Recent Blogs
To See the Holocaust in a Grain of Sand While the industrialized murder of six million people is in a category all its own, one can observe in daily life many of the tendencies that make it possible. The thinking that sees the machinery of death as solely a thing of the past, an incomprehensible Read more…
Patrick Martin in “Bernie Sanders to seek Democratic presidential nomination” takes a much needed CLOSE look at the history and realpolitik behind Bernie Sanders. In the kabuki that is America’s corporate-captured political establishment’s and corporate media’s greased slide to fascism, US Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont has stepped onto the stage to do his bit for Read more…
Reuters does its bit support alarmist claims about Venezuela’s economy in an article by Andrew Cawthorne and Brian Ellsworth: “Venezuela foreign reserves fall to lowest since 2003” screams the headline. It looks only at liquid reserves of Venezuela’s Central Bank. It so happens a few months ago, during a debate at Harvard, Francisco Rodriguez (not Read more…
Plenty of international media have pushed claims that the Venezuelan government is on the brink of default, but how many have done so AND provided readers with an interactive calculator so they can make up their own data about Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA? That’s what Reuters did in this article by Marianna Parraga and Read more…
Nasir Khan, April 27, 2015 Today is the anniversary of the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan. On 27 April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took over power. The socialist friends of Afghanistan are aware of the historic significance of this revolution in Afghanistan and for the people of the neighbouring countries. What happened to Read more…
by Sriram Ananth ([email protected]) Blog: https://loveliberationstruggle.wordpress.com/ An article I recently wrote on anti-oppressive listening and solidarity-based therapy was one of the more widely read pieces on my blog (which meant that it had a fighting chance of cracking three figures in unique views, but likely remained a solid two figures, which a writer Read more…
It was one helluva an election season on the shores of Lake Michigan. Last summer I was brimming with optimism. The Chicago Teachers Union(CTU) had people out canvassing the neighborhoods. CTU President Karen Lewis was polling well in a possible mayoral bid and it looked like Mayor Rahm Emanuel was on the run. I foresaw an electoral revolution Read more…
First I must declare I am no expert both in linguistics, science or politics. I have lived long in the cozy camp of Kantian idealism for many years and have only moved slightly from it to Hegelian and Marxian dialectical materialistic positions. I do not posses the precision or clarity of Vladimir Lenin, Christopher Caudwell Read more…
The victims of the shooting spree included a 9 year old, a 20 year old aspiring medical student and his mother, a 46 year old dermatologist, a 52 year old car dealer, a 47 year old truck driver, a 12 year old, a 52 year old businessman, a 77 year old gardener, a passenger on Read more…
Media Lens never engaged in “sexist abuse” of Emma Brockes, or anyone else, and never made threats against Bronwen Maddox. Unsurprisingly, the Murdochs appear fine with having this kind of extravagant liar on staff. Kamm obviously feels confident that he’ll never be held legally to account for being such a sleazebag. Norman Finkelstein responded effectively, Read more…
Green Time TV Water Running through Missouri by Don Fitz Missouri has some of the most beautiful waterways in the US. They can be admired and enjoyed or they can be contaminated and polluted. May 2015 episodes of Green Time TV explore both sides of water. Karst areas are formed when limestone-based sedimentary Read more…
On twitter David Smilde calls out this article by the WAPO’s Nick Miroff as a “smart Piece” An excerpt follows: “I think this summit will amount to a real test regarding the region’s commitment to Venezuela,” said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). “Will they circle the wagons and prioritize Read more…
According to Colin Todhunter in “The Perils of Concentrated Agriculture, US Agribusiness, GMOs and the Plundering of the Planet” rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations are destroying global farms and farmers. Monster Monsanto lobbies ever-onward for monopolistic tyranny globally particularly enabled by our US pimped out politicians misusing our military and intelligence services as well Read more…
Green Time TV The Substance of Criminality by Don Fitz Did it ever cross your mind that some relatively harmless things (including some substances) can land you time in jail, while other substances that are poison to plant, animal and human life are perfectly legal? The first three April 2015 episodes of Green Read more…
Re-post from 3-18-11 Correntewire [historical info taken from American Experience presentation and poetry from Jonathan Fink] On April 5, 2011, 400,000 New Yorkers, 1 out of 10, showed up in the rain to mourn the deaths of 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, who had died in the deadliest workplace accident in New York history. The victims Read more…
This is quite a refreshingly in-depth article by Reuters (authors Andrew Cawthorne and Girish Gupta) that explores the most extremist elements of the Venezuelan opposition. It mentions that some of them, unsurprisingly, find safe haven in Miami and more generally that they are “aided by campaigners in Europe and the United States”. It is worth Read more…
The Pentagon has decided to bring desertion and misbehavior charges against the former 5-year Afghanistan POW Bowe Bergdahl. The Wall Street Journal at one point published a commentary demanding a firing squad punish him. Right wing political and media operatives are still doing all they can to “swift boat” him, organizing and manipulating some of Read more…
Given all the frothing by hawkish U.S. Senators about Iran’s possible development of nuclear weapons, one might think that Iran was violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But it’s not. The NPT, signed by 190 nations and in effect since 1970, is a treaty in which the non-nuclear nations agreed to forgo developing nuclear weapons Read more…
In “The firing squad returns to America” Barry Grey rails against the re-institutionalization of the firing squad for capital punishment in the state of Utah this week. How is this systematized sadism and violence to be explained? Can we expect to see demands for the return of other practices? What about drawing and quartering, evisceration, garroting? Gratuitous Read more…
So once again international law is the enemy of the US and its Axis of Evil which includes Saudi Arabia and Egypt. One more country on the bloody clipboard of US hegemony is doomed for criminal and savage destruction. Niles Williamson in “The war in Yemen and the American drive for global domination”: The US is Read more…
Reuters’ Caracas folks write as if they’ve been told that only Datanalisis poll results can be reported. Datanalisis is an opposition aligned pollster. Its director, Luis Vicente Leon, regularly criticizes Maduro’s government in pages of El Universal. Diego Ore of Reuters says that, according to Datanalisis, support for the government has “inched” up to 25%. Read more…
On Saturday March 21, several hundred people shut down a McDonalds at Laramie and North Ave on Chicago’s Far West Side and then marched on and through a Food 4 Less store located further east. It was a major Fight for $15 action. Fight for $15 is the national movement of low wage workers whom Read more…
The Economist trotted out a farcical excuse that has become popular among Obama’s apologists – that labeling the situation in Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to declare a “national emergency” was just a legal nicety: “American law requires the administration to use such language if it wants to impose sanctions on individuals in another country.” Similarly, David Smilde, a Read more…
“It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain.” ― Upton Sinclair from his novel OIL! When 20th century writer Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, (about the birth of the petroleum industry) was turned into a film, it was titled “There Will Be Blood”. The Read more…
David Krieger’s new book of poems―Wake Up!―shows us that poetry engaged with world affairs can be very powerful. In a brief introduction to the book, Krieger―the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the author of several previous volumes of poetry―remarks that people who write poetry after Auschwitz, as well as after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Read more…
Reuters’ headline to this article by Corina Pons and Eyanir Chinea claims that “Venezuela puts debt service before food imports as cash dries up: sources” To make Reuter’s bias and double standards more obvious, consider the headlines when an international courts order Venezuela to pay over a billion dollars to Exxon. They don’t read “Court forces Venezuela to put Exxon Before Read more…
Introduction This is a page by page review of “What Does it Mean to Do Food Justice?” by Kirsten Valentine Cadieux and Rachel Slocum, Journal of Political Ecology, Vol. 22, 2015, (http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/volume_22/Cadieuxslocum.pdf). I apply a Farm Justice paradigm to the views presented in the paper. This is an important piece of work, a well Read more…
Jihadi John vs Beheading Barack I’ve got a great idea (even if I say so myself) but I don’t have the IT skills to implement it. Remember the front cover of Tariq Ali’s book The Clash of Fundamentalisms? Where George W. Bush morphed into a Muslim. Well how about we morph Jihadi John into Beheading Read more…
The popular myth concerning Britain’s relation to the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s and 70s – accepted and repeated to the point of delirium – is that parliament did not send troops, and therefore had no involvement at all. In a recent think piece for the BBC News website justifying the logic of austerity through Read more…
UPDATE: Toro has now “responded” again to my piece about his work without actually responding. I guess he wasn’t joking with his claim that I was trying to hide his “winning ugly” blog post by naming its author, title and date – and linking to other posts by him on his site. Great way to hide Read more…
We live in the 21st century. We are often told colonialism is “a thing of the past.” Yet the US still formally has five colonies: Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. These nations are often referred to as US “territories” (there are 16 official US territories in Read more…
It is at the end of the article by Andrew Cawthorne – a HUGE advance which would be a regular, not unusual, practice in a free press. Cawthorne wrote “’Venezuela is one of the very few countries with significant oil reserves which does not submit to U.S. dictates,’ wrote Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first Read more…
[Image citation: http://jessicamaccormackrmack.tumblr.com/] When I’m not writing lefty rants that no one reads or organizing in social justice movements that generally result in further self-marginalization, I work a day job that helps sustain those quixotic endeavors (not to mention paying off a mortgage, supporting a family, as well as buying beer and other staples). As Read more…
The New York Times, by far the most trusted and esteemed US newspaper, has always buckled under the pressure of powerful interests. Throughout the several decades of his long and productive career—although perhaps mostly prominently in Manufacturing Consent—Noam Chomsky has in particular heaped much criticism on the publication for its lies of exclusion, selective reporting Read more…
Andrew Cawthorne at least reported that Cuba, not just Venezuela, is mocking Obama’s announcement that there is Venezuelan threat to the “national security” of the USA that is “unusual and extraordinary”. Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, called it a “bad joke” which at least approximates an appropriate description of Obama’s assertion. The mind boggles attempting to Read more…
The exclusionary version of feminism reflected in Clinton’s politics contrasts with more holistic and robust feminisms practiced around the world by Kevin Young and Diana C. Sierra Becerra Source: Against the Current Assuming Hillary Clinton runs for President in 2016, much of her popular support will be based on her image as Read more…
Nasir Khan, March 9, 2015 – On March 3, 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel delivered his speech before a joint session of the US Congress. His reception was of a kind, which has amused very many of us around the world. Still, we may ask: For what was Netanyahu accorded such a heroic Read more…
As a scholarly specialist on the American peace movement, I am sometimes telephoned for background information by journalists writing articles about current demonstrations against war or against nuclear weapons. Almost invariably, they have no idea that the American peace movement has a rich history. Or, if they realize that it does have such a history, Read more…
John Otis tells NPR’s audience “In 2002, Chavez was briefly ousted in a military-backed uprising that he claimed — without proof — was supported by the United States.” That is quite a whopper even by the abysmal standards of the US media. The US government publicly supported the 2002 coup in Venezuela. Bush Administration spokesmen Read more…
Reuters tells us that “The decline in oil prices has slammed his [Nicolas Maduro’s] increasingly cash-strapped and unpopular government in the midst of a deep recession and ahead of important parliamentary elections.” Oil prices have recovered somewhat since January, so saying “increasingly cash-strapped” – if it refers to government export revenues – is wrong. The claim Read more…
Hi Girish: You (or perhaps your editors) wrote “Hyperinflation and shortages of basic goods have Venezuelans angry—and looking for new leadership” Venezuela doesn’t have anything close to hyperinflation – a rate of at least 30% per MONTH. Last year the Guardian conceded this point and corrected an article, so should TIME. You said NOTHING about Read more…
Can a dedicated socialist have a significant impact upon American life? Lauren Coodley’s biography of prominent socialist novelist and agitator Upton Sinclair shows that, with a lot of talent and fortitude, that kind of influence is possible. Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore in 1878―the son of a railroad baron’s daughter and a whiskey wholesaler. Read more…
1) A former CIA official advocates Muslim on Muslim genocide. 2) A Muslim condemns beheadings perpetrated by a UK citizen who joined ISIS, but says practices of British security services contributed to his radicalization. Who was treated with deference by a TV journalist and who was aggressively attacked? Unsurprisingly, number 1 was treated with deference. Number Read more…
Some feedback I had to this post was odd. It was conceded that this article was appalling piece of pro-coup garbage, but it was also argued that it was unfair to call it a “Reuters article”. I’ll happy clarify – again – that this rubbish was not written by Reuters’ Caracas-based reporters. If was written Read more…
An honest headline to this recent Bloomberg article would have been “Traders and Analysts Back Away from Venezuela Default Claims”. Regardless, the global downturn of 2008 / 2009 should have taught everyone not to give a damn what “traders and analysts” say, or even what most professional economists say. The nonsense about Venezuela being on the brink of Read more…
In the late fall of 2011, on a weekday evening in central Toronto, as the crisp cold was settling in to lay the foundation for the dreary winter to follow, I trudged back home from my then day job as a case manager and counsellor with a non-profit organization that supported marginalized folk with health Read more…
The RCP, RSB, and its front groups, identified as the VVAW, UWOC, and USCPFA, represent a threat to the internal security of the United States of the first magnitude. —FBI report on the Revolutionary Communist Party, September 6, 1976 The story of sixties radicalism in the US is one largely revolving around a discrete set Read more…