by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 11th, 2019
“We oppose the extraterritorial application of unilateral measures.”
That is not Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Russia, or China talking about the most recent unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States against Venezuela, i.e. economic sanctions that have become an economic blockade, but the European Union. Even allies who have embarrassed themselves by recognizing the phony “interim president” Juan Guaido are saying the US has gone too far.
All of the countries listed above and many more have stated their opposition to the escalation of the US economic war against Venezuela. Venezuela, along with Iran, has become a prime target of US …
It is in these bleak times that people need community and music more than ever — they just don’t tend to realize it. The choir actually needs to be preached to on a regular basis, or it starts singing out of tune.
I heard some professional musicians on a BBC program talking about how their feelings of self-worth and general contentment in life are directly related to whether or not they’re working on a regular basis. By “working,” they mean playing music in front of an …
Most of the people in the West or in North Asia usually never think about it, but Southeast Asia is one of the most depressed and depressing parts of the world.
It has been through genocides, wars and atrocious military regimes.
Then, those monstrous income disparities. Jakarta beggars at night
According to The Bangkok Post, in 2018, “the 10% poorest Thais had 0% wealth.
50% of the poorest Thais (25 million people) had 1.7% of the country’s wealth while 70% (35mn) controlled 5%.” In the same year, 1% of the richest Thais …
Privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools have always been a top-down neoliberal economic project.
The main features of neoliberalism, launched at home and abroad in the late 1970s, are privatization, deregulation, and abdication of government responsibility for the well-being of people.
Charter schools meet all three criteria: they are deregulated arrangements that reflect government abandoning responsibility for education by handing it over to the private sector and the “free market,” where chaos, anarchy, and violence prevail. This is why so many millionaires and billionaires have been involved in the charter school …
Ethiopia is a tribal nation, made up of 80 or so different groups, some large, some small, some powerful, some not. Large numbers of people, the majority perhaps, identify themselves with their tribe more powerfully than their country, or their region. Tribal affiliation runs deep among all age groups, loyalty is strong, resentment of tribal others can be fierce.
Social divisions along tribal lines, fear and animosity, particularly between the three largest groups – the Oromo, Amhara and Tigrinian – are acute. People within all three are heavily armed; carrying weapons in rural Ethiopia is commonplace, expected even. Isolated conflicts have …
Toronto Raptors’ president Masai Ujiri claims to be an ambassador for Africa. But, his embrace of the most bloodstained African leader makes a mockery of any pan-Africanist pretenses.
On July 26 Ujiri traveled to Kigali to visit Rwandan president Paul Kagame. He was photographed next to the ruthless dictator sporting a T-shirt with a small map of the continent. Ujiri posted on Instagram:
Put your money where your mouth is. So proud of President Kagame building the Kigali Arena. Told us a year ago that he was going to do it. DONE. A shining example that — Africa is NOW!!
Imagine just for a moment, the World would stand up in unison, sick and tired of the aggressive killer arrogance of the United States and her vassals – and their joint war-force called NATO – and this World, our World, what’s left of it when you deduct Washington and its Brussels allies, would at once block every shipment of everything destined for the ports of the United States of America; every sea port, airport and road port. Hermetically. Nothing would enter. Nothing, no food, no medicine, no electronics, no cars – no nothing. And nothing could leave. No exports, no …
A review of John Carlos Frey's book, Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border
by Ron Leighton / August 9th, 2019
John Carlos Frey’s Sand and Blood relates the roughly 140-year history of U.S. anti-immigrant racism and policy on the southwest border, and highlights its mostly pre-Trump, bipartisan intensification over the last thirty-odd years. Frey, an American citizen born in Tijuana, Mexico, and raised in San Diego county, did not give the Border Patrol or border policy much thought until one day in 1977, when he was 12. His mother, a green card-holding, legally-residing Mexican American, was arrested walking near her home because a Border Patrol …
The immigration policies of the U.S. government are once again igniting opposition. This time from members of the agriculture industry who say that blocking immigrants from entering the country is doing more harm than good.
U.S. farmers who depend on migrants as “guest workers” for their harvest are facing considerable financial losses. It’s the result of migrants being detained and deported at the U.S. – Mexican border.
One of the nation’s largest sources of agriculture is Southern California.
And as Correspondent Mike Kirsch reports, farmers in that region have been particularly hard-hit.
The worker shortage has caused many farmers to raise the …
Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (Andy Wong/AP)
When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates last week, commentators were asking why. According to official data, the economy was rebounding, unemployment was below 4% and gross domestic product growth was above 3%. If anything, by the Fed’s own reasoning, it should have been raising rates.
Market pundits explained that we’re in a trade war and a currency war. Other central banks were cutting their rates, and the Fed had to follow suit in order to prevent the dollar …
The US is less of a nation than a collective, psychotic episode.
Within day to day life in the nation, a cultural aura exists that shifts, mingles, and merges between a sense of nervous agitation and displaced rage, in combination with a sense of weightlessness. The fragmented quality of daily life imparts an insubstantial, unreal quality wherein the citizenry of the capitalist/consumer empire of hungry ghosts drift through a nadascape comprised of ad hoc, fast-buck-driven, suburban/exburban architecture and the ersatz eros of constant, consumer come-ons.
Yet beneath the nebulous dread and nettling angst of it all, there exists the primal human imperative …
There are thousands of faceless heroes out there on the Internet and on the airwaves. It’s about time they came forward and claimed the recognition they so justly deserve.
These brave soldiers battle for their and others’ freedoms each and every day. When events occur which will forever justify their labors, they are all too often forgotten while the spotlight shifts to other more easily accessible subjects.
Still they sit at their keyboards, or call in to their radio programs, or attend their rallies. But now things have certainly changed. It’s time for all of you who have worked so hard, to …
Charter schools are privatized arrangements imposed on society by the rich and their retinue.
There is nothing public about charter schools. Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools lack most of the features of public schools and typically operate as deregulated businesses.
Calling a charter school public is mainly for the self-serving purpose of illegitimately funneling vast sums of public money from public schools to wealthy private interests who own-operate nonprofit and for-profit charter schools. Charter schools are essentially pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as “innovations” that “save public education” and “give parents choices.”
Charter school owners-operators would not be able to fleece public money from public …
As our political and governmental systems deepen their dysfunctionality, as corporations act ever more brazenly in their greed, as our planet suffers from the horrors of a broken culture, we clearly recognize that these systems fail miserably when it comes to integrity. When we look at our local and statewide political institutions, we see a similar pattern of corruption, with policies and attitudes that favor the folks with lots of money.
And when we see two horrendous mass shootings only hours apart, one a mere 50 miles from me, we …
Remember when it was obligatory to call Julian Assange paranoid?
That changed in March when the first of 18 US indictments confirmed designs to get him. All charges pertain to Wikileaks data that made him famous in 2010. Hard proof that hounding ensued from those initial releases accordingly forced the punditry to reconsider at least one of its armchair diagnoses of Assange.
Though most are unaware of the details, such hostile pursuit has concerned more than a few countries and institutions. UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, recently …
As the business grew, Sturm Ruger CEO Michael Fifer lobbied personally against a Connecticut ban on high-capacity magazines, commonly used with the company’s semi-automatic rifles. “The regulation of magazine capacity will not deter crime, but will instead put law-abiding citizens at risk of harm,” Fifer wrote to state lawmakers in early 2011. The legislation died in committee that April. At the NRA’s annual Corporate Executives Luncheon the next year, Fifer presented a check to the group for more than $1.25 million—$1 for every Sturm Ruger gun purchased the prior year. Eight months later, 20-year-old Adam Lanza used a semi-automatic rifle
Monday morning is here, dawn has broken over the home of the brave and the land of the free. As those first shafts of sunlight creep westerly across the nation they illuminate, one after another, the flags that have risen to half-mast on this, another day of national mourning. The refrain is all too familiar to us now as we come to grips with the body count from the latest mass shooting. On this particular day after we confront the results of back to back slaughters that left over thirty people dead in the space of just over twelve hours …
If you enjoyed the global corporatocracy’s original War on Islamicist Terror, you’re going to love their latest spinoff, The War on White Supremacist Terror. It’s basically just like the old War on Terror, except that this time the bad guys are all white supremacists, and Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden … unless Putin is Osama bin Laden. OK, I’m not quite sure who’s Osama bin Laden. Whatever. The point is, the Terrorists are coming!
Yes, that’s right, some racist psycho murdered a bunch of people in Texas, so it’s time to “take the gloves off” again, pass some new kind …
Don’t play checkers with the grandmasters of chess
by Habib Ahmadzadeh / August 8th, 2019
Dear President Trump,
In a recent Tweet, you claimed that “Iranians never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” As a world citizen and a veteran of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, I have firsthand experience with the bitterness of war, and I have a few suggestions and responses for you.
First, I would advise you against using the words win and winning to describe war, especially from a US perspective. American history is filled with bitter experiences of losing wars. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and even the …
On July 29, 4-year-old Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan was reportedly summoned for interrogation by the Israeli police in occupied Jerusalem.
The news, originally reported by the Palestinian News Agency (WAFA), was later denied by the Israeli police, likely to lessen the impact of the PR disaster that followed.
The Israelis are not denying the story in its entirety, but are rather arguing that it was not the boy, Muhammad, who was summoned, but his father, Rabi’, who was called into the Israeli police station in Salah Eddin Street in Jerusalem, to be questioned regarding his son’s actions.
The Congress can overturn the abuses of Big Pharma and its “pay or die,” subsidized business model for its drugs.
Big Pharma’s trail of greed, power, and cruelty gets worse every year. Its products and practices take hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. from over-prescriptions, lethal combinations of prescriptions, ineffective or contaminated drugs, and dangerous side-effects.
The biggest drug dealers in the U.S. operate legally. Their names are emblazoned in ads and promotions everywhere. Who hasn’t heard of Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis? Big Pharma revenues and profits …
Remarks August 6, 2019, at Hiroshima to Hope in Seattle, Washington
by David Swanson / August 7th, 2019
http://davidswanson.org/long-after-hiroshima/
How do we honor victims? We can remember them and appreciate who they were. But there were too many of them, and too many unknown to us. So, we can remember a sample of them, examples of them. And we can honor the living survivors, get to know and appreciate them while they are still alive.
We can remember the horrific way in which those killed were victimized, in hopes of manipulating ourselves into doing something serious about it. We can remember those who were …
Justin Trudeau presents himself as “progressive” on foreign affairs. The Liberals claim to have brought Canada “back” after the disastrous Harper Conservatives. But their nuclear weapons policy demonstrates the emptiness of this rhetoric.
Reducing the chance nuclear weapons are used again should be a priority for any “progressive” government. But, powerful Canadian allies oppose nuclear arms controls so Trudeau’s government isn’t interested in the “international rules based order” needed to curb the existential threat nukes pose to humankind.
The Liberals have voted against UN nuclear disarmament efforts supported by most …
From the genocidal aftermath of Columbus’ accidental “discovery” of the New World, to the ever-deeper encroachments of Israeli settlements into the West Bank — five hundred years of European colonialism has cast a long shadow over this world. Colonization, in its supreme arrogance, carved up the globe according to the imperial logic of accumulation, imposing artificial borders on foreign lands and seeking to subjugate restive native populations through religious indoctrination and force of arms. But despite their military superiority, ideological warfare and constant recourse to savage brutality, colonial regimes have consistently failed to crush the will of colonized people to …
NOVA: If this region—New Orleans, the wetlands, and all—were a patient in the hospital, how would you describe them? At what stage are they?
IVOR VAN HEERDEN: Close to death.
[…]
There is the potential for extremely high casualties—people not only killed by flying debris, drowning in the soup, but also just imagine, how do we rescue the survivors? Unlike a river flood, it doesn’t come up and go down. The water stays. And it stays for months and months and months. How do you rescue all of these people? If there’s 200,000 survivors, you get 20,000 out a
There are stories that are unrelated to the news, but can explain much better than many combat reports, why people like me are fighting against the Empire and imperialism, with such determination and vehemence. Not all stories are ‘big’ or ‘heroic’; not all include famous people or iconic struggles. Not all take place on battlefields.
But they ‘humanize’ the struggle.
Once in a while, I like to share such stories with my readers. As I will do right now.
Because without them, frankly, nothing really makes sense.
*****
It was a hot, humid night in Jakarta; a megapolis with the worst pollution on …
Freedom Struggle from Exploitation and Degradation Is Global
by Colin Todhunter / August 6th, 2019
Today, we are in the grip of a globalised system of capitalism which drives narcissism, domination, ego, anthropocentrism, speciesism and plunder. A system that is using up oil, water and other resources much faster than they can ever be regenerated. We have poisoned the rivers and oceans, destroyed natural habitats, driven wildlife species to (the edge of) extinction and have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere with seemingly devastating effects.
With its never-ending quest for profit, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. It strides the world hand in glove with militarism, with the outcome being endless destabilisations, …
Greenland is one of the biggest targets for global warming, in part, because it’s so big it’s hard to miss. And sure enough, only recently crazy halting weather with inordinate hot temperature hit Greenland bull’s-eye, dead-on with one helluva meltdown.
That’s bad news for pretty much everybody on the planet.
On the hottest days, the melt-off could fill 3 million Olympic-sized pools end-to-end, extending from California to Maine, back and forth, 17 times. Eureka! That’s only one day. It’s staggering.
What’s going on?
The easy answer: Greenland is melting because global warming is acting up, a lot. But, it’s more complicated. Part of the meltdown includes a 4-mile-wide …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / August 6th, 2019
A new book published in May has raised questions about the origins of Lyme disease, which affects 400,000 Americans each year. And this book has caught the attention of Congress, prompting some to ask the question, did the Pentagon weaponize ticks and unleash them on an unsuspecting public? Here to talk about this is Kris Newby, the author of Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.
A prime function of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is the reinforcement and perpetuation of the state’s explanations of events, however absurd and discredited. While cultural offerings on PBS are excellent and appreciated, divergence from official governmental narratives is not permitted. PBS is a foremost informational gatekeeper, a role enhanced by its insistence that it represents the best of investigative journalism.
American Experience: “Oklahoma City”
The official stories of the Murrah office building and 9/11 are now enshrined in memorials, the purpose of which is to make a lie the truth.
