The 67th Bilderberg Meeting will take place in Montreux, Switzerland from 30 May – 2 June 2019, where the about 130 invitees – so far confirmed – from 23 countries, will stay at one of Switzerland’s most luxurious venues, the Montreux Palace hotel. About a quarter of the attendees are women.
The Bilderberg meetings started at the onset of the Cold War, as a discussion club of American and European leaders, a fortification against communism, in clear text, against the Soviet Union. The first event took place in 1954 at the Bilderberg hotel in the Dutch town of Oosterbeek. Ever since, …
An enduring memory of the 2016 Brexit campaign, so marked by the foppish-haired blusterer, Boris Johnson, was the claim that the European Union was hungrily drawing out from British coffers £350 million a week. It was insufferable, unqualified and dishonest. It was a claim reared in the atmosphere of outrageous deception marking the effort on all sides of the debate regarding Britain’s relationship with the EU. But some deceptions have the ballast to go further than others.
Rooted in the machinery of politics, such deceptions might have stayed there, deemed those natural outrages of a not so noble vocation. After …
The internet was hardwired to be a surveillance tool from the start. No matter what we use the network for today – dating, directions, encrypted chat, email, or just reading the news – it always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war….[Surveillance Valley shows] the ongoing overlap between the Internet and the military-industrial complex that spawned it a half century ago, and the close ties that exist between the US intelligence agencies and the antigovernment privacy movement that has sprung up in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks.
– Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of
by Edward C. Corrigan and Selvin Mejia / May 29th, 2019
There are some important changes that are going to impact refugees and even Permanent Residents in Canada. In the Ontario budget, released on April 11, 2019, Legal Aid Ontario’s funding was $133 million less in fiscal year 2019-2020 than the $456 million it had anticipated. In 2020 Legal Aid Ontario will somehow have to operate on further reduction of another $31 million. ((“Ontario’s cuts to legal aid will hurt the poorest,” Star Editorial Board, Toronto Star, April …
School daze are here to stay if we don't stop capitalism
by Paul Haeder / May 29th, 2019
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
— Borges, “The Immortal”, IV, in The Aleph (1949)
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
— Jorge Luis Borges
I knew it would come at me sooner or later, that feeling of dread that I had steeled myself against . . . staving off that realization that …
It feels like Trump is sniffing out all the issues that are sensitive with the majority of the population and then looks for any way possible to impose a kind of bill that will get on the nerves of the largest amount of people on any given one of these issues.
Let’s take one of his latest projects: abortion. It is so blindingly obvious that this thing is annoying not only Americans, but also a large portion of the Western Europeans. But voicing your outrage has never proven to be the way to make Trump change his mind, if anything it …
Palestinian groups, Fatah, Hamas and others should not confine themselves to simply rejecting the Trump Administration’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’. Instead, they should use their resistance to the new American-Israeli plot as an opportunity to unify their ranks.
Leaked details of the ‘Deal of the Century’ confirm Palestinians’ worst fears: the ‘Deal’ is but a complete American acquiescence to the right-wing mentality that has ruled Israel for over a decade.
According to the Israeli daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, a demilitarized state, ‘New Palestine’ will be established on territorial fragments of the West Bank, as all illegal Jewish settlements would …
by Susan Dirgham and Rick Sterling / May 28th, 2019
It’s a David vs Goliath story. A former local newspaper reporter, Robert Stuart, is taking on the British Broadcasting Corporation. Stuart believes that a sensational video story about an alleged atrocity in Syria “was largely, if not entirely, staged.” The BBC would like it all to just go away. But like David, Stuart will not back down or let it go. It has been proposed that the BBC could settle the issue by releasing the raw footage from the event, but they refuse to do this. Why?
In the past, whenever I went to (or more precisely, ‘through’) Israel, it was for some antagonistic purpose: to write about the brutal suppression of the intifada in Gaza or Hebron, to comment on the insanity of the land grab around Bethlehem, or to report from the eerie and de-populated Golan Heights, which Israel occupies against all international rules and the UN resolutions. You name it and I worked there: Shifa Hospital or Rafah Camp in Gaza, ‘Golans’, border with Jordan, Bethlehem.
I used to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, sleep one night in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or Haifa, meet my …
Most people in the West think of Denmark as a tolerant, peace-loving country, even—according to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—as a socialist country. Trump views this as a disease to be excised, and avoided in the US at all costs, while Sanders sees this as an ideal for America.
The truth is far from these tales. Denmark runs on a solidly capitalist economy, and it has been at war against all the countries the US has invaded since Iraq in 1990. Its troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq; and its planes bombed Syria not long ago. The various governments have cut …
It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.”
That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade – or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly liberal outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC.
Deregulated, deunionized, segregated, test-obsessed, privately-operated charter schools that lose employees regularly, manipulate student enrollment frequently, and funnel huge sums of public funds to the rich and their allies under the banner of high ideals cannot be prettified.
Engaging in all kinds of fraud and racketeering, including endless shady, if not illegal, real estate deals that greatly enrich charter school owners-operators at the expense of the public, and then turning around and saying we are “saving black kids,” offering “choices,” and “black families want charter schools” doesn’t wash.
Pay-the-rich schemes have no pro-social qualities.
Casually handing over billions in public dollars to the rich—for …
I’ve tried to hold my tongue long enough — after all, one tries to preserve one’s dignity! — but I can remain silent no longer. I’m appalled, absolutely appalled, by the sickening misconduct by the likes of Weinstein and, you know, the other ones (what’s his name!). Such behavior cannot, and will not, be tolerated in the workplace — and, yes, you’re right — in the home too! I’ve been reluctant to speak out — I, personally, have managed to avoid the worst of this as a professor — but there are limits!
The sun came out today. It’s been gone for a while. That means all of the lawnmowers came out too. It’s been soggy around here, and any chance for a fellow suburbanite to cut the grass is taken up immediately. It’s loud outside. It sounds like the humming of dozens of gasoline-powered bees. I mowed the front yard yesterday, and that was enough for now. The backyard will probably be a swamp until July. It’s best that I leave it alone.
Today is Sunday, so it’s not actually Memorial Day …
The vultures of the British conservative party have gathered, and the individual who seemed to thrive in failure, to gain momentum in defeat, has finally yielded. UK Prime Minister Theresa May will leave the way for change of leadership on June 7. Never known for any grand gestures of emotion, the Maybot finally gave way to it.
It had begun rather optimistically in 2016. May would preside over a Britain leaving the European Union in good order. She even dared suggest that an agenda of domestic reform might be implemented. Neither has transpired, and clues were already apparent with the blithely …
From left to right: Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, David Paul and Adrienne Pine at windows of the Venezuelan Embassy. Signs below them call for a mutual Protecting Power Agreement.
A Mutual Protecting Power Agreement Still Needed For US …
Money may not be able to buy the purest love, but it can buy the best, life-ending cancer. For Monsanto, giant of rule and misrule in matters of genetically modified crops, known for bullying practices towards farmers, things have not been so rosy of late. Ever the self-promoter of saving the world an agricultural headache (biotech crops being the earth’s touted nutritional salvation), the company has run into a set of legal snags that have raided its funds and risk sinking it, along with Bayer AG, the company that bought it last year for $63 billion.
So Trump has declared an “emergency” to circumvent Congressional oversight of arms shipments to other countries. By law Congress by law is given 30 days advance before before such sales are completed, and it can obstruct them. But a loophole in the Arms Control Act allows the president to authorize sales in an emergency.
One must ask what emergency causes the president to allow sale of $ 8 billion in arms manufactured by Boeing, Lockhead, Raytheon, and GE to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan. (Britain’s BAE and Europe’s Airbus will also profit handsomely from this decision.)
“Performance-based accountability” is a hackneyed, Skinnerian, neoliberal buzz-phrase often repeated dogmatically by charter school promoters in order to falsely claim that privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are more accountable and higher-performing than public schools.
But it is becoming clearer to everyone with each passing day that charter school promoters have long vastly over-promised and under-delivered, while rapidly enriching themselves at the expense of students, parents, the public, the economy, and the national interest.
Extensive research, including research funded by billionaire charter school supporters, has consistently demonstrated that poor performance remains widespread in the scandal-ridden low-transparency charter school sector that intensifies segregation.
By any reckoning, the claim made this week by al-Qaeda-linked fighters that they were targeted with chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Idlib province – their final holdout in Syria – should have been treated by the western media with a high degree of scepticism.
That the US and other western governments enthusiastically picked up those claims should not have made them any more credible.
Scepticism was all the more warranted from the media given that no physical evidence has yet been produced to corroborate the jihadists’ claims. And the media should have been warier still given …
Art-washing is a PR tactic that uses famous artists in ways that divert attention away from bad behavior. An ad designer who combines a Monet water lily image with an oil company logo is one way.
Recruiting an international pop icon like Madonna to sing at a music festival in the creepy political climate of Tel Aviv is another. Zionists uncomfortable with the growing Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement (BDS) are always on the prowl for a new gimmick that will put a fun or progressive face on their deplorable government.
In the past, Israeli apologists have tried redirecting …
Since the DOJ has indicted WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange with 17 more charges under the Espionage Act, many activists are worried about what this means for press freedoms. Former Professor of Journalism at Woodbury University Lyle Slack join In Question to discuss what this means.
Relying on the corporate media, including BBC News, to provide a reliable account of the world is literally a matter of life or death, on many levels.
Imagine, for example, a Russian dissident living in the UK who had published copious evidence of Russian war crimes, and who had then sought political asylum in an embassy in London. Imagine if that dissident were then expelled from the embassy, under pressure from Russia, immediately imprisoned in a high-security prison here and faced with the prospect of extradition to Russia to face life imprisonment or the death sentence. There would be a massive …
I think this is what you call a constitutional crisis.
The president says the Mueller Report exonerates him of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice. Democrats in Congress insist it does show evidence for obstruction, that needs further investigation through hearings. Trump has ordered his officials, lawyers and aides to refuse to testify, citing executive privilege, obliging the seven House committees investigating Trump to subpoena witnesses, who may still refuse to appear. Such people, if cited by Congress, with contempt could be forced by courts to pay fines or even be imprisoned. But it is not clear what will happen; hence, …
In these troubled times, around the world people seem to be asking each other, how do we fight back against this madness? In May, 1919 in Winnipeg, the working class answered this question by shutting down the city and running it themselves.
I was born in 1967, and for many people my age, who turned 13 in 1980 or so, I felt like I was growing up in the shadow of a massive, exciting, really earth-changing social movement that I had missed out on — what …
Watching their futures fade, the marginally comfortable do little about it.
by Jason Hirthler / May 24th, 2019
Passing through the vestibules of airports, one experiences the quotidian toil of modern neoliberal life. Even as one’s spirits rise at the thought of a fresh destination, or perhaps a familiar one, the vast task force of transit works fastidiously about you. The TSA army bark irritated orders to lethargic queues of travelers; everywhere badged employees swipe cards and pass through nondescript doors; a lone, lank youth brushes the carpeted floor with a broom, sweeping miniscule dust mites into his empty dust pan; the cashier issues her rote boilerplate: “Is that all?”, said with a faintly accusatory air, as though …
PBS stations around the U.S. were scheduled to show a riveting new Frontline documentary, “One Day in Gaza,” but at the last minute PBS pulled it.
The film is missing important context about the issue, but it includes footage that Americans, as Israel’s top funders, should see – including a young, unarmed teen being shot in her head.
BBC, the coproducer of the film, broadcast it to British viewers. We are posting it below so that Americans can also view it.
Recently, hundreds of PBS stations around the United States were scheduled …
Jimmy Dore is a comic who has taken on Russiagate, a deadly serious matter. He is one of those brave souls who count themselves as progressives but dared to call into question Russiagate.
There are those who will tell you that Trump is a despicable human; and so if Russiagate tarnished Trump, the argument goes, what did it matter whether it was true. (The proposition that Trump is more monstrous than his predecessors, Obama, W or the Clintons is highly dubious to say the least – but that is a different topic.). There is, however, a very good reason why it …
Back in January 2018, I wrote this piece about The War on Dissent, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is going gangbusters. As predicted, the global capitalist ruling classes have been using every weapon in their arsenal to marginalize, stigmatize, delegitimize, and otherwise eliminate any and all forms of dissent from neoliberal ideology, and in particular from their new official narrative … “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis.”
For over two years, the corporate media have been pounding out an endless series of variations on this major theme, namely, that “democracy is under attack” by a conspiracy of Russians and neo-Nazis that …
Why does the dominant media pay so much attention to Russian “meddling” in other countries, but little to Canada’s longstanding interference in the political affairs of nations thousands of kilometres from our borders?
The case of Ben Rowswell illustrates the double standard well.
The current Canadian International Council President has been the leading non-governmental advocate of Ottawa’s quest to overthrow Venezuela’s government. In dozens of interviews, op-eds, tweets and ongoing speaking tour the former ambassador has put a liberal gloss on four months of naked imperialism. But, Rowswell has been involved in efforts to oust Nicolas Maduro since 2014 despite repeatedly …
