Latest articles
by Jay Janson / July 13th, 2013
Whereas: Former Chad dictator Hissène Habré is about to be tried for crimes against humanity and atrocities, (Habré’s army was funded, armed and trained by Americans during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Habré, who seized power in a CIA-backed coup in 1982 and ruled with an iron fist until his own overthrow in 1990, was used to prevent African Union Chairman Gadaffi’s planned union of Libya and Chad). ((Former Chad leader Hissène Habré charged with crimes against humanity. Ronald Reagan’s support for dictator accused of killing and torturing tens of thousands of opponents offers cautionary tale for American intervention.))
Whereas: Former …
by Kamalakar Duvvuru / July 13th, 2013
In March 2013 Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was invited by some pro-business, pro-industry students at an American university to give a keynote address via video conference. Several staff and students petitioned against the keynote address by the one who has been accused repeatedly in the murder of several thousands of his state’s citizens, mostly Muslim men, women and children, (( “We Have No Orders To Save You,” Human Rights Watch, 2002 report on Gujarat communal violence.)) and “State- Sponsored Discrimination” against hundreds of thousands more in the decade that followed which has been documented by human rights organizations. …
by Anonymous / July 13th, 2013
by Binoy Kampmark / July 13th, 2013
It has become one of Europe’s biggest music festivals. The current issue of the inflight travel magazine on Serbia’s national airline JAT goes so far as to call it a global event. They are not the only ones. The name of this barnstorming event is Exit (July 10-14), the venue Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, that beautiful Belgrade on Valium, to use an expression wedged in one of the tour guides. Held at the Austrian built fortress of Petrovaradin, it has become a tourist beacon, a noisy attraction if only for a few days.
Exit, for all its zany excitement, …
by Jason Hirthler / July 13th, 2013
Are you a fledgling journalist trying to plot a path to prosperity? Do you find yourself torn between high-minded activism and straight-news reportage? Between Michael Moore’s florid exposes and Britt Hume’s studied gravitas? Are you confused by corporate media efforts to discredit The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald when he scooped the the New York Times and other establishment media on the Edward Snowden revelations? Do you wonder if Greenwald is a journalist or just a partisan pundit engineering nefarious disclosures that threaten our troops? Should you simply trust in the defamatory columns by Thomas Friedman and other respectable men with …
by Paul Haeder / July 13th, 2013
… You Know We All Live in the Same Psycho Neighborhood
Interesting events in the neighborhood. Look, the school yard fight is all about how we have become so stupid when it comes to fighting the corrupt pigs running things. How we have failed to teach young and old that they don’t have to show up to work, that they have to show up to city hall and the state capitals, and they must at all costs get arrested en masse protesting the likes of almost every single corporation on the planet.
I think all things run down hill, and in the …
by Doug Minkler / July 13th, 2013
Doug Minkler: Retire the U.S. Border Patrol and open the borders .
Fukushima Radiation Leaks Rise Sharply, Officials Are Baffled As to Why
by William Boardman / July 13th, 2013
Fukushima Situation Normal, in The SNAFU Sense of “Normal”
Bad as the situation is at Fukushima, it’s gotten worse.
Perhaps you’ve heard that radiation levels of the water leaving the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power plane and flowing into the Pacific Ocean have risen by roughly 9,000 per cent. Turns out, that’s probably putting a good face on it.
By official measurement, the water coming out of Fukushima is currently 90,000 times more radioactive than officially “safe” drinking water.
These are the highest radiation levels measured at Fukusmima since March 2011, when an earthquake-triggered tsunami destroyed the …
by Tom Burghardt / July 12th, 2013
People are shocked by the scope of secret state spying on their private communications, especially in light of documentary evidence leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
While the public is rightly angered by the illegal, unconstitutional nature of NSA programs which seize and store data for retrospective harvesting by intelligence and law enforcement officials, including the content of phone calls, emails, geolocational information, bank records, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, even medical records–in secret, and with little in the way of effective oversight–the historical context of how, and why, this vast spying apparatus came to be is …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 12th, 2013
The game of secrets is the hot house of deception. In it, the child of truth is spared in favour of the rod of deceit. In the conspiracy matrix, involving a trading of secrets, the entertainment of exposures and the trafficking of lies, conspiracy theories are near friends. Speculation is never far. Move over the post-nuclear world, argued Paul Virilio – we are living in the age of the information bomb.
For one thing, there is an undercurrent of suspicion as to why Edward Snowden did, in fact, reveal what he did and when he did. Such is the insidiousness of …
The Fight Against Fracking
by Walter Brasch / July 12th, 2013
Pennsylvanians want to put a moratorium on fracking.
And it’s not just a few thousand, but a majority of the state’s residents.
Pennsylvania lies in the heart of the Marcellus Shale, possibly the most productive shale for gas in the country.
A joint University of Michigan/Muhlenberg College study reveals that only 49 percent of Pennsylvanians support shale gas extraction and 58 percent of all Pennsylvanians want the state to order “time out” until the health and environmental effects of fracking can be fully analyzed. That same study revealed that 60 percent of Pennsylvanians believe fracking poses a major risk to …
Starvation, Riots, and War
by Robert Hunziker / July 12th, 2013
Scientific evidence is compelling that something big is brewing up north in the Arctic, “the sleeping climate giant.” As follows, when this sleeping giant awakens, life may never be the same. Unfortunately, its long slumber is now coming back to life, and the scientists studying this event are deeply concerned.
The danger involves an Arctic meltdown, and, as this sleeping giant awakens, it will prompt events that will likely cause significant disruption of the global economy, intense political turmoil, and global war as worldwide food production is seriously impaired. Some leading scientists refer to this impending event as a prescription for …
by David Macaray / July 12th, 2013
On July 1, the unionized employees of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) went out on what became a four and a half day strike. Despite the melodramatic tone of the media—practically depicting these transit workers as a group of unpredictable and ungrateful renegades—it was the first shutdown of BART since 1997.
Although no agreement was reached, the union (Service Employees International Union, Local 1021 and Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1555) willingly returned to work, willingly extended the existing contract (which had expired) for 30 days, and promised to continue to bargaining in good faith.
In the absence of …
by Gilad Atzmon / July 12th, 2013
Haaretz reported today that one third of Israeli Jews want the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem.
Apparently dozens of movements in Israel are attempting to change the status quo at Haram Ash-Sharif, widely considered the third holiest site in Islam. They aim towards a resurrection of the Jewish Temple at the site. Some are reconstructing ceremonial objects used in the Temple in the past, while others are making practical preparations for its rebuilding, including a renewal of animal sacrifice. Others deal in political lobbying and with encouraging Jews to visit the Mount.
“Attempts to distance the People of Israel from its …
by Doug Minkler / July 12th, 2013
Guantanamo Bay represents the worst aspects of the decaying US Imperialist system: war, land theft, loss of the right to a trial, torture, and rendition. The prison violates the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and ignores the World Court and UN. Graphic artist Doug Minkler illustrates Guantanamo Bay.
by Gareth Porter / July 12th, 2013
IPS — Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor who was prevented by Argentine President Cristina Kirchner from testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee investigating alleged Iranian terrorist networks in the Americas here this week, claimed in a recent report that Tehran was involved in a 2007 plot to blow up fuel tanks at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.
But his report offers no actual evidence that Iran was ever even aware of the airport plot, and the official documents in the case indicate that the U.S. government found no such evidence either.
Nisman’s sensational charge appears to be aimed at undermining the …
by Maryam Sakeenah / July 11th, 2013
The obvious conclusion from Egypt is that political Islam’s ‘concordat’ with democracy has proven a failed experiment. As predicted by Essam Haddad, ‘the message will resonate throughout the Muslim world that democracy is not for Muslims.’ The message has in fact been enthusiastically taken up, with Islamists saying ‘we told you so.’ An article on one such website states, ‘recent experience in Egypt has once again exposed the reality of ‘democracy’ and the true face of democracy- worshippers… democracy isn’t meant for us Muslims.’ The few willing to undertake a deeper and more insightful analysis of the dynamics of political …
by William Boardman / July 11th, 2013
The first thing to know about the danger from the radioactive mass remaining on site in the three reactors that melted down at Fukushima is that nobody knows how much radioactive material there is, nobody knows how much uranium and plutonium it contains, and nobody knows how to make it safe — so no one knows how great the continuing danger is.
To prevent nuclear material from being diverted to use in weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency of the U.N. requires each country to report regularly on the volume of nuclear materials in its nuclear power plants. At …
by CHA Steering Committee / July 11th, 2013
We in ComeHomeAmerica condemn our government’s war on Syria, prosecuted first with sanctions, then with covert support through “allies” like the dictatorial petro-monarchies of the Gulf and now with overt provision of arms for the anti-government forces and perhaps even a bombing campaign. We demand an immediate cessation of this bellicose policy by our government. Sanctions and military intervention in Syria are not in the interests of the American people; nor are they in the interests of the Syrian people.
We are far from alone in our opposition. Fully 70% of Americans are opposed to armed intervention in Syria …
by Adam Engel / July 11th, 2013
History, all fifteen minutes (or is that Fame? two nuts from the same tree), came unannounced, to Town.
“They left no note,” admitted the Police Chief. “No minutes mention debts, affairs; no major fuck-ups or threats to the Security of our National land, water or free and sacred air.”
“But what about that gash” — the word alone stretched wide eyes wider– “on said tree’s side?” asked a distinguished member of the local press.
“Who tree? What tree? When tree? Where tree? How tree? Why tree?” journalists shoved to gawk.
History’s tree, knotted, leafless, at the …
Global Power Project, Part 5
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / July 10th, 2013
Anyone who has paid even minimal attention to the global economic and financial crises gripping the world since 2007 has heard the name Goldman Sachs.
One of the largest banks in the United States, Goldman Sachs was central to the process of creating the housing bubble that popped in 2007-8, which led to the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. As Matt Taibbi famously documented in Rolling Stone, Goldman has been involved in “every major market manipulation since the Great Depression,” profiting along the way as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its …
How Egypt’s ‘Revolution’ Betrayed Itself
by Ramzy Baroud / July 10th, 2013
“The revolution is dead. Long live the revolution,” wrote Eric Walberg, a Middle East political expert and author, shortly after the Egyptian military overthrew the country’s democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi on July 3.
But more accurately, the revolution was killed in an agonizingly slow death, and the murders were too many to count.
Mohamed ElBaradei, a liberal elitist with a dismal track record in service of western powers during his glamorous career as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a stark example of the moral and political crisis that has befallen Egypt since the ouster of former President …
Great Statesmen Tamper with Packets
by John Stanton / July 10th, 2013
Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden dossier concerning the American Leviathan’s practice of harvesting, storing and analyzing the information/conversations of its own and the world’s political, military, economic and cultural gate keepers is fascinating. This is so not due to the technological sophistication and global reach of the USA’s intelligence capabilities, but for what it implies about the current state and future of the collective nation-states known as Western Democracies. And it undercuts nearly every ideal in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, leaving the dry, functional and core text of the US Constitution as the last mooring line to—paraphrasing …
A Weapon of Mass Destruction, F-35, Also Destroys the Democratic Process
by William Boardman / July 10th, 2013
[NOTE: Written before the public meeting on July 8, about F-35 basing in Vermont, this piece predicts the outcome. The prediction is correct, but most of the post-meeting coverage has less detail, background, and context than this pre-meeting exercise. The meeting drew about 250 people, lasted almost four hours — see end for outcome.]
When the city council in a city of just 18,000 people reverses a vote it took a year earlier, it’s not usually off national significance, but if the South Burlington City Council votes as expected on July 8, in support of basing the F-35 strike fighter in …
by Jonathan Cook / July 10th, 2013
Were it not for the razor wire, giant concrete blocks, steel gates, watchtower and standard-issue surly teenage soldier, it would be impossible to tell at what point the barren uplands of Israel’s eastern Negev give way to the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank.
The military checkpoint of Shani vaguely marks the formal demarcation between Israel and occupied Palestinian territory, but in practical terms the distinction is meaningless. On either side of the Green Line, Israel is in charge.
In recent weeks it has been intensifying a campaign to evict Palestinian farming communities summarily from their ancestral lands to replace them …
by Press TV / July 9th, 2013
Villagers in Wadi Fukin near Bethlehem were attacked by Israeli colonists/settlers from a nearby colony/settlement, when they intentionally poured thousands of tons of sewage into the only natural water spring and onto the land.
http://youtu.be/FZ4COu5rRBI
by Paul Haeder / July 9th, 2013
They Say ‘Working Class’
Okay, okay – I’ll insert a conversation two DV contributors have been having around the state of the collapse, but first some musings. Interestingly, both the DV poets are Baby-boomers approaching the Magical 65 (one’s USA-rooted; the other is Canada-anchored). In the USA, 10,000 Baby Boomers a day turn 65. You get the exponential math of that stat. What it means to a society like USA and the other capitalism-is-god countries that depend on the soiled ideas of economics sharks who see every flutter of a human’s eye as potential money-making activity . . . what it …
The final financial solution
by Bill Annett / July 9th, 2013
We’re living in a cuckoo’s nest that would have baffled Ken Kesey. Consider just three items at the top of our agenda. (1) Astronomical military spending at a time when there’s nobody left in the world big enough to fight us, (2) the health care farce, which makes us the most expensive, least effective (at least #47) and largest laughingstock in the world, and finally, (3) the final triumph of corporate governance in Washington, which is icing the decline and fall of both capitalism and democracy in one fell swoop.
Witness the final humiliation: Warren Buffett, the …
by Don Monkerud / July 9th, 2013
Despite being a party that looks backwards, Republicans are mounting attacks on Hillary Clinton’s “politics of the past,” fearful she will become president.
At a recent conservative confab, party stalwarts took pride in representing the GOP as the party that “stops progress cold in its tracks,” “set world records to restrict healthcare,” and vowed to defeat Hillary Clinton’s attempt “to move the country forward.”
“In our attempt to annul FDR’s reforms, reverse LBJ’s civil rights laws, and take the country back to the days of the Constitution, we cannot allow Hillary to become president,” said Mitch McConnell, minority Senate leader. …
by Nozomi Hayase / July 9th, 2013
Last month, whistle blower Edward Snowden’s leaking of the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying on hundreds of millions of people in the US and elsewhere sent shock-waves around the world. Disclosures included the collection of phone records and the PRISM program, which gives the NSA direct access to nearly everyone’s stored internet activity.
Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, who played a major role in releasing the leak claimed that the aim of the NSA was the creation of “a global, ubiquitous surveillance system that has as its goal the elimination of privacy worldwide”. Further disclosure of Snowden’s NSA files brought …
