It's OK America, pop pills and watch TV. Don't worry about abrupt climate change, environmental collapse, or perma-war blowback from your oil addiction.
by Glen Barry / October 24th, 2015
Only a couple centuries ago California was mostly covered in lush naturally evolving ecosystems that surrounded and provided ecological habitat for relatively small settlements of Native Americans. Grizzly bears roamed and redwood forests towered. Now the heavily industrialized state is an over-populated ecologically collapsing mess. Natural ecosystems are surrounded by an endless sprawl of human filth, and the very climate is abruptly changing.
California’s recent drought and wildfire outbreak is an exemplar of what surpassing a bioregion’s carrying capacity and resultant ecological collapse looks like. For decades naturally evolved ecosystems which make …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 24th, 2015
At its root, the TPP is about modern colonialism. It is the way that Western governments and their transnational corporations, including Wall Street banks, can dominate the economies of developing nations. And it’s not too late to stop it.
WASHINGTON — After nearly six years of negotiations, trade ministers recently announced they had reached agreement on the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This does not mean the TPP is a done deal. The next hurdle for this rigged corporate power grab is to convince the participating governments, including Congress, to ratify it. In the United States, the trade justice movement, which has …
Critics have labeled the current Israeli Likudnik government that is comprised of right-wing as well as religious parties, as the most extreme in that nation’s history. It features a Justice Minister (sic), Ayelet Shaked, a Deputy Foreign Minister, Tzipi Hotovely and a Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev who are all far out of step/out of line with international law and in fact the international consensus essentially of what should be the “rules of the road” for the long, arduous, and likewise seemingly neverending Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, all of these personages/individuals that occupy these positions in the …
Democratic critics of military seizures of power commonly refer to them as military coups. They adopt a very narrow and misleading conception of what is taking place.
Likewise, human rights activists and progressive analysts who conceptualize the reign of violence which follows, a ‘coup’ as state terror fail to take account of the systemic forces – the capitalist social order and class relations – which determine the classes which wield state power. They ignore the specific classes and groups which are targeted and which classes direct and …
Fifty years ago this month Indonesian Major General Suharto began a wave of terror that left hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and landless peasants dead. Did Canada try to stop the killing or at least protest the massive human rights violation? No, Lester Pearson’s Liberal government largely backed Suharto’s terror campaign and overthrow of elected president Sukarno.
Between October 1965 and March 1966 approximately one million “communists” were massacred by the Indonesian military and religious forces they supported. During this slaughter, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), one of the world’s largest, was all but wiped out as a …
In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the allocation of scarce resources. “Abundance” was always a pretty word with an idyllic connotation for Professor Samuelson. I often wonder why there weren’t a few classes about the real-life consequences of abundance, along with scarcity and people’s material welfare.The present generation of internet technology is a proper subject of study within an economic framework. It might help us understand what is happening to …
With Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at US $ 2.94 trillion (2014), the UK has the fifth largest economy in the world after Germany and Japan. It also suffers from acute income and wealth inequality and, according to Oxfam, who know all about poverty, “one in five [or 20%] of the population live below our official poverty line, meaning that they experience life as a daily struggle.”
The Conservative government repeatedly proclaims that the bitter medicine of economic austerity, so badly needed to ‘balance the nations wobbly books’, is the ‘right thing to do’ – yes, it’s painful, but ‘we’re all …
Right now, you’re probably asking yourself, “What does Jack think of Hillary Clinton?” Well, I’m glad you asked.
In fact, Madam Hillary, the leading candidate for CEO of the United States of Corporate Empire, is being buried in money by environmental polluters, defense cheats, banksters, and other oligarchs and plutocrats because she’s shown unwavering loyalty to these scum of the earth all her life. Shall we …
The Dodd-Frank regulations are so lethal to community banks that some say the intent was to force them to sell out to the megabanks. Community banks are rapidly disappearing – except in North Dakota, where they are thriving.
At over 2,300 pages, the Dodd Frank Act is the longest and most complicated bill ever passed by the US legislature. It was supposed to end “too big to fail” and “bailouts,” and to “promote financial stability.” But Dodd-Frank’s “orderly liquidation authority” has replaced bailouts with bail-ins, meaning that in the event of insolvency, big banks are to recapitalize themselves with the savings …
Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.
The few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite …
While most Canadians proudly recognize the beaver, the hockey player and the curling broom as symbols of this country, some of us would be made uncomfortable by another enduring emblem of the Great White North: a businessman wearing a Maple Leaf lapel pin discretely passing a plain manila envelope stuffed with cash to a foreign official.
Two weeks ago SNC-Lavalin agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a corruption case brought against it by the African Development Bank. Accused of bribing officials in Uganda and Mozambique, the Montréal-based company also accepted a number of other non-monetary conditions on its …
by Robert S. McIntyre and Gerald E. Scorse / October 21st, 2015
Meretricious means “based on pretense, deception, or insincerity.” That makes it the perfect word to describe the creation and spread of Roth individual retirement accounts (IRAs), especially the claim that they’re a plus for the Treasury. Just the opposite: the initial boost from Roths is largely a ruse, and the accounts in fact are a fiscal train wreck.
Let’s see what gives the myth a veneer of truth, why it persists, and what needs to happen to stem the losses that Roths are inflicting on the Treasury—and will be inflicting for decades.
The deception began at the beginning. When lawmakers created Roths …
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has attracted criticism for an incendiary speech in which he accused the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, of “inspiring the Holocaust”. Critics accuse Netanyahu of trivialising the Holocaust by attributing the impetus for Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe to the grand mufti.
In his speech Netanyahu described a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come …
My first stop, after living for 22 years in a refugee camp in Gaza, was the city of Seattle, a pleasant, green city, where people drink too much coffee to cope with the long, cold, grey winters. There, for the first time, I stood before an audience outside Palestine, to speak about Palestine.
Here, I learned, too, of the limits imposed on the Palestinian right to speak, of what I could or should not say. Platforms for an impartial Palestinian discourse were extremely narrow to begin with, and when any was available, Palestinians hardly took center stage.
There are three groups of American citizens whose birth certificates are falsified: those in the witness protection program, adopted people, and donor-conceived individuals.
Currently, in the United States, there is no national law (or Supreme Court decision) to protect people created through reproductive technologies (or who have been adopted) to factual birth certificates. This country needs to ensure the total transparency and truth by repealing outdated laws, then modernizing and standardizing laws that govern the generation of birth certificates for these two groups of people.
Inaccurate birth certificates are continually issued as “official” documents. Donor-conceived individuals receive only one birth …
One of the defining features of the corporate media is that Western crimes are ignored or downplayed. The US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on the night of October 3, is an archetypal example.
At least twenty-two people were killed when a United States Air Force AC-130 repeatedly attacked the hospital with five strafing runs over the course of more than an hour, despite MSF pleas to Afghan, US and Nato officials to call off the attack. The hospital’s main building, which contains the emergency operating room and recovery rooms, was heavily damaged. Dave Lindorff …
The October 12, 2015 terror bombing in Ankara, resulting in the death of 127 trade unionists, peace activists, Kurdish advocates and progressives, has been attributed either to the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan regime or to ISIS terrorists.
The Erdoğan regime’s ‘hypothesis’ is that ISIS or the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) was responsible for the terrorist attack, a position echoed by all of the NATO governments and dutifully repeated by all of the Western mass media. Their most recent claim is that a Turkish member of ISIS carried out the …
Canadian voters have voted resoundingly to toss out Stephen Harper – the arch control freak, corporate stooge, denier of colonialism, xenophobe, toadying chickenhawk for the crumbling hyperempire, another ego illiterate to the political tea leaves – and a bevy of his Conservative Party followers. That is the silver lining in the 2015 Canadian federal election!
If you are interested in a world of egalitarianism, where all people have access to quality medical care, have access to a high level of education, desire to preserve the environment for future generations to enjoy, where people come before conglomerates, and where war is a …
Among Palestinians and Israelis, the recent upsurge in violence has been variously described as the children’s, lone-wolf, Jerusalem and smartphone intifadas. Each describes a distinguishing feature of this round of clashes.
The steady erosion of Fatah and Hamas’ authority during the post-Oslo years, as the Palestinian factions proved incapable of protecting their people from the structural violence of the occupation, has driven Palestine’s orphaned children to the streets, armed with stones.
The growing hopelessness and sense of abandonment have led a few so-called “lone wolves” to vent their fury on Israelis with improvised weapons such as knives, screwdrivers and cars. These attacks …
Mislead: “to give false or misleading information to”.
— Collins Dictionary
In what The Mail on Sunday has described as a “bombshell White House memo”, leaked classified correspondence from then Secretary of State General Colin Powell to President George W. Bush, of March 28th, 2002, alleges that Tony Blair had done what the newspaper calls “a deal in blood” with Bush to support him, come what may, in the attack on Iraq – a full year before the invasion.
Blair at the time was claiming to be seeking a diplomatic solution in the Iraq crisis. “We’re not proposing military action”, he …
