Latest articles
by Jonathan Cook / October 6th, 2020
Faced with a barrage of criticism from some of his followers, George Monbiot, the Guardian’s supposedly fearless, left-wing columnist, offered up two extraordinarily feeble excuses this week for failing to provide more than cursory support for Julian Assange over the past month, as the Wikileaks founder has endured extradition hearings in a London courtroom.
The Trump administration wants Assange brought to the United States to face espionage charges that could see him locked away in a super-max prison on “special administrative measures”, unable to have meaningful contact with any other human being for the rest of his life. And that fate …
by James O'Neill / October 6th, 2020
It is no secret that the United States government has been bitterly opposed to the Nord Stream 2 project that will provide reliable, cheap and necessary oil supplies from Russia to Germany. It is tempting to view this opposition as based on economic self-interest. The substitute for Russian energy to Europe is American liquid natural gas, with its higher price tag (by about 40%) providing substantial windfall profits for United States producers hit by a declining domestic market.
The United States opposition, however, is based on much broader considerations, animated by a hatred of Russia and an overwhelming desire to maintain …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 6th, 2020
One measure of success in politics is the degree enemies imitate you, even if done insincerely and without flattery. Insincere imitation has become the preserve of a whole panoply of Donald Trump’s critics stretching from the money, corporate side of the Democrats to the sandalled warriors who believe in environmental eschatology. Most importantly for Joe Biden and fellow travellers of the Donkey Party, they remain incapable and uninterested in identifying and confronting their devastating loss in 2016. There is only one program in the works, the mission that matters: removal and elimination. Get Trump out, and all will heal.
This makes …
by Sean Reynolds / October 6th, 2020
September 26th was the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. In Chicago, where Voices for Creative Nonviolence is based, activists held the third of three COVID-era “Car Caravans” for nuclear disarmament, travelling through the city from Voices’ own rapidly gentrifying Uptown neighborhood to the statue on Chicago’s South Side which marks the fateful site of Earth’s first sustained nuclear chain reaction. Cars bore banners reading “End U.S. Nukes Before They End Us,” “Still Here? Dumb Luck” “Not China, not Russia, not Iran: the World Fears U.S.” along with more explicitly antinuclear messages.
Stalwart in building the event …
by Chris Wright / October 6th, 2020
Beethoven in 1803, painted by Christian Horneman
Two hundred and fifty years after Beethoven’s birth, we’re faced with something of a paradox: his music is known and beloved all over the world, probably more than that of any other composer, even as its real significance is hardly ever remarked on except in critical studies largely unread by the public. Familiarity, it seems, has bred, not contempt but ignorance. We hear the famous melodies for the thousandth time, whether in movies, commercials, or concerts, melodies from …
by Margaret Flowers / October 6th, 2020
The testimony portion of the extradition hearing of Julian Assange, taking place in the United Kingdom, concluded after four weeks. Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who presided over the hearing, will not announce her decision until January. Until then, Assange will remain in detention in Belmarsh Prison.
Under conditions that violated Assange’s rights and his ability to defend himself, his legal team made a clear case that for multiple reasons the only just solution is to free Assange. However, Judge Baraitser has not ruled favorably for him in her past decisions or …
A new industrial policy when we need a de-industrial policy
by Bernard Marszalek / October 5th, 2020
The most popular poster for the Green New Deal reveals startling assumptions.
Looking at it as a whole, ignoring the details for now, the poster exhibits a sense of movement. The train is the focal point and duplicates similar depiction of trains, for example, in vintage French posters. These huge machines, emblematic of the Modern Age, are a graphic cliché. Similar renditions are found in posters all over Europe and the United States.
The vehicle bridge reinforces the sense of …
Review of Don Fitz's Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution
by Keith Preston / October 5th, 2020
The issue of healthcare reform is one that is consistently identified by opinion polls as being among the most important to Americans. The United States continues to be the only fully industrialized nation that lacks a public healthcare system, a feature of modern “democracy” that is taken for granted in most developed countries. Most American proponents of healthcare reform typically cite the models utilized by Canada, Western Europe, or Australia as the most appropriate guides for the implementation of universal healthcare in the United States. However, Don Fitz, a …
by Peter Koenig / October 4th, 2020
Germany is again in the forefront in fighting the devastating, unjustified, illegal, economy-destructive, people debilitating and outright genocidal Corona Measures. The German COVID-19 Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee – in German – ACU – German acronym for Ausserparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss – (see diagram from ACU2020.org website, on the left) is planning to launch a Class Action Suit against not only governments and government officials, but specifically against the manufacturers of the infamous PCR test (PCR – Polymerase Chain Reaction – is a technique used to “amplify” small segments of DNA) which, according to honest virologists all over the world, is absolutely unsuitable for covid-19 …
System Fail #3
by subMedia / October 4th, 2020
In this episode we look at the continuing racial tensions in the United States, political violence in Kenosha and Portland, and the effect this is all having on the upcoming US election. We then shift our attention to the uprising in Belarus, and chat with Minsk-based anarchist, “Maria”.
by Yves Engler / October 4th, 2020
How much is too much? When will Israeli nationalists in North America completely discredit themselves by overusing their power to crush those defending Palestinians?
The recent ruthlessness of the Israel lobby is remarkable. Recently they’ve convinced Zoom to cancel a university sponsored talk, a prominent law program to rescind a job offer, a public broadcaster to apologize for using the word Palestine and companies to stop delivering for a restaurant.
A week ago Israel lobby groups convinced Zoom to cancel a San Francisco State University talk with Palestinian resistance icon …
by Craig Wood / October 3rd, 2020
Member of the radical 1960’s anti-war group Baltimore Four reflects on social justice, his life and going through it with a disability
Although activist Jim Mengel recalls falling asleep in class, he didn’t know he had narcolepsy until after he was married. At 92, he still dozes off occasionally, but that doesn’t stop him from attending weekly peace vigils in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.
Between boyish chuckles, the soft-spoken pastor remained humble throughout the interview. He was self-deprecating at times and deliberated questions at length before giving detailed explanations that sometimes digressed from the theme. It was apparent he took his faith in Jesus …
by David Rovics / October 3rd, 2020
A few thoughts on intentions, tactics, and building eviction defense networks.
Here in Portland, there are signs that the movement for Black lives and the movement for actually affordable housing are increasingly intersecting in all kinds of ways. Among the networks engaged in popular education and resistance organizing efforts around housing issues, you’ll find groups normally focused on the massive problems of killer cops and institutional racism, such as Don’t Shoot PDX. Outside of the home of a family facing foreclosure in North Portland on Mississippi, you’ll …
by Edward Curtin / October 2nd, 2020
Mendacity is a system we live in.
– Paul Newman, playing Brick in Tennessee Williams’, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
A profusion of philosophical, psychological, and political ink has been spent on the subject of lying and liars. The toll in loves lost and relationships destroyed from lying is incalculable. All the war dead are victims of government lies; what Marine Major General Smedley Butler called a “racket.” Lies are poison, slow or quick working, and they kill both body and soul.
We are living in a country of lies. A country where propaganda is disseminated around the clock and lies …
by Robert Hunziker / October 2nd, 2020
Photo: Rainforest Trust
As of September 29th, Brazil’s Bolsonaro government has fired the civilian-run National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which has monitored the Amazon rainforest for the past three decades. INPE is being replaced (drumroll please) by the Brazilian military as the new watchdog over the world famous rainforest. Voila, worldwide concerns about deforestation are… ah… indeterminate, vague, unspecified.
All along, the spectacularly bountiful rainforest has increasingly come under heavy attack and definitively at risk of turning into a degraded savannah. A warning put forward by world-renowned Amazonian …
Daring to call the entire Western Capitalist Crime Syndicate what it is - Left/Right/Center Thuggery
by Paul Haeder / October 2nd, 2020
First, the reality on the ground –
I am still working, losing billable hours weekly as my contract with an “anti-poverty/social capital” organization winds down. This is with a non-profit that is pushing over $100 million (“donated” by millionaires, billionaires, philanthropies and in some cases state and city programs) that came down the pike just in the past six months for so-called Covid-19 relief money for, right now, the 110,000 folk already, from Oakland to Detroit to Chicago and Austin and Seattle, who have applied for funds varying from $500 a person in King County, WA, from the Starbucks Mafia for …
by Colin Todhunter / October 2nd, 2020
Cotton is the only genetically modified (GM) crop that has been officially approved in India and has been cultivated (illegally then legally) in the country for more than 20 years. Although GM mustard has been approved for commercial cultivation by India’s apex regulatory body for GM crops (the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee, GEAC), a public interest litigation led by Aruna Rodrigues is before the Supreme Court challenging that decision and commercialisation of the crop is on hold.
The push to drive GM food crops into India has been happening for many years. Back in February 2010, the government placed an indefinite …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 2nd, 2020
October 1, 2020. Central Criminal Court, London.
The Old Bailey has been the venue for a trial that should never have taken place. But during the course of these extradition proceedings against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder accused by the US Department of Justice for violating the US Espionage Act (17 charges) and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an impressive battalion of defence witnesses has been called upon. They have assisted Assange’s legal team to build a picture of obscene politicisation, imperial overreach and wanton callousness.
A picture of the detention facilities awaiting the publisher was painted with fine …
by Peter Koenig / October 2nd, 2020
Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War.
— Plato.
This wisdom is as valid today as it was 2,500 years ago. Wars go on and on. They are exactly the antidote of sustainability. Though they may be the only “sustainability” modern mankind knows – endless destruction, killing, shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and its sentient beings, including humans.
Yes, we are hell-bent towards “sustainably”, destroying our planet and all its living beings, with wars and conflicts and shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and the people who have peacefully inhabited her lands for thousands of years.
All for greed, and more greed. Greed …
by David Penner / October 1st, 2020
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
— Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6th, 1816
As the tech monopolies, the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex, and other powerful corporate entities accumulate unprecedented wealth rivaling that which is wielded by many countries, the cult of identity politics has likewise become increasingly formidable. Indeed, this metastasizing Tower of Babel is fomenting an erasure of collective memory, as the multicultural sacking of the working class enters a new and increasingly violent phase, …
by Shawgi Tell / October 1st, 2020
From the very beginning, more than 35 years ago, the idea and practice of charter schools was conceived and gradually executed by those with abundant cultural, social, political, and economic capital. Charter schools are not the product of grass-roots forces, as the public has often been led to believe. They never have been. Charter schools did not arise as a result of ordinary everyday people coming together and saying: “hey, we need charter schools, let’s make it happen.” Charter schools did not emerge from the ground-up. Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, which have a well-documented track record of failure and …
by Ramzy Baroud / October 1st, 2020
It is abundantly clear that Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, has underestimated the seriousness of the challenges facing Palestine and the Palestinians.
The rushed agreement between his party, Fatah and Hamas in Istanbul on September 24, and the Palestinian leader’s speech at the 75th session of the UN General Assembly the following day, indicate that the Palestinian leadership insists on operating within the stifling confines of the Oslo accords and the dead-end road of the ‘peace process’.
Abbas has spent most of his political career mastering an intricate balancing …
by Beau Peters / October 1st, 2020
There’s no doubt that the resources of our digital age are valuable. They provide us with new development opportunities and help us to build meaningful connections with a diverse range of global communities. The past couple of decades have seen our adoption of tech grow, and as such we are seeing the first generations of digital natives. Kids are surrounded by technology from an early age and are more comfortable with its use. They continue to use it in creative ways, not least of which is organizing themselves …
by Jonathan Cook / October 1st, 2020
What I think of as the cynical left are once again berating the progressive critical left, myself included, for failing to write what they want written about Covid-19. I take this as a kind of unintended compliment: that they think we can write about their concerns better than they can themselves.
But even if I wished to write someone else’s argument rather than my own, it would still be difficult to know for sure what the cynical left wants from progressive writers: that we pronounce the pandemic fake, or that we declare the danger from it overblown, or that we …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 1st, 2020
Trump holds a chart of weapon sales as he welcomes Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office, March 20, 2018. (Photo: Reuters)
Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered on October 2, 2018 by agents of Saudi Arabia’s despotic government, and the CIA concluded they killed him on direct orders from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Eight Saudi men have been convicted of Khashoggi’s murder by a Saudi court in what the Washington Post characterized as sham trials with no transparency. The higher …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 1st, 2020
September 30. Central Criminal Court, London.
Today will be remembered as a grand expose. It was a direct, pointed accusation at the intentions of the US imperium which long for the scalp of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. For WikiLeaks, it was a smouldering triumph, showing that the entire mission against Assange, from the start, has been a political one. The Australian publisher faces the incalculably dangerous prospect of 17 charges under the US Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Stripped to its elements, the indictment is merely violence kitted out in the vestment of sham …
by Gary Olson / September 30th, 2020
To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand.
— Charles Taylor
Part One
In the early 1980s, which now seems a few lifetimes ago, I began offering a college seminar course titled “The Politics of Personal Identity,” quickly dubbed “POPI” by students. It was designed as a capstone course and limited to twelve seniors. Most of the identity groupings around today were addressed in readings, films and guest speakers. During the final weeks of the course, each student was responsible for giving a 45-minute oral presentation: “Who Am I? What Do I Believe? Why Do I Believe It?” …
by Eric Walberg / September 30th, 2020
I was always dismissed as a ‘Sov symp’ in the days of communism, attracted by the Soviet Union’s great foreign policy: anti-imperialist, ant-zionist, pro-nuclear disarmament, pro-liberation movements, etc, etc. I could never understand why lefties didn’t fall in love with the only real non-capitalist modern society. It worked, however badly. It had to be at the heart of the struggle against capitalism, imperialism.
Now I’m a ‘putinist’ according to my Canadian MP Chrystia Freeland, herself granddaughter of the leading WWII Ukrainian Hitler propagandist as Ukrainian Jews were whisked away to concentration camps and death. She was …
by Ramzy Baroud / September 29th, 2020
Overwhelmed by uncontrollable circumstances, the Greek government is bracing for another financial crisis that promises to be as terrible as the last one in 2015.
Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, announced on September 12 that Athens has made a “robust” arms deal that will “reinforce the armed forces” and create a “national shield”.
However, beyond Mitsotakis’ mask of confidence, there is a nightmare brewing that is likely to haunt Greece for years to come. Five years ago, when Athens defaulted on its debt, largely to European countries and institutions, …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 29th, 2020
September 29. Central Criminal Court, London.
Julian Assange’s defence team spent the day going over, reemphasising and sharpening the focus on what awaited their client should he, with the blessing of Her Majesty’s Government, make his way to the United States. Not only will he confront 17 charges under the US Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, he faces the prospect of imprisonment for the rest of his life in conditions that risk prematurely ending his life.
Warden Baird and SAMs
The opening expert witness was Maureen Baird, who knows a thing or two about US carceral fare, …
