Stephen Lendman

At a time of corporate dominated media, a free and open Internet is democracy's last chance to preserve our First Amendment rights without which all others are threatened. Activists call it Net Neutrality. Media scholar Robert McChesney says without it "the Internet would start to look like cable TV (with a) handful of massive companies (controlling) content" enough to have veto power over what's allowed and what it costs. Progressive web sites and writers would be marginalized or suppressed, and content systematically filtered or banned.

Media reform activists have drawn a line in the sand. Net Neutrality must be defended at all costs. Preserving a viable, independent, free and open Internet (and the media overall) is essential to a functioning democracy, but the forces aligned against it are formidable, daunting, relentless, and reprehensible. Some past challenges suggest future ones ahead.

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Stuart Littlewood

"Lucky we're not in Gaza," I said to my surgeon last week, “or you wouldn’t have been able to fix my problem.”

I was lying in a hospital bed in England, thinking how many Palestinians suffer a similar illness but are cruelly denied treatment.

Not because there aren't the surgical skills - Gaza’s health professionals are very talented, I hear - but because the Zionist thugs whom our sick-minded political leaders call friends and allies have systematically blockaded medical supplies and equipment, especially these last 2 years, wiping out proper healthcare in the Strip and sentencing innocent men, women and children to death. Those they can’t vaporize or blow to bits with high explosives and phosphor they destroy slowly by starvation and untreated disease.

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Dr. Glen Barry

If Gaia, the Earth System, is alive, then it stands to reason she can die. And the fact Gaia has not yet succumbed in past mass extinctions is no indication, and certainly no guarantee, that when hit simultaneously, in a geological flash of time -- with climate change, deforestation, toxics, soil loss, scarce freshwater, dead oceans and more; caused primarily by over-population and inequitable consumption -- that Gaia will not pass from being.

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Eric Walberg

Pornography, feminisation of the enemy? Confused over what Obama’s view on Guantanamo and the backlog of torture images from Abu Ghraib? Join the club.

The centrepiece of United States President Barack Obama’s PR campaign to show the world the US is the nice cop was to end the military tribunals, which he called “an enormous failure” during last year’s presidential campaign, and close the infamous Guantanamo prison. This was Obama’s first major “achievement” upon assuming office.

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James Petras

Introduction

President Obama’s greatest foreign policy successes are found in the reports of the mass media. His greatest failures go unreported, but are of great consequence. A survey of the major foreign policy priorities of the White House reveals a continuous series of major setbacks, which call into question the principal objectives and methods pursued by the Obama regime.

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eileen fleming

Four days before the forty-second anniversary of that other day in infamy, the release of The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship will reopen many wounds caused by the Israeli attack on the unarmed spy ship that navigated in international waters during the Six-Day War.

Acclaimed journalist and son of a survivor, author James Scott dedicated his extensively footnoted, compelling and dramatic account to his father, who lived to tell about it and the thirty-four sailors who did not.

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Robert Singer

The world is engulfed in a global economic crisis of staggering ferocity rivaling four other financial meltdowns—which all began in the month of October. [1]

VP Biden and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker don’t remember any time when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world. The current crisis looks more like the collapse of the Soviet Union, on October 18, 1991, when Gorbachev signed an agreement forming a new economic community.

The economic stimulus package that President Barack Obama said was needed to create millions of jobs to pull the economy out of recession and “essential to avoid having the worst economic crisis in a generation turn into a catastrophe” isn’t working according to the April 2009 Jobless rate.

Making matters worse: a government “by and for” the American people may not be prepared for the social dislocation, economic despair and breakdown in law and order that is likely to ensue.

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Najwa Sheikh Ahmed

Yesterday was the 61 anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, a term that reflects the loss of the land, of the home, and of all that is affiliated to this event. Many writers have written about the Nakba, and about loosing the homeland, loosing a nation dignity, and security. But none of them wrote about the frequent disappointments that the Palestinian refugees have to hold since then, the disappointments that, as well as, the dreams and hopes are forwarded to us from one generation to another without any hope of becoming true.

With each memory of the Nakba we as Palestinian refugees all over the world bring back the old memories that we kept and inherited from our parents and grandparents, narrate the old stories of fleeing the land, leaving every thing behind, fleeing for our lives and expecting to return in few days later, but the reality that we are still waiting affected our sense of both the time and place, and the intimacy that should connect us with the original homelands.

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Stephen Lendman

This is the sixth and final article on Ellen Brown's superb 2007 book titled "Web of Debt," now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free." This article focuses on establishing a people-oriented banking system. It's high time we had one and reclaimed what's rightfully ours.

Restoring National Sovereignty with A Truly National Banking System

One serving everyone, not powerful moneychangers alone, the so-called Money Trust cartel of Wall Street bankers looting the national wealth for themselves and heading the country for bankruptcy, tyranny and ruin. Stopping them is Job One, and only mass activist outrage can do it.

At the Chicago Democratic National Convention, William Jennings Bryan won the nomination saying:

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Gaither Stewart

(Rome) One of my favourite writers, Paul Bowles, lived much of his life in Morocco. His major theme is the clash between civilized man and an alien environment. His Westerner is inevitably defeated by primitive man. In the jungle or in the desert the Westerner is not only lost but also a victim of the primitive environment. Natural man is superior and defeats the neurotic product of technological society. The Westerner searches for primitive society, loves it, needs it, but in the end is defeated by it.

Years ago in Tangier, Bowles told me that he wanted to show how badly prepared the average Westerner is when he comes into contact with cultures he doesn’t know—or thinks he knows. The more he tries to penetrate it, the worse it gets, Bowles believed primitive man has retained things that western man has lost and can operate in natural surroundings. “Americans are less prepared than Europeans in such circumstances,” Bowles believed, “because they think everyone must do it the American way. Therefore it is hard for them to establish real contact with others. It is a paradox that self-subsistent primitive man is more adapted for communal life than is dependent western man, whose attempts at communal life are disasters. Primitives have a communal life. No one owns anything. Everything belongs to all. This couldn’t work in advanced societies. As soon as personal property appears, you have to invent another system.”

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