By editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The United States is a nation of lies: corporate media lies in the service of State Department, Pentagon and White House lies – a congealed, fictional mass that only Americans believe. The most mundane facts of economy are corrupted beyond recognition. “The court scribes who tell us that a statistical blip is proof of economic recovery or that the president had no choice but to accept the ‘Satan sandwich’ budget deal are no better than propagandists in dictatorial states.” Actual journalism is largely extinct. “The press corps in Libya, who actively assisted NATO in destroying that nation, committed international war crimes in the process.” Read more…
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By Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
When Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddows show, the liberal host pretended that President Obama had not recently gutted EPA’s ability to combat air pollution, as if it never happened. The truth is, “The White House conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the needs of susceptible populations, e.g., children, the elderly and medically compromise individuals and its corporate sponsors. The outcome was never in doubt.” The lesson: when the Democrat in the White House obeys his corporate master’s voice, his liberal supporters dutifully airbrush history. Read more…
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By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
While the United Nations toadies for NATO and the International Criminal Court behaves like an apartheid “Africans Only” prosecutor, a venue in Malaysia dares to put the real international criminals in the dock. “The Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War, found Blair and Bush guilty of ‘crimes against peace’ as a result of their plot to invade and occupy Iraq.” Naturally, the western corporate media pretended the trial never happened. Read more…
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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
As the U.S. and its NATO allies move southward to further consolidate their grip on Africa, following the seizure of Libya and its vast oil fields, most of the continent’s leadership seems to welcome re-absorption into empire. “Africa is the most vulnerable region in America’s warpath, a continent ripe for the plucking due to the multitudinous entanglements of Africa’s political and military classes with imperialism.” AFRICOM is already in the cat-bird seat, placed there by Africans, themselves.
“The United States and its allies, principally the French, are positioned to ‘take’ much of the continent with the collaboration of most of its governments.” Read more…
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By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Editor’s Note: The conservative tribe is rarely correct about anything—either by ghastly disregard for the truth or total lack of compassion—but their claim that fixing the climate would require doing away with capitalism is not far from the truth. Capitalism in all substantive matters is the enemy of nature. And the same applies to any industrial system in any nation that puts the interests of humans ahead of nature’s well-being.
Another disgraceful area of social and economic activity in the United States where conservatives have long opposed a real fix is healthcare. The fact is that a universal healthcare system based on a “single payer” model would quickly show the superiority of a public oriented solution over private enterprise, with the masses soon losing fear of “socialism”. As usual, capitalists abhor and fear the “demonstration effect” of socialistic policy. It threatens their mythology that the free market knows best. That fear has also shaped their unrelenting attacks and disinformation on the accomplishment of socialist nations from the moment of their inception.—P. Greanville
The following article first appeared on the Web site of the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for its email newsletters.
There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?” Read more…
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By Rick Wolff
Wages as percentage of GDP
SOURCE: John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, “Financial Implosion and Stagnation: Back to The Real Economy,”Monthly Review 60.7, December 2008
In Marxian terms, the current crisis emerged from the workings of the capitalist class structure. Capitalism’s history displays repeated booms and busts punctuated by bubbles. Capitalism’s cycles range unpredictably from local, shallow, and short to global, deep, and long. To keep capitalism is to suffer its chronic instability. To deal effectively with capitalism’s recurring crises requires changing to a non-capitalist class structure.
However, workers’ productivity kept rising (more machines, more pressure, and more skills). They produced ever more for their employers to sell, yet the employers paid them no more. Thesurpluses extracted (exploited) by capitalist employers — the excess of the value added by each laborer over the value paid to that laborer — rose. The last 30 years realized capitalists’ wildest dreams. Yet, stagnant wages and booming surpluses also eventually plunged US capitalism into today’s severe crisis.Since the mid-1970s, workers’ average real wages stopped rising. This was partly because capitalists’ computerization of production displaced workers. Capitalists also decided then to move more production to foreign countries for higher profits. Since employers thus needed fewer workers in the US, they could and did end the historic (1820-1970) rise of US wages. Read more…
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