Image Source: Pexels The planet may feel like a smaller place, thanks to the ease of travel and the internet, but the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that “approximately 1.2 billion people in the world live in extreme poverty” and earn less than a single dollar per day.
Poverty affects the health and livelihood of a large number of people worldwide. Thankfully, there are a number of human rights organizations working to end global poverty, some of which the most recognizable include The World Bank, Oxfam International, …
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) work hand in glove – smoothly. Not only are they regularly lending huge sums of money to horror regimes around the world, but they blackmail poor nations into accepting draconian conditions imposed by the west. In other words, the WB and the IMF are guilty of the most atrocious human rights abuses.
You couldn’t tell when you read above the entrance of the World Bank the noble phrase, “Our Dream is World Free of Poverty”. To this hypocrisy I can only add, ”…And we make sure it will just remain a dream.” …
Belgium is furious. On November 6, the Belgian government condemned Israel’s destruction of Belgian-funded homes in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Understandably, Brussels wants the Israeli government to pay compensation for the unwarranted destruction. The Israeli response was swift: a resounding ‘no’.
The diplomatic row is likely to fizzle out soon; neither will Israel cease its illegal demolitions of Palestinian homes and structures in the West Bank nor will Belgium, or any other EU country, receive a dime from Tel Aviv.
Welcome to the bizarre world of European foreign policy …
An interview conducted by Stephen Shenfield of the World Socialist Party of the United States with Dmitry Kosmachev, a member of the Minsk Socialist Circle, about the situation in Belarus, the current protests, and where they may lead. ***** Stephen Shenfield: In the 1990s I made visits to five of the new post-Soviet republics – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan. I got the impression that the situation for working people in Belarus was relatively tolerable. Only in Belarus did I find no evidence of people engaged in a desperate struggle …
Recently, Dissident Voice contributor, the never-compromising class- and labor-blogger, Michael K. Smith, took on a dragon of the progressive left whose slaying really seems long overdue. Writing in his typically potent style, Smith hammered out the following:
How many times do we need to request a meaningless ‘denunciation’ of white supremacy? We, on what passes for a left, are supposed to be critics of corporate media, so why the dog-like obedience to its idiotic framing on this non-issue?…
Let us have no more Southern Poverty Law Center-style ‘studies’ of how right-wing fascists are poised to take over the country, which they’ve …
Education is supposed to encourage critical thinking. However, if critical thinking ever were a part of the education curriculum, it usually goes out the window around Remembrance Day.
Take, for instance, Canada Remembers Times the Veterans’ Week Special Edition (5-11 November 2020). It is published by Veterans Affairs Canada and made available in BC provincial elementary schools. On page one an article caught my eye: “Going to War in Korea.”
The article relates:
The Korean War erupted 70 years ago when the North Korean troops poured across the border into South Korea on 25 June 1950…. More than 26,000 Canadians traveled halfway around …
It’s about the Elusiveness of Sanity in an Insane World
by Jonathan Cook / November 18th, 2020
Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual.
In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt to the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it induced a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity among its members. In modern …
In July 2020, US healthcare multinational UHS Delaware reached a $122million settlement with the US federal government as the result of an investigation by the FBI into fraudulent detentions of psychiatric patients for profit. Following the resolution of the investigation and civil settlement, UHS must retain an independent monitor selected by the Office of Inspector General within the US Department of Health and Human Services, who will monitor patient care protections. In addition, an independent review organisation will annually audit UHS’s claims to federal healthcare programmes.
The government claims UHS knowingly submitted false claims to Medicaid for services that were not …
It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Wilfred Owen, the great English poet of the First World War, described this phrase as ‘the old Lie’ in his famous war poem, ‘Dulce et decorum est’. Patriotism so often means ‘honouring’ those who ‘fell in service to this country’, grand ceremonies at war memorials, feasts of royal pageantry. And then sending yet more generations of men …
For most of 2020 Covid-19 has dominated mainstream media, and whilst serious, the pandemic is but the latest in a series of dark clouds gathering upon our collective horizon: interconnected crises, from the environmental emergency to war, poverty, inequality, and social division among others. All flow from the same root – a misguided set of conclusions about life and ourselves; this fragmented and conditioned pattern of thinking fuels actions that result in the various crises we see all around us. It is the consciousness of humanity with its misplaced values and beliefs, its ideologies and reductive notions of self that …
In lieu of writing reviews of their own books – with the exception of Walt Whitman, who did that with Leaves of Grass – writers often write introductions or prefaces. The purpose of such introductions is to give the prospective readers a sense of what to expect in the pages that follow, as if the author knew exactly what he was writing when he was writing it, as if he weren’t waylaid by words along the way, or could possibly know what a reader may experience when reading them. …
by Colin Todhunter and Rosemary Mason / November 17th, 2020
On 12 March 2020, British PM Boris Johnson, referring to COVID-19, informed the public:
We’ve all got to be clear; this is the worst public health crisis for a generation.
Since that time, we have seen lockdowns, an ongoing government-backed fear campaign, fundamental rights being stripped away, dissent censored, inflated COVID-19 death numbers and the use of a flawed PCR test to label perfectly healthy individuals as COVID-19 ‘cases’ in order to fit the narrative of a ‘second wave’.
But, just for a moment, consider an alternative scenario.
The government is extremely worried about a substance that could be contributing to a spiralling public …
This 31-page document reads like a blueprint on how to “execute” because an execution it would be – “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020), by Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO (since the foundation of the WEF in 1974) and his associate Thierry Malleret. They call “Resetting the Future” a White Paper, meaning it’s not quite a final version. It is a draft of sorts, a trial balloon, to measure people’s reactions. It reads indeed like an …
The panelists will discuss the UK extradition trial of Julian Assange, the 18 criminal offenses conjured by the U.S., and how the case impacts the 99%.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower, former defense analyst, activist.
MARJORIE COHN: Professor Emerita Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president National Lawyers Guild.
JOE LAURIA: Editor-in-Chief Consortium News, coordinator of extensive daily coverage of extradition hearings.
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (left) and his wife Janet Langhart Cohen (center) meet with King Mohammed VI, of Morocco, at his palace in Marrakech, on Feb. 11, 2000. Cohen and the King agreed to open an expanded security and defense dialogue, and discussed ways that Morocco could expand its leadership role in promoting regional stability in the Mediterranean and on the African continent. DoD photo by R. D. Ward. (Released)
I’m not misusing the word “war” to mean something like the war on Christmas or drugs or some TV pundit whom …
NOTE: The Kevin Zeese Emerging Activists Fund is accepting applicants for an unrestricted grant of $20,000 until December 13, 2020. Learn more at PopularResistance.org/kevin-zeese/. And join us for a webinar with Venezuelan social movements on November 18 to hear about their upcoming elections and how we can support their struggle against US intervention. Details at .
Health care will be a major issue early in the new Biden/Harris administration. Unemployment is still high with over a million people applying for unemployment benefits last week and 42.6% of working …
An update on the life of one independent artist in the fall of 2020 (in lieu of a crowdfunding campaign)
by David Rovics / November 14th, 2020
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Three months ago in August, I wrote a piece called Pandemic Panhandling, wherein I began with a brief recounting of the ways in which the music industry collapsed over the course of my musical career, prior to the pandemic, and then I wrote about some of the ways in which things have gotten exponentially worse for most formerly working musicians since the pandemic, in the US and many other places.
One dogma that is likely to persist in US foreign policy during a Biden presidency will be the sanctions regime adopted towards Iran. Every messianic state craves clearly scripted enemies, and the demonology about the Islamic Republic is not going to go begging. Elliot Abrahams, the current US special representative for Iran, told Associated Press on November 12 that, “Even if you went back to the (nuclear deal) and even if the Iranians were willing to return … this newly enriched uranium, you would not have solved these fundamental questions of whether Iran is going to be permitted to …
Disaffected Groups: “We need to unite!” Sympathizer: “What shall we unite around?” Democratic Party organizer: “Our differences!”
“I kind of wanted everyone to lose.”
— Krystal Ball Rising on the 2020 elections
The electoral verdict is in and the American people have rejected media drama in favor of thinking for themselves. They dislike Donald Trump’s governance, but are far from pronouncing him an Adolf Hitler clone, having awarded him some nine million more votes than last time around, to the horror of “woke” partisans, who are far more disliked than he is.
Supposedly a vicious misogynist, Trump’s share of the white woman vote, already a majority, went …
I am not a pundit, or at least not a legitimized one. I have never been a guest on any major TV network, as a pundit or as anything else. I have never taken a poll or been paid to make any predictions. But for two presidential elections in a row, the punditry was generally way off on their predictions, and I was pretty close to the mark. And yes, I also made my predictions in a public form — Twitter — prior to the elections, so there would be a record of them.
The election is now over and Joe Biden is the President-elect. What is likely to happen after Biden is inaugurated? The incoming Biden administration will face numerous huge problems left behind by the Trump administration. It is likely that Covid-19 will still be a major concern here and in many other nations around the world. President Biden will also have to deal with high levels of unemployment, of homelessness, of hunger, of people under-insured or without health insurance, of income and wealth inequality as well as an angry and divided people. In addition, the Biden administration will have to deal …
In January 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)’s Democracy Index downgraded the state of democracy in the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy”.
The demotion of a country that has constantly prided itself, not only on being democratic but also on championing democracy throughout the world, took many by surprise. Some US pundits challenged the findings altogether.
However, judging by events that have transpired since, the accuracy of the EIU Index continues to demonstrate itself in the everyday reality of American politics: the extreme political and cultural polarization; …
Republicans supporting Trump’s fraud allegations are putting democracy ‘on a dangerous path’ according to Barack Obama. But the US election system has been questioned for decades.
On 10 November 2020, the United States secretary-of-state Mike Pompeo, he of the ill-famed confession “We lied, we cheated, we stole,” spoke at the Ronald Reagan Institute.
The liar Pompeo can even speak candidly, “I’ve talked about American exceptionalism. I did so in Brussels; I did it in Cairo; I did it in Jakarta, and every opportunity that I’ve had in my public life. Sometimes it was met with a resounding thud as well. I’ve walked out of quiet ward rooms.”
Imagine a US secretary-of-state admitting that people walked out on American …
I’m not looking at schizophrenia for the moment as a sickness, but as a more or less inevitable development or consequence of a body that refines thought to such an extent that it becomes confused by its own images and beliefs and mistakes them for reality itself.
Conclusive certainty or dogma would be an obvious symptom of this crisis — a crisis which may have begun several thousand years ago and is only now approaching its ‘do or die’ moment: Learn this lesson or perish.
I think that some degree of schizophrenia is an inevitable consequence of hitting this confusion. And depending …
A recent analysis by Harvard geneticist Stephen Elledge tabulated the number of years that Americans who died from COVID-19 might have lived had they reached a typical life expectancy. The shocking answer is that the coronavirus has claimed more than 2.5 million years of potential life in the United States since 2020. And despite making up only one-fifth of the total recorded deaths from COVID-19, people under age 65 accounted for 1.2 million of potential years lost. A follow-up study now underway using race and ethnicity will very likely …
As of today, America does not seem convinced by its democratic nature and its democratic process. One poll released yesterday claims that “less than half of the Americans believe Biden is the legitimate winner of election; a third say Trump won.” By now it is reasonable to admit that America is far from being confident about anything that is traditionally associated with its core ideological roots and its founders’ philosophy.
By now it is also clear beyond doubt that the predictions of a Democratic ‘landslide victory’ …
A sense of redundancy might encourage calm. The job is done, however well or poorly. The legacy charted. But in the case of President Donald Trump, there is still much to be done. Leaving aside his priority of fortifying himself in the White House against any bailiff onslaught by president-elect Joe Biden, he is busy making decisions. One of them is something that this administration will always be remembered for: sackings.
The sacking of Defence Secretary Mark Esper was in keeping with a recently minted tradition. Trump has made a habit of cycling through appointees, notably those in the Defence Department. …
Analysts are still grappling with the fallout from the US election. Trumpism proved a far more enduring and alluring phenomenon than most media pundits expected. Defying predictions, Trump improved his share of the overall vote compared to his 2016 win, and he surprised even his own team by increasing his share of minority voters and women.
But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the US economy – the incumbent’s “trump” card – was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for Covid-19, Trump – not …
