Latest articles
by Nozomi Hayase / July 30th, 2016
The DNC emails released by WikiLeaks showed that the Democratic National Committee has been implementing a coordinated force to undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign and also the media’s collusion with the DNC. It is now clear that the democratic presidential primary was rigged from the start.
Bernie Sanders Delegates drop this Wikileaks Banner as Hillary Clinton speaks
Just before the Democratic National convention kicked off, DNC chair Debbie …
The political and elite class have us in a continual experiment of the new Inquisition
by Paul Haeder / July 30th, 2016
…the bourgeois order . . . has become a vampire that sucks out its [the smallholding peasantry’s] blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s cauldron.
— Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire
This is proportionally one of a 30-part serialization of a life, mine, in 30 segments, or 30 oddly disenfranchising anti-autobiographical parts, as if a significant chunk of my shaky 59 years on earth is being exhumed and sewn together with twine, or cat guts.
It’s one of a hundred things I coulda-shoulda-woulda written as tomes, but alas, the arteriosclerosis of the mind in America while working as a slave wager, in …
by Jonathan Cook / July 29th, 2016
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, awarded itself a draconian new power last week: A three-quarters majority of its members can now expel an elected politician if they do not like his or her views.
According to Adalah, a law centre representing the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian citizens, the so-called expulsion law has no parallel in any democratic state. The group noted that it was the latest in a series of laws designed to strictly circumscribe the rights of Israel’s Palestinian minority and curb dissent.
Others fear that the measure is designed to empty the Knesset of its Palestinian parties.
“This …
by Ralph Nader / July 29th, 2016
The 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was a multi-layered, raucous display of political theater. A host of delegates loyal to Senator Bernie Sanders were inside in large numbers exclaiming “No more war” during former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s speech and raising all kinds of progressive, rebellious signs and banners against the Hillary crowd. Although Hillary addressed them directly in her acceptance speech, “Your cause is my cause,” those dissatisfied delegates in the hall saw her rhetoric for what it was: insincere and opportunistic.
She said she’d tax the wealthy for public necessities, but declined to mention a sales tax on …
by John V. Walsh / July 29th, 2016
It is a dark night in New York, a city that knows how to keep its secrets. But on the top floor of Trump Tower, one man sits in solitude, tweeting out life’s painful truths. Donald Trump, billionaire.
Far below, a black limousine pulls up at the rear entrance in an unlighted, narrow alley. A lone figure in dark glasses, a black trench coat and an even blacker fedora alights with the agility of a seasoned athlete. He is quickly admitted.
Running up the many flights to the top floor he is ushered into the billionaire’s presence. He takes off his hat …
by Jonathan Cook / July 29th, 2016
A fortnight ago the London School of Economics published a report showing that uniformly the British press had misrepresented and denigrated Jeremy Corbyn from the moment he won the Labour party leadership last year. It was not that he had failed as leader; he was never given a chance to succeed.
LSE researchers found that 75 per cent of articles “either distorted or failed to represent his actual views on subjects”. Worse, in only 11 per cent of stories were his views fairly represented. In terms of tone, less than 10 per cent of reports were judged as positive.
At …
by Andre Vltchek / July 29th, 2016
Possibly I have spent too many years ‘abroad’, outside of North America and Europe. Perhaps I don’t feel ‘white’, or ‘Western’ anymore. Or who knows, maybe I never really felt too ‘Western’ anyway, thanks to my Russian and Chinese blood.
That could help to explain why, when I listened to the acceptance speech delivered by Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, I felt detached. In fact I felt great emptiness. I understood the words and their meaning, and I was even able to analyze what these words would mean to the world, were this forceful man to …
by Lesley Docksey / July 29th, 2016
by Stuart Littlewood / July 29th, 2016
A month on from the Brexit vote and Scotland’s EU-smitten First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, continues to stamp her foot in frustration. But hopefully, after her frantic tour of European capitals pleading for Scotland to remain a vassal of the EU one way or another, the absurdity of her stance is beginning to dawn on her. She’s a little less strident, a touch more subdued.
Nevertheless the two-times loser is still viewing the future through a wonky SNP prism, still pulling every trick and still straining every sinew to impose her peculiar brand of independence on Scotland, claiming it’s in our best …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 29th, 2016
Few sights are sadder in international diplomacy than seeing an aging figure desperate for honours. In a desperate effort to net them, he scurries around, cultivating, prodding, wishing to be noted. Finally, such an honour is netted, in all likelihood just to shut that overly keen individual up.
Such a figure is former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has become something of a prattler in chief, roaming an assortment of international stages in the vain hope that he might, just might, become the next UN Secretary General.
Nominees, of which former Portuguese prime minister António Guterres is said to be the …
Old Forms, New Content: Art Dealing with Crises
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / July 28th, 2016
Contemporary art is often criticised as pointless or overvalued by art market elites. Even the word ‘artist’ has lost much of its meaning. The many ongoing global socio-political crises seem to make even the idea of art fade into insignificance. Most art either reflects local reality (landscapes, cityscapes, portraits) or internal ‘reality’ (surrealism, conceptual art). But there are artists (in this case, I will focus on painters) who do not shy away from depicting the difficulties facing ordinary people or the elites who create those difficulties in the first place. Here we will look at particular ways in which painters …
Independent Jewish Voices criticize the JNF
by Yves Engler / July 28th, 2016
Despite a backlash evocative of those who defended the Jim Crow US South, Green Party members recently voted in favor of a resolution calling on Ottawa to stop subsidizing racist land covenants. Next weekend the Greens will make a final decision on whether they support the principles underlying a half-century old Supreme Court of Canada decision outlawing discriminatory land-use policies.
Two months ago Green Party member Corey Levine put forward a resolution calling on the Party to pressure the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the Jewish National Fund’s charitable status. The Independence Jewish Voices activist crafted a motion criticizing the JNF’s …
Sentenced to death on charges of apostasy and promoting atheism, Ashraf had his sentence reduced to eight years and 800 lashes.
by Paul MM Cooper / July 27th, 2016
Somewhere, maybe on the other side of the world from you right now, countless people are sitting locked in small rooms because of things they wrote. It’s a strange idea. How could the written word be so dangerous that the person responsible for it should be placed in a box, locked away from society along with arsonists and murderers? So many of these journalists and artists are unknown. They do not have hashtags. But one of them, Ashraf Fayadh, has become a rallying call around the world. More than 60 international arts and human rights groups have campaigned for his …
by Andre Vltchek / July 27th, 2016
New Cold War is now in full swing and the West is using both old and new tactics, in order to demonize and discredit all of its opponents: from Russia to China, Venezuela, North Korea, South Africa and Iran.
Our anti-imperialist media outlets, including those of the RT, TeleSUR, Press TV, CCTV and Sputnik are being labeled as ‘propaganda’ channels. Defensive and internationalist initiatives of our countries are branded as aggressions. Those governments that are relentlessly working on behalf of the people are defined as ‘evil’ or at least as ‘dictatorships’.
The Empire is erecting a complex and destructive web of lies …
by Ramzy Baroud / July 26th, 2016
(Author’s Note: Based on interviews with Palestinian refugees from Syria.)
The refugee camp of Yarmouk was ever present in his being, pulling him in and out of an abyss of persistent fears that urged him to never return. But what was this refugee without Yarmouk, his first haven, his last earth?
How could any other spot in this unwelcoming universe ever be a ‘home’ when he had learned that only Palestine, which he had never visited, can ever be a home? When questioned, he always answered without hesitation: “I am from the village of so and so in Palestine.” Yet the Yarmouk …
The Northern Territory, Torture, and Australia’s Detention Disease
by Binoy Kampmark / July 26th, 2016
What we’re changing is a culture in an organisation within the youth detention system and I think we’ve come a long way in that time.
— Adam Giles, NT Chief Minister, ABC News, July 26, 2016
It was an image that would not have been out of place in the sickly procession of pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay during the ill-fated and misnamed war on terror. Here was a young man, seated, strapped in and euphemistically “restrained,” verging on catatonic; on his head, a suffocating bag.
Within hours of the Australian investigative news program Four Corners covering that …
by Baheya Malaty / July 26th, 2016
In the summer of 2014, the people of Ferguson were brutally subjected to a military-style crackdown by local law enforcement following the murder of teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Police officers who appeared more like combat soldiers pointed military-grade assault rifles at peaceful protesters. Paramilitary units dressed in camouflage fired tear gas into residents’ front yards, and armored personnel carriers (APCs) rampaged through the streets of residential neighborhoods.
In the summer of 2015, at a weekend pool party in McKinney, Texas, police officer David Eric Casebolt brutally took down a fifteen year-old girl. Arriving …
Scandinavia on the Skids: The Failure of Social Democracy
(Part 5 in a 7 part series on Scandinavia’s “Socialism”)
by Ron Ridenour / July 26th, 2016
Now that Bernie Sanders is out of a presidential candidate job, some Danes want him to migrate to Denmark. The “Politiken” daily newspaper published a chronicle by Peter Ahrenfeldt Schroeder and Jakob Esmann, on April 28, 2016, heralding a new association, “Sanders for Prime Minister”.
“Bring Bernie to Denmark and make him Prime Minister,” they wrote. Their idea is that because Bernie Sanders is a leading advocate of traditional Danish social democracy, and since it is under serious attack, he would be an excellent candidate in the next Danish elections. Moreover, Sanders would collect taxes from the rich because a key …
Road to Hyperinflation or Cure for Debt Deflation?
by Ellen Brown / July 26th, 2016
Fifteen years after embarking on its largely ineffective quantitative easing program, Japan appears poised to try the form recommended by Ben Bernanke in his notorious “helicopter money” speech in 2002. The Japanese test case could finally resolve a longstanding dispute between monetarists and money reformers over the economic effects of government-issued money.
When then-Fed Governor Ben Bernanke gave his famous helicopter money speech to the Japanese in 2002, he was talking about something quite different from the quantitative easing they actually got and other central banks later mimicked. Quoting Milton Friedman, he said the government could reverse a deflation …
by Denis A. Conroy / July 25th, 2016
Voters have just elected a coalition of men and women to govern Australia for the next four years after a long drawn-out and insipid election campaign. A collection of almost equally conservative men and women lost the chance to govern by the proverbial whisker. The election campaign was a protracted affair running over six weeks. The outcome was protracted uncertainty, with observers vaunting fanfare for one side while consigning the other to feculent ignobility… imaginings of gladiatorial heft were strictly in the eyes of the beholding pundits. The Sturm und Drang of our reality television down under was a battle …
