Latest articles
by Peter F. Crowley / March 17th, 2019
Just outside of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi swore herself in as president. With right hand on the bible, she vowed to defend and protect the U.S. Constitution.
Watching the breaking story on Fox News, Trump unleased a Twitter storm like none other. If his previous contentious tweets were tsunamis, this was a deluge. Throughout U.S. media outlets, Republicans denounced Pelosi’s act as unconstitutional. Sean Hannity squinted, as though looking into the audience’s eyes, and asked why other nations don’t respect U.S. sovereignty. In a Rush Limbaugh interview, John Bolton asserted that the world doesn’t honor the political will of …
by Andre Vltchek / March 16th, 2019
Does it pay ‘to be good’? Is it still possible to play by the rules in this mad world, governed by brigands?
What if the rules are defined and ratified by all countries of the world, but a small group of the strongest (militarily) nations totally ignores them, while using its professional propagandists to reinterpret them in the most bizarre ways?
Describing the world, I often feel that I am back in my primary school.
When I was a child, I had the misfortune of growing up in a racist Czechoslovakia. Being born in the Soviet Union, and having an half Russian and …
by Paul Haeder / March 16th, 2019
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
We only think when confronted with a problem.
― John Dewey, 1938, Experience and Education (Vol. no. 10). New York: The Macmillan Company & 1933, How We Think. Boston, MA: D. C. Heath and Co
…
by Rosemarie Jackowski / March 16th, 2019
This is wonderful news… maybe the best news of the decade. Finally the truth about college admission scams has been exposed. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Corruption extends from K – 12 through Graduate School.
I have waited since 1942 for this. In 1942 I was five years old living with my parents in Philadelphia. My Father was employed by Bendix Aviation. Every night at the supper table my Dad would talk about how he had been called on to train and instruct the graduate engineers. The engineers were paid much more than my Dad. They had degrees but were sometimes …
by Dr. Hakim / March 16th, 2019
“Salam (peace)!” is how Afghans greet one another, some of them simultaneously placing a hand over their hearts.
But, while everyone including Afghans wants peace, the Afghan Peace Volunteers and I have observed that the human species appears to be stuck on violent peace. We think that this is because most of us are reared as armed doves, like the one drawn by Wifred Hildonen for Cartoon Stock below.
There is a new Peacemaker in town!
Using Wilfred’s cartoon analogy, the Afghan Peace Volunteers and I are differentiating violent …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 15th, 2019
Five weapons were said to have been used, all inscribed with symbols, numbers and insignia. The individual charged with the shootings at two Christchurch mosques that left 49 dead was an Australian with, it is alleged, a simple purpose: inflict death, and on specific communities in worship. Even as the carnage became clear, Christchurch was already the epicentre of twenty-four hour news television, supplying a ghoulish spectacle. Saturation coverage followed, and continues to do so, a point that will warm the attacker’s blood (his entire effort was streamed on live video on Facebook).
The alleged perpetrator, one Brenton Harrison Tarrant, …
Israel, Neoconservatism and the Military Industrial Complex
by David Spero / March 15th, 2019
The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.
— President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, January 17, 1961
Why exactly does the US government go to war with so many of Israel’s enemies, starting with Iraq? The costs have been enormous, the results horrible, the rewards imperceptible. The Iraq war was the second in a long series of US invasions, bombings and destructions of majority-Muslim states. Despite …
by Robert J. Burrowes / March 15th, 2019
Recently I wrote an article explaining how you could defeat, using nonviolent strategy, the US coup attempt that is taking place in your country.
I would like to complement that article by now briefly explaining how you can also defeat a military invasion by the United States and any collaborating invaders by using a strategy of nonviolent defense as well.
In making this suggestion, I acknowledge the extraordinary difficulties inflicted on Venezuela by the US sanctions imposed over many years as part of its ‘undeclared war against Venezuela’ (partly designed to destroy its progressive social banking model), explained straightforwardly by Ellen …
by Paul Haeder / March 15th, 2019
Hold those things that tell your history and protect them… The ability to have somebody to tell your story is so important. It says: ‘I was here’.
— Maya Angelou
One of those splattering days — called to teach special education at one of the high schools in Lincoln City. Wonderful students, wonderful para-educators, wonderful teachers.
But not according to the powers that be in the world! How many students are thrown to the floor/ground and handcuffed by armed cops? How many schools are like prisons, with armed …
1989-2017, Part 2 of 2 Part Series
by Bruce Lerro / March 14th, 2019
Adjuncts of the world unite!
Between the worlds
Throughout all my formal studies, I continued to be an artist model and it wasn’t until I began teaching in college that the paths of teaching and modelling crossed in irreconcilable ways. My first teaching gig was at New College of California in 1988, teaching Soviet Personality Theory, a course that I made up. About the second week I was teaching there the booking secretary of the Model’s Guild offered me a modelling job in the New College Art Department. The …
by Yves Engler / March 14th, 2019
The hypocrisy is head spinning. As Justin Trudeau lectures audiences on the need to uphold Venezuela’s constitution the Liberals have recognized a completely illegitimate president in Honduras. What’s more, they’ve formally allied with that government in demanding Venezuela’s president follow their (incorrect) reading of that country’s constitution.
In November 2017 Ottawa’s anti-Venezuela “Lima Group” ally Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) defied the Honduran constitution to run for a second term. At Hernandez’ request the four Supreme Court members appointed by his National Party overruled an article in the constitution explicitly prohibiting re-election.
JOH then ‘won’ a highly questionable poll. With …
by David Rovics / March 14th, 2019
Being a writer of weekly columns and topical songs, these things are supposed to be at least somewhat temporary in nature. But whether it’s a podcast from last summer or a song I wrote a decade ago, change one or two words and it could have been written yesterday. To mention a few subjects I have addressed in recent months that refuse to fade into recent history: child separations at the border are once again in the news for a number of reasons, including corruption …
by Colin Todhunter / March 14th, 2019
In his 1978 book India Mortgaged, T.N. Reddy predicted the country would one day open all sectors to foreign direct investment and surrender economic sovereignty to imperialist powers.
Today, the US and Europe cling to a moribund form of capitalism and have used various mechanisms to bolster the system in the face of economic stagnation and massive inequalities: the raiding of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, financial speculation and increased militarism. Via ‘globalisation’, Western powers have also been on an unrelenting drive to plunder what they regard as ‘untapped markets’ in other areas …
by Michael K. Smith / March 14th, 2019
Freedom begins between the ears.
— Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey
“What do old men who don’t believe in Heaven think about?” queried Edward Abbey rhetorically in his masterpiece Desert Solitaire. “… they think about their blood pressure, their bladders, their aortas, their lower intestines, ice on the doorstep, too much sun at noon.” In other words, they think about postponing dying, though many may never have gotten around to actually living.
To die well, one must live fully, Abbey thought, and dedicated himself to the task.
Anarchist, wilderness defender, story-teller, truth-lover, …
by C. J. Hopkins / March 14th, 2019
Get the kids into the house! Lock your doors! Board up the windows! Break out the gas masks and hazmat suits! According to the corporate media, we are now officially deep in the throes of a deadly anti-Semitism pandemic! And just as the threat of mind-controlling Russian influencers was finally waning! It seems the fabric of Western democracy just can’t catch a break these days.
The origins of this pernicious, panic-inducing pestilence remain shrouded in mystery, but epidemiologists now believe that it began in the Spring of 2015, shortly after the resignation of Ed Milliband as UK …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 14th, 2019
Lobbies, powerful interests and financial matters are usually the first things that come to mind when the aircraft industry is considered. Safety, while deemed of foremost importance, is a superficial formality, sometimes observed in the breach. To see the camera footage of the wreckage from the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 was to be shocked by a certain irony: cameras were found lingering over an inflight safety cards on what to do in the event of an emergency. For those on board that doomed flight, it was irrelevant.
The deaths of all 157 individuals on board the flight en route …
The decision to ally with the Jewish equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan lays bare where the Israeli right plans to head next
by Jonathan Cook / March 14th, 2019
After a decade of coalition governments in Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the language needed to describe them has necessarily grown more extreme.
At first, they were right-wing. Then ultra-nationalist. Recently, analysts have started to talk of Netanyahu leading a far-right coalition. Now it seems we may have to go further still.
Should he win Israel’s election in April, Netanyahu’s next government will be one that openly embraces the terrorist right.
Last week, the Central Elections Committee, a body overseeing the election process and dominated by the main political factions, gave the green light for Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) to …
by Peter Phillips / March 13th, 2019
Regime changes in Iraq and Libya, Syria’s war, Venezuela’s crisis, sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Russia, and North Korea are reflections of a new global imperialism imposed by a core of capitalist nations in support of trillions of dollars of concentrated investment wealth. This new world order of mass capital has become a totalitarian empire of inequality and repression.
The global 1%, comprised of over 36-million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, employ their excess capital with investment management firms like BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase. The top seventeen of these trillion-dollar investment management firms controlled $41.1 trillion dollars in 2017. These firms are …
by Gary Leupp / March 13th, 2019
Paul Manafort has been convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for what the judge calls “white collar crimes” unrelated to “Russian collusion.” The mainstream press is in a state of shock. Surely, the morning cable anchors protest, he should have gotten 20 years!
He was friends with (“pro-Russian”) Ukrainian businessmen and politicians! He took fees for political consulting work with foreigners—that he never reported to the IRS! He committed bank fraud and tax fraud! And he may have had a role in the decision of the Republican National Committee at the Republican convention in July 2016, to modify a …
by Jason Hirthler / March 13th, 2019
Back in the chaotic collapsing scenery of the Soviet Union in the late Eighties, there occurred an event that signaled the eventual fate of the USSR, even if no one exactly knew it at the moment. A fairly unknown teacher named Nina Andreyeva published an essay in a political magazine called Sovetskaya Rossiya, or Soviet Russia. The brave Andreyeva leveled sharp criticism at Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), a reformist agenda clandestinely aimed at dismantling the Communist Party and moving the country toward perhaps what would have been a vague form of European market-based social …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 12th, 2019
Trudeau came out and asked for strong women, and he got them.
— Michelle Rempel, Conservative Party MP, The Atlantic, March 12, 2019
The gods have various roles, and most of them are intrusively irritating. They select humans, and drive them mad. They select them for special missions, praise them and drive them to death. They also select them to, if the time comes, commit foolish suicide. The going might be good for a time, but they shall utterly be vanquished, mortal snots that they are.
The situation with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will either ensure his survival for some time, or …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 12th, 2019
More US measures have been taken in recent weeks to further cement the Israeli position and isolate the Palestinian Authority (PA), before the official unveiling of President Donald Trump’s so-called ‘deal of the century’. But while attention is focused on spiteful US actions, little time has been spent discussing the PA’s own responses, options and strategies.
The last of Washington’s punitive measures came on March 3, when the US shut down its Consulate in Jerusalem, thus downgrading the status of its diplomatic mission in Palestine. The Consulate has long served as a de-facto American embassy to the Palestinians. Now, the …
by Edward Curtin / March 12th, 2019
You road I travel and look around! I believe you are not all that is here! I believe that something unseen is also here.
— Walt Whitman, Poem of the Road
Tragic
Jimmy C., age 9, died on the evening of December 28, 19_ _ from a gunshot bullet to the heart. He was shot by his seven-year-old brother Dennis, while, as The New York Times reported, “the two were playing with a rifle in a neighbor’s apartment in the northeast Bronx.” The boys were visiting with their mother and found the rifle under a bed. It was loaded and accidently fired, hitting Jimmy …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 12th, 2019
“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury.” So explained Chelsea Manning in justifying her refusal to answer questions and comply with a grand jury subpoena compelling her to testify on her knowledge of WikiLeaks. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly stated ethical obligations to the grand jury system.”
Manning, whose 35-year sentence was commuted by the Obama administration in an act of seeming leniency, is indivisibly linked to the WikiLeaks legacy of disclosure. She was the source, and the bridge, indispensable for giving Julian Assange …
by James Petras / March 11th, 2019
The US is currently engaged in negotiations with at least a dozen countries — which involve fundamental political, military and economic issues.
The US has adopted diplomatic strategies in the face of its ‘inability’ to secure military victories. The purpose of adopting a diplomatic approach is to secure through negotiations, in part or fully, goals and advantages unattainable through military means.
While diplomacy is less subject to military and economic losses it does require making concessions. …
by Peter Koenig / March 11th, 2019
Once the all-encompassing chittering and chattering about tariffs on Chinese imports by the western corporate media subsided, Trump, egocentric businessman rather than the President of the Empire, “out of the blue”, one could almost say, under the pretext of ‘unfair’ Chinese trading, launches a new ferocious and as usual totally illegal campaign of aggression against China’s fast-growing economy. It’s an illicit campaign against Chinese competition, against Chinese unstoppable growth. It’s a tacit recognition of China’s emerging supremacy which the United States can only confront with fraud, deceit and illegal activities. And this only as long as Washington controls the western …
by Media Lens / March 11th, 2019
One of us had a discussion with an elderly relative:
He can’t be allowed to become Prime Minister.
Why not?
It’s so awful…
What is?
The way he hates the Jews.
The last comment was spoken with real anguish, the result of continuous exposure to just two main news sources: the Daily Mail and the BBC.
What is astonishing is that, just four years ago, essentially no-one held this view of Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn first became an MP in 1983. He stood for the Labour leadership 32 years later, in May 2015. We searched the ProQuest database for UK newspaper articles containing:
Jeremy Corbyn and anti-semitism before 1 May
…
by Yves Engler / March 11th, 2019
While the Justin Trudeau government’s interference in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin highlights corporate influence over politics, it is also a story about a firm at the centre of Canadian foreign policy.
In a recent story titled “Canada’s Corrupt Foreign Policy Comes Home to Roost” I detailed some of SNC’s controversial international undertakings, corruption and government support. But, there’s a great deal more to say about the global behemoth.
“With offices and operations in over 160 countries”, the company has long been the corporate face of this country’s foreign policy. In fact, it is not much of an exaggeration to …
by Jonathan Cook / March 11th, 2019
The United Nations postponed last week for the third time the publication of a blacklist of Israeli and international firms that profit directly from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
The international body had come under enormous pressure to keep the database under wraps after lobbying behind the scenes from Israel, the United States and many of the 200-plus companies that were about to be named.
UN officials have suggested they may go public with the list in a few months.
But with no progress since the UN’s Human Rights Council requested the database back in early 2016, Palestinian leaders are increasingly …
The fight for bans on single-use plastic grocery bags is the plastic straw in the Pacific gyres
by Paul Haeder / March 10th, 2019
It was a heck of a thing – a hundred people at the Newport City Council at 6 pm most of whom wanted to talk about the proposed single-use plastic bag (grocery) ban that is an ordinance largely led by citizens, and members of the Surfrider organization. Interestingly, the Newport voters five years ago were asked in a vote to decide whether a plastic bag ban was what they wanted.
A minority of citizens brought that up – how very few of the registered voters voted in 2014, and the vote against a plastic bag ban was …
