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by Allen Forrest / November 13th, 2024
Does legacy media engage in brainwashing?
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / November 13th, 2024
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
—James Madison
Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom, but concentrated power across all three branches is the very definition of tyranny: a dictatorship disguised as democracy.
When one party dominates all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—there is even more reason to worry.
There’s no point debating which political party would be more …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 13th, 2024
A boy sits in rubble in Gaza. Photo Credit: UNICEF
When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and almost as quickly end Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far, from Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador make for a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.
The only …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 13th, 2024
The scene is memorable enough. November 2016. The Twin Peaks Tavern, Castro District. Men gathered, beside themselves. “It’s shocking how those people voted him in,” splutters one over a Martini. “Yes,” says a companion, bristling in anger at the election of Donald J. Trump, sex pest, dubious businessman, orange haired monster and reality television star. “Why were they ever given the vote?” History had come full circle, the claim now being that tens of millions of voters in the 2016 US presidential election should have been disenfranchised. In their mind, this bloc was to be abominated as Hillary Clinton’s designated …
by Inside China Business / November 12th, 2024
Gold prices are at historic highs, buoyed by India and China central bank buying in OTC markets. Further, all-time high levels of gold repatriation are underway, to vaults in Asia. Industry insiders and market experts are puzzled at the intensity and the timing of the gold buys, which seem divorced from economic fundamentals.
But these moves are an essential aspect of the BRICS countries’ de-risking from Western banking systems. Following the sanctions on Russia, whereby billions of dollars of Russian reserves in US and European banks were seized, China and …
A Glimpse into the Near Future
by Media Lens / November 12th, 2024
In the 35 years since we first protested for action against climate change on the streets of London, we have often wondered what it is exactly we are trying to avert. Sometimes, notably in the wee small hours, we have tried to imagine how a destabilised climate might one day cause society to collapse. Would the lights just go out? Would supermarkets suddenly be empty of food? Would there simply be no-one to call for help? Would law and order progressively vanish from a newly barbarised world? For a long …
by Allen Forrest / November 12th, 2024
A comforting perspective.
Let’s Demand Accountability at COP
by Aaron Kirshenbaum and Melissa Garriga / November 12th, 2024
As we write, New York City is an unsettling 70 degrees in November. Meanwhile, a cohort of war profiteers, their pockets lined by the very industries destroying our climate, are flying to COP, the annual U.N. climate summit hosted by a petrostate, no less. They’re gathering to “discuss climate solutions”—but one of the world’s biggest contributors to the climate crisis will be entirely overlooked: the U.S. military-industrial complex.
The world’s largest institutional emitter, the U.S. military, sits beyond the reach of the metrics meant to hold countries accountable for climate pollution. Exempt from transparency requirements at the COP or within U.N. …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 12th, 2024
It was catastrophic, cataclysmic and all destructive. It wiped out empires and aristocracies and tore through the middle class. The First World War was a conflict that should never have happened, was pursued foolishly and incestuously by the royal families of Europe and fertilised the ground for an even greater war two decades later. It produced an atmospheric solemnity of grief and loss, and a lingering, collective neurosis.
On November 11, 1918, when the guns fell silent in Europe, some 16 million had been left dead. A ceremonial ritual grew up around commemorating the fallen. So horrific were those events that …
by Roger D. Harris / November 11th, 2024
For the thirty-second time in so many years, the US blockade of Cuba was globally condemned at the UN General Assembly’s annual vote in October. Only Tel Aviv joined Washington in defending the collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.
For the vast majority of Cubans, who were born after the first unilateral coercive measures were imposed, life under these conditions is the only normalcy they have known. Even friends sympathetic to socialism and supporters of Cuba may question why the Cubans have not simply …
The newspaper’s report about a purported conversation “absolutely does not correspond to reality,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said
by RT / November 11th, 2024
by Edward Curtin / November 11th, 2024
Everybody knows the boat is leaking/Everybody knows the captain lied.
– Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”
When the polls closed on Tuesday, November 5, I was sound asleep, like a baby rocking gently in his cradle, lost to the frenzied rants or joyful shouting of the different political claques. Even though I missed the results of what the mass media had been telling us was the most important election in our lifetimes, I was happily oblivious to their cant. I remember hearing that nonsense many times before.
I gave up on my country’s electoral system more than fifty years ago. Every presidential election is …
by Allen Forrest / November 11th, 2024
What does fact-checking mean for the self-designated fact-checkers?
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 11th, 2024
From Uncaptured Media:
The video provides a stunning and emblematic example of on-going police massacres of civilians as the U.S. government pushes for a UN intervention….
Go to Uncaptured Media.
The Musings of Shigeru Ishiba
by Binoy Kampmark / November 11th, 2024
Japan’s new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is stirring the pot – notably on regional security matters. He has proposed something that has done more than raise a few eyebrows in the foreign and defence ministries of several countries. An Asian version of NATO, he has suggested, was an idea worth considering, notably given China’s ambitions in the region. “The creation of an Asian version of NATO is essential to deter China by its Western allies,” he revealed to the Washington-based Hudson Institute in September.
During his campaign for office, Ishiba had mooted changes to the deployment arrangements of the …
by Francisco Domínguez / November 9th, 2024
The people of the United States and most of the rest of the world woke up this week to the last news they wanted to hear.
Not only had Donald J Trump presiding over a proto-fascist Maga mass movement been elected president of the United States, he will enjoy a comfortable Republican majority in the Senate, and he also may have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
He obtained about the same number of votes as in 2020, 74 million, and he scored an electoral victory because the Democrat candidate, Kamala Harris, got well over 10 million votes less than …
by Robert Glover / November 9th, 2024
It has been suggested that to reduce landfill greenhouse gas emissions, food wastes should be ground up and sent to the sewer. This is the worst possible attempt to reduce greenhouse gases, and will, in fact, increase the amount of greenhouse gases released to process those food wastes.
I have worked at a wastewater treatment plant for the last five years. These facilities are located in every small, medium and large city, with public sewer systems, across the world. They are designed to process human fecal waste, capture organic matter and metals, and release treated water back into the environment. They …
by Allen Forrest / November 9th, 2024
Proving you are human to a machine.
by Robert Hunziker / November 9th, 2024
Billions of dollars will buy almost anything anybody wants, and on November 5 billions of dollars bought the world’s leading climate-skeptical political administration, aka: the Trump Administration, which is anti-almost-everything, except for a free reign to the almighty market. Price determines policy, and it buys political office.
According to Americans for Tax Fairness, 150 billionaire families broke all campaign-spending records by a country mile, spending $2 billion in total to get a Republican majority with $1.36 billion going to Republicans versus $413 million to Democrats and the balance to specific causes, proof positive that billions of dollars can buy anything.
by Martin Averick / November 8th, 2024
War never changes. The circumstances, participants, causes and locations may vary, but the essence remains unchanged: war is always a tragedy, since it is waged by people against people. And the suffering of the most vulnerable, silent victims of any conflict – children – always remains unnoticed. While activists and volunteers sound the alarm and try to organize humanitarian aid, the kings of the information field – media corporations – prefer to discuss the main actors of the conflict and cover politics and economics, as the most effective …
by Eric Zuesse / November 8th, 2024
Ever since the November 5 defeat of the so-called ‘Democratic’ Party and of its unanimous neoconservative obsession to defeat Russia with the help of Ukrainians (claiming all the time that doing this is necessary in order to protect Americans and America’s ‘democracy’), the Bilderburg member Donald Graham, who at the 2013 Bilderburg meeting met privately with Jeff Bezos and agreed to sell him the Washington Post, has been instead using his Foreign Policy magazine in order to increase the pressure upon President Joe Biden to escalate the U.S. Government’s proxy-war in Ukraine …
A left view of the election from an expat in the UK
by Dave Lindorff / November 8th, 2024
TRUMP VOTER IN New Hampshire
Cambridge, UK — As the voting results started coming in here from Virginia at 4 am (GMT, which is five hours later than Eastern Time in the US), I went to bed, having seen enough to know that Kamala Harris’s crash campaign for the White House was failing.
I knew what was coming. I’d experienced it four times already. In 1968 I watched Richard Nixon, the notorious House version of Commie-hunter Sen. Joe McCarthy rouse what he dubbed the “Silent Majority” of right-wing white bigots and …
by Vijay Prashad / November 7th, 2024
Ōriwa Tahupōtiki Haddon (Ngāti Ruanui), Reconstruction of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, c. 1940.
For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today, as they become part of the US-led …
2024 Election Postmortem
by Roger D. Harris / November 7th, 2024
The chickens that the Democrats hatched in 2016 came home to roost in 2024. Back then, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), representing the party’s establishment, promoted Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. They thought him to be an easy mark who would be opposed by both the Republican Party establishment and most US voters.
That stratagem turned out to be correct about the Republican establishment but wrong about the electorate. In any case, Trump went on to not only capture the GOP but the archaic Electoral College as well.
The DNC reprised that strategy with the same suicidal results this year, putting …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 7th, 2024
It takes some skill to make Donald J. Trump look good. Two Democrats have succeeded in doing so: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024. The conceit of both presidential campaigns, and the belief that attacking a staggeringly grotesque moral character for being such, was laughable. (When a Clinton mocks groping philanderers and creepy molesters, one must reach for, well, the Starr Report?) In certain countries, abominating and execrating your political adversary for being a moral defective might work. In the United States, such figures can draw benefit from being outside the constraints of law-abiding society. They are …
by Philip A. Farruggio / November 7th, 2024
They attribute the famous quote ‘Let them eat cake’ to Marie Antoinette, Queen Consort of King Louis XIV of France. Apparently, she was told that the peasants did not have enough bread to eat. Her retort Let them eat cake, famous for all the Super Rich throughout history (and right smack dab into our present USA), shows the utter arrogance, indifference and lack of empathy for most of our low and middle income working stiffs. Last night’s disgraceful vote results to allow Trump back into power reveal just how far down the rabbit hole of immorality our nation has fallen! …
by Paul Haeder / November 6th, 2024
In the face of an avalanche of brain-numbing and spiritual-lobotomizing wrong “truths” and miseducated citizens, it is still incumbent upon the misinformed, ill-informed and uninformed to attempt to learn.
Deep learning deploys a set of lenses that takes the complexities of contradictions and not-so-self-evident truths and focus into some sense of why “they” are where “they” are economically, culturally and spiritually.
The US election is over (as of Nov. 5 midnight?), but the dangerous clown show of misanthropy and hegemony marches on. I am writing this for National American Indian Heritage Month (Nov.), because Native Peoples in this part of the world …
by Allen Forrest / November 6th, 2024
by Ellen Brown / November 6th, 2024
Asheville, North Carolina, is known for its historic architecture, vibrant arts scene and as a gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a favorite escape for “climate migrants” moving from California, Arizona, and other climate-challenged vicinities, until a “500 year flood” ravaged the city this fall.
Hurricane Helene was a wakeup call not just for stricken North Carolina residents but for people across the country following their tragic stories in the media and in the podcasts now favored by young voters for news. “Preppers” well equipped with supplies watched in helpless disbelief as homes washed away in a wall of water and mud, …
by Leah Yananton / November 5th, 2024
Much significance will happen at the end of Election Day, and a countdown will begin at 11:00 p.m. PDT on November 5th. While everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. The Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile will cross the Pacific Ocean and 22 minutes later crash into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.
This is what …
