The Greanville Post —Vol. VII- 2013

Something to think about—(put cursor over scroller to stop it)

We're engaged in a protracted mass communications battle, a contest of propagandas, Their object is to prop up the system's legitimacy; ours precisely the opposite. The core of a system's illegitimacy is nothing more nor less than its easily demonstrable Orwellian nature. If it claims to be a democracy it must be a plutocracy; if it proclaims to defend the safety of its population, it actively endangers it; if it struts around loudly shouting its allegiance to freedom and the rule of law, it is in actuality a cynical hidden dictatorship; If it brags about its "free press", then you know for sure that it is an abject, servile tool of the power elites. Of course the most infamous contradiction is that when this hypocritical scum kneel before the altar of peace they are actively engaged in making war. On and on. Always the opposite of what it claims. In America, especially, anyone awake can see that readily. But unfortunately the majority are still asleep.—Sean Lenihan •••The cowardice and duplicity of Congress, above all, the Democrats, and the subservience of the media, exhibited in their response to the exposure of the NSA spying programs, encourage the military and intelligence agencies to go even further in their drive toward dictatorship. Mark Udall, the Democratic senator presented as the most “outspoken” critic of the spying programs, began his interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program by pledging his support to the “war on terror” and denouncing leaks of classified information.—Barry Grey••••From Athens to Paris to Brazil, there is growing realization that politics as usual just won’t cut it anymore. We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities. The defense of the earth requires immediate and decisive action: logging roads need to be blocked, driftnets need to be cut, and cages need to be emptied. But these are piecemeal and reactive measures, and in addition to these tactics, radical movements and alliances must be built that unites struggles on behalf of humanity, nonhuman animals, and the earth in a politics of total liberation. Resistance is the oxygen of the future. Live to resist, resist to live.—Steve Best••••For 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.

Keystone XL Activists Labeled Possible Eco-Terrorists
Green Scare Continues by STEVE HORN Documents recently obtained by Bold Nebraska [1] show that TransCanada – owner of the hotly-contested Keystone XL (KXL) [2] tar sands pipeline – has colluded with an FBI/DHS Fusion Center in Nebraska [3], labeling non-violent activists as possible candidates for “terrorism” charges and other serious criminal charges. Did you like this? Share it:
Gangsta Government
Awake and Take Back Your Republic! by WILLIAM O’CONNOR “I’ll let you have the $10,000 for three points. That’s only because I know you.” I’m listening to Tony yak, my Shylock. Yak, yak has earned the moniker. He never gives his mouth a rest. Yak’s giving me the loan at street price: $30 for every [...]
Edward Snowden Had a Breaking Point, Where He Decided to Risk It All to Fix This Country — What’s Yours?
By Kevin Zeese [2], Margaret Flowers [3] When Edward Snowden [4] reached his breaking point, the world saw the truth about the vast extent of spying by the NSA on Americans and people around the world. In an act of conscience, Snowden released secret information, saying “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their [...]
Spying, Control and Murder Under the Imperial Presidency
Surveillance and the Corporate State by ROB URIE With all of the fear mongering the subject has received in recent decades, Americans have in fact had remarkably little to fear directly from ‘terrorism.’ While actual attacks have been spectacular—they were designed to garner attention, they are both rare and far less dangerous than opportunistic politicians [...]
The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning
By Chris Hedges FORT MEADE, Md.—The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that [...]
Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage
Whistleblowing in the Name of the Constitution by CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE Edward Snowden may go down inhistory as one of this nation’s most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest. The 29-year-old former technical assistant to the CIA and employee of a defense intelligence contractor has admitted to disclosing top secret documents about [...]
Iran To Send 4,000 Troops To Aid President Assad
By Robert Fisk Source: The Independent Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region. Did you like this? Share it:
Camping Out: Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful”
From our archives— Camping Out: Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful” Kurt Jacobsen [from New Politics, vol. 7, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 27, Summer 1999] KURT JACOBSEN is a research associate in political science at the University of Chicago and reviews films for the London Guardian. Prefatory note: As a movie buff I was baffled and [...]

Obama Better than Bush? Yes, But for Who?

ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE Comments Off

Sep 142011

By Stephen Gowans

The view of the New York Times and its columnist Paul Krugman is that the Obama presidency isn’t proceeding the way it was supposed to. The president has failed his liberal Democratic supporters and capitulated to the Republicans.

Here’s their charge sheet:

Obama failed to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, failed to create a government-run health insurance system, and failed in his negotiations with Congress on raising the debt-ceiling to shelter Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Continue reading »

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How Not to Stop a Pipeline

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Sep 142011

Why Are Environmentalists Coddling Obama?

By RALPH NADER

It was the most extraordinary citizen organizing feat in recent White House history. Over 1200 Americans from 50 states came to Washington and were arrested in front of the White House to demonstrate their opposition to a forthcoming Obama approval of the Keystone XL dirty oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada down to the Gulf Coast.

Anyone who has tried to mobilize people in open non-violent civil disobedience knows how hard it is to have that many people pay their way to Washington to join a select group of civic champions. The first round of arrestees – about 100 of them – were brought to a jail and kept on cement floors for 52 hours – presumably, said one guard, on orders from above to discourage those who were slated to follow this first wave in the two weeks ending September 3, 2011. Continue reading »

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9/11, ten years on

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Sep 142011

Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG

The tragedy precipitated a cynically exploited wave of jingoism that ripples to this day.

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was predictably exploited by the US ruling elite and the media in another attempt to wear down the critical faculties of the American people and justify the crimes carried out over the past decade in their name.

There is a palpable sense, however, that these efforts are wearing thin. Like everything else in American life, the official commemorative ceremonies for 9/11 have a ritualized character that has less and less to do with people’s real concerns.

The lives of the three thousand victims of the appalling crime carried out ten years ago should be honored and those they left behind supported. But this is something entirely different from the attempt to exploit their tragic deaths again and again for the most nefarious purposes. Continue reading »

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Obama’s jobs fraud

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Sep 142011

By Barry Grey, WSWS.ORG

Following his speech before a joint session of Congress Thursday night, President Barack Obama on Friday launched his campaign to marshal public support for his American Jobs Act with a rally in Richmond, Virginia, the first in a series of such events to be held around the country.

The Richmond event presented the sorry spectacle of working people being mobilized to cheer for measures whose implementation will mean a further deterioration in their conditions of life. Continue reading »

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The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux

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Sep 142011

Using Privilege to Challenge the State

Noam Chomsky

Since we often cannot see what is happening before our eyes, it is perhaps not too surprising that what is at a slight distance removed is utterly invisible. We have just witnessed an instructive example: President Obama’s dispatch of 79 commandos into Pakistan on May 1 to carry out what was evidently a planned assassination of the prime suspect in the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, Osama bin Laden. Though the target of the operation, unarmed and with no protection, could easily have been apprehended, he was simply murdered, his body dumped at sea without autopsy. The action was deemed “just and necessary” in the liberal press. There will be no trial, as there was in the case of Nazi criminals—a fact not overlooked by legal authorities abroad who approve of the operation but object to the procedure. As Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition of assassination in international law traces back to a forceful denunciation of the practice by Abraham Lincoln, who condemned the call for assassination as “international outlawry” in 1863, an “outrage,” which “civilized nations” view with “horror” and merits the “sternest retaliation.” Continue reading »

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Gowans Report— Cuba Still Making It Tough To Screw Others

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Sep 142011

By Stephen Gowans (See article criticized at bottom, under “ADDENDUM”)

New York Times reporter Damien Cave has written an article about changes that will allow Cubans to buy and sell their homes.

Cave seems to criticize the plans because they’ll likely outlaw real-estate-related social parasitism, limit “opportunities for profits and loans,” and prohibit foreign ownership.

Havana, 2011. Stephen Gowans.

“The plan outlined by the state media,” he writes, “would suppress the market by limiting Cubans to one home or apartment and requiring full-time residency.”

Gasp! Continue reading »

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Wildfires devastate Texas following historic drought

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Sep 142011

By Charles Abelard and Tom Carter , WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization

Local onlookers at the Riley Road fire in Montgomery County, Texas

Editor’s Note: Ironically, Texas—along with much of the South and Southwest— is a state with a disproportionate number of people denying the importance of climate change as a result of human mistreatment of the environment. Of course, it doesn’t occur to the mediocrities in the corporate media to poll Texans about their views on global warming, now that they have been at the receiving end of mother nature’s fury for a while. That would be interesting news.

Wildfires, historic in scope, are devastating rural and small-town households across the state of Texas.

Texas has languished for months with the lowest rainfall in all of its recorded history, as well as unprecedented high temperatures. Under these conditions, vast numbers of dangerous, independent wildfires have flared up that now threaten countless homes and workplaces (see “Historic heat wave and drought in southwestern US“).

As of September 5, Texas wildfires had burned a staggering 3,582,000 acres so far this year. With the profusion of fires by no means contained, this number is expected to increase substantially over the coming months. Continue reading »

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Record number of Americans in poverty

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Sep 142011

By Joseph Kishore, WSWS.ORG
14 September 2011

The poverty rate in the US soared to 15.1 percent in 2010, its highest level since 1993, according to a report released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday. Household incomes continued to fall sharply, amidst the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the number of people without health insurance increased.

The bureau’s report documents a shocking decline in the living standards of millions of people, a devastating indictment of the policies of the Obama administration and the entire political establishment. The new figures cover conditions one year after the supposed beginning of the recovery in June 2009. Continue reading »

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Many topics to choose from

There’s violence and there’s violence

Revolutionary Violence vs Institutionalized Violence

"There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves..." —Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution.

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By Joseph Kishore, WSWS.ORG14 September 2011

By Joseph Kishore, WSWS.ORG
14 September 2011