Image by Derek Goulet via Flickr
with Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley
Black Agenda Report Presents: The Left Lens on Sep 28, 2020
The U.S. claims to hold a monopoly on human rights despite being the most egregious human rights violator on the planet. Margaret Kimberley and Danny Haiphong discuss the domestic and international scope of U.S. human rights abuses and the hypocrisy of the evidence-free claims made against China.
Image by Raymund Flandez via Flickr
by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy, Sept. 21, 2020
September 24, 2020
Excerpted from Leaving World War II Behind
If you were to listen to people justifying WWII today, and using WWII to justify the subsequent 75 years of wars and war preparations, the first thing you would expect to find in reading about what WWII actually was would be a war motivated by the need to save Jews from mass murder. There would be old photographs of posters with Uncle Sam pointing his finger, saying “I want you to save the Jews!”
Image by Antonio Marín Segovia via Flickr
CN Live! E16 The Extradition Extra Edition: Ellsberg, Pilger & Mercouris
Consortium News on Sep 19, 2020
After a powerful week for the Assange defence we invite expert witness Daniel Ellsberg, veteran journalist John Pilger and UK legal analyst Alexander Mercouris to comment.
Image by Brad Dougherty via Flickr
The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published Dec. 16, 2018
September 20, 2020
If we, the people, wrote a constitution now, what would go in it? Equal rights for women, men, non-binary, and undefined? Caps on wealth tied to poverty levels? Rights of nature? Reparations for past crimes, wrongs, and thefts? Limits on military spending? A free and open Internet? Abolition of mass incarceration, or the entire prison system; replaced with restorative and community justice? Free healthcare for all? Living wages or universal basic income? Would we keep corporate personhood or the electoral college?
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by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy
September 18, 2020
1. The effort to extradite and prosecute Julian Assange for journalism is a threat to future journalism that challenges power and violence, but a defense of the media practice of propagandizing for war. While the New York Times benefited from Assange’s work, its only reporting on his current hearing is an article about technical glitches in the court proceedings — utterly avoiding the content of those proceedings, even falsely suggesting that the content was inaudible and otherwise unobtainable. The corporate U.S. media silence is deafening. Not only does President Donald Trump’s effort to imprison Assange (or, as he has publicly advocated in the past, kill him) conflict with media fictions about Russia, and contradict fundamental pretenses about U.S. respect for freedom of the press, but it also serves an important function that is clearly in the interest of media outlets that promote wars. It punishes someone who dared to expose the malevolence, cynicism, and criminality of U.S. wars.
Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below
with Chris Hedges
Popular Resistance on Sep 9, 2020
The attempt to extradite Julian Assange to the United States for prosecution is a war against freedom of the press and our right to know. If the prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act occurs, it will define journalism for the 21st Century. No journalist or publisher who exposes war crimes or corruption will be safe.
Image by duncan c via Flickr
by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Ireland
Crossposted from Sputnik, Sept. 8, 2020
September 9, 2020
If Donald Trump was genuinely against “endless wars” – as he claims to be – then he would do the decent thing and call off the persecution of Julian Assange.
Image by Antonio Marín Segovia via Flickr
by John Pilger
John Pilger, Sept. 7, 2020
September 8, 2020
When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism.”
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by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
August 26, 2020
In Mexico, the intensity of the Covid-19 pandemic is increasing. With more than 568,600 cases and 61,450 deaths (third largest number of Covid-19 deaths), the country is staggering under the Coronavirus pandemic. While the entire country is experiencing the impact, indigenous communities represent the hardest hit demographic. Data from Coneval, the national government’s social development agency, has shown that the Covid-19 fatality rate in Mexico’s poorest 427 municipalities is 14.1. On the other hand, the fatality rate in the country’s 54 wealthiest municipalities is 8.1, “meaning that people who live in impoverished parts of the country are almost twice as likely to die if they become sick with Covid-19 than those who live in affluent areas.”
Image by Tomás Flores Saavedra via Flickr
by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
August 14, 2020
On 1 August, 2020, a group of civilians, in complicity with the Chilean national police force or the carabineros and right-wing hoodlums, violently attacked Mapuche community members who were on a hunger strike in front of the Municipality of Victoria, in Araucania. The attack was strategic, organized and preplanned with the occupied town halls of Ercilla and Traiguén also being attacked, Mapuche women and children being beaten and vehicles being set on fire.
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by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
July 29, 2020
Amid the current Covid-19 pandemic, the Garifuna community of Honduras is experiencing state-sponsored violence and regulated repression. On July 18, 2020, heavily armed personnel of the Police Investigation Department (DPI) barged into the house of Alberth Sneider Centeno, Garifuna president of the land community of El Triunfo de la Cruz, and abducted him. Later, the same armed group kidnapped Suami Aparicio Mejía García, Gerardo Mizael Rochez Cálix and Milton Joel Martínez Álvarez, members of the OFRANEH (Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras), and a fifth person, Junior Rafael Juárez Mejía. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) has issued a statement saying “that the kidnapping of these people is motivated by the activity of the Garifuna people in defense of their ancestral lands and the rights of Afro-indigenous and indigenous people in these territories.”
Image by Lee Bosher via Flickr
by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
July 25, 2020
At Cerrejon (Colombia), the largest open-pit coal mine in Latin America owned equally by BHP (Australia), Anglo American PLC (United Kingdom) and Glencore (Switzerland), the situation of the indigenous people is progressively worsening. Cerrejon Limited has informed the workers that “all the existing shifts will be unified into a single 7-day work, for three days off.” With the enforcement of the new shifts, “workers would go from working 15 to 21 days and the mine would go from 4 to 3 shifts, leaving at least 25% of the current workforce unemployed.” The new shift pattern is likely to aggravate the health of workers as long working hours increase the number of work-related pathologies. Current work shift arrangements have already led to more than “700 pathologies associated with musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular and ear diseases, among others.” As the level of work becomes more stressful, these occupational diseases will start multiplying.
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This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
ARTE Documentary on ~ Jun 30, 2020
The ‘Operation Hotel’ revelations back in 2018 revealed that the Ecuadorian government was spying on Julian Assange, taking refuge in their London embassy at the time. But recent evidence from Spanish authorities suggests that it was in fact American intelligence that sponsored the surveillance. With the USA currently trying to extradite Assange from his London prison to be tried for the disclosure of hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents on WikiLeaks, the global Assange story, murkier than ever, is ongoing.
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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist
July 9, 2020
Mao said that “All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful.” We’re seeing this now in the case of Israel, whose fascistic president Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to annex the West Bank as a show of the supposed strength of the Zionist project; behind Netanyahu’s confident appearance, his actions have been driven by fears of a decline for the global empire that props up Israel.
Image by The Official CTBTO Photostream via Flickr
goingundergroundRT on Jun 25, 2020
We speak to legendary former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters. He discusses the threat of nuclear war in 2020, why he believes nuclear weapons need to be abolished across the world, the Black Lives Matter protests which have swept the world since George Floyd’s murder at the hands of US police, the history of the British Empire which is under increased scrutiny, the United States’ regime change attempt in Venezuela against Nicolas Maduro, Israel’s coming illegal annexation of Palestine’s West Bank, the revelations that Julian Assange had fathered two children during his time in the Ecuadorean Embassy and more! He plays us out with ‘Two Suns in the Sunset’.
