Новости за 11.11.2015

Consider the following scenario. A police officer tells a person to stay in one place, or to sit down, or to lie down on the ground face down. The person starts to walk away, and gets arrested. Though that may be a brief journalistic description, it has enormous political ramifications. Lets take a specific example, seen nationally in an officer’s own lapel camera video. First, the journalistic version: a pregnant woman who had just brought her daughter to school, and who happens to be black, is approached by a cop. Читать дальше...

Nothing unifies a divided people quite like a common enemy. Fighting the enemy focuses people’s energies and generates a common frame of reference that delivers moral clarity. However, once the enemy is vanquished the unifying frame of reference vanishes along with it. Suddenly, a new, “peacetime” frame of reference fills the void, and old divisions redevelop, maybe even some new ones. Canadian voters are just now coming to appreciate that while winning a war may be hard, winning the peace is even harder. Читать дальше...

Why hasn’t the U.S. working class risen up to destroy the capitalist system and the pitiless masters who have treated the laboring masses with murderous contempt? Part of the answer lay in the way that American capitalism has encouraged the white majority of workers to, in historian David Roediger’s words, "define and accept their class position by fashioning identities as 'not slaves' and 'not blacks.'" By W.E.B. DuBois' account in 1935, anti-black racism grants lower and working-class whites a "public and psychological wage" ... Читать дальше...

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) achieved its greatest victory in the four year-long war on Tuesday when it recaptured the strategic Kuweires military airbase in North Syria. Hundreds of ISIS terrorists were killed in intense fighting while hundreds more were sent fleeing eastward towards Raqqa. The victory was announced just hours after Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said More

(Thanks to Pixabay.) As of October 2015, American consumers owe $8.17 trillion in mortgages, $900 billion in credit cards, and $1.19 trillion in student loans. Home mortgages, credit cards, and student loans occupy the most of the consumer credit market. The consumer credit market is the dream paradise of money merchants, known as moneylenders. Just as pharma More

There are only two flashpoints in American history where labor unions became center stage in politics. I will call these “Big Bang” moments because they propelled the American Federation of Labor (AFL) after 1886 and the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) after 1935, from fledgling organizing committees into mass organizations directly impacting and attracting millions. More

Theatrical differences aside, the reputed bad chemistry between them, Obama and Netanyahu are two peas in a pod conjoined in ideology by a spirit of amoral cynicism in which unrestrained militarism, passing for diplomacy, seeks out to destroy Enemies of the State, i.e., whomever is in the way of a hubristic nationalism identified with Rightest More

“Trudeau unveils most diverse Cabinet in Canada’s history”, was how one media outlet described the new Liberal cabinet. It includes a Muslim woman, four Sikhs, an indigenous woman, two differently abled individuals and an equal number of women and men. Half even refused any reference to God at Wednesday’s swearing in ceremony. But in one More

Apparently, I am a “nut job” because I adhere to anti-capitalist, socialist, human-hating ideology.  Not only that, I am working to keep millions in poverty and assisting in “crimes against humanity.” I guess that’s the type of thing human-hating ‘nut job’ individuals do. Well, it is according to the warped world view of pro-GMO individual More

The decision by the Center for American Progress, which calls itself progressive, to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu serves as another example of a phenomenon endemic in mainstream American politics called “progressive except Palestine,” observed Josh Ruebner, policy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. With co-sponsor Jewish Voice for Peace, More

When I arrived at the Kabul International Airport on November 4, I was unaware that the same day the New York Times published an article, “Life Pulls Back in Afghan Capital, as Danger Rises and Troops Recede.” My friends Abdulhai and Ali, 17 years old, young men I have known since my first visit five years ago, greeted me More

Today’s politically-correct college students are playing right into the hands of the 1%. They also may be cheating themselves out of an education. By fixating on “intersectionality,” hiding behind “trigger warnings” and adding ever-more letters and characters to the “LGBTQIA+” alphabet soup, campus activists marginalize themselves. Expending energy on issues such as bathroom access for the More