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Nine-year-old Jana ignores the gunfire in the distance as she carries a cardboard box across the sand. The box contains her best friend: a four-month-old orange-white kitten that bears her name and cuddles with her when the bombs are falling. A few meters behind her, her twelve-year-old sister Nada carries one of the kitten’s siblings, a silver-grey tabby who likewise shares her name. Their father, Salah El-Din Youssef, named the kittens after his daughters so the girls would become attached to them. He didn’t have to bother. They would have loved the kittens no matter what their names were. …

Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed…There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons…

– Paulo Friere,  Pedagogy of the Oppressed

This week marks one year of Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, violence the Israeli regime has been emboldened to escalate in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. We are reflecting on this moment with a new visual and a re-release of the We Had Dreams platform.

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Free markets?  Free trade?  The modern economic world has little time for these erroneous, misdirected terms.  More evident are the feelings of resentment, prejudice and indignant parochialism more accurately called My Country First, and Everyone Else Last.  Back your industries; hobble the competitors.  And everyone is doing it, except certain ideologues who, childishly, cling to the view that there ever was such a thing as a true laissez-faire world.

Free trade remains, in general, a fantasy, dangerous for the naïve who feel that by embracing it, they are somehow enlarging their appeal and standing.  Often, countries extolling its value are only …

In an election year, both US parties are competing to outdo one another with hawkish rhetoric on the Korean Peninsula, leaning heavily into the strategy of confrontation with China through the US-South Korea-Japan tripartite alliance; a flawed vision that threatens to “erupt into a regional war, a full-scale war, or even a nuclear war.”

In her closing speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris presented the most openly militaristic take on Washington’s Korea policy “since the GOP convention that nominated [Senator Barry] Goldwater in 1964.” Harris’ hawkish view all but discards …

Down at my grocer’s for half a dozen eggs and some melon, I answered the usual question about my well being openly as accustomed. My neighbour is a friend and his query is sincere. After recounting local concerns he expresses his frustration, one more people certainly share, that they can witness audio-visual depictions of the rampage in the Gaza concentration camp of occupied Palestine on television and hear the words of the ostensible leaders of the great states in the United Nations assembled say little and do less to stop the …

Sen. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio seem to have issues with the elementary process of counting. Last time I checked, there were fifty states, not fifty-one states, in the United States of America. Unfortunately, Scott and Rubio seem to have missed this lesson in civics class and have somehow wound up believing that they are the representatives of the Venezuelan people.

While it is a tragedy that Scott and Rubio were not able to learn this basic fact prior to being elected to the Senate, it is not surprising. In recent years, Florida has become a platform for Neoconservatives to …

What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

— …

(Full article …)

2024 presidential candidates: Former President Donald Trump (left) and current Vice President Kamala Harris IMAGE/ABCNews

When faced with two adverse unethical options, a person may try to avoid the more harmful immoral choice. This is ancient strategy people have talked and written about, and applied in various situations. In the US political parlance, the term “lesser of two evils,” is choosing the evil that will be less damaging.

There is talk about voting for the “lesser of two evils.” The rationale behind this …

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle of … the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
— (BAP Principle of Unity)

Today, October 7, 2024, the world commemorates – some in horror, others in celebration – a full year of a genocidal war, prosecuted in real time in occupied Palestine. In spite of the commonly accepted lie that the Al Aqsa Flood on October 7 was the beginning, this “war” actually began on November 29, 1947, with the passing of the UN resolution that led to the …

What does questioning the status quo signify?

I’ve appended an excellent article by Mike Whitney, which I read as I was starting to write this. It makes mine much shorter because it says much of what I intended, and better, with good references. It’s worth reading carefully, even if you find that much of it simply confirms what you suspected, with more evidence and argument. What I would like to add, nevertheless, is what the future bodes and what Palestine/Israel may finally look like.

1. Israel will not defeat Hamas or its allies in the Palestinian resistance. Hamas is becoming stronger, not weaker, with a …

A national veterans’ organization on 30 September called for a grand jury to indict Department of State (DOS) Secretary Antony Blinken and the U.S. Ambassador to Israel for lying to Congress, violating the Export Control Act, the Genocide Prevention Act and the U.S. War Crimes Act.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, Veterans For Peace (VFP) cited published reports showing that internal DOS emails and the statements of two senior State Department officials showed Blinken lied when he issued his “Report to Congress” stating, “…we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting …

But is it literally darkest before the dawn?

One has to be careful when the government throws free speech and free expression in the toilet.

The hopeless fault-finder. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

These days the People’s Republic of China is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Over the past 75 years, China has grown from a poor and backward country to the world’s second-largest economy, with about one-sixth of the world’s population escaping poverty.

However, as China continued to rise, the US’ attitude toward China has changed dramatically. Be it the “China threat” narrative or the “China challenge” theory, US politicians …