Latest articles
The Guardian Removes Bin Laden’s "Letter To America"
by Media Lens / November 28th, 2023
The Guardian has long promoted itself as a valiant publisher of news and analysis that holds the powerful to account. It is a thing of wonder that the Guardian appends the following comment beneath news pieces:
Our quality, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more.
For over twenty years, Media Lens has shown how false is this claim.
A new, significant example occurred just last week. On 15 November, the paper removed Osama bin Laden’s …
The Forty-Seventh Newsletter (2023)
by Vijay Prashad / November 28th, 2023
Tagreed Darghouth (Lebanon), from the series The Tree Within, a Palestinian Olive Tree, 2018.
Every day since 7 October has felt like an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, with hundreds of thousands gathering in Istanbul, a million in Jakarta, and then yet another million across Africa and Latin America to demand an end to the brutal attack being carried out by Israel (with the collusion of the United States). It is impossible to keep up with the scale and frequency …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 28th, 2023
It is a particularly quotidian breed in the modern, management-driven university. The desk clerk who pretends to be an academic and researcher but is neither. The desk clerk who admires rosters, work plans and “key performance indicators”, thinking that the process of knowledge is quantifiable by productivity targets and financial returns. The desk clerk who pilfers the work of undergraduates, sports a dubious doctoral thesis, and who rarely sets foot within the sacred surrounds of a library.
The rise of such a figure in the global university scene, one neither fish nor fowl, is no accident. As universities have declined, bureaucracy …
by Yves Engler / November 27th, 2023
Aggressive pre-dawn police raids on homes and charging individuals with hate crimes for posting social justice messages is legal overreach at best and “thought crimes” reflecting creeping fascism at worst.
Truth is Heather Reisman, not those putting up posters, is the one who should have been charged with breaking Canadian law.
Between 4:30 and 6 am Wednesday Toronto police raided the residences of seven individuals alleged to have been involved in putting posters and fake blood on an Indigo bookstore on November 10. According to a summary of the police operation posted by World Beyond War, eight or …
by Allen Forrest / November 27th, 2023
by Binoy Kampmark / November 26th, 2023
There was no better example of Australia’s politicised public service than its Home Affairs Secretary, Mike Pezzullo. In most other countries, he would have been the ideal conspirator in a coup, a tittletattler in the ranks and bound to brief against those he did not like. Give him a dagger, and he was bound to use it.
His rise to power paralleled that of the emergence of that super amalgam of a ministry that arose during the Turnbull government. Falling for the fatal error that centralising power assures the consolidation of efficiency, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was swayed by arguments that …
by Ellen Brown / November 24th, 2023
Three U.S. presidents were instrumental in establishing Thanksgiving as a regular national event. On October 3, 1789, George Washington declared the first federal Thanksgiving holiday. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln made it an annual federal holiday. And in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill setting the date at the fourth Thursday of every November. All three presidents were giving thanks for bringing the country through a major financial crisis related to war, and they all achieved this feat through what Sen. Henry Clay called the “American system” of banking and finance – sovereign or government-issued money and credit.
For Washington, the challenge …
by Robert Hunziker / November 24th, 2023
It’s 35 years since formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities.” Subsequently, COP21 at Paris ‘15 warned the world not to exceed 1.5°C, and worst case, not to exceed 2.0°C above pre-industrial or risk lasting damage to crucial life supporting ecosystems, ultimately leading to some level of an extinction event.
Following three decades of IPCC failures to convince nation/states to make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions, which increase more and more each year, a high-ranking group of rebellious climate scientists claim the IPCC’s upper temperature limits of …
by Edward Curtin / November 23rd, 2023
What is the truth, and where did it go?
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
“Shut your mouth,” said the wise old owl
Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul
Don’t worry, Mr. President
Help’s on the way
Your brothers are coming, there’ll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What’s this about hell?
Tell them, “We’re waiting, keep coming”
We’ll get them as well
— Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul
*****
Why President Kennedy was publicly murdered by the CIA sixty years ago has never been more important. …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 23rd, 2023
It resembles a chronology of desperation, shifting narratives, and schoolboy howlers. From the outset, the mass lethality of Israeli strikes against Gaza and the collective punishment of its populace needed some justification, however tenuous. If it could be shown, convincingly, that Hamas and its allies had militarised such civilian infrastructure as hospitals, they would become fair game for vengeful air strikes and military assault. Thus, could Israel’s soldiers demonstrate, not merely the animal savagery of Hamas, one indifferent to humanity and suffering, but the virtue of Israel’s own military objectives. The forces of pallid light would again prevail against swarthy …
Voluntary and involuntary psychic insulation
by T.P. Wilkinson / November 23rd, 2023
At least as one response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, some of what became the Romantic movements in the 19th century turned away from social interaction, especially collective activity, and toward individual isolation. Such a reaction was not peculiar to this period. In fact, withdrawal from social contact was an established niche strategy throughout Latin Christendom. There were two broad views in the Church as to how sin was to be encountered. One was collective labour. The other was solitary penitence.
Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a …
by Ralph Nader / November 23rd, 2023
“It should never have happened,” an elderly Holocaust survivor of a Nazi death camp told the New York Times. He was referring to the colossal failure on October 7, of Israel’s touted high-tech military and intelligence operations that opened the door to Hamas’ attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians. In many parliamentary countries, the government ministers who are responsible for this kind of failure would have immediately been forced to resign. Not so with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ministers.
Instead, Netanyahu’s coalition of extremists, who know that the Israeli people are enraged about their government’s failure to defend the border, has unleashed a …
by Allen Forrest / November 23rd, 2023
by Kathy Kelly / November 23rd, 2023
Negev Nuclear Research Center photographed by a U.S.
reconnaissance satellite in 1968 Declassified Public Domain
It’s one thing to burrow beneath the ground, digging to construct a tunnel for refuge, a passage of goods, or to store weapons during a time of war. It’s quite another to use one hand, as a small child, to try and dig your way out of the rubble that has collapsed upon you.
Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, a professor based in Jerusalem, spoke sadly of the reality in Gaza where, he said, “one child …
by Binoy Kampmark / November 22nd, 2023
The fossil fuel lobby has had a busy year on the eco-camouflage front. Earlier this year, interest started to rumble and rage against the stranding of humpback whales on the east coast of the United States. Suddenly, opponents of wind turbine technology – and renewable technology more broadly – had identified an invaluable, if tenuous nexus: a link between whale mortality and offshore wind farms.
One true enthusiast for the proposition proved to be Donald Trump. Speaking at a rally in South Carolina in September, for example, the Republican presidential contender suggested that these “windmills” were driving whales “crazy”, inflicting …
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / November 22nd, 2023
Woman hugging tree video
*****
Painting by Sliman Mansour
I hugged the olive tree. It was precious to me, so I hugged it. I felt like I was hugging my child. I’d raised the tree like my child. They attacked around 500 trees filled with olives. Each tree could have filled two sacks of olives. They destroyed my olive tree, but I grew them back. I tended them and they came back even better than before. Settlers will never be able to take …
by Paul Tritschler / November 22nd, 2023
Reflections on the psychological, moral and political implications of what we eat, and on prospects for non-violent social change.
Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.
— Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme, (Penguin Books, 1994): p.13.
Getting back into fasting after a break is difficult. In the past, I would fast for two days in every week, but occasionally challenged myself to extend that by a day or two, maybe three, until one day — evidently one day too many — I collapsed like a device unplugged and cracked my head on the sink …
by Allen Forrest / November 22nd, 2023
by Roger Stoll / November 22nd, 2023
The holocaust now visited on Palestine by US-Israel is unique in many ways. Rates of killing and maiming exceed those of previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the perpetrators announce their genocidal intent with unusual frankness, and Western media and official apologists are especially shameless.
But in a world under centuries of West European domination, this particular intentional genocide/mass-death event ought to seem familiar. These mass killings have always been necessary for the global system to function, providing land for settlement, cultivation and resource extraction, labor for hyper-exploitation, and geopolitical power.
In the “long 16th century” (~1450 to ~1650) the capitalist world system …
Will Joe Manchin become the next U.S. president?
by Dan Lieberman / November 22nd, 2023
The divisive America of today longs for the time when the country united in one mission and selected a leader it could trust to accomplish the mission. The year is 1940 and the New York Times estimates that incumbent president, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. (FDR), a non-declared and drafted candidate for the Democratic Party (D) nomination, will have 691.5 delegates before the convention, well ahead of his two rivals, Vice-President John Garner’s 69.5 delegates and Postmaster General James Farley’s 38.5.delegates. At the convention, FDR wins the nomination on the first ballot by near acclamation.
Before the Republican (GOP) convention, …
by Sayed Hasan / November 22nd, 2023
Since he was elected Hezbollah Secretary General in 1992, following Israel’s assassination of his predecessor and mentor Sayed Abbas Mousawi, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has achieved a very special status in the history of Arab & Muslim leaders. As Norman Finkelstein put it, “Nasrallah is the only political leader in the world from whom you learn in the speeches. He is a teacher. He is among the shrewdest and most serious political observers in the world today. Israeli leaders carefully scrutinize Nasrallah’s every word.” And denouncing the relentless censorship suffered by my translation …
by Darrell Jackson / November 22nd, 2023
I am a Black man in prison, and I want to talk about trauma. I want us all to be able to talk about trauma.
I’m here because when I was a teenager and young man, I made many bad life choices involving drugs and violence. Living with the consequences of my actions is not always easy, but I keep moving forward toward redemption. As I have struggled to understand those choices, I also have realized I must go further back in my life, long before I committed a crime, if I want to heal myself.
When I was a child, I …
by Ted Glick / November 21st, 2023
Standing on a corner,
alone,
in the early morning
half-dark, half-light,
You, waiting for
the commuter bus
to take you to
the Big Apple,
Me, on one of my
3/4 times a week
long distance bike rides,
approaching you,
30-20-10 feet away,
And our eyes meet,
followed a second or two later
by a smile,
an involuntary acknowledgement,
you to me
and vice-versa,
that though we
don’t know each other
and may never see
each other again,
Today, this morning,
for literally one second,
we felt the warmth,
the quiet joy,
the reassurance
of human connection.
I wrote this poem in 2016. I was reminded of it by something which happened yesterday morning.
I’ve been sick for a week and a half, needing to stay home and concentrate on trying …
Israel is openly carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Yet, just as happened with the first Nakba in 1948, Israel’s lies and deceptions dominate the West’s media and political narrative
by Jonathan Cook / November 21st, 2023
History is repeating itself – and every politician and establishment journalist is pretending they cannot see what is staring them in the face. There is a collective and wilful refusal to join the dots in Gaza, even when they point in one direction only.
There has been a consistent pattern to Israel’s behaviour since its creation 75 years ago – just as there has been a consistent pattern to the “see no evil, hear no evil” response of western powers.
In 1948, in events the Palestinians call their “Nakba”, or Catastrophe, 80 percent of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their lands …
Freedom’s Greatest Hour of Danger Is Now
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / November 21st, 2023
We are approaching critical mass, the point at which all hell breaks loose.
The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.
What makes the outlook so much bleaker is the utter ignorance of the American people—and those who represent them—about their freedoms, history, and how the government is supposed to operate.
As Morris Berman points out in his book Dark Ages America, “70 percent of American adults cannot name their senators or congressmen; more than half don’t know the actual number of senators, and nearly a quarter cannot name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment. Sixty-three percent …
by Allen Forrest / November 21st, 2023
Belief is a choice that is antithetical to critical thinking.
News on China No. 172
by Dongsheng News / November 21st, 2023
by E.R. Bills / November 20th, 2023
His June 18, 1996 obituary in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is short and succinct:
Lawrence M. Peters, 78, a retired Allied Mills employee, was found dead Friday [June 13] in Teague. Funeral: 11 a.m. today at Avant A.M.E. Church in Teague. Burial: Fairfield. Mr. Peters retired in 1982.
It’s not much of a lede, but it’s where we should start.
Lawrence M. Peters died on June 13, 1996, and his obit ran on June 18. No picture. No next of kin listed. No mention of his loved ones.
Most of the obits around it have pictures of the deceased, several lines about the lives …
by Bruce Lerro / November 20th, 2023
Summary of Part I
In Part I of my article, we began by distinguishing the social self from two forms of identity that are often confused with it: temperament and personality. The focus of part one is to show how very social (or even socialist) was the work of social psychologist George Herbert Mead. We discussed in detail the thirteen building blocks necessary for creating the social self. This self must construct both an objective and subjective identity. From here even by the age of eight the child must learn to navigate routine, …
by Allen Forrest / November 20th, 2023