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 [...]

  • The Tornado and Other Man-Made Disasters

    The Tornado and Other Man-Made Disasters

    Our Economic System is Driving Climate Change by KEN KLIPPENSTEIN The ancient Greeks attributed weather to the god Zeus; today we can safely attribute it to industrial capitalism and its voracious consumption of fossil fuels. The carnage left by a tornado in Oklahoma yesterday is just the latest in our economic system’s daunting body count. [...]

  • Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

    Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

    By Barry Grey and Nick Barrickman, wsws.org Twenty-seven-year-old Ibragim Todashev was shot and killed early Wednesday morning while being interrogated by police and intelligence officials in an Orlando, Florida, apartment. Todashev, a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and, like Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, was reportedly being questioned by a Federal Bureau of [...]

  • Classical Essays: The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte - Part One

    Classical Essays: The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte – Part One

    PART ONE OF FOUR Editor’s Note: The core truth about Napoleon is still a matter of debate. Napoleon, opportunist or usurping though he may appear to a modern Marxian obswerver, not to mention Anglo-American mainstream historians tainted with Francophobic hatred and contempt for the French and their revolution, was also seen as a threat by [...]

  • 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 [...]

Today Detroit – Tomorrow, Every City in America

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 082011
 

By Rania Khalek

Friedman: He worked hard (and was richly rewarded) to make the antisocial "free market' respectable.

If Milton Friedman, father of the free market, were alive today, I imagine he would be jumping with joy at the prospect of the abandonment of public education for private, for-profit charter schools.

Back in 2005, following the devastation of hurricane Katrina, Friedman wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal where he said “This is a tragedy.  It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”  Soon after, Friedmonites rushed into New Orleans for the chance to implement what Friedman had long envisioned. With the help of the Bush administration, they dissolved the public school system and in its place built a network of publicly funded charters run, not by educators, but by private entities that made their own rules. Continue reading »

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The NHS, an island of socialism, hit hard by the capitalist ocean in Britain

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM  Comments Off
May 082011
 

The   B u l l e t
Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 498
May 6, 2011

‘What Matters Is What Works’: The State and the National Health Service in Scotland and Wales

Colin Leys

After forty years of ideological onslaught the very idea of ‘the state’ is close to joining others, such as ‘collective’ (not to mention ‘socialist,’ and even ‘left’), in the depository of Unclean Concepts. ‘State bad, private good’ may be a crude and simplistic slogan, but it is the very real starting-point of many politicians and most media commentators and BBC interviewers today, from John Humphrys down. Continue reading »

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The Goldstone Affair

 ANNOTATED NEWS, The Middle East, Zionist Occupation  Comments Off
May 082011
 

The Nation   April 14, 2011 |  This article appeared in the May 2, 2011 edition of The Nation.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the article below appeared in our May 2 print issue. Subscribers can download the PDF.

Judge Goldstone

From the moment the Goldstone Report was published in September 2009, its opponents have worked tirelessly to undermine it. The 452-page investigation of the 2008–09 Gaza conflict by a United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission accused Israel and Hamas of war crimes for attacks on civilians, but its overall thrust was harshly critical of the Israeli onslaught, which took as many as 1,400 Palestinian lives, including those of more than 300 children. The US Congress denounced the report for allegedly denying Israel’s right of self-defense (it didn’t); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortlisted the report, along with Hamas rockets and a nuclear-armed Iran, as one of the three main threats to the Jewish state; and Alan Dershowitz accused the report’s chief author, Richard Goldstone, of being a traitor to the Jewish people. As recently as March, Eli Yishai, Israel’s bellicose interior minister, wrote to Goldstone charging his report with giving “legitimacy” to terrorist organizations and “calm[ing] murderers without a conscience” when they murder children. Continue reading »

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4/ Why you can’t (and shouldn’t) trust liberals: CHRIS MATTHEWS

 ANNOTATED NEWS, LIBERAL BETRAYALS, MEDIA SCUM, Obama  2 Responses »
May 082011
 

Stenographers to power series—

Matthews: “Obama did what America needed!”

By Chris Matthews, Hardball host | May 2, 2011
MSNBC HARDBALL

Prefatory Note:

Chris Matthews

FOR A LONG TIME NOW MSNBC’S CHRIS MATTHEWS has been pretty much unwatchable. Someone should do everyone a big favor and tell Chris that he needs to tone it down, that his position as bloviator extraordinaire, establishment wag, obnoxious self-promoting narcissistic browbeater, and Olympic-class motormouth is secure. Solid.  No competition, compadre.  Indeed, the latter trait is so pronounced that his guests often scramble to finish a single sentence.  For Matthews, the cynical showman, it’s clear that guests are not really sparring partners in an honest dialogue of ideas, but mere props allowing him to show off in front of the whole wide world what a bright guy he is.

Of late, in keeping with his combative born-again liberalism,  the former Catholic schoolboy has apparently transmogrified himself into  a Hitler Youth bully, compulsively  patrolling the corridors of opinion looking for those injudicious enough to doubt the wisdom of the Great New Leader. Since Obama critics, including a considerable number of idiots and corruptos from the right, abound, Matthews has his work literally cut out or him.  Continue reading »

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