Recent Blogs
What About Classism? is a new UK based pressure group geared towards making rigged economics a human rights issue. Perhaps you think that this is a good idea but feel that it is a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Here I would like to try to convince you that, at least in theory, it Read more…
Green Time TV Young Environmental Activists and Ideas by Don Fitz Protection of the environment requires experienced activists forging young ideas and training youth to take over their roles. May Green Time episodes look at developing actions and people, both in St. Louis and around the world. What experiences did young people have at the Read more…
I had this review posted years ago on Amazon but I no longer post content there since Amazon pulled Wikileaks from their site. *** Review of Brian Nelson’s “The Silence and the Scorpion” Nelson’s thesis is that the Chavez government “repressed a peaceful march with gunfire” on April 11, 2002. (p. 255). He acknowledges that Read more…
But don’t expect outrage from big “press freedom” advocates By Joe Emersberger (originally for Telesur ) Even before Mauricio Macri’s recent efforts to get Telesur off Argentina’s airwaves, the newly elected president had been tilting Argentina’s media landscape in his favor. What will Reporters without Borders (RSF), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Read more…
the infinitesimal is utopian; it falls behind the curve that slopes ever so slightly, tends to lie lest it fall behind further, at which point there is no real point, is there? “Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it Read more…
Nasir Khan, March 30, 2016 A suicide bomber belonging to extremist group, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, associated with the Pakistani Taliban, attacked a large park in Lahore where people were celebrating Easter Sunday. His powerful bomb caused the deaths of at least 70 people, mostly women and children, and injured more than 350 people. The bomber seemed to Read more…
Re-post from 3-18-2011. [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. Read more…
Nasir Khan On 22 March 2016, some suicide bombers carried out their indiscriminate attacks on the innocent people in Brussels. Their acts of vicious violence are shocking and despicable. ISIS has claimed responsibility for these attacks. ISIS has shown once again that it can strike anywhere it chooses and by such violent actions, it gains Read more…
The Democratic presidential primaries have been upended by Bernie Sanders’s populist revolution on the “left” tapping into the deep discontent of a broad swath of the population, still suffering the after-shocks of the Great Recession. His success has forced Hillary Clinton to adjust her rhetoric. Claiming she is the real “progressive”, who will get “Wall Read more…
Isn’t it rather odd that America’s largest single public expenditure scheduled for the coming decades has received no attention in the 2015-2016 presidential debates? The expenditure is for a thirty-year program to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal and production facilities. Although President Obama began his administration with a dramatic public commitment to build a nuclear Read more…
According to the Green Party’s 2016 Presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, the Democratic Party cannot be trusted to defend the “interests of regular people.” Stein declares: “We need our own party, organized by, led by, and founded by, WE the people NOT the corporations!” “My Power to the People Plan is for deep system change, Read more…
the myth is not the fairytale, though it pretends to catch the drift, the smoke and the paltry guts that flake off when dents of time speak stilted ifs and buts, when the theme of now occludes, prevents power from showing where it really comes from from myth “The language of Realpolitik offers a poor Read more…
by Dr. Nasir Khan People around the world have become increasingly aware of the blasphemy laws in Pakistan. In fact, in a country where the 95-98% people are the followers of Islam, there was never any danger to this religion, its founder or its holy scripture. Then, why were these laws promulgated in this Islamic Read more…
INTRODUCTION (This introduces and supplements my recent op-ed, linked just below.) Farm justice, (labeled as a “family farm” point of view,) has not fared well against the dominant narrative in mainstream media in the 21st century, or even in alternative progressive media or among food progressives and other progressives, or among conservatives. Unfortunately almost all Read more…
(This blog is Part 1 of a 2-part article.) Monbiot’s Pro-Corporate Outrage (Authors note: This is a work in progress which I will further edit as I have time. There is demand for access to it, however, so I’m posting this now. The same goes for Part 2, which begins with his discussion of sustainable Read more…
This is a third example of how USDA fails as an objective source on farm bill information, including farm bill history.(1) It’s an answer to a question from email: Question: “Brad, how would you comment on this USDA farm policy info piece?” Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, “The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Read more…
Introduction The new blog, “Why Should Young People Care About The Farm Bill?” from USDA’s “Office of Communications,” is a great teaching tool, as it can illustrate how our government supports mega corporate interests while disguising those impacts. In saying this I don’t mean to necessarily assign malign purposes to the writers. What they’re portraying Read more…
Caught in an undertow of ever-escalating amorality, we, the American people, drift ever farther from the shores of a representative democracy. For one more national presidential election, will we throw away another opportunity to rescue ourselves and our country, not to mention the rest of humanity as well as our very planet? Will we choose Read more…
INTRODUCTION TO JILL & GREEN NEW DEAL! #JillStein: Green Party prez candidate: physician, her Green New Deal to eradicate unemployment & mitigate climate change! #JillStein: Green Party prez candidate fighting ferocious corporate media blackout of her campaign for environment & economic/social justice. #JillStein & Green Party can bring about paradigm shift from patriarchy win/lose, violence, Read more…
On February 10, 2016, Peace Action—the largest peace organization in the United States—announced its endorsement of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for President. Peace Action is the descendant of two other mass U.S. peace organizations: the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (the Freeze). SANE was Read more…
Below is a presentation of the basic plan, in three stages, for our new pressure group called What About Classism? The idea in presenting this here is to give people a general feel for the overall direction we hope to move in and how we intend to get there. Stage One: In 2015 we Read more…
Nasir Khan, February 8, 2016 To murder any person, Israeli or Palestinian, is not just because of ‘human nature’! In normal circumstances, any act of premeditated homicide is a crime in any state where the rule of law prevails. There are also ‘abnormal’ political circumstances when a people occupy another people’s country and keep their Read more…
Below are what I regard as the key excerpts from the UN working group ruling in favor of Julian Assange. The following excerpt from the ruling sums up the “argument” that Sweden made for its prosecutors refusing for years to move the “preliminary investigation” forward by coming to London to interview Assange: In the case Read more…
Writing in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell asks what can be learned from the residents of New Orleans who left for good after Hurricane Katrina struck. Quoting research that compared a group of evacuees who relocated to Houston with residents who returned to New Orleans, Gladwell writes that the residents who preferred New Orleans “put Read more…
The latest NYT reporter to be parachuted into Venezuela writes “Press freedom throughout Latin America is under threat, though the Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Venezuela as a better place for reporters than Colombia or Mexico in terms of the number of journalists killed. But deaths are not the only way to measure attacks on Read more…
A fight now underway over newly-designed U.S. nuclear weapons highlights how far the Obama administration has strayed from its commitment to build a nuclear-free world. The fight, as a recent New York Times article indicates, concerns a variety of nuclear weapons that the U.S. military is currently in the process of developing or, as the Read more…
Green Time TV Safety for People and the Environment by Don Fitz Protecting people and the environment can be two sides of the same coin. February Green Time episodes present efforts to integrate the two. Fission reactors produce very expensive energy, require a huge amount of water, and have risks that are seriously understated. In Read more…
Tom Anderson and Eliza Egret report from the war-torn city of Kobanê and meet those trying to rebuild what Daesh and US bombs have destroyed January 2016 Kobanê city ‘We have cleared 1.5 million tonnes of rubble,’ Abdo Rrahman Hemo (known as Heval Dostar), head of the Kobanê Reconstruction Board, tells us humbly as we sit Read more…
Tom Anderson and Pete Smith 14 January 2016 Reflections on the Paris climate talks from members of the Corporate Watch collective. The Agreement We won’t spend too much time discussing the agreement itself as plenty of others have done that already (see this excellent summary from ROAR magazine and this from climate scientist, Kevin Read more…
Looking at high energy carbohydrates from an evolutionary, political, disease, sports and science perspective. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” Hippocrates Ancestral Health Global cooling around the last modern ice age, 2.5 million years ago, meant early humans found fruits and vegetables scarcer to find and helped bring about the adaption Read more…
Expanding access to high quality early childhood education is among the smartest investments that we can make. Research has shown that the early years in a child’s life—when the human brain is forming—represent a critically important window of opportunity to develop a child’s full potential and shape key academic, social, and cognitive skills that determine Read more…
Nasir Khan, January 9, 2015 This message of Chief Sitting Bull can stir the conscience of every human being. In any case, this is a hope and wish I have for the for common men and women in the world. But the situation is not so simple. There are people who are immune to what Read more…
Nasir Khan, December 27, 2015 I assure the followers of one Supreme God who belong to different religions, both monotheistic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and others (Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, etc.) that old gods and goddesses were not ‘real’. They were only man-made and existed in the imagination of their believers. However, it is important to point out Read more…
Nasir Khan, January 7, 2016 President Obamas shedding tears for the US children killed in gun violence Oh, what a sad sight! The kind-hearted and benevolent US president Obama has shed tears for the US children who were victims of gun violence! But he didn’t shed any tears on the cold-blooded killings of men, Read more…
When Americans think about nuclear weapons, they comfort themselves with the thought that these weapons’ vast destruction of human life has not taken place since 1945—at least not yet. But, in reality, it has taken place, with shocking levels of U.S. casualties. This point is borne out by a recently-published study by a team of Read more…
January 25th last year has been a tremendous victory for hope in Europe: Alexis Tsipras and Syriza won elections in Greece. Their program was clearly socialist and democratic, against the rule of the troika experts and global finance institutions. The close relationship between the struggle for democracy and the struggle against “debtocracy” has nothing new Read more…
Nasir Khan, December 24, 2015 “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” ― Read more…
Green Time TV Environmental Justice – Social Action by Don Fitz Environmental and social racism are parts of an interconnected whole. January Green Time episodes explore how environmental and social justice activists are working to overcome them. The first January Green Time features Sylvester Brown reminiscing about the idea for the Sweet Potato Project, which Read more…
A study released at the beginning of December by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) reported that America’s 20 wealthiest individuals own more wealth than roughly half the American population combined—152 million people. The startling level of economic inequality in the United States is also highlighted by Forbes, which recently observed that the richest 400 Read more…
Mon, 07/12/2015 – 18:27 Throughout 2015 Corporate Watch has been organising a series of workshops on capitalism and climate change. The workshops have generated some fascinating, thoughtful discussions exploring the overlaps and interactions between climate change and capitalism, and what it means to have agency in tackling these enormous issues. Informed by these conversations, Read more…
Sat, 12/12/2015 – 11:03 Mangroves are among the most powerful natural defences against global warming. But their decline, due to the spread of polluting agents and clearances to make way for big business, is putting countries like Mexico at risk of catastrophic natural disasters. Almudena Serpis writes for Corporate Watch from Cancun, about the importance Read more…
Tue, 15/12/2015 – 18:32 Almost 86,000 children were in foster care in the UK last year. The support they receive from their foster carers can make a huge difference to their lives. Foster care placements are still paid for publicly but they are increasingly organised by private companies, for a profit.* The number of children Read more…
Barricades on the streets of Diyarbakır The Kurdish city of Amed (Diyarbakır in Turkish), is currently under attack by Turkish state forces. Amed is situated within the borders of Turkey and its residents are locked in a decades long struggle for self determination. In November, people erected barricades in the neighbourhood of Sur, part of Read more…
Some key definitions you’ll need to know in order to understand this Daily Beast article by Itxu Diaz: Democracy – a political system in which people supported by the United States government always win elections. It’s preferable, but not essential, that at least two US-backed groups will compete for political power. Evidence – any claim Read more…
RE: Exclusive: U.S. to charge Venezuela’s National Guard chief with drug trafficking Dear Julia Harte and Nate Raymond How would this article be any different if it were a press release written by US prosecutors? Why not seek comment from US attorneys Brain Concannon or Ira Kurzban? They can both tell you how US prosecutors Read more…
The latest French regional elections have been another episode in the everlasting rise of the National Front. Political anthropologists such as Marc Abélès have already underlined that one of the effects of capitalist globalisation upon contemporary society is a double process of fragmentation: vertically, i.e. between classes, and horizontally, between communities, cultures and identities. Its Read more…
“I can’t wait to read this bullshit” is what I immediately thought before reading the NYT’s editorial on the opposition’s big win in Venezuela’s National Assembly elections. The editorial board has been repeatedly maligning Venezuelan democracy – most recently in a November 18 editorial entitled “Venezuela’s Threatened Elections”. How would they spin the fact that the side they support Read more…
The international media seemed to have struggled a bit to spin the results of Venezuela’s National assembly elections in which the opposition has won a 2/3 majority of the seats. These elections did not have any US-approved “international observers” like the OAS – and Venezuela’s government has been depicted as a dictatorship, or very close Read more…
No exaggeration to say that this excerpt below from the UK Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow reads like it comes out of the Onion. Corporate journalists are often at their funniest when they do not intend to be. What does the Oldham result really tells us Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership? A Q&A Almost all the media reporting from Read more…