Globe and Mail omissions enable its wild foreign policy claims. By failing to mention crucial history Canada’s ‘paper of record’ can claim the military spreads the “democratic gospel” in Africa.
A recent front page Globe story headlined “Honduran women risk death and imprisonment as they try to access reproductive care” discussed the plight of women in the Central American country. Adding political context the article noted, “In 2009, then-president Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup by Honduras’s army with the support of powerful political elites. Religious leaders took on prominent positions in politics and condemned emergency contraception — …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / August 17th, 2023
When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.
— Mike Thomas, sports editor, Sportscasting, November 9, 2020
What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.
In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a …
Just a short time ago it would have seemed like a Quixotic adventure in the colonised, neocolonised, or even the imperialist nations themselves to make any attempt to create films of decolonisation that turned their back on or actively opposed the System.
— Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino – ‘Towards a Third Cinema’
From the short black and white films of the Lumiére brothers to the technically superb blockbusters of today, cinema has been analysed from every kind of social and political perspective. Yet, it is still a relatively young art, …
It was a shallow affair. Reputed to have exceptionally poor hairdo, the figure who became one of Europe’s, and indeed one of the globe’s most lasting and influential politicians, inspired memes aplenty for what she sported on her bonce.
The teases, the parodying, the satire, began to bite. Stylists were sought in an attempt to do away with the soup bowl severity of her hair, all part of the rebrand in running against Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2005. There was Udo Walz, whose clients included Chancellor Schröder himself, and celebrity terrorists such as Ulrike Meinhof.
Former world hairdressing champion, Martina Acht also …
“JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr. assassinated by their own government.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy Theory!”
“Power elite of war industry in collusion with the US government (i.e., the “corpocracy”) killing hundreds of millions of people for profit, plunder, and more power.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“The power elite cause widespread poverty.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“911 tragedy was an inside job.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“US operates a criminal injustice system.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“Covid-19 was a CIA operation.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“US industry buys and bribes politicians’ votes.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“US corpocracy “dumbs down” Americans via contrived public education, …
A year prior to Italy’s 2022 elections, Giorgia Meloni was invited to join the Aspen Institute, a Washington based strategic think tank with close relations to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Atlantic Council and the military industrial complex:
“The Aspen institute is also involved in the arms industry, with links to arms manufacturing giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It has typically supported the US’s ‘democracy-defending’ or ‘democracy-propagating, humane and civilized’ wars.”
Prominent US politicians including Madeleine Albright, Condolezza Riceas well as Victoria Nulandhave actively collaborated with the Aspen Institute.
At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay. Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of 1917, any sentence is bound to be hefty. Were he to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the US, Assange will disappear into a carceral, life-ending dystopia.
In this saga of relentless mugging and persecution, the country that has featured …
It’s never a very enjoyable experience, facing the fact that you’ve been bamboozled. Realizing that you’ve fallen prey to an elaborate con, or PYSOP, is painful. It’s embarrassing. People feel ashamed. No one likes to see themselves as a sucker. It’s humiliating. It makes people angry. It makes them want to lash out at someone.
The funny thing is, it usually isn’t the person who conned them that they want to lash out at. Doing that would only make them feel more ashamed. No, typically, who people want to lash out at, when they finally realize that they’ve been bamboozled, are …
Smalltown stories scaling up to universalities all people can learn from
by Paul Haeder / August 14th, 2023
Bayside Cellars (Waldport, OR) proprietor just getting started — Community Journalism gets to the soul of humanity and our connections to the larger world. First appeared in Newport News Times
Pulling out all the skills one gains through living, working and surviving can turn a dream into a going concern. One Waldport entrepreneur is digging being her own boss, expressing creativity in her hospitality business and turning into the toast of the town. Bayside Cellars is Shauna Flynn’s wine “bar” inspired by her …
FIFA is a funny organisation. Mafia-run, obscenely corrupt, it governs the most popular game on the planet with a shameless, muscular vigour that must make other criminal enterprises green with envy. But even its members must find the curious limitations to viewing matches of the 2023 Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New Zealand odd, especially given the organisation’s efforts to promote the appeal of the game.
Billed as the most popular women’s tournament ever, Australians have been rationed in their share of viewable matches. A mere 15 matches are available from the free-to-air service on Channel Seven. If …
• BRI investments increase, prioritizing smaller projects
• Historic drop in FDI in China
• Gig workers face lower wages
• Movies from China aimed at Chinese audiences
A leaked cable just confirms what the world has had enough of. US muscle pushed for toppling Imran Khan. Just as it has from Ukraine to Africa to Brazil, and anywhere else Uncle Sam wants to get his way.
Akeel Bilgrami’s article “Gandhi and Liberal Modernity: The Vexed Question of Caste” undertakes a materialist interpretation of Gandhi’s thought against the background of capitalism and the agrarian question. Gandhi’s idealization of precapitalist communities is given “descriptive” dignity as an implicit grasp of the inapplicability of the Marxist notion of “primitive accumulation” to India. While those dispossessed by primitive accumulation in England could move to other parts of the world as a result of settler colonialism, the impoverished Indian peasantry finds itself without such avenues for migration. This historical difference creates a divergence in the process of class formation. In …
Elements of Settler Colonialism appear in the Middle East crisis and these elements have been fitted together to obtain the accepted definition. The term is ominous; previous Settler Colonialism operations ended by either indigenous people regaining lands and dignity, as in the African nations, or evolving into the destruction of native people, as occurred in the Americas. Under Settler Colonialism, the fate of the Palestinian people leans heavily in the direction of destruction. No change in the 75-year-old monotonic trajectory of Settler Colonialism is apparent; economic, legal, and physical avenues of contention to the oppression have been explored and none …
US President Joe Biden speaks at the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center on August 10, 2023 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Photo: AFP
At a political fundraising event in Park City, Utah on Thursday, US President Joe Biden said China was “in trouble” because of economic and population issues and slammed China’s economic situation as “a ticking time bomb” in many cases. He also said, “When …
In May last year, the Washington Post ran a fairly typical piece about what the paper perceives as an unjustified conservative mania regarding President Joe Biden’s son. While those in the US worried “about such things as inflation and the war in Ukraine, the top concerns of congressional Republicans can be ranked roughly as follows: 1) Hunter Biden; 2) Hunter Biden; 3) Hunter Biden; 4) Hunter Biden.”
None of this can get away from the fact that Hunter Biden is an inkblot for his father and the Democrats. What matters is how big that blot is, and how far …
Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.
This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses. This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years. People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is …
Time and again Nicaragua is showing other countries the importance of fighting for sovereignty, independence, peace and the well-being of its people.
by Nan McCurdy / August 11th, 2023
(Photo Credit: Lapaz Telesur)
On June 27, 1986, the World Court condemned the United States for illegal war and aggression against Nicaragua and ordered the US to compensate Nicaragua for damages estimated to run to US$17 billion dollars, what today would be more than US$55 billion. On June 27 of this year, President Daniel Ortega demanded that the US fulfill its obligation. He stated:
On June 27, 1986, the International Court of Justice condemned the US and directed it to compensate Nicaragua for all damages caused as a consequence of military …
Colonialism has as its aim gaining ownership/control of the land and its resources regardless of whether or not the land was already populated by an Indigenous people. Morality aside, colonialism has been very successful in the context of Turtle Island. This is also true in northwestern Turtle Island, where the colonies designated “Vancouver Island” and “British Columbia” (merged in 1866) were created through the dispossession of First Nations.
Dispossession of a people is a thoroughly nasty business, and it blatantly violates one of the biblical ten commandments, one that is encoded in law around the world, namely, “Thou shalt not steal.” …
The Far-Right takeover of the Republican Party has readied a battle plan for 2025 that will crucify commitments to fight global heat; namely, Project 2025 / Presidential Transition Project, a 920-page formal proposal to take over and reconstruct government via abandonment and/or defunding of federal agencies that protect the nation’s health and environment.
Project 2025’s call to arms: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” 1“The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, A Note on …
In an historic event, the US Congress Oversight Committee, have been talking about UFOs. Except they don’t call them UFOs anymore, it’s too specific I suppose: the more ambiguous UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) is preferred. Whatever term is used, the hearing represents a powerful sign of the extraordinary times we live in, times of revelation, when people will no longer be silenced, truth buried.
The hearing may lift the stigma of reporting sightings of UFOs/UAPs, among personnel in the armed forces (of all nations), and is a major step in revealing the level of official deceit surrounding the topic.
When the FDIC put Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank into receivership in March, a study reported on the Social Science Research Network found that nearly 200 mid-sized U.S. banks were similarly vulnerable to bank runs. First Republic Bank went into receivership in May, but the feared contagion of runs did not otherwise occur. Why not? As was said of Lehman Brothers fifteen years earlier, the targeted banks did not fall; they were pushed, or so it seems. One blogger shows how even JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, could be pushed — not perhaps by local …
In late July, I visited two settlements of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) on the outskirts of São Paulo (Brazil). Both settlements are named for brave women, the Brazilian lawmaker Marielle Franco – who was assassinated in 2018 – and Irmã Alberta – an Italian Catholic nun who died in 2018. The lands where the MST has built the Marielle Vive camp and the Irmã Alberta Land Commune were slated for a gated community with a golf course, and a garbage dump, respectively. Based on the social obligations for land use …
In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum. “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.”
The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light. Information freedom is …
Take your pick from two definitions of modern-day Republicans: foolish hypocrites or hypocritical fools. When it comes to America’s $32 trillion federal deficit, each one is as fitting as the other. They’re hypocrites for saying one thing and doing another. They’re fools because the actions they take are driving the deficit ever higher.
Let’s listen to the words Republicans mouth. Let’s look at the laws they pass and propose. Let’s zero in on their special ways of spending—and spurning—tax dollars.
Off we go, into a world of debt created by the party that claims to be concerned about debt.
Book Review of Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance by Daniel Kovalik
by Rick Sterling / August 9th, 2023
Many nations in the Americas have suffered from US promoted coups, dictatorships, sanctions and outright invasions. Nicaragua may take the cake for being the most victimized. Dan Kovalik has written a book which reviews the history of intervention and resistance up to the present day.
Kovalik includes his own experiences from several decades visiting Nicaragua. The first time was with a Veterans for Peace (VFP) convoy of trucks bringing aid to Nicaragua in 1987. Incredibly, for two months the US government blocked the aid trucks from exiting the US en route to …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / August 9th, 2023
Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.
This is what it means to go back-to-school in America today.
Instead of being taught the three R’s of education (reading, writing and arithmetic), young people are being drilled in the three I’s of life in the American police state: indoctrination, intimidation and intolerance.
Indeed, while young people today are learning first-hand what it means …
