington DC demanding equal rights for African-American residents of the United States. It was on that day the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. made one of his best-known speeches; a speech from which just a few phrases are usually quoted. “I have a dream…” said King that day. “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of …
Now that serious talks with Iran over its nuclear program are underway, one seemingly insurmountable issue is whether Iran has the right to enrich uranium. The short answer is: Yes.
Those who are trying to torpedo the ongoing talks, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, want Iran to be forced to agree to the whole monty–a complete cessation of uranium enrichment and a dismantling of all enrichment facilities.
Iran claims that it has the inalienable right to enrich uranium as guaranteed in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which it is a signatory.
The NPT treaty language is quite clear. In Article IV …
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
— Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832
In Syria now, apart from funding weapons to a reported thousand different factions of foreign terrorists from perhaps eighty plus countries, NATO, the US, UK and their Middle East cohorts have seemingly delivered polio.
Prior to interruption by the devastating uprising — designed largely from within the US Embassy in Damascus before Ambassador Robert Ford fled across the border for a flight to the safety of Maryland — Syria had one of the highest polio vaccination rates in the region, with the World Health …
Ice hockey is a game that requires exceptional skill by virtue of having to perform it on an ice surface wearing thin blades of steel. It is a challenging game where a player must elude opponents and combine with teammates to put pucks in the opposition net and keep the puck out of one’s own net. Yet hockey has an unseemly side reflected that undermines its seriousness as a respectable sport. Funnyman Rodney Dangerfield captured the absurdity of hockey in his joke, “I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.” ((Rodney Dangerfield, “They …
The following public service advertising is brought to you by the school of dampening and dumb-downing, the Admin Class of Overlords of Language, the PC Folk, as in Particularly Cowed Class. This is a typical class on most campuses across this land from sea to shining sea, or C to sniveling C. As in CORRECTNESS!
I have had to face these sorts of workshops for the past 15 years, in higher education and on other fronts, working with non-profits, et al. Luckily, since teaching beginning in 1983, I had at least 15 years without this complete double-think hand ruling all things …
Other "play nice and be better than thou art" rules
by John Steppling / November 1st, 2013
Media Lens gets a lot of things right, and so, it is disappointing when they succumb to what is, increasingly, a tendency on the left to punish lack of purity.
Russell Brand is a comedian. I have no real opinion on his value as such because I’ve not really seen enough. But I did see his interview on the BBC with Jeremy Paxman. What he said was clear, honest, and, yes, obvious. That is a germane point in all this; what he said is what almost everyone should be saying. The system in place is anti-democratic, and institutionalizes inequality. Electoral politics …
In Iraq, you can’t put pink gloves on Apache helicopter pilots and send them into the Ultimate Fighting ring and ask them to take a knee. These are attack pilots wearing gloves of steel, and they go into the ring throwing powerful punches of explosive steel. They are there to win, and they will win.
— Lt. Col. Chris Wallach
The video known as Collateral Murder is strong evidence of genocide being carried out by the US against the people of Iraq. Hidden in the horrors of its brutality is a rich historical record revealing an armed force which systematically targets and …
I don’t mean of the belly laugh sort, but rather the ironic variety (although a decent argument could be made that many elements of modern work life have the humour quotient of a Three Stooges skit).
There was a rally Thursday to support unionized cleaners working in Cadillac Fairview buildings in downtown Vancouver who are paid in the $12 per hour range. Cadillac, self-described as “one of North America’s largest investors, owners and managers of commercial real estate” and owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, has given its former $12 per hour cleaning contract …
Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously said that you can judge a country by how well it treats its prisoners. This observation has been amended to apply to other groups: to how well a country treats its old people, to how well it treats its minorities, to how well it treats its children, to how well it treats its mentally ill, even to how well it treats its pets. That last one is a bit hard to swallow. (“Hey, Freedonia must be a great country….they’re really nice to their dogs.”)
Because most of the world’s people are required to work for a living, and …
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 …
