Новости за 14.08.2015

After Barack Obama became President in January of 2009, and Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister of Israel two months later, the Israel lobby, taking direction from Netanyahu’s government, became more brazen. Perhaps they sniffed out the new President’s weakness; perhaps they despised him for being black. These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Whatever their reasons, the lobby threw subtlety aside – to such an extent that nowadays, its existence – and its power -- is apparent to all.... Читать дальше...

Russian President Vladimir Putin takes the threat of terrorism very seriously, which is why he has been working around-the-clock to engage leaders from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Kurds and Syrian opposition groups in negotiations to put an end to the fighting and reestablish security in Syria. It's worth noting that there's been an effective blackout of these crucial negotiations in the western media, mainly because they make Putin look like a peacemaker who is respected among... Читать дальше...

Rebellions aren’t simply repressed. They’re pacified. While repression—the iron hand—is useful to terrorize a population into submission, the issues animating a rebellion must be partially redressed—the velvet glove—to forestall a further reaching revolutionary upsurge. The most effective way to defeat rebellion is to blunt its grievances and overtake its leaders. This is precisely what is happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. For the past year, much attention has focused on the most dramatic... Читать дальше...

Since reconstruction, black people have asked to be seen as human beings—to be treated with dignity. We asked at the turn of the century amid race riots and lynching. We asked in the 1960s with the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. We asked in the 1980s while policies were enacted that marginalized black economic possibilities and created a criminal justice system that disproportionately imprisoned people of color. We were saying then, like we are declaring now, that #BlackLivesMatter. Yet a question remains—one that is rarely spoken... Читать дальше...

Politics is about, among other things, competing storytelling. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of economics. The American two-Party dynamic is of the Party in power talking up economic circumstance while the Party out of power trashes it. This practice preys on the heroically short memories of Americans through posing functionally equivalent More

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, even Donald Trump must stand naked, and like everyone else sometimes he winces at what he sees. Consider Trump stepping out of the shower--forced to confront all that sun-lamped, over-fed, over-cologned flesh, and those hate-lines around his pout-shaped mouth, and, of course, that wildly asymmetric mass of orange-Kool-Aid-colored hair, still wet from the shower--on one side of his head, it hangs down past his shoulder in a huge ragged curtain; on the other side of his head, there is nothing but bald scalp and sadness. Читать дальше...

On August 7, 2001, Marion “Suge” Knight, the 350-pound boss of Death Row records, was released from prison after serving five years on charges stemming from a 1992 assault. About the time Knight regained his freedom, a documentary film, Welcome to Death Row, about the rise and fall of his company was making the rounds More

I don’t really know, I don’t understand how it feels: to live in a rich European country, which is rich mainly because it has been directly plundering many poor nations around the world. Or it has been plundering by association, through its membership in some extremist organization like NATO. To live there, refusing to acknowledge More

Earlier this summer, Ruben Espinosa fled Mexico’s Gulf coast state of Veracruz after receiving death threats. His work as a photojournalist there had made him an enemy of the state’s governor, who presides over one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a reporter. On July 31, Espinosa was found beaten and More

Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu and his countless underlings in the United States are busy running around, telling all and sundry what a terrible thing the newly-approved nuclear agreement with Iran is for poor, defenseless little Israel. This agreement allows Iran to continue its peaceful use of nuclear power, yet denies it the capacity to More

Hillary Clinton’s recent attack on fellow presidential hopeful Marco Rubio (R-FL) over abortion (“offensive,” “outrageous” and “troubling,” she said) reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to wonder aloud for some time: Why doesn’t the Democratic Party call for a federal law legalizing abortion? Thanks to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion is legal. More

When I was a teenager I used to skip class, nestle under a desk in my high school’s library where the school administrators wouldn’t find me and open up a tattered copy of Leaves of Grass. The way Walt Whitman wrote about America was so blithe and idealistic, operatic and direct that I had to read the More

Recent acts of nonviolent civil disobedience have gained a significant amount of national attention. On June 27, Bree Newsome scaled a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House to take down the Confederate flag that was on display. On July 18, Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley More

‘Could be.’ ‘Might be.’ ‘Can’t show or prove anything, but maybe.’ Is there any wonder that with such language coming lately from the “official” but secretive investigation of the July 17, 2014 crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, there is little reason for confidence in a final report? And lots of reason for concern of More

Some of my best friends demand that I write an article condemning unconditionally the “administrative detention” of Jewish terrorists. Three suspected terrorists have already been arrested under this procedure. They are members of a group following the teachings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (the leader is actually his grandson). Kahane was an American Rabbi who came More

“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith …” What if words like this actually meant something? This is Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which the United States signed in 1970. It continues: “… on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race More

In the land where history was first written, the complete erasure of over 8,000 years of cultural heritage, record, ethnic pluralism, and memory is underway. Although sidelined by the exigencies of war, those losses will impact Iraq’s potential to rehabilitate post-conflict. They represent an abrogation of a collective heritage: the world’s first legal code, writing system, More

For the crime of telling America and the world about the lawlessness of the American political class — including one Hillary Rodham Clinton — Chelsea Manning is now a political prisoner, serving a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth’s US Disciplinary Barracks, after a show trial which violated nearly every basic benchmark of American justice. For More

On Thursday, July 30, 50 Black and Latino students wearing mock bullet proof vests with stickers that stated #StudentsAintBulletProof #End1033, from the Strategy Center’s Fight for the Soul of the Cities, once again asked the Los Angeles Unified School District to give us a list of the weapons they received from the Department of Defense More

The new austerity program that was proposed  (13/8/2015) by the SYRIZA government and voted by the majority of SYRIZA and the discredited old pro-austerity and pro-EU (European Union) parties brings disaster for the Greek people. Economic depression will be aggravated, foreign debt will be increased, wages and pensions reduced even more, poverty exacerbated and Greece’s More

Writing is a way to be useful if you believe that our long-suffering humanity must be better, and more fully educated, given the incredible ignorance in which we are all enveloped, with the exception of researchers who in the sciences seek satisfactory answers. This is a word which implies in a few letters its immense More

How much noise does the other shoe make when it drops? If the shoe is a law that would complete the development of a police surveillance state in the United States, it’s almost silent. Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee quietly sent a bill to the Senate that would require on-line Internet content and service More

Trondheim, Norway.  As a point of departure I refer to this paper, on page 2 in the Real-World Economics Review, issue 71, 28 May 2015. The paper argues for and describes how to possibly implement an electronic parallel currency in Greece. But the proposal for a parallel currency should now be even more specific, tailored More

Military chaplains serving in the unnecessary Afghanistan and falsely-based Iraq wars are accomplices to horrible war crimes launched by the George W. Bush administration. Complicit also are their sponsoring faith organizations, with theological schools hopping on President Bush’s “global war on terrorism” warwagon and promoting military chaplaincy as a career, and clinical pastoral education organizations More

Gambit I was the start of false accusations by the then Bush Administration in 2007 that Iran was preparing a nuclear weapon, when in fact Iran had no such ambitions at all, but a plan to open an Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) in Teheran, an international hydrocarbon exchange, where all countries, hydrocarbon producers or not, More