Latest articles

Dad: “What do you want to be when you grow up, Jimmy?”
Jimmy: “A lobbyist.”

On June 1, 2013, the New York Times published the names of the top-twelve biggest spending lobbyists of 2012. It’s a fascinating list. Despite all the propaganda, disinformation and outright lies about organized labor that have been circulated by right-wing groups, there’s not a single labor union listed among them—not even the estimable AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in history.

The reason there are no unions included is because, as any labor aficionado will tell you, organized labor doesn’t have anywhere near the …

Christ held an Apostle’s Conference (White House Press Corps) at the White House Rose Garden recently in Washington, DC, the Capital of the Holy American Judeo-Christian Empire.

Before taking questions, Christ opened with a brief statement.

“He knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you have been bad or good. So be good for goodness’ sake. He makes a list and checks it twice. You had better not cry or pout. He knows who has been naughty and nice.”

Christ’s statement went on.

“I am pleased to report that God is thrilled with the National Security …

Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terrorism.

— President Barack Obama 15th February 2013 (re Boston bombings)

Having learned nothing from the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, it seems President Obama, the equally clueless UK Prime Minister Cameron and his culturally challenged Foreign Secretary William Hague are cheerleading another bloodbath in formerly peaceful, secular, outward looking Syria.

Having covertly provided arms and equipment to insurgents from numerous different countries for over two years, they have now moved to the overt stage, a move over which even arch hawks such as former National Security Advisor Zbigniew …

In an electoral system, run by and for a corporate oligarchy, deception and demagoguery are essential elements – entertaining the people while working for the wealthy.

Every US President has engaged, in one fashion or another, in ‘play acting’ to secure popular approval, neutralize hostility and distract voters from the reactionary substance of their foreign and domestic policies.

Every substantive policy is accompanied by a ‘down home’ folksy message to win public approval. This happened with President …

Indigenous families in Paraguay have been living precariously on the side of a highway in Paraguay’s remote Chaco region for more than 20 years, ever since a German cattle rancher and the Paraguayan state illegally kicked them off of their ancestral lands. A 2006 Inter-American Human Rights Court ruling held the Paraguayan state responsible for returning roughly 14,000 hectares to the community Sawhoyamaxa, a small fraction of their original territories. After pursuing every legal means possible and even blocking the highway in protest to no avail, the community decided in March 2013 to take matters into their own hands and …

Will the biotech companies ever give up on trying to sell Europe their genetically modified crops?  Their latest PR man is the UK’s Minister for the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Owen Paterson.  His website (very bland and uninformative apart from his list of engagements) says he is “a passionate supporter of localism, free enterprise and less interference in people’s lives”.  But he also loudly supports Monsanto et al, and wants all of Europe to grow and eat GM foods.  I would say that thoroughly destroys any localism, interferes in the most basic way with …

In the wee hours of June 17, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Hotel found some door latches taped over to prevent them from locking. He removed the tape but later found it had been replaced. He called Washington D.C. police, who proceeded to catch five “burglars” conducting an illegal surveillance operation inside the office of the Democratic National Committee. As it happened, the name of President Richard Nixon’s White House security consultant E. Howard Hunt was in the address book of two of the burglars.

Ultimately, the burglars along with two White House functionaries, were convicted of conspiracy, burglary, …

The US Special Forces is a bizarrely gendered world, as I found out when I joined it to write a book about war. This all-male bastion is sexualized in a truly perverted way, particularly in its methods for turning young men into killers on command.

Being the epitome of patriarchy, the military creates soldiers by forcing them into the role of the lowliest creatures in patriarchy: women. The recruits’ sense of personal power is stripped away, and they are required to obey commands from the men higher in the hierarchy and do the military’s “housework”: scrubbing and waxing floors, dusting windowsills, …

The world waits. Washington and other western capitals ponder war. Tehran and Moscow assume their positions, wary of their flanks and the rear. Syria suffers. Groups within and without Syria’s borders position themselves as representatives of the Syrian people, almost every one of them hoping for some kind of Western support now that Obama and his White House have decided to publicly join the fray. The question remains. How much military aid and of what nature? Does the White House honestly think it can get away with providing small arms and ammunition to the rebels in Syria? Or is it …

Sun Tzu, the ancient author of The Art of War, must be throwing a rice wine party in his heavenly tomb in the wake of the shirtsleeves California love-in between President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping. “Know your enemy” was, it seems, the theme of the meeting. Beijing was very much aware of — and had furiously protested — Washington’s deep plunge into China’s computer networks over the past 15 years via a secretive unit of the National Security Agency, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (with the apt acronym TAO). Yet Xi merrily allowed Obama to pontificate on …

It makes no difference if Edward Snowden, who had fled to Hong Kong and revealed that the American government was spying upon American citizens, is a traitor or a hero.

Intelligence agencies from China, Russia, England, Israel, and maybe even Lichtenstein, probably already know that the National Security Administration (NSA) is collecting data of all the phone calls and emails of Americans, and linking them to conversations with foreign nationals. What is unsettling is that everything the NSA is doing is legal. Secret federal courts can issue secret warrants to agencies that maintain secret files.

Americans who have been paying …

The mainstream press has not yet picked up on the most pressing issue of our time, which is rapid warming of the Arctic with a consequent colossal release of methane into the atmosphere, threatening an extinction event. On the other hand, the press has no problem castigating Iran and North Korea for going nuclear!

The warming Arctic is clearly the single most threatening event in human history, much more so than Iran and North Korea, as detailed by the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG), a hard core group of the world’s most accomplished climate scientists whose initial public assessment headlined …

For radical parents, it sometimes feels like the deck is stacked when it comes to kids’ media that represents progressive values. Children’s books often tokenize girls, depend on stereotypes, and push kids into fulfilling narrow gender roles. Diverse families are hard to find – most mainstream kids’ books feature all white kids living with two heterosexual parents. For those who want to help raise feminist, cooperative, anti-racist, and anti-authoritarian children, the challenge can be daunting.

A founding member of Design Action Collective, a worker-owned cooperative design studio in Oakland, Innosanto Nagara wanted a book to teach his son the ABCs …

NAZARETH — One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades of massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout of Israeli soul-searching.

Superland, a large amusement park near Tel Aviv, refused to accept a booking from an Arab school on its preferred date in late May. When a staff member called back impersonating a Jew, Superland approved the booking immediately.

As the story went viral on social media, the park’s managers hurriedly offered an excuse: they provided separate days for Jewish and Arab children to keep them apart and prevent friction.

Government …

“In Yemen we are close to the bottom in all kinds of measures like income and education, but there’s one statistic where we come out on top: the number of prisoners in Guantanamo,” laughed Mohammad Naji Allaw, a successful Yemeni lawyer who ploughs his firm’s profits into the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms. “Over 90 of 166 Guantanamo prisoners are from Yemen. Most of them, 56 to be exact, have already been cleared by the US government for release but the US government still won’t send them back.”

Our American peace delegation spent the week in Yemen meeting with …