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
Sep 122011
 

A bridge of peace between humans and non-humans: an example to be imitated.

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?
If You Build It, THEY Will Come…

This is the actual turn-off From Banff, Alberta, Canada to the #1 highway to Calgary.

Great picture isn’t it? They had to build the animals their own crossing (especially the elk) because that was where the natural crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too many accidents.

It didn’t take the animals long to learn that this was their very own bridge!
And then you have some people saying ‘Animals aren’t intelligent.’

Really….?  

Continue reading »

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Sep 122011
 

By Johannes Stern, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization

Egyptian protesters ram a security gate at the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

The US-backed military junta in Egypt has responded with large-scale violence after protesters stormed the Israeli embassy in Giza, near Cairo, on September 9. Units of Egypt’s Central Security Forces (CSF) mounted a crackdown on demonstrators in front of the Israeli embassy Friday night, killing three protesters and injuring more than 1,000.

The CSF launched their attack after dozens of protesters had managed to break through the wall surrounding the embassy building and enter the lobby of the embassy.  

Protesters reportedly threw items and documents out of the windows, including “confidential” material showing close ties between the Egyptian and the Israeli regimes. This collaboration, which is deeply unpopular among Egyptians, was an issue during the revolution from the start. Continue reading »

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Sep 122011
 

Editors’s Note: Can spontaneous revolts make revolution? That is the question. And while an all-out uprising can indeed topple a tyrant, without a vanguard revolutionary party, “the system” (the underlying web of social power relations) is bound to remain in place. In the essay below, Jim Cannon, a veteran fighter for socialism and a Trotskyst, analyzes the value of organizing a vanguard party. —PG

James P. Cannon

V. Lenin at his office in the Kremlin, 1918. As usual, perusing the papers to understand contemporary events.

First Written: 1967
Published: International Socialist ReviewVol.28 No.5, September-October 1967, and later included in the anthology 50 Years of World Revolution (1917-1967)(Merit Publishers: New York, 1968).
Source: Fighting for Socialism in the ‘American Century’ © Resistance Books ©2000 permission granted by Resistance Books for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2003.
TranscriptionHTML Markup: David Walters


The greatest contribution to the arsenal of Marxism since the death of Engels in 1895 was Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party as the organiser and director of the proletarian revolution. That celebrated theory of organisation was not, as some contend, simply a product of the special Russian conditions of his time and restricted to them. It is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end. Continue reading »

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