Latest articles
The proposal deliberately includes a host of unrealisable preconditions before what remains of Palestine can be recognised
by Jonathan Cook / January 30th, 2020
Much of Donald Trump’s long-trailed “deal of the century” came as no surprise. Over the past 18 months, Israeli officials had leaked many of its details.
The so-called Vision for Peace unveiled on Tuesday simply confirmed that the US government has publicly adopted the long-running consensus in Israel: that it is entitled to keep permanently the swaths of territory it seized illegally over the past half-century that deny the Palestinians any hope of a state.
The White House has discarded the traditional US pose as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinian leaders were not invited to the ceremony, and …
by John R. Hall / January 29th, 2020
The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Year finds me ensconced in Tucson, Arizona. This is definitely not Trump country. Our man in The U.S. House of Representatives is Raul Grijalva, possibly one of the most influential liberals in D.C. Tucson’s newly-elected mayor is Regina Romero, a Latina leftie who doesn’t shrink from the task of taking on every conceivable social issue. And I have begun attending what might just be the most influential church in the U.S.A. when it comes to actually DOING the work of Jesus Christ, and not just chatting about it: Southside Presbyterian, where the Sanctuary Movement began, …
by Matthew J. L. Ehret / January 29th, 2020
A David vs. Goliath battle between the independent Virginia-based online journal Consortium News and the gigantic Security Communications Establishment of Canada has begun this week. As Consortium News’ Editor-in-Chief, Joe Lauria wrote in his recent press release:
Consortium News has sent libel notices to the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s version of the US National Security Agency, and to a major Canadian television network, Global News, for a report that said Consortium News was “part of a cyber-influence campaign directed by Russia.”
To the knowledge of this …
by Jason Holland / January 29th, 2020
One of George Carlin’s great lines said with apropos satirical condemnation was “Nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.” And what Carlin was speaking to was the ills of socioeconomic power, but when it comes to drastically dismantling the majority of the planetary ecology in under forty years his line is an even more salient observation of the mental state of the masses. This statement gives rise to a question that seems more pertinent than ever to ask the people of America, and the world over for that matter, the same basic question Marvin …
by Roger D. Harris / January 29th, 2020
As predictable as death and taxes is the quadrennial injunction from liberals for progressive third parties to cease and desist. Equally predictable is the admonition that this will be the most decisive presidential election in US history. Given the prospect of four more years of Trump, do they have a valid thesis or are they once again just sheep-dogging those of little faith back into the true church of the Democratic Party?
Prominent left-liberals Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters and Michael Albert issued an Open Letter entreating third parties …
by Lawrence Wittner / January 28th, 2020
On August 12, 1945, six days after the U.S. government obliterated the city of Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb, Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, delivered a remarkable public address. Speaking on his weekly radio program, the Chicago Roundtable, Hutchins observed that Leon Bloy, a French philosopher, had referred to “the good news of damnation” under the assumption that only the fear of perpetual hellfire would motivate moral behavior. “It may be,” Hutchins remarked, “that the atomic bomb is the good news of damnation, …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 28th, 2020
Massive natural gas discoveries off the eastern coast of Israel and Palestine is slated to make Tel Aviv a regional energy hub. Whether Israel will be able to translate positive indicators of the largely untapped gas reserves into actual economic and strategic wealth is yet to be seen.
What is certain, however, is that the Middle East is already in the throes of a major geostrategic war, which has the potential of becoming an actual military confrontation.
Unsurprisingly, Israel is at the heart of this growing conflict.
“Last week, we started to stream gas to Egypt. We turned Israel into an energy superpower,” …
by Nicolas J. S. Davies / January 28th, 2020
Sixteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, most Americans understand that it was an illegal war based on lies about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” But our government is now threatening to drag us into a war on Iran with a nearly identical “big lie” about a non-existent nuclear weapons program, based on politicized intelligence from the same CIA teams that wove a web of lies to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In 2002-3, U.S. officials and corporate media pundits repeated again and again that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that posed a dire threat to the world. The CIA produced reams of false intelligence to support the march to war, and cherry-picked the …
by C. J. Hopkins / January 28th, 2020
I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m a little worried about Donald Trump. I’m worried he may be on the verge of a sudden, major heart attack, or a stroke, or a fatal golfing accident.
Food poisoning is another possibility. Or he could overdose on prescription medication. A tanning bed mishap is not out of the question.
He could accidentally hang himself during autoerotic asphyxiation, or get shot by a lone-wolf white supremacist terrorist trying to start the RaHoWa. The Russians could spray him with that Novichok perfume.
There are any number of ways he could …
by Andre Vltchek / January 27th, 2020
I am not sure when and how it happened or even what precisely took place, but suddenly, nothing feels the same, and nothing feels right in Malaysia.
Several years ago, things used to be totally different here. One would land at KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) – in the past one of the most modern and well-run mid-sized airports in the world, located some 70 kilometers from the city – and feel the omnipresent optimism and pride.
Malaysia was on the rise: a fast train was connecting the airport to the sprawling metropolis. It was passing near the famous Formula-1 circuit, the …
Their “Open Letter to the Green Party”
by Stansfield Smith / January 27th, 2020
Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert wrote an Open Letter to the Green Party, asking them to support the 2020 Democratic candidate regardless who wins the nomination. It was in response to an article well worth reading by Howie Hawkins, “The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem“.
It has become too common over the last 15 years to see used-to-be anti-imperialists, or at least harsh critics of the US government’s brutal policies at home and abroad, fold under corporate America’s unrelenting onslaught on humanity and …
Will The US Listen?
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 27th, 2020
The world is saying no to war with Iran and US out of the Middle East. Hundreds of protests were held in the United States and around the world on Saturday with a unified voice of “No War.” These protests are in solidarity with massive protests in Iraq calling for the US to get out where it is now an occupying force as the government has asked it to leave.
These protests and the uprising over the US remaining in Iraq are not being covered in the US corporate media. …
by Myles Hoenig / January 26th, 2020
I just read the open letter by Noam Chomsky, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathy Kelly, Ron Daniels, Leslie Cagan, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert calling on the Green Party not to run a candidate this year.
This helped me to come to a decision. I was seriously thinking of sitting this one out but my response to the above is: Fuck You! and I will now vote for whomever the Green Party nominates.
The authors above utilize so many clichés that it’s getting beyond …
by Bill Willers / January 26th, 2020
Martin Luther King Jr. Day has morphed into an annual reminder of the truth in Vladimir Lenin’s observation that great revolutionaries, while alive, are hounded by the powerful, and later, after they’ve been terminated, are lauded by their oppressors and transformed into harmless icons to placate the masses. Among the MLK-related articles to appear recently is a reposting of Edward Curtin’s 2017 review of Willam Pepper’s book The Plot to Kill King. Pepper, King’s friend and attorney for the King Family, spent 40 years researching the assassination, and Curtin’s review …
by Edward Curtin / January 25th, 2020
We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.” An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions. These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one. The result is mass hallucination.
This is the fundamental seismic shift of our era. There is a lot of bitching and joking about it, but when all is said and done, it is accepted as inevitable. Digital devices are embraced as phantom lovers. Technological “advances” are accepted as human destiny. …
Split Hearings
by Binoy Kampmark / January 25th, 2020
It is being increasingly larded with heavy twists and turns, a form of state oppression in slow motion, but the Julian Assange extradition case now looks like it may well move into the middle of the year, dragged out, ironically enough, by the prosecution. Curiously, this is a point that both the prosecutors, fronted by the US imperium, and the WikiLeaks defence team, seem to have found some inadvertent agreement with. This is the biggest case of its kind, and will determine, for an era, how journalism and the …
by Jeff J. Brown / January 24th, 2020
As of 24 January, a grand total of 25 people in China have died from a new strain of flu being dubbed “Wuhan”, after the city where it started. A few days ago, when 17 had died, Chinese media reported that 16 of them were over 65 years of age and the 17th was 61. So, clearly, the elderly is the most at risk group. But, that’s the case for mutating flu viruses every winter.
Beijing is taking unprecedented, anti-market, anti-capitalist measures to control it. Right at the peak of …
by William Vaillancourt / January 24th, 2020
Charles Sumner caned over his anti-slavery speech
When the likelihood of a person’s death increases on the day of his or her birth, this is called the “birthday effect.” An unimaginative term, it is not derived from obscure mysticism or divine occurrences beyond one’s control, but rather the practicality that the occasion can bring increased feelings of stress and depression, and that birthday celebrations can lead to fatal accidents. But the English language has no term for someone who is born and dies in the same place, …
by Robert Hunziker / January 24th, 2020
Thwaites, in West Antarctica, is the world’s most dangerous glacier. As of January 15th, scientists have labeled it: “A Climate Time Bomb.”
Thwaites is crumbling apart on the underneath side where warm ocean currents circulate, which is clear evidence that global warming is really, truly hitting its stride even as America, obeying President Trump’s orders, rejected its commitment to Paris ’15, a major climate agreement of almost all the nations of the world.
In point of fact, America is too focused on ceaseless (mindless) NYSE trading at new heights to give …
by Vijay Prashad / January 23rd, 2020
Hangameh Golestan, Witness 1979, 1979
On 17 January, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the Friday prayers for the first time in eight years. He mocked the ‘American clowns’ who threatened Iran and said that Iran’s response to the US assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani was a ‘slap in the face’ of US power. Tensions between Washington, DC, and Tehran seem to have gone from a boil to a simmer, …
by Yves Engler / January 23rd, 2020
While the current Liberal government claims to be progressive and in favour of a rules-based international order, promotion of democracy and world peace, its actions regarding Iran demonstrate that the primary drivers of Canadian foreign policy remain US geo-political interests and the interests of the rich and powerful.
(This previous article argues this has long been the case.)
While Israeli nationalists and Conservatives demand new measures targeting Iran, the reality is ordinary Canadians will not benefit from war with the 18th most populous country in the world. The families of Iranian-Canadians will certainly not benefit.
Despite election promises to the …
by Ben Norton / January 23rd, 2020
Video and a transcript of former OPCW engineer and dissenter Ian Henderson’s UN testimony appears at the end of this report.
A former lead investigator from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has spoken out at the United Nations, stating in no uncertain terms that the scientific evidence suggests there was no gas attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.
The dissenter, Ian Henderson, worked for 12 years at the international watchdog organization, serving as an inspection team leader and engineering expert. Among his most consequential jobs was assisting the international body’s fact-finding mission (FFM) on the ground in …
by Matthew J. L. Ehret / January 23rd, 2020
Anyone looking with sober eyes upon today’s world and the feeble economic and geopolitical underpinnings holding the system together must accept the fact that a new system WILL be created.
This is not an opinion, but a fact. We are moving towards eight billion lives on this globe and the means of productive powers to sustain that growing population (at least in the west) has been permitted to decay terribly over the recent half century while monetary values have grown like a hyperinflationary cancer to unimaginable proportions. Derivatives speculation alone under the deregulated “too big to fail” banking system has resulted …
Class Trumps Partisan Differences
by Roger D. Harris / January 22nd, 2020
On January 20, Donald G. Trump completed his third year in office. My one blog that received five-digit Facebook shares predicted Trump would lose in 2016. I was spectacularly wrong but not alone. Even the Las Vegas bookies thought Clinton was a shoo-in with her unbeatable two-punch knockout of (1) I’m not Trump and (2) World War III with the Russians would be peachy at least until the bombs start falling. What could possibly have gone wrong?
More to the point, the unexpected victory of Trump was the historical reaction to the bankruptcy of Clinton-Bush-Obama neoliberalism. Now after three years of …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 21st, 2020
Billions of US tax-payers’ money will continue to be funneled into Israel in the next fiscal year, and for many years in the foreseeable future. Republican and Democratic Senators have recently achieved just that, passing a bill aimed at providing Israel with $3.3 billion in annual aid.
The Bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Senator, Chris Coons and Republican Senator, Marco Rubio, passed on January 9, only one day after Iran struck US positions in Iraq. Enthusiasm to push the Bill forward was meant as an assurance to Tel Aviv from Washington, that the US is committed to Israel’s security and …
by Shawgi Tell / January 21st, 2020
To the shock of many, the Buffalo News, Buffalo’s main newspaper, recently published an article exposing serious problems with charter schools. Like Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, the Buffalo News usually goes out of its way to provide biased reporting on charter schools, almost always presenting them in the most favorable light possible, while consistently ignoring well-documented problems.
The Buffalo News published “Viewpoints: Charter schools are no educational panacea” by Buffalo School Board Member Larry Scott on January 18, 2020.
Several points are worth highlighting.
First, non-profit and …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 21st, 2020
From Stop The Militarization of Police Facebook page
In recent weeks Popular Resistance has focused on the escalation of US militarism around the world, especially in the Middle East with the assassination of General Soleimani, US troops staying in Syria to take their oil and the US refusing to leave Iraq despite being asked to leave. The US is in the midst of a potential escalation toward full-scale war in the Middle East once again.
However, militarism abroad is mirrored by militarism at home, especially in …
by Chris Wright / January 21st, 2020
At this point in history, two things are clear. First, Marx was right that capitalism is torn by too many “contradictions” to be sustainable indefinitely as a global economic system. In its terminal period, which we’re entering now (and which we can predict will last generations, because a global economic order doesn’t vanish in a decade or two), it will be afflicted by so many popular uprisings—on the left and the right—so many economic, political, and ecological crises causing so much turmoil and dislocation, that only a permanent and worldwide fascism would be able to save it. But fascism, by …
by Peter Koenig / January 21st, 2020
Why, after so many assurances to the contrary, have the three European Iran’s Nuclear Deal Partner’s – Germany, France, the UK – decided to go after Iran, to follow the US dictate again?
The short answer is because they’re cowards. They have zero backbone to stand up against the US hegemony, because they are afraid to be sanctioned – as Trump indicated if they were to honor the” Nuclear Deal”. Iran is absolutely in its right to progressively increase uranium enrichment, especially since the US unilaterally dropped out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also called Iran’s Nuclear Deal, without …
by William Hawes / January 21st, 2020
Recently, the ridiculous real estate company WeWork has faced intense scrutiny after their business model was absurdly overvalued and their CEO, one Adam Neumann, was exposed as an abusive boss as well as an overall crazy person. Investors from the Saudi royal family, companies like SoftBank and J.P. Morgan, and numerous venture capitalists poured vast sums of money into the company, fueling its overvaluation, which ran as high as 47 billion dollars. Unfortunately, mainstream media continues to trot out this story, as well as other famous instances of corporate fraud, corruption, and malfeasance as anomalies, aberrations. Somehow, absurd …
