The merchants of the Olympic brand are running out of ideas. For decades, the deception of common humanity and the broader interests of building peace before the terror of war supposedly immunised the Olympics from slander and critique. Olympism was a high-ended spectrum of nobility, though it reeked of the body beautiful and a state sponsored cult of blood.
It also meant that countries, and more to the point cities, were encouraged to host the large scale event before a rather inflated name. Megalomaniacs, dictators, and gullible democracies joined in the profligate fun. Even mayor Jean Drapeau of Montreal, host city …
The business records provision of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, is scheduled to expire on June 1st. It’s the legal basis for the NSA’s collection of telephone meta-data inside American borders. A few days ago the House Judiciary Committee proudly announced that it had approved a bill, (HR 2048/S.1123) the USA Freedom Act of 2015, which alters the provisions of Section 215. The Judiciary Committee claims that their proposed legislation “ends bulk collection.” At best this is a mischaracterization that flagrantly ignores additional surveillance laws.
According to language of the bill the revisions defined …
In the UK social services are being cut because of lack of money. In one of the world’s wealthiest countries there are ‘one million Britons using food banks’.
The Conservatives say they will cut 12 billion pounds from the welfare system if they get elected on May 7th. We learn from an Oxford university research paper that this will push the number of people using food banks up to over two million. At the same time the UK government is spending one hundred billion pounds on renewing our arsenal of nuclear weapons which military leaders consider useless as weapons …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 4th, 2015
The announcement by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby that the six officers involved in the murder of Freddie Gray will be prosecuted was welcomed with cheers at City Hall and in Freddie Gray’s community, car horns were honked in celebration. The welcome announcement is a first step toward justice for the family of Freddie Gray and a hopeful beginning for the kind of accountability that has been missing in Baltimore when it comes to police violence.
Don’t expect the concept of extinction or omnicide to roll off the lips of nuclear warriors. Their brains focus on the win-ability of nuclear war to the exclusion of all other possibilities. Let’s take a minute to examine the myopic mindset of nuclear strategists and what we should be doing about it.
The story of nuclear weapons begins with the dropping of an atomic bomb named Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Since then, many authors have written and exposed this event as being more about starting a new war with our ally Russia than …
When the most highly degreed receive food stamps and eat Top Ramen on Fridays
by Paul Kirk / May 4th, 2015
The fight for the $15 an hour wage is alive and strong in Washington State, for faculty, AKA, professors at the college level. Think hard how the majority of faculty teaching young and old in Washington state, known for Bezos of Amazon, Gates of Microsoft, and Big Planes Brought to you by Intelligence Monitoring Boeing, are precarious, working semester-to-semester and quarter-to-quarter and subject to the whine or whim of disgruntled, uninformed and poorly formed students. One bad evaluation, or one helicopter parent against the teacher’s politics, and, bam, bye-bye $3100 a class. Bye-bye job. Bye-bye campus. Bye, sucker, and please …
The Hillary Clinton campaign is now focusing its public pitch at liberal fools to get them to ignore her record and believe her words. Here are examples:
The NBC ‘News’ political analyst (and perhaps a future President Clinton’s Press Secretary) Chuck Todd posted, on May 1, the following item:
*** Why Bernie Sanders likely helps Hillary: Bernie Sanders’ official entrance into the 2016 presidential race is most likely a good outcome for Hillary Clinton. Why? He will elevate many of the issues that Clinton and the entire Democratic Party want to discuss during the primary season (income inequality, curtailing the role of big money in presidential politics, climate change). And he’ll do so
On April 30, Jonathan Cohn provided a perfect example of what America’s media get wrong about the meaning of “socialism” — and about the meaning of the new U.S. Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders.
Cohn said that “Socialism, as commonly understood by Americans, means widespread government ownership of business,” but Cohn said that, “that’s not the agenda Sanders has actually been promoting.”
We should all welcome the news of charges being brought against the six police officers in Baltimore for the death of Freddie Gray. At the very least, the Baltimore Police Department’s culpability in Gray’s death is uncontroversial.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, those of us not on the ground in Baltimore, anyway, in considering this matter resolved, either locally or nationally. Because it isn’t.
The idea that the “system” is “working” because of these charges is completely false. On the morning of May 1, soon after the charges were brought, Al Sharpton spoke to Tamron …
The war and its results have turned Yemen back a hundred years, due to the destruction of infrastructure … especially in the provinces of Oden, Dhalea, and Taiz.
— Izzedine al-Asbali, Yemeni Human Rights Minister
Yemen is devastated. There are no roads, water, or electricity. Nobody’s left but thieves.
— a resident of Sanaa, Yemen
The Euro-American and Japanese ruling classes, as well as their collaborators in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries, have accumulated vast profit. This has occurred through a complex stratified system re-concentrating the world’s wealth through: 1. The exploitation of labor in the First World (North America and Western …
First of all, spare me any #notallwhites vitriol because you haven’t personally lynched any black people today. (Incidentally, it may be a frivolous aside, but can there be any more depressing harbinger of non-change that this–Lynch–is the last name of the newly installed Attorney General?) If that is your initial reaction, you have already missed the points I haven’t even made yet. You might want to stop reading here (though you in particular should probably read the whole thing). It is a thing of sheer beauty–terrible, evil beauty to be sure. But beauty nonetheless in the way that a near …
A lane, a narrow passage to Jallianwala Bagh Garden inside the old city of Amritsar, in the state of Punjab. It is a monument now, one of the testaments to madness and crimes committed by the British Empire during its colonial reign over Sub-Continent.
This is where, on April 13 1919, thousands of people gathered, demanding release of two of their detained leaders, Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Saifuddin. It was right before the day of Baisakhi, the main Sikh festival, and the pilgrims came to the city, in multitudes, from all corners of Punjab.
The British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer brought fifty Gurkha …
I see my old friends, Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel, are still flogging their dead horse of a Holy Roman-Leninist Empire in their latest DV article, “The Future of Solidarity.”
My previous DV article, “No Marx Again,” criticised them for pushing the notion of a ‘Leninist Socialist State’; where workers who supposedly ‘owned the means of production’ could ‘go on strike’ presumably against themselves for better pay and conditions!
In their latest article, they now admit that their future ‘Marxist’ society would also incorporate both State and Government. This is strange! Doesn’t a ‘Government’ imply the existence of those …
Last week’s drownings in the Mediterranean were the foreseeable, and indeed deliberate, a result of the anti-human policies of strategic violence by a dying neo-colonial empire. They were the consequence, firstly, of a series of wars of aggression that have made life intolerable across vast swathes of Africa and West Asia, and, secondly, of the fateful EU decision last November to end Italy’s search-and-rescue programme, Mare Nostrum. This much has been admitted by politicians and commentators from across the entire British political establishment, from Nigel Farage and the Daily Telegraph to David Cameron and Ed Miliband. Whilst these admissions have often been …
“As you resume or take office, you will recognise one of the heaviest and most important burdens on your desk will be your responsibility for Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. That deterrent exists, as you will know, not as a military weapon but as a political one whose very purpose is for it never to be used in anger. It is there to deter aggression against this country and our allies and to counter any nuclear blackmail which would threaten Britain’s essential interests or survival.”
So, with just days to go before the UK general election, starts the letter in the …
Part Three: Wear jeans, millions of flies can’t be wrong.
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 30th, 2015
Colonel, later Major General, Edward Lansdale began his professional career in advertising. In other words, Lansdale was a corporate propagandist. He is credited with the campaign that made Levi’s Jeans into a “national craze” and converted plain working clothes into what has become the standard clothing item of the American empire.
Lansdale went to the Philippines in 1950 where he became infamous for his contributions to the development of US political warfare tactics. ((Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire (2009) …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / April 30th, 2015
TRNN’s Eddie Conway and Megan Sherman and Baltimore City firefighter Gary Nelson give the real account of the encounter between Baltimore youth and police on Monday and discuss the underlying conditions that produced it.
Report: Up to 75 House Republicans Oppose Fast Track, Almost All Democrats Oppose, Fast Track is Dozens of Votes Short of a Majority
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 30th, 2015
Opponents of fast track trade authority from Popular Resistance, Public Citizen, Communication Workers of America and Friends of the Earth rallied on Capitol Hill to welcome Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe as he came to speak to a Joint Session of Congress with a three story tall Trojan Horse. The theme of the protest was ‘No Fast Track for Secret Corporate Trade Deals’. Banners read “No Fast Track for Secret Trojan Treaties” and “Stop the TPP: Transparency Release the Text.” There were also signs in Japanese which said: “U.S. citizens stand in solidarity with Japanese citizens against the TPP” and “TPP = Trojan …
The corporate media keeps churning out good news stories about the booming shale oil and gas industry in the United States. Apparently, the fracking industry is going to lead to America becoming the next Saudi Arabia with a hundred years of oil and natural gas. It will provide cheap energy supplies that will boost U.S. Industry and give a major boost to consumers and help the so-called economic recovery. Yet all of the over inflated claims for shale oil and gas are based upon a fantasy. The geological evidence ((See the exhaustive studies by University of Texas and by the …
…[G]enocide is a new technique of occupation aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost.
– Raphäel Lemkin, 1944
In 2008 I wrote a post-graduate research paper about the “Vietnam War”. I believe I showed quite clearly that Viet Nam lost its war with the United States by any reasonable criteria apart from the most obvious surface events. We are now at the 40th anniversary of the time when North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. Christian Appy has just published a piece criticising a popular revisionism that misrepresents the events of 40 years ago as an uncontextualised …
