Latest articles
What Elor Azaria Taught Us about Israel
by Ramzy Baroud / January 17th, 2017
For some, the ‘manslaughter’ conviction – following the murder by Israeli army medic, Elor Azaria, of already incapacitated Palestinian man, Fattah al-Sharif – is finally settling a protracted debate regarding where Israelis stand on Palestinian human rights.
Nearly 70 percent of the Israeli public supports calls to pardon the convicted soldier who is largely perceived among Israelis as the “child of us all.”
Israeli leaders are also lining up to lend their support to Azaria and his family. These sympathetic politicians include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and ministers Naftali Bennett and Miri Regev, among others. Leading opposition leaders are also …
by Edward Curtin / January 17th, 2017
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
— Martin Luther King, Strength to Love, 1963
As Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 – people will be encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave). Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice …
by Jonathan Cook / January 16th, 2017
Forget the empty posturing of world leaders in Paris yesterday. This photo tells us what the Israel-Palestine “conflict” is really about.
Imagine for a second that the little boy – how old is he, eight, nine? – is your son, trying to adjust his keffiyeh because it keeps falling over his eyes and he can’t see anything. Imagine your small son surrounded by masked Israeli “soldiers”, or what looks more like a Jewish militia than an army. Imagine that the boy is likely soon to be bundled into the back …
by Radmilo Bozinovic / January 16th, 2017
The curtain on the long and sad quadriennial spectacle of “democratically” reselecting American executive government is presumably falling with the approaching formal inauguration of the 45th President of the U.S. While past experiences — along with objective fatigue from a grotesquely distended process — would suggest a relatively “business-as-usual” transfer of power within closed elite circles, the controversy and acrimony surrounding the incoming Trump administration persist.
Much of this is currently played out in conjunction with Martin Luther King Day, highlighted by protests against the crude, divisive and often racist rhetoric of the president-elect himself and yet many other reactionary elements …
by Robert Hunziker / January 16th, 2017
The waters of the Pacific off the California coast are transparently clear. Problem is: Clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into desert.
From Alaska to Central America, and beyond, sea life has been devastated over the past three years like never before. Is it Fukushima, or nature running its own course, or some kind of perverse wrath emanating from global warming? For a hint, scientists refer to the lethal ocean warming over the past few years as “the Warm Blob.”
After all, global warming hits the ocean much, much harder than land. …
But Beware of the False Left
by Kim Petersen / January 16th, 2017
One Linear Representation of Left-Right Political Spectrum
Paul Craig Roberts was the United States assistant secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan. Nowadays he writes about American domestic, economic, and foreign policy with a souciant eye as to the destruction caused by American elitists to regular people at home and abroad.
In his most recent article, he investigates “why 10 of 11 US aircraft carriers are lined up in a row in dock allegedly for maintanence. [sic]” The reason given to him …
Capital versus Humanity
by Zarefah Baroud / January 15th, 2017
The catastrophic climate change is no longer a subject for argument, at least on a mainstream level within the science community. Yet, as temperatures continue to rise, American efforts to combat global warming, sadly seem to decline.
President Elect, Donald Trump is more concerned by the economic cost of combating global warming, and has repeatedly rejected United States’ role in the Paris Climate Agreement that took place in December of 2015.
In fact, Trump has pledged to end US involvement in the Paris climate deal, arguing that the main concern of the American government is the continuation of the construction of …
GPS relocates the foreign policy narrative
by Jason Hirthler / January 14th, 2017
If you walk through Times Square and try to locate yourself on your mobile GPS, you’ll find it often places you several blocks from where you are. One assumes the massive electricity being pumped through the grid sends GPS technology haywire. Tourists veer to and fro, led astray by their mobile masters. But you don’t need to come to New York to experience a dysfunctional GPS. Just tune in the Fareed Zakaria’s show GPS every Sunday at 10 a.m. on CNN. But prepare for a nauseating ride. Even as Fareed breaks the mould of his grimace of humanitarian concern, smiling …
A Maximum of 20 Times The Wage Of Their Lowest-Paid Worker
by Adnan Al-Daini / January 13th, 2017
The Leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has proposed that bosses’ pay should be no more than 20 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker in the company. The salaries of top bosses have reached grotesque levels as a multiple of average pay. For example, the average pay of the CEOs of the FTSE100 companies in Britain has gone up from 47 times average wage in the 1990s to around 180 times today. The disparity in income will be even more shocking if the multiples are related to the minimum wage.
The …
And the Liberal-Left Is Helping
by Paul Craig Roberts / January 13th, 2017
Reuters reports that 2,700 US troops accompanied by tanks are moving across Poland toward the Russian border. Col. Christopher Norrie, commander of the 3rd Armoured Brigade Combat Team, declared: “The main goal of our mission is deterrence and prevention of threats.” Apparently, the colonel is not sufficiently bright to realize that far from preventing threats, the force he is leading presents as a threat. And to no less a military power than Russia.
What is the point of this miniscule force? It would not constitute a threat to Russia if it were 100 times larger, perhaps even one thousand times larger. …
The CIA, Trump and Unverified News
by Binoy Kampmark / January 13th, 2017
London — Morning breakfast news on the BBC’s Radio Four on Friday was a delightful affair filled with discussions on Russia (when do we not talk about that busy, stirring Bear these days?), Donald Trump, dossiers and the intelligence fraternity. Did it even matter that various sources have been unverified, subject matter lumped together in cumbersome conversations on fake news, sexual frolics and the like?
Discussants on the Beeb who kept listeners company over coffee included former, recently confessed spook Frederick Forsyth, for years the go-to creator of the spy narrative, and the official intelligence historian Sir Christopher Andrew.
For Forsyth, the …
by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall / January 13th, 2017
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg is a meticulously documented investigation of the historical roots of class inequality in the US. Despite the warm and fuzzy founding myths all American children are taught in school, the foundation for class inequality was laid during the earliest colonization of North America. The wealthy English elite who financed the colonies viewed the New World as a giant workhouse for England’s surplus poor (following the Enclosure Acts that drove them off the commons). British …
Without Substantiation, Media Integrity Suffers
by Kim Petersen / January 13th, 2017
We are being assaulted by mass media “news” of alleged hacks by alleged actors, allegations of politicians compromised by financial dealings, and sexual hijinks.
First, governments and media do not belong in the bedrooms of the people.
Second, outside of religion and corporate/state media (let’s rubbish the misnomer of “mainstream” for what is predominately a “propagandic stream”), credible evidence is indispensable.
Imagine if justice were administered mainly on hearsay (ignoring the fact that justice is too often lacking in society). It is a cardinal rule of justice that rendering a decision …
by Paul Craig Roberts / January 12th, 2017
There is no doubt that US President Barak Obama is a war criminal as are his military and intelligence officials and most of the House and Senate.
Obama is the first president to keep the US at war for the entirety of his eight-year regime. During 2016 alone the US dropped 26,171 bombs on wedding parties, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, schools, people in their homes and walking their streets, and farmers tilling their fields in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
What does the administration have to show for eight years of illegal military interventions in …
by Mitchell Thompson / January 12th, 2017
Canadian capitalism is in crisis, with household debt reaching a record high 166.9 per cent of disposable income and about 208 per cent of GDP, and wage stagnation is a primary cause.
Richard Vague told the Globe and Mail “any country whose private-debt-to-GDP ratio goes beyond 150 per cent and that has a five-year growth rate of 18 per cent or greater in that ratio experiences a financial crisis at some point.” The Globe says Canada has already passed both benchmarks in its ongoing borrowing binge.
The headlines get grimmer every week and the causes, outlined by the business press, are surely …
by Graham Peebles / January 12th, 2017
In the early 1900s when the idea that industrialisation could potentially result in global warming was first posited, the consensus was that it was unlikely, and in any case, an increase in temperature was to be welcomed. What possible harm could it do?
Well, we are now witnessing the widespread consequences of climate change. Destructive, life-threatening effects, which demand a fundamental shift in the way we are living if we are to preserve the integrity of the planet, and protect the rich abundance of life on Earth.
Warmer year on year
The industrial revolution, beginning in Britain in the late 17th century, then …
by Bashar Salame / January 12th, 2017
When it comes to healthcare Donald Trump has a two-part plan, repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better. As with other proposals by the president elect, specifics remain scarce. Upon meeting President Obama and later Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor regarded as the architect of The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Donald Trump came to the same realization most Americans do when the law is broken down, he actually liked it.
Reduced to individual components, president Obama’s signature legislation is extremely favorable. Most, if not all, individuals agree health insurers ought not deny coverage based on preexisting conditions or a costly …
by Matt Peppe / January 12th, 2017
In the last full week of Barack Obama’s eight year tenure as President of the United States of America, dozens of political prisoners still sit in cages across the nation’s prisons, rotting away as Obama consciously chooses not to exercise the power to simply free them with the stroke of a pen. Many activists for Puerto Rican independence, Native American and African American rights, and other causes were targeted by the political police’s illegal COINTELPRO program and convicted in sham trials. Now elderly, some in poor health, they may effectively be facing death sentences unless Obama decides within the …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 12th, 2017
It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust unthinkable.
— Zygmunt Bauman
Modernity, as the late Zygmunt Bauman noted in his magisterially provocative Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) has not necessarily entailed enlightenment, the liberation from immaturity. Since the cave dweller existence, humanity has retained traditional forms of savagery. What mattered was the sheer lethality of it all, driven by a sociopathic rationality: mass murder became industrialised; population control became ever more ruthless.
The zealous could be, essentially, more efficient, thereby doing, as Adolf Eichmann did, a sterling job for his employers in the Nazi death machine. Hitler may have …
Repent, and Repeal Obamacare!
by William Boardman / January 12th, 2017
No, seriously – repeal Obamacare!
Yes, that is what the ideological one-noters among Republicans want to do, so let them do it! Of course it’s not that simple, as even two-note Republicans have begun to acknowledge wanly, since flat-out repeal could make enemies for the party, maybe twenty million of the suddenly uninsured. That’s almost ten times the number of votes Hillary won by. Bring it on.
In reality, Obamacare threatens to become a deadly serious tar baby for Republicans: the more they mess with it, the more it’s going to entangle them in sticky …
