Subjects Archives: Media

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” —Malcolm X

It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.

AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.

A Review of Michael Hudson’s new book AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS

The camps organised by nationalist parties train children as young as 8 to hate Russians, foreigners and gay people—and they now receive considerable government money to do so, reports YURAS KARMANAU

When the Great Financial Crisis hit in 2008, there was a gasp of guilty excitement on the left at the sudden re-emergence of the conditions for radical social change, after 30 years of what has become known even by mainstream economists as ‘neoliberalism’: an obsession with privatisation and financialisation that has made the world more […]

Ex-Trump aide’s visit ‘legitimises racist views’

You all know how the saying goes: “Poor Mexico–too far from God, too close to the United States.”

In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives–supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order”–rather than in individuals.

Italian street artist Jorit Agoch unveiled one of the largest and most impressive murals of the Latin American revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara days ahead of the 51st anniversary of his assassination at the hands of the Bolivian army in La Higuera, Bolivia.   

It would be a mistake to see Germany’s Greens as radical, well to the left. While the Greens stress environment above all, they have decided that this does not require conflict with big business, which must simply be convinced that ecology and profits can be combined.

Although initially obscured by The Economist, among others, the sudden and unprecedented increase in Russian adult male mortality during 1992-1994 is no longer denied. Instead, the debate is now over why?

The October 16 issue of NY Review of Books has an article by Janine di Giovanni titled “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets”. The article exemplifies how western media promotes the White Helmets uncritically and attacks those who challenge the myth.

The Electronic Intifada has obtained a complete copy of The Lobby–USA, a four-part undercover investigation by Al Jazeera into Israel’s covert influence campaign in the United States.

Bolsonaro’s rise to power came with a welter of misinformation, rumour and lies. What role did ‘fake news’ play in the far right leader’s victory?

We need individuals and social movements willing to disturb the normalization of a fascist politics, oppose racist, sexist, and neoliberal orthodoxy.

The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report earlier this week on “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” apparently based on the fact that “coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” even though Marx’s birth was in May (1818).

The second round of elections in Brazil will take place Oct. 28, and this time two opponents will face off. On the one side is Fernando Haddad from the Workers’ Party (PT) who promises to continue the project started by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

Sivamohan Valluvan and Eleanor Penny unpack neoliberal attitudes to migration and ‘low-value’ humans.

War is romantic only when it is limited to the confines of a sanitized imagination. Movies that portray heroic soldiers vanquishing demonic enemy combatants or rescuing fallen comrades may whip up jingoistic war fever, but horrific images of real children and elders maimed, scarred, dismembered and killed during armed conflicts have the power to end wars.