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
  • Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby versus Prince Harry and his polo-playing American friends

    Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby versus Prince Harry and his polo-playing American friends

    By David Walsh, wsws.org “Prince Harry rounded off his hugely successful week-long tour of the U.S. today very much in his comfort zone – playing polo. … He was greeted by club founder Peter Brandt [sic] and his model wife, Stephanie Seymour. Brandt, 65, – whose wife is 44 – is an American industrialist and [...]

  • America Honors Its Worst

    America Honors Its Worst

    by Stephen Lendman Presidential Medals of Freedom are awarded annually. They mock what they claim to represent. Many go to deplorable recipients.  Previous dishonorees include GHW Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Shimon Peres, Margaret Thatcher, Alvaro Uribe, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Alan Greenspan among others. Did you like [...]

  • Disconnect: Soaring Markets/Troubled Economies

    Disconnect: Soaring Markets/Troubled Economies

    by Stephen Lendman Capitalism has succeeded in capturing governments around the world. Forget everything you learned about markets, economics and finance. Perhaps Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and other noted figures were wrong.  Central banks run today’s world. Major ones matter most. Money printing madness controls everything. Love doesn’t make the world go round. [...]

  • Can America Come to Terms with Boston Bombing Suspect's Stated Motives?

    Can America Come to Terms with Boston Bombing Suspect’s Stated Motives?

    Consortium News [1] / By Ray McGovern [2] Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the [...]

  • A new film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

    A new film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

    By David Walsh, wsws.org Directed by Baz Luhrmann, co-written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald “It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick [...]

  • Obama’s New Appointments Prove that He Will Continue to Lick Wall Street’s Boots In His Second Term

    Obama’s New Appointments Prove that He Will Continue to Lick Wall Street’s Boots In His Second Term

    by WashingtonsBlog Puts Fox In Charge of the Henhouse … Again The party line is that Obama’s new pick for SEC boss – Mary Jo White – will be tough on Wall Street. For example, the Wall Street Journal writes: Obama Taps Ex-Prosecutor Mary Jo White, Portending Increased Policing of Wall Street In reality, this is putting the [...]

  • Pole dancing for the faint-hearted

    Let the Real Housewives try this for a change. Did you like this? Share it:

  • IRS Scandal Headlines: More Than Meets the Eye

    IRS Scandal Headlines: More Than Meets the Eye

    by Stephen Lendman More than targeting political enemies is involved. More on than below. The practice is longstanding. Republican and Democrat administrations use the IRS abusively.  During the Coolidge administration, Republican Senator James Couzens investigated the IRS’ predecessor – the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR).  Did you like this? Share it:

Do We Really Need an International Criminal Court?

 ANNOTATED NEWS, IMPERIALISM, The Middle East  Comments Off
May 152011
 

A Pretext for War

By DIANA JOHNSTONE

A little over four years ago, CounterPunch ran an article I wrote based on my presentation at an international conference held in Tripoli on the International Criminal Court. At a moment when the ICC is being used, predictably, to justify the NATO aggression against Libya, including the targeted assassination of Moammer Qaddafi, or a ground invasion ostensibly to capture him, I think it would be appropriate to rerun this article.–DJ

Jewish settlers have only aggravated the eternal crisis.

Year after year, people in the Arab countries are helpless spectators to the ongoing destruction of Iraq and Palestine by the United States and Israel. They see families wiped out by bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. They see Arabs tortured and humiliated in Abu Ghraib and in Guantanamo. They see Israel regularly carrying out “targeted” assassinations in the Occupied Territories (splashing death around the target) while extending its illegal settlement of land belonging to Palestinians. Probably no people have greater cause to yearn for an equitable system of international justice. But where are they to look for it? Continue reading »

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Court: No right to resist unlawful police entry

 ANNOTATED NEWS, Law & Judiciary  Comments Off
May 152011
 

Indiana sets a very dangerous precedent

Updated: Saturday, 14 May 2011, 3:05 PM EDT

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – People have no right to resist if police officers illegally enter their home, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in a decision that overturns centuries of common law.

The court issued its 3-2 ruling on Thursday, contending that allowing residents to resist officers who enter their homes without any right would increase the risk of violent confrontation. If police enter a home illegally, the courts are the proper place to protest it, Justice Steven David said. Continue reading »

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The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes

 ANNOTATED NEWS, US Foreign Policy, US Military  Comments Off
May 152011
 

May 12, 2011

Versailles on the Potomac and Its Endless Wars

The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes

By WILLIAM J. ASTORE

The killing of Osama bin Laden, “a testament to the greatness of our country” according to President Obama, should not be allowed to obscure a central reality of our post-9/11 world. Our conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya remain instances of undeclared war, a fact that contributes to their remoteness from our American world. They are remote geographically, but also remote from our day-to-day interests and, unless you are in the military or have a loved one who serves, remote from our collective consciousness (not to speak of our consciences).

And this remoteness is no accident. Our wars and their impact are kept in remarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little knowledge and even less say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged. Continue reading »

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The Death of the Myth of the “Political Middle”

 American Parties, ANNOTATED NEWS, Liberaloids & Radical Centrists, MEDIA SCUM  1 Response »
May 152011
 

The real question is: Can social democracy ever deliver the goods?

STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH
Crossposted with  http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12687

Canada's Jack Layton: genuine leftism or another Clinton/Blairite clone?

Notably, the week of May 1, 2011 was marked by two major political deaths.  The one receiving huge attention, around the world, was that of Osama bin Laden. It will likely have a major impact on everything from US domestic politics to US relations with Pakistan ranging from the fairly short-term (US domestic politics, given the media-driven incredibly short attention span of most US voters) to the possibly rather long-term, on policy and politics in South and South-Central Asia. Continue reading »

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The People vs. Goldman Sachs

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 152011
 

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department
should bring criminal charges

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein testifies before the Senate in April 2010

BY MATT TAIBBI
They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial. Continue reading »

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Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

 ANNOTATED NEWS, GOVERNMENT CRIMES, IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 152011
 


We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

By Noam Chomsky

Chomsky

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.” Continue reading »

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