by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this[Read More...]
The recent Quad leaders meeting in the White House on September 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue between four countries, the United States, India, Japan and Australia. Instead, the United States seems to be moving much closer to Australia as a strategic partner and providing it with nuclear submarines. Supplying Australia with U.S. nuclear submarines[Read More...]
A militarized rivalry between the US and China will be costly and dangerous for all concerned, but the people most likely to suffer from it will be found in the countries that the two major powers choose to turn into their battlefields. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union split Europe down the middle, but it[Read More...]
Pandora Papers is not the entire Pandora’s Box; but a part of it only. The full picture is yet to emerge, in one sense, and in another sense, the whole is already perceptible. The way the rich have their wealth, the way they accumulate, the way they hide, the way they deceive, the way they deprive, the way they lie[Read More...]
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen claimed that the social media giant for prioritizing profits over public safety. Haugen, who worked on the company’s Civic Integrity team until it was dissolved shortly after the 2020 election, said that Facebook has been a major contributor to divisions in society. “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people[Read More...]
The merits are hard to stomach for partisans long jaundiced by presumption and dislike, but the cheer at the deplatforming of Donald Trump by a range of social media platforms said as much about the nature of any sentiment about democracy as it did about those claiming to defend it. For one, it shut off a valve of fantastic, instant[Read More...]
While political changes have been in the forefront of most recent discussion on Afghanistan and Myanmar, a serious humanitarian crisis looms large for several million people. Over 50% of the nearly 88 million people living in these troubled lands are likely to face serious shortages of food, medicine and other essential needs. Invariably minorities identified on religious, ethnic, regional or[Read More...]
Afghanistan and Tajikistan share a 1,400-kilometer border. Recently, a war of words has erupted between Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and the Taliban government in Kabul. Rahmon censures the Taliban for the destabilization of Central Asia by the export of militant groups, while the Taliban leadership has accused Tajikistan’s government of interference. Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troops to the border, and held military[Read More...]
Where so many mainstream writers miss the mark is that whereas dispossession was a zero-sum game, these would-be settlers, mostly peasants, were fleeing feudalism at home. “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa[Read More...]
Today marks fifteen years since WikiLeaks was founded by Australian publisher Julian Assange on October 4, 2006. In the years since, the small media organisation, founded on a shoestring, has become synonymous with the courageous exposure of government and corporate crimes, as well as the ever-more ferocious attempts of state agencies and the ruling elites to censor the internet and[Read More...]
