The Base Heather Stroud
Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism Sean Carleton and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair (Eds)
Wired for Authoritarianism: American Oligarchies and How to Re-Wire America for the People Charles Derber
The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace You–and How to Stop It Garrison Lovely
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who helped defeat Japan, then France, then the United States in a 35-year war for national independence, died in Hanoi on October 4 at the age of 102. He had been ailing and living in a military hospital for the last four years.
Giap’s extraordinary generalship drove French imperialism out of the three countries of Indochina — Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — in the mid-1950s. At the time he declared the anti-French struggle “was victorious because we had a wide and firm National United Front… organized and led by the party of the working class — …
“We must reflect on the absurdity that the survivors of a shipwreck are put under criminal investigation,” said Cecile Kyenge, Integration Minister in the current center-left Italian government. ((Steve Scherer, “Divers recover more migrant bodies from Sicily wreck,” Reuters, 6 October 2013.))
Allegro – Local Failure
In 2010, I wrote an article titled, “Environmentalism is Dead,” decrying the ineptitude and/or downright skulduggery of large environmental nonprofit organizations. At the time, I still held the foolhardy belief that we could keep environmental activism alive at the local level through traditional nonprofit vehicles, particularly because of the “good people” typically involved in such outfits and the hypothesis suggesting small and nimble – and the development of personal relationships – could create more effective tactics within a comprehensive strategy or agenda.
Of course, I was wrong.
I suppose one could argue isolated circumstances …
Among the casualties of the U.S. government shutdown is President Barack Obama’s trip to Indonesia for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. In calling President Yudhoyono of Indonesia on October 3, to express his regrets over the last-minute cancellation, Obama, according to the White House, “reaffirmed the importance of the U.S.-Indonesia partnership.”
It is a partnership that, despite its long-standing global significance, typically garners little attention in the United States. But it merits careful scrutiny, not least for what transpired 48 years ago. The beginning of October 1965 saw the kidnapping and murder of six Indonesian generals, killings that the …
Safe to say, most of us have never heard of agronomist Norman Borlaug. If I hadn’t been tangentially involved with Indian agriculture, I wouldn’t have heard of him. But Borlaug is not only a famous scientist, he’s one of only seven people to have won the Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. Apparently, the only prize to elude him was the Cy Young Award.
Dr. Borlaug is most famous for having launched what came to be known as the Green Revolution—the agricultural phenomenon responsible for an exponential increase, a veritable explosion, in the amount of …
Debt Ceiling? What Debt Ceiling? That’s a unicorn in Congress’s garden!
For all the talk about the United States approaching a catastrophic Debt Ceiling and subsequent unprecedented but exceptional default that would have unpredictable but probably dire impact on pretty much everybody, one thing you don’t hear much is that There is No Debt Ceiling.
Seriously, the relevant law literally does nothing to control the national debt. A serious Debt Ceiling law would prevent Congress from appropriating expenditures beyond the debt limit. Congress has never done that, Congress probably never would do that, even if it could. Congress doesn’t want to do that, and it would probably be irresponsible for Congress to …
The Jesters Capture the Court
We have sent to Washington a company of court jesters, supplying them with portraits of knights in shining armor in the shape of a handheld mirror, so that when they gaze at themselves they perceive heroes standing strong for all that is good and right. They have been given a script and they will not wander from it. They defiantly disbelieve everything the president, the economists and even the corporate wing of their own party says. They alone represent truth, justice and the American way. They alone are God’s chosen.
Can you imagine a less effective spokesperson for a political party …
Israel will not recognize an Israeli nationality while it seeks to maintain Jewishness at all costs
Israel is almost certainly the only country that deceives the global community every time one of its citizens crosses an international border. It does so because the passports it issues contain a fiction.
When a border official opens an Israeli passport for inspection, he or she sees the passport holder’s nationality stated as “Israeli.” And yet inside Israel, no state official, government agency or court recognizes the existence of an “Israeli” national.
This month the highest court in the land, Israel’s Supreme Court, explicitly affirmed that it could not uphold an Israeli nationality. Instead, the judges ruled, citizenship and nationality in Israel …
General Petraeus Secured Away from Students
Just scanning the junk of America, the stories about cops killing a Down syndrome youth for going into a movie twice while paying once (come on, search it on Zion-Google), or all the dreadful creeps defending Breaking Wind (Bad) (oh, god, the Huffington-NBC-NYT-Time Magazine-drool turning this half-assed drugged-out show into high art, beware, Margaret Atwood), or all the sickos yammering about how Petraeus the puke deserves his $150,000 a year from one institution (princeTon) as an adjunct faculty (one class a semester at CUNY) and that any youth willing to protest that piece of Princeton …
I never liked school right from grade 1 through to grade 12. I don’t think I was unique, but I think my dislike of school was of greater magnitude than most students. So after I graduated from high school, I declared to my mother, “I’ll never go to school again.” Dead-end, unfulfilling work post-school led me to violate my declaration with the approval of my parents. University was a different world. There were few overbearing professors harping at me to attend classes and do my homework. Much of my study was self-directed, and my learning and grades were more-or-less up …
There is an old joke about a tortoise saying to a hare, “you can run but you can’t hide.” So it used to be with politicians running for elections and relying on constituent donations — thus sensitive to voter sentiment. Not any more. Not when both major parties are bought and paid for quite legally by agenda driven large out-of-state interests and wealthy private donors.
Much more than a parliamentary system, U.S. federal governance is dependent on goodwill. The filibuster custom, the independence of the House, Senate and Executive, the right of each state small and large …
Regarding the painstaking process of historiography, someone of relative importance once remarked, “History is written by the victors.” A statement which echoes Plato’s dictum that, “those who tell the stories also hold the power,” its modern source is unclear. Still, many do not hesitate to attach these words to Winston Churchill, Britain’s renowned Prime Minister during the Second World War. Considering Churchill’s own history — born into an aristocratic family; his grandfather the 7th Duke of Marlborough; his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a wealthy British statesman; his mother, Jennie Jerome, an “American socialite,” herself the daughter of a financier, speculator, …
More than two and a half years on, Israel’s purported neutrality in the Syrian conflict and the United State’s fanfare rhetoric urging a “regime change” in Damascus were abruptly cut short to unveil that the Israeli factor has been all throughout the conflict the main concern of both countries.
All their media and political focus on “democracy versus dictatorship” and on the intervention of the international community on the basis of a “responsibility to protect” to avert the exacerbating “humanitarian crisis” in Syria was merely a focus intended to divert the attention of the world public opinion away from their …
People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.
— Wendell Berry ((“Writer and Farmer Wendell Berry on Hope, Direct Action, and the ‘Resettling’ of the American Countryside,” Yes!))
The need for more studies confirming that we’re approaching an irreversible ecological crisis, the tipping point beyond human control, is over. James Hansen, the world’s most eminent climatologist is so certain of this evidence that he’s added civil disobedience to his resistance repertoire. Along with legal challenges, expert testimony and lobbying governments, the 72-year-old grandfather advocates direct …
Empire Under Obama: Part 2
Under the administration of Barack Obama, America is waging a global terror campaign through the use of drones, killing thousands of people, committing endless war crimes, creating fear and terror in a program expected to last several more decades. Welcome to Obama’s War OF Terror.
When Obama became President in 2009, he faced a monumental challenge for the extension of American and Western imperial interests. The effects of eight years under the overt ruthless and reckless behaviour of the Bush administration had taken a toll on the world. With two massive ground wars and occupations under way in Iraq and …
Indictment of the Federal Government of the U.S. for the commission of international crime
Information Clearing House — All citizens of the World Community have both the right and the duty under public international law to sit in judgment over a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental norms of international criminal law committed by any member state of that same World Community. Such is the case for the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nationalities in the United States of America that convenes in San Francisco during the weekend of October 1-4, 1992. Its weighty but important task is to examine the long history of international criminal activity …
It’s time to take some of the profit out of the for-profit healthcare system currently victimizing the people of the United States. This is a small step and one which can be implemented on levels which do not necessitate the consent of an entire nation.
If you’re not intelligent enough to already have realized that the present for-profit healthcare system in the United States constitutes a human rights violation, you might as well go back to watching black and white 1950s sitcoms on your smart phone, and stop reading altogether.
“I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients …
October 16, 2013 is World Food Day. Fours days before this event thousands took to streets across the world’s cities to protest the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) products and pesticides that are suspected of being linked to diseases. The giant multi-national corporation Monsanto was one of the main targets of the protests. Over 50 countries took part in the march for World Food Day, and all across the United States and Canada.
Many of the demonstrators have been calling for the permanent boycott of GMOs and “other harmful agro-chemicals,” according to March Against Monsanto’s official web page. Protesters …
Cities are where most humans live, with more people moving to them every day. As anyone who has lived in a big city knows, existence in urban environments is a challenge. This challenge is greater the less money one has. Like everything else, the advent and growth of the neoliberal economy has exacerbated the challenges associated with urban life in a multitude of ways. In response to these challenges, various movements have arisen. Perhaps the most important of those movements is the one involved with creating a just and sustainable existence. A multi-faceted movement, this movement has almost as many …
The dawning of a brave new world order of all-powerful, robust energy may be right around the corner, and it’s a game changer.
Solar-power may be on the brink of an incredible discovery so thrilling it nearly takes one’s breath away! Indeed, this new solar blockbuster may solve many of the world’s climate change problems… Exhale! But, it is still too early to know for sure, and similar to all good things that happen on a large scale, it will take time.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel energy appears old, tired, and archaic, especially when compared to sleek, glistening solar-power, which is …
In 1961, German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt travelled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 docudrama Hannah Arendt tells the story of her journey and the controversy following her report.
What Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) saw in Eichmann was not stupidity, but actually a thoughtlessness – a complete incapacity for independent critical thought. Arendt understood that it was within this thoughtlessness that the evil becomes banal as opposed to being a sinister premeditated crime. The ‘banality of evil’, as such, is the structure that allows the ethical …
Petitioning the American government and the United Nations to take over the Fukushima clean-up would be morally wrong and a political folly.
The argument goes that since TEPCO and the Japanese government have shown themselves incompetent and untrustworthy in their information policies regarding the Fukushima disaster, now the international community and especially the United States government should step in and take over.
However, looking at the US’s own track record in giving comprehensive and accurate information about its nuclear accidents and the failure of its nuclear industry to even implement the most basic safety precautions would actually be letting the fox guard …
Which will impale you—humanitarian intervention or deficit reduction?
The word dilemma springs from the Greek for di and lemma, basically a “double proposition.” The idea is that you have found yourself in a situation in which your only choice is between two ‘horns’, and your only question is which horn you would prefer to be gored by? As Americans, we may look abroad to avoid the calamity of Congress, but there we find war. We may look homeward to avoid the horror of industrial warfare, but here we find gangs of elitists jockeying for position in the great race to privatize the commons. We are left to ask …
He did not seem the sharpest sandwich at the picnic. But that did not matter. Australia’s notorious Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, a half-comic, half-sinister crim who blazed his quixotic way into that country’s limited folklore, dead at 58, did not feel the need to be. He was mocking the very public who took him seriously, and evidently relished it. He mocked the journalists, and liked that even more. And most of all, he mocked himself.
How much of that notoriety was merely a celluloid blast remains the paradox of criminal obsessions. Cruelty indulges curiosity. People who tend to abide by the …
Nah, think hard, readers: I am tough as nails, and I dare you to challenge that with ANYONE who knows me. I have spit in the faces of colonels, cops, Aryans, the pigs of capital. I have danced on the graves of bankers and thrown tequila bottles, empties that is, on John Wesley Hardin’s grave. Had my time with Lee Marvin, some Sandinistas, some Zapatistas, and a whole lot of infamous and small-time hoodlums throughout Tex-ass and Mexico. Hitchhiked from Nogales to Panama.
Nah, I am not special, because, there are many like me. Thanks effe-ing Christ. Unique like a snowflake? …
IPS — In an effort to provoke any possible opposition in U.S. political circles to a nuclear deal with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to exploiting an old claim that Iran is building intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit the United States.
The Netanyahu claim takes advantage of the extreme position that has been taken on the issue by Pentagon and Air Force intelligence organisations but goes even further.
In an Oct. 1 interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS News, Netanyahu said Iranians are “building ICBMs to reach…the American mainland within a few years”. And in an interview with …
Public in Dark for Days Due to Government Shutdown
Over 20,600 barrels of oil fracked from the Bakken Shale has spilled from a Tesoro Logistics pipeline in Tioga, North Dakota in one of the biggest onshore oil spills in recent U.S. history.
Though the spill occurred on September 29, the U.S. National Response Center — tasked with responding to chemical and oil spills — did not make the report available until October 8 due to the ongoing government shutdown.
“The center generally makes such reports available on its website within 24 hours of their filing, but services were interrupted last week because of the U.S. government shutdown,” explained Reuters.
The “Incident Summaries” portion of the …
They say you get more conservative, nostalgic for the past and critical of young people as you age. In my case it’s true, but maybe not in the same way most people expect.
This 60-year-old grandfather’s conservatism is reflected in a growing respect for the institutions, programs and social services that previous generations of ordinary working people built through organizing and struggle. I believe in preserving these institution, programs and social services despite the onslaught of right-wing choppers and cutters who proclaim “progress” when in fact people’s lives are being made worse.
My nostalgia for the past is reflected in fond memories …
Are we witnessing the beginning of user-generated politics, even hashtag politics, with no need for leadership? Since the dawn of user-generated content, it has become ever easier for us common people to assert political views in forums where they can be viewed and studied by all.
Now, popular grievances and political ideas can be expressed by anyone in chat-rooms, in the comments sections of websites, or simply condensed and inserted into the debate as a hashtag on Twitter. Distrust of authority necessarily extends from the anarchic democratization favored by the internet, as each person sticks to his own user-generated political theory. …
When Rabbi Ovadia Yosef first appeared on the national scene, I heaved a deep sigh of relief.
Here was the man I had dreamed of: a charismatic leader of oriental Jews, a man of peace, a bearer of a moderate religious tradition.
“Rabbi Ovadia”, as everybody called him, who died this week at the age of 93, was born in Baghdad, came to Palestine as a boy of 4, gained huge respect as a religious scholar. During the 1948 war he was the chief rabbi of Egypt, later he became the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel. When his appointment was not renewed, …
