Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership
Guest Editorials— By Andre Damon, wsws.org The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report Monday showing that electronics giant Apple Inc. uses offshore tax shelters to avoid taxes on the majority of its income and cheated the US government out of $9 billion in 2012 alone. That same day, a tornado leveled the town [...]
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 [...]
OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon
By Pepe Escobar, RT.com Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent. US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’ from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it. Did you like this? Share [...]
Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide
AlterNet [1] / By Sean McElwee [2] Last week two important stories about U.S. foreign policy broke. First, the White House released some 100 pages of e-mails confirming a dastardly scandal: rather than call the Benghazi attack a “terrorist act,” President Obama, in a Nixonian power grab, called it an, “act of terror.” Did you like this? Share it:
From Tbilisi to Worchester by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI (With report & VIDEO by PressTV, see addendum below) It was humanity at its best. Showing compassion for the quick and the dead. The quick made news in Tbilisi, Georgia. The dead made news in Worcester, Massachusetts. Did you like this? Share it:
The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt
Despite Annulment, Genocide Trial a Breakthrough for Justice and Truth by LUZ MENDEZ The sentence of 80 years in prison against former de facto president Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during Guatemala’s armed conflict, emitted on May 10, 2013, was annulled by the Constitutional Court ten days later. The court’s [...]
By Stefan Steinberg, WSWS.org
An Italian author with links to the extreme right shot down two immigrants and seriously wounded three others in Florence on Tuesday before taking his own life. The shooter was named by police as Gianluca Casseri, the 50-year-old author of a number of fantasy novels, a resident of Tuscany, and member of an ultra-right anti-immigrant movement called Casa Pound. Continue reading »
Codifying Big Brother
by RALPH NADER
Paraphrasing Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of Capitol Hill. A majority of Congress is just about to put the finishing touches on an amendment to the military budget authorization legislation that will finish off some critical American rights under our Constitution. Here is how two retired 4 star marine generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, described in the New York Times the stripmining of your freedom to resist tyranny in urging a veto by President Obama:
“One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past…. Continue reading »
By DAVE LINDORFF
Even as President Obama and War Secretary Leon Panetta announce the “end” of the Iraq War, a US “covert war” against Iran, as the National Journal put it in a December 4 article, has already begun.
This secret war–at least secret from the American people–is being conducted in part directly by the US, as evidenced by the advanced American RQ-170 Sentinel stealth surveillance drone just recently downed–apparently by sophisticated electronic countermeasures that allowed the taking control of, and landing of the vehicle–by Iran. Also conducted in part of proxies, including the Iranian anti-government terrorist organization MEK (for Mujahideen-e Khalq), and of course Israel’s Mossad, this dirty covert war has led to an escalating string of acts of terror inside Iran, including a campaign of assassination against Iranian nuclear scientists, and bombings of Iranian military installations. Continue reading »
Where’s Captain Hook in NPR’s Fairy Tale?
by SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES
“Los niños nacen para ser felices.”– José Martí
On November 19, 2011 NPR broadcast “Children Of Cuba Remember: Their Flight To America.” Reporter Greg Allen claimed the 1960-62 journey from Cuba to the United States of 14,000 plus Cuban children “was made possible because of a deal a priest in the Miami diocese [Father Bryan Walsh] … worked out with the US State Department. The agreement allowed him to sign visa waivers for children 16 or under.” Allen then interviewed several right-of-center Cuban Americans to offer “objective” perspective on the facts surrounding Operation Peter Pan. Continue reading »
By David Swanson
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police state. The doomsday clock of our republic just got noticeably closer to midnight, and the fact that almost nobody knows it, simply moves that fatal minute-hand a bit further still.
BILL VAN AUKEN, WSWS.ORG
The US Senate’s approval Thursday of legislation allowing the indefinite military detention of US citizens without charges or trials marks a new stage in a decade of uninterrupted assault on the most fundamental democratic and constitutional rights.
The Senate’s 86-to-13 vote in favor of the legislation followed its approval in the House of Representatives Wednesday. It also came after the announcement by the White House that President Barack Obama would not exercise his power to veto the measure, which is included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a $662 billion package to fund Washington’s war machine. Continue reading »