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Palestinian Rights Are Human Rights

March 24, 2025 M. Reza Behnam, Consortium News. , , ,
The philosophical belief that certain rights are inherent and inalienable by virtue of human existence becomes harsh reality when they are denied. This is especially salient for the people of Palestine, who have had to struggle for their inalienable rights for more than a hundred years. The violation of their human rights really began on Friday, Nov. 2, 1917, when British foreign secretary and Christian Zionist, Arthur James Balfour, put his signature to a letter addressed to British Jewish banker, Lionel W. Rothschild, promising the land of Palestine to the Zionist Federation in Europe. With that, the ongoing catastrophe began.

Ms. Farmer’s Law Protects Trans Women

March 19, 2025 Lolo Serrano, Workers World. , , , , ,
On his first day in office, President Trump 2.0 signed Executive Order 14168: “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” EO 14168 sets in motion an attack on trans people throughout the country — then, using trans people as a springboard, an attack on incarcerated people as a whole. Within weeks of Inauguration Day, Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) announced plans for implementing EO 14168. FBOP officials told the less-than-two-dozen trans women housed in women’s facilities that they would be summarily transferred to men’s prisons.

It’s Up To Europe’s Citizens

March 19, 2025 Edward Lozansky, Consortium News. , , , , , , , ,
For the record, it was the U.S., from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, that provoked the Ukrainian tragedy. And now it is the Europeans who can stop it. NATO’s Eastern expansion led to the bloodiest military conflict in Europe since the Second World War, one that could lead to a Third. Donald Trump in his first term tried to exit this crisis, only to be subjected to the Russiagate “scandal” and two unsuccessful impeachment efforts led the bipartisan U.S. War Party. Eventually, they succeeded and took back power, facilitating Joe Biden’s 2020 victory with various manipulations, including producing a letter signed by 51 top, retired U.S. intelligence officers falsely blaming Russia for the criminal contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop that included his father’s involvement.

Participatory Budgeting Includes Community Members In Public Funding

March 18, 2025 Damon Orion, Resilience. , , , ,
In 1989, one-third of the inhabitants of Porto Alegre, Brazil, lived in impoverished regions on the fringes of the city, cut off from sanitation, clean water, medical facilities, and other essential resources. In response, the Brazilian Workers’ Party created participatory budgeting (PB), a citizen engagement process that enables community members to decide how to use a portion of public funds. A 2007 report by the North American Congress on Latin America stated that this brought treated water to 99 percent of Porto Alegre’s population, expanded the sewer system’s reach from 46 percent in 1989 to 86 percent of the city, led to the construction of more than 50 schools from around 1997 to 2007, decreased truancy from 9 to less than 1 percent, and helped double the number of students attending university from 1989 to 1995.

Will Pakistan Remain A US Proxy Or Become A Regional Partner?

March 10, 2025 People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , , ,
Pakistan is one of the largest countries in South Asia. Ever since its formation in 1947, it has been politically dominated by a coalition of landed and military elites who rule over millions of impoverished citizens mainly by force. Attempts to break this dominance and establish a truly popular government independent of the military establishment have mostly failed. Meanwhile, the ruling classes in Pakistan have been unable to industrialize and democratize the state. Their deep dependence on rent and the interests of the imperialists are in complete opposition to the popular aspirations and sentiments of the people.

Columbia University’s Nazi Tradition

March 10, 2025 David Swanson, World Beyond War. , , , , , , , ,
According to Columbia Magazine, published by Columbia University’s Office of Alumni and Development, but ultimately named for a brutal imperialist mercenary, in 1933 while Nazis in Germany were burning books by Jews, Columbia’s president — and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient — Nicholas Murray Butler “welcomed Hans Luther, the German ambassador to the United States, to Morningside Heights, insisting that he be accorded ‘the greatest courtesy and respect.'” Columbia’s Daily Spectator newspaper “denounced what it saw as Butler’s courtship of the German government and its universities.”

Cuba Sends Doctors, The United States Sends Sanctions

March 10, 2025 Helen Yaffe, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , ,
On February 25, US secretary of state Marco Rubio announced restrictions on visas for both government officials in Cuba and any others worldwide who are “complicit” with the island nation’s overseas medical-assistance programs. A US State Department statement clarified that the sanction extends to “current and former” officials and the “immediate family of such persons.” This action, the seventh measure targeting Cuba in one month, has international consequences; for decades tens of thousands of Cuban medical professionals have been posted in around sixty countries, far more than the World Health Organization’s (WHO) workforce, mostly working in under- or unserved populations in the Global South.

Global North Has Nine Times More Voting Power At The International Monetary Fund Than Global South

March 7, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , , , , , , ,
As far as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is concerned, each person in the Global North is worth nine people in the Global South. We get that calculation from IMF data on voting power in the organisation relative to the population of the Global North and Global South states. Each country, based on its ‘relative economic position’, as the IMF suggests, is given voting rights to elect delegates to the IMF’s executive board, which makes all of the organisation’s important decisions. A brief glance at the board shows that the Global North is vastly overrepresented in this crucial multilateral institution for indebted countries.

New Report Warns Of Increasing Nuclear Dangers

March 6, 2025 Alice Slater, InDepthNews. , , , , ,
Once again the ‘Gloomsday’ Machine is reporting the awful news about the growing nuclear threats, the widening nuclear proliferation, and ongoing modernization and development of new weapons most recently in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor which defines itself as “a research project managed by Norwegian People’s Aid with contributions from a broad range of external experts and institutions, including the Federation of American Scientists and the Norwegian Academy of International Law”. There is never any attempt to make people aware of how the nuclear arms race and new forms of proliferation are being driven and the many missed opportunities, over the 80-year course of the nuclear age to reverse the Doomsday machine and move forward to a new world at peace.

Slouching Towards Mount McKinley

March 5, 2025 Alfred McCoy, Tom Dispatch. , , , ,
“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs,” President Trump announced to a burst of applause during his inaugural address on January 20th. Continuing his celebration of a decidedly mediocre president, best known for taking this country on an ill-advised turn towards colonial conquest, Trump added: “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent — he was a natural businessman — and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did including the Panama Canal which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.”

How Rank-And-File Democracy Transformed The Teamsters And UAW

March 3, 2025 Michael J. Goldberg, Power At Work. , , , , , , ,
It’s well known in labor circles that the 2020’s opened with a tremendous resurgence of rank-and-file activism in the workplace. Beginning with 2021’s “Striketober” and sparked initially by the hardships of the pandemic and emboldened by the labor shortages that followed, that upsurge targeted union and nonunion workplaces alike. Among the collective bargaining breakthroughs in already unionized workplaces, two of the most important involved the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and the United Auto Workers (UAW). In 2023, the IBT won a historic contract with its largest employer, UPS, without having to follow through on its threat to strike.

The Geopolitics Of Peace

February 28, 2025 Jeffrey D. Sachs , Consortium News. , , , , , ,
Thanks to all of you for the chance to be together and to think together. This is indeed a complicated and fast-changing time and a very dangerous one. So, we really need clarity of thought. I’m especially interested in our conversation, so I’ll try to be as succinct and clear as I can be. I’ve watched the events very close-up in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine, very closely for the last 36 years. I was an adviser to the Polish government in 1989, to President Gorbachev’s economic team in 1990 and 1991, to President Yeltsin’s economic team in 1991 to 1993 and to President Kuchma’s economic team in Ukraine in 1993 to 1994.

The Chris Hedges Report: The World After Gaza

February 27, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , , , , , , ,
The Holocaust is the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the Holocaust — genocide — has had a closer proximity both in time and place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of billions of people. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, “The World After Gaza.” Mishra argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global South’s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.

Japanese-Americans Confront ICE Detention

February 27, 2025 Jim McMahan, Workers World. , , , , , ,
Seattle, Washington - With the increase of the U.S. Trump/Musk pogroms against immigrants, Japanese and Japanese-Americans have increased their solidarity against roundups, detentions and deportations of migrant workers. In Seattle, 400 people marched in the International District/Chinatown protesting U.S. immigrant detention on February 19, the Day of Remembrance. It’s the day in 1942, a few months after the U.S. entered World War II against Japan, when U.S. executive order 9066 was signed. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment or imprisonment of Japanese-Americans who had emigrated to the United States and were living on the West Coast.

Ukraine Timeline Tells The Tale

February 26, 2025 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. , , , , , , , ,
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history. A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine. There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country. Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine. The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
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