Racism, Poverty, Violence…
by Kim Petersen / July 24th, 2017
“Make America Great Again” was Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. It appeals to the people whose hearts beat with patriotic fervor. But what does such a slogan explicitly point out?
Syntactically, Trump is telling Americans that the United States of America is not great. A country can only become something again when it is currently not that something it seeks to recapture – in this case, that something is greatness. So currently the US is not great according to the mantra of Trump.
Two questions are raised by this?
1. When was America …
by Yves Engler / July 24th, 2017
Two weeks ago the worst fear of Canadian opponents of neoliberal ‘free trade’ agreements came true.
Surprisingly, there has been almost no reaction from the political parties, unions, and other organizations that warned these agreements would be used to undermine Canadian law, even though this is exactly what happened.
After David Kattenburg repeatedly complained about inacurate labels on two wines sold in Ontario, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) notified the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) that it “would not be acceptable and would be considered misleading” to declare Israel as the country of origin for wines produced in …
by Ellen Brown / July 24th, 2017
Illinois is teetering on bankruptcy and other states are not far behind, largely due to unfunded pension liabilities; but there are solutions. The Federal Reserve could do a round of “QE for Munis.” Or the state could turn its sizable pension fund into a self-sustaining public bank.
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Illinois is insolvent, unable to pay its bills. According to Moody’s, the state has $15 billion in unpaid bills and $251 billion in unfunded liabilities. Of these, $119 billion are tied to shortfalls in the state’s pension program. On July 6, 2017, for the first time in two years, the …
by Dr. Nayvin Gordon / July 23rd, 2017
The Republican Party prepares to violate the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution: Social Security — the 14th amendment and “odious debt”.
For decades the working people have been paying millions more than was needed into Social Security and for years the excess money has been borrowed by the government. Presently there is almost $3 trillion owed by the government to the Social Security Trust Fund. The Republican Party now controls the government and has a budget plan that will give less than was promised to millions of people who have paid excess into Social Security for years. ((New York Times, …
Social Justice Discourse and Ideology as Knowledge
by Julian Vigo / July 22nd, 2017
Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
As a scholar who has spent my professional life reading, writing, and teaching university students, I have come to realize how lucky I was to have been fully funded for my graduate studies and likewise received into departments around the world where my scholarship was welcomed by scholars from countries whose compatriots, when they immigrate to …
Book Review of Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
by Vacy Vlazna / July 22nd, 2017
Of the roughly millions of novels published annually worldwide, Arundhati Roy is one of the rare maverick authors for whom justice and politics is integral to her art and to her identity. Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which I would describe as her summa injustica of India, has been criticised as “A Novel That Is Neither Creative Nor Fiction.”
Well, it is definitely outside the run-of-the-mill novel genre enjoyed by suburban book clubs, and you can thank the god of your …
by Stuart Littlewood / July 22nd, 2017
In a letter to a local newspaper about Brexit and the way prime minister Theresa May is handling it, I happened to mention in passing the Balfour Declaration, criticising her plans to celebrate the centenary “with pride” and invite Israel’s PM Netanyahu to the fun. This drew a sharp response from someone spouting the usual Israeli propaganda ‘facts’ and saying my attitude harmed the Jewish community worldwide.
The Balfour Declaration is a deadly serious subject. It is a cause of great horror and grief, of justifiable international anger, and a matter for profound regret. This is a right time and proper …
Lament in an Insane World: Stateless, Expelled Camels
by Felicity Arbuthnot / July 22nd, 2017
After his visit to the Kingdom in May, Donald Trump decided to back the Saudi-led blockade of tiny Qatar (2015 population 2.235 million, but just 313,000 citizens) imposed less than a month later.
The siege was also joined by Bahrain, Doha, the Maldives, the UAE – Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Quwain. It was quickly pointed out that:
(The) US President has long history of lucrative investment deals with Saudi Arabia but few ties to the small Gulf nation.
Trump’s financial bounties from Saudi “… includes the purchase of tens of millions of dollars in Trump’s real …
by Kathy Kelly / July 21st, 2017
I come and stand at every door
But none shall hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
— Nazim Hikmet, I Come and Stand at Every Door
On July 18, 2017, at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing focused on “The Four Famines: Root Causes and a Multilateral Action Plan,” Republican Senator Todd Young, a former Marine, asked officials present if ongoing war in Yemen could fail to exacerbate the catastrophe developing there – one of four countries, along with Southern Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia, set to collectively lose 20 million people this year, one third the death toll …
by Graham Peebles / July 21st, 2017
This time of year Mediterranean beaches are the destinations of choice for many European holidaymakers; it’s also the beginning of the busiest time of year for the people smugglers based in Libya and elsewhere along the North African coast. July to October is their peak season — during this time in 2016 around 103,000 refugees were crammed into unsafe boats, often in the dead of night, and cast off into the Mediterranean Sea.
Some don’t survive the crossing. Whilst the number of migrants arriving at Europe’s back door may have decreased — from 205,858 in the first five months of 2016, …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 20th, 2017
Dusting away the must on a constitutional text may be a rare thing, but it should be a point of order for the elected officials of a country. Often, these contain laws that are irretrievably archaic, and resist change by virtue of being embedded in a document deliberated over in another age.
The one provision in the Australian Constitution that has received considerable attention of late is section 44, one unmistakably dull yet absolute in effect:
Any person who is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or citizen or entitled to the
…
by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall / July 20th, 2017
In From Global to Local: The Making of Things and the End of Globalisation, Finbarr Livesey challenges the common neoliberal claim that globalization is the be-all and end-all of global prosperity.
Livesey’s premise, which he supports with an impressive array of data, is that globalization peaked shortly after 2008 and the world economy is in a period of deglobalization. World trade is slowly declining as a percentage of GDP, and many companies who moved factories to the third world are improving their bottom line by reshoring them to the …
by John Stanton / July 20th, 2017
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his creation.
We should value those who solicit our votes by other standards than have recently been in fashion. While we believe that good is something to be invented, we
…
by Yves Engler / July 20th, 2017
While few Canadians could find Zambia on a map, the Great White North has significant influence over the southern African nation.
A big beneficiary of internationally sponsored neoliberal reforms, a Vancouver firm is the largest foreign investor in the landlocked country of 16 million.
First Quantum Minerals (FQM) has been embroiled in various ecological, labour and tax controversies in the copper rich nation over the past decade. At the end of last year First Quantum was sued for US$1.4 billion by Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Investment Holdings (ZCCM-IH), a state entity with minority stakes in most of the country’s mining firms. The …
by Bernard Marszalek / July 19th, 2017
Should capitalism be put in a museum?
If you think that’s a good idea, you should visit the Museum of Capitalism (MOC) in Oakland, California.
Some might object that this is an outlandish idea, that capitalism is hardly material for a museum in the way communism or apartheid may be. The Apartheid Museum, for your information, opens daily at 9am in Johannesburg. And if you happen to be in any number of Eastern Europe’s major cities, most likely you will find enterprising young people doing sardonic museum-without-walls tours of communist wastelands—the former industrial sites—like Nova Huta, the Russian built …
How Trump and Netanyahu pushed Palestinians into a Corner
by Ramzy Baroud / July 19th, 2017
Early October 2016, Misbah Abu Sbeih left his wife and five children at home and then drove to an Israeli police station in Occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem.
The 39-year-old Jerusalemite was scheduled to hand himself over to serve a term of 4 months in jail for, allegedly, trumped up charges of ‘trying to hit an Israeli soldier’.
Misbah is familiar with Israeli prisons, having been held there before on political charges, including an attempt to sneak into and pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Al-Aqsa Mosque is part of a large compound known as Haram al-Sharif, which includes – aside from Al-Aqsa – …
Unit 731 Museum
by Kim Petersen / July 19th, 2017
During World War II, Japan’s imperialist military invaded Northeast China and afterward spread throughout Southeast Asia, then on to an ill-fated attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese crimes were many during the war and included the coerced services of ianfu (comfort women) for Japanese troops, slave labor, and experimentation on living humans.
Today Japanese right-wingers clamor for a re-expansion of Japanese militarism; prime minister Abe Shinzo pays visits to a shrine venerating Japanese dead — among them war criminals; the Diet demonstrates belligerence toward North Korea, a country Japan had formerly occupied; Okinawans’ (Japanese living on the southern archipelago) call for …
by Ricardo Vaz / July 18th, 2017
A chavista campaigns for the upcoming Constituent Assembly elections (left) and opposition officials set fire to the voting records from their consultation
Sunday, July 16, was a significant day in Venezuela’s political history. The right-wing opposition MUD, backed by the United States, threw all its weight behind a “consultation” that they hoped would show that their (coup) attempts had a formidable public backing and trigger the “zero hour” of a new phase that would lead to the removal of the Bolivarian government. In the end the stunt backfired, …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 17th, 2017
It’s all well and good to huff at the current President of the United States, who has managed to get under more irritated skin than an army of dedicated leaches. The immersion of the White House into the reality television show of Trumpland has set people on edge, lighting volatile fires and driving some commentators, quite literally, around the bend.
There is much to set the traditional group of political vultures on edge. It could be Donald Trump’s stance on climate change, his indifference to Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential elections or, for that matter, Russia at all. He cares …
So that settles it!
by Gary Leupp / July 17th, 2017
Monday morning. David Chalian, CNN Political Director, on CNN’s “New Day” program. News ticker: “How do Trump-Russia and DNC-Ukraine compare?
New Day co-anchor Alysin Camerota (former Fox anchor) puts the question to her Political Director.
Chalian’s mechanical reply: “Russia is an adversary, Ukraine is not.”
Camerota, as always exuding wisdom, follows up: “Thanks so much for sifting through this with us.” (Good, so that’s settled! There had been so much sifting there, in those few precious boilerplate minutes.)
But wait, Mr. Political Director! (And by the way, Dave, what’s your job description? How exactly do you direct CNN’s politics? The responsibility must rest heavily …
