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On the merger of Galician saving banks: (a possible connection of the President of the Galician Xunta, Alberto Nuñez Feyjoo, and former Spanish President, Mariano Rajoy with the Venezuelan opposition, and an example of Spanish Political Corruption) I read in “En Marea’s” Telegram (a Left-wing electoral coalition in Galicia, Spain [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_Marea]) that the National Spokesman, Read more…
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…
Anton Glaving: Debunking the Times on Bush I:s foreign policy recordBelow is a list of the most blatant pieces of deception concerning George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy record, reported in Adam Nagourney’s commemorative NYT piece. Nagourney writes that ”Environmental groups praised Mr. Bush’s record on climate change and the environment. As president, he signed the United States to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate 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…