TFF Blog

ICAN: The US boosted its nuclear arms budget A record $73 billion spent on nukes in 2019 – says ICAN. Nuclear-armed states spent a record $73 billion on nuclear weapons in 2019, a nearly 10% increase from 2018, and the US accounted for almost half of the spending, a new report states. Please find a short conversation about that at PressTV’s Channel at Urmedium.

Richard Falk May 16, 2020 Prefatory Note Republication of opinion piece published in Al Jazeera English on May 13, 2020. The published AJE text has been slightly modified. Annexation foreplay These are the strangest of times. On this almost everyone will agree. Lives all over the planet are being torn apart either by COVID-19 or as a result of its devastating social and economic dislocations. In such a moment, it is hardly surprising that the best and worst of humanity is being showcased. Yet what seems worse beyond even these forebodings is the persistence of gangster geopolitics in its various manifestations. Intensifying U.S. sanctions in the midst of the health crisis on already deeply afflicted societies and suffering populations such as Iran and Venezuela is one striking example. This display of the primacy of geopolitics is highlighted by its rejections of numerous high profile humanitarian appeals for the suspension of...

The war in Syria has dropped out of the news, like almost everything else, in a time when the Coronavirus seems to dominate all discourse and reporting. But the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to strangle its own country. The Russians continue to bomb on his behalf, terrifying civilians and hospitals. The Americans work semi-clandestinely to undermine both the regime and its Russian backers. There is no sign in the US-Soviet relationship of what was called in the 1970s and 80s détente. The big powers, Russia, the US, the UK and France appear intent on maintaining their interests in the Middle East. Russia has long been a friend of Syria and has had its single foreign base there since Soviet days. For even longer the US, France and the UK have been a friend of Saudi Arabia and today provide weapons for the Saudi air force so it can support...

Richard Falk May 08, 2020 More than earlier crises of my lifetime, including the Great Depression, World War II, 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic illuminates as never before, how precarious and uncertain is the future wellbeing, and possibly survival, of the human species. The concreteness, immediacy, and haunting uncertainties of the pandemic is quite terrifying on its own, but its heuristic pedagogy seems applicable to a range of potentially catastrophic threats of global scope, most obviously climate change, biodiversity, nuclear weaponry. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s blog on May 3, 2020 What we should now be able to realize even while asleep is that when the under-preparedness of governance and political leadership is based on ignoring a scientific consensus is combined with radical uncertainty and myopic nationalism the stage is set for planetary and species disaster, and not only personal grief and national emergency. These signature traits of the 21st century heighten...

John Scales Avery May 7, 2020 We See Clearly What Is Near to Us There is a remarkable contrast in the way that governments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the way that they have responded to the climate emergency. The pandemic, which indeed represents an extremely grave danger to humanity, has produced a massive global response. Borders have been closed, airlines have become virtually inoperative, industries, restaurants and entertainments have been closed, sporting events have been cancelled or postponed, people have been asked to stay at home and practice social distancing, and the everyday life of citizens around the world has been drastically changed. John Scales Avery By contrast, let us consider the threat that if immediate action is not taken to halt the extraction and use of fossil fuels, irreversible feedback loops will be initiated which will make catastrophic climate change inevitable despite human...

With a bit more pushing and – after, unfortunately, a bit more killing – the three remaining serious wars on the planet, in Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen, should come to an end. Then it will be time to take stock on what caused the killing, especially why so many innocents lost their lives and whether wars of this kind can be deterred in the future. The world has already made a lot of progress over the last few decades: there are no inter-state wars and the number of civil wars has steadily fallen, (albeit the graph has begun an upward turn in the last two years mainly because of mini-wars in West Africa). Eighteen years ago the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute war criminals was established by treaty. Nearly all the world signed up. The US, Israel, Russia, China and India did not. However, the latter three have not...

Jan Oberg April 30, 2020 Last year, the Danish artist Gudrun Steen-Andersen created a multimedia installation under the theme: “Perpetuum Mobile – What Would Happen If Migration Was Free Worldwide?” Naturally, it is a thought experiment – not the least in these times of multi-crisis where nationalism, xenophobia, populism and the building of walls seem to have emerged as just another – political – virus way before the Coronavirus. The Danish-language version was made in 2019 and in March this year, we repeated – more or less, that is – the video lectures in English. It was about the time when the Coronavirus had just begun its race to the top of the global agenda. You’ll find them all the videos here or click on this: Steen-Andersen’s heuristic intention – somewhat in the tradition of the great future-thinker Robert Jungk’s future workshop – was realized through her own amazing installation...

Med udenrigsminister Jeppe Kofod i spidsen er Danmark nu på vej ud i sin største udenrigspolitiske skandale – det siger en del – siden besættelsen af Irak. Ifølge denne artikel på DR.dk er hverken Udenrigspolitisk Nævn eller Grønlandsudvalget blevet orienteret om USA’s “offer you can’t refuse” til Grønland – som fremstillet af den amerikanske ambassadør i København, Carla Sands, på Altinget.* © Jan Oberg Folketingsmedlemmer fra både SF og Dansk Folkeparti kalder USA’s udmelding “forkastelig” og “uhørt.” Tidligere udenrigsminister, Martin Lidegaard, siger at han ikke er blevet orienteret om det. Regeringen er altså enten blevet informeret af USA men har holdt forhandlingerne hemmelig eller også er USA nu i færd med at købe Grønland bag ryggen på Danmark. Udenrigsministerens måde at svare på i ovenstående artikels video lugter langt væk af at der er noget, der slet ikke stemmer. Og det han citeres for viser, at han ikke har forstået...

It might seem that the world is going to pot in a hand-basket. Not quite true. There are ways out. Asia has shown how to deal with the Coronavirus and how to stay politically stable. Europe, with the exception of wise Sweden, has muddled along, following belatedly the conventional wisdom of its scientific community. As for the United States, President Donald Trump has made a fool of himself and his country, ending up with the highest death rate in the world. No longer can the West rely on the US to be its leader. Even if Trump is deposed in the November election, the Europeans, the Canadians and Japanese should not let it return to being treated as the number one. It is too beholden to the military/legislative/industrial/academic complex. The consensus appears to be that confronting China and Russia is the right thing to do. The Coronavirus has shown up...

Renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton on the Goldwater Rule: We have a duty to warn if someone may be dangerous to others. 23 april, 2020 Bill Moyers There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics: “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit? Originally published at billmoyers.com, September 14, 2017 As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing public figures whom they have...

Remember this? It seems that God is saying: “America, you are too arrogant and I will break the backbone of your power!” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Listen! MLK’s strong prophecy came to me today when I read this article in TIME magazine today – “Begging for Thermometers, Body Bags, and Gowns: U.S. Health Care Workers Are Dangerously Ill-Equipped to Fight COVID-19.” TIME – April 20, 2020 The health care workers have to beg – and people have to die – because their mal-developed country lacks the most basic. It’s a country which, at least since 1945, has created human history’s largest military machine, sees itself as “the policeman of the whole world” – a country that conducted wars virtually every day, built 600+ bases in 130+ countries, deploys its CIA and Special forces virtually everywhere, destroyed societies and killed millions of people around the world in warfare and economic...

The greatest American foreign affairs columnist since Walter Lippmann was William Pfaff of The International Herald Tribune. He wrote in his path-breaking book, “Barbarian Sentiments” that the US political atmosphere was full of “exhausted ideas, like a dead star”. Nevertheless, “these ideas remain central to the way certain subjects are discussed and to the formulation of national policy. These are ideas that people want or need to be true”. I was told by the editorial page editor, Serge Schmemann, that when the New York Times bought the Herald Tribune the paper decided to cut back on printing Pfaff after 20 years of using him because he was considered anti-American – which, ironically, was one indication that he was right in his diagnosis. Freud reminded us in his “Civilization and its Discontents”, that we should “familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which...