TFF Blog

  Is democracy in decline? If you talk about the quality of democracy the answer is clearly yes. The US, the world’s first and most important democracy- although at the beginning a limited democracy for white men only – is in trouble. President Donald Trump has brought old problems to the surface – the money that buys candidates and policies, gerrymandering, an increasingly polarised electorate and a deadlocked Congress. He has added his own negatives – misusing his power to threaten his opponent, Hilary Clinton, with jail, waging a war against the media and attempting to make it clear that he has the sole power to use nuclear weapons and that he will use them against North Korea, even if North Korea has not used its. If we talk about quantity the report issued today by the American organisation, Freedom House, that has monitored the rise and fall of democracy...

  • What is now unfolding in both North America and Western Europe is fake social activism, controlled and funded by the corporate establishment. This manipulated process precludes the formation of a real mass movement against war, racism and social injustice.   The anti-war movement is dead. The war on Syria is tagged as “a civil war”. The war on Yemen is also portrayed as a civil war.  While the bombing is by Saudi Arabia, the insidious role of the US is downplayed or casually ignored. “The US is not directly involved so there is no need for us to wage an anti-war campaign”. (paraphrase) In turn, dissent has become compartmentalized. Separate “issue oriented” protest movements (e.g. environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, LGBT) are encouraged and generously funded as opposed to a cohesive mass movement against global capitalism. This mosaic was already prevalent in the counter G7 summits and People’s Summits of the 1990s...

  By Richard Falk This post is a modified version of an article published in Middle East Eye on Jan. 1, 2018. It contends that the proper priority for genuine advocates of peace between Israelis and Palestinians should be centered around apartheid rather than be devoted to reviving an Oslo style ‘peace process’ (always a sham) or proclaiming the goal of an independent and sovereign Palestine as attainable without first dismantling the apartheid structures that subjugate the Palestinian people as a whole so as to maintain the Zionist insistence on Israel as the state of the Jewish people (rather than providing a homeland within a normal and legitimate state based on ethnic and religious equality, human rights, and secular principles.   Originally published on the “Global Justice in the 21st Century” blog   Despite all appearances to the contrary, those in the West who do not want to join the premature...

Introduction This is a collection of biographical sketches showing people whose wise voices from the past can help to guide us today. All of the women and men, brief glimpses of whose lives and ideas are portrayed here, gave a high place to compassion. None of them was a slave to greed. We need their voices today! A Lower-Upper Middle Class Family and Education Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was the great-grandson of Charles Blair, a wealthy country gentleman, and Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland. Over the generations that separated Eric Blair from his great-grandparents, some of the gentility remained but most of the wealth disappeared, and he described his family as being “lower-upper middle class”. Eric Blair was born in British India where his father was working, but when he was one year old his mother took the...

• “Free elections and free markets” represent “the single sustainable model for national success”. So declared the US National Security Strategy published by the Administration of George W Bush in 2002. It’s a document better known for the novelty of its proposed variation on the traditional UN provision for the legal use of force: the concept of pre-emptive self-defence. You don’t have to join many dots to infer that countries which deviate from this path of righteousness risk being regarded as security threats, and, the document continues: “As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed”. Is it heresy against free-market fundamentalism that has put one regime after another in the firing line, in the period since? Even before Bush took office, the US and allies went to war over Kosovo, in ‘Operation Allied Force’, the bombing of Yugoslavia...

Farewell Seminar SCAR, George Mason University, Arlington-VA 6 Dec 2017 • Two basic institutions in Western history and individual lives: Christianity offering Salvation to those following Laws, Commandments, and Science offering Truth to those who believe in scientific laws. After Enlightenment ushered in a godless world, one is waning and the other vexing, seen as antithetical to each other. Is evolution being contested by “intelligent design”? By “diversity and symbiosis”? Neither one nor the other?  Or both? We do not know, nor do we come to grips with evolution beyond homo sapiens. Neither did Christianity. Via transcend.org But we are used in history to successors carrying the imprints of predecessors, and vice versa.  We are used to plus ça change plus ça este la même chose (the more it changes, the more it stays the same). And the more intended Italian cambiamo le cose affinche se mantengono le stesse (we...

  . It was late 2003, the Liberian war was winding down after taking the lives of 250,000 civilians, spawning a small army of deadly child soldiers, and I was sitting at lunch in Monrovia inside the president’s palatial office and residence with the American ambassador on my right and George Weah, Fifa’s World Footballer of the Year, on my left. When I introduced myself to the ambassador he made it clear he didn’t want to talk. He wasn’t happy having ended up with a journalist next to him. Every 15 minutes an aide would rush up to him with the latest news on the fighting. We could hear the sound of rifles cracking. I asked him if he was nervous. He ignored me. But Weah was more than ready to chat. “What brings you to Liberia?” he asked. “I’m a journalist for the International Herald Tribune”. “That’s a great...

By David Swanson • The case against Iraqing Iran includes the following points: Threatening war is a violation of the U.N. Charter. Waging war is a violation of the U.N. Charter and of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Waging war without Congress is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Have you seen Iraq lately? Have you seen the entire region? Via davidswanson.org Have you seen Afghanistan? Libya? Syria? Yemen? Pakistan? Somalia? War supporters said the U.S. urgently needed to attack Iran in 2007. It did not attack. The claims turned out to be lies. Even a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 pushed back and admitted that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. Having a nuclear weapons program is not a justification for war, legally, morally, or practically. The United States has nuclear weapons and no one would be justified in attacking the United States. Dick and Liz Cheney’s book, Exceptional, tell us...

By Gareth Porter • The Trump administration has been telling people for months that the crisis with North Korea is the result of North Korea’s relentless pursuit of a nuclear threat to the US homeland and past North Korean cheating on diplomatic agreements. However, North Korea reached agreements with both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations that could have averted that threat, had they been completed. Instead, a group of Bush administration officials led by then-Vice President Dick Cheney sabotaged both agreements, and Pyongyang went on to make rapid strides on both nuclear and missile development, leading ultimately to the successful late November 2017 North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test. Via antiwar.com The record shows, moreover, that Cheney and his allies derailed diplomatic efforts to curb North Korean nuclear and missile development, not because they opposed “arms control” (after all, the agreements that were negotiated would have limited only North...

New book by Evelin Lindner • Humankind has reached a boiling point. Violence, hatred, and terror have become deeply entangled with honor, heroism, glory, loyalty, and love. Over the past five percent of modern human history on planet Earth, roughly the past ten millennia, human activity has reached a crescendo of rapid and ruthless competition for domination, a fight for power over people and the planet, where “might” has become “right.” Within this context, a dangerous culture of honor has evolved, in which destruction is mercilessly merged with love: “It is my duty, if I love my people, to heroically destroy our enemies and secure all resources for us,” underwritten by an ominous motto: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Humanity has haphazardly constructed an entire world-system on top of this merger, holding the whole world hostage through never-ending cycles of domination and humiliation. The consequence, today, is the...

By Richard Falk • Prefatory Note -This post addresses the need for dialogue with the political, economic, and cultural ‘other,’ that is, those multitudes acutely alienated from and angry with secular globalism and the Enlightenment legacy often equated with ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization.’ At the core is a search for closure on the nature of reality as well as feelings about equity (given many dimensions of inequality) and ethical innovation (revisionist approaches to gender, sexuality, marriage). Does reason or faith or tradition provide greater closure? Can the Thomistic grand synthesis of the 13th Century be repeated under 21st Century condition in the rough waters of controversy generated by Trump and Trumpism? Is this too Western a way of putting the problem? I write as an American, but there are many parallels in other countries. The first step is to admit being out of touch with the ferment below the surface. A...

• Two important words enriching each other. “Nonviolent” easily becomes bla-bla, and “economy” is too general. But, does “nonviolent” make a difference for the better to the economy?  And vice versa, can “economy” make “nonviolent” more positive, beyond resistance to evil? Let us start with “economy”, here conceived of as a cycle with three poles: Nature, Production, Consumption. And three processes: Extraction from Nature, Distribution from Production to Consumption, and Pollution from Production-Consumption back to Nature. The cycle flow is in that order: Nature → Production → Consumption → Nature. Via transcend.org A simple summary of the economy: humans extract resources from nature, produce-process for (end) consumption, and sends what they cannot consume back to nature (but economists, like book-keepers, left out the Nature part). And we want it all to be nonviolent! “Do no harm!”, nonviolent, is insufficient.  “Peace”, “peaceful” include positive peace–Peace Economics, A Theory of Development are...