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 [...]

  • Benghazi: Imperialist Outpost

    Benghazi: Imperialist Outpost

    Politicized-Militarized Diplomacy by NORMAN POLLACK I am not naïve.  Embassies have been centers of intrigue, propaganda disseminators, bases for political intervention in a nation’s internal affairs, intermediaries for the promotion of markets and investments, etc., practices not confined to those representing the US, and hardly confined to recent times.  That said, Benghazi (technically, a consulate), signifies, as [...]

  • OpEds—Capitalism: "Horror Without End"

    OpEds—Capitalism: “Horror Without End”

    by John Peterson, Socialist Appeal The stream of distressing news seems to flow endlessly: School shootings from Colorado to Connecticut. Factory collapses and explosions from Bangladesh to Texas. Terrorist attacks from Pakistan to Boston. Crumbling infrastructure from Mexico City to Minneapolis. Kidnappings and torture from Ciudad Juarez to Cleveland. War and civil war from Syria [...]

  • How Medea Benjamin got to heckle Obama

    How Medea Benjamin got to heckle Obama

    Speeches given in front of ‘vetted” sycophantic audiences, behind closed doors. A glorified photo-op perfectly apt for a manipulated democracy.  Did you like this? Share it:

  • 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 [...]

Change is Sweeping Italy

 ANNOTATED NEWS, EU.Italy  2 Responses »
Jun 052011
 

Resisting Austerity
By MICHAEL LEONARDI

Italy hosts the central command for NATO’s war on Libya in the Gulf of Naples with US and NATO military bases dotting the landscape from North to South. There is almost constant traffic of U.S. nuclear submarines and nuclear armed aircraft carriers in and out of Italy’s waters. Sardinia especially suffers from the weight of US military presence. The town of Quirra located near Europe and NATO’s largest weapons testing facility in the southeastern part of Sardinia is plagued by cancerous tumors and leukemia that have recently been linked to the military testing at the facility. A growing number of Italians have had enough of this colonial like presence that threatens the health of the citizens and these treasured ecosystems…”

Italians protest against Berlusconi.

The Communist and Green Left in Italy has won a resounding victory against the politics as usual of the Berlusconi government and the center-left in Italy sweeping the Mayoral races in Naples, Milan and Cagliari. This coupled with the Supreme court’s decision to allow the vote on the referendum to ban nuclear power from Italy overriding the Berlusconi government’s attempt to eliminate it, has had people celebrating in the streets and singing the Communist Partisan’s anthem Bella Ciao! in piazzas up and down the peninsula this week. Continue reading »

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HOWARD ZINN: THE INTIMATELY OPPRESSED

 ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Jun 052011
 

Chapter 6: from A People’s History of the United States, By Howard Zinn

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a double oppression). The biological uniqueness of women, like skin color and facial characteristics for Negroes, became a basis for treating them as inferiors. True, with women, there was something more practically important in their biology than skin color-their position as childbearers-but this was not enough to account for the general push backward for all of them in society, even those who did not bear children, or those too young or too old for that. It seems that their physical characteristics became a convenience for men, who could use, exploit, and cherish someone who was at the same time servant, sex mate, companion, and bearer-teacher-warden of his children. Continue reading »

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ARCHIVES: The Fake Persuaders

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CITIZEN TOOLS  Comments Off
Jun 052011
 

ARCHIVES: ARTICLES YOU SHOULD HAVE READ THE FIRST TIME AROUND, BUT DIDN’T
Companies are creating false citizens to try to change the way we think

By George Monbiot. First published in the Guardian 14th May 2002
Republished June 4, 2011

Persuasion works best when it’s invisible. The most effective marketing worms its way into our consciousness, leaving intact the perception that we have reached our opinions and made our choices independently. As old as humankind itself, over the past few years this approach has been refined, with the help of the internet, into a technique called “viral marketing”. Last month, the viruses appear to have murdered their host. One of the world’s foremost scientific journals was persuaded to do something it has never done before, and retract a paper it had published. Continue reading »

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HENWOOD: In and out of school

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CITIZEN TOOLS  Comments Off
Jun 052011
 

BY DOUG HENWOOD

LBO's Henwood

It’s remarkable how similar the U.S. educational system is to our health care system: by world standards, we spend gobs of money on both, and both yield underwhelming outcomes. With health, we’re in a class by ourselves, spending a two-thirds higher share of GDP than the OECD average (a share bigger than any country in the world, by a long shot) to produce some of the worst health indicators in the First World. We’re not so egregious on education. We spend just a third more than the OECD average, the second-highest of any country, to produce merely mediocre scores on internationally comparable tests. But there’s a pattern there, don’t you think? Continue reading »

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ARCHIVES: WALL STREET / Class Racket

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ARCHIVES, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY  Comments Off
Jun 052011
 

By Doug Henwood
THE LEFT BUSINESS OBSERVER
The author made no money on this book, so please consider a donation.

Wall Street was first published in hardcover by Verso in 1997, and in paperback in 1998. Since Verso chose not to reprint it when it went out of stock, the rights reverted to the author in March 2005.

It’s now available for free download on the web, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivslicense. It may be recirculated freely for noncommercial use only. No alterations are allowed, and the author must be credited.

The book is a definitive overview of the financial markets and their economic and political role.

The file is in Acrobat 5.0 format and is 1.1 megabytes in size.  DOWNLOAD (FREE) THE WHOLE BOOK HERE Continue reading »

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Obama the Minimalist

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, Zionist Occupation  Comments Off
Jun 052011
 

Hypocritical Washington Raises Middle East Tensions

By PATRICK BOND

Here in Palestine, disgust expressed by civil society reformers about Barack Obama’s May 19 policy speech on the Middle East and North Africa confirms that political reconciliation between Washington and fast-rising Arab democrats is impossible.

Amidst many examples, consider the longstanding US tradition of blind, self-destructive support for Israel, which Obama has just amplified. Recognizing a so-called “Jewish state” as a matter of US policy, he introduced a new twist that denies foundational democratic rights for 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel. For a Harvard-trained constitutional lawyer to sink so low on behalf of Zionist discrimination is shocking. Continue reading »

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