| Old Articles | | Tuesday, February 26 | | · | A Response to Stephen Gowans' False Accusations against Stephen Zunes |
| Thursday, December 20 | | · | Holiday Season Hypocrisy |
| Thursday, December 13 | | · | The Truth about Immigration |
| Saturday, May 12 | | · | No Mama - No Die |
| Friday, July 21 | | · | Who's Using Humanitarian Aid as a Political Weapon? |
| Thursday, March 09 | | · | For Them Indian Mangoes |
| Friday, July 08 | | · | A Gildof distraction for Blair's 'G8' terminal ills |
| Wednesday, November 24 | | · | VHeadline.com's firewall eliminated 11,468 viruses in the space of one hour |
| Wednesday, September 08 | | · | Notes From Bedlam |
| Tuesday, April 01 | | · | This Time Around, The Generals Are The Real Reporters |
| Friday, January 17 | | · | The jihad of peace |
| Friday, December 06 | | · | Peace On Earth Seems Elusive: How About Peace for A Week? |
| Friday, October 11 | | · | Indigenous people 'suffer abuse' |
| Wednesday, October 09 | | · | I'm amazed that US random killers are so rare |
| Monday, September 23 | | · | Amnesty Int. petitions US impunity agreements |
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World Focus: U.S. to ICC: We Will Break Your Legs
Monday, March 25 @ 08:43:40 UTC |  By Andre Vltchek
March 25, 2019 - opednews.com
Well, not exactly like that, but in a way, yes. Now, finally, ‘the gloves are off’. The U.S. is openly threatening the historically timid ICC (International Criminal Court) and its judges. And unexpectedly, the ICC is hitting back. It refuses to shut up, to kneel, and to beg for mercy.
Suddenly, even the Western mass media outlets cannot conceal the aggressive mafia-style outbursts of the U.S. government officials. On March 15, Reuters reported:
The United States will withdraw or deny visas to any International Criminal Court personnel investigating possible war crimes by U.S. forces or allies in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday.
The court, which sits in The Hague, responded that it was an independent and impartial institution and would continue to do its work “undeterred” by Washington’s actions.
The Trump administration threatened in September to ban ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the United States and sanction funds they have there if the court launched a probe of war crimes in Afghanistan.
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War and Terror: How America Spreads Global Chaos
Saturday, November 04 @ 05:12:45 UTC | The U.S. government may pretend to respect a
“rules-based” global order, but the only rule
Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief
instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S.
Davies.
By Nicolas J.S. Davies
November 01, 2017 - Consortium News
As the recent PBS documentary on the American
War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American
officials ever believed that the United States
could win the war, neither those advising
Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of
U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he
escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had
already killed millions of people.
As conversations tape-recorded in the White
House reveal, and as other writers have
documented, the reasons for wading into the Big
Muddy, as
Pete Seeger satirized it,
and then pushing on regardless, all came down to
“credibility”: the domestic political
credibility of the politicians involved and
America’s international credibility as a
military power.
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War and Terror: 'Human Rights' Warriors for Empire
Saturday, February 18 @ 05:16:15 UTC | By Glen Ford
February 17, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
The largest imperial offensive since the Iraq invasion of March, 2003, is in full swing, under the banner of “humanitarian” intervention – Barack Obama’s fiendishly clever upgrade of George Bush’s “dumb” wars. Having failed to obtain a Libyan-style United Nations Security Council fig leaf for a “humanitarian” military strike against Syria, the United States shifts effortlessly to a global campaign “outside the U.N. system” to expand its NATO/Persian Gulf royalty/Jihadi coalition. Next stop: Tunisia, where Washington’s allies will assemble on February 24 to sharpen their knives as “Friends of Syria.” The U.S. State Department has mobilized to shape the “Friends” membership and their “mandate” – which is warlord-speak for refining an ad hoc alliance for the piratical assault on Syria’s sovereignty.
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Latin America: Current United States bellicose 'Cognitive Infiltration' of the Enemy
Friday, March 04 @ 14:50:45 UTC | By Franz J. T. Lee
March 04, 2011
The Third World War has begun long ago already, it is claiming millions
of African, Palestinian and Arab lives. Important for Venezuela to note
is that currently there is waging an inexorable global 'war of ideas',
the counter-attack of the United States of America against emancipatory
theoretical praxis and praxical theory. This 'full spectrum dominance'
is now called: "cognitive infiltration of the enemy', of the extremist
and terrorist groups.
Nothing in capitalism is new, it has no relation to the New, to the
homo novum. Hence, this latest 'psychological operation' is not new, it
is a war strategy as old as Metusalem. It was used by all ruling
classes, especially those of the fascist caliber or the Nazi pedigree.
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World Focus: Zizek and the End Times
Friday, November 26 @ 16:13:23 UTC | The End of the World as We Know It
By Ron Jacobs
November 26, 2010 - counterpunch.org
It's the end of the world as we know it. Slavoj Zizek has several ideas why. Foremost among them is the coming end of the economic system we know as capitalism. Although you wouldn't know it by its champions around the world (especially in the USA) the last few decades have been rough on capitalism. In order to maintain its necessary expansion, credit has been extended to individuals and institutions that would never have qualified for it before 1973. This has enabled consumer purchasing power to extend beyond most people's earning ability. Furthermore, many services that were formerly provided by government are now privatized. This phenomenon includes some schools, libraries, and certain military, police and security operations. This transition has been precipitated by the continual decrease in tax bills for the very rich and the de-prioritizing of all social services. Naturally, the military continues to devour most national budgets in many countries, especially in the United States. This fact combined with the aforementioned privatization of some military operations, prisons, and police functions, has created a situation where the poor and so-called middle classes watch their futures grow dimmer while the wealthy circle their wagons on a global scale to insure what they hope will be their continued dominance.
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World Focus: The Promise of the Land: Soils and Souls
Tuesday, October 12 @ 15:05:22 UTC |
By Robert Jensen
October 12, 2010 - counterpunch.org
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A poet, an economist, and a biologist walk into in a barn in Kansas and start talking. What do you get when you cross their ideas?
Answer: Hybrid vigor.
OK, the joke might not quite work unless you’re an agronomist (and maybe even the agronomists aren’t laughing), but it captures the importance of the conversations at The Land Institute’s annual gathering in Salina, KS. In the search for alternatives to our dead-end industrial agriculture system, Land Institute researchers are pursuing plant breeding programs that just may be the key to post-oil farming. But beyond the science, “The Land” -- that’s how everyone there refers to the Institute in conversation -- provides a fertile space for mixing the ideas of people as well as the genes of plants. In both cases, the hybrid vigor -- the superior qualities that result from crossbreeding -- is exciting.
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World Focus: The far right has a ready answer. Does the left?
Monday, September 27 @ 08:10:24 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
September 25, 2010 - gowans.wordpress.com
“The search for scapegoats has started,” observes German magazine editor Michael Naumann, alluding to growing anti-immigrant sentiment throughout Europe. The Swedes “elected an anti-immigrant party to Parliament for the first time, and the French are busy repatriating Roma” while “Germans continue to debate a best-selling book blaming Muslim immigrants for ‘dumbing down society’.” (1) Complaints are heard in England that England is no longer for the English, while a paroxysm of Islamophobia marks a US campaign to block a Ground Zero mosque, which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero. Naumann’s point is taken, but he misses the reality. The search hasn’t just begun, it’s complete.
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World Focus: Democracy, East Germany and the Berlin Wall
Friday, October 30 @ 16:49:18 UTC | The GDR was more democratic, in the original and substantive sense of the word, than eastern Germany was before 1949 and than the former East Germany has become since the Berlin Wall was opened in 1989. It was also more democratic than its neighbor, West Germany. While it played a role in the GDR's eventual demise, the Berlin Wall was at the time a necessary defensive measure to protect a substantively democratic society from being undermined by a hostile neighbor bent on annexing it.
By Stephen Gowans
October 25, 2009 - gowans.wordpress.com
While East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) wasn't a 'workers' paradise', it was in many respects a highly attractive model that was responsive to the basic needs of the mass of people and therefore was democratic in the substantive and original sense of the word. It offered generous pensions, guaranteed employment, equality of the sexes and substantial wage equality, free healthcare and education, and a growing array of other free and virtually free goods and services. It was poorer than its West German neighbor, the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG, but it started at a lower level of economic development and was forced to bear the burden of indemnifying the Soviet Uni0n for the massive losses Germany inflicted upon the USSR in World War II. These conditions were largely responsible for the less attractive aspects of life in the GDR: lower pay, longer hours, and fewer and poorer consumer goods compared to West Germany, and restrictions on travel to the West.
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War and Terror: The Politics of The New York Times
Sunday, April 12 @ 10:15:55 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
April 03, 2009
gowans.wordpress.com
The New York Times' and The Washington Post's promotion of a chauvinist understanding of foreign policy is evidenced in their recent treatment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and their non-treatment of criminal proceedings in Spain against six senior Bush administration officials for torture.
Al-Bashir is sought by the ICC in connection with war crimes charges related to the civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan. Like the United States and Israel, Sudan is not a signatory to the treaty establishing the court. Neither country is willing to submit to the ICC for fear, they say, that their officials will face politically-motivated prosecutions, a fear they unjustifiably suppose is unique to their own nationals.
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World Focus: Is Marx the first theoretician of globalization obsolete?
Monday, March 16 @ 17:33:04 UTC | By Franz J. T. Lee
March 12, 2009
Within the current international devouring maelstrom of the breakdown of capitalism, many of us have not yet grasped the magnitude of this economic world war; we are still caught up in the ideological tentacles of the Cold War, of rabid anti-communism, of anti-socialism, of anti-Marxism. It is not the first time that we fear non-existent ideological, diabolical monsters.
Many of us are still hiding our alienated heads in the sands of the Arizona or Nevada deserts and do not notice what is happening next door in "Area 51". In spite of slow burn, especially in North America, we urgently have to change radically our life styles, beliefs, dolce vita, especially our ignorance about the negation of capitalism, about scientific and philosophic Marxism.
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World Focus: Greek Student Revolts and Brutal Capital Accumulation
Sunday, December 14 @ 18:17:48 UTC | By Franz J. T. Lee
December 14, 2008
In such critical times like ours today, one expects worker and student revolts in France, in the birthplace of the political revolution of bourgeois capitalism; also there one awaits the return of the proletarian spirit of the French Communards who were 'storming the heavens' (Marx). One recollects the student revolts of the sixties, sees Molotov cocktails flying through the air and their explosive flaring up; one is looking everywhere to spot 'Danny the Red' behind the barricades in Paris.
Nowadays who still talks about George Lukacs' "History and Class Consciousness" (1923), about the birthplace of the accumulation of capital, about the slave resistance and revolts, about Ancient Greece, about the fons et origo of the current Greek student, pupil and youth rebellion and its brutal suppression? Except Olympic pan et cirsenses, when last did news about contemporary Greece make world headlines for a week? How many US citizens know where Greece is situated, especially something essential about its history, about Miletus?
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The Crack of Wall Street is not a Cause, is an Effect of an obsolete world order
Friday, October 31 @ 19:30:05 UTC | by Franz J. T. Lee
October 31, 2008
As Karl Marx pointed out long ago, the major weapon that modern ruling class ideology, fascist brain-washing and corporate terrorism of the global mass media utilizes is simply to turn the historic truth upside down, and thus to cause mob pathology, mafia megalomania and finally it succeeds to blur and confuse causes and effects of global and globalized exploitation, domination, discrimination, militarization and alienation. In this way, currently Bush suffered a divine transubstantiation and became a humane Chávez and Chávez is being ostracized and condemned as a tyrannical, dictatorial prince of darkness to the netherworld of international terrorism. In fact, to regain their very own capitalist insanity, the global fascist ideologues and 'think tanks' themselves are becoming so confused that they have to study Marx's "Capital" to transcend their 'postmodern' obsolescence. Contrary to the ailing global stock markets, like in the late sixties, the global sales of Marxist works experience an unprecedented boom, a political renaissance as seldom before.
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Africa Focus: WaBun-Inini: A true American hero
Tuesday, July 29 @ 12:57:18 UTC | By Obi Egbuna
July 29, 2008
Harare
ONE of the most tragic lessons that continues to be overlooked in the history of the United States is that the country is nothing, but a settler colony.
This means the so-called founding fathers, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of their gang, should be referred to as the first thieves.
When we as Africans at home or abroad begin looking at US history with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights or the Articles of Confederation, we must realise we are slapping the indigenous inhabitants of this land in the face, which is not culturally or politically acceptable.
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World Focus: Zunes' Compromising with Capitalism's Sad Reality
Wednesday, March 05 @ 14:04:51 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
February 25, 2008
http://gowans.blogspot.com
Stephen Zunes has written a reply to my article criticizing his connections to US government- and ruling class-funded "peace" organizations, but far from rebutting my criticisms, he helps make my point.
He writes, "The unfortunate reality in capitalist societies is that most non-profit organizations – from universities to social justice organizations to art galleries to peace groups (and ICNC as well) – depend at least in part on donations from wealthy individuals and from foundations which get their money from wealthy individuals."
On this we agree: The capitalist class, through its money power, dominates capitalist societies, including its universities, social justice organizations, peace groups and scholars of non-violence (at least those willing to feed at the trough.) Is it any surprise, then, that handsomely-funded social justice organizations, peace groups, progressive media and scholars of nonviolence might be understood to be agents of capitalism and imperialism within the left community?
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World Focus: Food price rises will kill millions
Wednesday, February 27 @ 21:05:08 UTC | socialistworker.co.uk
February 26, 2008
Esme Choonara looks at protests and riots as market madness threatens world’s poor
Millions around the world are facing a future of insecurity, starvation and malnutrition as the price of basic food soars. The price of maize, wheat, soya beans and rice – staples for the majority of the world’s population – have more than doubled in the last few years.
Around 25,000 people currently die every day from hunger and poverty-related causes. This figure is set to rise as food prices drive more into food insecurity.
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