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It’s the Class War, Stupid: An Evening with Noam Chomsky

28Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

USA

It’s the Class War, Stupid: An Evening with Noam Chomsky

BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO - RAIHAN ALAM Photo by Kayle Kaupanger In mid-April, we hosted renowned linguist, political analyst, and activist Noam Chomsky for a speaking and Q&A event at Lehigh University as part of the Douglas Dialogues forum. The event was attended by hundreds of students, faculty, and staff, and provided the Lehigh University community an opportunity to engage in contemporary political issues with Professor Chomsky, as related to the rise of global and domestic extremism. This reflection looks at some of Chomsky’s insights, and what they tell us about the state of democracy in America today. It’s been over two years since the January 6th insurrection, where thousands of far-right rioters stormed our nation’s Capitol in an attempt to stop the peaceful tran...

Wars and More Wars: The Sorry U.S. History in the Middle East

28Apr

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Middle East, USA

Wars and More Wars: The Sorry U.S. History in the Middle East

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photo by Levi Meir Clancy The American republic morphed well over a century ago into an empire of many endless wars. With U.S. troops still in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and numerous African countries, with over 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and a war budget of roughly one trillion dollars a year, it’s no surprise that one of our main exports is weapons and that arms merchants call the shots in Washington. Presidents come and go, but the wars don’t: they drag on. And when a president does manage to extract the country from one of these military quagmires, as Biden did in Afghanistan, he gets nothing but grief. This only serves to encourage barbarity – like freezing Afghanistan’s $7 billion in the bank, while Afghans starve due to the U.S. having...

Has the Worm Turned in the Assange Case?

28Apr

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Human Rights, Media, United Kingdom, USA

Has the Worm Turned in the Assange Case?

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante One of the world’s most courageous whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg challenged U.S. prosecutors on December 6 to come after him, as they have pursued Julian Assange. The 91-year-old Ellsberg, whom the U.S. security state decades ago possibly hoped to drive to suicide, announced that he too had received leaked materials containing evidence of U.S. war crimes from former military analyst Chelsea Manning. “Let’s take this to the Supreme Court,” Ellsberg said, ready to contest the constitutionality of the ghastly Espionage Act, used against him and now Assange. Ellsberg’s bombshell followed on some other key news about Assange. Finally, on November 28, mainstream newspapers located, after an arduous search, the elusive courage to ...

27Apr

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Russia, USA, World

The Global Fight Against Fascism

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph Source: Mike Steele – CC BY 2.0 The Spanish civil war of 1936 becomes more relevant every day. That’s because it was a war against fascism in its pure form. In case you wonder what form that is, amid the poisonous, weedy varieties sprouting up globally these days, it’s fascism, exercised through corporate control of government, against and thus persecution of leftists, non-Christians and trade unionists. If that sounds familiar, don’t be surprised to hear it spelled out: this is the explicit program of much of the U.S. Republican party. The Dems enabled it, make no mistake, and they are just as complicit in the corporate merger with government. But they at least have the good grace not to embrace the rest of it. In Spain, when the fascists...

Zapatistas Versus the “Neoliberal War Against Humanity”

27Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Mexico

Zapatistas Versus the “Neoliberal War Against Humanity”

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph Source: (Jose Villa) at VillaPhotography – CC BY-SA 3.0 The Zapatista revolution has survived in Chiapas, southern Mexico, since 1914, and that is a miracle. Zapatistas endured the assaults of government paramilitaries, the betrayals of Mexican presidents and crushing poverty. “They don’t care that we have nothing,” the Zapatistas said of Mexico’s elite at the start of their first uprising, “absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no healthcare, no food, no education, not the right to freely and democratically elect our political representatives nor independence from foreigners.” This specter of destitution loomed over the Zapatistas, and indeed millions of indigenous people because of NAFTA. After a 12-day war ag...

The Military-Industrial Media Complex Strikes Again

27Apr

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USA

The Military-Industrial Media Complex Strikes Again

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph Source: DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison – Public Domain Tens of thousands protested against the skyrocketing cost of living and against Macron in France October 16, led by left-wing politician Jean Luc Melenchon, but there were few front page or top-of-the hour headlines in the U.S. Huge protests occurred in Rome the same day to demand an end to Italy’s involvement in NATO, but no coverage on the west side of the Atlantic. Thousands protesting in Paris October 22 against NATO, but little notice in North America. Massive protests against NATO and inflation due to sanctions on Russian energy in France, Germany and Austria in September, but little news of it here in the heart of the empire. German police beat citizens protesting en...

27Apr

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Human Rights, USA

Homeless in America

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair One of the six colossally dangerous promises made by Trump, should he regain the white house, is his plan to deport homeless people from urban centers to tent cities on the periphery. Another word for tent cities is concentration camps. As anyone with a brain can deduce, a Trump team might very well not stop with packing off the homeless to concentration camps. Next could come Black Lives Matter protesters, anyone accused of being antifa, then all leftists in general, then immigrants, Muslims…you get the picture. Arranging for forced relocation to tent cities is a slippery slope into fascist hell. Even if it is limited only to the unhoused, it would be an execrable violation of their human rights. So it is to be opposed on all c...

27Apr

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USA

Class Warfare Grinds On

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph Source: elliotstoller – https://www.flickr.com/photos/23114432@N05/52024190882/ – CC BY-SA 2.0 The business of America is said to be business. But that is not the business of America’s tens of millions of workers. Their business is getting paid fairly and not working 100 hours per week. Their business is having an occasional day off and paid sick leave. Their business is getting treated decently on the job. And when these things don’t happen, the business of the many millions of blue collar and part-time workers is to strike. Lately they’ve done quite a bit of that. Take Starbucks baristas. They’ve been organizing like mad for months, so much so that management decided to snarl their labor activism by withholding raises from union workers. Sta...

Maybe Civilization Was a Mistake, After All

27Apr

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World

Maybe Civilization Was a Mistake, After All

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photo by Raphaël Biscaldi Civilization was possibly a mistake. It led to capitalism five hundred years ago, and that was unquestionably, absolutely a mistake. Capitalism now consumes the planet. It expands like a metastasizing cancer over the face of the earth, heating the atmosphere to unbearable levels and at the current rate may well destroy our world within another hundred years. We would do well to replace it with something that won’t render the globe uninhabitable. But what? Well, of the 200,000 years that humans have dwelled on this planet, 95 percent of that time we were hunter gatherers. We had better health, greater longevity than our agricultural descendants who ruled for millennia before the current, unfortunate arrangement, less patriarchy, liv...

The Biden-Trump Persecution of Julian Assange

27Apr

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Human Rights, Media, USA

The Biden-Trump Persecution of Julian Assange

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph Source: Jeanne Menjoulet – CC BY 2.0 For a good while one could blame Trump for the prosecutorial monstrosity perpetrated on journalist Julian Assange. But now it’s time for Trump to move over. The single worst assault on the first amendment and a free press in recent centuries is no longer solely his. Biden owns it. Biden could end this state persecution of a journalist today, if he felt like it. A persecution that a U.N. expert has called torture. A persecution that could easily lead to Assange’s death. But maybe that’s the point. Indeed, if killing Assange isn’t the point, Biden should prove it, by pardoning him now. Biden doesn’t feel like it. Unlike Jamal Khashoggi, whose murder he deplored before he didn’t, Biden never censured the years...