Latest articles
by Paul Haeder / August 25th, 2013
you know the world burns when the mainstream mush periodicals selling themselves as specialty rags for the smart ones side with Monsanto, Bayer and all the other Colony/Community Collapse Poisoners!
[Note — A second Soy Mafia story on DV August 27 bright and early! Read IT here!!!]
Blending Faux-Contrived-Manufactured Neutrality Science Rags with the Corporate Capital Bottomline
We are doomed, those of us fighting schemes of the technologists, Mengele’s, media whores, the entire cabal of idiots who work for the poisoners. Again, all the work so many around the world have been doing on trying to stop the Franken-crops/Franken-foods/ …
by Bill Quigley / August 25th, 2013
We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted…the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.
– US Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall
The President, the Head of the National Security Agency, the Department of Justice, …
by Bill Annett / August 24th, 2013
Last year, when a UN committee gave Canada a slap on the wrist for its treatment of indigenous people, a stalwart response followed from Justice Murray Sinclair, Chairman of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the form of a photo-op and an “interim report” at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. On the same day, like a countervailing bookend enclosing the atrocity of Canadian history, at the University of British Columbia, on the other side of that same city, an interesting contrapuntal statement was being delivered.
It is included below, along with my intrusive …
by Walter Brasch / August 24th, 2013
Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a horde of members of Congress of both parties want to decide who is and who isn’t a reporter. Sen. Feinstein says a “real” reporter is a “salaried agent of a media company.”
She mentions the usual suspects—New York Times, ABC News. She dismisses part-time staff. She dismisses freelancers. She dismisses those who write, often without pay, for the hundreds of alternative publications, and often break news and investigative stories well ahead of the mainstream media. She dismisses anyone who, she says, “have no professional qualifications.”
…
by Peter Breschard / August 24th, 2013
Imagine a large city somewhere in the northern United States where one night 2/3 of the population relocates to warmer climes.
Boom! Out of nowhere a massive number of houses are left abandoned. Boom! In an instant municipal tax revenues are insufficient to fund basic necessities of civilization. Boom! Everybody left in town has to stop what they’re doing and start bailing 24/7 because they know they’re on a rapidly sinking ship.
Now imagine instead so many people leaving in one day, the process involves decades. You know what I’m talking about.
When a municipality’s survival is based on a …
Forty Years on
by Ron Jacobs / August 24th, 2013
Autumn 1973 was quite the autumn. Personally, I had just moved to New York City to attend college at the Bronx campus of Fordham University. I vaguely recall my first full weekend in New York, checking out the Village and attending a showing of National Lampoon’s production Lemmings at the Village Gate. Some of the cast members would be household names by 1980: John Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Chevy Chase. I smoked a joint during the show and afterwards took the D Train back to the Grand Concourse. The next weekend I met an older woman who invited a fellow …
by Ajamu Baraka / August 24th, 2013
On August 28, the 50th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington, an event is being organized at the Lincoln Memorial by the King Center, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Council of Negro Women to commemorate that extraordinary and consequential demonstration. To highlight the occasion, these organizations apparently extended an invitation to the President of the United States to deliver the keynote address on the very same spot where Martin Luther King delivered his legendary “I have a dream” speech.
The fact that Barack Obama will be standing in the shadow of Dr. King, his presence conveying …
by William Bowles / August 24th, 2013
Over the past three days, since the story first broke, the BBC’s news Website (I use the word news advisedly) has carried twelve stories on the alleged chemical weapons attack that took place in a suburb of Damascus. Today’s offerings include, Hague believes Assad behind attack (23/8/13), without offering a shred of proof that the Assad government is behind the alleged attack or even that it took place, takes foreign secretary Hague’s ‘belief’ as a given. The lead paragraph tells it all:
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague says he believes President Assad was behind a chemical attack in Syria.
What Hague’s belief is …
by Andre Vltchek / August 24th, 2013
It is crowded and loud. La Froridita, a famous old bar in Havana Vieja (Old Havana), is packed to the roof. Patrons consist mostly of foreigners and some overseas Cubans. They are loud, trying to shout over the upbeat son music booming from an old stage where the confident lead singer of an all-girl-band is threatening her boyfriend or husband, by a stunning re-arrangement of the old bolero ‘Si Tu Te Vas’ (‘If you go away’).
It is all very cool. This is the exact bar where Hemingway used to have his countless daiquiris. Not those touristy and over-sugary ones that …
by Adam Engel / August 24th, 2013
After his last disastrous gig, The Inventor, architect, engineer and patent-holder — his liability for which is pending, according to his attorneys — of Pandora’s Box, sought solitude and silence.
His next project, The Library of Babel, was at least critically accepted, and Borges sent him a share of his own royalties, though revenue from even an anthologized short-story can’t compare to the infinite helix of data contained within, and surging without, the Library of Babel!
He needed something.
“I need something,” he lamented. “Some thing. Gee, but what?”
Again The Inventor sequestered himself, and again his efforts bore fruit, big fruit this time, …
by David Swanson / August 23rd, 2013
A 40-year reunion is being planned for the end of this month in Gainesville, Fla., of the Gainesville 8. Sadly, Richard Nixon won’t be able to join them, although his presidential library has just released more audio recordings of his descent into madness — or what we like to call today: standard government practice.
The Gainesville 8 were eight men, seven of them members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), who planned to nonviolently demonstrate at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. They were wrongfully prosecuted for planning violence, and they were all acquitted by a jury on August …
by James Petras / August 23rd, 2013
Political and economic changes in recent years have opened possibilities for the end of international and national conflicts. Regime changes, pragmatic leaders and the promise of serious negotiations in the Middle East, North Africa, Russia, Southwest Asia, China and elsewhere provided the Obama regime an opportunity to end long standing and costly wars, to access new markets and resources and to reduce domestic deficits and external trade imbalances.
At every opportunity, with precise consistency, the Obama regime rejected fresh overtures from adversaries, choosing instead to rely on a …
by Kim Petersen / August 23rd, 2013
Common decency demands that when someone slanders you in a public forum that you should have the right to respond in that same forum.
TRNN is an independent news network that provides thought-provoking news, analysis, and commentary. TRNN is much more than news headlines. For the greatest part, news events are reported in context and with relevant background information. This distinguishes TRNN very much from state and corporate media news. In addition, TRNN senior editor Paul Jay is very adept at playing devil’s advocate, laying out the corporate media/government line whereby guest analysts can probe and expose propaganda and disinformation.
Since criticizing …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 23rd, 2013
M[s]. ((“I Am Chelsea Manning. I Am a Female”: Bradley Manning Announces Gender Transition. This article has been amended accordingly.)) Manning’s treatment has been intended to send a signal to people of conscience in the U.S. government who might seek to bring wrongdoing to light.
— Julian Assange, ABC News, Aug 21, 2013
Wikileaks chief editor Julian Assange, and leader of the WikiLeaks Party, deemed it a “tactical victory” though still revolting to western concepts of justice. The 35-year sentence of Chelsea Manning immediately brings to mind a sense of disproportion, an enormous swatter taken to the hapless …
by Robert Hunziker / August 23rd, 2013
A slow motion ‘death march’ is already well underway.
The following excerpt is taken from an interview with Dr. Alex Rogers, professor, University of Cambridge and Scientific Director, International Programme on the State of the Ocean:
The change we’re seeing at the moment is taking place extremely rapidly… We’re seeing levels of pH [a measure of acidity] in the ocean that probably haven’t been experienced for 55 million years… I find it very difficult to tell people what a scary situation we’re in at the moment. The oceans are changing in a huge way, and I am particularly worried for my grandchildren. …
by John Stanton / August 23rd, 2013
“Products are supposed to be based on valid scientific data. Strong Choices and the Universal Prevention Model are based on perceptions and opinions.”
In March of 2012 an article was published outlining some of the allegations of fraud, waste and abuse within the US Army’s Center for Substance Abuse Programs (ACSAP). Since the publication of that piece, sources say, only minor changes were made: one employee resigned, another was reprimanded.
Indeed, sources now report that the ACSAP program has become a lucrative for-profit business operating within the US Federal government (ostensibly a non-profit operation). ACSAP management there, Leslie …
Why Snowden didn’t stick around to face the music
by Claude Coulomb / August 23rd, 2013
There are a wide variety of leakers, some of them from the corporate world, government workers, public servants, military personnel or security contractors. Different avenues are taken regarding the vetting process, the platform chosen to express indignation and the logistics behind the leak itself. Most stay behind to act within the judicial framework. Some, like Edward Snowden, leave the ship in a bid for self preservation. One common theme we can all agree on is the gravity of the consequences faced by whistleblowers.
In contrast with both Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and Snowden relieved with temporary …
by Al Engler / August 23rd, 2013
For forty years people have been bombarded with claims that economic well being depends on private capital not on governments. Public utilities and services have been privatized. Regulations on corporations have been weakened. Taxes paid by corporations and the top income brackets have been slashed. Capital has been freed to move jobs from higher wage to lower wage countries.
Capitalist minorities — major shareholders and top corporate executives, two percent and less of populations — have increased their share of total income from ten percent to twenty percent. Capitalists have increased funds for private investment, but roads, bridges, rail lines, sewage …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / August 23rd, 2013
This week, to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the CIA-MI6 overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossaddegh, on August 19th, 1953, the (US) National Security Archive has released documents confirming the details of the coup and the grubby US-UK involvement.
The document makes fairly clear that the British government has fought for much of the sixty years to prevent revelations of details of another shameful event – which has anyway long been public knowledge, if not in minute detail.
The document, “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup”, a posting of recently declassified documents, “includes what …
by Sue Warrior / August 22nd, 2013
Word trauma. Print culture dead after all those years. True, nearly all web pages are mostly print, but talk, written or otherwise, is cheap. Everyone writes, though no one reads the everyones’ always writing, no one but themselves at any rate, adding more junk, more artifacts – albeit digital and easily erased – to the proverbial Pile. Screaming raging ranting raving blogging texting worse than television, shut it, shut it, shut, shut, shut the damn thing off.
Some, noticeably more than others, are sensitive to the pain of repetition. Honestly, Gertrude, I’ve known “more of the same” but no repetition in …
by Greg Palast / August 22nd, 2013
When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn’t believe it.
The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.
The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret …
by Jim McCluskey / August 22nd, 2013
Helen Caldecott is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a world renowned campaigner against nuclear weapons. She says that our species is “mentally sick… The whole society is sick”. We are in the grip of a death wish. She points out that 1 in 25 people are sociopaths with “no moral conscience” and these are the people who rise to the top; who are in charge. Is she right? Have we really become insane? There is good reason to believe so. By insane behaviour I am referring to avoidable behaviour which will result in our own destruction …
by Xero Hostel / August 22nd, 2013
It’s hard to believe another day could end this way. That we won’t finally, after all, wake up. “Just a dream,” and all that.
Honestly, I never imagined it would come so — not sudden, there was a kind of sequence of degeneracies, noticeable in sum, but hard to detect from within the slow slide down – never imagined it would come so run-of-the-mill. The process, I mean. Not the thing itself. Which is, which cannot possibly exist. You can be living, you can’t be dead. Well, relative to others around you, sure, you can be dead, as in “he was …
by Gareth Porter / August 21st, 2013
[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay on a 2009 article by Rotella for the Los Angeles Times about an alleged bomb plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2008. It offers a very good illustration of some of the problems raised in my original critique of Rotella’s most recent work, notably the virtually exclusive reliance on sources that are clearly hostile to …
Rabias of the World Unite
by Ramzy Baroud / August 21st, 2013
“Lord! You know well that my keen desire is to carry out Your commandments and to serve Thee with all my heart, O light of my eyes. If I were free I would pass the whole day and night in prayers. But what should I do when you have made me a slave of a human being?”
These were the words of the female Muslim mystic and poet, Rabia Al-Adawiya. Her journey from slavery to freedom served as a generational testament of the resolve of the individual who was armed with faith and nothing else.
Rabia’s story is multifarious, and despite the …
by David Macaray / August 21st, 2013
Based on everything that’s happened in the last 70 years or so, one might reasonably assume the Republican Party is labor’s chief adversary. After all, it was the Republicans who sponsored the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, a squalid piece of pro-business legislation that pretty much defanged and de-clawed the landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act (known as the Wagner Act).
Among other things, Taft-Hartley outlawed jurisdictional and wildcat strikes, secondary boycotts and secondary picketing, the closed shop, and most importantly, provided the legal underpinnings that made “right-to-work” states possible. And, as late as 2009, it was congressional Republicans who torpedoed the proposed …
by Lesley Docksey / August 21st, 2013
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
At long last Britain is discussing and objecting to fracking – or we would be if the general public had access to accurate information. As it is, Prime Minister David Cameron is going all out to promote a country-wide embrace of shale gas.
Forgotten is his promise to lead the ‘greenest government ever’. Forgotten is the fact that shale gas is yet one more fossil fuel that increases the risks from climate change; that methane is far worse than most carbon emissions where global warming …
by Dylan Murphy / August 21st, 2013
‘We of course recognise that this is it-make or break time for us to make the long overdue change occur now-per our core demands and are thus in it for the long haul-the sacrifice is minor compared to what we’ve endured for 30 years!
— Todd Ashker, prison hunger strike representative 44 days on hunger strike
As the hunger strike enters its eighth week California prison officials have got approval from a federal judge to force feed prisoners. Prison policy is to let prisoners starve to death if they have signed a do not resuscitate request. The judge’s ruling will allow …
by B.J. Sabri / August 20th, 2013
The removal of elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, the ongoing crackdown on the Muslim Brothers, the sad deaths of hundreds of people from both sides, and the destruction that ensued have ignited fiery debates between those who support the action and those who oppose it.
It is curious to see how diverse the front of the opponents is. Imperialists, Zionists seeking confusion, governments of diverse political orientations, pretenders of human rights, some Arab writers, many progressive western writers, and sizeable internet writers with hazy understanding of revolutionary issues all joined in the play of a theater of the absurd before Egypt’s …
by Paul Haeder / August 20th, 2013
when you believe that there are no teachers anymore, that’s when you have no idea how dumb your culture really is
It’s what most of us called precarious college faculty want to say, or have deep within, cultured like intellectual bacterium waiting to take over all synaptic functioning –
Henry Giroux —
Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. The reform movement is also determined to underfund and disinvest resources for public schooling so that public education can be completely divorced from any democratic notion of …
