All Content Types
The shockwaves of Sept. 11 have made life more difficult for the left in Canada. Canada’s increased militarization and the repression of civil rights have been disorienting. But our strategic problems remain the same. They’re simply more intense. For the first time in more than a generation, the public is showing strong public support for Read more…
By a vote of 1.69 million for Robert Mugabe to 1.28 million for Morgan Tsvangirai, the people of Zimbabwe re-elected the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) president last weekend. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), founded in September 1999, lost by more than in the last national election, in June 2000 when Zanu gained a Read more…
Following our Media Alert, ‘Nick Cohen of the Observer on Iraq, Chomsky and Pilger’ (March 13, 2002), Media Lens received this reply from Nick Cohen on March 13, 2002: “The problem with the sanctions cause starvation theory is that: 1. It was never used about sanctions against South Africa 2. Saddam is a tyrant who Read more…
He has won two elections, and he has made a start on relieving poverty. So now the US wants to get rid of Venezuela’s president Almost 30 years after the violent destruction of the reformist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, a repeat performance is being planned in Venezuela. Little of this has been reported Read more…
Last month, a caller to a Winnipeg CBC radio phone-in show where I was a guest berated me for not supporting United States President George Bush’s attack on Afghanistan. “As a feminist,” he said, “you must admit that, without the bombing, women would still be enslaved there.” Whether or not women will be better off Read more…
It is the “vision” thing again. When President George Bush wanted Arab support for the US bombing of Afghanistan in September, he suddenly announced he had a “vision” of a Palestinian state. Then it disappeared off his radar screen. Yet now it’s back in a watered-down, US-framed UN resolution that affirms “a vision of a Read more…
The American military has become like one of these couples that always goes on holiday to the same resort. They’re sat in the Pentagon muttering: “We always bomb the same place, every year. This year we looked through the brochures and thought of bombing somewhere new, like Yemen or North Korea, but in the end Read more…
Joke # 1 Adding lead to gasoline was a little trick invented in the U.S. Back in the nineteen twenties, leaded gasoline became the norm in America and in the rest of the world. By the time the United States government banned it in 1986, it was killing adults at a rate of 5,000 per Read more…
Let us now take a walking tour of Washington, D.C., to see whether the Enron scandal has loosened corporate America’s grip on our nation’s capital. (Okay, the answer is no.) At the White House yesterday, President Bush announced a 10-point plan that he said will “improve corporate responsibility and help protect America’s shareholders.” It will Read more…
Hah, say my liberal friends, the Enron disaster proves that the system doesn’t work. Now, the government must step in and regulate the corporations. I’m all for regulating corporations, but my question is: what system doesn’t work and for whom doesn’t it work? The system worked well for Texas Governor Rick Perry (R), who Read more…
The news that the Pentagon had secret contingency plans to fight terrorism with nuclear weapons has the marks not of considered military doctrine but rather of an infantile tantrum born of the Bush administraton’s frustration in making good on its overblown promise to end the terrorist scourge. There is desperation in the air; the giant that Read more…
Former Toyota engine fabrication assembly line worker Ella Williams just got the shaft from the Supreme Court and as a consequence so have tens of thousands of workers who will need but will no longer have the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to protect them in the event of a disabling impairment such as carpal Read more…
US Vice-President Dick Cheney arrived yesterday in a Middle East far more concerned with the firestorm between the Palestinians and the Israelis than with Washington’s plans for a war with Iraq. President George Bush may believe Iraq is part of an “axis of evil” but it was clear from their reactions to Mr Cheney’s mission Read more…
Dear Friends, It’s a few minutes before midnight, on Friday night on 3/8/2002. I’m in San Diego, and I have just escaped being arrested by the San Diego police. This book tour keeps getting more surreal, but the last hour has been unlike anything I have yet seen. I have come to San Diego to Read more…
By Let’s start with Baruch Kimmering, a sociologist at Hebrew University. Here’s what he sent to the Jerusalem Weekly Kol Ha’Ir last month, which duly published it: “I accuse Ariel Sharon of creating a process in which he will not only intensify the reciprocal bloodshed, but is liable to instigate a regional war and partial Read more…
Gore Vidal, the great novelist and political critic, asked me how I liked living under the dictatorship. I laughed, but I felt a chill. We’ve now experienced six months of life under unusual circumstances and it’s time that citizens did some serious critical re-evaluation of our predicament. To say that democracy is at stake is Read more…
He has won two elections, and he has made a start on relieving poverty. So now the US wants to get rid of Venezuela‘s president Almost 30 years after the violent destruction of the reformist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, a repeat performance is being planned in Venezuela. Little of this has been Read more…
Thomas Friedman has achieved another media triumph with the debut of “Tom’s Journal” on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” The feature will be a “one-on-one debriefing of Friedman by Lehrer or one of the program’s senior correspondents,” says a news release from the influential PBS program. Friedman will appear perhaps a dozen times per year Read more…
Steve Shalom. The New York Times ran a story on February 25 by Juan Forero titled “Colombian Rebels Sabotage Peace Hopes.” Perhaps you can address some of the questions raised by the article. Let me begin, however, by asking about the political program and values of the guerrilla group, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Read more…
Comrades! Comrades our slogan today is “not in our name†but unfortunately, it is in our name. The bombs that are dropped on Iraqi will be British bombs funded by British taxpayers like ourselves. The depleted Uranium that was used before was paid for by us. All the crimes that have been described today are Read more…
Palestinian women reacting to explosions in Balata last Friday. “Why is the IDF allowed to harm Palestinian civilians and we aren’t allowed to harm Israeli civilians?” they asked in the refugee camp. (Photo: AP) In Ha_aretz, the Israeli Newspaper published in Tel Aviv BALATA – Even when the soldiers who had taken the upper floors Read more…
Today, almost six months after the attacks on New York and Washington, the US is putting in place a network of forward bases stretching from the Middle East across the entire length of Asia, from the Red Sea to the Pacific. US forces are active in the biggest array of countries since the second world Read more…
And then unto China came POTUS (President of the United States, in the lingo of the Secret Service), a messenger from the Republic of Enron, to preach the gospel about the path to true freedom. Go ye, he urged, beyond Maoism. Beyond Marxism. And yes – will the choir say amen – beyond Materialism. For Read more…
Those of us who opposed the bombing of Afghanistan warned that the war between nations would not stop there. Now, as Tony Blair prepares the British people for an attack on Iraq, the conflict seems to be proliferating faster than most of us predicted. But there is another danger, which we have tended to neglect: Read more…
I stand by what I have said in my Affidavit and I have served the sentence which the Supreme Court imposed on me. Anybody who thinks that the punishment for my supposed Å’crime¹ was a symbolic one day in prison and a fine of two thousand rupees, is wrong. The punishment began over a year Read more…
Let’s start with Baruch Kimmering, a sociologist at Hebrew University. Here’s what he sent to the Jerusalem Weekly Kol Ha’Ir last month, which duly published it: “I accuse Ariel Sharon of creating a process in which he will not only intensify the reciprocal bloodshed, but is liable to instigate a regional war and partial or Read more…
If, in May 1967, an Arab prince had proposed that the whole Arab world would recognize Israel and establish normal relations with it, in return for Israel’s recognition of the Green Line border, we would have believed that the days of the Messiah had arrived. Masses of people would have run into the street, singing Read more…
In Afghan fields, the poppies blow. Yes, even as the Americans are moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords and gangsters running much of the western-supported Afghan government are ensuring a bumper new crop of heroin for the world’s markets. The UN have warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The Read more…
I don’t know if he still uses it, but as a Member of Parliament in New Zealand, before being inflicted on the rest of the world through the WTO, one of Mike Moore’s favourite expressions was “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” A Malaysian human rights lawyer once told me Read more…
While Internet stocks may have crashed, Internet optimists still abound. In Next: The Future Just Happened (W.W. Norton, 2001), for example, author Michael Lewis celebrates what he sees as the unstoppable momentum of the digital age, the liberating effect of digital technologies and the inherent ability of the new technologies — and those, ever younger, Read more…
The United States is now set on war with Iraq. What justification is there for such a war? Occasionally it has been suggested that Iraq was somehow linked to the 11 September attacks. The strongest alleged link has been the supposed meeting of Mohammed Atta, the 11 September ringleader, and an Iraqi diplomat expelled from Read more…