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”
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, [...]
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
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
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
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
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
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 [...]
by Stephen Lendman
Like most in Congress, he serves wealth and power alone. People needs don’t matter. Rule of law principles are spurned.
Peace is deplored. War is official policy. So are other duplicitous foreign policies for unchallenged global dominance.
Imagine what’s ahead in a second term, regardless of which party controls Congress. Both are in lockstep on issues mattering most. They include pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. Continue reading »
by Phil Rockstroh
Abetted by the decadence and examples of the Western superrich, the excesses have also reached the Chinese oligarchy.
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Wall Street is again flush with the electronic facsimile of the stuff once known as money. But this is a Botox Recovery: A superficial procedure, accomplished with a nerve paralyzing poison, reserved for the wealthy whose vanity has driven them to transform their faces into caricatures of corruption…to acquiring a countenance, frozen as a creepy doll, incapable of showing emotion — a grotesque simulacrum of the human face.
A Botox-distorted face reveals an individual with a distorted view of existence: that life’s limits, in this case the process of aging, must be hidden, and by doing so, artifice trumps reality. In a similar manner, life under our current Botoxed economic and political structure seems a gruesome distortion of life itself — a desperate gambit to veil the carnage inflicted by the monstrous excesses of oligarchic and Anthropocene Age exploitation of populace and planet. Continue reading »
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April 9, 2012 |
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What would you be doing right now if you had happened to win big in last month’s record-breaking Mega Millions lottery? Most of us see questions like this as welcome opportunities for some idle daydreaming, nothing more. We’re never going to win the lottery. We know it. But some Americans win the equivalent of a record-breaking lottery haul year after year after year. We call these fortunate souls hedge fund managers. The single most fortunate among them, we learned just over a week ago, has walked off with $7 billion for his last two years of labor. That’s over ten times the $656 million won in that most recent record-smashing lottery drawing. The key difference — besides size — between a lottery jackpot and a hedge fund windfall? The mere mortals who win lotteries pay over twice as much of their winnings in taxes as the folks who run hedge funds. In this week’s Too Much, we have lots more about the great and grand — and still ongoing — scam the hedge fund industry is so brazenly visiting upon us. Continue reading » |
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Interview with Gaither Stewart
Conducted by Paul Carline.
GAITHER STEWART / Photo: A. Krynsky
Editor’s Note: With this interview we take pleasure in introducing our audience to the work of our European correspondent and senior editor Gaither Stewart as a novelist, and to Punto Press, a new publishing house affiliated with The Greanville Post. Its mission is to publish alternative voices not likely to be welcome at mainstream publishing houses, and to disseminate messages and ideas conducive to the deepening of authentic democracy and the dismantlement of the lies that support the current global status quo, which, as so many of our readers know, constitutes by now a gigantic edifice of hypocrisy and self-serving mythology. The Trojan Horse, the first volume in Stewart’s Europe Trilogy, is a very special—some might say unique—type of espionage thriller, a thriller with a serious message and a wealth of historical and political information. As Russian anthropologist Michael Korovkin has put it, the extraordinary value of this novel is not so much that it delves masterfully into thecomplexities of the human psyche, but that it focuses on a relatively little explored topic by the leading authors of our time, the uncomfortable issues of the terrorism hype permeating our consciousness and concomitant tension strategy.” Continue reading »
