Latest articles
America’s Aircraft Carrier: Australian Bases for US Bombers
Subservience is a terrible state, not merely because of its indignities, but its distortions. Speech from the main political centre is garbled and marred, ever mediated by the higher power. Media releases from departments from the vassal or satrap state tend to be coloured by the broader interests of the larger power. For years, that has been characteristic of US-Australian relations.
The Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was again sallying forth with a whitewashing measure, hoping that no one would notice that Australia was again offering itself up for conspicuous targeting in the event of any future conflict. In February, the …
Romney Throws Hat Toward Ring, Warns of Abyss
I’m not here to announce my candidacy for office…. America will remain, as it is today, the envy of the world….
If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished….
A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president….
I understand the anger Americans feel today…. Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes…. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.
— Mitt Romney, Hinckley Institute of Politics, Salt Lake City
Mitt Romney, former Republican candidate for …
City of London: Haven of Havens
When it comes to The City of London, the term ‘tax haven’ is not describing all that it should. It doesn’t just shield the mega-wealthy from paying their fair dues it goes further and offers a departure from the rule of law as you would know it. Secrecy is its raison d’être. These secrecy laws do not benefit the local people living in its jurisdiction but only those individuals and corporations with enough money and with something to hide.
The reality is that the City of London caters for those above the law, it operates on the basis of bypassing democratic society as …
In Venezuela, Only Government News is Fit to Print
Today is a big media day in Venezuela. Today, Friday, March 11, 2016, the news is all about the news and it’s as if the Bolivarian government was taking a page out of President Obama’s playbook to make a whole movie. Yet while the U.S. president can only go after individual whistleblowers (and boy does he ever! with more whistleblowers serving more jail time under Obama than all previous presidents combined) in Venezuela the government shuts down whole newspapers.
There are, of course, other differences between a capitalist national security state like the U.S. where some checks and balances remain …
Indian Point Crisis
Open Letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo
One of the stupidest schemes on the planet has just hit a snag.
The plan is for natural-gas giant, Spectra Energy, to construct a new high-pressure, 42-inch gas pipeline in the immediate vicinity of the Indian Point nuclear power plants. The pipeline would carry fracked-gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale wells up into New England and then to LNG terminals in Canada. From there the gas would be exported to India, Japan and elsewhere around the planet.
The proposed new pipeline has been bitterly opposed for over two years.
The Spectra project, known as the Alconquin Market (AIM) project, …
Bullying as US Foreign Policy
Anti-Empire Report #144
American exceptionalism presents an election made in hell
If the American presidential election winds up with Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, and my passport is confiscated, and I’m somehow FORCED to choose one or the other, or I’m PAID to do so, paid well … I would vote for Trump.
My main concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy is the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity, and the environment. And when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster. From Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras the world is a much worse place because of her; so …
Who Owns American Skies: the People or the Skyjacking Airlines?
That’s a question currently being asked by legislators in the halls of Congress. Without a muscular pushback from the public, the big airlines could claim the American airspace as their own to tax and regulate, without any significant compensation to the American taxpayer and no oversight from elected officials. Talk about getting skyjacked!
An amendment in the 273-page FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) reauthorization bill― H.R. 4441 ―currently moving through Congress means to remove air traffic control from the authority of the FAA and hand it over to a private, not-for-profit corporation. This new corporate-controlled body would be responsible for the over …
The Corporatization of Education
The Gates Foundation, Arnie Duncan, and Bruce Rauner
For over twenty years, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, has been warning us about the coming corporatization of education through fascistic charter school privatization that will be subsidized by public finances. Iserbyt, author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, has described the charter school takeover, otherwise known as the “school choice” movement, as “[c]ollusion between neoconservatives, corporations, and leftists in education, including former ‘conservative’ Secretaries of Education and the NEA, [which] enabled corporations to take control of American education.”
As a …
Inside Control Centre of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
What was happening inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant?
It is nearly impossible to think about the disaster of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant without wondering what it must have been like inside the control center. The first 88 hours after the reactors went out of control were the most critical. It’s when the workers of Fukushima Daiichi met the devil of cataclysm face-to-face.
Now for the first time ever, the public will be able to go inside the control room of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in a documentary drama, Meltdown – The Fateful 88 Hours (“Meltdown”), a NHK Documentary premiering …
Web of Life and Systems Thinking All Bound Up in Soil, Roots, Limbs, Canopies
Inland Northwest's tree experts rate the state of the region's urban forests
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
― John Muir
Tree Dialogues
Talking trees with the typical Spokane (Washington) “tree surgeon/arboriculturalist” is like speaking to a philosopher/doctor/medicine man/geek all in one breath. These men and women have a passion for trees because they see each community’s health, resilience and psychological well being tied to robust and plentiful trees.
Emblematic of how a community or even family should thrive, a city’s vast mosaic of trees and runs of forests turns our ecosystem into a fully connected biological living history – past, present and future.
Some sentiments can be dry – urban forests …
Death In Honduras: The Coup, Hillary Clinton And The Killing Of Berta Cáceres
On February 28, Hillary Clinton told an audience from the pulpit of a Memphis church: ‘we need more love and kindness in America’. This was something she felt ‘from the bottom of my heart’.
These benevolent sentiments recalled the national ‘purpose’ identified by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, shortly before he flattened Iraq. It was, he said, ‘to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world’.
Clinton, of course, meant North America, specifically the United States. But other places in America are short on love and kindness, too. Consider Honduras, for example.
On June …
Michael Moore’s Election Year Odyssey
Where to Invade Next riffs off of the idea of critiquing the US war without end. Despite the title, documentarian Michael Moore is not going there in his first film in six years. Rather, Moore adroitly shows positive examples from abroad of what he believes might be done at home if there were the political will this election year.
With Old Glory in tow, Moore’s “one-man army…invades” Western Europe, plus stops in Slovenia and Tunisia, to “steal” good eye-opening ideas to take home:
Gourmet public school lunches in France
Free higher education for citizens and foreigners alike in Slovenia
Decriminalization of drugs and attendant …
The Crazies are Coming, the Crazies are Coming!
That, of course, is not true. The Crazies are here and have been in power since Ronald Reagan was elected President of the USA. Their craziness became obvious when Reagan ignored his personal beliefs and the beliefs of all conservatives and began spending federal money like there was no tomorrow. Fiscal prudence was totally ignored because the USA and the Western World were in the severest economic downturn since the Great Depression and things were getting worse by the day. Workers were getting angry, very, very angry, they wanted jobs and would not stand in soup lines, sell apples on …
Why Peace People Should Care About Money in Politics
The 2016 presidential elections are proving pivotal in U.S. history, although not just for the self-proclaimed socialist-democrat Bernie Sanders, the feminist squabble unfolding around Hillary Clinton, or the larger-than-life wild card Donald Trump.
The elections are revealing more dramatically than ever the corrosive effect of big money on the U.S.’s decayed democracy. In a country founded on the principle that every citizen has an equal voice and an equal vote, how is money stealing center stage in U.S. elections?
Following Citizens United v. FEC, SpeechNow.org vs. FEC, and McCutcheson v. FEC, corporations and the wealthiest in society have been granted the legal right to …
When Google Meets the Pentagon
What Happens When You Merge a Psychopath with a Killer?
The United States is, indisputably, the world’s foremost killing entity, and it has been since its genocidal inception., The killing is relentless — in more recent times wreaking destruction in Iraq ((Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik …
How Defamation Law has Developed and is Applied in Canada
Canadian Defamation Law is Noncompliant with International Law (Part Two of a Two Part Series)
This article was prepared for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA). It is also posted on ocla.ca.
Overall Summary
Part 1: Defamation law in Canada is contrary to international law, in both design and practice. Under international law, the right to hold an opinion is absolute, and the right of freedom of expression can be restricted “for respect of the rights or reputations of others” solely using written laws that must conform to the “strict tests of necessity and proportionality”. With Canadian civil defamation law, the state has unfettered discretion from an unwritten common law that provides presumed falsity, presumed malice, …
Trump-Sanders 2016? In the Last Election Cycle Pre-TPP, Only Pariahs Will Do
With the TPP cell-door slamming shut, it’s curious how Fox and MSNBC take turns deriding the only two guys prepared to stand in its way.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
— Allen Ginsberg, America
Critical thinking in America politics has been edged out by meme-factory conveyor belts and Facebook repeater towers eager to share the latest red-blue molehill with five hundred of their closest friends.
One bit of unexamined kookiness (a favored Fox News trope) is that there’s still such a thing as operative liberals in America. Another, emanating from both sides, is that the country will go down the tubes should Party X prevail against Party Y. Despite decades of tag-team, blue-red empire wars, many still swallow the channelized …
Syria Dispatch: Most Syrians Support Assad, Reject Phony Foreign “Revolution”
In April 2014 I first visited Syria, going to Homs and Latakia, in addition to Damascus. On each of my three subsequent trips to Syria, speaking moderate colloquial Arabic, I have been able to interact one-on-one with Syrians there, whether in markets, taxis, on the streets or in areas I visited.
In Latakia, many of the over 1 million Internally Displaced Persons from Idlib, Aleppo and surrounding areas who are being housed and supported by the Syrian government spoke of the same heinous kidnappings, beheadings, and other crimes that most media currently only associate with …