Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields
  • The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

    The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

    The controversies over the IRS and especially the AP phone records appear to have long-lasting effects By Glenn Greenwald,  guardian.co.uk  Barack Obama Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ’s attack on AP’s news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record [...]

  • Argentina’s General Videla and the “war on terror”

    Argentina’s General Videla and the “war on terror”

    By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla died May 17 at the age of 87 as the result of injuries suffered from a fall in a prison shower. He was remembered as the head of a savage military dictatorship that between 1976 and 1983 murdered and “disappeared” some 30,000 Argentine workers, socialist militants, [...]

  • Rise Up or Die

    Rise Up or Die

     By Chris Hedges Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion [...]

  • PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary "Citizen Koch" To Appease Koch Brothers

    PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary “Citizen Koch” To Appease Koch Brothers

    By Brendan Fischer, PRWatch | Report “Citizen Koch,” a documentary about money in politics focused on the Wisconsin uprising, was shunned by PBS for fear of offending billionaire industrialist David Koch, who has given $23 million to public television, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The dispute highlights the increasing role of private money in “public” television and raises [...]

  • Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

    Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

    by Pascal Robert, Black Agenda Report Don’t worry about Barack Obama. He’s far too useful to the rulers of America to be derailed by scandal, or even a combination of scandals. “Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have [...]

  • Obama's War on Free Expression

    Obama’s War on Free Expression

    by Stephen Lendman It’s the most fundamental right. Without it all others are endangered. Obama’s waging war to destroy it. He’s done so throughout his tenure.  He targeted AP. He did so unjustifiably. A previous article discussed it. Did you like this? Share it:

  • The Jesuit Pope – Who is Francis and who he pretends to be

    The Jesuit Pope – Who is Francis and who he pretends to be

    Written by Esquerda Marxista editorial board Wednesday, 15 May 2013 The election of Pope Francis marks a turn in the prolonged crisis of the Catholic Church. It is important for revolutionaries to understand the reasons for the ongoing struggle within the Church. Far from moving to the left, Francis is trying to entrench the Church in [...]

  • Apple CEO defends multi-billion-dollar tax dodge

    Apple CEO defends multi-billion-dollar tax dodge

    By Andre Damon, wsws.org   Apple CEO Tim Cook used his appearance Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—called to investigate Apple’s evasion of billions of dollars in taxes—to call for a sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate. The senators on the committee, Democratic and Republican alike, agreed with Cook [...]

The 10 Worst States in Which to Lose Your Job

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 032011
 

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on May 3, 2011

T H E   R E C E S S I O N has hurt the whole country, but not equally. For example, the unemployment rate in North Dakota, a state with its own bank, which helped insulate it from the financial crash, stands at just 3.6 percent, while Nevada’s rate last month was 13.2 percent.

Obviously, it’s much harder to find a job in places where unemployment is high and there are lots of other people vying for open positions than it is in a tight job market. But looking at the top-line unemployment rate alone doesn’t tell the full story of what it’s like to be jobless in any given part of the country. While being unemployed sucks for everyone, the benefits available to keep the unemployed afloat vary significantly from state to state. Continue reading »

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MUBARAKISM STILL RULES EGYPT

 ANNOTATED NEWS, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
May 032011
 
Eric Margolis | April 16, 2011

Egypt's Field Marshal Tantawi and Robert Gates: Touching base with the local henchmen.

The arrest and interrogation last week of deposed president Husni Mubarak and his two sons has left Egyptians jubilant.   The armed forces threw the Mubaraks to the wolves to placate mounting public demands for retribution against former leaders of the hated old regime.

But the fact remains, in spite of Mubarak’s fall, not much has  changed in Egypt. The Old Guard of generals and bureaucrats still rule Egypt. An intensifying struggle goes on behind the scenes between the military and the fragmented democratic opposition. So far, the military retains an iron grip on Egypt in spite of noisy street demonstrations.  Muabarak is gone but Mubarakism still lives. Continue reading »

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BP Still Being Awarded Lucrative Government Contracts

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE, ENVIRONMENTAL STRUGGLES  Comments Off
May 032011
 

By Jason Leopold , TruthOut.org
Posted on on May 3, 2011

BP continues to receive tens of millions of dollars in government contracts, despite the fact that the British oil company is under federal criminal investigation over the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and twice violated its probation late last year.

Last week, the Defense Logistics Agency awarded Air BP, a division of BP Products North America, a $42 million contract to supply fuel to Dover Air Force Base for the next month and a half. BP is the biggest supplier of fuel to the Defense Department. Continue reading »

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The Conspirator: Film on Lincoln assassination trial misses the mark

 ARTS & FILM, HISTORY  1 Response »
May 032011
 

By Shannon Jones | 2 May 2011

Directed by Robert Redford, written by James D. Solomon and Gregory Bernstein

Robin Wright as Mary Surrat

The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford, is a historical drama centered on a little-known aspect of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln: the trial by military commission of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), who ran the boarding house frequented by Lincoln’s assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth. Surratt became the first woman to be executed by the US government (the next would be Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, a victim of Cold War anticommunist hysteria). Continue reading »

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The Myth of High US Corporate Tax Rates

 ANNOTATED NEWS, IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 032011
 

By: David Dayen Tuesday May 3, 2011

  It should not have to come to this. The data on the US corporate tax rate has been out there for years. David Cay Johnston could tell you this stuff in his sleep. While conservatives focus on the nominal corporate tax rate of 35%, that’s almost a meaningless number compared to the effective tax rate, AKA what corporations actually pay to the government. And that tax rate is among the lowest in the industrialized world. Continue reading »
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The killing of bin Laden and the “war on terror”

 IMPERIALISM, Policies & Politicians  1 Response »
May 032011
 

Bil Van Auken |  3 May 2011

The attack on the NYC towers provided the ideal pretext for the endless "War on Terror" and for the huge propaganda wave that continues to this day.

WASHINGTON AND THE CORPORATE media have used the killing of Osama bin Laden to launch a strident celebration of US militarism. Missing from both official speeches and media commentary, however, is any assessment of the decade-old “global war on terror,” in which bin Laden’s summary execution in Pakistan is proclaimed a landmark victory.

By the time of his death on Sunday, however, Osama bin Laden had become largely irrelevant, a sick old man who by all evidence lived under effective house arrest as a ward of Pakistan’s military intelligence. The strategic importance of his demise is generally acknowledged as nil. Continue reading »

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