Recent Blogs
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…
When Donald Trump was running for the presidency, he promised that, if he was elected, “American worker[s] will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.” Today, though, safely ensconced in the White House, President Trump is waging a fierce campaign against American workers. His appointments to federal positions created to Read more…
FAIR posted a piece of mine the other day (very proud of that as a long time fan) providing extremely important information about a referendum Ecuador held on Sunday – information that has been ignored by the international media. So of course, the day after the referendum, a flurry of articles appear continuing the same Read more…
In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. occupation authorities in Germany, checking on the effectiveness of their “denazification” program, polled Germans on whether they believed a civilian was “less worthy than a soldier.” One wonders what they would think of the exalted status that many Americans currently accord to anyone serving in the Read more…
the theoliberal dust will settle in time not before befuddling hearts, sinking minds, coalescing goodwill into mush and repeating mulch from a petrified storybook few cared would matter, but it did, and it stored dark endings as a matter of tact. the geoliberal must settle longitudinal accounts with the attitude of frost, and give; give Read more…
What is the one thing that would help the left right now and in the future? Having more resources. The left could do what it does now, just better, if we had more resources. Think of all the things that could grow with more money: Coops, legal aid, alternative media outlets, local chapter activities, social Read more…
I live in Denmark, a small country in Scandinavia, which, as I’m writing this, is a welfare state. We have free health care, high wages, progressive taxation, sustainable energy production, strong unions, democracy in universities, public-paid liveable income for students, a safety net for the unemployed, rent control, clinics for addicts, protection (though modest) for Read more…
US liberals have always preferred to have the US government use economic strangulation against its enemies rather than military force. They’ve also, much more than “conservatives”, stressed the importance of having accomplices (“allies” is common euphemism). David Smilde, in a New York Times op-ed, stated that a US military invasion of Venezuela would be “folly”. Read more…
Hi Alexandra: I find it remarkable how this article glosses over Lenin Moreno’s extreme hypocrisy and cynicism. He is literally doing the opposite of what he said he would do as a candidate when he ran as staunch Correa loyalist and defender of the government’s record – a government he was a part at the highest level for 10 years. Read more…
During the mid-1930s, a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade, combined with a U.S. Congressional investigation of munitions-makers led by Senator Gerald Nye, had a major impact on American public opinion. Convinced that military contractors were stirring up weapons sales and war for their own profit, many people grew critical of these “merchants of Read more…
November 6 was the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Charter of the Forest in England on November 6, 1217. This charter returned to free men rights of access to the royal forests of southern England that had been taken from them by William the Conqueror. It was the first time in European history Read more…
I. Do your words support this one tradition or that? did the vault of your craft meek out yet another salve or did it glare in revulsion to craft? do you salvage or savage the cow at the altar of the unholy? does the sacred tempt you to sacrilege or do you bow? will you Read more…
This October, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that its estimate of the cost for the planned “modernization” the U.S. nuclear weapons complex over the next three decades has risen to $1,200,000,000,000.00. For those of you not familiar with such lofty figures, that’s $1.2 trillion. Furthermore, when adjusted for inflation, the cost of the Read more…
Arch Blairite John Rentoul claimed that Jeremy Corbyn’s “complaint about growing global inequality is not based on facts” Corbyn had said “The growing concentration of unaccountable wealth and power in the hands of a tiny corporate elite, a system many call neoliberalism,…has sharply increased inequality, marginalisation, insecurity and anger across the world,” Chu’s article, contrary Read more…
John Lee Anderson rambled on for over 7,600 words in a New Yorker article about Venezuela. I’ll highlight some quotes from Anderson’s article and respond to them below: In all, a hundred and twenty protesters died in the fighting, and on two occasions National Guardsmen and chavista loyalists stormed the National Assembly to assault opposition legislators. Read more…
This is a very well done piece that Adam Johnson wrote for FAIR: “WaPo’s One-Sided Cheerleading for Coup and Intervention in Venezuela” I’d only add that while many people will see through the Trump administration, even the Obama admin, when it comes to foreign policy, this isn’t as likely when the basic US/corporate media position is echoed Read more…
Although the U.S. peace movement has been on the wane for about a decade, it remains a viable force in American life. Organizations like Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Jewish Voice for Peace, and numerous others have significant memberships, seasoned staff, and enough financial resources Read more…
If Reuters reported what the temperature was in Caracas on a given day I would not expect them to cite a source, but when you report sweeping claims about the Venezuelan government’s human rights record then citing a source and making an effort to assess its bias should be a standard journalistic procedure. This Read more…
It would be hard to surpass this use of social media (by a historian named Abdullah Al-Arian) to debunk imperial propaganda. Some highlights below. Al-Arian’s Twitter thread has so much more. The ones picked out of his compilation start over 60 years ago and progress to the present day. I thought it would be useful Read more…
I’ve written a lot about how much fierce opposition to the government is regularly expressed in Venezuela’s largest TV networks and newspapers. Western media and big NGOs have been relentlessly pushing the opposite view for almost two decades. Freedom of expression in Venezuela is constantly dying a rapid death according to them. Wouldn’t it be totally Read more…
A flurry of reports by corporate media today (see below) about Venezuela’s long time former prosecutor, Luisa Ortega Diaz, saying she is working to have President Maduro tried by the ICC. Ousted Venezuelan prosecutor seeks ICC probe into Maduro Venezuela’s ex-chief prosecutor asks international court to try Maduro Venezuela’s president accused of crimes against humanity Read more…
A Caracas-based journalist has expressed frustration to me that people on the Chavista side of the political divide, even those independent of the government, don’t answer his calls, don’t want to talk to him – basically don’t trust him. This piece by Girish Gupta of Reuters, depicting a Venezuelan supreme court judge as corrupt, is a nice illustration Read more…
The death of Ed Herman, co-author with Chomsky of the classic “Manufacturing Consent”, is a tremendous loss but he left behind a body a work to help us carry on his struggle. With Ed Herman’s words (above) in mind, consider some headlines today about Venezuela. Surprisingly one of the least dishonest was provided by Bloomberg News: A Reuters headline Read more…
CAAT calls Venezuela a “hybrid regime” by relying on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index which also labels the UK a “full democracy” – along with a few others like Canada and Spain. What a joke. In all of those “full democracies”, most of Venezuela’s opposition leaders would have been locked up and never seen or Read more…
An NBC news article on Venezuela stated Thanks to the “free press” how many people would know any better? Even Bernie Sanders’ campaign was ignorant (or dishonest) enough to call the late Hugo Chavez a dictator. Hugo Chavez and current president Nicolas Maduro were both democratically elected, but when Washington (and its accomplices in Ottawa Read more…
The reckless threats of nuclear war flung back and forth between the North Korean and U.S. governments remind me of an event in which I participated back in the fall of 1961, when I was a senior at Columbia College. At the end of August 1961, the Soviet government had announced that it was Read more…
There is useful information in this Reuters article but some comments are worth making: The headline is “Venezuela to restructure foreign debt, default looms as possibility” Reuters reports President Nicolas Maduro vowed to make a $1.1 billion payment on a bond maturing on Thursday, but also created a commission to study “restructuring of all future Read more…
A CBC news article reports that Trudeua’s foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland “steps up diplomatic pressure on Venezuela, warns of refugee crisis” [1] Freeland makes a subtle appeal to xenophobia to justify Canada’s aping of Trump and other right wing governments in the region who want to see Venezuela’s government overthrown. Fortunately for Freeland, she Read more…
Based on recent economic developments, the super-rich don’t have much to complain about. A study just released by UBS, a major global financial services company, has revealed that, during 2016, the total wealth of the world’s billionaires rose by 17 percent―from $5.1 trillion to $6.0 trillion. Furthermore, the number of billionaires grew by 10 percent Read more…
Green Time TV Wrapping Up Environmental TV by Don Fitz Green Time may be wrapping up it production by the end of the year, depending on the future of KNLC Channel 24. Email me at fitzdon@aol.com to confirm dates of the last three shows and those in December. Is Elston McCowan crazy to think that Read more…
Venezuela’s opposition was supposed to receive 3 million more votes than the government in the regional elections of October 15 according to the international media and the main pollster they rely on. Over 18 million Venezuelans were eligible to vote. Instead, the opposition received 700,000 fewer votes than the government nationwide and took only 5 Read more…
Reuters used to occasionally push back – albeit timidly – against what other corporate outlets reported about Venezuela. Now it appears to have given up making any effort at all to break from the corporate pack. This article “No visas, bad jobs: Venezuelan emigrants reluctantly return home” is an example. Consider this excerpt: For decades after Read more…
In recent months, advances in the North Korean government’s nuclear weapons program have led to a sharp confrontation between the government leaders of the United States and of North Korea. This August, President Donald Trump declared that any more threats from North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never Read more…
A weird Guardian editorial seems very much to worry that Central Bank independence “will not survive” It is 20 years since the Bank of England gained independence. It may not survive the nationalist pressures of leaving the EU Indeed, it should not survive. It is very important that Corbyn’s Labour kill it. Note the toxic elite Read more…
This BBC article by Katy Watson states Official figures put the number of Venezuelans who have left their homeland for Colombia because of the crisis at 300,000. But the actual number is thought to be much higher. A study of the official figures at a Colombian university put the number at 348,321 over the past Read more…
At the UK Labour party conference, Emily Thornberry, who I continue to like and believe to be well-intentioned, said the following: “From Venezuela to The Philippines we see the rule of law ignored and originally democratic governments turning into increasingly autocratic regimes,” If Venezuela were as “autocratic” as the UK then western media darlings like Leopoldo Read more…
Just kidding. Of course they didn’t. The question of legality does not even come up in these Reuters articles (here and here). Sanctions on Venezuela violate the charter of the Organization of American States (Chapter 4, Article 19) and other international treaties, but Canada is mimicking the world’s leading gangster state so nobody cares. You also Read more…
I never identified myself with leftwing politics until, sometime in the 1990’s, I read Noam Chomsky, and a short time after that, his friend and long time collaborator, Michael Albert. Much of the left, it had seemed to me, was riddled with bad ideas and hypocrisy. What these two guys, and a small group of others engaged in similar Read more…
Has nationalism captured the hearts and minds of the world’s people? It certainly seems to have emerged as a powerful force in recent years. Trumpeting their alleged national superiority and hatred of foreigners, political parties on the far right have made their biggest political advances since the 1930s. After the far right’s startling success, in Read more…
The North Korean government’s progress toward developing a long-range nuclear weapons capability, accompanied by bellicose pronouncements, has been alarming enough to spark worldwide public dismay and new sanctions by a unanimous UN Security Council. But even if, at the very best, sanctions (which, so far, have not worked) or diplomatic negotiations (which have yet to Read more…
Green Time TV Overcoming Irresponsibility by Don Fitz What are environmentalists to do when confronting irresponsible people with power? October 2017 Green Time episodes explore how to respond to a congress that will not provide medical care for all, a president who wants to destroy energy assistance for low income families and an economic system Read more…
The mocking headline to this Reuters article reads Venezuela’s new plan to beat hunger: Breed rabbits Mockery of the Maduro government in Venezuela routinely catches the approving and mirthful eyes of corporate journalists. The article states Maduro’s critics lampooned the idea. “Are you serious?” asked Henrique Capriles, a state governor and two-time opposition presidential candidate Read more…
Lilian Tintori is the wife of Leopoldo Lopez – a Venezuelan politician whom the western establishment has quite absurdly hailed as a hero. In her NYT op-ed from the other day Tintori wrote “We have no freedom of speech”. Here is lengthy interview Tintori gave in July on Venevision, a large private TV network that anyone in Read more…
In this op-ed from today in El Universal, a newspaper the international corporate media and NGOs like the Committee to Protect Journalists have depicted as having been taken over by the government in 2014, Julio Borges talks about his trip to Europe which was aimed at ramping up international pressure and condemnation of Venezuela’s government. Borges Read more…
Some whoppers were slipped into this transcript of an interview between Aljazeera’s Lucia Newman and the president of Venezuela’s Constituent Assembly (and former Foreign Minister) Delcy Rodriguez. Aljazeera says the “adapted” transcript has been “edited for clarity and brevity”. That’s an Orwellian way to put it. *** *** In the interview (the video) Rodriguez correctly Read more…
Alleged Venezuelan political prisoner (more on that below), Yon Goicoechea, had an op-ed published in the New York Times that made the following claim: A health minister was fired for releasing his department’s annual report, revealing that infant mortality has returned to 1950 levels. In 1959, Venezuela’s infant mortality rate (IMR) was 61.9 deaths per Read more…
RE Venezuela bars opposition activist from traveling to Europe An AP article reported the following today about the wife of jailed Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. She is now part of a criminal investigation after 200 million Bolivares in cash were found in a car she owned. “Tintori said she kept such a large sum in Read more…
Nasir Khan, September 3, 2017 For many historians of the Indian subcontinent Mr Jinnah’s role both as a leader and a statesman in pre-partition India is controversial. Personally, I have never accepted even for a second his communalist perspective that led to the demand for Pakistan. Right from the start, the “Two Nation Theory” was Read more…
Missouri Green Party Convention Gets Weird by Don Fitz Happenings at the first Missouri Green Party (MOGP) convention since it obtained ballot status were unusual, to say the least. They issue warnings to state Green Parties across the US as well as for any group that seeks to empower members to make decisions collectively. While Read more…