• Keystone XL Activists Labeled Possible Eco-Terrorists

    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

    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?

    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

    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

    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

    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 [...]

  • Camping Out: Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful"

    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 [...]

  • Memorable quotes from Snowden interview

    Memorable quotes from Snowden interview

    Free citizen Dennis Leahy, affiliated with Facebook’s group Edward Snowden Supporters, to which I also subscribe, is making the following material available. Share as widely as you can.—Sean Lenihan Here is a listing of 27 quotes, pulled from the Edward Snowden interview: #1 “The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting [...]

The Marxist Critique of Religion: Dialectical Materialist Views

 CLASS STRUGGLE, Religion + religiosity, VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

Paul N. Siegel
The Meek and the Militant

Part 1: The Marxist Critique of Religion
Chapter 2

The Marxist View of Religion
Dialectical Materialism and Its Criticism of French Materialism

‘The materialism of the last century,’ says Engels, was

predominantly mechanical, because at that time of all natural sciences only mechanics, and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies – celestial and terrestial – in short, the mechanics of gravity, had come to any definite close … This exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature – in which processes the laws of mechanics are, indeed, also valid but are pushed into the background by other, higher laws – constitutes the first specific but at that time inevitable limitation of classical French materialism. The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development … Nature, so much was known, was in eternal motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion turned, also eternally, in a circle and therefore never moved from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again … This same unhistorical conception prevailed also in the domain of history … Thus a rational insight into the great historical interconnections was made impossible, and history served at best as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of philosophers. (On Religion, pp.231-3) Continue reading »

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The Marxist Critique of Religion

 ANNOTATED NEWS, Religion + religiosity, VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

Paul N. Siegel
The Meek and the Militant

Part I: The Marxist Critique of Religion

Chapter 1
French Enlightenment Materialists’ View of Religion
The French Materialist Ancestors of Marxism

Marx and Engels saw the French Enlightenment philosophers as being among their intellectual ancestors. [1] Engels paid tribute to them as follows:

The great men who in France were clearing the minds of men for the coming revolution themselves acted in an extremely revolutionary fashion. They recognized no external authority of any kind. Religion, concepts of nature, society, political systems, everything was subjected to the most merciless criticism; everything had to justify its existence at the bar of reason or renounce all claim to existence. [2] Continue reading »

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TOO MUCH—Inequality Monitor (10.31.11)

 ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

Texas governor Rick Perry has unveiled, with suitable hoopla, his Presidential campaign’s tax plan. His new plan, released last week, differs on the details with the tax plans his rivals for the GOP nod had earlier offered up. But all the plans end up in the same place. They all generate huge tax savings for America’s rich.

A reporter asked candidate Perry if these windfalls for the wealthy — “millions of dollars” in savings for some taxpayers — bothered him at all. Perry shrugged. His response: “I don’t care about that.”

Those of us who do care about “that,” about policies that widen our already staggering economic gaps, now have two new resources. In this week’s Too Much, we review the first, a sprightly UK think tank online pamphlet that offers “ten reasons to care about economic inequality.”

The second, an engaging 17-minute video from the famed epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, charts how inequality is eating away at how well — and how long — we all live. Rick Perry will likely never watch this video. The rest of us should. Continue reading »
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The Butchering of Gaddafi Is America’s Crime

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTIWAR, US Foreign Policy, US Military  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

Moammar Gaddafi’s last minutes gave clarity to NATO’s war in Libya. It is a mission of mass murder and theft of sovereignty through the arming of savages. “The saner sections of America’s psychological operations machinery were doubtless as horrified as anyone at the Libyan jihadis’ insistence on revealing so graphically to the entire planet the barbaric character of the ‘revolution.’” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s “hands and gums ooze blood – a lasting impression on decent world opinion.”

By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared like ghoulish despots at a Roman Coliseum, reveling in their Libyan gladiators’ butchery.”

Last week the whole world saw, and every decent soul recoiled, at the true face of NATO’s answer to the Arab Spring. An elderly, helpless prisoner struggled to maintain his dignity in a screaming swirl of savages, one of whom thrusts a knife [4] up his rectum. These are Europe and America’s jihadis in the flesh. In a few minutes of joyously recorded bestiality, the rabid pack undid every carefully packaged image of NATO’s “humanitarian” project in North Africa – a horror and revelation indelibly imprinted on the global consciousness by the brutes’ own cell phones. Continue reading »

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The Spirit of the Age

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, OWS  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

How do the 99% compare with mass protests of the past – and can they succeed?
Following the collapse of communism in 1991, [and thanks to media's complicity Conservative icon] Edmund Burke’s notion that “in all societies, consisting of different classes, certain classes must necessarily be uppermost” and that “the apostles of equality only change and pervert the natural order of things”, became the common-sense wisdom of the age. 

By TARIQ ALI

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

The spirit of that 19th century socialist is alive among the idealistic young people who have come out in protest against the turbo-charged global capitalism that has dominated the world ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Continue reading »

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Talking With Michael Moore on OWS

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, OWS  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

It’s Starting in Oakland—

By DAVEY D AND DENNIS BERNSTEIN

FILMMAKER MICHAEL MOORE IN OAKLAND TO PROTEST MASSIVE POLICE VIOLENCE AND SUPPORT THE OCCUPY OAKLAND MOVEMENT

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, Oct. 25, the heavily armed Oakland Police Department in conjunction, with 16 other police departments from all over Northern and Central California, stormed the Occupy Oakland Encampment, fully dressed in helmets, and riot gear, and armed with shotguns, “nonlethal pellet guns,” teargas and concussion grenades. The first attack on Frank Ogawa Plaza, in downtown Oakland, where about 200 men, women and children were camped came at about 4:45 a.m.  Helicopters were circling and crisscrossing their spot-lights from above, and at least one armored personnel carrier was in the streets, turning downtown Oakland into an instant war-zone. Within a half an hour or so, the police had roughed up, cuffed, and arrested over hundred of the protesters, and routed the rest the rest away from the area. The police occupied the area all day, denying the public access. The peaceful protestors were held on high bail, for several days, contrary to the cite-and-release policy usually employed during arrests at political demonstrations.” Continue reading »

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As expected: the Great Phony names WS lobbyist as senior campaign adviser

 ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

How about it, Obamabots? Still in love with the plutocracy’s Trojan Horse?

[The plutocracy's] President Barack Obama’s new senior campaign adviser is a longtime Wall Street lobbyist, and has the potential to damage the president’s aspirations to appeal to the protesters currently “occupying” New York City’s Zuccotti Park.

Obama’s new adviser, Broderick Johnson, has an extensive history of lobbying for big banks and corporations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2007, he lobbied for JP Morgan Chase and in 2008 Johnson lobbied for Bank of America and Fannie Mae. From 2008 through 2010, he lobbied for Comcast and in 2011 he lobbied for Microsoft. Continue reading »

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4 Simple Steps for Taking Your Money Out of the Vampire Banks

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet

Can’t pitch a tent at Zuccotti Park? Not to worry. There’s something meaningful you can do to stand up to vampire banks that bleed the economy — and your wallet. The feeling of satisfaction amply rewards the inconvenience.

I know. I decided to break up with my bank this week. The whole thing was an arranged marriage from the start. HSBC and I were joined because it gobbled up Marine Midland, the bank I actually signed up for in the late 90s. The truth is that my bank was taking advantage of my trust and abusing my loyalty. So I said sayonara. Continue reading »

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OpEds: A portrait of America in decline

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

By Patrick Martin, SEP, a socialist org

A series of reports over the past ten days—on poverty, wages, income inequality and social mobility—have painted a portrait of America starkly at odds with the official mythology of the United States as the land of unlimited economic opportunity, the country with the world’s highest standard of living.

IMAGE: The US has the highest poverty rate of any developed nation, according to the OECD. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The World Socialist Web Site has naturally drawn attention to these reports, but Marxist critics and opponents of American capitalism did not collect this data. On the contrary, the figures come from US government agencies like the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security Administration, the Bureau of the Census and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Continue reading »

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The attack on Scott Olsen: now for the repercussions

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 312011
 

MICHAEL RIVERO—WhatReallyHappened
Occupy Oakland Crackdown:
Hells Angels Join OWS: US Marine Scott Olsen condition still critical

Tired of being mistreated and denied their lawful rights by the police, sooner or later the people will respond in kind and then all hell will break loose. In such an eventuality, keep an eye on how the media distort the news to suit its masters.  

We are hoping that Scott is going to recover fully from this assault on him but there is no question he has galvanized the attention and focus of the entire Military… we are hearing from every branch of the service that Veterans and serving rank and file are going to be joining with the occupy protesters in the streets of America because they realize they are being attacked, and they are watching as this super committee is savaging their veterans benefits… they are cutting of their medical care and Scott walked his talk, he put on the uniform of the USA and served two tours in Iraq and he comes home and this is how the government he fought for treats him when he dares to stand up and stay “I disagree with how the nation is being run.” So they shoot him in the head.  Continue reading »

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