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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 …

Great Britain is a small island, no more that 600 miles on its longest north/south axis from John O’Groats in Scotland to Lands End in Cornwall.  Yet it has the most diverse geology, layer after layer of it laid down over the millennia.  In other countries one might travel for 200 miles or even much more before the scenery changes in any way.  Here 20 miles will do it, and the most obvious sign is what the old houses are built of.  In Dorset where I live the cottages were built in chalk clunch or a mixture of flint and …

Recognition that 95 million human beings were killed in World War I and II has helped the people of the world understand that the method of war is not cost-effective. An awakened world hoped the United Nations could, as determined in the UN Charter, eventually ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’.

The scourge of war in Afghanistan continues, with the United Nations reporting that more than 3,000 Afghan civilians have been killed and wounded in the first five months of this year, a fifth of whom were Afghan children. So ordinary people should seize opportunities to tell …

The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today’s global power oligarchy. In Part 1, which appeared last week, I provided an overview examining who and what constitute the global ruling elite – often referred to as the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). In this second part, I will attempt to identify some of the key, dominant institutions that have facilitated and have in turn been supported by the development of this oligarchic class. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.

In …

The argument against government regulation of commerce goes something like this: These dreaded regulations are cumbersome, confusing, expensive, inefficient, vaguely “unconstitutional,” and, ultimately, counter-productive, because they hurt the very businesses and industries they were established to protect.

The argument in favor of regulation goes something like this: Our understanding of human nature, the laws of economics, the history of mankind, and a quick glance in the mirror tells us everything we’ll ever need to know. In short, that so-called “self-policing” doctrine being peddled by free market zealots is a howling fraud.

Just consider other applications of “self-policing.” What if it were applied …

Continuing revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have cast a spotlight on widespread U.S. government surveillance of Americans and others around the globe, just as the NSA completes a new data farm in Bluffdale, Utah, set to be the largest spy center in the country.

The servers at the innocuously titled Utah Data Facility will have the capacity to store “100 years worth of the worldwide communications, phones and emails,” according to former NSA technical director-turned-whistleblower William Binney. But the ill-examined ecological impacts of the site, and other smaller but similar NSA data hording facilities like it, is far from …

The Green Shadow Cabinet stands united in opposition to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and is committed to defeating this Obama administration effort to enrich and empower global corporations at the expense of people and planet.

For three years, the Obama administration has engaged in 16 rounds of secret negotiations to develop the TPP. Those negotiations have included hundreds of representatives of global corporations. The TPP negotiations have excluded representatives of the vast majority of the American people. It is a fact that the TPP is global economic policy for the 1%, at the expense of the 99%.

Today, all five branches …

John is 46 but looks twenty years younger, with not a single white hair or whisker. His grungy style also suspends him in early adulthood. His mom was a registered nurse, then secretary at a garage. His dad sold car parts and drove a mail truck from Philly to Harrisburg in the evening. “I’m not doing as well as my parents, but I’m not trying as hard either,” John confided as he sat in McGlinchey’s, a pint of Rolling Rock in front of him. It was late afternoon, and the place was still quiet, with the jukebox interfering only intermittently. …

This article begins the second in a series that takes an inside snapshot of American industries along with their control of a servile government. The first in the series was a three-part synopsis of the military/industrial/political triumvirate, the most deadly and destructive part of the entire corpocracy.  ((A Deadly Monster by Gary Brumback (Part 1: Dissident Voice,  December 11 2012; Part 2: Dissident Voice,  December 19, 2012; Part 3: Dissident Voice, January 18; 2013).))  The present article overviews another industry that is often deadly, the pharmaceutical industry, along with a servile government that provides a variety of hand …

Hassan Rouhani’s unexpected victory in this weekend’s Iranian election has sent Israeli hasbara into a tailspin. The desire for an Iranian bogeyman is so intense in the warmongering mainstream of Israeli and neoconservative discourse that any attempt to mask their pre-election desires and post-election frustration has been futile. Their entire game plan has been on display — every Iranian leader is a New Hitler and every New Hitler must be stopped. The whole point is to stave off any possible reconciliation or even minor deflation of tensions between Iran and the West, namely the United States, …

The old left had failed facing the AKP challenge – because they read them erroneously as a linear prolongation of the military dictatorship. As the authoritarian and culturally repressive tendencies of Erdogan are coming to the fore, a new chance is being offered to social revolutionary democrats. But there is one condition: not to tap into the trap laid out by Kemalism which already had seemed to be moribund.

The starting point of the mass protests, to hinder the destruction of a park in the very heard of Istanbul’s political centre, offered a broad and flexible platform. As the movement is …