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Ethiopia Conflict by US Design
Supported by America and other foreign forces, including elements within United Nations (UN) agencies, The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) is attempting to overthrow the democratically elected Government of Ethiopia and regain power. This would be disastrous for the country and the region.
The impact of the year-long conflict is devastating. Perhaps as many as three million people are internally displaced, tens of thousands have been killed; women and girls raped, property trashed, land destroyed, livestock slaughtered by TPLF fighters. At this stage it is difficult to see how a peaceful resolution can be reached; the government has said it will …
The Tribal Left’s a Mirror Image of the Tribal Right
Of course, I expect a backlash every time I write. It comes with the territory. There is no point being a Bari Weiss or a David Frum and crying out against “cancel culture”. Dissension is part of the rough and tumble of a modern world in which everyone – at least, for a little longer – gets their 15 minutes of sounding off, however ignorant their opinions. There are millions of people out there on social media, and some of them seem to have pretty disturbing views.
But I don’t write just …
Reminder: The Rich are Vampires
They are different from you and me...
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” published in 1926 by Red Book magazine
The rich are vampires. In 2020, for example, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires while an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. Indeed, the very rich are different. But it goes further than money. Much further.
The rich are vampires. In 2020, for example, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. …
A People’s History of the Canadian Military
A review of Yves Engler's book Stand on Guard for Whom?
Many informed Canadians remain surprisingly unenlightened about the country’s military history. Canada’s military is widely viewed as either nonexistent, irrelevant, or a force for good. The Canadian Forces’ (CF) public relations department has been very effective in crafting a positive image for the country’s military. In addition, constant comparisons to the US’s rampant militarism benefits Canada’s image.
With the new book Stand on Guard for Whom: A People’s History of the Canadian Military, Canadian foreign policy expert Yves Engler produces a rigorously researched document that exposes Canada’s role …
Manchin’s better way to pay for Build Back Better
Amazing but true: One of the best ideas to pay for Build Back Better came from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV).
Yes, Manchin is a big reason that president Biden’s landmark bill is taking forever to get through Congress. Yes, Manchin personally vetoed a tax on billionaires that passed muster with everybody except, well, billionaires. “I don’t like the connotation,” he said, “that we’re targeting different people.”
Manchin wouldn’t take that route. Instead, in words that go to the heart of tax fairness, he called for all hands on deck: “I’m supporting basically that everyone should pay their fair share.”
No, everyone …
Austria: First Western Country to “Legally” Impose “Vaccination” on Her Population
The Beginning of a Well-Orchestrated Western Depopulation Agenda
Austria announced a few days ago that it will go into a total lockdown for at least 2 weeks and a maximum of 20 days. Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg added that ”there will be a legal requirement to get vaccinated from 1 February 2022.”
This and more was reported by BBC, and as we know, BBC gets it always right and questions nothing; doesn’t criticize even the most flagrant infraction of human rights.
What “legal requirement”? There can be no legal requirement in a so-called democracy that is above a Human Right. None. BBC doesn’t seem to know, nor care. What Austria …
News on China | No. 77
In this week’s News on China in 2 minutes: economic changes in China; increased share of the wealth pie garnered by the richest 10%; curbing groundwater exploitation; Chinese entertainment achieving international popularity.
Off to the Solomon Islands: Australia’s Civilizers Get Busy
A small riot. Unrest. Risk of collapse. All given a ballooning effect and inflated for policy makers across the ocean. Before much time elapses, Australian security forces are skirting off to restore order in their vast watery neighbourhood. It is a reminder that such relations in the Pacific region are a mixture of intervention, forcible charitable guidance and, at times, plain scolding.
In the Solomon Islands, Australian interventionism was originally cloaked in shining dress, justified as humanitarian and utterly noble. By the time some 2,000 troops, police officers and support personnel, mostly Australian, were deployed in 2003, the country had already …
We Do Exist: Why the Palestinian Voice Should Take Center Stage
At a recent New York event, the President of the Foreign Press Association Ian Williams declared, before an approving audience, that it is time “to reclaim the narrative on Palestine”.
This phrase – ‘reclaiming the narrative’ – is relatively new to the Palestinian discourse. Years ago, the concept, let alone its implementation, were quite alien: the pro-Israel crowd refused, and still refuses, to acknowledge that Palestinians, their history and political discourse matter; some in the pro-Palestinian movement relegated Palestinian voices as if they were simply incapable of articulating a coherent narrative.
For many years, I, along with other Palestinian intellectuals, raged against …
This Victory Gives Confidence for Future Struggles
A farmer at the protest encampment at Delhi’s Singhu Border carries the flag of the All India Kisan Sabha, 21 November 2021. Subin Dennis / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
On 19 November 2021, a week before the first anniversary of the farmers’ revolt, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi surrendered. He accepted that the three laws on agricultural markets that …
The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster
The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the petit-bourgeois intellectual servants of capital would see no rival or check on U.S. power. According to liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, with the dismantling of the Soviet state and system, the historic struggle to establish the hegemony of classical liberalism and capitalism as …
No Thanks, Thanksgiving … National Day of Sorrow … Mourning
Yet, they still say, Happy Thanksgiving, and they still believe it's about the turkey, pies and Black Friday plans!
Yep, a broken record, or to update that, another one of a million cries in the dark digital dungeon to relearn history, and unlearn the rotten past. I have been looking at the Reclaiming the Sacred since I met Winona LaDuke decades ago. That’s a whole other story.
But it doesn’t matter, especially in a time of Branch Covidians and the Trump-Biden-Obama-Clinton-Bush-Carter-Nixon-Ford-LBJ Days of Wine and Roses. Full of military industrial complex disease, and forget about American Indian Movement or Joan Baez or Leonard Peltier or even that guy, Marlon Brando.
Forget about the PhDs and MDs and leaders and elders alive …
Harnessing Social Media to Help Solve and Predict Crime”
Welcome to 2054?
On January 30, 2020, The Brennan Center for Justice sent a letter to the Los Angeles Police Department that began as such:
This is a request under the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”), Cal. Gov’t Code §§ 6250-6270, on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law (“Brennan Center”). The Brennan Center seeks information relating to the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of social media to collect information about individuals, groups, and activities, described below as “social media monitoring.
If you want to nerd out to the …
What Are The Prospects For Peace?
Interview with Lee Camp
Events are unfolding at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we are looking to our most respected and renowned thought leaders for an honest assessment of both U.S. foreign and military policy to offer their most current thoughts and insights. We know they have some ideas for improving the prospects for peace.
Lee Camp is the head writer and host of the national TV show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp on RT America. He’s a former contributor to The Onion, former staff humor writer for the Huffington …
Everything goes Better with Coca Cola: Hitching Capitalism to Sweet Slow Death
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” — John Muir
“All things are connected like the blood that unites us. We do not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” – Chief Seattle
The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the soda pop! It’s complicated, but also not. When a second country to me, Mexico, is colonized by Capitalism, the results are as clear as what the billionaire class, the …
The Dreaded Rainforest Shift
Photo Credit: Rainforest Trust
Major portions of the Amazon rainforest have shifted from a carbon sink to a carbon source. This shift has severe planet-wide negative implications.
Studies of the Amazon rainforest over the past decade have shown telltale signals of an impending shift from a carbon sink of heat-trapping gases to a source of greenhouse gases. It’s a dangerous shift that will destabilize the atmosphere of the entire planet. Alas, the dreaded shift has been confirmed via a laborious ten-year airborne detailed study.
The study shows the eastern Amazon rainforest has …
Equality Under the Law is a Reactionary Doctrine
If one is to remain agnostic of the motivations and social movements that brought Kyle Rittenhouse to Kenosha on the night of August 25th, 2020, it becomes impossible to make proper meaning of the two murders he would commit that night, and of his recent acquittal. That agnosticism is precisely what the American justice system relies on, and why there was no chance that it could deliver justice in this case.
Legally speaking, Rittenhouse may very well have had every right to fire his weapon. Legally speaking, everything that occurred from then until now, from the police’s preferential treatment to the …
Is There Much Point in Putin or Xi Talking With Biden?
© Mandel Ngan
If a dialogue produces positive results then of course such dialogue should be pursued earnestly. That’s a general rule. But what about in the case of dialogue between the US president Joe Biden and his Russian or Chinese counterparts?
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is due to hold a virtual face-to-face meeting with Biden in the coming weeks. No date has been set yet. The format will be similar to the one held last week between the American leader and Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.
Of course, …
America’s “Long War” against the Korean Nation
1. US War Crimes committed against the Korean Nation (1950-53)
“Fire and Fury” was not invented by Donald Trump. It is a concept deeply embedded in US military doctrine. It has characterized US military interventions since the end of World War II.
What distinguishes Trump from his predecessors in the White House is his political narrative at the 2017 United Nations General Assembly.
President Harry Truman from the very outset of the Korean War (1950-53) was a firm advocate of “Fire and Fury” against the people of both …
Totalitarian Cyber-Creep: Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse
Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley. At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad. At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious, demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of information and flashes of data. Such boys (they are mostly boys), felt somehow left out by the currents of reality, their own world excruciatingly boring and filled with pangs of childhood disturbance and regret. So they sought vengeance upon us all: imposing a global regime of fairly useless cyber architecture that saps intelligence in the …
Don’t Give up on the Blessings of Freedom
All we are saying is give peace a chance.
—John Lennon
How do you give thanks for freedoms that are constantly being eroded?
How do you express gratitude for one’s safety when the perils posed by the American police state grow more treacherous by the day?
How do you come together as a nation in thanksgiving when the powers-that-be continue to polarize and divide us into warring factions?
Every year finds us struggling to reconcile our hope for a better, freer, more just world with the soul-sucking reality of a world in which greed, meanness and war continue to triumph.
Fifty years ago, John Lennon …
A Rock and a Hard Place in India
Prior to the COVID-related restrictions and lockdowns, I had spent a substantial part of every year in India since 1995 (25 consecutive years). Much has happened in that time and I have been observing, analysing and commentating extensively on developments there, especially the devastating agrarian crisis.
While veteran rural affairs reporter P Sainath has described rural India as arguably the most fascinating place on the planet, urban India should not be overlooked. An urban landscape that continues to feed off the lifeblood of the rural. But it too has more than its fair share of beauty, happiness, misery and contradictions.
A full-force …
Raids, Arrests and Death Threats: Israel’s Strategy of Silencing Human Rights Defenders
On October 21, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced the issuance of a military order designating six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as ‘terrorist organizations’. Gantz claimed that they are secretly linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a socialist political group that Israel considers, along with most Palestinian political parties, ‘a terrorist organization.’
The Palestinian organizations included in the Israeli order are Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights, Al-Haq, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.
Considering the significance of …
What Do an Apology, Reconciliation, and a Sacred Obligation to Constitutionally Guaranteed Rights of First Nations Look Like in Canada?
They send a hundred RCMP to go protect a pipeline and not protect people’s lives so we need to push back. They put industry, they put fracking, they put gas and oil over everyone’s lives.
— Eve Saint, a Wet’suwet’en land defender
In the nineteenth century, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, a colonial official, wrote an account — The Nootka: Scenes and Studies of Savage Life — of his time among the Nuu Chah Nulth people on the west coast of Vancouver Island. He noted that the Nuu Chah Nulth (mistakenly first called Nootka by captain Cook) have “known every …
US Past and Present
Recently there has been much discussion about the teaching of US history. In the past and perhaps slightly less so in the present, the full story of our history and of the founding fathers hasn’t been presented. The founders’ inspirational and impressive accomplishments have been highlighted. The fact that many of the founders were slave owners was downplayed or ignored. In addition, the truly horrific evils of slavery and the mistreatment of Blacks under Jim Crow laws received very limited coverage. Moreover, the genocide of Native Americans received little mention. This biased presentation of US history set the stage for …
The High Stakes of the U.S.-Russia Confrontation Over Ukraine
The border between post-coup Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, based on the Minsk Agreements. Map credit: Wikipedia
The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.
The last time this …
President John F. Kennedy: His Life and Public Assassination
The following article by Edward Curtin on the life of President John F. Kennedy, and his assassination on this date, November 22, 1963, is the lead piece in the eighth issue of Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics that has just been published: “The Political Assassinations of the 1960s.” From JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X, to Hammarskjold and Lumumba, the 1960s were a tragic period when the CIA took over the United States and profoundly changed the course of history, and Garrison is indispensable for understanding that …
The Hypocritical Oath
Medical Residency Trains Physicians to Be Tools for Capitalism
Residency training often claims to focus on training effective physicians. In reality, it’s an intricately designed conditioning process to train physicians to be tools for profit maximization. In order to be truly “effective” physicians, residents, in solidarity with other healthcare workers, must organize to challenge the systems that lead to suffering and illness both in health care and around the globe.
The end of …
Jumping to China-bashing Conclusions
Due process calls demands waiting for the facts
Peng Shuai, a highly successful tennis player from China is currently at the center of a western media maelstrom. This maelstrom stems from a 2 November post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Peng is said to have publicly accused the former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli of raping her in 2018.
The timing, of what effectively becomes a trial by western media, is most inauspicious for China. TSN points to the looming winter Olympics slated for Beijing and then adds in the ludicrous allegation of crimes …