Journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin put out a video “Scott Ritter’s home raided by the FBI.” Maupin affirmed his solidarity with Ritter, a staunch opponent of US militaristic support for Ukraine and Israel.
Ritter’s anti-imperialist stand is nothing new. He first came to wider attention with his opposition to US plans to attack Iraq for having weapons-of-mass-destruction. Ritter, the then United Nations weapons inspector, said that Iraq was “fundamentally disarmed.” History has proven Ritter correct. The US government was wrong.
Nonetheless, many patriots often trot out the canard “my country, right or wrong.”
Failure to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians gambles with the fate of humanity as a whole
by Kathy Kelly / August 8th, 2024
Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.”
“Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to …
I have been in Caracas, Venezuela, for the past two weeks, before and after the presidential election on 28 July. In the run-up to the election, two things became clear to me. First, the Chavistas (supporters of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian project that is now led by President Nicolás Maduro) have the enormous advantage of an organised mass base. Second, knowing that the odds were not in their favour, the opposition, led by far-right María Corina Machado and the US government, were already …
Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder!
Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts ! You are not machines! You are not cattle!
You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts!
– Charlie Chaplin, excerpt of final speech in The Great Dictator, 1940
We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin
by Jonathan Cook / August 8th, 2024
The headline above, about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.
When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.
1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew …
While the Kamala Harris coronation for Democratic presidential nomination continues in its safely shielded path, her sacred status among party members growing with each day, the decision to select Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as Vice Presidential running mate had all the hallmarks of unbearable caution. Caution for being secure from any ambition on his part (Presidential contenders tend to pick running mates unlikely to go off the reservation or eclipse them during their time in office.) Caution, as well, from other factions in the party that may make things interesting at the Chicago Democratic Convention slated to start on …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / August 7th, 2024
You shall have no other gods before me.
— The Ten Commandments
Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.
— Donald Trump
Politics has become our national religion.
While those on the Left have feared a religious coup by evangelical Christians on the Right, the danger has come from an altogether different direction: our constitutional republic has given way to a theocracy structured around the worship of a political savior.
Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation. Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?
Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create the United Nations, with a mandate to “maintain international peace and security.”
Money vs the gift
Sacred Economics 100
Deconstructing the Story of Self/ the World
Life without prisons
Marx’s ‘death knell’ of capitalism, revolution, was the first answer to capitalism’s ills, after which the state would wither away, and we would live in a utopian bliss. The 20th century put paid to that vision, as revolution, as most revolutions do, disappointed, mostly unravelled, and predatory capitalism took hold again. Are we stuck with a system that’s quickly leading us to the cliff edge with seemingly no turning back?
Happily, no, and happily no need for messy revolution, though there is already …
Bureaucrats tasked with protecting national security are often inclined to encourage insecurity. It’s all part of the job prescription. The imperative is understandable if chillingly amoral: increased budgets are demanded to counter threats, however spectral; justifications for existing budgets needlessly bloated are always sought. In the Cold War, an old favourite was the teeth-chattering concern that the other side might just steal a march on the other in terms of nuclear missiles. Legendary “missile gaps” were confected to frighten lawmakers.
In any logical sense, such distinctions were always superfluous, even idiotic: one can only destroy the planet once, and claiming to …
Labor unrest has been a part of history for generations. Some sources even point to the first ever recorded strike taking place in 1170 BCE Egyptover delays in receiving building materials. With the emergence of organized labor, it was a dialectical inevitability that the bourgeois class would take on their own efforts to undermine the organizational endeavors of the working class by any means. From the Pullman Strike of 1894 to the PATCO Strike of 1981 to the union-busting efforts of Starbucks in the 2020s, the forces of capital …
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh – image from Press TVOn July 31, Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Ismail Haniyeh attended the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Hours later, he was reported killed in an “Israeli strike” along with his bodyguard in Tehran.
Simultaneously, Israel claimed it had killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, and that its intelligence had confirmed that another top Hamas leader Mohammed Deif was also killed in a July 13 Israeli strike in Khan Younis, Gaza.
Democracy can be considered a commodity with multitude of varieties. Each elite ruling class claims theirs is the best suitable for its people, and thus imposes it on them. Mind you, not pure democracy — government of the people, by the people, for the people” — because that would amount to nothing less than socialism. The “democracy” that countries profess to practice is nothing but an interpretation of the ruling class in those countries with the aim to control its general populace.
India has Modi-cracy where one man, Narendra Modi, is running the show. A year ago, …
So, my second trial for alleged thoughtcrime-tweeting is going ahead as planned on August 15 in Berlin Superior Court (Das Kammergericht). Full-blown anti-terrorism security protocols will be in effect in the courtroom. Yes, that’s right, the Berlin Superior Court denied my attorney’s motion to rescind their special Security Order, so the German authorities will be putting on an elaborate official show of force, which everyone is welcome to attend!
Or, actually, according to the Security Order, only 35 people are welcome to attend. That’s one of the anti-terrorism security protocols. Also, if …
This July, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) held its annual summit in Washington, DC, where they celebrated themselves for continuing to exist for 75 years, despite the growing opposition around the world to Western hegemony that the US, EU, and their military gang of thugs NATO carry out.
Even after months of massive and consistent protests against the genocide in Gaza, it seems inconceivable that NATO would still gather to plan the next phase in maintaining Western imperialist hegemony over the world, but this is logical and necessary for their purposes because imperialism cannot continue to rule the world without …
Every empire falls. Its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become
by Jonathan Cook / August 5th, 2024
There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.
That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way – hailed at every step as a conquering hero – to the podium of the US Congress.
The fact that the Democrats currently occupy the White House has done little to ruffle the equation of blood and gore in the Middle East, notably regarding the fate of the Palestinians. The ongoing Israeli campaign of stunning ruthlessness against the Gaza unfortunates is certainly a worry for some Democratic strategists, if only because certain voters are finally expressing an opinion on the subject. Israel, right or wrong, is no longer an entirely plausible proposition.
In swing states such as Michigan, the cranky and disgruntled on the issue, certain given the potential role of Arab American voters, is not negligible. In …
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
— Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, Written in 1939 and published in 1946
Voters in the U.S.A. live in fantasy and probably always will. No matter how obvious it is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, not a democracy, the ardent pipe dreams of a …
East vs West and the Ecological, Political and Economic Reasons for Their Differences
by Bruce Lerro / August 5th, 2024
Orientation
How much do left brain pathologies have to do with culture and geography?
Recently I was interviewed by Jeff J. Brown on China Rising about an article I wrote titled “The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations”. During the interview, I contrasted the differences between the functions the left and the right sides of the brain. As we went through this, Jeff commented on how the characteristics of the right side of the brain corresponded to Chinese culture and how the characteristics of the left side of the brain seemed to be an …
To: The State of Israel, AIPAC and the International Zionist Movement
I write as an American citizen. You have stolen my country, and I want it back.
I did not ask for my country to be complicit in the ongoing genocide and attempted eradication of the people of Gaza and Palestine. I do not want to be complicit in the genocide of anyone. I do not want this crime to stain the name of the United States of America whenever it is spoken for the next century and for all eternity, and to bring shame upon me and my descendants, and to …
It was not the highly visible acts of Congress but the seemingly mundane and often nontransparent actions of regulatory agencies that empowered the great transformation of the U.S. commercial banks from traditionally conservative deposit-taking and lending businesses into providers of wholesale financial risk management and intermediation services.
While the world is absorbed in the U.S. election drama, the derivatives time bomb continues to tick menacingly backstage. No one knows the actual size of the derivatives market, since a major portion …
It is increasingly becoming clear–even to some Western observers—that the Zionist project has run its course. It had an extraordinary run, but it has now reached the end of its settler-colonial track.
The creation of this exclusionary settler-colonial Jewish state was a historical anomaly, among the greatest blunders of Western civilization in the twentieth century. Despite the deep alliance—between Western Jews and their Western tormentors—that established Israel in the mid-20th century, this Jewish state could not in the long run resist the deep logic of history. A few sober Israelis, too, can …
How aristocratic it all sounds, if only in a playground, papier-mâché sense. The language of the estates, the “crowning,” the “coronation,” words repurposed for republican politics, is much in evidence with Kamala Harris, who is all but guaranteed formal nomination at the Democratic Party Convention as US presidential candidate. She has now secured the necessary votes from Democratic delegates, without running a single primary, let alone engaging any rival contenders in her party. She has also garnered support despite her abysmal efforts to secure presidential nomination in 2020.
Her tenure as Vice President has been far from glorious, a point …
What explains the meteoric rise of a little-known principal at an investment firm to one of the youngest, least politically experienced Vice-Presidential candidates in US history? How did Senator J. D. Vance rise from relative obscurity in 2016 to become the current running mate to Donald Trump?
Simple: groveling service to the ruling class.
In 2016, Vance published a book describing his youthful hardships growing up in the Midwest, the Rust Belt, or Appalachia, depending on what you choose to call the vast lands impoverished by corporate deindustrialization in the late twentieth century. The social, political, and economic …
A new study shows methane (CH4) emissions behaving like a sprinter on speed, setting decadal records. This is bad news. It’s 80-times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat.
Global emissions of methane, a powerful planet-heating gas, are ‘rising rapidly’ at the fastest rate in decades, requiring immediate action to help avert a dangerous escalation in the climate crisis, a new study has warned.
— “Global Methane Emissions Rising at Fastest Rate in Decades, Scientists Warn”, The Guardian, July 30, 2024.
The new study by Drew Shindell, et al, “The Methane Imperative”,Frontiers in Science, July 29, 2024 discusses the methane issue …
Rula Halawani (Palestine), Untitled XII from the Negative Incursion series, 2002.
On 26 July, senior United Nations (UN) officials briefed the UN Security Council about the terrible situation in Gaza. ‘More than two million people in Gaza remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale’, said Deputy Commissioner-General Antonia De Meo of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Within Gaza, the UN officials wrote, 625,000 children are trapped, ‘their futures at risk’. The World Health Organisation …
