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by Brian Terrell / August 30th, 2018
On August 14, 2018 a report from a grand jury investigation in Pennsylvania identified 300 Catholic priests across the state who had sexually abused more than 1,000 children. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades,” the grand jury wrote in one of the broadest inquiries into church sex abuse in U.S. history. Five days earlier, on August 9, in northern Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit a school bus with a missile made by Lockheed Martin and supplied to the …
by Ricardo Vaz / August 30th, 2018
V Ernesto Che Guevara Brigade Signs Off from Santos Lugares
The fifth Ernesto Che Guevara Medical-Cultural Brigade took place on August 18 and 19, in the village of Santos Lugares, in the province of Santiago del Estero, Argentina. Having been present in the brigade, in this article we report on the activities that took place, both in terms of healthcare and education. During two very intense days, Che’s footprint was present in Northern Argentina.
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Santos Lugares is a remote village, with a population of 300 according to …
by Ameth LO / August 30th, 2018
The following talk was given by Ameth Lô in a French-language panel, “L’aurore de notre libération,” in Montreal on May 20, 2018, at “The Great Transition: Preparing a World Beyond Capitalism.”
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The centenary of the October 1917 Russian revolution, a world-shaking historic event, was an occasion for celebration throughout the world.
Many diverse interpretations are advanced as to its success in achieving a radical transformation of society, both in terms of its history and its overall impact. Nonetheless, there is no denying that this event altered forever the course of history.
For Black peoples, this revolution arrived just over …
Social Media Giants, “Free Speech,” and the Control of Information (Part 1 of a 2-Part Series)
by Leftist Critic / August 30th, 2018
Recently, there has been much talk about “free speech” in light of Alex Jones’s Infowars being cast out in a seemingly organized campaign of censorship by social media platforms, such as YouTube, Spotify, Pinterest, Facebook, and Apple, which some called “the great de-platforming of Alex Jones.” Unsurprisingly, Jones has decried it as “censorship” and abridging his “free speech.” Those who support such actions of these platforms include liberal Amanda Marcotte of Salon who said that it was a “sudden bout of atypical decency and common sense” in fighting against “disinformation” and Mike Snider of USA Today noting that “free speech …
by Sputnik Radio / August 29th, 2018
Sputnik Radio Interview
by Anastasia Romadina
Transcript of a Sputnik Live Radio Interview with Peter Koenig
28 August 2018
Introduction
The German newspaper “Die Welt” announced that Russia actively seeks to get rid of dependency on the US dollar by purchasing gold and selling the bulk of the Moscow-owned US Treasury bonds.
According to political advisor and author James Rickards, cited by the newspaper, the Russian government pursues “a strategic plan” aimed at protecting the country from “dollar sanctions” by building up Russia’s gold reserves.
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Sputnik Radio: The author of the article for “Die Welt” called gold ‘a perfect investment’ for Russia in the face of US sanctions. How much does this assessment correspond to …
by Daniel Borgström / August 29th, 2018
Obit scribblers are calling John McCain a war “hero.” Well, I have to concede that unlike so many warmongering chickenhawks such as Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan and most other neocons, McCain did actually serve in the military. But the same could be said for nearly all top Nazis including Hitler and Goering; they fought in a war and they loved war. They were destructive persons who learned nothing positive from their military experience.
Of course, few of the pundits and politicians who are eulogizing McCain would wish to include Nazis in their hall of fame, nor would most of …
by Jason Holland / August 29th, 2018
Capitalism in a truthful word: Exploitation.
The long form definition is full of complexities purposely installed to hide the fact the short version sounds so ugly, because few would agree to engage in an economic system that was called what it truly is — exploitism.
Through decades of red baiting and condemnation of any alternative system that doesn’t drive monetary resources to the few at the expense of the many we’ve arrived at a state of indoctrination where people cannot see past the wall of propaganda that has been projected in Plato’s cave. Minds are bombarded with falsehoods about the virtues of …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 29th, 2018
Obituaries are not the best places to identify faults unless they assume the form of a hatchet job. The opposite is more often the case: worshipful and respectful to the point of being cloying. As the tears dry, and the sobs of reflection pass, the figure transmogrifies. For a politician, aspects of the hero are sketched out, crumples and creases ironed. In the case of the late Senator John McCain, his role as sober, stable legislator were underscored in a world of Trumpland’s narcissistic chaos. His five-year stint a prisoner of war in that brutal school of re-education “Hanoi Hilton” …
by Yves Engler / August 28th, 2018
Are soldiers more valuable to society than teachers? Are they more essential than the people who drive buses or clean up our waste? Are their jobs that much more dangerous than firefighters, or psychiatric nurses or loggers? Is what they do more honourable than parenting, caring for elders, providing essential social services or reporting the news?
These questions arose when reading that British Columbia is currently holding a six-week public consultation on whether former RCMP members should be permitted access to special veterans license plates. The opposition has complained the consultation is only taking place online while some military veterans have …
by Ramzy Baroud / August 28th, 2018
Hanan al-Khoudari resorted to Facebook in a cry for help when Israeli authorities rejected her request to accompany her three-year-old son, Louay, to his chemotherapy treatment in East Jerusalem.
The boy is suffering from an ‘aggressive soft tissue sarcoma’. Israeli authorities then justified their decision based on a vague claim that one of Hanan’s relatives is a ‘Hamas operative.”
The rights group, Gisha reported that the state remains unwilling to define precisely what it means to be a ‘Hamas operative.’ Even if an explanation is offered, denying gravely ill Palestinians from receiving life-saving treatment remains an immoral and illegal act.
“The …
by Mirah Riben / August 28th, 2018
Most people know of adoption through the self-selecting lens of someone they know who has adopted, or someone “desperate” to parent through adoption as a last resort. They may also have a family member or friend who was adopted as a child but seldom, if ever, talks about it with them on any deep level.
Others get their impressions of adoption from television, movies, and other media. Scripts of sitcoms (such as Modern Family), crime fighting shows (such as SVU), and musical shows (such as Glee), etc., all have included an adoption theme. In addition to these fictionalized versions of adoption, …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 28th, 2018
Photo by M-molly Adams from Flickr
Medicare for all has had majority support in the United States for more than a decade. As more people become aware of the details, support is growing. An August 23rd poll, conducted by Reuters/Ipsos, found 70% of the public now supports Medicare for all. We see the potential for winning National Improved Medicare for All in the early 2020s if people continue to build the movement necessary to demand it.
Support Moves From Majority to Super-Majority, On the Way to National …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 28th, 2018
Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths.
— Cardinal Carlo Maria Viganò, August 25, 2018
It could be called the apology drive, a journey of institutional contrition. Pope Francis’ Ireland trip has seeped with remarks of forgiveness, seeking understanding from those who found themselves victims of child abuse within the Catholic Church. “We apologise,” he told a church service attended by some hundred thousand at Dublin’s Phoenix Park, “for some members of the hierarchy who did not take care of these painful situations and kept silent.” He …
by John W. Whitehead / August 27th, 2018
There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
I have known a lot of good cops, I have defended a lot of good cops, and I have been fortunate to call a number of good cops friends.
So when I say that warrior cops—hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge—have not made America any safer or freer, I am not disrespecting any of the …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 27th, 2018
Image from Creative Resistance by Natasha Mayers, Artists Rapid Response Team (ARRT)
The United States has a long history of dominating international economic institutions and has been able to use that power in the past to control other governments and enrich its industries. At present, the United States is waging an economic World War targeting much of the world economy, including allies who refuse to comply with US mandates.
Among the nations included in the US economic war are China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, Nicaragua and North Korea. …
by Said Mohammad / August 27th, 2018
Samir Amin and I at Mayakovski Theatre in Moscow
Said Mohammad: Thanks for accepting to do this interview on Samir Amin. I knew you two had met on different occasions and that you gave lectures with him. Can you tell us something about the person behind the ideas and how you remember him?
Andre Vltchek: Pleasure to be able to address your readers. The first time I met Samir Amin was in Beijing, during the First World Cultural Forum in 2015. Both of us were keynote speakers. The event …
by RT / August 27th, 2018
FILE PHOTO. © Paul Hanna / Reuters
The US may have plans to use a fake chemical attack in Syria to hit government forces with airstrikes, the Russian Defense Ministry has said. Washington is already building up strike capability in the Middle East, it said.
The warning comes a day after the Russian military said it had information about a looming provocation in Syria’s Idlib governorate, which would involve a staged chemical weapons attack. The US earlier warned it would respond to a chemical weapons attack by Syrian government …
by Gilad Atzmon / August 27th, 2018
Haaretz delivered a warning today to American Jewry. “If Trump falls, the testimonies of Cohen, Pecker and Weisselberg could spark an anti-Semitic Backlash.”
Many have passed through the Trump Administration’s revolving door and faded away quietly but those who may bring the president down are “the lawyer-fixer (Michael Cohen), the smut-dealing publisher (David Pecker) and the numbers whiz who knows it all (Alan Weisselberg).” Prominent Haaretz correspondent Chemi Shalev is honest enough to openly acknowledge that “the trio’s public profile is a Jewish stereotype.”
Shalev dared to write the article every other political analyst has dreaded putting into words let …
Book Review of The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century
by Chris Wright / August 26th, 2018
Reading the daily headlines, it’s easy to forget that the corollary of a civilization in precipitous decline is a world of creative ferment, a new world struggling to be born. If you could have a God’s-eye view of all the creative resistance rending the fabric of political oppression from the U.S. to Indonesia to Colombia, you would surely be persuaded that all hope is not lost. This conclusion is borne out in detail by a book published earlier this year, The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dario Azzellini and Michael G. Kraft. …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 26th, 2018
It was a year of manic tumult. Students revolted in Paris and other global capitals; the Tet Offensive permanently impaired the US war effort in Vietnam, at least on the home front; Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both felled by assassins’ bullets in the United States. “What is hard to convey,” reflected Todd Gitlin, “is the texture of shock and panic that seized the world a half-century ago. What is even harder to grasp is that the chief political victory of 1968 was the counter-revolution.”
Such is the impulse of the revolutionary impulse: in its aftermath …
... like blowing up a bridge to stop an advancing army
by Jonathan Cook / August 26th, 2018
The latest “scandal” gripping Britain – or to be more accurate, British elites – is over the use of the term “Zionist” by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition and possibly the country’s next prime minister.
Yet again, Corbyn has found himself ensnared in what a small group of Jewish leadership organisations, which claim improbably to represent Britain’s “Jewish community”, and a small group of corporate journalists, who improbably claim to represent British public opinion, like to call Labour’s “anti-semitism problem”.
I won’t get into the patently ridiculous notion that “Zionist” is a code word for “Jew”, at …
by RT / August 26th, 2018
FILE PHOTO White Helmets in Syria © Omar Haj Kadour / AFP
“Foreign specialists” have arrived in Syria and may stage a chemical attack using chlorine in “the next two days,” the Russian Defense Ministry said. This will be filmed for international media to frame Damascus forces.
Defense Ministry Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said the operation is planned to unfold in the village of Kafr Zita in Syria’s northwestern Hama Province in “the next two days.”
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by RT / August 25th, 2018
File Photo: A US Air Force B-1B Lancer / AFP
The US and its allies are preparing new airstrikes on Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry said, adding that militants are poised to stage a chemical weapons attack in order to frame Damascus and provide a pretext for the strikes.
The attack would be used as a pretext for US, UK and French airstrikes on Syrian targets, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov said. USS ‘The Sullivans,’ an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer, was already deployed to …
by Deena Stryker / August 25th, 2018
American progressives have been desperate lately that their cries merely echo through a wilderness, but now comes Andre Vltchek’s latest book, Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism to magnify our voices.
As a Russian born but Western raised ‘professional expat’, Vltchek has spent his life covering the world’s tragedies, in film and word, until he can no longer bear the pain. As revealed by a series of short takes written over the last few years, Vltchek’s only hope is the energetic optimism that animates revolutionaries the world over. I was privileged to observe that phenomena in early sixties Cuba, as was at …
by Peter Koenig / August 25th, 2018
Glencore, according to statistica.com is the world’s largest mining company by revenues. As a way of introduction, here is what statistica.com has to say about Glencore.
Glencore-Xstrata is a public limited company founded in 1974 by Marc Rich whose headquarters are based in Baar, Switzerland and also has registered office based in Saint Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands. Glencore-Xstrata is also a mining company whose headquarters are based in the United Kingdom. On May 2nd, 2013, the current company was established through a merger between Glencore and Xstrata. Glencore-Xstrata is the third largest family owned business in the world and was ranked
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Israeli group submits freedom of information request as evidence grows of meddling by Netanyahu government in UK politics
by Jonathan Cook / August 25th, 2018
Has Israel been covertly fueling claims of an “anti-Semitism crisis” purportedly plaguing Britain’s Labour Party since it elected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, three years ago?
That question is raised by a new freedom of information request submitted this week by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and human rights activists.
They suspect that two Israeli government departments – the ministries of foreign affairs and strategic affairs – have been helping to undermine Corbyn as part of a wider campaign by the Israeli government to harm Palestinian solidarity activists.
The Israeli foreign affairs ministry employs staff of the country’s embassy in London, which …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 25th, 2018
It is a continuation of Malcolm Turnbull by other means. The new Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison and his freshly appointed Deputy, Josh Frydenberg have ensured that the “insurgents”, as Turnbull deemed them, did not come through. Both were respective architects – failed ones at that – of the company tax plan, voted down in the Senate, and the National Energy Guarantee, torn up by the Liberal Party room. Both claim that this was a “new generation” of leadership. These claims were extraordinary in their repudiation of reality.
Turnbull, who has promised a swift exit from federal politics, was never …
by Roger D. Harris / August 25th, 2018
After four months of violence, peace may be breaking out in Nicaragua, which has gotten those North American partisans opposed to Nicaraguan President Ortega worried. But they have one last hope.
The latest in a series of anti-Ortega articles in The Nation is entitled “An eternal night of persecution and death.” We are told: “Despite mass killings and newly authoritarian laws, a diverse opposition says the movement to oust Ortega is far from over.”
Although some analysts understand the relative calm that has befallen Nicaragua is mainly due to the failure of the opposition to sustain public support, this …
by Rick Sterling / August 25th, 2018
Western media has described the unrest and violence in Nicaragua as a “campaign of terror” by government police and paramilitary. This has also been asserted by large non governmental organizations (NGOs). In May, for example, Amnesty International issued a report titled “Shoot to Kill: Nicaragua’s Strategy to Repress Protest”.
A Miami Herald op-ed summarized, “It’s not like there’s any confusion over who’s to blame for the recent killings amid Nicaragua’s political violence. Virtually all human rights groups agree that Ortega’s police-backed paramilitary goons are the culprits.”
Much less publicized, other analysts have challenged these assertions. They claim the situation is …
by John Steppling / August 25th, 2018
Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.)
A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.)
Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.)
— Nick Turse, Chronicles Magazine, July 2018
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
The U.S. is now a endless machine for war profiteering and endless war itself. Simultaneously a hyper Imperialist machine directed toward global hegemony. Domestically it is a McCarthyesque empire of propaganda …
