Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac and Other Activists is a virtual encyclopedia of the global drug trade. Author John L Potash devotes special attention to the long involvement of the British and US governments in illegal drug trafficking – for the political and financial benefit of the elite families who control these governments. Most of the book focuses on MKULTRA, the top secret CIA program devoted to developing and experimenting with mind altering drugs, such as LSD, MDA (an ecstasy precursor), STP, PCP and Scopolamine.
Bill Lee Seeks to Be Labor’s Anti-Candidate in 2016 Vermont Governor Race
by David Van Deusen / September 3rd, 2016
MONTPELIER, Vermont — Anyone who grew up in New England or Quebec in the 1970s, any baseball fan really, knows tales of the Spaceman. Pitching for the Boston Red Sox from 1969-1978 and the Montreal Expos from 1979-1982, yarns of Bill sprinkling “marijuana dust” on his pancakes to help him cope with big city bus fumes abound. We Vermonters know him as an adoptive (and eccentric) favorite son, involving himself politically in support of single payer healthcare and endorsing Anthony Pollina’s own 2008 run for governor. Now the Spaceman …
Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, Pantheon was released August 23rd. Dr. Thompson is a Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan and remains on the Faculty of Temple University. Noted by The New York Times as a “superb work of history” ((“’Blood in the Water,’ a Gripping Account of the Attica Prison Uprising,” by …
September 9th is fast approaching- a day that stands out in the celebrated history of domestic resistance against official State terror and institutional slavery in this country. On that day in 1971 thousands of prisoners entombed in an upstate prison in rural New York, perhaps the worst in the United States at the time, said enough as they seized Attica. They said no to slave wages, no to physical abuse and no to psychological torture; they demanded improved living conditions, medical treatment, religious freedom and educational and training opportunities. Most important, they demanded an end to the systemic assault upon …
What a fine race it has become! Both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump are competing in it as a who is the ‘tougher guy/gal’ in what could be easily described as a 21st Century Tarantino-style (or Scorsese-style) political pulp fiction gore.
What they both utter, may often sound like some staged bluff: “Are you talking to me? Hey, there’s nobody else here… Are you talking to me?”
But just think for a moment what would really happen if one of them sticks to his or her ‘promises’ and ‘principles’, after getting elected! (The bullets would be flying, the nukes exploding, and millions …
Al Gore, former Democratic nominee in 2000, has a warning for anyone concerned about climate change that is planning on voting for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein: don’t! He urges them to vote for Hillary Clinton, saying that he knows from “experience” the damage that third party candidates can do to spoil it for corporatist Democrats. We explain why he’s wrong.
An elitist, nationalist, bias dominates all areas of Canada’s paper of record.
On the front of last weekend’s Style section the Globe and Mail profiled Sonja Bata on turning 90. Business partner and wife of the deceased Thomas Bata, the Globe lauded Sonja for the “many contributions she has made to Canada”, including the Bata Shoe Museum and various other establishment “cultural, environmental and social causes.” The article touched on the shoemaker’s early history and described how she “traveled the world building a shoe empire – between 1946 and 1960, 25 new factories were built and 1700 Bata …
In the period from 1945 until approximately 1989, the white empire in North America learned to rely upon its cadres of military officers throughout the world to directly control its non-white (in the US a term which extends to most of the world’s population) dominions. This was defended by the pretext — inherited from the propaganda of WWII — that the Red Army which had quite surprisingly defeated Western attempts to destroy it culminating in Operation Barbarossa (a campaign that would have been impossible without the tacit consent of France, Britain and the US), would be able to drive the …
We’ve got the best,
Glass bottles. Goats and girls,
In the town we call the World.
— Ditty on Charters Towers, circa late 19th Century
Charters Towers, North Queensland — The Australian outback shrinks human life forms. In a manner no doubt similar to an extra-terrestrial experience, the human form becomes minute, placed before yawning spaces and vast horizons. It also explains the sheer bombast behind those who, in places of intense isolation, find grand terms to reduce space and insignificance.
It is with wonder that such hotels as The Imperial (“Impy” for the locals) water and feed patrons in the small town of Ravenswood …
… a landmark agreement that will save lives and ease the immense human suffering caused by armed conflict around the world. It will reduce the number of illegal arms …We should be proud of the role Britain has played to secure this ambitious agreement … that will make our world safer for all.
— David Cameron on the Arms Trade Treaty, April 2, 2013.
The death toll in Yemen is now so high that the International Committee of the Red Cross is donating “entire morgue units” to hospitals still standing, having so far escaped the illegal Saudi assault, backed, advised and …
The Bolivian cooperatives’ protests and their August 25 killing of the Bolivian Vice Minister of the Interior Rodolfo Illanes requires us to question our assumptions about cooperatives. What are the Bolivian mining cooperatives? Most began during the Great Depression as miners banded together to work a mine in common. However, like many cooperatives in the US that arose out of the 1960s, they have turned into small businesses. Regardless of their initial intentions, cooperatives existing in a surrounding capitalist environment must compete in business practices or go under.
The Bolivian mining cooperatives themselves underwent this process, and have become businesses whose …
Down with Capitalist Australia’s Military Build Up!
U.S., Australian Militaries: Stay Out of the South China Sea!
by Trotskyist Platform / August 31st, 2016
In October 2015, the U.S. warship, the USS Lassen destroyer (pictured left) sailed through waters, not far from mainland China, that are claimed by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) as its territorial waters. This provocative action in the South China Sea was fully backed by the right-wing Australian government and the ALP Opposition. Moreover, the Defence White Paper of 25 February 2016 released by Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull’s government announced a massive military buildup for the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) which the White Paper could not …
America cannot "lead the world" without a valid election
by L'Ordre / August 31st, 2016
When confronted on his alleged foreign interference in the US election by leaking emails discrediting Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Julian Assange rightly pointed out that he doesn’t get a chance to vote in the US election. He should have that chance, he implied, due to his own country of Australia being an involuntary member of the US “alliance”.
This argument is more powerful than the mere quip Assange intended it to be. If America is a democracy, and America believes in its responsibility to “lead the world” as President Obama loves to repeat in his speeches, should it not validate this mandate …
If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes US President, she will be the first neoconservative to actually occupy that office. The neoconservatives have been an ascendant force in policymaking since the Reagan administration, and remained (through Vice President Dick Cheney) an unsteady heartbeat from the presidency in the G.W. Bush administration. Now possession of the highest office in the land is within their grasp.
This is important because the neoconservatives are wedded to war, death and destruction. It is the foundation of their policy and it dominates the culture that they …
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing”, opposed …
If I told you that Democratic Party lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose brother John Podesta chairs Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is a registered foreign agent on the Saudi government’s payroll, you’d probably think I was a Trump-thumping, conspiratorial nutcase. But it’s true.
The lobby firm created by both Tony and John Podesta in 1988 receives $140,000 a month from the Saudi government, a government that beheads nonviolent dissidents, uses torture to extract forced confessions, doesn’t allow women to drive, and bombs schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods in neighboring Yemen.
The Podesta Group’s March 2016 filing, required under the Foreign Agents …
The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns
So long, farewell, goodbye
— Modest Mouse, “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine”
We all know that our money will be worthless soon, yes? Our national debt is over 19 trillion and counting, gaining approximately one trillion dollars per year.
With the rigged Democratic presidential nomination behind us, the US election reality show continues. The mass media is creating sensations around what has become a national embarrassment with this contest of the lesser of the two crazies. On the one hand we have Donald Trump, depicted as a quintessential narcissist and on the other, Hillary Clinton who is often portrayed as a sociopath. Hype is created by putting these labels on the candidates, pitting one personality disorder against the other.
This is a corporate sponsored election charade doing business as usual and distracting people from the real power behind …
The media battle between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has sidetracked the impact of an unusual congressional campaign and diluted its essential meaning — voter dissatisfaction. In the democratic primary race for Washington’s 7th congressional district, State Senator Pramila Jayapal’s victory relates an important story of this election year — the public favors a new Democratic Party, which is partially guided by the objectives and politics of Senator Bernie Sanders. State Senator Jayapal, founder and executive director of OneAmerica, a pro-immigration advocacy group, was one of the first 2016 congressional candidates to earn an endorsement from …
Yemen is being destroyed. A US-backed “Saudi Coalition” has been bombing and shelling Yemen for 16 months. The UN puts the civilian death toll at 3700, but (aside from the question of why combatants’ lives apparently only count if they are Western soldiers) this probably vastly under-represents the death toll by both direct violence and by the indirect effects of the war. Most of the country has no reliable access to clean water and people, particularly young children, are dying of disease and deprivation.
On August 22nd, two eminent commentators gave interviews on Yemen. Harper’s magazine editor Andrew Cockburn …
