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Why is there so much attention paid to people as consumers, but so little to people as workers?

Is it because the mere mention of our rights as workers brings up all kinds of uncomfortable truths that threaten the very ideological foundations of the current economic system?

The vast majority of us are wageworkers. Wages are our primary source of income. Or we collect a pension because we and/or our spouse were once workers. Or we are dependents of workers.

In fact, a huge proportion of the money spent by consumers in our economy comes directly or indirectly from our wages as workers.

Despite …

Police states quaffing the blood of victims have an excuse: they wish to oppress in order to justify the status quo, keeping the fires burning, their subjects scared.  They deceive because they know that truth is another country.  States that possess some constitutional worth, those that front a democratic chamber, elected by an enfranchised electorate prefer more subtle techniques, resorting to indefinite detention, without charge.

The breakdown of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s confinement for 1000 days reads as a resume on how authorities can dilute legal obligations with corrosive effect.  10 days were spent in solitary confinement in Wandsworth prison; 550 …

The first two essays were about corporations’ pretenses of being ethical and of being socially responsible respectively by having programs bearing those names, all the while their normal corporate behavior is unethical and socially irresponsible. This third and last essay in the series shines a brief “slime light” on all the rest of the charades corporations have in their bag of dirty tricks. They are in this order: philanthropy, general counsel, governance, investor relations, public relations, advertising and marketing, customer relations and service, human resources and employee relations, and finally, the biggest charade of them all, corporate personhood.

Philanthropy

“Philanthrôpía,” to …

We are now at a critical stage, where each minute that passes is extremely taxing mentally and physically. Many of us participating since day one are suffering what may be irreversible damage, and are facing a very real possibility of death.

— Pelican Bay hunger striker and Short Corridor representative Aurturo Castellano 55 Days on Hunger Strike

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) refuses to negotiate with prison hunger strikers as they enter day 56 of the protest at solitary confinement and inhumane conditions. The hunger strikers are in increasing danger from heart attacks but maintain their resolve to continue their resistance …

Barack Obama’s decision to go crawling to Congress for permission to launch a gratuitous attack on Syria is more than a humiliating climb-down. It could well signal the beginning of the end of the zionist imperial presidency.

This might seem like a bold claim—Congress is, after all, still Israeli occupied territory, as Pat Buchanan famously said—but the fact that a “president” found it necessary to respect Congressional authority in matters of declaring war reverses the imperial foundation of the U.S. police state.

Tension between the executive and legislative branches over the power to declare war had been a long-standing feature of U.S. …

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

— George Orwell, “Politics and the English language.”

US secretary of state John Kerry has just delivered what may turn out to be his most shameful moment in history. Kerry has been handed the baton of sabre-rattler-in-Chief by a President that has much vested interest in upholding his facade of “reluctant warmonger”. Since President Obama declared his now infamous “red-line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria; it has invariably been White House underlings and members of the State …

“I have no interest in any open-ended conflict in Syria, but we do have to make sure that when countries break international norms on weapons like chemical weapons that could threaten us, that they are held accountable,” President Barack Obama said in a PBS interview earlier this week.

With allegations of a horrific chemical weapons attack outside Damascus and new reports of a “napalm” bomb being dropped on a school playground in northern Syria, this statement, made by an American Commander-in-Chief, would certainly come as a surprise to many of Obama’s predecessors, considering the use of chemical …

It was the forty-eighth day of the Prisoners’ Hunger Strike. Thirty thousand inmates of prisons throughout California had launched a mass hunger strike, probably the largest in history, to oppose cruel and unusual punishments, such as the very common practice of locking people in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, for years and even decades. At this time, several hundred were still refusing food. People we normally think of as criminals were taking a heroic stand in the face of oppression. Here in Oakland, on the Saturday afternoon of August 24th, we were gathering to …

There go the extremists again, with their assumptions of guilt in advance and embrace of the paranoid and fanciful. And they do not come any more extreme than Mr. Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal National Coalition who is cruising, on latest polls, to victory on September 8. The problem here is that an Abbott-led government is going to take the scissors to the Refugee Convention with manic purpose while enforcing a regime of permanent detention.

The topic is tedious and unnecessarily vicious. Asylum seekers and the seeking of refuge, mocked and restricted for years …

Two recent events, while not of any great significance in themselves, reveal much about the state of Canadian foreign policy.

B’nai Brith Canada, Canada’s oldest Jewish service organization, founded in 1875, hosted Brigadier-General Eden Attias, Canada’s first Israeli defense attache (only the US and Canada have ‘Israeli defense attaches’), at the Asper Jewish Community Campus in Winnipeg on 28 August (free admission and refreshments).

The Canadian Jewish Defense League has invited Pamela Geller, founder of Stop Islamization of America, and Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch, to speak at the Hilton Suites Hotel in Markham, on 17 September, despite lobbying by anti-racist …

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s recent mission to Latin America cannot mask Canada’s unprecedented diplomatic isolation in the hemisphere. Despite shifting ‘aid’ to the region and claiming to have made Latin America a priority, Ottawa is increasingly offside with a region breaking free from centuries of Western imperialism.

On July 9 the Organization of American States (OAS) held a meeting to discuss four European countries’ refusal to let Bolivia’s presidential plane enter their airspace. Six days earlier Evo Morales was returning from a meeting in Moscow where he said Bolivia could be open to giving political asylum to former CIA contractor, …

Are you saying that doing nothing in Syria is the best option? 

The unpleasant reality in Syria is that there are no good choices, for the U.S. or much of anyone else.  But the crushing reality is that, comparatively, the U.S. and perhaps the world will be better off keeping Assad in power for the nonce, rather than coping with the likely chaos flowing uncontrollably from any other outcome.

There is no good reason to make a bad situation worse. It’s likely to get worse all on its own, and unimaginably worse if the government starts to fall.

But wouldn’t it be …