Corporate TV news anchors including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes are reporting as fact–with fuming indignation–that Russia (and specifically Vladimir Putin) not only sought to influence the U.S. election (and–gosh!–promote “doubt” about the whole legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system) but to throw the vote to Donald Trump.
The main accusation is that the DNC and Podesta emails leaked through WikiLeaks were provided by state-backed Russian hackers (while they did not leak material hacked from the Republicans). I have my doubts on this. Former U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan and torture whistle-blower Craig Murray, a friend of Julian Assange, has stated that the DNC …
What’s left and what’s right? Usually it is obvious, but sometimes you have to take a step back and consider the bigger picture.
For example, the Toronto toll debate has exposed a lack of scrutiny of the leading source of corporate profit over the past century by many supposed leftists. Absent a political economy of the auto industrial complex, many Marxists have objectively allied themselves with the private car’s awesome political, cultural and ideological power.
Part 2: Readings in the Jewish Zionist control of the United States: Interviews with Francis Boyle, James Petras, and Kim Petersen
by B.J. Sabri / December 16th, 2016
From observing the Zionist expressions of power, one stands out above the rest: Dominance. Because it is an umbrella covering various forms of power and influence, dominance is versatile. In the politics of power, dominance is such a force that it can generate authority, adulation, and appeal for association. This phenomenon could happen anywhere and in any society regardless of the personal beliefs of those who acknowledge the Dominance Factor and work within its rules. However, our focus here is Authority. Among all the practical mechanism of Authority, control is the most looked-after commodity because those who possess and employ …
Turning Point USA is biased against black faculty and freedom of speech. Turning Pointis 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded on June 5, 2012. They sponsor Professor Watch List, a website meant to expose and document college professors who allegedly discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom. Listed on this watch list are 147 US college professors who have supposedly expressed leftist perspectives. Turning Point accept tips for new additions to the Professor Watch List, but claims to only publish profiles on incidents that have already been reported somewhere else.
Turning Point’s mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of …
I just released this new song in solidarity with the Muslim community. It is called From Denver to Dearborn.
From Denver to Dearborn is produced by Giuseppe. It is about the rise of neo fascism and how nazism, white supremacy, and patriarchy are being more and more normalized by the media and people bowing down to repression. I wrote this in solidarity with the Muslim population who face discrimination, surveillance, and attacks. During WWII the Grand Mosque of Paris housed the Jewish population from nazis and after Hurricane Katrina
a mosque in the neighborhood of Algiers was converted into a community …
Nixon’s final defeat, now underway, can only be understood in the context of a future that is currently manifest, as prognosticated by our greatest writers. Today’s circumstances are just as overpowering as “The World State” of Aldous Huxley’s The Brave New World (1932) with its hypnopaedic education of children and discouragement of critical thinking whilst the people bathed in an abundance of material goodies.
A quickie comparison of Orwell to Huxley explains the compelling relevance of Huxley to today:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book,
Intent and causation are important features in the course of history. The former envisages motive and hope, irrespective of outcome; the latter envisages consequence. Often, these get muddled in the jumbled process of reasoning. An intervention in the affairs of another state goes awry; a historical incident goes belly up with ferocious consequences. Suddenly, in the aftermath, we are wise, we knew better, and we can categorise plans as venal and characters as wicked.
In a world of Clinton-Trump machinations, distinctions about intent and causation have fallen into a soup of conjecture. The stakes to win in November were so high …
Some fifteen years ago, when I lived in Hanoi, I used to come very often to the rooftop bar at the Meritus Hotel for an evening drink, just to feel the gentle breeze and to spot ancient cargo boats majestically sailing on the surface of the Red River. Sometimes the river could be clearly visible, but often it was covered by fog, like in an old Vietnamese painting.
There were villages on the horizon, consisting mainly of simple ‘tunnel’ houses, and I could also see a few skyscrapers in the center of the city. Far below, the buildings on the shores …
When a veteran war reporter like Robert Fisk constructs his argument regarding the siege of Aleppo based on ‘watching’ video footage, then one can truly comprehend the near impossibility of adequate media coverage on the war in Syria.
In a recent article in the British Independent, Fisk reflects on the siege, uprising and atrocious Nazi massacres in Warsaw, Poland in 1944. The terribly high cost of that war leads him to reject the French assertion that the current siege in Aleppo is the ‘worst massacre since World War Two.’
Did Canada lead the international charge against apartheid and white rule in South Africa or criticize a country that, in fact, did?
Recent commentary about Canada’s policy towards southern Africa’s liberation struggles distorts history that should inform debate over Canada’s planned military deployment to the continent today.
A Globe and Mail article last month described “Canada’s strong support for the anti-apartheid movement” while a Kingston Whig Standard story last week claimed a “senior Canadian diplomat and his wife became engaged in providing support to a wide array of South Africans actively opposing the apartheid regime.” A Le Devoir …
In recent times, and probably since the establishment of universal voting, presidents-elect have systematically violated or broken their promises to their supporters.
This essay begins with the campaign promises of the outgoing President Barack Obama and the President-Elect Donald Trump. We will then examine the reasons why rhetorical populist, peaceful and democratic promises always accompany campaigns and are immediately followed by the victor appointing cabinet members who are committed to elite-driven, militarist and authoritarian policies – so far from the expectations of the voters.
Even the most powerful systems of propaganda inadvertently allow uncomfortable truths to slip out into the public domain. Consider a recent BBC News interview following the death of Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro. Dr Denise Baden, Associate Professor in Business Ethics at the University of Southampton, who has studied Castro’s leadership and Cuban business models, was asked by BBC News presenter Justine Mawhinney for her views on Cuba and Castro. It’s fair to say that Baden’s responses didn’t follow the standard establishment line echoed and amplified in much of the ‘mainstream’ media.
According to unnamed officials a classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) blames the Russian government for, among other things, providing WikiLeaks with hacked emails during the run-up to 2016 presidential election. One source referred to this conclusion as the “consensus view” of the intelligence community. Though if that’s the case, then someone forgot to tell all those agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who, in their desire to obtain proof beyond a reasonable doubt (imagine that), have up to now declined to make a definitive statement. Ditto that for the Office of the Director …
Elections have consequences, as the cliché goes, and those consequences are unpredictable, perhaps never more unpredictable than when no one wins the election — but someone takes office anyway. When that happens, the country is largely defenseless, as we learned so disastrously in 2000.
That was when we had five unprincipled Supreme Court justices to thank for promoting an actual (but uncounted) loser to the presidency. George W. Bush proceeded to reward the country’s wary trust by blithely ignoring warnings of a terrorist attack, then using 9/11 to jingo up the fear-laden public mood and urge us …
In of itself, technological development is benign. But behind every use is a human agent, and behind that agent is a motive, an inspiration, an agenda. Monitoring one’s employees has become the great mainstay of what companies claim is a productive exercise. The watched employee will have incentives to behave, to prosper, and to fulfil the ethos of the company.
Management at the mining giant Rio Tinto have ambitions to take the technology of monitoring employees to another level – quite literally. Proud to have been at the forefront of various technical innovations in the employment field, the recently proposed surveillance …
“May you live in interesting times” was a curse the ancient Chinese hurled at their adversaries, wishing them strife, oppression, and struggle. It applies to us now because for all the uncertainties a Trump presidency holds, it will certainly be an interesting time, filled with opportunities for resistance and perhaps revolution.
Big T’s pedal-to-the-metal exploitation of humanity and the planet will accelerate the vicious policies of his two predecessors, poisoning the environment, forcing our financial will around the world, killing thousands of people in imperialist wars, manipulating other nations, modernizing our nuclear weapons, and jailing dissenters at home. Fortress America will …
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, but the New POTUS is on the Record with Insults
by Paul Haeder / December 12th, 2016
Any jackass can knock down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one. LBJ
There will be a million takes on the election results, on the first 100 days in office, and on what four years will play out for the US of A. Towns where I live and work in — Portland, OR, Vancouver and Spokane, WA — sometimes profess that the head of the “free” (sic) world makes no difference to their respective metropolitan and county politics and doings.
We know it’s not true, and many times in this column space with DV, I take the microcosmic …
On November 30th, I walked into the historic building housing the Cuban Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was getting cold and it was drizzling. Several Vietnamese guards stood silently at the entrance. Flowers were everywhere and a big black photo of Comandante Fidel was facing a busy street.
I explained who I was, and an embassy official first let me into a courtyard decorated with more flowers and images, and later into a room with a beautiful book, into which I penned several sentences of grief, but also admiration and hope.
“People come day and night,” Cuban officials told me. “It is …
In three days, from December 11-13, 1981, U.S.-trained troops in Central America’s smallest, most densely populated republic, El Salvador, rounded up and killed over a thousand unarmed civilians in the hamlet of El Mozote, in Morazán province, near the Honduran border. This massacre, I believe, still has the dubious distinction of being the largest mass killing of civilians by state forces in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century.
Most people who know anything about the Central American civil wars in the last decades of the Cold War know that they were U.S. proxy wars, the Reagan Administration’s “line in the …
