We Are Calling for People to Occupy the Debates
by Kevin Zeese / September 11th, 2016
A recent USA Today poll found 76% of voters want debates with four candidates including not just the two most hated candidates in history, the Republican and Democratic nominees and their vice presidential running mates, but Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka of the Greens, and Gary Johnson and Bill Weld of the Libertarians.
Any candidate on enough ballots to achieve 270 electoral college votes should be in the debates. The people have a right to see all candidates debating the issues who are on their ballots.
The deceptive debate commission, which is called a debate commission just to hide the truth: …
by Yves Engler / September 11th, 2016
By funding international journalism projects Ottawa shapes perceptions of Canadian policies abroad.
Last Saturday the Ottawa Citizen published a feature titled “The story of ‘the Canadian vaccine’ that beat back Ebola”. According to the article, staff reporter Elizabeth Payne’s “research was supported by a travel grant from the International Development Research Centre.” The laudatory story concludes with Guinea’s former health minister thanking Canada “for the great service you have rendered to Guinea” and a man who received the Ebola vaccine showing “reporters a map of Canada that he had carved out of wood and displayed in his living …
by James Petras / September 10th, 2016
US empire building depends on regional regimes’ support, especially in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. These proxy regimes fulfill valuable military roles securing control over neighboring regions, populations and territory.
In recent times, however, we witness the same proxies developing their own tendency toward expansionist policies – in pursuit of their own mini-empires.
Client regimes with local or regional ambitions now present Washington with new points of contention. At a time when the US empire …
by Ron Ridenour / September 10th, 2016
US President Barak Obama took to three former enemy targets in Asia this year.
His mission in Vietnam was to sell “lethal weapons”. This comes after a 50 year embargo of selling it weapons, and after the US weapons industry had scored billions selling death tools to its government so that it could conduct the un-provoked war (1960-75). The cost in human lives: between 1.5 and 3.9 three million Vietnamese and 58,000 US aggressors.
Weapon sales are conditioned, naturally, on Vietnam respecting US-defined human rights.
In return for this generous offer, the Vietnamese government commits itself to drop its Russian-built MIG-21 jet fighters …
by Jonathan Cook / September 10th, 2016
The row about Facebook censoring the iconic photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl, Kim Phúc, fleeing a US napalm attack has led to justified outrage. But it is also helping to solidify deeply misguided assumptions about the supposed differences between “new” and “old” media.
That view is illustrated in this article today by Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg. She states:
Media consumption today is increasingly digitized, but even more so it is curated. News and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard have overtaken traditional news outlets as our
…
by Binoy Kampmark / September 9th, 2016
Empires are often in the habit of producing brutes. Colonies, once left to their own devices, can either improve in the face of history, or degenerate. The Philippines provides an example of cruelty fashioned into office: dictatorships with a pro-US strain; subservient administrations.
What is in power in Manila is Rodrigo Duterte, a figure from that same cloth, albeit of a different, independent strain. For the first time in decades, the Philippines has a leader who insists on the sovereign issue against the interests of the United States. Even when it comes to the extrajudicial killing of 1,300 drug suspects over …
by Ralph Nader / September 9th, 2016
Fifty years ago this month (on September 9, 1966), President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety laws that launched a great life-saving program for the American People.
I was there that day at the White House at the invitation of President Johnson who gave me one of the signing pens. In 1966, traffic fatalities reached 50,894 or 5.50 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. By 2014, the loss of life was 32,675 or 1.07 fatalities per hundred million vehicle miles traveled. A huge reduction!
This was an astounding success for a federal safety program that included mandatory vehicle-safety standards …
Toxic cop-unions, Francis Scott Key's vicious racism, and traumatic encephalopathy
by Denis R. O'Brien / September 9th, 2016
The Colin Kaepernick National Anthem media-storm raises a number of issues that have yet to be addressed in the MSM, and I just wonder whether maybe now isn’t the time to introduce some of them before it’s too late and the story is pushed aside by the flood of October Surprises that will surely dominate the hottest month of the election cycle. And so here are three antinomian issues you may find worthy of studied consideration . . . or raging ridicule. As always here at LogoPhere, your choice.
Issue …
Hillary's Campaign is Degenerating into crude anti-Russian Propaganda
by Andre Vltchek / September 9th, 2016
It is now September 2016, just two months before the Presidential elections, and both political camps have already managed to disgust a great number of the US voters, by offering almost no comprehensive political or economic program, by offering … close to nothing!
While Donald Trump is lashing out at the ‘enemy within’, during his dark moments that are increasingly resembling an advanced stage of delirium tremens (complete with a mad chase after white mice and promises to cleanse society from some imaginary and filthy rapists and social benefits guzzlers, that are constantly pouring from the south), Ms. Clinton is saddling …
by Edward S. Herman / September 9th, 2016
“Containing the United States” is, of course, a ridiculous and self-contradictory idea in the U.S. and Western ideological and propaganda system. We all know that the United States had to “contain” the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991, and since then has had the task of containing Russia and China. Only they threaten, bully, aggress and worry countries like Poland and Vietnam. Obama has had to reassure them both of our steadfast stand against Russian and Chinese military attacks. NATO has, of course, expanded greatly over the past several decades, despite the deaths of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, …
by Rosemary and Walter Brasch / September 9th, 2016
Before a football game against the Green Bay Packers two weeks ago, Colin Kaepernick, San Francisco 49ers quarterback, refused to stand for the pre-game patriotic ceremony that is wound around the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner.”
Kaepernick later said he was “not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” and said his stance, a quiet form of civil disobedience, was to him “bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people …
Experts know panhandling and “brother can you spare some change” signs are tips of the iceberg
by Paul Haeder / September 8th, 2016
A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, ‘Get a boat!’ ―Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure
It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A
…
by James Hoover / September 8th, 2016
Drawing on a community service mentality, President Obama failed to grasp the profit-maximizing plans of the health care industry. He assumed that the industry would really jump at the chance of serving millions of new customers.
In contrast, like sharks, when Congress was considering the Affordable Care Act (ACA), health care lobbyists swarmed the Capital – eight for each member of Congress. Their goal was to insure maximum profits with only industry priorities. In step with their benefactors, Republicans and the conservative media odiously dissed any health care reform, even without knowing any details about ACA, spitting out the word …
by James Petras / September 8th, 2016
Large-scale political and economic challenges are confronting the US multi-national corporate elite. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Pfizer and scores of other multinational tax evaders are facing the triple threat of multi-billion dollar fines, the redistribution of their wealth and the possible reintroduction of equitable socio-economic programs, which could undermine their power.
Washington-backed exporters and financiers, eager to impose free trade agreements on European and Asian business classes, have been faced with stiff resistance and outright rejection.
In …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / September 8th, 2016
Let me ask you one question. Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could?
— Bob Dylan, “Masters of War” from his 1963 recording “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”
On Tuesday, September 6th, twenty-four hour monitoring by the country’s Legal Centre for Rights and Development (LCRD) recorded the bombings by the Saudi led “coalition”, armed by the US and UK and advised by their military specialists, thus collusion and co-operation of both countries render them equally culpable for the carnage.
Yemen has a population of just 24.41 million (2013 figure) and according to the Rural Poverty …
by Anthony Tarrant / September 8th, 2016
So, 40 years later, we come back to commemorate this struggle against the historical backdrop of a people who have been so terrorized and traumatized and stigmatized that we have been taught to be scared, intimidated, always afraid, distrustful of one another, and disrespectful of one another. But the Attica’s rebellion was a countermove in that direction. I call it the niggerization of a people, not just black people, because America been niggerized since 9/11. When you’re niggerized, you’re unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, hated for who you are. You become so scared that you defer to the powers
…
Hope for the Philippines?
by Gary Leupp / September 8th, 2016
Son of a bitch (var. sonovabitch): Something that is very difficult or unpleasant. Used to express surprise, disappointment, anger, etc. (based on Merriam-Webster)
Rodrigo Duterte, elected president of the Philippines last May, was supposed to meet with President Obama in Laos on the sidelines of the ASEAN meeting Monday. He had referred to Obama as a putang ina (“son of a bitch”) in a news conference, and earlier to U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg with what was reported as a homophobic slur.
(I understand that Duterte routinely uses the word bakla or “gay” to refer to elite men, but — like most Filipinos …
by Robert Hunziker / September 8th, 2016
A major new scientific report, “Explaining Ocean Warming” was released on September 5th. It is grim.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, the findings are based upon peer-reviewed research compiled by 80 scientists from 12 countries. It is the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on the subject of warming of the ocean.
Significantly, the ocean has absorbed more than 90% of “enhanced heating from climate change since the 1970s.” In other words, the ocean has been “shielding us” from the extensive affects of global warming. And, the consequences for the ocean are “absolutely …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 8th, 2016
Australia’s distance from various centres of power has been called a tyranny. But flip that tyranny over, and you have an assortment of benefits for local development, the mighty laboratory that bred a middle class experiment supposedly egalitarian and oiled by principles of social justice.
These days, such distance is said to have been overcome, the effects of instant communication, rapid travel, and transport. People still think Australia might be somewhere in Europe, but that mistake does not get away from assumptions that a wandering finger on a globe would be able to land safely on Sydney or Melbourne.
Those imaginative creatures …
by Bruce Lerro / September 7th, 2016
Why is violating a sports ritual such a big deal?
Rather than focus on either the nobility, courage, arrogance or ungratefulness of Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand up for the national anthem, I think it is more revealing to consider why it seems so important to sports fans that he stand up for the national anthem. It has been pointed out that when Donald Trump claims he wants’ to “make America great again” the “Trumpettes” cheer wildly. The implication, of course, is that America is not so hot now. But when a sports athlete also says America isn’t so hot, refuses …
