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 [...]

Is Capitalism Losing the Debate?

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Nov 012011
 

A Steady Diet of Distortions

by CARL FINAMORE

Obama: Detour to the abyss.

A remarkable shift in mass public opinion is occurring right before our eyes. It does not happen often. Normally, only when there is a severe breakdown in public confidence about the future.

Now is such a time.

Millions are demanding clear explanations for the economic turmoil surrounding their lives and rejecting en masse standard platitudes from an increasingly discredited political establishment.  

Fox-News pundits, Heritage Foundation business scholars, glib right-wing loudmouths and two-faced politicians from both major parties have been exposed as stand-in ventriloquists for the wealthy – shockingly, all in a few short weeks.  It all began with only a few hundred protestors camped out on Wall Street challenging conceited notions of the one percent. Continue reading »

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Keeping Democrats on the Hook

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  1 Response »
Nov 012011
 

Beware MoveOn

by ALAN NASSER

“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare”
– Mitt Romney on OWS, Oct. 4, 2011

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) represents a nationwide movement-in-the-making that is independent of the two-Party duopoly. Both the movement’s staying power and its effectiveness depend crucially on this independence. The established powers are fully aware of the dangers implicit in a truly popular democratic, i.e. independent of the two Parties, movement. It is therefore on our agenda to beware of colonization by the powers that be. No one worries about Republican infiltration. It is the Democrats who have the most to lose by OWS. We can be certain that the Party’s operatives will attempt to incorporate the movement into an agenda that does not challenge the legitimacy of the Democratic Party by, for example, underscoring Obama’s whole-hog subservience to Wall Street, and the Party leadership’s acquiescence to the president’s across-the-board betrayal of his once enthusiastic acolytes. Continue reading »

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Russell Simmons Still Ain’t Hip-Hop and He Ain’t No Occupier Either!

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Nov 012011
 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by editor and columnist Jared Ball

The experience of the last five weeks shows that Wall Street “occupiers’ fear of liberal co-optation is fully justified.” Media mogul and debit card finance capitalist Russell Simmons escorted Kanye West and Al Sharpton into the Zuccotti Park occupation mix, in yet another attempt “by the soft liberal Left to co-opt anything that has any degree of revolutionary potential.” Cooptation efforts are to be expected. However, “If the Simmons and Sharptons of the world are to be combated a more genuine Black leadership must emerge from the ranks of Black people.” Continue reading »

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Occupy Atlanta VS Kasim Reed, the Black Misleadership Class and the One Percent

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, THE COLOR LINE  Comments Off
Nov 012011
 

By Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Why are police across the country arresting and dispersing occupation sites? And why is the Black Misleadership Class, and its black Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed threatened by the occupy movement? Why did Atlanta send copters, hundreds of police, and spend at least $800,000 to breakup Occupy Atlanta? Where will it assemble next? Can homeless Atlanta and Occupy Atlanta work together, and if they can, will mayor Reed and his friends in the one percent like that even less?

Back in January 2010, I wrote that

“ the black political elite no longer believes its mission is to fight for peace and justice. The newer, more cynical black elite are unmoored from their peace-and-justice-loving base. They are focused on their own careers, and the corporate largesse that makes those careers possible… the black politics of a previous generation, in which black candidates and public officials were expected to stand for something beside their own careers, is over.” Continue reading »

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The Marxist Critique of Religion: The Charge that Marxism is a Religion

 ANNOTATED NEWS, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGIOSITY & SUPERSTITION  Comments Off
Nov 012011
 

Paul N. Siegel
The Meek and the Militant 

Chapter 3
Marxism and Religion  
Compared

The Charge that Marxism is a Religion

One religious response to Marxism has been that Marxism itself is a religion. By saying this, religionists seek to blunt Marxism’s attack on religion with a ‘you’re another’ argument: if religious belief is intellectually reprehensible, then you’re a sinner too! It is also a charge made by secular liberals who would dismiss Marxism as being as obsolete for an educated man as religion is.

This description of Marxism, however, far from being sophisticated modern understanding, is merely an updating of the comment on atheism by the Parisian intellectuals of the 1840s, who, says Engels, ‘could conceive a man without religion only as a monster, and used to say to us: ‘Donc, l’atheisme c’est votre religion!’ (On Religion, p. 239). To say that atheism is itself a religion is manifestly a mere playing with words. In the sense of the popularly accepted use of ‘religion’ as a belief in a God or gods – or in the broader definition of religion by the anthropologist Tylor that religion is ‘a belief in spirits’ – atheism is of course a denial of religion. The paradox is achieved by implying another definition of religion such as ‘coherent world outlook’. But this is to disregard the atheist claim that religion is a world outlook that makes use of fantasy. Continue reading »

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America’s Phoney War in Afghanistan

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTIWAR, US Foreign Policy, US Military  Comments Off
Nov 012011
 

ARCHIVES: Articles you should have read the first time around, but didn’t.

Why should the American ruling circles have any compunction about dealing with tyrants and crooks? They are among pals. 
By F. William Engdahl

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ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE ASPECTS of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.

Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured. Continue reading »
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