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 [...]

What’s A Tarantula Without Its Sting?

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, TACTICS & STRATEGIES  Comments Off
Oct 172011
 

Plots of the Capitalists

By CLANCY SIGAL

Patrick Bateman: “I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust…I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.”

– ‘American Psycho’ (film) 

“FIGHT CORPORATE GREED!” is a popular slogan of the ‘We Are The 99%’ movement that began a month ago in New York’s financial district and is now popping up in hundreds of cities everywhere. For moral clarity and sheer zip-and-bounce there’s nothing to beat it.   The lively, drum-beating encampments validate a classic anarchist principle: it’s spontaneous, consensual, leaderless, non-violent.   With luck the movement will grow without the fatal burden of  takeover specialists a.k.a. ‘leaders’.   

But fight corporate greed?  Just as easily resist the sun rising in the east.  Wall Street without its gut-instinct for cannibalizing is Abbott without Costello, a tarantula without its sting.  Top-level financial executives, traders, hedge-funders and bank directors can’t help themselves, it’s like their Tourette’s syndrome, you might as well cut off their oxygen supply, the harm they do us is built into the profit-at-any-cost system itself. Continue reading »

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An Insidious Threat to the Occupy Movement

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, TACTICS & STRATEGIES  Comments Off
Oct 172011
 

Beware the Democrats!

By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH

The threat I am referring to is not that of being pepper-sprayed, arrested, beaten or imprisoned. It is a different type of threat: a stealthy challenger that while pretending to advance the goals of the Occupy Movement tends to undermine it from within—more or less like the proverbial elephant in the room. I am referring to the threat of preemption, or cooptation, posed by the Democratic Party and union officials. In light of their unsavory record of undermining the revolutionary energy of social movements, projections of sympathy for the anti-Wall Street protesters by the White House, the Democratic Party officials and union leaders can be viewed only with suspicion. Continue reading »

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Cindy Sheehan: My October 15th Remarks at Occupy Sacramento

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 172011
 

BY CINDY SHEEHAN

This movement should not allow itself to be co-opted by partisan political hackery. If Obama or Democrats were the answer, then, guess what? We wouldn’t be here today. The wars would be over; the 99% would have single-payer health care, housing, education, a sustainable energy policy, and meaningful jobs with a livable wage as RIGHTS not PRIVILEGES for the 1%.

Mugshot from my arrest
later that night.

Continue reading »

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Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bigger Than Left vs. Right

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 172011
 

Taibblog—
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Tactically, what we’ll see here will be a) people firmly on the traditional Democratic side claiming to speak for OWS, and b) people on the right-Republican side attempting to portray OWS as a puppet of well-known liberals and other Democratic interests…<>What nobody is comfortable with is a movement in which virtually the entire spectrum of middle class and poor Americans is on the same page, railing against incestuous political and financial corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues, and that’s a story our media won’t want to or know how to handle…”

Demonstrators associated with the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement face off with police in the streets of the financial district of New York.

I was surprised, amused and annoyed all at once when I found out yesterday that some moron-provocateur linked to notorious right-wing cybergoon Andrew Breitbart had infiltrated a series of private e-mail lists – including one that I have been participating in – and was using them to run an exposé on the supposed behind-the-scenes marionetting of the OWS movement by the liberal media.

According to various web reports, what happened was that a private “cyber-security researcher” named Thomas Ryan somehow accessed a series of email threads between various individuals and dumped them all on BigGovernment.com, Breitbart’s site. Gawker is also reporting that Ryan forwarded some of these emails to the FBI and the NYPD. Continue reading »

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Occupy Wall Street: Populist Financiers Supporting Protesters Is Part of the Problem, Not the Solution

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 172011
 

BY  FINIAN CUNNINGHAM 

“…[O]ur leaders have pursued solutions that are not solving our problems, instead they propose policies that accomplish little … With democracy in crisis a true grassroots movement pointing out the flaws in our system is the first step in the right direction. Count me among those supporting and cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement.”, Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States. 

“They [the Occupy Wall Street Movement] blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington. And at some level, I can’t blame them.” Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.  
 
“There has been class warfare going on,… It’s just that my class is winning.  And my class isn’t just winning, I mean we’re killing them.”, Warren Buffett, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Hedge Fund, third richest man on the Planet. Continue reading »

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The Rome March of Indignant Youth, Exasperated and Furious: Two Anomalies

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE  1 Response »
Oct 172011
 

By Gaither Stewart, Special European Correspondent
The “Black Blocs” represent a challenge to the system and the larger Occupy movement itself.  And although the corporate media are already painting the violence as “reprehensible” and “unacceptable”, and many Occupy groups committed to nonviolent protest seek to distance themselves from those who choose to express their pent-up rage in more aggressive ways, “the hooded unknowns” clad in black may be simply ahead of their time. 

Rome demonstrators burn a police van on October 15. Their tactics present a dilemma for the nonviolent movement that may resonate with greater force as more protesters around the world increasingly clash with a system determined to maintain business as usual while practicing selective repression and cosmetic reforms. 

(Rome) Last October 15, up to 200,000 Italians marched in Rome in the name of change, under the vague aegis of the “Movement”. Young and not so young from all corners of the country marched in the direction of the huge Piazza San Giovanni where Italians traditionally hold political manifestations. October 15 was a landmark of the new Resistance spreading in Italy, on the one hand in imitation of Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand a kind of  summing up of the air of not completely non-violent protest infecting the country.  Continue reading »

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