Recent Blogs
Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal rebutted In Part 1 we saw how Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal’s article examining the speakers’ roster of the Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago elicited an unhelpful reply from the editors of New Politics, which had been one of the sponsors of that event. Turning to the Norton-Blumenthal (N-B) article Read more…
Earlier this month, maverick left journalists Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal blasted the various conveners of this summer’s Socialism 2019 conference in Chicago. The editors of the journal New Politics, one of the sponsors of said conference, responded with “In Defense of Socialist Internationalism.” Neither side of this exchange–not the editors of New Politics nor Read more…
You mass media folks lead busy lives, I’m sure. But you must have heard something about nuclear weapons―those supremely destructive devices that, along with climate change, threaten the continued existence of the human race. Yes, thanks to popular protest and carefully-crafted arms control and disarmament agreements, there has been some progress in limiting the number Read more…
The text was sent to the European Parliament, where I started a petition, the Galician Nationalist Bloc of Santa Comba, where everything happened, and, as usual, other places). I’d like to share a personal problem that involves issues related to mental health, human trafficking and the rights of immigrants. Don’t have much trust on institutions Read more…
Is the United States becoming a plutocracy? With the manifestly unqualified but immensely rich Donald Trump serving as the nation’s first billionaire president, it’s not hard to draw that conclusion. And there are numerous other signs, as well, that great wealth has become a central factor in American politics. Although big money has always played Read more…
I conclude, by means of interacting with pilgrims here, in Santiago de Compostela, that all guys between sixty and eighty five are seriously scared about dementia. They were all born between 1958 and 1933. As a matter of fact, I’ve been recently thinking they could constitute some kind of “demented” movement, or “demented army”: Dementia Read more…
New York TImes, Meridith Kohut and Isayen Herrera, December 17, 2017 “As Venezuela Collapses, Children Are Dying of Hunger” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/world/americas/venezuela-children-starving.html?module=inline Washington Post, Anthony Faiola, February 12, 2018 “Venezuela’s economy is so bad, parents are leaving their children at orphanages” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuelas-economy-is-so-bad-parents-are-leaving-their-children-at-orphanages/2018/02/12/8021d180-0545-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e_story.html?utm_term=.d10ac9514d41 New York Times, Kirk Semple, March 20, 2018 “‘We’re Losing the Fight’: Tuberculosis Read more…
As U.S. college students―and their families―know all too well, the cost of a higher education in the United States has skyrocketed in recent decades. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 2008 and 2017 the average cost of attending a four-year public college, adjusted for inflation, increased in every state in the Read more…
I think it’s isn’t a time for reading or writing. I think it’s a time for barricades. Real fire, real struggle. Personally, I’m tired and I do not trust any more on words.
There’s a problem in Spain with Venezuelan pensioners. Guys that have payed for twenty years or so haven’t got any rights under Maduro’s government. The thing affects about eight thousand (8000) people in Spain and 650 persons in Galiza. Here there’s been a sentence by the High Court of Galiza, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Court_of_Galicia(one for 650 cases) stating the Spanish Read more…
If Cancer’s patients are allowed to reject Chemotherapy …, Why Mental Health Patients are life-time enforced (by gubernamental laws, by their families and “caregivers,” by the Cops, by judges), to be their whole life “on Meds”?https://beyondmeds.com/2019/05/03/embracing-our-madness/ This is one of my many posts to Galician Deputy in the Spanish Congress (she’s leaded the United Left Read more…
In late April, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that, in 2018, world military expenditures rose to a record $1.82 trillion. The biggest military spender by far was the United States, which increased its military budget by nearly 5 percent to $649 billion (36 percent of the global total). But most other nations Read more…
Article VII (Article 7 – Ratification) The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same. The US CONSTITUTION WAS APPROVED BY JUST THE 11 or 13 STATES EXISTING BY 1788. When Did Each State Join the United States? I ‘D Read more…
My knowledge of (1789) English is not enough to understand Section ii) of the Sixth Article: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Read more…
Article V (Article 5 – Mode of Amendment) The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendmentsto this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Read more…
Article iv), Section i) states: Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof. Article iv), Section ii), Read more…
About this I find the English Wikipedia article on the US Judiciary starts like this: Article III, Section 1of the Constitutionprescribed that the “judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and such inferior Courts” as Congress saw fit to establish. It made no provision for the composition or procedures Read more…
About US election system, I find some clear explanation in the Spanish Wikipedia. The president of the United States is elected in an assembly formed by 538 electors. This figure is equal to the sum of 100 senators + 435 congressmen + 3 delegates from Washington D.C., which does not have senators but delegates. Each Read more…
By Tapani Lausti Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, Alfred A. Knopf 2018. The recent arrest of WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange made a large part of the corporate press gloat in a way that highlighted the continuing degeneration of serious journalism. WikiLeak’s revelations of the true face of the American role in the world confirm Read more…
AN OVERDRIVE READING OF US CONSTITUTION Article i), Section ii), Clause i) What does it mean? Are Representatives at the Congress really elected every two years? The translation into Spanish by the Google Translator just doesn’t make any sense: “La Cámara de Representantes se compondrá de Miembros elegidos cada dos años por la gente de Read more…
Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution sets forth the eligibility requirements for serving as president of the United States: No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither Read more…
Fernando Vilas, the acquaintance that was sitting by my side, made me change “was” to “is” in the farewell phrase of the Bob Dylan’s concert on Monday, April 29th. I thought of “heart,” and pronounced it, like in Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” Charlie Sexton, when I said “You are great (pronounced in the wrong way) Read more…
Vieques is a small Puerto Rican island with some 9,000 inhabitants. Fringed by palm trees and lovely beaches, with the world’s brightest bioluminescent bay and wild horses roaming everywhere, it attracts substantial numbers of tourists. But, for about six decades, Vieques served as a bombing range, military training site, and storage depot for the U.S. Read more…
mind control 💀 Publicado por MONTREALITY en Miércoles, 11 de abril de 2018
I’ve been searching about the finances of two bars I use to visit, because in one of them the fifty years old waitress cheated me into believing she was the owner, and formed a trio with the old tattooed waiter, her husband, also an owner, and a twenty four years old girl, sometimes their daughter, Read more…
As president, Donald Trump has leaned heavily upon what he has called an “America First” policy. This nationalist approach involves walking away from cooperative agreements with other nations and relying, instead, upon a dominant role for the United States, undergirded by military might, in world affairs. Nevertheless, as numerous recent opinion polls reveal, most Americans Read more…
This song by Andres Calamaro is titled “Alta suciedad.” There’s a pun between Spanish word for “dirtiness” (“suciedad”) and the Spanish word for “society” (“sociedad”). It claims you can only trust in dirty people, the lowest layers of society. “High dirt! (high dirt garbage) You can not trust anyone else …” Repeats the chorus. Read more…
In recent weeks, Donald Trump and other Republicans have begun to tar their Democratic opponents with the “socialist” brush, contending that the adoption of socialist policies will transform the United States into a land of dictatorship and poverty. “Democrat lawmakers are now embracing socialism,” Trump warned the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in early March. Read more…
Institutional propaganda that becomes motto and emblem of the initiatives of public administrations in Galicia, and in most of the”civilized world”, I guess, most of the time borders on the absurd. In Galicia, which comes from a matriarchy and is traditionally little exposed to violence against women, public advertising campaigns against gender violence have acquired Read more…
We the people should stop trusting the same ‘journalists’ that cajoled us into the invasion of Iraq, Libya, ect. Large numbers of us protested then, perhaps we now sulk that if our protests didn’t stop it then, why should we try again? But we have got to wake up, instead of waiting for another huge Read more…
Palestine needs Europe and the world’s solidarity in effective ways, so its good to hear a union in my own abuela Beazcochea’s Basque country has voted against its company’s attempted collaboration with the internationally condemned Israeli occupation. The workers council of Spanish train manufacturer CAF voted last month against participation in the Jerusalem light rail tramway Read more…
Coming from Serbia, but living in Germany for more than 10 years, it is easy to lose perspective. Every time I visit my home town of Belgrade I wonder if it is only my view which is getting distorted, or the country is indeed continuously deteriorating. However, it seems I am not the only one Read more…
The Trump administration’s campaign to topple the government of Venezuela raises the issue of whether the U.S. government is willing to adhere to the same rules of behavior it expects other nations to follow. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. foreign policy was characterized by repeated acts of U.S. military intervention in Latin Read more…
Last year, I asked Amnesty International for its position on US economic sanctions against Venezuela. I also asked Amnesty’s position on the threats US officials have made against Venezuela’s government, including open encouragement of Venezuela’s military to perpetrate a coup. Last year, Amnesty replied that it took “no position” on US economic sanctions. Regarding US Read more…
At the beginning of February 2019, the two leading nuclear powers took an official step toward resumption of the nuclear arms race. On February 1, the U.S. government, charging Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, announced that it would pull out of the agreement and develop new intermediate-range missiles banned by it. Read more…
Use of the term ‘Populism’ is a deliberately vague misdiagnosis of our world’s problems. It lumps all change that might threaten the status quo as the same chaos, the danger of populism. Every politician must be elected by popular vote, so to diagnose some as populist is meaningless. It is to spook the very idea Read more…
Ever since the U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, a specter has haunted the world―the specter of nuclear annihilation. The latest report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, issued on January 24, reminds us that the prospect of nuclear catastrophe remains all too real. Citing the extraordinary danger of nuclear disaster, Read more…
By Tapani Lausti David Edwards & David Cromwell, Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. Foreword by John Pilger. Pluto Press 2018. The heated debate about fake news supposedly separates “real journalists” from writers who try to confuse people’s views about what is really happening in the world. If only it was that simple. Read more…
This Reuters article says “The Maduro regime is illegitimate and the United States will work diligently to restore a real democracy to that country,” Pompeo told reporters in Abu Dhabi, where he is on a tour of Middle East countries. ” [emphasis added] The Onion might have simply changed “countries” above to “dictatorships” or, Read more…
Something about the connection among “seats” and “votes” at the Spanish Congress. Scroll to “results” and look at the distribution of seats, in relation to the votes at the Spanish general election held in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Spanish_general_election Unless the data in the English Wikipedia are wrong, which rarely happens, the results are even more frightening: x Read more…
Bill Blum passed away early last month in Virginia. Many Z Net readers will know his canonical book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII, or remember his regular newsletter Anti-Empire Report. My first contact with Bill came in 1995 when I wrote him about something he had written on the Cold War. Read more…
According to numerous reports, the world’s billionaires keep increasing in number and, especially, in wealth. In March 2018, Forbes reported that it had identified 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries and territories. Collectively, this group was worth $9.1 trillion, an increase in wealth of 18 percent since the preceding year. Americans led the way with a Read more…