News Articles | January 23, 2022
There is one last hope for the United States. It does not lie in the ballot box. It lies in the union organizing and strikes by workers at Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, Lyft, John Deere, Kellogg, the Special Metals plant in Huntington, West Virginia, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the Northwest Carpenters Union, Kroger, teachers in Chicago, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, fast-food workers, hundreds of nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
Organized workers, often defying their timid union leadership, are on the march across the United States. Over four million workers, about 3% of the work force, mostly from accommodation and food services, healthcare and social assistance, transportation, housing, and utilities have walked away from jobs, rejecting poor pay along with punishing and risky working conditions. READ MORE
As the U.S. moves nuclear forces closer and closer to the border of Russia, and as our corporate media bang their war drums louder and louder, does anyone remember the Cuban missile crisis?
In June of 1961, just three months after the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was defeated, the United States began the deployment of fifteen Jupiter nuclear missiles to Turkey, which shared a border with the Soviet Union. Each missile, armed with a W49 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead, was equivalent to 175 Hiroshima bombs. With their fifteen-hundred-mile range, the missiles were capable of annihilating Moscow, Leningrad, and every major city and base in the Russian heartland. Each missile could incinerate Moscow in just sixteen minutes from launch, thus wildly raising the possibility of thermonuclear war caused by technological accident, human error, miscommunication, or preemptive attack. READ MORE
As the West worked itself into a lather in the last month over Russia moving its troops within its own borders, one GOP senator, Roger Wicker of Mississippi bellowed on December 8 that the U.S. should attack Russia with nuclear weapons. This horrifying threat to end human life on the planet comes from someone of no little puissance, as others quickly noted. Wicker sits on the armed services committee. So he communes regularly with Pentagon bigwigs, many of whom are said to have little regard for presidential professions of concern for posterity and promises never to explode the nuclear devices that would eliminate that posterity once and for all. One must assume when someone of Wicker’s exalted position speaks, he speaks not only for himself. READ MORE
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken today in Geneva. The two discussed Moscow’s recent request that NATO stop expanding towards Russia’s borders, particularly into Ukraine. But the US and European NATO states have repeatedly rejected that proposal. RT America’s Peter Oliver gives us the latest. (1:12) Then, former UK MP George Galloway and NYT bestselling author and President of the Schlafly Eagles Ed Martin share their perspectives. (6:34) A Belgian court found a 45-year-old Vietnamese man guilty of human trafficking in connection with the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants whose bodies were found in a truck in Britain back in 2020. The three men and eight women were making their way to the UK from Southeast Asia – in hopes of finding better jobs and pay, but instead, met a brutal demise. RT America’s John Huddy has more. (17:04) Four and a half years after London’s deadly Grenfell fire tragedy, fears of a repeat have emerged among the public. That’s amid plans to build a new high rise in the area – with yet again – just one fire escape for its residents. RT’s Shadia Edwards-Dashti has the details. (19:36) _WATCH
"There is a deadly ticking clock counting swiftly down."
So says Tom Gammage, an ocean campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a United Kingdom-based group whose new report warns that only a muscular global treaty can turn the tide against the life-threatening crisis of plastic pollution.
Published on Tuesday, Connecting the Dots: Plastic Pollution and the Planetary Emergency assembles the latest scientific data to show how the unprecedented accumulation of toxic plastic particles "directly undermines our health, drives biodiversity loss, exacerbates climate change, and risks generating large-scale harmful environmental changes." READ MORE
There's a human-caused extinction crisis underway—probably the start of the Sixth Mass Extinction—and denial or indifference to this planetary crisis is "an abrogation of moral responsibility," according to scientists behind a new study.
Published last week in the journal Biological Reviews, the assessment by biologists from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris finds that the unprecedented rate of species loss is undeniable. The authors reject both the argument that the human-caused loss of species are simply a natural trajectory of life on Earth and that extinction rates are exaggerated.
Part of the issue, they say, may rest in a reliance on the "Red List" maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The list, despite assessing over 120,000 species, covers a mere 5.6% of the over 2.2 million animal and plant species recognized by taxonomists. READ MORE
Progressive International recently asked for contributions so they can send a delegation to Havana next week to promote Cuba's effort to vaccinate the world against Covid-19.
But in an apparent genuflection to the illegal U.S. embargo against the island, Dutch multinational bank ING has blocked all donations supporting the trip, the group said Tuesday.
"This is scandalous," said Progressive International (PI) general coordinator David Adler.
"The U.S. wields unparalleled power over our global financial system," Adler continued. "Yesterday, a message received by our supporter revealed the far-reaching consequences of the U.S. embargo on Cuba: a European bank, established in the Netherlands, has decided to put the interests of the U.S. government above the lives of millions of people." READ MORE
The level of chemical pollution on Earth has crossed a "planetary boundary" and now threatens global ecosystems that support all life, according to a new study on human-made substances whose production has rapidly increased in recent decades.
Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC) examined the levels of 350,000 plastics, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and other chemicals and found that human activity is releasing so many of these substances each year that their production has altered "the remarkably stable state Earth has remained within for 10,000 years—since the dawn of civilization." READ MORE
Ayear ago, VICE’s Motherboard published an account of the underhanded tactics used by IRI Consultants, the “union avoidance” firm Google hired to prevent its employees from unionizing. The report used leaked files to show how IRI gathered private information on the personalities, work ethics, and motivations of its clients’ employees and then used that data to target individual workers in an effort to sway their votes in union elections.
While the corporate press has lately reported on the upsurge in unionization efforts by workers at Big Tech companies, it has mostly ignored how these companies regularly hire union-busting consultants to thwart those organizing efforts. Project Censored identified Motherboard’s report on Google union-busting as one of the most important but underreported news stories of 2020-2021. READ MORE
Minutes after their bombshell exposé of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s crimes, Project Veritas was banned by Twitter in an effort to hide the incriminating evidence from the public.
On Monday evening, minutes before the Twitter ban, Project Veritas released never before seen military documents detailing the origins of Covid-19, gain-of-function research, vaccines, potential treatments, and the government’s effort to hide everything from the public.
The newly U.S. military documents prove that Dr. Fauci lied under oath.
Thegatewaypundit.com reports: Fauci has repeatedly testified under oath to Congress that the US government was never involved in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. READ MORE
Joe Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve longstanding foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising.
Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. READ MORE
During 2021, there were signs of growing militancy in America’s beleaguered union movement, as thousands of workers went out on strike at John Deere, Kellogg’s, Nabisco, Frito-Lay, Volvo, Frontier Communications, New York University, and Columbia University, as did thousands more from the ranks of union carpenters, hospital workers, airport workers, and coal miners.
Even so, William Scheuerman argues in this new, groundbreaking book, U.S. unions are in deep trouble and, acting alone, they “cannot deliver a resurgent labor movement.”
Scheuerman is well-qualified to deal with labor issues for, in addition to his academic credentials as professor emeritus of political science at SUNY/Oswego, he served as president of United University Professions (the largest higher education union in the United States) for 14 years and as president of the AFL-CIO’s National Labor College for another two. READ MORE
Astrike waged by over 8,000 grocery workers in Colorado has ended after the union announced on Friday that it has reached a tentative agreement with King Soopers, which is owned by grocery giant Kroger.
Union members will begin voting on the three-year deal on Monday. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 told workers that they are to return to work within a week.
The terms of the agreement have not yet been made public, but workers will be given details in the coming days. Kim Cordova, the president of UFCW Local 7, praised the deal.
“After months of negotiations and after our members walked out on strike, we have reached a tentative agreement with King Soopers/City Market that addresses the company’s unfair labor practices and ensures that our members will receive the respect, pay and protection they warrant,” Cordova said in a statement. READ MORE
The final big legislative achievement of 2021 was a bill authorizing $768 billion in military spending for the next fiscal year. President Biden signed it two days after the Christmas holiday glorifying the Prince of Peace.
Dollar figures can look abstract on a screen, but they indicate the extent of the mania. Biden had asked for “only” $12 billion more than President Trump’s bloated military budget of the previous year — but that wasn’t enough for the bipartisan hawkery in the House and Senate, which provided a boost of $37 billion instead.
Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending — while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations at many local, state, and national government agencies. It’s a nonstop trend of reinforcing the warfare state in sync with warped neoliberal priorities. While outsized profits keep benefiting the upper class and enriching the already obscenely rich, the cascading effects of extreme income inequality are drowning the hopes of the many. READ MORE
Given the speed at which the most cherished landmarks of American liberalism–reproductive rights, workplace safety, voting rights and the regulatory power of the state–are being shredded, a recently-arrived foreign exchange student (assuming there are any left who want to come here, except to sample the potent quality of our fentanyl) might be forgiven for assuming that rightwing vandals seized the capitol 15 years ago and began ransacking the government. But hark, young scholars! The Democrats have controlled the White House for nine of the last 15 years and have not once in the last 50 years dropped below the magical threshold of 40 senators, giving them the power (bestowed upon them by the Senate Parliamentarian, if not the exalted Founding Fathers) to stop almost every species of legislative filthiness the barbarians on the other side of the aisle might cook up in their Koch Bros-funded laboratories. READ MORE
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did not wait for fellow Republicans to finish blockading federal voting rights legislation in the Senate before ramping up suppression efforts in his home state. Experts and activists say DeSantis is clearly targeting Black and Brown voters.
In an unusual move on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, DeSantis proposed an alternative political map for Florida that experts said would dilute the power of Latino voters and effectively eliminate two majority-Black voting districts out of only four in the state. DeSantis then asked Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature for nearly $6 million to create the nation’s first state police force for enforcing election laws, including sweeping new voting restrictions he signed into law last year. READ MORE
Syria’s largest dam was supposed to be off-limits during the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State, but nearly five years ago, the Pentagon bombed it anyway, jeopardizing tens of thousands of civilians’ lives, the New York Times reported Thursday.
The Tabqa Dam is a massive, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that holds back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley home to hundreds of thousands of people. It was also “a strategic linchpin” controlled by the Islamic State, the newspaper noted.
On March 26, 2017, a series of explosions battered the dam, knocking workers to the ground and sparking a power outage, fire, and equipment failures. As the reservoir began to rise, local authorities urged people living downstream to flee. The entire dam could have failed, experts say, had one of the bombs not been a dud. READ MORE
The youth-led Sunrise Movement on Thursday deemed President Joe Biden’s first year in office a failure on the existential threat of climate change, which the administration has vowed to tackle while simultaneously greenlighting fossil fuel projects that will worsen the crisis.
In a statement marking the one-year anniversary of the president’s inauguration, Sunrise executive director Varshini Prakash said that “Biden is failing us — he’s failing young people and the millions of people that took a chance on him in 2020 because he refuses to meet the moment we’re in right now — from the climate crisis to the student debt crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.” READ MORE
New reporting has revealed that the scheme to use fake electors to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021, was coordinated by members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign team, including Rudy Giuliani, who was his personal lawyer at the time.
Giuliani and other campaign associates coordinated the plan on a state-by-state level, sources told CNN. The Trump campaign was directly involved in finding Trump loyalists to participate in the plan in seven states, and ensured that fake electors could have rooms in statehouses to conduct their unofficial business.
The fake electors’ documents – which were forged but purported to be official – were sent to the National Archives. READ MORE
In the early weeks of the pandemic, novelist and activist Arundhati Roy brilliantly laid out the stakes of one of the coronavirus’s reverberating impacts. According to Roy, COVID-19 profoundly disrupted everyone’s modes of living under global capitalism. “It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a halt,” she wrote. Roy then powerfully asserted that the pandemic was — among other things — “a portal,” or a moment for us to “temporarily, perhaps … make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it [capitalism] or look for a better engine.” READ MORE
As reproductive freedom is imperiled by the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority and Republican-led state legislatures, advocates rallied in Washington, D.C. on Saturday—the 49th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling—while abortion rights supporters called on lawmakers to pass legislation to codify Roe as the "law of the land."
Rights defenders gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court in the nation's capital, where Sam Goldman of Rise Up for Abortion Rights and Refuse Fascism led demonstrators in chanting, "We refuse to let the Supreme Court decimate women's rights and their humanity."
"We refuse to go back," the crowd roared. "No surrender! Abortion on demand and without apology!"
"It's the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and if we don't fight like hell it could very well be the last," Goldman warned. READ MORE
The recent drone and missile attacks in Abu Dhabi claimed by the Houthis, as well as the retaliatory Saudi coalition airstrikes on a residential area in Sana'a on Monday, show that the war on Yemen continues to destabilize the region and that civilians are still paying the highest price. Worse, the Biden Administration now says it may re-designate the Houthis as terrorists, which could cut off even more humanitarian aid beyond the current Saudi blockade strangling the country.
Biden said last year at this time that he wanted to end the war, but this appears to be moving the needle in the complete opposite direction.
The Houthi attacks on Abu Dhabi's airport and an oil facility on Monday killed three civilian workers, and the immediate coalition response killed at least 20 people, mostly women and children. While the U.S. and the rest of the world have neglected the conflict and ignored the increasingly dire humanitarian crisis there, the war has intensified again. READ MORE
A series of Saudi-led airstrikes were blamed Friday for killing scores of people in Yemen as civilians, including children, continue to suffer deadly consequences of the U.S.-backed conflict that has lasted for years.
Overnight bombings included one that targeted a prison holding mostly migrants in the northern city of Sa'ada, an area described as being under the control of Houthi forces.
"It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. It seems to have been a horrific act of violence," said Ahmed Mahat, MSF's (Doctors Without Borders) head of mission in Yemen.
A hospital in the city "has received 138 wounded and 70 dead" and is "so overwhelmed that they can't take any more patients," MSF said. READ MORE
After grilling fossil fuel chief executives on climate disinformation at a historic hearing last year, Democratic leaders sent letters late Thursday calling for board members at the same four major oil and gas giants to testify next month before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
The testimony requests—and the threat of subpoenas if they don't cooperate—come after ExxonMobil, one of the targeted companies, came under fire this week for a new net-zero plan that one critic called "more greenwashing from the biggest climate liar in history."
Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), welcomed Democrats' demand that members of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell's boards of directors join the February 8 hearing to discuss the companies' climate commitments. READ MORE
A group of more than 100 millionaires and billionaires on Wednesday presented fellow members of the global economic elite with a stark choice: "It's taxes or pitchforks."
In an open letter published amid the corporate-dominated virtual Davos summit, 102 rich individuals—including such prominent figures as Disney heiress Abigail Disney and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer—warned that "history paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like."
"For all our well-being—rich and poor alike—it's time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich," the letter reads. "Show the people of the world that you deserve their trust."
The letter was released hours after an analysis conducted by the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam, and Patriotic Millionaires showed that a modest annual wealth tax targeting the world's millionaires and billionaires would raise $2.52 trillion dollars a year, enough to lift billions of people out of poverty and vaccinate the world against Covid-19. READ MORE
The Zero Hour recently interviewed whistleblower, activist, and author Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers more than half a century ago and has remained a voice of conscience ever since. A national security analyst in the 1960s, Ellsberg's most recent book is "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner."
Ellsberg spoke about the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation, the move to build more world-threatening ICBMs, and the need for a renewed anti-war movement. Some excerpts from the conversation are below (they have been lightly edited for clarity): READ MORE
Throughout 2021, Americans were absorbed in arguments over mask mandates, school closings and the meaning of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Meanwhile, geopolitical hot spots were erupting across Eurasia, forming a veritable ring of fire around that vast land mass.
Let’s circle that continent to visit just a few of those flashpoints, each one suffused with significance for the future of U.S. global power.
On the border with Ukraine, 100,000 Russian troops were massing with tanks and rocket launchers, ready for a possible invasion. Meanwhile, Beijing signed a $400 billion agreement with Tehran to swap infrastructure-building for Iranian oil. Such an exchange might help make that country the future rail hub of Central Asia, while projecting China’s military power into the Persian Gulf. Just across the Iranian border in Afghanistan, Taliban guerrillas swept into Kabul ending a 20-year American occupation in a frantic flurry of shuttle flights for more than 100,000 defeated Afghan allies. READ MORE
Speakers: Brian Becker, Max Blumenthal, Randy Credico, Leo Flores, Eleanor Goldfield, John Kiriakou, Marianne Williamson and Ann Wilcox.
On Monday at 10:45 GMT the High Court in London will announce its decision on whether it will permit Assange to appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court on its ruling to allow his extradition. The High Court’s decision is a formality however, as Assange can apply directly to the Supreme Court to appeal if the High Court does not grant permission.
The Supreme Court’s website says: “An application for permission to appeal must be made first to the Court of Appeal. If that Court refuses permission, an application may be made to The Supreme Court. An application is made by filing an application for permission to appeal.” _WATCH
The United States and Russia still maintain vast nuclear arsenals of mutual assured destruction, putting the future of humanity in jeopardy every instant. But an unnerving nonchalance has settled over the American side which has become so casual about the risk of cataclysmic war that the West’s propaganda and passions now ignore Russian fears and sensitivities.
A swaggering goofiness has come to dominate how the United States reacts to Russia, with American politicians and journalists dashing off tweets and op-eds, rushing to judgment about the perfidy of Moscow’s leaders, blaming them for almost anything and everything.
These days, playing with nuclear fire is seen as a sign of seriousness and courage. Anyone who urges caution and suggests there might be two sides to the U.S.-Russia story is dismissed as a wimp or a stooge. A what-me-worry “group think” has taken hold across the U.S. ideological spectrum. Fretting about nuclear annihilation is so 1960s. READ MORE
Throughout the long, documented history of the United States illegally overthrowing governments of foreign lands to build a global empire there has emerged three ways Washington broadly carries out “regime change.”
From Above. If the targeted leader has been democratically elected and enjoys popular support, the C.I.A. has worked with elite groups, such as the military, to overthrow him (sometimes through assassination). Among several examples is the first C.I.A-backed coup d’état, on March 30, 1949, just 18 months after the agency’s founding, when Syrian Army Colonel Husni al-Za’im overthrew the elected president, Shukri al-Quwatli. READ MORE
In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled “Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste and gender.”
“Multidimensional poverty” is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at 10 indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. READ MORE
In a drastic pivot from typical denunciations of false flag operations as conspiratorial nonsense that don’t exist outside the demented imagination of Alex Jones, the U.S. political/media class is proclaiming with one voice that Russia is currently orchestrating just such an operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine.
“As part of its plans, Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday. “We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine.” READ MORE
And, what do Hiatt and other neocons at The Washington Post say about confronting the Russians over the Ukraine crisis, which was stoked by neocon holdovers in the U.S. State Department, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 to replace the CIA in the business of destabilizing targeted governments? [See Consortium News “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]
The Post is demanding a new Cold War with Russia in retaliation for its relatively non-violent interventions to protect pro-Russian provinces of two countries that were carved out of the old Soviet Union: Georgia where Russian troops have protected South Ossetia and Abkhazia since 2008 and in Ukraine where Russian soldiers have taken control of Crimea. In both cases, the pro-Russian areas felt threatened from their central governments and sought Moscow’s assistance. READ MORE
Restrictions including COVID-19 passes, mask mandates, and work-from-home guidance will be removed in England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday.
Johnson also suggested that self-isolation rules may also be thrown out at the end of March as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic becomes endemic.
Effective immediately, the UK government is no longer asking people to work from home.
The COVID pass mandate for nightclubs and large events won’t be renewed when it expires on Jan. 26.
Also from Jan. 27, indoor mask-wearing will no longer be compulsory anywhere in England.
The requirement for secondary school pupils to wear masks during class and in communal areas will be lifted on Jan. 20. The Department for Education is expected to update its national guidance soon.
Health Secretary Sajid Jajid will also announce plans to ease restrictions on care home visits in the coming days.
Roaring cheers from lawmakers could be heard in the House of Commons following Johnson’s announcements on masks. READ MORE
‘This is intentional, premeditated, mass murder. There’s absolutely no doubt about it because nothing else makes any sense,’ said attorney Reiner Fuellmich. ‘We’re going to get them.’
A recent analysis of public government data reveals very high percentages of adverse events reported as a result of COVID-19 experimental “vaccine” injections, including over 21,000 deaths, have occurred in a small minority of product batches released by pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Furthermore, according to analysts, the wide dispersement of these highly toxic batches (or “lots”) to numerous U.S. states, along with their apparent sequential labeling according to levels of toxicity, is evidence of intentionality in adulterating the contents of the shots and is thus likely a serious violation of federal regulations that require such products to have consistency. READ MORE
The How Bad Is My Batch Website
Displays number of deaths and disabilities associated with each batch/lot number = indication of relative toxicity of one batch/lot compared to another
No one currently knows the reason why some batches/lots are associated with excessive deaths, disabilities and adverse reactions (up to 50 x). Until we do know, it is best to be cautious
[“Batch-code” = “Lot Number” = the number they write on your vaccination card.]
Check out your batch code (lot number)
Over the past few months, U.S. lawmakers, the Afghan government, and the international community have called on Washington to stop strangling the Afghan economy as its people continue to suffer from a U.S.-created humanitarian crisis. On December 22nd, the Biden administration effectively rejected those calls, opting instead for half-measures that will do little to counter the effects of stringent economic sanctions imposed on the Taliban or to improve the material well-being of the Afghan people.
Sanctions in Context
Contrary to the narrative of U.S. politicians and journalists, the August 2021 withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan did not mark the end of the United States’ so-called “forever war” but rather a shift in U.S. policy—from direct military intervention and occupation to one based on economic sanctions and indirect political subversion. Although the tactics changed, the goal is the same: the accumulation of wealth and power through class warfare against the Afghan people. READ MORE
Let us recall his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. READ MORE
“The bottom of the Empire,” was Reverend Jesse Jackson’s description of who Martin Luther King was seeking to serve with his politically revolutionary ministry of the 1960s. Jackson was standing in the Reverend Martin Luther King Legacy Apartments on the West Side of Chicago to give a press conference on, what would have been, King’s 93rd birthday, January 15, 2022. Joining Jackson were representatives from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and the Illinois Union for the Homeless. The city of Chicago has transformed the lobby of the King Legacy apartment building into a small museum, showcasing the governmental-capital conspiracy that created the “ghetto.” Through decades of redlining and other discriminatory lending practices, public infrastructural programs to preserve segregation, police enforcement of residential borders, and “neighborhood covenants” among white homeowners and landlords to never sell or rent to Blacks, Northern cities became white fiefdoms. READ MORE
To speak of “fascism” in American political discourse has long been one of the great taboos of political life – the wise opinion-leaders ritually insisting that this nefarious reference, like dictatorship, tyranny, and totalitarianism, is relevant exclusively to other countries.
* Carl Boggs, 2018
In my writing and interviews, I have consistently referred to Donald Trump as a fascist. I have received a great deal of resistance to that claim.
* Salon columnist Chauncy de Vega, May 1, 2017
This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021), by Paul Street
Deniers
The liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put things well on the morning of January 7, 2021, in a column titled “Appeasement Got Us Where We Are”:
‘So, is it finally OK to use the F-word? One shouldn’t use the term “fascist” lightly…Donald Trump, however, is indeed a fascist — an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals. So are many of his supporters. If you had any doubts about that, Wednesday’s attack on Congress should have ended them.’ READ MORE
I have a story to tell you. It regards the mayhem you see all around you. The exponential growth tearing apart being, sending humanity well beyond Earth’s carrying capacity, and threating perma-war, abject poverty, and environmental collapse if we don’t act immediately…
We will get to the solutions, but first understand the magnitude of intertwined crises as biosphere collapse looms.
Earth is massive yet finite. For eons humans have intensively cultivated natural ecosystems, and once overexploited, moved on to destroy the next forest, grassland, and aquatic ecosystem. At low population densities, this allowed diminished areas time to recover.
In an ecological blink of an eye humanity’s population has exploded. In just over a century, human numbers have surged nearly ten-fold from one to eight billion. It’s so damn simple – the actual and perceived material needs of these apex predators in sum are totally and completely overwhelming nature. READ MORE
The Chinese are in the process of displacing the monopoly of the US dollar. They are dropping their US Treasury bonds, stockpiling gold reserves, and opening regional distribution banks for their own national currency. This will give them easier access to capital markets and insulate them from financial manipulation by Washington and Wall Street.
Fearing the eclipsing of the US dollar and the Bretton Woods system by a rival financial architecture the US response has been an attempt to damage the Chinese markets and increase the value of China’s currency. China has responded through regulations in the market and then quantitative easing of its currency to maintain the low prices of Chinese manufactured goods and exports.
Beijing’s quantitative easing is a reaction or response to the financial manipulation of Washington and Wall Street. Additionally, Washington never thought that the Chinese would respond by dumping US Treasury bonds. Instead of the hysteria about the Chinese economy, «the impending collapse of the US dollar should be getting all of the attention of investors», one US economist (Peter Schiff) has warned. Schiff’s voice is one of many analysts saying that the talk about the Chinese economy faltering is exaggerated and bad spirited. READ MORE