The Base Heather Stroud
Wired for Authoritarianism: American Oligarchies and How to Re-Wire America for the People Charles Derber
The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace You–and How to Stop It Garrison Lovely
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time
– Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt,
10 August 2024
One would expect that human rights organisations would spring into action during an impending or unfolding genocide – the ultimate violation of human rights. Maybe human rights NGOs actions should be proportional to the level of the crimes they are concerned with. Thus, the more killing, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, bombing…, etc., that is plainly evident, the more action one would …
Seems Germany is doing whatever it can to descend into increasing irrelevance as a state.
A video was circulated on social media showing German police chasing a boy, said to be 10-years-old, carrying a Palestinian flag during a pro-Palestinian protest in Berlin.
Activists stated that the child had been detained.
The child’s fate or whether he has been released is, at present, unconfirmed.
It was a shock to some of us progressives when Liz Cheney—once a rising, strong Republican star in the U.S. House—recently declared she was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and would campaign and spend millions on it in battleground states.
As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”
But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic …
Joint Statement from Veterans For Peace and Move to Amend
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has produced increasing calls for an immediate ceasefire, while a pro-Israel, U.S.-based group has waged an increasing war on democracy with little public scrutiny and no end in sight.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most politically and electorally influential groups in this country. They have bombarded our “democratic” system spending over $100 million just in 2024 to punish opponents of Israeli policies, including the military assault on Gaza that’s claimed over 40,000 deaths and displaced 2.3 million people.
Our democracy has always been incomplete at best, but peoples’ movements have won …
In recent days, Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally-admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants.
Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers …
Adivasis facing eviction from Nagarhole Tiger Reserve protest at the park’s entrance. ©Survival
Adivasi (Indigenous) people have organized mass protests across India to denounce forced evictions from their forests to make way for tiger reserves.
Thousands of people facing eviction from their villages, and some already evicted, joined the protests last week and this week at several of the country’s most famous tiger reserves – including Nagarhole, Udanti-Sitanadi, Kaziranga, Rajaji, and Indravati. Many more protests are planned.
The director of India’s …
Don’t become addicted to power.
Here he goes again, cap in hand, begging for the alms of war. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been touring the United States, continuing his lengthy salesmanship for Ukraine’s ongoing military efforts against Russia. The theme is familiar and constantly reiterated: the United States must continue to back Kyiv in its rearguard action for civilisation in the face of Russian barbarism. By attempting, not always convincingly, to universalise his country’s plight, Zelenskyy hopes to keep some lustre on an increasingly fading project.
The Ukrainian president has succeeded most brazenly in getting himself, and the war effort, into the innards of the US …
How a genocide got to the impossible "here" from the improbable "there"
Note: Update of my previous article from March 2008.
Except for a brief interlude during the Eisenhower administration, United States’ support for Israel, in its genocide of the Palestinian people, has been an ongoing process since the Truman administration recognized the state. Contemporary events prompt a review of the post-World War II history that resulted in the formation of a nation that had no visible name until David Ben Gurion proclaimed, on May 14, 1948, the state as Israel.
Books, articles, documents, memoirs and letters from past generations detail how a small group of insiders prevailed over recommendations from an experienced and …
When you’re 20, playing college football, chasing girls and barely keeping enough passing grades to stay out of the draft, what could be better? That was this writer in the fall of 1970, at the height of the Vietnam debacle (I never would call it a war). Just completed the greatest summer of my life (even now 54 years later) and living at home with not a damn care in the world, other than how to get more weed for the weekends. My cousin Mick and I spent June and July in beautiful (to us city boys) Virginia Beach, with …
Some people believe in a god sitting on a cloud and others believe that the Earth is a flat disk, despite the photos of Earth, the moon, Mars, and other planets belying the latter belief.
I joined the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) in 2018 on the fiftieth anniversary of Dr King’s assassination. Rev. Dr. William Barber II, who Cornell West has described as “the closest thing we have to Dr. King,” envisioned the new PPC as a “re-consecration” of King’s life’s work to “change the coversation about what is possible in our life together.”
The first PPC dissolved after King’s assassination and I felt this rebirth, with its dynamic leadership, organizational skills, social media savvy and empathetic young membership,had the potential to evolve into a radical itransformative movement. There was a palpable sense of camaraderie at the …
Our latest visual captures the horrific testimonies of Palestinian women from Gaza who were arbitrarily detained and held incommunicado by Israel for more than 50 days, according to interviews by Amnesty International and the UN. Held hostage under the “Detention of Unlawful Combatants law,” which grants the Israeli military sweeping powers to detain anyone from Gaza without evidence, Palestinians detained from Gaza are being subjected to torture and inhumane treatment, denied access to lawyers, while their location is kept secret from their families.
Paul MacCready bicycled across the English Channel (34 km) in June 1979 on wings of carbon and Kevlar, the Gossamer Albatross
Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts. No!
Well then, don your bicycle helmet. No! Drivers actually pay less attention to you if they see a helmet, figuring they’re not likely to kill a smarty-pants, and are less careful around you (2x as likely to pass close). A toque or baseball cap in case of rain …
Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889.
In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère …
Concerning opposing ideologies.
Boeing Headquarters, Chicago
December 14, 2023
On the last night night of Chanukah, you stand on a bridge, alongside twelve others, blocking traffic. You hold a black rectangular posterboard with the letter “I” lit up in small holiday lights bright against the dark matting. You are letter seven in the phrase CEASEFIRE NOW! “F” stands to your left, “R” to your right. You check in with each other, smiling. Each one of you, each letter, is a necessary part of the entire demand.
On the sidewalk, a rally with speeches, singing and chanting continues, a determined, spirited din to accompany your blockade. Through …
The government wants your money.
It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.
The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.
Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, …
The coffin is in Gaza
After WWII, economically advanced and well-accepted American Jews represented almost 50 percent of world Jewry. Their economic, social, and political progress and humanist values established a tone for Western Jews. The Zionists usurped the American position. Jews became a nationality within the borderless state of Israel.
Although the Jews are not a people — speaking different languages, having different cultures, not having a shared history, and not residing together in one place for generations — and Judaism has featured rabbis, who are teachers, and has never instituted a hierarchy, Israel’s Nation State Laws unilaterally claimed Israel as being the sole representative of …
How Covid Increased Housing Rage
Covid may have reduced road rage and cut gas and transportation bills but it has increased housing rage. Many in apartment or condo buildings have had their fill of the following irritants after more than a year of seclusion (not to mention their fill of family or roommates). Here are some of the issues of contention that have increased since Covid.
Mail Room
Why do businesses keep attaching door hangers for home improvements or cut-rate auto tune-ups? Don’t they know we are as broke as they are?
Why do companies …
Among the very few things to look forward to on Labor Day is Jack Rasmus’s annual report on the state of US labor. Rasmus, an accomplished political-economist, riffs on the famous Frederick Engels book with Labor Day 2024: The Condition of the American Working Class Today. It may come as a surprise to some, but academically-trained economists are among the most intellectually shallow and ideologically tainted practitioners of the social sciences. Some are so in awe of their own academic specialty that they paint all economic …
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a September 20th Bloomberg TV interview aired in Copehagen on the morning of September 23rd, that NATO nations must remove all restrictions on the use of their weapons against Russia by Ukraine, because Russia’s President Vladimir Putin aims to conquer NATO: “This thinking that if we allow him to take Ukraine or parts of Ukraine, then he will be satisfied, I disagree.” In other words: even for Russia to retain the parts of Ukraine that it currently occupies in Ukraine is entirely unacceptable, and so Russia must be simply …
“Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” Author Promotes Genocide of 86% of the World’s Population”
Dennis Meadows, one of the main authors of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, is a member of the World Economic Forum.
The Amazon rainforest is in deep trouble. Labeling it a “crisis”, however, seems too hackneyed and not descriptive enough because the devastation is beyond description.
The magnificent rainforest is morphing into a tinder box that’s trapped in the worst drought of all time. According to MapBiomas, an all-time record amount of land is charred and smoldering as 180,000 fires this year, over 50,000 current, light up Brazil, potentially threatening major cities Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
An estimated 20% of the Brasilia National Forest burned just last week.” (ABC News, 9/10/2024)
What’s happening in the Amazon may strike people as routine …
Claims that Nicaragua is “weaponizing” immigration by allowing free passage of migrants towards the U.S. border have been appearing regularly in the media over the last twelve months. The claim was made on NPR in January, in the Associated Press last October, in El Pais last November and by the BBC this July, to cite just a few. In May, the Biden administration accused the Nicaraguan government (the “Ortega-Murillo regime”) of “repressing people and preying on migrants,” imposing new sanctions on those it believed responsible. Is there any basis to these claims?
Behind all such stories …
“In a peer reviewed study Scientists show that Nano structures self assemble after Pfizer/Moderna shots are injected into humans.” RealWorldNewsChannel.T.ME.
Videos show Israeli soldiers push three Palestinian men off a roof in a West Bank town under illegal Israeli occupation. The western media can barely stifle their yawns.
The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya – it’s unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead – is being barely reported by the western media, even though it was videoed from two different angles and a reporter from the main US news agency Associated Press witnessed it.
The Israeli soldiers killed, mutilated and humiliated the bodies of three Palestinians in Qabatia ( Jenin area) today and threw their bodies from a high building to the ground in a savage and inhuman manner. pic.twitter.com/0umG45ZhPH
— Mustafa Barghouti @Mustafa_Barghouti (@MustafaBarghou1) September 19, 2024
AP reported on this incident some nine hours ago. Its news feed is accessed by all western establishment media, so they all know.
Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. …
The Thirty-Eighth Newsletter (2024)
Niniko Morbedadze (Georgia), The Orange Clouds on the Boundary, 2018.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 13 September, at a conclave in Washington, DC, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer indicated that it would be acceptable for Ukraine to fire missiles, provided by the West, into Russian territory. No official decision has been announced as of yet, but it is clear where the conversation among North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member states is …
Peace has always been fundamental to me.
My first forays into activism were for peace: as an elementary school student blowing up balloons for a protest when the white train carrying nuclear warheads passed through my hometown in Idaho, organizing a protest of the first Gulf War in junior high school, writing letters to protest Army recruiters being allowed on school grounds in high school. I love peace so much that I studied it in college – my bachelor’s degree is in Peace and Global Studies.
So it was with some surprise …
With each ludicrously diabolical move, Israel’s security and military services are proving that they will broaden the conflict ignited when Hamas breached the country’s vaunted security defences on October 7. Notions such as ceasefire and peace are terms of nonsense and babble before the next grand push towards apocalyptic recognition.
The pager killings in Lebanon and parts of Syria on September 17 that left almost 3000 people injured and 12 dead were just another facet of this move. On September 18, a number of walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah were also detonated, killing 14. (The combined death toll continues …
