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 [...]

Alan Grayson Destroys PJ O’Rourke on Maher

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS  Comments Off
Oct 082011
 

NOTHING PISSES ME OFF more than when a show like Bill Maher’s has on a conservative who is permitted to spout lie that are unchallenged.  It’s fine to have Republicans on a “liberal” show like Maher’s, but not when they get away with that.  That’s why I was thrilled to see Alan Grayson absolutely demolish the insufferably smug, lying P.J. O’Rourke tonight.  (O’Rourke also appeared to have had one too many before the show.) Continue reading »

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Freedom Rider: Occupying Wall Street

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 082011
 

By Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

It is great that the Occupation “movement” exists, but unclear where it is going. Its leaderless nature may help to avoid cooptation and media manipulation, but there are equally serious drawbacks. “The movement may be doomed to become a permanent gripe session against an obvious villain, but with no means of planning how to end the system that increases income inequality, debt peonage and unemployment.” Most importantly: can the 99%ers bring themselves to abandon the Democrats? Continue reading »

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Wall Street as Public Enemy Number One

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 082011
 

By Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford

They are very young, very white, and largely inexperienced in organizing. But the Occupy Wall Street crew has picked the right target: finance capitalists, the class that is the common enemy of the human race. In that sense, “the Zuccotti Park campers are eons ahead of the faux radicals and ‘progressives’ who, in terror of the Tea Party and Republican presidential clown candidates, will soon return to the Obamite fold in their eternal search for lesser evils.” Obama was, and will remain, the candidate of Wall Street. Continue reading »

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Are Democracy Now!’s Libyan Correspondents Feeding Us the State Department and Pentagon Line on Libya?

 ANNOTATED NEWS, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
Oct 082011
 

By Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Is the independent media movement’s flagship radio-TV show Democracy Now! pushing the State Department and Pentagon line on Libya instead of “going where the silence is” and telling the truth without fear or favor? Are its Libyan correspondents embedded with the US-backed Libyan rebels to such an extent that they have minimized and failed to follow up persistent reports of ethnic cleansing in Libya or investigate whether alleged “mercenaries” ever existed or Khadaffi’s “massacres” ever took place? Continue reading »

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BOOKS—Radical Peace: People Refusing War

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, BOOK NOTES, CITIZEN TOOLS  Comments Off
Oct 082011
 

February 20th, 2011 // From Archives—Articles you should have read the first time around, but missed.
William T. Hathaway

CROSSPOSTED WITH PEOPLES VOICE
It costs 50 million dollars to kill each Taliban, but when dead he becomes a martyred hero to recruit new replacements, so the numbers of Taliban are increasing. In Iraq the terror our invasion unleashed still rages unabated, with hired mercenaries and local soldiers unable to stop it, as our troops before them were unable to. Yet we continue the fighting, and Obama the peace candidate has morphed into a war president. We are trapped in endless war. Continue reading »

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Paul Carline: revolts everywhere, the broader picture

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE, FINANCE CAPITAL  Comments Off
Oct 082011
 

Plus ça change …. Occupy Wall Street and the centenary of Francis Delaisi’s groundbreaking work “Les financiers et la démocratie” (The financiers and democracy) 

<< Although almost an unknown today, Delaisi was a prolific writer, prophetic in many of his visions for the 20th Century and beyond. 

2011: “We the people” demonstrate in ever larger numbers, not just in the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations in New York, but in other cities across America and beyond. Expressions of protest are occurring around the world, in Greece, in Spain, even in relatively wealthy Tel Aviv. The online campaigning organization Avaaz has just launched a global appeal for signatures to support the OWS protest. Its petition message to the New York protesters reads: “We stand with you in this struggle for real democracy. Together we can end the capture and corruption of our governments by corporate and wealthy elites, and hold our politicians accountable to serve the public interest. We are united – the time for change has come!” As of 10am GMT it had already secured over 200,000 signatures. Continue reading »

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