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
Nov 272011
 

C.P. Ellis was born in 1927 and was 53-years-old at the time of this interview with Studs Terkel. For Terkel, America’s foremost oral historian, this remains the most memorable and moving of all the interviews he’s done in a career spanning more than seven decades, for C.P. Ellis had once been the exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, N.C. During the interview, Terkel learned that Ellis had been born extremely poor in Durham, North Carolina; had struggled all his life to feed his family; had felt shut out of American society and had joined the Klan to feel like somebody. But later he got involved in a local school issue and reluctantly, gradually, began to work on a committee with a black activist named Ann Atwater, whom he despised at the time. Eventually, after many small epiphanies, he realized that they shared a common concern for their children, common goals as human beings. More surprising still, Ellis became a union organizer for a janitor’s union—a long way from his personal philosophical roots. The Ellis-Atwater story is best documented in The Best of Enemies, a book by Osha Gray Davidson that tells of the unlikely friendship that developed between Ann and C.P. Ellis, when they first met in the 1960′s. Apparently, their commonalities as oppressed human beings proved far stronger than the racial hatred that initially divided them. (IMAGE: Studs Terkel) Continue reading »

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Nov 272011
 

GLOBAL RESEARCH ONLINE INTERACTIVE READER No. 1

Libya and “The Arab Spring”: Neoliberalism, “Regime Change” and NATO’s “Humanitarian Wars”

by Michel Chossudovsky, Finian Cunningham and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Note to Reader’s: This document can be saved to your computer for future reference.

Foreword

LEFT: Gaddafi’s brutal murder, at the hands of US/Western “freedom fighters”—the culmination of an insidious campaign—Eds.

First in Global Research’s Interactive Reader Series, we bring to the attention of our readers a collection of Global Research articles on the “Arab Spring”, covering recent developments in several countries across the Middle East and North Africa region.

The Interactive Reader is a collection of previously published articles on Global Research. Its objective is to provide an overview as well as a comparative understanding of country-level experiences of the upheavals. Continue reading »

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Nov 272011
 

By IRIN

Demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir square against Egypt’s interim military rulers have reportedly left at least 33 people dead and more than 1,500 injured since they began on 19 November. 

The protesters accuse the Supreme Council of Military Forces (SCAF) of hijacking the revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak in February, and failing to protect the human rights the uprising intended to enshrine. 

The following are some of the concerns over the state of the rule of law in Egypt.  Continue reading »

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Nov 272011
 

I’ve noticed a meme beginning to fester among liberal insiders who are positing that the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to “distract” the citizenry from the wicked machinations of Republicans of the legislative class.

Nonsense.

The OWS movement is not a distraction from—but serves as an alternative to—the disingenuous theatrics staged by the political hacks of this faux republic. Conversely, movement members have grasped that it is the hollow grandstanding–the modus operandi of the present U.S. political system itself–that serves as distraction from the realities of the day. Continue reading »

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Nov 272011
 

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality

Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park. Continue reading »

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Nov 272011
 

By Jeff Mullen
PREFATORY NOTE


  • This document is meant to explain and show the weaknesses in basic Libertarian Ideology. It is not intended to show one how to convince a Libertarian that s/he is wrong–Libertarianism requires a belief in magic (the magic of the “Free Market”), and nothing can convince a believer that there is no such thing as magic–rather, it is meant to give one the tools to show those considering Libertarian Ideology how it is wrong, and to prevent others from falling into the Libertarian trap. Libertarians are VERY good at using good-sounding words to make bad things seem preferable. This will help a skeptic to cut through it, and describe Libertarian memes more accurately than the Libertarians themselves. Continue reading »
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