Commentary
Commentary
Worldwide Hurricane
David Swanson: One of my favorites has got to be the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. ... To compete against the U.S. so-called justice system, which tried to kill Carter, wounded him, stole 18 years of his life, but did not defeat him, depended on the legal work, the research, the analysis of Carter himself and his Canadian family, a group of caring individuals who lived together in Toronto. Almost never will a collection of lawyers, no matter how many degrees they have or what level of status and celebrity, do what people who love each other will do. ... We have to collectively and selflessly work together cooperatively, without any let-up or discouragement, until we free, not one wronged person, but a whole wronged species, our whole human potential to be as courageous and determined and wise and forgiving as Rubin Carter was able to be...
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Jul 20, 2018, 3:51pm
Commentary
While the World Celebrates Mandela's 100th Birthday, Remember That For Most of His Life, American Conservatives Vilified Him
Bill Berkowitz: President Ronald Reagan, who placed the ANC on the U.S. terror list in the 1980s (a designation that wasn't removed until 2008), labeled the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 as "immoral" and "utterly repugnant." Instead, the Reagan Administration adopted "a position a position of constructive engagement towards South Africa." ... In 1985, Rep. Dick Cheney voted against a congressional resolution calling for the release of Mandela and the recognition of the African National Congress. ... The Religious Right in this country -- and the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in particular -- were steadfast in its support of apartheid as well as counter-revolutionary movements in Angola and Mozambique...
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Jul 18, 2018, 2:49pm
Commentary
Amazon Employees Are Using Prime Day to Push for Better Working Conditions
Chavie Lieber: Some Amazon employees in Europe are on strike, and people around the world are boycotting in support. ... “You spend 10 hours on foot, there’s no windows in the place, and you’re not allowed to talk to people — there’s no interactions allowed” ... “I got a sense in no time at all that they work people to death, or until they get too tired to keep working” ... “After two months, I felt I couldn’t work there and maintain a healthy state of mind.” ... The strike from European employees officially started last week, with a European workers’ union, the Transnational Social Strike Platform, announcing that workers in Spain, Poland, Germany, Italy, and France would participate. The workers want “health and decent jobs for all Amazon workers”...
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Jul 17, 2018, 11:43am
Commentary
The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom
Chris Hedges: The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the publisher—the maniacal goal of the U.S. government—would set a legal precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation of the corporate state. ... The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations. The ruling elites, who refuse to accept responsibility for profound social inequality or the crimes of empire, have no ideological veneer left to justify their greed, ineptitude and pillage...
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Jul 16, 2018, 12:47pm
Commentary
Education and the Mental Health Epidemic
Graham Peebles: Over the past 25 years, depression and anxiety amongst teenagers in the UK has increased by 70%. This pattern is repeated across the developed world, and is the result of a cocktail of pressures, pressures that result in 10% of under 18-year-olds in America being dependent on mental health medication. ... In parts of Asia things are just as bad or worse: the pressure to achieve high marks in exams in Hong Kong is driving some students to suicide ... For many young people education has become a bi-word for competition and anxiety ... Instead of policies rooted in competition, cooperation and sharing need to be encouraged in all aspects of education and standardized exams consigned to the past. The educational environment needs to be one in which children are encouraged to support each other, to share their own particular gifts with the group and build a sense of social responsibility...
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Jul 15, 2018, 1:00pm
Commentary
The Con of Diversity
Chris Hedges: Diversity in the hands of the white power elites—political and corporate—is an advertising gimmick. A new face, a brand, gets pushed out front, accompanied by the lavish financial rewards that come with serving the white power structure, as long as the game is played. ... The absence of genuine political content in our national discourse has degraded it to one between racists and people who don’t want to be identified as racists. ... Glen Ford, the executive editor of the Black Agenda Report - points out that “diversity” has been substituted by the white power elites for “affirmative action.” And, he argues, diversity and affirmative action are radically different. The replacement of affirmative action with diversity, he says, effectively “negates African-American history as a legal basis for redress.”...
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Jul 10, 2018, 12:35pm
Commentary
Agrarian Crisis and Climate Catastrophe: Forged in India, Made in Washington
Colin Todhunter: India is under siege from international capital. It is on course not only to be permanently beholden to US state-corporate interests but is heading towards environmental catastrophe much faster than many may think. ... The (IMF and World Bank) plan for India involves the mass displacement of people to restructure agriculture for the benefit of powerful corporations. ... The drive is to entrench industrial farming, commercialise the countryside and to replace small-scale farming, the backbone of food production in India ... If people are inclined to think farmers would be better off as foreign firms enter the supply chain, we need only look at the plight of farmers in India who were tied into contracts with Pepsico. Farmers were pushed into debt, reliance on one company and were paid a pittance...
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Jul 9, 2018, 12:46pm
Commentary
Mediterranean Sea: The Largest Graveyard in Modern History
Peter Koenig: In June 2018 alone, more than 500 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Their boats were refused access to land in either Malta or Italy. ... These are de facto murders, high crimes against humanity, committed by the very European Union. The same “leaders” (criminals, rather), whose forebears are known to have raped, exploited, tortured, ravaged peoples and their lands of Asia, Africa, Latin America over the past 1000 years of abject colonization. Europeans have it in their genes to be inhuman. ... The west, and only the west, is responsible for the endless destructive chaos, torture and lawlessness in these nations that the west wants to dominate, for myriad reasons – to steal their energy, minerals; for their strategic location, and finally on the way to total full spectrum world hegemony...
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Jul 7, 2018, 4:07pm
Commentary
Supreme Court Ignored International Law in Upholding Muslim Ban
Marjorie Cohn: Under the guise of deferring to the president on matters of national security, the 5-4 majority disregarded a litany of Trump’s anti-Muslim statements and held that the ban does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which forbids the government from preferring one religion over another. Neither the majority nor the dissenting opinions even mentioned the U.S.’s legal obligations under international human rights law. ... The travel ban violates two treaties to which the United States is a party: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. It also runs afoul of customary international law. ... Both of these treaties and customary international law prohibit the government from discriminating on the basis of religion or national origin. Trump’s Muslim ban does both...
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Jul 6, 2018, 5:05pm
Commentary
Why Does Palestine Matter?
Sheldon Richman: First, perhaps most basically, the sheer cruelty — the scope of the violation of human, i.e., natural individual, rights — of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians warrants the concern of all who favor freedom and other (classical) liberal values: justice, social cooperation, free exchange, and peace. ... The second reason why Palestine matters is that American taxpayers are forced to underwrite this system of injustice and repression. The US government gives Israel, the Middle East’s only nuclear state, over $3 billion a year in military aid ... The third reason I want to point to is the threat of a wider war, one that could reach beyond Palestine and Israel and even beyond the Middle East...
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Jul 5, 2018, 2:44pm
Commentary
The Constitution Is Not Neutral: Courts of Justice Should Not Act Like Courts of Order
John W. Whitehead: For those still deluded enough to believe they’re living the American dream—where the government represents the people, where the people are equal in the eyes of the law, where the courts are arbiters of justice, where the police are keepers of the peace, and where the law is applied equally as a means of protecting the rights of the people—it’s time to wake up. ... We no longer have a representative government, a rule of law, or justice. ... Liberty has fallen to legalism. ... Freedom has fallen to fascism. ... Justice has become jaded, jaundiced and just plain unjust...
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Jul 3, 2018, 2:48pm
Commentary
The Lack of Accountability in US Politics Is Beyond Shameful
Klaus Marre and DonkeyHotey: One of the biggest problems in the US — yet the one that is talked about the least — is that there is a complete lack of accountability for politicians who are screwing up the country. ... First, there is the two-party system that deprives voters of making anything other than a binary choice. It forces Americans to select the lesser of two evils rather than somebody they can feel truly good about. ... Second, thanks to partisan gerrymandering, most voters don’t even get to make that choice in November because so many congressional districts have been drawn in a way that makes the winner a foregone conclusion in the general election. ... With so much job security and so little accountability, it’s no surprise that US lawmakers aren’t really doing the people’s business. There is simply no incentive to do so. Instead, they most often side with the people who write their checks...
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Jul 2, 2018, 3:03pm
Commentary
Venezuela: Towards an Economy of Resistance
Peter Koenig: Venezuela, is a socialist country defending the rights of the working class, fostering solidarity, human rights and sheer human values, so close to the borders of an abject neoliberal and increasing militarized greed-driven dictatorship, pretending untouchable ‘exceptionalism’. Daring to stand up against the threats of boots and bombs from the North, is simply intolerable for Washington. ... A real foreign imposed economic crisis is in full swing. ... Despite the Yankee boot on her neck, Venezuela has demonstrated the audacity to launch a dollar-independent incorruptible cryptocurrency that is slated to become a new world reserve currency, especially as other countries are having similar plans...
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Jun 29, 2018, 10:36am
Commentary
The Anti-Empire Report #158 - Published June 26, 2018
William Blum: Those in the US generally opposed to immigration make it a point to declare or imply that the United States does not have any legal or moral obligation to take in these Latinos. This is not true. The United States does indeed have the obligation because many of the immigrants, in addition to fleeing from drug violence, are escaping an economic situation in their homeland directly made hopeless by American interventionist policy. ... But whenever a progressive government comes to power in Latin America or threatens to do so, a government sincerely committed to fighting poverty, the United States helps to suppresses the movement and/or supports the country’s right-wing and military in staging a coup. This has been the case in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras...
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Jun 27, 2018, 12:56pm
Commentary
Did Sen. Warner and Comey ‘Collude’ on Russia-gate?
Ray McGovern: The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak ... A deal that was being discussed last year between Assange and U.S. government officials would have given Assange “limited immunity” to allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been exiled for six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit through redactions “some classified CIA information he might release in the future,” ... The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to “provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases,”...
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Jun 27, 2018, 12:43pm
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