Latest articles
The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: Book Review
by Roger D. Harris / June 14th, 2017
Accused of being a “Useful Idiot or Propagandist for Russia,” labor and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik is anything but. His book, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia, rather, holds the US to the same level of scrutiny as the Russophobes insist we examine Russia. Kovalik’s careful dissection of the US record makes Russia’s transgressions pale in comparison.
American exceptionalism – the conviction that our excrement smells like perfume and everyone else’s stinks – is deconstructed. Kovalik documents how the US “has fought against nearly every war of liberation …
by Jonathan Cook / June 14th, 2017
After more than two decades at the Guardian, George Monbiot has finally written a column in which he concedes that the entire British media has a problem, including its supposedly left-liberal elements like the Guardian. After years of cheerleading for his employer, that is a momentous, though not entirely surprising, turn-around. It would, after all, be hard for a serious commentator to overlook the media’s wretched failings over the past two years in maligning Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and failing to grasp until the very last minute how powerfully his message resonated with much of the public.
Monbiot observes:
They
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Living in a stop and frisk nightmare, fifty years of Rip Van Winkle bedtime
by Paul Haeder / June 14th, 2017
Police state, corporate state, denuded duncery state — a blistery bunch of 80 percenters lost in a carnival of debt, malignant food, maladjusted education and the folly of a full-throttle powerfully propagandist media like a proverbial copper girdle wire around our collective consciousness. That So Called Liberal (sic) Press (sic) playing triple dirges for the death of any emaciated version of democracy with a capital D for dollar.
Feeding frenzy of the old and new rich class, and a …
by Stuart Littlewood / June 14th, 2017
Former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne, now editor of the London Evening Standard, calls Theresa May “dead woman walking”. Another former minister Anna Soubry says: “She is in a desperate position. It is untenable….”, while according to former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan she cannot lead us into another election and a leadership challenge is possible during the summer.
While stunned Conservatives try to recover their composure, the rest of us can amuse ourselves speculating on whether it’ll be messed-up May or her nemesis the charismatic lefty Jeremy Corbyn who’ll be leading the UK to the sunny uplands of post-Brexit opportunity in three …
by John Andrews / June 14th, 2017
Unsurprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn is walking around with a permanent grin on his face. He is rightly delighted with the achievement of the Labour Party in Britain’s recent general election. Given the two years of relentless abuse and ridicule that’s been heaped upon him by the mainstream media, together with the appalling treachery of most of his fellow Labour MPs who tried, but failed miserably, to oust him as leader, the result of the June 8 ballot was a ringing endorsement and validation of his remarkable accomplishment.
The victory of the Conservative Party over Labour was so marginal that they are compelled …
by Colin Jenkins / June 13th, 2017
Colin Kaepernick took a courageous and principled stand last season by kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games. This was done in response to a society that continues to systematically, culturally, and institutionally devalue Black lives. This devaluation is played out in many areas, including politics, economics, housing, employment, and perhaps most notably, within the criminal punishment system. Black lives are routinely extinguished by police in the streets without recourse, in the courts without pause, and in the prisons without hesitation. Entire generations of Black Americans have essentially been destroyed through the “school-to-prison pipeline” and a system of mass …
by Andre Vltchek / June 13th, 2017
“America first” and “to hell with the rest of the world”! One single stroke of hand, one signature, and over 1,000 hardworking people in Bali, Indonesia, suddenly ended up on the pavement. No second thoughts, no mercy. American savage capitalist ways met and embraced that fabled Indonesian feudalism, which was implanted into this country several decades ago, precisely after the 1965 military coup sponsored by the West.
U.S. President Donald Trump, always on the lookout for some great business opportunities, finally found one in Bali (and one more in West Java), a tropical, once paradise-like Indonesian island. And not just somewhere …
(Exchange-Value as the Receptacle/Mirror of Conceptual-Perception Within the General Commodity-Form)
by Michel Luc Bellemare / June 13th, 2017
According to Karl Marx, the basic datum-bit of the capitalist mode of production and/or capitalist society in general, is the commodity, in the sense that “the individual commodity appears as its elementary form”. And due to this nucleus of the capitalist mode of production, Marx begins his analysis of Capital (Volume One) by specifically analyzing the commodity in its most elementary form as “an object with a dual character, possessing both use-value and exchange-value”, inherent in its structure. Foremost, Marx states that …
by Ramzy Baroud / June 13th, 2017
The typical newsroom set-up, where journalists chase after news headlines dictated by some centralized news gathering agency – often based in some western capital – does not suffice any more.
In the case of the Middle East, the news narrative has been defined by others and dictated on Arab journalists and audiences for far too long.
This hardly worked in the past but, in the last a few years, it has become even more irrelevant and dangerous.
There are millions of victims throughout the Middle East region, numerous bereaved families, constant streams of refugees and a human toll that cannot be understood or …
by Chris Wright / June 13th, 2017
It should hardly be controversial anymore to say we’re embarking on the “end times” of…something. Maybe it’s corporate capitalism, maybe it’s civilization, maybe it’s humanity. Whatever it is, the unsustainability of the contemporary ancien régime, on the global level, has become obvious. Economically, socially, politically, and environmentally, the next fifty years will see major upheavals, which may end up dwarfing those even of the 1930s and 1940s—the Great Depression and World War II.
In this moment of crisis and uncertainty, as we wonder what might come next and if in the long run there is any hope for a positive resolution …
by John Rohn Hall / June 13th, 2017
Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
— Henry A. Kissinger
Ouch! Blindsided by an epiphany. Once upon a time I believed that the U.S. Government looked after the best interests of its own citizens to at least some small degree. It doesn’t. Of course, I’ve long been aware of all the wars waged for fossil fuel. The millions of dead and many more millions wounded and displaced in the name of U.S. control of world trade and resources. All the bombs and rockets that have rained down upon those unfortunate enough to be standing in …
by Finian Cunningham / June 12th, 2017
Despite a vicious smear campaign to denigrate Britain’s Labour leader as a “terrorist sympathizer,” Jeremy Corbyn still pulled off an amazing achievement in the general election.
Hardly has a politician in any Western state been so vilified with character assassination, and yet he has proven to be most popular Labour leader in Britain since the Second World War.
After weeks of trailing his Conservative rival Theresa May in the polls, Corbyn’s socialist manifesto appealed to a record number of voters – closing the gap between the parties to only two percentage points behind the Tories.
This was in spite of a concerted media campaign to destroy Corbyn in the eyes of the British public as a “terrorist stooge.” The irony here …
by David Macaray / June 12th, 2017
An early sign that Trump’s cabinet appointments reeked of unprofessionalism was when organized labor and congressional Democrats gave tentative approval to naming Elaine Chao (former Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush) as President Trump’s Secretary of Transportation. The Senate confirmed her by a vote of 93-6.
Not that unions and Democrats were impressed with the hyper-ambitious Chao, because, clearly, they weren’t. Elaine Chao (wife of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell) is a “climber,” one of those turbo-charged resume-builders who obsessively jump from one high-profile job to another. Like a shark, they must keep moving to survive.
Ms. Chao has done everything. …
Conservatives lose majority
by Stuart Littlewood / June 12th, 2017
“It was an amazing own goal. We didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot, we shot ourselves in the head.”
That’s how one long-established backbench Conservative MP summed up the unnecessary snap election called by Theresa May which has left the UK almost ungovernable at a key moment in its history.
The Conservatives already had a 17-seat majority in the House of Commons. They were riding high in the opinion polls but May wanted more in order to strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations. She needed 326 seats for a majority. Thanks to her cack-handed campaign and a surprise surge in …
Higher Interest Rates Will Kill the Recovery
by Ellen Brown / June 12th, 2017
Higher interest rates will triple the interest on the federal debt to $830 billion annually by 2026, will hurt workers and young voters, and could bankrupt over 20% of US corporations, according to the IMF. The move is not necessary to counteract inflation and shows that the Fed is operating from the wrong model.
Responding to earlier presidential pressure, the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates this week for the third time since November, from a fed funds target of 1% to 1.25%. But as noted in The Guardian in a March 2017 article titled “Trump Is …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 11th, 2017
The shocking election result in the United Kingdom – the Conservatives losing their majority and the creation of a hung Parliament; and Jeremy Corbyn being more successful than any recent Labor candidate – cutting a 20 point Theresa May lead down to a near tie – gives hope to many that the global shift to the right, fueled by the failures of governments to meet the basic needs of their population and growing economic insecurity, may be ending.
Corbyn is a lifelong activist whose message and actions have been consistent. He presented a platform directed at ending austerity and the wealth …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 11th, 2017
A man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.
— Simon and Garfunkel, “The Boxer” (1970)
No one could say that Donald Trump has not made politics interesting. In so doing, he may well have distorted it, mangling its practice with ingredients of corrupting alt-reality. That same process has seen a distinct cheapening as well, but it could not be anything else.
Trump has revealed, within political practice, the virus that has afflicted it, the theatre that takes place from the White House, to Congress, to the Deep State. Life may be a stage, but Trumpland is a flickering pantomime, …
Why Bio-Social Evolution and Futurology Should Matter to Socialists
by Bruce Lerro / June 10th, 2017
Until now… men were living both dispersed and at the same time, closed in on themselves, like passengers in a ship who have met by chance below decks with no idea of its mobile character and its motion. They could, accordingly think of nothing to do… but to quarrel or amuse themselves… Hitherto, in spite of external forces whose influence is to bring them together, the relations between spiritual atoms seem to be governed by an inflexible internal repulsion…. The more planetary ties tend to force us together, the more do we feel the need to disengage ourselves from one
…
by Ian Robinson / June 10th, 2017
The Prime Minister has made a pledge that if re-elected, they will take steps to abolish the Human Rights Act. This is allegedly on the basis that the Act is enabling criminals and terrorists to operate freely in our society, and that the Act is preventing any progress in the domestic war on terror.
The Conservatives have a long-standing tradition of openly representing the wealthy, and have been long-time enemies of any progress being made within the concept of ‘fairness and freedom for all.’
Following the scene that played out in Europe from 1933-1945, with all its associated horrors, and the tyranny …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 9th, 2017
The pollsters only got it partly wrong this time, though the most spectacular prediction cock-up was that on what would happen to British Labour prior to the exit polls. Scotland crept up with a Tory surge, netting 12 seats, and there were scattering and skirmishing victories over the Scottish National Party, which suffered a considerable bruising.
But what mattered here was a return to the two-tiered showdown, the battlefront which saw Labour mount a challenge that recovered electoral ground almost to the tune of 10 percent from the last vote in 2015. At the end of this bloody carnival, the only …