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
  • Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Guest Editorials— By Andre Damon, wsws.org The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report Monday showing that electronics giant Apple Inc. uses offshore tax shelters to avoid taxes on the majority of its income and cheated the US government out of $9 billion in 2012 alone. That same day, a tornado leveled the town [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric

    Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric, Congo war crimes, Jailed for silence, DOJ assault on Fox Source: RT.com On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin and political commentator Sam Sacks go over the Orwellian rhetoric in Obama’s latest foreign policy speech. Abby highlights a recent UN investigation bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by a [...]

  • Dr. Noam Chomsky breaks the set on war, imperialism and propaganda

    RT’s Abby Martin interviews Noam Chomsky on current issues stemming from pseudo-democratic governance in the United States. On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to philosopher, linguist, professor, political critic and author of over 100 books Dr. Noam Chomsky about the Boston bombings, US terror inflicted abroad, drones, Obama’s rebranding of Bush [...]

  • OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    By Pepe Escobar, RT.com  Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent. US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’ from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it.  Did you like this? Share [...]

  • Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    AlterNet [1] / By Sean McElwee [2] Last week two important stories about U.S. foreign policy broke. First, the White House released some 100 pages of e-mails confirming a dastardly scandal: rather than call the Benghazi attack a “terrorist act,” President Obama, in a Nixonian power grab, called it an, “act of terror.” Did you like this? Share it:

  • Religious Barbarians

    Religious Barbarians

    From Tbilisi to Worchester by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI (With report & VIDEO by PressTV, see addendum below) It was humanity at its best.  Showing compassion for the quick and the dead.  The quick made news in Tbilisi, Georgia.  The dead made news in Worcester, Massachusetts. Did you like this? Share it:

  • The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    Despite Annulment, Genocide Trial a Breakthrough for Justice and Truth by LUZ MENDEZ The sentence of 80 years in prison against former de facto president Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during Guatemala’s armed conflict, emitted on May 10, 2013, was annulled by the Constitutional Court ten days later. The court’s [...]

The Day Before Mother’s Day, Don’t Tell Other People’s Children To Sign Up for War.

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTIWAR, Heroes, OpEds, US Military  Comments Off
May 092011
 

By Pinko the Bear

Michelle Obama, at Commencement in Iowa (2011)

I LIKE YOU MICHELLE OBAMA. You seem like a nice lady, good wife and good mother. By the way Michelle, Happy Mother’s Day. I hope your family shows you a little love and appreciation for all you do. Go ahead and enjoy it, you most likey deserve it. That said, I am spending part of my Mother’s Day responding to your words at the commencement address you gave yesterday at the University of Northern Iowa, and I have a bone to pick with you. A couple of bones, actually. Shall the picking begin?

I think it was very nice of you to take your time to visit them, wish them well in the working world -as if they will be able to find jobs – and to offer some motherly advice. It was sweet of you to recall how you had been received in Iowa just a few years ago while on the campaign trail for you fabulously energizing, charasmatic, hopeful and sincere sounding husband.

“People didn’t know a thing about me, yet they listened. They asked questions. They gave me the benefit of the doubt and a chance to show who I was. And that’s because people here in Iowa understand that everyone has something to offer.” Continue reading »

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The Pain in Spain

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 092011
 

The Spreading Euro Crisis is Eloquent

By CONN HALLINAN

Spanish villa for sale: with the market softening, maybe a long wait.

When the current economic crisis hit Europe in 2008, small countries on the periphery were its first victims: Iceland, Ireland, and Latvia. Within a year it had spread to Greece and Portugal, though the GDP of both nations—respectively 11th and 12th in the European Union (EU)—are hardly central to the continent’s economic engine.

But now the contagion threatens to strike at the center of Europe. Spain, the fifth largest economy in the EU and 13th largest in the world, is staggering under a combination of debt and growth-killing austerity, and the balance books in Italy, the Union’s fourth largest economy, don’t look much better. Indeed, Italy’s national debt is higher than that of Greece, Ireland or Portugal, three countries that have been forced to apply for bailouts. Continue reading »

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Ron Paul: More Progressive Than Obama?

 ANNOTATED NEWS  3 Responses »
May 092011
 

Who is the Real Reactionary?

Ron Paul: More Progressive Than Obama?

By CHARLES DAVIS

Ron Paul

Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I’ll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn’t protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn’t overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government’s criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama? Continue reading »

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Killing Osama, Resolving Nothing

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, GOVERNMENT CRIMES  1 Response »
May 092011
 

Piles and Piles of Corpses

By DAVID SWANSON |  May 2, 2011

The repulsive cynic and semi-deranged Glenn Beck was jubilant, naturally. As a top chauvinist demagog, that kind of response comes with the territory.

The plane I was on landed in Washington, D.C., Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.

Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being — which despite the pilot’s prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing foreign leaders whom we’ve previously supported has been an ongoing disaster. Continue reading »

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The Illogic of Lesser Evilism: the Obama Example

 American Parties, ANNOTATED NEWS, Obama  1 Response »
May 092011
 

“Lesser evilism is ultimately illogical because evil choices can and do affect future choices in ways that make the lesser evil down the road worse than the greater evil now is.”

By ANDREW LEVINE

As things stand, Obama will get away with it again in 2012.

Barack Obama will likely be the lesser evil in the 2012 election.  That may be a reason to vote for him then; perhaps even a compelling reason in some circumstances.  But it is not a reason to support him now.

What follows is addressed to Obama supporters who disagree, “progressives” who think that it is illogical not to support the lesser evil.  To those who are in Obama’s camp and whose support is not of the lesser evil variety – who think Obama’s presidency is good for liberty, equality and fraternity or that it is as good as can be in the circumstances he confronts, I can only say that, given all that has happened in the past two years, I find unambivalent support incomprehensible, and “panglossian” : support only slightly more plausible. Continue reading »

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INEQUALITY MONITOR (5.9.11)

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM  Comments Off
May 092011
 

Paul Ryan town hall meeting: A tougher ride than before.

THE HYPOCRISY OF CAPITALISM is evident everywhere you look, but is particularly repugnant in its “normal” compensation disparities, with the executive class (not to mention the actual business owners) earning obscene multiples of an average working person’s pay. Capitalism in that manner exhibits the same indifference to inequality as its predecessor regime, feudalism, but justifies itself (especially in the American lore) through the spurious notion in practice that “anyone can make it if you work hard enough.”   Well, that ain’t much of a consolation for the enormous numbers who try faithfully, and still fall through the cracks (hint: the system is rigged). And guess what: Feudalism also had its ‘rags to riches” stories.

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan and the new crop of Randian moral cretins, notably the Republican (and often Democratic) governors blasting social defense mechanisms and public services in state after state, continue to rewrite the American social contract to the painful detriment of the masses. They can do so with something approaching impunity, for although the public is waking up to the sheer criminality and cynicism of these doctrines and beginning to spot the scaffolding of lies that props them up, popular organizations have yet a long way to go before they can really challenge the status quo. This week’s TOO MUCH newsletter packs a wealth of information and examples to help activists and citizens realize the full extent of the current usurpation. Invest a few minutes and divest yourself of the ignorance garroting this republic one twist at a time. —Patrice Greanville Continue reading »

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