Archive | December, 2017

  • Illustration of Stagnation

    Secular Stagnation

    The fundamental changes I would advocate are those that would: dramatically boost worker power; secure a progressive and growing funding base for a needed expansion of public housing and infrastructure and public spending on health care, education, and transportation; and end the production and use of fossil fuels and significantly reduce greenhouse emissions.

  • Seymour Hersh

    Useful idiots who undermine dissent on Syria

    There has been much disingenuous criticism of those, like me, who question why the western corporate media have studiously ignored the latest investigation by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh on Syria. Hersh had to publish his piece in a German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, after the entire US and UK media rejected his article. There has still been no mention of his investigation more than a week later.

  • Students at Bay Point Middle school work on a science assignment in 2011

    New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes

    Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

  • Face to face. Phil Collins and the lichen-encrusted statue

    Phil Collins: why I took a Soviet statue of Engels across Europe to Manchester

    Friedrich Engels spent two decades in Manchester. The horrific conditions he saw in the cradle of industrialism forged his great works. But the city has never commemorated him – until now.

  • New Yorkers protest Trump

    Are liberals having second thoughts about immigration?

    On June 20 The Atlantic posted an article by Peter Beinart claiming that the Democrats had “lost their way on immigration.” While the article has been lauded by Rightwingers, it is mostly a compendium of familiar sound bites on immigration, presented without much understanding of the issues.

  • Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason

    David Harvey: Marx, Capital and the madness of economic reason

    David Harvey, one of the most influential figures in geography and urban studies, and among the most cited intellectuals of all time across the humanities and social sciences, delivered a featured lecture, “Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason.” at the 2017 AAG annual Meeting.

  • Media’s propaganda war on Syria in full flow

    Media’s propaganda war on Syria in full flow

    If you wish to understand the degree to which a supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and docile, then there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

  • The trouble with geoengineers “hacking the planet”

    The trouble with geoengineers “hacking the planet”

    To be sure, I can actually imagine a world in which a small and strictly limited amount of albedo modification could sensibly be deployed as a complement to strong and largely successful efforts to bring carbon dioxide emissions towards zero, accompanied by successful deployment of technologies for actively removing the gas from the atmosphere. But that would be a world with a truly exceptional level of international agreement, fact-based decision-making, and cooperation towards shared goals. A world where somebody like Donald Trump can become president of a superpower is not that world.

  • Seymour Hersh

    Seymour Hersh dishes on new exposé upending the official story about Trump and Syrian chemical attacks

    Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who famously exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and more recently, the U.S. military’s abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. This weekend, Hersh reported that the alleged chemical attack in Idlib, Syria, this March was not perpetrated by the Syrian military, as the Trump administration has claimed

  • President Donald Trump signing the new Cuba policy

    US Cuba policy has been hijacked by Cuban-Americans

    US policy toward Cuba (Trump reverses Obama’s Cuba deal, limiting travel and trade, 17 June) has been hijacked by a clique of Cuban-American politicians, who have sold their support in Congress to President Donald Trump. Above all, these individuals – and Trump – have demonstrated the corrupt and clientelist nature of the US political system. Can such a system serve as a symbol of “freedom” to anyone in the world?

  • Izzadine Mustafa

    Izzy out loud

    This year, Ramadan—the ninth month of the Islamic year, in which observant Muslims fast to commemorate the revelation of the Quran—happens to coincide with most of Gay Pride month. Quiet as it’s kept, there are uncounted numbers of queer Muslims in the gay community. One of them is Izzadine Mustafa.

  • W. E. B. Du Bois mural in Philadelphia, 2011. Photograph by Laurenellen McCann / Flickr

    W. E. B. Du Bois’s revolutions

    “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” With this sober stroke of his insurgent pen, the 93-year-old scholar joined the Communist Party.

  • Our duty to win

    Organizing a strategy that is likely to win is no easy task. After all, the enemies of the working class are more powerful today than ever before; they have control over the military, the media, the courts, the politicians, and even the unions. The fight against the patriarchal capitalist system, therefore, must be strategic to be effective.

  • 64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup

    64 years later, CIA finally releases details of Iranian coup

    Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.

  • Seymour Hersh

    Trump ignored intel before bombing Syria

    When the US bombed a Syrian military airfield in April, the White House said US intelligence had confirmed the Assad regime used chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhun.… Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reports US intelligence actually warned president Trump it had no evidence that the Syrian military had used sarin gas.

  • In this image provided by the U.S. Navy, the guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) launches a tomahawk land attack missile in the Mediterranean Sea, Friday, April 7, 2017. (Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ford Williams/U.S. Navy via AP).

    Trump‘s red line

    President Donald Trump ignored important intelligence reports when he decided to attack Syria after he saw pictures of dying children. Seymour M. Hersh investigated the case of the alleged Sarin gas attack.

  • When you reject class-based politics

    When you reject class-based politics

    If you reject from the outset the idea of uniting a majority based on shared economic interests, then pretty much all you’ve got left is the “thoughtful and humane co-optation” of racism and xenophobia.

  • Comic about Trump in the LA Times

    John Bellamy Foster interviewed on Law and Disorder radio

    Is Trump a neofascist? Thoughtful analysts on the left like Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism. They call him a right wing populist. What is neofascism? Right wing Populism? Does it really matter what Trump is called? The great German playwright and political thinker who lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, Berthold Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it fourth?” We speak today with John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable magazine “Monthly Review”. He wrote the lead article in the current June 2017 issue titled “This Is Not Populism.”

  • The MQ-9 Reaper, a combat drone, in flight

    Killer drones and the militarization of U.S. foreign policy

    In the eyes of many around the world, diplomacy has taken a back seat to military operations in U.S. foreign policy. The drone program is a prime example.

  • Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro participate in a rally in support of the National Constituent Assembly in Caracas

    What do Venezuelans think?

    Venezuelan public opinion is not what you’d expect if you rely on the disinformation loop in which corporate media and Washington-friendly NGOs like HRW participate.