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
  • 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 [...]

  • Dissent or Terror: New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide

    Dissent or Terror: New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide

    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)

    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 [...]

  • America: A Modern-Day Sparta

    America: A Modern-Day Sparta

    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

    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 [...]

  • Connecticut May Let Students Opt Out of Dissection

    Connecticut May Let Students Opt Out of Dissection

    by Alicia Graef Connecticut students who have a conscientious objection to dissection may soon have the right to opt out if lawmakers pass An Act Concerning Dissection Choice. Students have come forward to express their discomfort and objections to learning about the study of life by wasting the lives of innocent animals. Some are met with [...]

  • Russia Catches CIA Spy Red-Handed

    Russia Catches CIA Spy Red-Handed

    by Stephen Lendman America never permitted the bipolar rivalry to die down, and now given its taste for world domination it is wantonly creating new flashpoints for lethal confrontation. The upshot may be another arms race and a world that much closer to WW3. CIA agents operate most everywhere. They don’t promote friendly relations. They’re [...]

  • 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 [...]

Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Doesn’t Think So (Probably)

 ANNOTATED NEWS, SCIENCE  Comments Off
Aug 022011
 

The most famous scientist in the world, Stephen Hawking, has never avoided the big questions, from the nature of time to the fate of the universe.

By Dan Vergano, USA Today

British physicist Stephen Hawking attends the 2010 World Science Festival opening night gala performance at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday, June 2, 2010 in New York. (Evan Agostini, AP)

But that was just a warm-up. Now he is squaring off with God.

Hawking will kick off Curiosity, the Discovery Channel’s weekly look (Sunday, 8 p.m. ET/ PT) at what research says about life’s big questions. It starts on Aug. 7., with an epsode entitled, “Is There a Creator?” Afflicted with a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) while young and now paralyzed, Hawking speaks with the aid of a voice synethesizer, and a narrator on the show.

“I recently published a book that asked if God created the universe. It caused something of a stir,” Hawking, 69, begins on the episode. (The “stir”, in fact, was religious leaders denouncing his book’s conclusion that God was unnecessary to the universe.) On the show, he takes viewers on a walk through humanity’s history of appraising our place in the universe, from Vikings facing down eclipses to the laws of modern cosmology, which explain the origin and structure of universe. “I believe the discovery of these laws is mankind’s greatest achievement,” he says. Continue reading »

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Greanville Tweetios: Keith Olbermann on the deficit deal gets a C+ (VIDEO)

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, LIBERAL BETRAYALS  Comments Off
Aug 022011
 

K. Olbermann

Patrice Greanville

THESE ARE TOUGH TIMES FOR PEOPLE WHO TELL THE TRUTH IN AMERICA, especially in the lamebrain media where they are almost non-existent, so I guess we must be grateful for what we get. Still, we feel that some glaring omissions should be pointed out in those cases where, as happened with Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment last night (8.1.11), good intentions do not suffice to get the American people to really understand what is now facing them. Continue reading »

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Obama & the Fake Debt Ceiling Crisis: This President Is Really Just Smarter Than You Are

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM  Comments Off
Aug 022011
 

By Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Obama's demagogic skills makes Louisiana's legendary Huey Long --"The Kingfish"—look like a rank amateur. Except that the latter often delivered for the people.

So why won’t the president call Republican and bankster bluffs and shut down the phony debt ceiling crisis? Why won’t the Republicans take yes-may-I -have-another-tax-cut-for-the-rich for an answer? And why won’t president Obama stand up and fight for the poor and working people who voted for him in their tens of millions, who have made his career possible.

It’s taken a long while, but I’m finally coming around. I’m about ready to admit the truth. Supporters of the president have long insisted that The Man simply knows things most of us don’t. After all, he’s the president. He’s got access to the facts, the figures. He’s looking further, they say, seeing deeper, playing sixth dimensional chess while most of us can barely get our minds around checkers. You know, they just might be right. If there’s one thing this phony debt ceiling crisis proves, it’s that Barack Obama really is smarter than most of us, especiall smarter than the tens of millions who voted him into office. Continue reading »

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MEDIA MANURE: David Gregory’s Social Security Nonsense

 ALERTS, ANNOTATED NEWS, HUMBUG CENTRAL, MEDIA SCUM  Comments Off
Aug 022011
 

Action Alert / A Dispatch from FAIR

David Gregory’s Social Security Nonsense
Misinforming viewers about deficit’s causes–and public’s solutions

What's most irritating is that insufferable idiots—or is it ignoramuses?— like Gregory are the norm, not the exception. A situation that just happens to suit the status quo admirably.—Eds

Corporate media coverage of budget deficits and debt often turns to blaming Social Security and Medicare for being the real problem. NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory is especially fond of passing off such misleading claims as facts.

In a question to Republican Sen. John Thune, Gregory put it this way (7/31/11):
Senator, what’s really ludicrous to the American people, even when the American people don’t always speak with one voice on this matter, is that Washington is not really dealing with what really drives the debt, that’s entitlement spending. It’s been going on this way and was a ticking time bomb since the ’60s, and Democrats–like you were saying, “Hey, we can’t deal with Social Security and Medicare.”

Republicans, you know, sign tax pledges, “I’m not going to raise taxes.” Well, we can’t deal with revenues. I mean, this is what’s ludicrous to the American people. And even here, if we have a deal, we’re going to solve a political problem but not the underlying fiscal problem, which is what creates our debt, senator, no? Continue reading »

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OpEds: The debt limit deal and the social counterrevolution in America

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
Aug 022011
 

BARRY GREY, WSWS.ORG (a member of the SEP, a socialist organization)

The nation would have been far better off if Obama had never tackled "the Deficit Crisis".

The agreement reached by the Obama administration and Democratic and Republican congressional leaders to raise the federal debt limit marks a turning point in the class struggle in the United States. The deal imposes sweeping cuts in vital social programs upon which millions of working people depend without a penny in tax increases on the corporations or the wealthy.

It inaugurates a frontal attack on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as part of a drive to reverse all of the social reforms of the 20th century. It sets a precedent for an escalation of the assault on social programs far beyond the already cruel cuts mandated in the agreement by linking increases in the federal debt limit to the equivalent amount in deficit reduction. The current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek features a cover story headlined “Why the Debt Crisis is Even Worse Than You Think” which argues that $15 trillion must be slashed over the next decade—more than five times the level of cuts in the agreement reached over the weekend. Continue reading »

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WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
Aug 022011
 

The Historical Gastonia Textile Mill Strikes Are Not Forgotten

By Gaither Stewart

Olive Dargan

(Rome) When in the early part of this millennium I was writing a rather surrealistic novel, ASHEVILLE, about the town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where I started out my life, I ran into the story of the Asheville-based self-professed Communist writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, of whom I had never heard before. Visiting then her gravesite in the little known Green Hills Cemetery in West Asheville and researching her and her activities I fell into a gossamer review of early 19th century labor struggles in the good old U.S. South.

Here I want to share this bit of labor history—its passion, its shortcomings and failures, to shed some light on what might be the future. But first some words by and about Dargan. Back during one of the fervid witch hunts of native Communists, she wrote this in a novel:

A young black Harvard graduate makes a speech at a Fourth of July celebration:

“Suppose that some great disaster were to sweep ten million families out to sea and leave ‘em on a desert island to starve and rot. That would be what you might call an act of God, maybe. But suppose a manner of government that humans have set up and directed, drives ten million families into the pit of poverty and starvation? That’s no act of God. That’s our fool selves actin’ like lunatics. What humans have set up they can take down….Whoever says we’ve got to have a capitalist government when we want a workers’ government, is givin’ the lie to the great founders of these United States….”—A Stone Came Rolling, page 161, Olive Tilford Dargan

Continue reading »

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