Selected Articles: Imperial Presidency of Trump, US-Russia Peace Initiative Folds, No Palestinian State Under Netanyahu
By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay, February 15 2017
When 46.1% of Americans voted for Trump in November they did not know precisely “what they were buying”. They did not expect that the promised “change” the Republican presidential candidate envisioned and promised was going to be, in fact, “chaos” and “turmoil” in the U.S. government.
Trump Decapitates the Russia Peace Initiative
By Prof. John McMurtry, February 15 2017
Trump folds under totalizing corporate media and war-state pressures today. The resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn decapitates his presidency’s peace initiative with Russia after years of campaigning for it.
There Will Be No Palestinian State Under Netanyahu’s Watch
By Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, February 15 2017
President Trump should not be swayed by Netanyahu’s duplicitous argument, however convincing it might sound, that he is committed to a two-state solution when in fact he has opposed and will continue to reject in principle the creation of an independent Palestinian state under any circumstances.
Pro-GMO Scientists Blinded by Technology and Wedded to Ideology
By Colin Todhunter, February 15 2017
Some 20 years of GM indicate that statements about the efficacy and benefits of GM are based more on wishful thinking than actual reality. GM has been dominated by giant transnational corporations who have used the technology to grow a select handful of crops, which by and large have been used to feed people in richer countries, not poorer regions where hunger and malnutrition persists. Moreover, GM has been integral to a system of food and agriculture in the US that fuels obesity, bad health and monolithic diets that are nutritionally poor. Also, in the US, farmers are squeezed and kept afloat by taxpayer subsidies so that Monsanto, Cargill and the likes of Wal-Mart can rake in massive profits.
Without Poetry We are Dead: With It We Die Living
By Edward Curtin, February 15 2017
Most Americans dislike poetry, or at least are indifferent to it. That is probably an understatement. We live in an age of prose, of journalese, and advertising jingles. Poetry, the most directly indirect, mysterious, condensed, and passionate form of communication, is about American as socialism or not shopping. Unlike television, texting, or scrolling the Internet, it demands concentration; that alone makes it suspect. Add silent, calm surroundings and a contemplative mind, and you can forget it, which is what most people do. Silence, like so much else in the present world, including human beings, is on the endangered species list. Another rare bird—let’s call it the holy spirit of true thought—is slowly disappearing from our midst.