Latest News: Archive for the ‘author’ Category

“George HW Bush thought the world belonged to his family. How wrong he was.” – ARIEL DORFMAN in The Guardian

Monday, December 3rd, 2018

As the world says goodbye to George HW Bush, I am tempted to add my own personal memories to the mix, and illuminate perhaps his legacy by recounting the two intense nights that my wife and I spent in close proximity to the former president at the end of October 2001.

It was at the Park Hyatt hotel in Sydney, where I had been invited to deliver the Centennial Lecture celebrating the Federation of Australia. The day after our arrival, the hotel manager – a corpulent, affable man of Spanish extraction – asked us if we wouldn’t mind exchanging our suite, only for the next two days, he said, for another one, just as nice, he promised, elsewhere on the premises.

Read the full article here.

“CBN is the most influential evangelical Christian organization in the world – without a doubt.” – TERRY HEATON discusses Trump and the Christian Broadcasting Network on Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post

Monday, November 5th, 2018

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly labelled much of mainstream American media “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”. But there are a few outlets that are in Trump’s good books.

It’s common knowledge that Fox News is a soft landing spot for the president, but what’s less well known is the wide-ranging access he, and many members of his administration, offer to the much smaller Christian Broadcasting Network, or CBN.

Watch the full program here.

VIJAY PRASHAD on fascism in the age of digital reproduction in the Daily Hampshire Gazette

Thursday, November 1st, 2018

You blame Trump for everything. I admit: It is hard to disagree with you. He is a disagreeable person. There is the sexism and the predatory behavior. There is also the racism and the transphobia. Add to that his acidic rhetoric, the grisly way in which he dismisses all that he dislikes. But then again, there is more to Trump than meets the bile duct. He’s so ordinary these days. So unoriginal.

Read the full article here.

“A fake “balance” between Palestinians and Israelis is a “balance” that favors Israel.” – GREG SHUPAK writing in FAIR

Thursday, October 25th, 2018

Since the Palestinians’ Great Return March began on March 30, Israel has killed 217 Palestinians in Gaza, 163 of whom were participating in the demonstrations. Among the dead are 33 children, three paramedics and four people with disabilities; Israel has injured a further 11,155 Palestinians, many of whom will be maimed for life.

Read the full review here.

“How we roasted Donald Duck, Disney’s agent of imperialism.”- ARIEL DORFMAN in The Guardian

Friday, October 5th, 2018

When Ariel Dorfman co-wrote a book finding colonialist intent in the actions of a well-loved cartoon character, it got burned in Chile’s streets and earned him death threats. Now it’s back – and newly relevant in the ‘pre-fascist’ Trump era. He explains why.

Read the full article here.

Pat Robertson’s Hurricane “Miracle” – TERRY HEATON in Counterpunch

Friday, September 21st, 2018

My old boss Pat Robertson prayed last week that God would turn Hurricane Florence and move her out to sea without harming the coast. That’s a paraphrase, of course, but a fair representation of the prayer. He “commanded” the thing to move in the name of Jesus, according to the Charlotte Observer. The question is did his prayer work?

Read the full article here.

Beyond Bolton: The Path to a Progressive Foreign Policy – MEDEA BENJAMIN in Consortium News

Thursday, September 13th, 2018

America’s miserable record over 30 years should make it clear a serious and genuine commitment to the rule of international law offers a more viable way forward than the “law of the jungle,” argue Nicolas Davies and Medea Benjamin..

Read the full article here.

“I thought democracy in Chile was safe. Now I see America falling into the same trap.” – ARIEL DORFMAN on the 45th anniversary of the coup in Chile in The Guardian

Tuesday, September 11th, 2018

It can’t happen here. That’s an avowal I have been hearing from Americans ever since my family and I, fleeing a dictatorship in our native Chile, finally came to settle in the United States in 1980.

What happened to you in Chile can’t happen here. Democracy in the US is too stable, the institutions too deeply rooted, the people too much in love with liberty.

Read the full article here.

“Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes! In the name of the people of Chile. In the name of the people of Vietnam!” – revisiting the moment MEDEA BENJAMIN confronted John McCain at The Real News

Monday, September 3rd, 2018

BEN NORTON: Longtime Republican Senator John McCain passed away on the 25th of August.

McCain was a vociferous representative of the military-industrial complex on Capitol Hill.

He will be remembered as one of the most hawkish politicians in Washington, one who publicly condemned peace activists as “low-life scum” and joked about bombing Iran.

PROTESTERS: Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes!

MEDEA BENJAMIN: In the name of the people of Chile. In the name of the people of Vietnam!

Watch the incident here.

“Israel Has No Right of Self-Defense Against Gaza.” – JAMIE STERN-WEINER and NORMAN FINKELSTEIN writing in Jacobin

Thursday, August 2nd, 2018

A UN General Assembly resolution “deplore[d] the use of any excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force by the Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians,” while the UN Human Rights Council denounced Israel’s “disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force.” After Israeli snipers killed Razan al-Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old unarmed Palestinian paramedic, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process warned Israel that it “needs to calibrate its use of force.” In a devastating report, Human Rights Watch concluded that “Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip … against demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes.”.

Read the full article here.

JOE LAURIA on the Trump-Putin summit at Loud & Clear

Thursday, July 19th, 2018

On today’s episode of “Loud & Clear,” Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News and author of “How I Lost, By Hillary Clinton,” and Peter Kuznik, a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

Listen to the full interview here.

“We are not our brain: How to break the spell of the neurosciences.” RICCARDO MANZOTTI writing for Science & Nonduality

Thursday, July 12th, 2018

What are we? Are we a soul? An immaterial mind? A flow of energy? A body? A series of neural patterns? Is there an answer to such questions that is compatible both with the hard sciences and with our personal insights? I believe there is, and it is not the one currently defended by neuroscientists (for instance, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831830-300-consciousness-how-were-solving-a-mystery-bigger-than-our-minds/). It’s an answer that will overturn the current accepted conceptual landscape in three steps and it is dubbed The Spread Mind (www.thespreadmind.com). Before getting there, let me outline the common ground with neuroscience.

Read the full article here.

“The Trump Administration’s Human Cages Aren’t New — They Have a Long and Shameful American History.” ARIEL DORFMAN writing for Alternet

Wednesday, July 11th, 2018

When Donald Trump recently accused “illegal immigrants” of wanting to “pour into and infest our country,” there was an immediate outcry. After all, that verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of dehumanizing Jews and communists as rats, vermin, or insects that needed to be eradicated.

Read the full article here.

“Pocket-size but ticks like a bomb.” THE ANIMALS’ VEGAN MANIFESTO in The New York Times

Tuesday, July 10th, 2018

In the East Village in the early 1980s, the British-American artist Sue Coe showed some of the strongest political art of the day, and in the most traditional of media: figurative painting, drawing and printmaking stretching back in its influences to Käthe Kollwitz, José Guadalupe Posada and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya. In such work, reportage, advocacy and emotion are never far apart. And propelling themes — in Ms. Coe’s case, racism, war, capitalism and violence against all animals, including humans — are never in doubt.

Read the full article here.

ALEX NUNNS on the BBC’s bias against Jeremy Corbyn in RT

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018

The BBC has been exposed by startling statistics showing a consistent bias against left-wing political opinion, despite their stated commitment to ‘impartiality’, according to figures compiled by a key Corbyn ally.
Alex Nunns, author of ‘The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power’ and prominent supporter of the Labour leader, has collated figures on the political persuasions of expert journalists who have appeared on the BBC’s Sunday Politics Show.

Nunns has calculated that since the 2017 general election, only 10 percent of journalists to have made an appearance on the panel of three ‘experts’ have been from the left, 33 percent from the center (encompassing the center-left), and a whopping 56 percent from the right.

Read the full article here.

STEPHEN GILPIN on the inside story of Trump University on The Torch

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018

Stephen Gilpin Author of Trump U: The Inside Story of Trump University. The first insider account straight from Trump University, by one of its principal instructors. -Trump University, the infamous and elaborate scheme to con hundreds of earnest citizens out of their hard-earned dollars.

Listen to the full interview here.

MEDEA BENJAMIN discusses the Iran Nuclear Deal and the Korean peace process on the Thom Hartmann Program

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

Listen to the interview here.

The segment with Medea begins approximately 48 minutes into the show.

“I was not in a cage, but was scarred for life.” ARIEL DORFMAN writing for CNN

Monday, June 25th, 2018

Many questions swirl around Donald Trump’s executive order that supposedly reverses his policy of breaking up families at the border, but one thing is certain amid so much confusion, hypocrisy and ineptitude: permanent damage has already been done, and more is to come. Damage to the children and their parents, and damage to the United States and what it stands for.

Read the full article here.

MEDEA BENJAMIN author of INSIDE IRAN interviewed at Loud & Clear

Thursday, June 21st, 2018

On today’s episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Medea Benjamin, an anti-war and anti-torture activist and the co-founder of Code Pink, and Simone Chun, a fellow at the Korea Policy Institute and a member of the Korean Peace Network.

Listen to the full interview here.

“We’re living in a culture characterised by competition, where the idea is that we can manage through extra strong faith in ourselves.” CARL CEDERSTROM interviewed in Business Insider

Wednesday, June 13th, 2018

Ever since Dale Carnegie launched his ground-breaking book How to Win Friends and Influence People in the middle of the Great Depression, self-help books, methods, seminars, and recently apps and web sites have evolved into an industry earning billions each year.

Carl Cederström, Associate Professor of organization studies at the University of Stockholm, and professor André Spicer at the Cass Business School of London, decided to try them all.

Read the full article here.

“The justifications given for the deaths of Palestinian protesters just don’t add up.” JAMIE STERN-WEINER in Vice

Tuesday, June 12th, 2018

Over the past ten weeks, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have participated in the “March of Return”, mass nonviolent demonstrations to protest Israel’s illegal siege. Throughout, Israel has responded with violent force.

As of the 7th of June, Israeli forces had killed more than 110 Palestinians in the course of the protests, including 14 children, and injured more than 3,700 with live ammunition. In order to brutalise the people of Gaza into submission while minimising the international criticism that accompanies lethal force, Israeli snipers deployed along Gaza’s perimeter fence methodically shot the legs of Palestinian demonstrators. “The aim”, reports the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, was “to leave as many young people as possible with permanent disabilities”. To this end, the snipers used expanding bullets that “pulverised” bones and left exit wounds the size of a fist. According to the Secretary-General of UNRWA, the United Nations agency providing education and healthcare for refugees in Gaza, “many” of those shot will suffer “life-long disabilities”. Mission accomplished..”

Read the full article here.

“Join us in building an economy that is not dependent on killing and maiming people to boost the profits of weapons manufacturers.” – MEDEA BENJAMIN in Nation of Change

Monday, June 11th, 2018

Former President Jimmy Carter has called U.S. politics a system of “legalized bribery” in which powerful interests spend billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign funding to ensure that members of Congress pay more attention to them than to the general public. With the upcoming midterm elections, we will see the full force of this tsunami of cash washing over our electoral system.

The human cost of this corrupt system has been searingly rammed home since the Parkland school shooting, as grieving high school students determined to curb America’s gun violence have found themselves in a pitched battle with the “gun lobby,” led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most entrenched and powerful interest groups in the country.”

Read the full article here.

“There will be no end to the Middle East conflicts without Iran” – MEDEA BENJAMIN interviewed in The Iranian

Wednesday, June 6th, 2018

Medea Benjamin’s entry into the public sphere came with disruptive vigor in May 2013, when she interrupted an address by former US President Barack Obama to object to his then policy on the use of armed drones.

Obama responded to Benjamin at the time saying, “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to… these are tough issues, and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong.”

Read the full article here.

Does Israel have a ‘right to self-defence’ against Gaza? – NORMAN FINKELSTEIN and JAMIE STERN-WEINER in Red Pepper

Wednesday, June 6th, 2018

On 1 June 2018, Razan al-Najjar—a 21 year-old paramedic—was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in Gaza while providing medical treatment to wounded protestors. She became the 119th Palestinian killed in Gaza since mass demonstrations against Israel’s siege began on 30 March. During the same period, Israeli forces shot more than 3,600 protestors with live ammunition, a figure which Israel’s preeminent human rights organisation B’Tselem has characterised as a ‘mindboggling number of casualties’. The onslaught has left Gaza’s strained healthcare system on the verge of collapse.

Read the full article here.

“There’s real support for a binational state in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. You wouldn’t know it from the media” – GREG SHUPAK in Salon

Tuesday, June 5th, 2018

The one-state solution is the idea of bringing justice and peace to Palestine/Israel by having all inhabitants of historic Palestine — the land that includes Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza — living in one, binational country, where everyone has equal rights and political matters are settled on the basis of one person, one vote. This arrangement differs from the two-state solution, which would partition historic Palestine into two states divided along ethno-religious lines, and contrasts with present conditions, in which Palestinians live as second-class citizens inside Israel, and under Israeli occupation in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — the last of which is subject to a merciless siege.

Read the full article here.

North Korea has taken big steps. Now it’s Trump’s turn to show goodwill – MEDEA BENJMIN in the Guardian

Tuesday, June 5th, 2018

Respect and reciprocity are key elements in Korean culture. During our recent trip to South Korea as part of an international women’s peace delegation, South Korean women complained that Donald Trump’s erratic conduct showed disrespect for the mediating role of their president, Moon Jae-in. They also commented on the lack of US reciprocity for North Korea’s goodwill gesture of returning three imprisoned US citizens and blowing up three of the four tunnels and all the administrative buildings at the Punggye-ri nuclear testing area.

Read the full article here.

“After watching in horror as the United States invaded Iraq I am determined to do everything I can to stop a similar situation in Iran.” – MEDEA BENJAMIN interviewed in The Progressive

Monday, June 4th, 2018

Peace activist Medea Benjamin famously heckled President Barack Obama about closing Guantanamo Bay, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, won the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize in 2010, and is the author of ten books. Her latest, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, offers the first general-audience introduction to the country and the roots of its antagonistic relationship with the U.S.

Read the full interview here.

How the media denies Palestinians their humanity – GREG SHUPAK in Middle East Eye

Thursday, May 31st, 2018

Since the Great Return March demonstrations began on 30 March, Israel has killed at least 116 Palestinians in Gaza and injured thousands more while shooting at unarmed protesters.

Israel has used bullets that leave “unusually severe wounds to the lower extremities… [and] an extreme level of destruction to bones and soft tissue”, according to Doctors Without Borders. Israel’s most egregious attacks on unarmed protesters came on 14 May, when its forces killed 62 Palestinians…

Read the full article here.

What’s happening in Gaza? – GREG SHUPAK interviewed at A Correction podcast

Thursday, May 24th, 2018

In this episode Lev speaks with Greg Shupak about the recent events in Gaza. They discuss the goals of the demonstrators and the Israeli government, the economics of Gaza, and what it means to manufacture consent.

Listen to the full interview here.

“We got to a point of thinking that there is nothing left to do but tear everything down. ” – JONATHAN LERNER interviewed in the New Haven Independent

Monday, May 21st, 2018

Jonathan Lerner was lucky. He didn’t end up killing anybody.

But as a member of the Weather Underground in the 1960s, he did help people who killed people — and carried out narcissistic violence in the notion that they were making a better world.

Fifty years later, he has revisited how he got caught up in that mess. He sought to understand how that happens to people. And what lessons he can offer for young people today who are similarly convinced they need to take dramatic action at a time when America’s political system seems hopelessly broken..

Read the full interview here.

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