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 [...]

A CASE FOR VIOLENT REVOLT IN EUROPE

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 142012
 

Special Dispatch

The clash between the transatlantic plutocracy and the masses is reaching all corners of European society, and turmoil and agitation are growing. But seeking “solutions” within the rules of the capitalist system is guaranteed to produce failure, since it is such rules that caused the crisis in the first place.


The exemplary Greeks march in protest against the corporate plutocracy’s moves to impose “austerity.”

(Gaither Stewart in Rome) |||  Under a hot May sun, Italy’s neo-Communists marched through the streets of Rome last Saturday under the slogan of “Communist Pride”. Images of Che Guevara and Lenin, the hammer and sickle, symbolic relics of the now defunct, once beloved Italian Communist Party, accompanied by the Communist salute of raised left fists and the powerful voices of the 40,000 marchers singing the song of Italian Communists, Bandiera Rossa, Red Flag, and distributing copies of Communist publications named for the Leninist publications, The Spark, What Is To Be Done and Hammer and Sickle. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 5:14 pm

Too Much: Chronicles of Inequality [May 14, 2012]

 Uncategorized  Comments Off
May 142012
 

 Special—

Too Much

 May 14, 2012
THIS WEEK

The most expensive Presidential election of all time? That came over a century ago, in 1896, when America’s original Populists endorsed a young Democrat off the Great Plains who had championed a federal income tax on America’s rich.

America’s rich would not be amused. They funneled unprecedented millions into the campaign of GOP candidate William McKinley. Of every $1,000 Americans spent for goods and services in 1896 — our gross domestic product — 60 cents went for Presidential campaign spending, most all of that for McKinley. In 2008, by contrast, White House candidates spent just over a dime per $1,000 of GDP.

But spending this year may end up rivaling that incredible 1896 level, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has blown away limits on how much the rich and the corporations they run can contribute politically. Just one right-wing political group alone, we learned last week, will likely spend a quarter-billion dollars in 2012.

Ironically, this sway the rich hold over our elections for public office is growing at the same time the rich seem to be losing their sway over the balloting that takes place in their own private backyards, at corporate annual shareholder meetings. What’s going on here? That puzzle we contemplate in this week’s Too Much. Continue reading »
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 Posted by at 4:21 pm

How terrorist ‘entrapment’ ensnares us all

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, GOVERNMENT CRIMES  Comments Off
May 142012
 

    ◦    By Karen Greenberg
    ◦    Suggested by Contrib. Ed Paul Carline


NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly holds pieces of a pipe bomb confiscated from alleged terrorist Jose Pimentel last month; the FBI reportedly had misgivings about the NYPD’s use of an informer in the plot. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Two weeks ago, Jose Pimentel was arrested as an alleged terrorist bomb-maker as a result of an NYPD sting. Within hours of the arrest, his attorney raised the prospect of a possible entrapment defense. Last month, when Mansour Arbabsiar was indicted for trying to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on behalf of Iran, he, too, was the subject of a sting, in this case by the FBI, and he claimed entrapment. These are but the latest iterations of dozens of terrorism cases that have come through the system with varying degrees of “entrapment” claims by the defense at the time of arrest. The Fort Dix case from New Jersey in 2007, and the more recent instances of the sole terrorism suspects in Portland, Washington, DC and Baltimore are among the many cases in which some sort of entrapment was alleged (at least, at the outset). Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 3:52 pm

What Jamie Dimon’s $2 Billion Dollar Fail Reveals About Our Banking System

 CORPORATE CRIMES, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, INDECENT SLIMEBALLS, PLUTOCRATS, SCUMWATCH  Comments Off
May 142012
 

JPChase's chief Dimon: son and grandson of stockbrokers, he's got the Wall Street disease in his blood. Among the highest compensated executives in the world. What's a billion here and a billion there?

 

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Blog

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said Dimon, a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.” Continue reading »

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