Recent Blogs
In late November 2018, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned public intellectual, remarked that “humanity faces two imminent existential threats: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war.” Curiously, although a widespread environmental movement has developed to save the planet from accelerating climate change, no counterpart has emerged to take on the rising danger of nuclear disaster. Indeed, this danger―exemplified Read more…
If Bill Gates walks into a room full of factory workers then the average income of everybody in the room skyrockets. It would skyrocket even if everybody else in the room were going bankrupt as Gates entered. Similarly, the average income of the people in the room would plummet as Gates walked out the door even Read more…
“CONAIE and CREO direct the new National Electoral Council“ announces a headline yesterday in the rightwing Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo. CONAIE is a self-declared “left” federation representing indigenous peoples in Ecuador. CREO is the party of the “defeated” right wing presidential candidate in 2017. I put “defeated” in quotes because CREO’s electoral defeat – which they stupidly Read more…
Here are poetic tangents – mine with Lorde’s and Rukeyser’s – to a podcast I heard last night: a tribute paid to Eqbal Ahmad by his friend, Edward Said. Said contrasted his personal ‘filiation’ with his ‘affiliation’ in relation to Ahmad and the world of idea(l)s, Ahmad’s unceasing commitment to the creative versus mere politics, Read more…
In July 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1, with one abstention, nations from around the world attending a United Nations-sponsored conference in New York City voted to approve a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Although this Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received little coverage in the mass media, its passage was Read more…
Dear Esther: I reply below to your review of my complaint about Evan Dyer’s “analysis” piece about Venezuela. Your review begins as follows: COMPLAINT You took issue with a story published on the cbcnews.ca website entitled “Why some Venezuelans fear Maduro is selling them out to China” written by Ottawa-based reporter Evan Dyer. You corresponded Read more…
And here is my second attempt at bridging the three areas: poems, justice and data visualization. This time, it’s the Palestinian poet, Fadwa Tuqan, whose poems I have highlighted alongside some charts depicting the progress over the years on a number of women’s education indicators in the West Bank and Gaza. (Earlier, I had used Read more…
A Question of Style The current events in Istanbul say nothing at all about the medieval regime in Saudi Arabia we didn’t already know. It would be hard to guess that, given the uproar in media and government about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a furore that tells us a lot more about our western Read more…
Below is a slightly edited (and rushed) transcript of a talk I was asked to give. It was part of the webinar series organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Group and the Alliance for Global Justice. There were some minor technical glitches with the sound level but the recording is here. *** Ok we’re here to Read more…
The IMF says unemployment in Venezuela is at about 30% It claims it was 27% in 2017and that it will average 33% in this year. How wild are these claims? A group of anti-government academics whose surveys are often cited in the international press estimated unemployment to be 9% in 2017. Torino Capital’s chief economist, Read more…
I have long been entertaining the possibility of somehow tying together the three areas: poems, social justice and data visualization. It has been tricky, but here is my first attempt. The 10 poems by Audre Lorde and Muriel Rukeyser (wellsprings of poetic sensibility) are intended to provide context for the accompanying data visualization on gender Read more…
Dreaming political concepts in Iran and the US: Huey Newton and Ali Shariati, through the movie Black Panther In the movie Black Panther, N’Jobu is residing in Oakland, California as a Wakandan spy when he’s troubled by the racism faced by black Americans. T’Chaka, the king of Wakanda, considers N’Jobu’s plot of Read more…
The recent announcement by the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, that his company would give substantial raises to its lowest-paid employees should not blind us to the fact that most American workers are not receiving big wage increases. In fact, the real wages (that is, wages adjusted for inflation) of average American workers are declining. Read more…
An op-ed in The Hill ran with the headline “Options to get Maduro out are limited and unpleasant” The author, Mark Feierstein, is a “senior advisor” with the Albright Stonebridge Group led by Madeleine “the price is worth it” Albright. Needless to say, no matter how much death and destruction the US and its allies Read more…
If anyone can claim the title of “the people’s historian” in Pakistan, it is Mubarak Ali. Some years ago, he put up all his books – Urdu and English – on his website in PDF format. He has been a prolific writer, and although his work in Urdu far outweighs that in English, I thought Read more…
Resistance, the flowering fire of memory – Rukeyser, Muriel As we mark the thinness of the ten thousand things, as we go past the halt, the hark of memory, can we shirk off the rock of my mountain’s mountain? as we claim the fire of childspeak, childstone, where will the song of my deadwood ash Read more…
Despite the soaring costs of attending American colleges and universities, their students are receiving an education that falls far short of the one experienced by earlier generations. The sharp increase in costs is clear enough. Between 1978 and 2013, American college tuition rose by 1,120 percent, and became the major source of revenue for higher Read more…
By 2008 Nicaragua’s real GDP per capita had grown to 23,087 Cordoba’s according to the IMF. The IMF doesn’t list a real GDP per capita value for 1980, the year after US-back dictator was overthrown, because it oddly doesn’t have population figures. However if we take the World Bank’s population figure for Nicaragua in 1980 Read more…
1) OAS approves creation of group to address crisis in Nicaragua (7/30/2018) Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz; Writing by Julia Love; Editing by Sandra Maler 2) Nicaragua’s Ortega rejects early elections, U.S. rebukes crackdown (7/30/2018) Reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington & Oswaldo Rivas in Managua; additional reporting by Diego Ore in Mexico City; editing by Read more…
BELOW IS AN EMAIL I SENT TO AMNESTY TODAY Drones were just used to drop bombs on a large crowd in an attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Maduro. In February, I asked Amnesty if it would denounce remarks against Maduro’s government made by Trump, Tillerson and Rubio that could incite violence and Amnesty refused. See below ME: Read more…
This passage below from Stephen Bush’s latest on Jeremy Corbyn’s “anti-Semitism crisis” rings very true regarding Jon Lansman and a segment of the Labour left that lacks the willingness to stand up to Israel’s apologists or to fight for a civilized foreign policy. Lansman is on Labour’s National Executive Committee and also runs Momentum, a Read more…
Since the advent of the Trump administration, American progressives have been aghast at its narrow nationalist approach to world affairs. But many of them are also uneasy at the American Establishment’s defense of its own foreign policy. The Trump “America First” approach has largely dispensed with American-led alliances of the past and, instead, emphasized U.S. Read more…
Whatever happened to the notion that rich people should pay their fair share of the cost for their country’s public programs? Progressive income taxes―designed to fund government services and facilities—go back centuries, and are based on the idea that taxes should be levied most heavily on people with the ability to pay them. In the United Read more…
“Early elections” were advocated by Washington and US apologists in 2002 to consolidate the coup that briefly ousted Hugo Chavez. It’s way to sound like you’re for democracy while actually seeking to consolidate the overthrow of a democratically elected government. If you oppose a coup then you demand the restoration of the government that was Read more…
Even as Ecuador looks very ready to hand over Julian Assange to the UK government, and months after Lenin Moreno’s government ruthlessly trampled over Assange’s right to free expression (Assange is an Ecuadorian citizen since about December of 2017), widespread ignorance about Ecuador shields its government from accountability. The only thing Lenin Moreno ‘s government Read more…
Recently, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an obscure, upfront democratic socialist from the Bronx, easily defeated one of the most powerful U.S. Congressmen in the Democratic primary, the story became an overnight sensation. How, the pundits wondered, could this upset have occurred? Actually, it shouldn’t have been a total surprise for, in recent years, democratic socialism Read more…
If only it was somebody’s job to scrutinize claims made by officialdom and other partisan actors. We could call the people paid to do this “journalists”. There is not a single mention of Venezuela’s high homicide rate in this article below or of the high death rate of its police officers (which Reuters itself has Read more…
You have to love this headline. The “missing opposition figure” isn’t missing! Ex-Ecuador leader sought in case of missing opposition figure In 2012, Fernando Balda was the victim of a foiled kidnapping in COLOMBIA. If Balda was ever “missing” it was for a few hours (if that) back in 2012! The culprits were tried and Read more…
Although many people have criticized the bizarre nature of Donald Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea, his recent lovefest with Kim Jong Un does have the potential to reduce the dangers posed by nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Even so, buried far below the mass media coverage of the summit spectacle, the reality is that Read more…
Although the U.S. mass media are awash with stories about America’s “booming economy,” the benefits are distributed very unequally, when they are distributed at all. Buoyed by soaring corporate profits and stock prices, the richest Americans have reached new and dazzling heights of prosperity. As of May 2018, the growing crop of billionaires included corporate Read more…
Kath Viner became the Guardian’s editor–in-chief in 2015. She reminds me of OAS chief Luis Almagro and Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno: all three have served the US Empire at least, if not more, slavishly than openly declared right wingers might have done. All were initially applauded by the left who heaved sighs of relief when they got in. Read more…
Images and statistics regarding Venezuela’s economic crisis are relentlessly aimed a demonizing President Maduro’s government and absolving Trump for what U.S. sanctions do to Venezuelans. For example, in these Reuters articles below, the harmful impact of the Trump’s economic sanctions on the population (and their illegality) can only be reported as claims by the Venezuelan Read more…
One of the most important achievements of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s ten years in office was the vast improvements in Ecuador’s roads. The time required to travel from previously isolated regions of the country to the most populated (and therefore economically developed and politically influential) was drastically reduced. The comfort and safety of road Read more…
It’s not every day that an insider tells us how preparations for nuclear war have been proceeding. So, when one does, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. Although Daniel Ellsberg is best-known for his 1971 role in delivering the Pentagon Papers (the Top Secret Defense Department study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam) to the Read more…
America’s oft-quoted Declaration of Independence, when discussing “unalienable rights,” focused on “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Although “happiness” is rarely referred to by today’s government officials, the general assumption in the United States and elsewhere is that governments are supposed to be fostering the happiness of their citizens. Against this backdrop, it’s worth Read more…
Anyone who has been following the career of Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour party since 2015, knows that his key allies within the party have been a small group of Labour MPs and the party membership. They have been Corbyn’s bulwark against a hard core of about 30-40 right wing Labour MPs who Read more…
I get lost in the words. I listen and watch this fool of a stooge president And then I look at my friends who live, work Or have fled from Central America Live in Venezuela Y me duele el corazón. ¿Qué puedo hacer? Una tristeza me lleva Como un abrigo en el verano I have Read more…
Go to source Is it war yet? Yes, in too many respects. It’s a relentless economic, diplomatic, and ideological war, spiced with (so far) just a dash of military war, and the strong scent of more to come. I mean war with Russia, of course, although Russia is the point target for a constellation of Read more…
I sent this note to the Guardian’s readers editor today about a Nick Cohen article that was both libelous and anti-Semitic.* The article has already been up for over a week. I wish I had noticed it earlier but I can seldom bother to read Cohen’s trash closely. _______ It is ok to conflate “the Read more…
The late Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who blew the whistle on its dirty dealings, was the Edward Snowden of his time. A 1961 diary entry of Agee’s said regarding a CIA program in Ecuador that “It costs about 50,000 dollars a year and in a place like Quito a thousand dollars a week Read more…
Add to that list the poet who rambles on in stolen dark a dark prepared in stark solemnity a dark unacceptable to the lavish word the poem struggles to breathe it crosses over and touches void and here it speaks attaches belongs the proverbial becoming adversary — We live of course in a world not Read more…
Early this February, the Republican-controlled Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed new federal budget legislation that increased U.S. military spending by $165 billion over the next two years. Remarkably, though, a Gallup public opinion poll, conducted only days before, found that only 33 percent of Americans favored increasing U.S. military spending, while 65 percent Read more…
An extremely long article in the New York Times today has the headline “Can Venezuela Be Saved?” The subhead reads “As a nation unwinds, Leopoldo López, the opposition’s most prominent leader, sits under house arrest and contemplates what might still be possible.” The article states “The world is full of byzantine methods to communicate through Read more…
An article by Julia Symmes Cobb and Anggy Polanco ran with the headline ‘Migrate or die’: Venezuelans flood into Colombia despite crackdown This article says Some 3 million Venezuelans – or a tenth of the population – have left Venezuelan since late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez started his Socialist revolution in 1999. UN population Read more…
ME: What is Amnesty’s position on the economic sanctions the Trump Administration has implemented against Venezuela? AMNESTY: Amnesty International monitors and documents human rights violations globally, regardless of the country or government exercising authority in the place where such violations occur, from Israel to Argentina, as well as the USA and Venezuela. Amnesty International believes Read more…