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
May 252011
 

SPECIAL—

When Animals Resist
Let Us Now Praise Infamous Animals

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR | Counterpunch.org
Thank you, Jeffrey St. Clair


In the spring of 1457, a gruesome murder took place in the French village of Savigny-sur-Etang. A five-year-old boy had been killed and his body partially consumed. A local family was accused of this frightful crime by local residents who claimed to have witnessed the murder. The seven suspects, a mother and her six children, were soon tracked down by local authorities, who discovered them still stained by the boy’s blood. They were arrested, indicted on charges of infanticide and held in the local jail for trial. Continue reading »

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May 252011
 

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Beck (third from left) sporting the obligatory yarmulke. Compared to Beck, Elmer Gantry was brimming with principles.

Conservative huckster Glenn Beck is packing up his white board and floppy clown shoes and heading to Jerusalem, where he hopes to inspire the world to join him in scuttling any hope of a two-state solution to the 60-year-old Israel-Palestine conflict.

Of late, Beck has been making some mention of Israel on his show every day. He just returned from a “fact-finding” trip to the Holy Land, he’s reportedly making a movie about the Jewish state, and this week he announced that he’ll be holding a “restoring courage” rally in Jerusalem this summer, where he hopes his legion of devoted fans will take few days out of their retirements to join him. Continue reading »

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May 252011
 

Breaking the tyranny of the palate may prove one of the toughest struggles of them all.

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet

A confinement space for pigs. Unbearably crowded conditions are only the tip of the suffering for these animals, along with the damage we do to ourselves and the health of the planetary systems we depend on for our ultimate survival.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently delivered a major victory to factory farms. Under a 2008 EPA rule, any confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) “designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge” animal waste must apply for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit under the Clean Water Act. The livestock industry ridiculed the notion that a farm must apply for a permit to discharge manure whether it intended to discharge it or not. And while, when phrased that way, it might sound ridiculous to you too, the details of the case betray a different story. Continue reading »

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May 252011
 

The main banner says it all: ”We demand REAL democracy!” “Were not chattel of politicians or bankers.”

Written by Alan Woods Monday, 23 May 2011

It leaps across frontiers, defying all barriers, it laughs at the threats and curses of the ruling class and it sweeps aside the forces of the state. It cannot be halted. The mass protests that are spreading from one country to another have caught all the forces of the old society by surprise. They do not know how to react. If they do nothing, the movement grows, but if they attempt to crush it, it will grow much more rapidly.

In Spain tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets over the last week. In demonstrations that seemed to come from nowhere, demonstrators filled city plazas all over Spain in a wave of outrage over government austerity policies and high unemployment rates. The “experts” were taken completely off guard. Where had this movement come from? The youth is apolitical, they said; the youth is apathetic.  Continue reading »

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May 252011
 
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Cornel West: His criticism would be better grounded if it was straight political analysis instead of bourgeois psychobabble.

Unable to defend the indefensible, Black Obama supporters have been “rendered all but mute on issues of policy.” They got their chance to reenter the political conversation when Princeton professor and media celebrity Cornel West, a former Obama supporter who is now a harsh critic, speculated on the racial workings of the president’s brain. “There is no need to inject racial psychoanalysis into the (public) conversation when straightforward political analysis is more than sufficient to the task.” Continue reading »

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May 252011
 

The tornado’s lessons are clear to those who can see the obvious.

JOSEPH KISHORE | wsws.org |  25 May 2011

Another disaster has struck an impoverished region of the United States. The death toll from Sunday’s tornado, which tore up a large portion of Joplin, Missouri, now stands at 124, and will almost certainly rise much higher, with 1,500 people still unaccounted for. It already stands as the deadliest single tornado in the United States since 1947.

With tornado season still in its early months, 2011 already ranks as one of the deadliest years in the history of the country. At least 487 have been killed so far, the most since 1936, before the introduction of tornado warning systems. Even as rescue teams searched through the rubble of collapsed houses and buildings on Tuesday, the region braced for new and even bigger storms. Continue reading »

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