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
  • The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

    The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

    The controversies over the IRS and especially the AP phone records appear to have long-lasting effects By Glenn Greenwald,  guardian.co.uk  Barack Obama Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ’s attack on AP’s news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record [...]

  • Argentina’s General Videla and the “war on terror”

    Argentina’s General Videla and the “war on terror”

    By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla died May 17 at the age of 87 as the result of injuries suffered from a fall in a prison shower. He was remembered as the head of a savage military dictatorship that between 1976 and 1983 murdered and “disappeared” some 30,000 Argentine workers, socialist militants, [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • The Tornado and Other Man-Made Disasters

    The Tornado and Other Man-Made Disasters

    Our Economic System is Driving Climate Change by KEN KLIPPENSTEIN The ancient Greeks attributed weather to the god Zeus; today we can safely attribute it to industrial capitalism and its voracious consumption of fossil fuels. The carnage left by a tornado in Oklahoma yesterday is just the latest in our economic system’s daunting body count. [...]

  • Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

    Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

    By Barry Grey and Nick Barrickman, wsws.org Twenty-seven-year-old Ibragim Todashev was shot and killed early Wednesday morning while being interrogated by police and intelligence officials in an Orlando, Florida, apartment. Todashev, a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and, like Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, was reportedly being questioned by a Federal Bureau of [...]

  • Classical Essays: The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte - Part One

    Classical Essays: The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte – Part One

    PART ONE OF FOUR Editor’s Note: The core truth about Napoleon is still a matter of debate. Napoleon, opportunist or usurping though he may appear to a modern Marxian obswerver, not to mention Anglo-American mainstream historians tainted with Francophobic hatred and contempt for the French and their revolution, was also seen as a threat by [...]

  • PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary "Citizen Koch" To Appease Koch Brothers

    PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary “Citizen Koch” To Appease Koch Brothers

    By Brendan Fischer, PRWatch | Report “Citizen Koch,” a documentary about money in politics focused on the Wisconsin uprising, was shunned by PBS for fear of offending billionaire industrialist David Koch, who has given $23 million to public television, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The dispute highlights the increasing role of private money in “public” television and raises [...]

  • Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

    Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

    by Pascal Robert, Black Agenda Report Don’t worry about Barack Obama. He’s far too useful to the rulers of America to be derailed by scandal, or even a combination of scandals. “Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have [...]

ISSUES & ALIBIS: Remember, Remember, The Eleventh Of September!

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM  Comments Off
Sep 082011
 

By Ernest Stewart

“It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government.” ~~~ David Ray Griffin, Ph.D.

“I don’t get Obama anymore – he can’t even beat Boehner on what day his speech is? He’s a Sphinx to me – by that I mean a giant pussy.” ~~~ Bill Maher

“We are returning cash assistance to its original intent as a transitional program to help families while they work toward self-sufficiency.” ~~~ Michigan Governor Rick Snyder

It’s always something,
There’s always something going wrong
That’s the only guarantee,
That’s what this is all about
Life Is A Lemon ~~~ Meatloaf

Well, gosh, how time flies when you’re having fun, huh, America? Has it really been ten years since the PNAC project came to fruition? Continue reading »

Did you like this? Share it:

Deficit-Obsessed Media Misinform on Causes Nightly network news fumbles reasons for debt

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, MEDIA SCUM, SCUMWATCH  Comments Off
Sep 082011
 

Extra! September 2011
By Carolyn Cutrone and Steve Rendall, FAIR!

 
At a time when the federal budget deficit is so prominently featured in the news, with pundits and “experts” (falsely) touting it as a leading concern of the U.S. public (FAIR Blog, 1/21/11), you might think corporate journalists would be well-practiced in explaining the chief causes of the deficit. 

Unfortunately, if you rely on network nightly news programs for your information about the economy, you are likely to be misinformed about the main causes of the current deficit—in order of importance, the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without the recession and these policy changes, the deficit would barely exist (Economic Policy Institute, 5/18/11).  Continue reading »

Did you like this? Share it:

The ‘Worst of the Worst’? 9/11, Guantánamo and the failures of U.S. corporate media

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CITIZEN TOOLS  1 Response »
Sep 082011
 

Extra! September 2011

By Andy Worthington

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush deliberately discarded domestic and international laws, creating an experimental facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There prisoners would be deprived of the protections of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, held without rights as “unlawful enemy combatants” in a world-wide program of extraordinary rendition, secret prisons and torture. Corporate media largely failed to hold the government responsible for this authoritarian response. Continue reading »
Did you like this? Share it:

Attack on the towers: The doubts persist

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CITIZEN TOOLS  Comments Off
Sep 082011
 

9/11 Mythology: The Big Lie of Our Time -
A broad section of Americans (and many people around the world) continue to be divided about who exactly carried out the attacks, with the “Truthers” arguing it was all an inside government job, and others believing the facts remain inconclusive and often contradictory. One thing unites all critical factions, though: that the US government knows much more than it has admitted, that its actions bespeak complicity, at best, and that it has feloniously hidden vital information and blocked all significant inquiries into the events of September 11,  while hypocritically exploiting the tragedy for its own propaganda ends.  In the essay below, contributor editor Lendman sums up the situation as we approach the tenth anniversary of the assault. It should be noted that, to this day, TGP’s editorial team is deeply divided about this topic.—Eds

By Stephen Lendman

Winston Churchill rightly explained that “(a) lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Today, of course, it circulates everywhere instantly.

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, once said: 

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

He added that “truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Corporate media manipulators love a big story they can hype, distort, and falsify to attract large audiences  supportively for the worst imperial crimes.  In fact, the bigger the event, the worse the reporting, sacrificing truth for managed news and opinions everyone should understand and avoid. Continue reading »

Did you like this? Share it:

The BULB act: yet another attempt at treachery by the repugnant Republicans

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CITIZEN TOOLS  Comments Off
Sep 082011
 

By Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss |
From the archives of EarthTalk, published by E Magazine 

New efficiency requirements for light bulbs may sound the death knell for incandescents, which have not changed significantly since Thomas Edison invented them in 1879. Newer, more efficient styles cost more but could save consumers some $6 billion in annual energy costs by 2015 — while also eliminating the equivalent of 30 large power plants’ electrical output and 14 million cars worth of carbon emissions.  © Hemera Collection

Dear EarthTalk: What was the BULB Act pertaining to light bulb energy efficiency that just failed to pass in the House of Representatives?—Betsy Edgerton, Columbus, OH

The Better Use of Light Bulbs (BULB) Act (H.R. 2417) was a failed attempt in July 2011 by some Republicans in the House to repeal a 2007 law mandating increased efficiency for light bulbs sold anywhere in the U.S. Sponsors of the bill cited the 2007 bulb efficiency requirements—whereby light bulbs must be 25 to 30 percent more efficient by 2014 and then as much as 60 percent more efficient by 2020—as a key example of how government overreaches its authority.

“The 2010 elections demonstrated that Americans are fed up with government intrusion,” said Representative Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who proposed the repeal. “The federal government has crept so deep into our lives that federal agencies now determine what kind of light bulbs the American people are allowed to purchase.”  Continue reading »

Did you like this? Share it: