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 [...]
What the Syrian Constitution says about Assad and the Rebels
By Stephen Gowans, What’s Left The idea that the uprising against the Syrian government is inspired by a grassroots movement thirsting for a pluralist, democratic state is a fiction. The opposition’s chief elements are Islamists who seek to establish a Sunni-dominated Islamic state in place of a Syrian government they revile for being secular and [...]
ARCHIVES: The U.S. Left and Media Politics
Articles of compelling importance you should have read but missed the first time around. Robert W. McChesney, Monthly Review, a fraternal organization ••• American democracy is in deep trouble. Cynicism and distrust of the political system, fueled at least in part by imposed ignorance, have grown steadily in recent years. There are several reasons for [...]
The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda
JOHN PILGER: One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading [...]
MADISON, WI — DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details [...]
Chronicles of Inequality [TOO MUCH, 20 May 2013)
May 20, 2013 THIS WEEK Oh, please, spare us any more pious declarations. After a week of “IRS scandal,” we simply can’t bear another bogus claim that we’re witnessing one of the “most shameful abuses of government power in 20th-century American history.”We’re witnessing no such thing. Let’s be clear about what’s really happened: An understaffed and overburdened IRS office [...]
BY STEPHEN LENDMAN Permanent war is longstanding policy. America deplores peace. Throughout its history, it’s waged war annually at home and/or abroad. Today it does so globally. Giving peace a chance is loathed. Direct or proxy wars rage in multiple countries. Did you like this? Share it:
The decomposition of American democracy
BY TOM CARTER, WSWS.ORG On Thursday, Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the war on terror would continue at least another 10 or 20 years. Alluding to last month’s lockdown of Boston, he said the president and the military would continue to assert “wartime” powers, unchecked by Congress or [...]
By Ted Rall—
Stifling Liberal Dissent Under Obama
Rall
NEW YORK–After they called the presidency for Obama, emails poured in. “You must be relieved now that the Democrats are taking over,” an old college buddy told me. “There will be less pressure on you.”
That would have been nice.
In the late 1990s my cartoons ran in Time, Fortune and Bloomberg Personal magazines and over 100 daily and alternative weekly newspapers. I was a staff writer for two major magazines. Continue reading »
By Steve James, Political analyst, wsws.org | 17 May 2011
The British Queen in Ireland: Honored by good Irish lads...What does it really mean?
A huge security operation is being rolled out to protect Queen Elizabeth and her husband Philip during their four day visit to Ireland beginning today. The measures will be extended for the visit of US President Barack Obama just three days later.
The royal tour is the first visit by a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland since the creation of the Irish Free State and independence from Britain. It has been described as an historic moment, with Taoiseach Enda Kenny hailing it as “symbolically a healing of the past” and President Mary McAleese as a “signal of the success of the peace process” and a sign that Ireland and Britain were forging a “new future, a future very, very different from the past, on very different terms from the past”. Continue reading »
The “Nabka” protests turn bloody as Israel uses lethal force to repel demonstrators. (See video below)
Bill Van Auken | 17 May 2011
Nabka Day protest, on the Lebanese border.
The Obama administration’s reaction to Israel’s massacre Sunday of unarmed Palestinian protesters on its borders underscores the hypocrisy of those ascribing “humanitarian” motives to Washington’s predatory policy in the region.
Israeli troops opened fire with live ammunition and, in one case, tank fire on Palestinians who demonstrated on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. Tens of thousands joined in the protests, which were called to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the term used by the Palestinians for Israel’s declaration of independence and the wholesale ethnic cleansing that drove three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Continue reading »
Why They Hated Dominique—
And now let’s be grateful for small favors
By MIKE WHITNEY | May 16, 2011
Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Rotten to the core but better than the alternative? This is beginning to sound familiar.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is effectively finished as a political force, even if he doesn’t draw a guilty verdict in New York, where a 32-year-old maid says she was attacked and forced to perform oral sex on him. He’s finished as IMF chief and his candidacy against Sarkozy also looks to be in ruins. Continue reading »
By Stephen Lendman
Let’s face it, a millennia or longer of vicious persecution of Jews in most of Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, has given the monstrously deformed state of Israel the perfect and perennial cover for its own criminality.—Eds
Rachel Corrie: American member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). An unknown to 99.999 of Americans, and no movies are being optioned on her tragic biography. You ever wonder why?
On May 16, at 6:54AM Gaza time (3:54AM GMT), in international waters, an Israeli naval vessel attacked the Malaysian owned Spirit of Rachel Corrie ship (officially the MV Finch), carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. More details below.
Lawless Monday followed Nakba Day’s bloody Sunday, Israeli security forces assaulting unprecedented numbers of nonviolent demonstrators in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and along the Lebanese/Syrian borders.
Egypt was complicit, blocking activists from reaching Rafah. So was Jordan, forcefully preventing Palestinian supporters from approaching the King Hussein Jordan River Crossing Point.
Nonetheless, the day was potentially historic. Activists hope it will inspire greater global support for Palestinian liberation and justice, what only hindsight will show.
Up to two dozen were killed, scores injured, and many arrested, soldiers and police firing high-velocity tear gas canisters at point blank range, rubber bullets, live ammunition, and tank shell warning shots, a shocking display of violence given scant coverage in America’s media. Continue reading »
By Phil Rockstroh
“Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. But we’re in a stage of denial: we want to re-establish things as they used to be, to put the country back where it was.” — James Hillman
Most of the men I grew up with in Alabama and Georgia deny the veracity of climate change. They are unwilling to make the connection between their ownership (actually the bank’s) of SUVs and oversized pickup trucks and the super storms and massive floods that, now with alarming regularity, ravish the region. Continue reading »