What is really happening in Egypt? Are the latest developments a progressive step forward or a regressive step backward for the millions of Egyptians seeking political change primarily through prolonged mass mobilizations in the streets?
It’s been over a month since a military coup d’état, with popular support, ousted the country’s first democratically elected government July 3 after only one year in office, following an earlier military coup with popular support that brought down dictator Hosni Mubarak.
There are diametrically opposed interpretations about what is taking place in Egypt. One fact remains certain, however. In 1952 during the overthrow of the monarchy, …
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, a new book by writer/professor Sarah Schulman, tells the story of Schulman’s transformation from a “Jewish, lesbian New Yorker” into a “Cosmopolitan queer and avid BDS advocate.” Her book is a must read—and not because it offers original ideological or political outlook, not at all. Schulman actually provides us with a unique and invaluable window into Jewish secular progressive thought. It unveils the structure of LGBT politics and its operation within the Palestinian solidarity movement. Schulman also provides the reader some crucial and juicy references to the direct involvement of Georg Soros’ …
Code PINK activist Medea Benjamin deserves plenty of accolades because she puts herself out there on the frontline of social justice issues, in particular speaking for victims of the wars of US empire. However, her narrative that criticizes American imperialism is itself criticize-able for its rhetoric and omissions. Recently Benjamin appealed to frightened Americans in an essay, “10 Ways to Reduce the Threat of Terrorist Attacks on Americans.”
Benjamin calls for a “a moratorium on drone strikes.” But why not call for an outright ban on drone strikes and have them declared war crimes? The call for a moratorium suggests …
Part 5 of 6: Waking a Sleeping Giant with the “Youth Industry”
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 6th, 2013
Writing in the New York Times in 2008, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski stated:
Though U.S. leadership has been essential to global stability and development, the cumulative effects of national self indulgence, financial irresponsibility, an unnecessary war and ethical transgressions have discredited that leadership. Making matters worse is the global economic crisis.
The resulting challenge is compounded by issues such as climate, health and social inequality – issues that are becoming more contentious because they have surfaced in the context of what I call “the global political awakening”.
For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically …
skipping stones in the big pond where the One Percent bury their dead . . . US!
Again, mining the mighty independence and harmony of philosophical thought that can be the Internet, the web, these blogs like DV. Since I’ve opened up my posts — including poetry — to open comments from around the globe, I have been pleasantly pleased by the few focused, targeted comments around my sometimes looping vascular pieces, which many have found intriguing and exhausting to read. Such is life, as I personally tell those that email me.
I’ve lived the life of a daily small-town and medium-sized …
Harry Truman spoke in the U.S. Senate on June 23, 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning,” he said, “we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”
Did Truman value Japanese lives above Russian and German? There is nothing anywhere to suggest that he did. Yet we debate, every August 6th or so, whether Truman was willing to unnecessarily sacrifice Japanese lives in order to scare Russians with his nuclear bombs. He was willing; he was not willing; he was willing. Left out …
In Part 2 Middle East observer BJ Sabri analyzed the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood vis-à-vis Gaza and the struggle against Zionist violence and oppression. The interview continues with analysis of how the Muslim Brotherhood have responded to western imperialism in the Middle East, particularly regarding Syria. (See also Part 1.)
KP: Not so long ago, Morsi severed relations with Syria and even called, indirectly, for war against the Syrian government. It is obvious that Morsi has taken sides. Was Morsi pushed by the US to take that action? In retrospect, what would have happened if Israel entered openly …
Peru’s Ministry of Culture, charged with protecting indigenous peoples’ rights, last week issued a report outlining the dangers the project would pose to uncontacted and isolated Indians’ lives. But the report disappeared just hours after it was published online, and both the Minister and Vice-minister of Culture have now …
It was a hot day for a funeral, but not humid. The powder-blue sky was adorned with puffs of cloud, few in number and tastefully spaced wide. The landscaped flora beneath bloomed lush, aggressive, and the sun shined bright as the machines within the Greater Network that defined her life and ours.
“I broke the Internet,” confessed The Mortician to his phone.
“Are you connected?” demanded The Help Desk.
The voice of Help, tender, female, emerged from the thin gadget, loud enough for The Bereaved to hear.
“Does the little ‘hand-shake’ icon on your pad flash green, or red?”
The Detroit bankruptcy is looking suspiciously like the bail-in template originated by the G20’s Financial Stability Board in 2011, which exploded on the scene in Cyprus in 2013 and is now becoming the model globally. In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks.
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / August 5th, 2013
Pope Francis impressed Brazilians with his modest lifestyle and sympathy for the poor, but he did not support the mass struggle for economic justice and instead echoed the right-wing focus on corruption in government.
Let us not get too worked up. Let us not even feel too conspiratorial. But is it coincidence that, after a series of exposures of such programs as PRISM, that a “global terror alert” has been announced? Taxpayers want bang for their buck; even more so, they want to see their hulks of security justified. The fact that the Obama administration has been presiding over the world’s most extensive regime of unwarranted global surveillance, both of its citizens and of others, suggests that some retort was bound to come in the face of Edward Snowden’s revelations.
Packed into the small reception area of the Florida Governor’s office in Tallahassee, a couple dozen determined Dream Defenders conducted a people’s hearing on racial profiling. Black and brown college and high school youth took turns giving compelling testimony of being profiled at school, in public and by the police. In one corner was a court reporter. A camera was live streaming the proceedings.
On the coffee table, a can of iced tea and a bag of skittles. On the floor were strips of tape to keep an aisle clear so the Governor’s people could find get in and out of …
There are two ways to look at a so-called “raid” of one union by another. We can see it as treachery, as an unwarranted assault, as a selfish attempt to undermine already fragile working class “solidarity” in return for increased revenue or power, or we can see it simply as another rough-and-tumble aspect of organized labor’s natural evolution.
Of course, because these internecine battles usually involve boisterous, working class exchanges at union halls, and not the hushed tones of hallowed board rooms, the corporate media can be depended upon to portray them in the crudest terms possible. …
Already the early enthusiasm for Egypt’s 3 July coup is waning, as EU leaders demand President Morsi’s release and US President Obama prevaricates. Senator John McCain, who soon after the coup called for an end to US military funding as stipulated by law, arrived in Cairo Monday to mediate. As a kind of cruel joke, the new ‘president’ Adly Mansour, who is also president of the Supreme Constitutional Court, has scheduled a trial 25 August of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie and his deputies, including Khairat el-Shater, who are accused of killing protesters, though it is the Egyptian coupmakers who …
The pro-refugee groups are milling about along Swanston Street, Melbourne, the arterial route of the city centre in what apparently qualifies as Australia’s “cultural” capital. The actions of protest took place over the weekend to respond to the first group of individuals destined for Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Then, there was the call: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will be going to the polls on September 7, hoping that his campaigning will hoodwink voters about his autistic governing skills. The ballot will take place a day after his ego-puffing escapade at St. Petersburg (G-20, and all …
One Little Smear of Peanut Butter, One Giant Nanoparticle for Mankind
Oh, how we’ve become the victims of the modern bait and switch Joseph Mengele of the very modern despicable kind. Not just sinister scientists, the triumphant technologists and the corrupt corporations and their massive on-going Petri dish experiment on human kind. Not just some latent harkening back to syphilis put into the human biochemistry of Alabama blacks or incarcerated Guatemalans.
We are nanoparticle plagued, and by 2015, the market for nanoproducts is going to hit $2.4 trillion according to Global Industry Analysts, Inc. From air, to soil, to roots, to grains, …
If John Kerry were beating his children and promising to stop “very very soon” and then explaining that he meant “very very soon” in a geological sense, he’d be forced to resign his office.
If we even discovered that John Kerry had once beaten one of his children, even many years ago, perhaps shortly after he returned from killing people in Vietnam, he’d be forced to resign.
Imagine if we were to discover that John Kerry was actually murdering children, and women, and men, using missiles shot out of flying robots and promising to stop “very very soon” and explaining that what …
As the plane – Russian-built Tupolev-204 – was taking off from Pyongyang Airport, I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. The morning fog was at first covering the runway, and then it began to lift. The engines roared. Right after the takeoff I could clearly distinguish green fields, neat villages and ribbons of ample and lazy rivers below the wing. It was undeniably a beautiful sight: melancholic, poetic, and truly dramatic. And yet I felt numb. I was feeling nothing, absolutely nothing.
Overhead monitors were beaming endless images of one parade after another, of endless celebrations and bombastic concerts. The volume was up, …
Part 4 of 6: Avaaz - Be the Change the Global Elite Want
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 3rd, 2013
In 2006 another ‘democracy’ project made its debut throughout the world. The organization is called Aavaz. According to its website:
Avaaz—meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.
Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. Our model of internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be …
Four freedoms have always formed the bedrock of American liberty. The freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the rights to privacy and to a fair trial, largely covered in the first, fourth, and sixth Amendments. It is astonishing that a single president has so thoroughly undermined all four. With the conviction of Bradley Manning Tuesday on 20 criminal charges carrying a potential sentence of 136 years in prison, the verdict on the muckraking aspect of free speech is clear—state crimes must be hidden, and those who expose them must be destroyed. That the Obama administration so vigorously …
“Once Upon a Palestine” began in the spring of 2011; a few lines and the title, swiftly followed by a cascade of verse, then put to one side for a previous work barging in out of nowhere, demanding to be written. Going through my own dark night of the soul at the time, “Once Upon a Palestine” continued to gather dust in a drawer until the summer of 2012, when the words came back to haunt me. So here it is. My humble contribution to the betrayed, abandoned, shunned, vilified, outstandingly brave Palestinians of Palestine. I don’t know about the …
The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men.
— Samuel Adams, 1722-1803, (letter 1775)
This will surely have you falling down with surprise. According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by the (UK) Sunday Telegraph, the August 2009 release from Scotland’s Barlinnie jail of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, accused of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, hinged on an oil and arms deal, allegedly brokered by roving war monger (sorry, roving “Peace Ambassador”) Tony Blair.
At this point it should be said that anyone who has read John …
We have reality TV, rednecks and shit-kickers, overweight housewives, blue-fin tuna machos, endless drones of these white things with pencil-neck logic declaring war on art, people, freedoms, and self-engagement. That’s what those guys and gals have given us — 18-wheelers delivering our wants, the entire race of men and women trading chemicals for dollars, the belly of the beast rotten from the end-trail out.
You have to read to the very end, and get some of that People’s wisdom, quotations from great tribal elders and others declaring their humanity in the face of hustlers and blanket-seeders, those great powerful cancers that …
Declared a “Young adult” at eighteen, though still a resident of Father’s home, I matured admirably toward twenty.
Across the water stretched the shore of my nineteenth year, Summer of sun, sand, song. Girls young to love – not as daughters, lovers, then, – as lovers then, and wine and song and moving toward, looking toward, confident, impatient, forward toward never look back.
At forty I turned twenty-one, and they were dead, all of them, the ones I was going to impress.
Deceased. Gone.
The Old Man too. Da. Da. Gone.
What sharp torsion wrenched the spine of my Time crooked; maimed the Smithy of …
Traveling by train to Philadelphia, going North, you will pass by Chester, PA, a city that has been in decline for more than half a century. Founded in 1682, the same year as Philadelphia, Chester was a major manufacturer of US Navy ships from the Civil War until World War II. It also made ammunitions and automobile parts. Despite its relative small size, with a peak population of 66,039 in 1950, Chester was an industrial powerhouse.
In 1926, Mrs. Marin Garvey won a $160 washing machine for coming up with an enduring slogan for her city, “What Chester Makes …
These are some of the reasons why Washington and its allies are attempting to carry out a vast, coordinated and covert regime change strategy in Brazil, in cahoots with Brazil’s ultra-reactionary comprador elites who detest the centre-left orientation of the Brazilian government and long for a return to the good old days of fascist dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
The class of people who will lose most in this game are the very people protesting, the new petite-bourgeoisie, a credit-bubble class who will default on their debts, thus falling back into proletarian and lumpen-proletarian classes.
Besides superior wages and benefits, one of the advantages of belonging to a union is that you can perform your job with dignity. Under a union contract, the boss can’t harass you, he can’t arbitrarily mess with your hours or seniority, and he can’t alter your pay. After fighting with his wife, your boss can’t show up for work and make you the unfair target of his foul mood. Your rights are laid out in the contract, and when those rights are violated, you have the means to fight back.
In the 1990s, I had a friend who was a low-level …
Most political parties, central banks and the corporate media insist that public debt is the most pressing problem facing governments. Meanwhile, real wages in the U.S., UK and Canada, and much of the EU continue to fall. Disparities widen. Rates of chronic unemployment are rising. Unemployment levels for young people are at historic highs, over fifty per cent in Greece, Spain and Portugal. But capitalists—whose income comes from profits, dividends, interest, rent and capital gains—are preoccupied with public debt.
For centuries, public debt has been a driver of capitalist growth. By increasing financial reserves, government bonds and treasury bills add to …
