Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.
— Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler, 1961
At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy. She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one. “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social …
Australia has given the world two influential and disruptive exports in the field of media. One, currently in London’s Belmarsh Prison, is facing the prospect of extradition to the United States for charges that could see him serve a 175 year sentence in a brutal, soul destroying super max. The other, so the argument goes, should also be facing the prospect of incarceration for what he has done to politics in numerous countries. But media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the gruesome presence behind Fox News and News Corp, is unlikely to spend time in a cell any time soon. The same …
“If we are going to live another four years with President Trump, God help us, God help you and God help the whole world.”
These were the words of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, during a virtual meeting with European legislators on November 3. While some may agree with Shtayyeh’s assessment, such utterances by a top Palestinian official are hardly reassuring.
This was not the first time that Shtayyeh used the phrase, “May God help us,” with reference to US President, Donald Trump. Nor were these the only instances …
Many observers would agree that the biggest loser in the recent U.S. presidential election was not Donald Trump, it was the media. The news that was presented to the American public amounted to a tsunami of negative reporting on Donald Trump buttressed by opinion polls that turned out to be poorly executed and wrong by a huge margin. Some might argue that Trump got what he deserved as he was a bad candidate and a bad man, but the unwillingness of the media to pursue stories …
Is nuclear energy safe? What can we do about the waste? What about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima – don’t they prove that we can’t rely on nuclear reactors? Won’t a tiny amount of radiation kill you? Why are reactors so expensive to build with so many delays? Why don’t we just use renewables? Why don’t we just abandon dirty, wasteful industry and go back to the land?
These are some of the skeptical questions on the minds of progressives and even socialists. In this article I will …
When one is stuck in traffic with an old car, in my case a 1962 Mercedes diesel, with no power anything, and merely 45 bhp to deal with younger cars, there is no temptation to aggressive driving. Despite the fact that a Mercedes is a classic man’s car, there is no machismo with a vehicle that tops at 120 km/h. However, what driving such a car makes obvious is just how few good drivers there are on the road despite, or perhaps because of, the advances in automotive technology.
The job is done, Corbynism is defunct, and now Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is coming for all of those who were close to him. What of Emily Thornberry? She’s keeping quiet.
“I can’t even describe what this meant to me and my sisters, my brother, my mom and closest friends to experience together.” So remarked Kim Kardashian West with thanks and appreciation for a hologram of her father, Robert Kardashian, who died in 2003. The hologram of one of O.J. Simpson’s defence attorneys was a gift from husband and unsuccessful presidential aspirant Kanye West, a visually striking effort, yet implausible. The figure does speak of being “a proud Armenian father” but the factor of implausibility is enhanced by Kanye’s own scripting and contribution. With indulgence, the hologram tells Kim …
Okay, so, that was not cool. For one terrifying moment there, it actually looked like GloboCap was going to let Russian-Asset Hitler win. Hour after hour on election night, states on the map kept turning red, or pink, or some distinctly non-blue color. Wisconsin … Michigan … Georgia … Florida. It could not be happening, and yet it was. What other explanation was there? The Russians were stealing the election again!
But, of course, GloboCap was just playing with us. They’re a bunch of practical jokers, those GloboCap guys. Naturally, …
Robert Fisk, the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, died on 30 October aged 74. In reviewing his life and career, the newspaper for which he worked for more than two decades wrote of their star reporter:
‘Much of what Fisk wrote was controversial…’
As John Pilger noted, in describing Fisk’s journalism as ‘controversial’ the Independent was using a ‘weasel word’.
The soul of America is like the character Two Face in the Batman movie series.
One defeat of the Party of Trump and its 73 million apparatchiks is not enough. In Trump, the United States has bred its own dictator in waiting and he’s got an army of servile apostles willing to fight and die for him. Vigilance by his opponents has never been more important.
This Fuhrer dictatorship could produce only lackeys and profiteers of the most reactionary and aggressive part of German imperialist reaction. Its Germanic democracy reared the repulsive type of a human breed that …
Change doesn’t come from the top, especially within a manipulated ‘democracy’ as exists in the United States. When social transformation occurs, it follows years of educating, organizing and mobilizing at the grassroots. Elected leaders who represent that transformation ride on a wave created by social movements, not the other way around.
As many people around the country and the world celebrate the media’s announcement of the defeat of President Trump, those who advocate for transformational changes in the political, economic, legal and social systems are talking and writing about the …
The extraordinary amount of cover in the Australian mainstream media of the results of the United States election is quite unparalleled and in any other political event. The bias of the media is readily apparent: they expect a Democratic party victory and no alternative is given much space. The result is not, in fact, as clear cut as they would like us to believe. Certainly, on the claimed results Joe Biden has a convincing lead, and the local media happily endorse that, referring in unfailing deprecatory terms to Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.
Regularly, the media has reported the dire effects of European dominance on the communities of a disenfranchised minority: the public execution of African-Americans by police, the epidemic of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada, the shadow of residential schools in North America, the legacy of red-lining, the impact of the murders of the oil-rich Osage County Indians in Oklahoma, the victimization of native lobster fisherman in Nova Scotia, and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. None of these things would have been if they were not fueled …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 9th, 2020
Obama and Biden meet Gorbachev – did Biden learn anything? (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) Congratulations to Joe Biden on his election as America’s next president! People all over this pandemic-infested, war-torn and poverty-stricken world were shocked by the brutality and racism of the Trump administration, and are anxiously wondering whether Biden’s presidency will open the door to the kind of international cooperation that we need to confront the serious problems facing humanity in this century.
For progressives everywhere, the knowledge that “another world is possible” has sustained us through decades …
The 2020 presidential election may be over, but nothing has really changed.
The U.S. government still poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
This threat is especially pronounced for America’s military veterans, especially that portion of the population that exercises their First Amendment right to speak out against government wrongdoing.
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, Switzerland, brings together international business and political leaders, economists and other high-profile individuals to discuss global issues. Driven by the vision of its influential CEO Klaus Schwab, the WEF is the main driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.
The great reset entails a transformation of society resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as entire …
The long wait and frankly, the long nightmare will soon be over. At least for the Trump page of American history. If the news is true that Jared Kushner is trying to talk him into conceding, and if successful, we won’t have to worry much about what he might do to disrupt and interfere with the tally and a relatively smooth transition may take place.
Biden won with the largest number of votes than ever before. 74million +. Almost looks like democracy worked, except for all the voter suppression from both the Democrats and Republicans. But there’s a side to this …
Whatever was set to happen on November 3, President Donald J. Trump would not lose. Falling in that establishment firebreak against democracy known as the Electoral College would not erase, let alone repudiate him. His now victorious opponent, far from convincing, strengthened by only one fact – not being Trump – remains a projection of all the unresolved problems of the republic.
A Joe Biden presidency promises to be a return, not a progression. But a glance at the US electoral map suggests no easy pathway to political amnesia. A vote count shy of 71 million for Trump will be a …
There is a 100% chance that the next U.S. Secretary of Education will, like many previous secretaries of education, continue to promote privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools and keep undermining the right to education. ((Arne Duncan and John B. King Jr., both former U.S. secretaries of education and both staunch supporters of privately-operated charter schools, have praised Biden’s victory. Nina Rees, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, also congratulated Biden. See Education Week, Novmber 7, 2020.)) Both Democrats and Republicans have long supported segregated charter schools—in Congress and at the state and …
An old friend of mine seems lately to have finally attained that hallowed state-of-being, that kingdom of quietude (or “quietus”), which can only be called Nirvana. Yet his struggle was a long one, frequently disrupted by outbreaks of…Noise. How did he overcome this spiritual pollution–once he had ultimately attained his Epiphany of Cacophony? Perhaps these fragmentary notes from his daily journal, which is all that he left behind before he retreated into Silence, may offer an answer….
2:37 am: Due to current atmospheric conditions, the never-ending stream of 18-wheeled tractor-trailers on the Interstate (? mile away) is emitting a sustained roar. …
Now that the election is all over, it should be the time to debate our future political activity. The Left insisted that Trump was the anti-Christ and that working people should vote for a lesser evil, the saintly figure of Joe Biden. But now with Biden in the White House they are telling us to begin organizing campaigns to save ourselves from the very evil we just helped to put into the Oval Office. The Justice Democrats and their ilk now expect us to accept the right-wing narrative that Biden can be made to take a left turn, ignoring that …
Former radical and Black Panther advocate, now prison abolitionist, Angela Davis, is “very excited” that Senator Kamala Harris is a Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in the current US election. She admits there may be “problematic areas” with Harris’ political record, like her support of the death penalty, (or perhaps her opposition to a California bill when she was attorney general that would have had her office investigate all fatal police shootings?) but Davis has said feminists have to make “pragmatic compromises” and Harris might be “amenable” to future “progressive radical pressure.” Davis then explains that …
I recently published in Middle East Eye a long analysis of last week’s report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into the question of whether the UK Labour party had an especial antisemitism problem. (You can read a slightly fuller version of that article on my website.) In the piece, I reached two main conclusions.
First, the commission’s headline verdict – though you would never know it from reading the media’s coverage – was that no case was found that Labour suffered from “institutional antisemitism”.
That, however, was precisely the claim that had been made …
The discussion on institutional Israeli racism against its own Palestinian Arab population has all but ceased following the final approval of the discriminatory Nation-State Law in July 2018. Indeed, the latest addition to Israel’s Basic Law is a mere start of a new government-espoused agenda that is designed to further marginalize over a fifth of Israel’s population.
On Wednesday, October 28, eighteen members of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) conjured up yet another ploy to target Israeli Arab citizens. They proposed a bill that would revoke Israeli citizenship for …
During the last 10 years I have written multiple articles documenting how Cuba has better medical practice and education than the US. To be honest, I have known for a long time that there is an area of medical training where medical students in the US get considerably more training than do those who study in Cuba.
This realization came to me when my daughter Rebecca was in her first year of medical school in Havana. When I phoned after she had been there for a few months, she said, …
If you think we’re taking advantage of the moratorium on evictions, you’re damn right we are. You have been taking advantage of the tacit threat of forced eviction ever since you bought your first apartment complex.
Dear CTL/Randall Group,
(Please forward to corporate.)
I appreciate the advice you’ve been sending to your tenants about rental assistance that is available from the local authorities, most of which, as you may know, actually is not available, because the …
— Pink Floyd, “Pigs,” from the album Animals, 1977
Here, on the bristling with White Noise precipice of another trumped-up quadrennial election, all who choose — or are “permitted” — to participate in this farce face a stark reality. Donald Trump is the Mayor of Crazy Town these days (a fact still crazy on its face, of course…), and this election appears to be little more than a final court hearing on the divorce of Trump from his trusty-yet-faithless spouse in the House, Nancy Pelosi, in light of which the impeachment proceedings were …
Is the world making more love than war these days? And if so why?
It’s a question that three great contemporary intellectuals have either indirectly or directly wrestled with in their life’s work.
The first of our intellectuals is Francis Fukuyama. In his celebrated debut book The End of History and The Last Man, Fukuyama argued with great verve and imagination that Hegel’s nineteenth century insights into the mystery of human history were relevant to better understanding the political nature of our times.
Through the interpretive filter of the Russian-French philosopher Alexander Kojeve, Fukuyama explained that History’s trajectory was bent towards individual freedom …
A Call for Civil Disobedience (loosely based on a video interview with Michel Chossudovsky
by Peter Koenig / November 6th, 2020
The going narrative in the west is: “Covid is on the Rise. We are entering the second wave. We must protect our people.”
The offered recipe is testing-testing-testing. It is the instrument for increasing “cases”. The more you test, the more cases you have. Is that so difficult to understand? If tomorrow the world stops “testing”, covid is gone. Finito. Back to life. That’s what they don’t want, though. “They”, the higher-ups. Let me call them the diabolical Deep Dark State.
However, testing and the testing results are never analyzed. How many positives are asymptomatic, who are the “positives’, what are their …
