US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is willing to risk a war with China in order to defend “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea. Speaking in Honolulu, Hawaii on Wednesday, Carter issued his “most forceful” warning yet, demanding “an immediate and lasting halt to land reclamation” by China in the disputed Spratly Islands. Carter said: “There should be …
Inducing Psychosis: Who’s the Real “Menace to Society”: Journalist or Leading Psychiatrist? by BRUCE E. LEVINE
On April 26, 2015, Jeffrey Lieberman, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, stirred up controversy by calling investigative journalist Robert Whitaker a “menace to society” on CBC radio because Whitaker, in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, had challenged the long-term effectiveness of psychiatric medication. But is it Whitaker or Lieberman who has been a menace to society? Lieberman, the APA president through May 2014, …
In Search of the Democratic Soul – Richard Eskow
A Google search for the phrase “soul of the Democratic Party” yields thousands of hits, because the struggle for that soul has been a perennial subject of debate. I’ve probably used the phrase myself. But after a week spent tracking the independent left’s political progress, I’ve become even more convinced that politicians should seek the soul of the country instead. Tap into that, and the …
How Much Money Did the Fed Dump into the Stock Market? By Joshua Krause
Ever since the housing crash of 2008 and the stock market crash that followed, there has been an undeniable trend in our economy. As soon as the Fed began its quantitative easing program, the stock market started to recover. The more cash they dumped into the economy, the higher NASDAQ would soar. To the central planners in Washington, this was a recovery, …
The College Bureaucracy: How Education Forgot the Students and Became A Business By Devon DB
Students attend college to pursue their interests, broaden their intellectual horizons and make headway toward a career. While this is made difficult due to the amount of debt that many must saddle in order to earn a degree, there is also another, much stealthier problem as well: the college bureaucracy. University bureaucracies absorb large amounts of funding and undermine the …
Why is the media ignoring Israel’s alliance with al-Qaeda? Asa Winstanley
Since January, I have been ploughing a lonely furrow in this column by covering what is certainly one of the most under-reported stories in the world right now: Israeli involvement in the war in Syria. Almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, Israel’s occupation forces in the Golan Heights have been in alliance with the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s official franchise in …
When the Left Promotes the Political Economy of the Far-Right by ROB URIE
The American preference for ideological, or ideologically based, explanations of world events frames them as both self-generated and inexplicable— self-generated because causal relations recover history and thereby clutter ideology and inexplicable in that ideology didn’t exist until it did, again recovering history. Through an ideological frame the American Revolution was driven by the desire for ‘freedom’ and the Russian and …
Is US Planning to Increase Military Aid to Israel Even More? – Sarah Lazare
The United States is “likely” to significantly boost its already astronomical military aid to Israel, Reutersreported Thursday. Citing an anonymous U.S. official, journalist Dan Williams wrote that, after the $3 billion annual military aid package expires in 2017, this amount could be raised to $3.6 to $3.7 a year. An unidentified Israeli official pegged this post-2017 amount between $3.5 billion and $4 …
Media failing on climate-change coverage – Tyler Hamilton
More than two dozen news publishers from around the world launched an initiative on May 21 called the Climate Publishers Network, spearheaded by the popular U.K. newspaper The Guardian. As members of the network, publishers agree to freely share climate change-related news content to raise public awareness of environmental issues in the lead-up to the UN climate change summit in …
Ben Gurion’s 1948 Letter: The Ethnic Cleansing Policy and Palestinians “Right of Return” By Jonathan Cook
Over many decades, Israel’s self-serving deceptions about the Nakba in 1948 have been exposed for the lies Palestinians already knew them to be. It was long accepted in the west that, as Israel claimed, Palestinians left their homes because they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab leaders. The lie usefully distracted diplomats and scholars from the much more pertinent question of why Israel had refused to allow 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return to …