Latest articles
Rogue States and Thought Crimes
by Binoy Kampmark / June 14th, 2025
Pre-emptive attacks in international law are rarely justified. The threat must evince itself through an obvious intent to inflict injury, evidence preparations that show the threat to be what Michael Walzer calls a “supreme emergency”, and arise in a situation where risk of defeat would be dramatically increased if force is not used.
Reaching an assessment on that matter is almost impossible. Evidence of such a threat by the aggressor state is bound to be speculative, concealing other strategic objectives that make that action amount to illegal, preventive war. Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure …
by Barbara MacLean / June 13th, 2025
Why Communists Should Respect the Work of Jean Piaget
Synthesizing biology and philosophy
Without a doubt Jean Piaget is one of the greatest Western psychologists of the 20th century. By training as a biologist, he synthesized biology with his love of philosophy through the practical work of understanding human development over the life span. Piaget must have been in heaven as he got a chance to apply Kant’s categorizes of thought to how children navigated the world. He found that children’s sense of time, space, causality, chance, and numbers changed qualitatively as they got …
Project 2025 is hollowing out government--and it’s just getting started
by Bill Berkowitz / June 13th, 2025
Project 2025 is hollowing out government — and it’s just getting started
As we approach the fifth month of Donald Trump’s second term, you might be asking: “What’s up with Project 2025?” According to GPAHE (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism), “Data compiled by the Project 2025 Tracker reveals a presidency operating with methodical precision, adhering to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook. Of the 313 …
by Allen Forrest / June 13th, 2025
by Thomas C. Mountain / June 13th, 2025
In today’s Ethiopia, ruled by a US backed gangster named Abiy Ahmed, things are falling apart. To start with 75% of the country is out of the government’s control as insurgencies rage. “Prime Minister” Abiy is, in reality, only the Mayor of the capital Addis Ababa with rebel armies ringing the city only 30 miles from its outskirts.
On one side of Addis Ababa is the ethnic Amhara FANO (patriot) fighters. On the other side of Addis Ababa is the Oromo rebels. Being that these two ethnic groups, nations really, are the …
by Mike Ferner / June 13th, 2025
It only took 20 days.
I didn’t have to sleep on the cold, wet ground, live in a tent; relieve my bowels and bladder in the open like everyone around me; watch my children burn to death or die in my arms because all the hospitals were purposely destroyed; drink polluted water, dodge snipers or hear deadly drones buzzing day and night.
I’m here in New York, a city millions come to visit and where residents pay outrageous amounts just to live. I drink all the clean water I want, have a warm bed at night, walk about safely, see the greatest …
by Jill Clark-Gollub / June 13th, 2025
Left Photo: Inmate in Nicaragua receives diploma (19 Digital). Right Photo: Inmates dehumanized in El Salvador (El Salvador Presidency handout/Anadolu/Getty Images)
Ortega and Bukele are polar opposites: one invests in dignity and democracy, the other in mass incarceration and imperial alliances.
Opposition media from both Nicaragua and El Salvador, along with the Washington Post, Amnesty International, …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 12th, 2025
They really ought to be doing more. But in the scheme of things, the sanctioning of Israeli’s frothily fanatical ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich by New Zealand, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and Australia is a reminder to the Israeli government that ethnic cleansing, mass killing and the destruction of a people will receive some comment. But a closer look at the trumpeted move does little to suggest anything in the way of change or deterrence, certainly not in Gaza, where the cataclysm continues without restraint.
According to the joint statement, both politicians “have incited extremist violence …
by Ann Garrison / June 12th, 2025
General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, left, was acquitted of all charges in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s Appeals Court after a 14-year battle waged by the late Christopher C. Black, right.
Christopher C. Black fought for justice in politically agendized international courts.
International criminal defense attorney and writer Christopher C. Black died suddenly on June 5, 2025. He will be sorely missed. His analysis of the imbalanced scales of international justice and his representation of those wrongly …
by John Perry and Roger D. Harris / June 11th, 2025
“We look for the poorest patients,” the Cuban doctor in charge of the eye clinic said. “Often we travel to remote rural areas and bring them to the clinic in a bus.” The clinic, located in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, was part of Misión Milagro (Miracle Mission), a joint initiative run by the Cuban and Venezuelan governments. The larger mission has treated over seven million patients in 33 countries since 2004. Local Nicaraguan doctors, trained by the Cubans, are now in charge in Ciudad Sandino.
Misión Milagro is despised by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Washington has imposed …
by Zara Zimbardo / June 11th, 2025
If Mars Is the Answer, What Was the Question?
Mars is 140 million miles away, but it has never been closer. Whether it’s Elon Musk’s relentless cheerleading, the competing plans of various nation states, or the unending cycle of popular culture, Mars is having a serious moment.
Composite image of Earth and Mars
Earthlings have been projecting hopes and fears onto Mars for a very …
by Allen Forrest / June 11th, 2025
Just what is the reach of social media?
by John Perry / June 11th, 2025
AP (4/13/25) attributes Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s re-election to “voters weary of crime”—even though murders rose sharply under his administration.
Elections in Latin America are often controversial. While many countries in the Global North regularly shuffle between parties offering alternating versions of neoliberalism, voting in Central and South America often offers starker contrasts: An anti-imperialist candidate in the mold of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez might be up against a neoliberal such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. It could hardly be otherwise, …
by B.R. Gowani / June 11th, 2025
IMAGE/Getty Image/CNN
A South Asian proverb:
When-buffaloes fight, it’s the trees that gets wrecked.
An African saying:
When elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets hurt.
Just at this moment, I received a divine revelation:
“When the world’s most powerful person and the planet’s richest person fight, it’s the world that gets ravaged.”
HOPE NOT!
HOPE …
they’ll “have dinner together,” instead.
To me, war God YHWH further revealed:
“Whatever happens elsewhere is none of my business. However, what happens in my ‘chosen land’ is …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / June 10th, 2025
In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.
What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.
Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.
This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.
When Trump issues a call to “…
by Allen Forrest / June 10th, 2025
First considerations about cellphones.
by Binoy Kampmark / June 10th, 2025
The latest incident with the Madleen vessel, pictured as a relief measure by celebrity activists and sundry accompaniments to supply civilians with a modest assortment of humanitarian aid, is merely one of multiple previous efforts to break the Gaza blockade. It is easy to forget that, prior to Israel’s current program to kill, starve, and empty the enclave of its Palestinian citizens after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Gaza had already become, arguably, the world’s largest open-air prison. It was a prison which converted all citizens into inmates trapped in a state of continual privation, placed under constant …
by Ann Wright / June 9th, 2025
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s (FFC) sailboat, Madleen was intercepted in international waters by the Israeli military at 3:02 am CEST at 31.95236° N, 32.38880° E.
Photo from camera onboard the Madleen.
The ship was unlawfully boarded, its 12 unarmed civilian crew and participants abducted, and its life-saving cargo – including baby formula, food and medical supplies – confiscated, as well as personal possessions taken.
To our knowledge, no one from the Madleen was …
by Allen Forrest / June 9th, 2025
A short and direct critique
by Michel Luc Bellemare / June 9th, 2025
One of the greatest tricks capitalism ever played on the global intelligentsia was convincing some of them that it no longer exists, that it is dead and gone, having vanished in plain sight from the face of the earth. And in the last few years, a branch of political economy has risen arguing exactly this, whereby capitalism has unraveled and devolved into techno-feudalism. That is, that capitalism has exited the stage of world history, or has started to do so, only to be replaced by techno-feudalism, i.e., a socio-economic formation, where markets have been usurped and/or abolished in favor of highly-organized and …
by Pauline Easton / June 9th, 2025
It is noteworthy that those in the U.S. fighting for their rights against the oligarchs have as one of their slogans “No Kings” and here Carney is going in the opposite direction. It is another indication of the anti-people, anti-democratic aims of this government.
No matter what variant the ruling circles give of nation-building, of significance is that nation-building is not possible today without first settling the issue of where sovereignty is vested: in narrow private interests or in the people? And, along with this, who is “the people”? If “the people” is the ruling class, …
by Media Lens / June 9th, 2025
Noam Chomsky offered a rule of thumb for predicting the ‘mainstream’ response to crimes against humanity:
‘There is a way to calibrate reaction. If it’s a crime of somebody else, particularly an enemy, then we’re utterly outraged. If it’s our own crime, either comparable or worse, either it’s suppressed or denied. That works with almost 100 percent precision.’ (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.27)
Now is an excellent time to put Chomsky’s claim to the test.
A BBC headline over …
by Eric Zuesse / June 9th, 2025
Ever since the economic crash in 2008, it has been clear that the foundation of standard or “neoclassical” economic theory — which extends the standard microeconomic theory into national economies (macroeconomics) — fails at the macroeconomic level, and therefore that in both the microeconomic and macroeconomic domains, economic theory, or the standard or “neoclassical” economic theory, is factually false. Nonetheless, the world’s economists did nothing to replace that theory — the standard theory of economics — and they continue on as before, as-if the disproof of a theory in economics does NOT mean that that false theory needs to be …
by Philip A. Faruggio / June 9th, 2025
As we have those great warriors leading our nation, let’s look at their military service. You know, the important things that so many love to thank them for. Let’s see, we have Donnie Trump, who supported the Vietnam War but just could not serve, due to 4 student deferments and then one medical for bone spurs in his foot. Yet, he stood tall in his salute to our boys in The Shit as the Nam was called. W Bush was one who served during the height of the Vietnam War, with the Texas Air National Guard. Now, for those who …
by Jonathan Cook / June 8th, 2025
Through his dehumanisation of Palestinians, his racist incitement and mindless conflation of “Israelis” and “Jews”, Morgan continues to add fuel to the fire of genocide.
I already had a very low opinion of Piers Morgan. But I was stunned by his display of racist ignorance last night while interviewing the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who showed great fortitude and dignity throughout.
Outrageously Morgan berates Alnaouq, whose entire family in Gaza was wiped out by Israel early on in its genocide, for insisting that there is a distinction – recognised by Palestinians, if not Israel – between Israelis and Jews.
Alnaouq points …
by Medea Benjamin / June 8th, 2025
Chaos at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site in Rafah. Photo: AP
Recent reports say that US AID is considering giving $500 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—an “aid” initiative launched at Israel’s request. At first glance, that might sound like a generous effort to help desperate Palestinians in Gaza. But peel back even one layer, and you’ll find a deadly political scheme masquerading as humanitarian relief.
This is not about helping hungry people. It’s about controlling them, displacing them, and starving them into submission.
Let’s start with some basics. …
Slave patrols, Texas Rangers, Border Patrol, ATF, Sheriff Departments, good cop/bad cops, unlimited immunity, Thin Blue Line, SWAT, Military Hardware, Israeli Occupation Forces trainings
by Paul Haeder / June 7th, 2025
The U.S. Marshals always get their kill shot — and a young man, young woman, and two five-year-old children swarmed by SOG, special operations group/gang, in Michigan, and the man bleeds out, the kids are in the house traumatized, and the mother is swarmed in the town getting groceries.
I expected to get deep into this Oregon organization’s amazing work, Freedom Farms, working with released inmates to heal, to get back into just plain normal breathing health, working the land, crops, harvests.
…
by Ann Wright / June 7th, 2025
Freedom Flotilla coalition
The Gaza Flotilla sailboat Madleen set off from Catania, Sicily, Italy on June 1, 2025 for a 7-day voyage to Gaza to break the 40-year illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and now to stop the 600 day genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Madleen and her 12-person crew and participants departed Catania, Sicily, Italy about 4pm Central European Summer Time on Sunday, June 1, 2025 following four very successful community events in Catania, each event having several hundred members of the local community attending.
The Madleen is named after Gaza’s …
Dystopian fantasy writers beware: Trump, MAGA, the Republican Party and its Christian nationalist allies may put you out of business!
by Bill Berkowitz / June 7th, 2025
Works of dystopian fiction, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, once seemed like dark fantasies of an authoritarian future. Their themes were warnings, not …
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / June 7th, 2025
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (5 January 1938-28 May 2025)
Let us now look about us. Where are our national languages now? Where are the books written in the alphabets of our national languages? Where is our own literature now? Where is the wisdom and knowledge of our fathers now? Where is the philosophy of our fathers now? The centres of wisdom that used to guard the entrance to our national homestead have been demolished; the fire of wisdom has been allowed to die; the seats around the fireside have been thrown on to …