Recent Blogs
New York TImes, Meridith Kohut and Isayen Herrera, December 17, 2017 “As Venezuela Collapses, Children Are Dying of Hunger” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/world/americas/venezuela-children-starving.html?module=inline Washington Post, Anthony Faiola, February 12, 2018 “Venezuela’s economy is so bad, parents are leaving their children at orphanages” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuelas-economy-is-so-bad-parents-are-leaving-their-children-at-orphanages/2018/02/12/8021d180-0545-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e_story.html?utm_term=.d10ac9514d41 New York Times, Kirk Semple, March 20, 2018 “‘We’re Losing the Fight’: Tuberculosis Read more…
As U.S. college students―and their families―know all too well, the cost of a higher education in the United States has skyrocketed in recent decades. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 2008 and 2017 the average cost of attending a four-year public college, adjusted for inflation, increased in every state in the Read more…
In late April, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that, in 2018, world military expenditures rose to a record $1.82 trillion. The biggest military spender by far was the United States, which increased its military budget by nearly 5 percent to $649 billion (36 percent of the global total). But most other nations Read more…
By Tapani Lausti Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, Alfred A. Knopf 2018. The recent arrest of WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange made a large part of the corporate press gloat in a way that highlighted the continuing degeneration of serious journalism. WikiLeak’s revelations of the true face of the American role in the world confirm Read more…
Vieques is a small Puerto Rican island with some 9,000 inhabitants. Fringed by palm trees and lovely beaches, with the world’s brightest bioluminescent bay and wild horses roaming everywhere, it attracts substantial numbers of tourists. But, for about six decades, Vieques served as a bombing range, military training site, and storage depot for the U.S. Read more…
As president, Donald Trump has leaned heavily upon what he has called an “America First” policy. This nationalist approach involves walking away from cooperative agreements with other nations and relying, instead, upon a dominant role for the United States, undergirded by military might, in world affairs. Nevertheless, as numerous recent opinion polls reveal, most Americans Read more…
In recent weeks, Donald Trump and other Republicans have begun to tar their Democratic opponents with the “socialist” brush, contending that the adoption of socialist policies will transform the United States into a land of dictatorship and poverty. “Democrat lawmakers are now embracing socialism,” Trump warned the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in early March. Read more…
We the people should stop trusting the same ‘journalists’ that cajoled us into the invasion of Iraq, Libya, ect. Large numbers of us protested then, perhaps we now sulk that if our protests didn’t stop it then, why should we try again? But we have got to wake up, instead of waiting for another huge Read more…
Palestine needs Europe and the world’s solidarity in effective ways, so its good to hear a union in my own abuela Beazcochea’s Basque country has voted against its company’s attempted collaboration with the internationally condemned Israeli occupation. The workers council of Spanish train manufacturer CAF voted last month against participation in the Jerusalem light rail tramway Read more…
Coming from Serbia, but living in Germany for more than 10 years, it is easy to lose perspective. Every time I visit my home town of Belgrade I wonder if it is only my view which is getting distorted, or the country is indeed continuously deteriorating. However, it seems I am not the only one Read more…
The Trump administration’s campaign to topple the government of Venezuela raises the issue of whether the U.S. government is willing to adhere to the same rules of behavior it expects other nations to follow. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. foreign policy was characterized by repeated acts of U.S. military intervention in Latin Read more…
Last year, I asked Amnesty International for its position on US economic sanctions against Venezuela. I also asked Amnesty’s position on the threats US officials have made against Venezuela’s government, including open encouragement of Venezuela’s military to perpetrate a coup. Last year, Amnesty replied that it took “no position” on US economic sanctions. Regarding US Read more…
At the beginning of February 2019, the two leading nuclear powers took an official step toward resumption of the nuclear arms race. On February 1, the U.S. government, charging Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, announced that it would pull out of the agreement and develop new intermediate-range missiles banned by it. Read more…
Use of the term ‘Populism’ is a deliberately vague misdiagnosis of our world’s problems. It lumps all change that might threaten the status quo as the same chaos, the danger of populism. Every politician must be elected by popular vote, so to diagnose some as populist is meaningless. It is to spook the very idea Read more…
Ever since the U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, a specter has haunted the world―the specter of nuclear annihilation. The latest report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, issued on January 24, reminds us that the prospect of nuclear catastrophe remains all too real. Citing the extraordinary danger of nuclear disaster, Read more…
By Tapani Lausti David Edwards & David Cromwell, Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. Foreword by John Pilger. Pluto Press 2018. The heated debate about fake news supposedly separates “real journalists” from writers who try to confuse people’s views about what is really happening in the world. If only it was that simple. Read more…
This Reuters article says “The Maduro regime is illegitimate and the United States will work diligently to restore a real democracy to that country,” Pompeo told reporters in Abu Dhabi, where he is on a tour of Middle East countries. ” [emphasis added] The Onion might have simply changed “countries” above to “dictatorships” or, Read more…
Bill Blum passed away early last month in Virginia. Many Z Net readers will know his canonical book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII, or remember his regular newsletter Anti-Empire Report. My first contact with Bill came in 1995 when I wrote him about something he had written on the Cold War. Read more…
According to numerous reports, the world’s billionaires keep increasing in number and, especially, in wealth. In March 2018, Forbes reported that it had identified 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries and territories. Collectively, this group was worth $9.1 trillion, an increase in wealth of 18 percent since the preceding year. Americans led the way with a Read more…
The Social Institutions and Gender index (SIGI) was first launched in 2009, and then updated in 2012 and 2014. The fourth edition of the SIGI was launched in December 2018. The index uses these four dimensions to measure the institutional effects on gender parity: Discrimination in the family Restricted physical integrity Restricted access to productive Read more…
Maybe those delirious crowds chanting “USA, USA” have got something. When it comes to military power, the United States reigns supreme. Newsweek reported in March 2018: “The United States has the strongest military in the world,” with over 2 million military personnel and vast numbers of the most advanced nuclear missiles, military aircraft, warships, tanks, Read more…
In late November 2018, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned public intellectual, remarked that “humanity faces two imminent existential threats: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war.” Curiously, although a widespread environmental movement has developed to save the planet from accelerating climate change, no counterpart has emerged to take on the rising danger of nuclear disaster. Indeed, this danger―exemplified Read more…