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
  • 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 [...]

  • Red State Hypocrites: Inhofe and Coburn

    Red State Hypocrites: Inhofe and Coburn

    Salon [1] / By Joan Walsh [2] Just a week ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe suggested that President Obama might be impeached over the Benghazi non-scandal. Now, Inhofe must watch as Obama declares Inhofe’s state a disaster area and promises Oklahomans “all the resources they need at their disposal.” Did you like this? Share it:

  • The Shame of the Fourth Estate

    The Shame of the Fourth Estate

    From our archives: articles you should have read when they first appeared but missed.  The mainstream media’s long-time kid-glove treatment of Andrew Breitbart led directly to the unjustified ouster of Shirley Sherrod. By Charles Kaiser  [Originally: July 26, 2010 ] This piece was first published by the Hillman Foundation. Let me make this utterly clear: What you [...]

  • Michel Chossudovsky: Time for a counterpropaganda front

    Michel Chossudovsky: Time for a counterpropaganda front

    Editor’s Note: The Western left, and the American left in particular, have been scandalously myopic and inadequate in organizing against the corporate media.  The goal from the start should have been to neutralize the effects of the corporate media, since without that the great battles to win over the American majorities would be impossible.  This [...]

  • What the Syrian Constitution says about Assad and the Rebels

    What the Syrian Constitution says about Assad and the Rebels

    By Stephen Gowans, What’s Left The idea that the uprising against the Syrian government is inspired by a grassroots movement thirsting for a pluralist, democratic state is a fiction. The opposition’s chief elements are Islamists who seek to establish a Sunni-dominated Islamic state in place of a Syrian government they revile for being secular and [...]

  • ARCHIVES: The U.S. Left and Media Politics

    ARCHIVES: The U.S. Left and Media Politics

    Articles of compelling importance you should have read but missed the first time around.  Robert W. McChesney, Monthly Review, a fraternal organization ••• American democracy is in deep trouble. Cynicism and distrust of the political system, fueled at least in part by imposed ignorance, have grown steadily in recent years. There are several reasons for [...]

  • The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda

    The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda

    JOHN PILGER: One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading [...]

  • Dissent or Terror: New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide

    Dissent or Terror: New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide

    MADISON, WI — DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details [...]

There’s an alternative to capitalism’s mad obsession with constant growth: the steady state economy

 ANNOTATED NEWS, LUNACY, POLITICAL ECONOMY, SAVING THE PLANET  Comments Off
Dec 212011
 

 

Capitalism requires constant growth: an impossibility 

STEADY-STATE ECONOMICS

By Herman Daly

A Catechism of Growth Fallacies

The part played by orthodox economists, whose common sense has been insufficient to check their faulty logic, has been disastrous to the latest act.—J. M. Keynes (1936)

The first question asked of any critic of the status quo is: What would you put in place? In place of the growth economy we would put a steady-state economy. But such a theoretical alternative is not of great interest unless there is dissatisfaction with the business-as-usual growth economy. If you have eaten poison, it is not enough to simply resume eating healthful foods. You must get rid of the specific substances that are making you ill. Let us, then, apply the stomach pump to the doctrines of economic growth that we have been force-fed for the past four decades. Perhaps the best way to do that is to jump right into the growth debate and consider critically some fifteen to twenty general pro growth arguments that recur in various guises and either expose their errors or accommodate their valid criticisms. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 9:49 pm

Why Are We Forced to Worship at the Feet of ‘Mythical’ Financial Markets Controlled by the Elite?

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM  Comments Off
Dec 212011
 

By Les Leopold, AlterNet

The markets are “jittery,” “upset,” “skittish” and “unnerved.” They are “confident” or “unsure.” They are “demanding” that political leaders “put up or shut up.” And they are “reacting unfavorably” to Obama’s newfound populism.

These are just a few of the many ways financial markets are described each and every day by the media, financial players and public officials. At first it seems as if these markets are humanoids onto which we project our feelings. Yet, on closer inspection, it’s more like we have ascribed to them god-like powers. We are told to appease the market gods or face eternal financial damnation. As President Obama warned Europe recently, they must “muster the political will” to “settle markets down.” Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 5:51 pm

Freedom Rider: Christopher Hitchens, White Man

 ANNOTATED NEWS, COMMENTARIAT  Comments Off
Dec 212011
 

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
 

There was nothing witty, cute, or endearing about the late Christopher Hitchens, a racist to the core whose association with the Left served only to discredit it. “Beneath his mutterings against ‘Islamofascism’ he was nothing more than an angry white guy who wanted brown people to be conquered or dead.”  A man of many prejudices but no real loyalties or principles, he flowed with the money. “Why toil away as a left winger known only within that smaller group, when more money and media attention awaited a cheerleader for pax Americana and white supremacy?”

“In the end all his words amounted to nothing more than fighting for the rights of white people to control everyone else in the world.” Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 5:11 pm

THE SOVIET UNION— Environmental Degradation: Some Historical Antecedents

 ANNOTATED NEWS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, RUSSIA, SAVING THE PLANET  1 Response »
Dec 212011
 

From our archives (revised edition, first published in 1990)—

The ecological abuses triggered by the pressure to develop in a hurry were compounded after WW2 by the bureaucratism and careerism that had begun to creep into many operations…”

PREFATORY NOTE: I wrote this article in the Fall of 1990 at a moment of heightened propaganda against the putative ills of communism and the Soviet Union, in particular, as the Western “democracies”, with the US in the lead, and already smelling the impending disintegration of their greatest ideological foe, stoked the fires of change and rebellion.

In this epochal process, Mikhail Gorbachev (left) played a pivotal role for which he has been both praised and—in my view— justifiably damned inside the former USSR.  But while his place in history remains to be determined, the facts are clear and indisputable. After assuming the reins of power in 1985, Gorbachev’s reforms as well as summit conferences with Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, ended the political supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For these efforts, the West, recognizing an ally, awarded Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and the Harvey Prize in 1992 as well as Honorary Doctorates from Durham University in 1995,[1] Trinity College in 2002[2] and University of Münster in 2005. 

Not missing an opportunity to put as many nails in the coffin of their former enemy as possible, the western media crowed frequently about the “inevitability” of the USSR’s downfall due to its inherently “inferior” political and economic system, one which, it was loudly proclaimed, was riddled with cronyism, rigidities, corruption, and total indifference to the fate of the environment.  Considering the record of the West, and especially the United States in these matters, it took some cheek to point the finger at the Soviets for such sins, but the power of the Western media is so stiflingly total that few voices deemed it possible to file a dissenting view.   Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 1:58 am

The Phony Payroll Tax Battle

 ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Dec 212011
 

This Isn’t Stimulus
Everybody who understand the way a capitalist economy works knows the US economy needs an urgent Keynesian shot in the arm, enough to revive it to an acceptable level of employment.  Obama knows this, too, so his “too little, too late” strategy is contemptible at best.—Eds

by DEAN BAKER

The economy badly needs stimulus. The collapse of the housing bubble caused us to lose more than $1.2 trillion in annual demand. Residential construction collapsed when the bubble burst, falling by more than 4 percentage points of GDP, which translates into approximately $600 billion a year in lost annual demand.

The collapse of the bubble also led to the destruction of close to $8 trillion of bubble-generated housing equity. The wealth effect of this equity on consumption generated close to $500 billion in annual consumption demand. This also was lost when the bubble burst. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 12:04 am