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
  • Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    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 [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric

    Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric, Congo war crimes, Jailed for silence, DOJ assault on Fox Source: RT.com On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin and political commentator Sam Sacks go over the Orwellian rhetoric in Obama’s latest foreign policy speech. Abby highlights a recent UN investigation bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by a [...]

  • Dr. Noam Chomsky breaks the set on war, imperialism and propaganda

    RT’s Abby Martin interviews Noam Chomsky on current issues stemming from pseudo-democratic governance in the United States. On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to philosopher, linguist, professor, political critic and author of over 100 books Dr. Noam Chomsky about the Boston bombings, US terror inflicted abroad, drones, Obama’s rebranding of Bush [...]

  • OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    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

    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:

  • Religious Barbarians

    Religious Barbarians

    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

    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 [...]

Over The Hill: Why We Need To Be In All Media

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, CITIZEN TOOLS, MEDIA SCUM, PROPAGANDA, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA  Comments Off
May 212012
 

By Danny Schechter, Author of Blogothon

News Dissector Danny Schechter on the imporance of books and reaching people you disagree with though the media they watch, read and listen to.

Danny S.

When do you feel like you are over the hill?

 When you get letters like this one from Jose Hevia after writing an op-ed featuring an essay ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-schechter/foreign-reporting-future_b_1511648.html ) from your recent book Blogothon, (http://www.1888pressrelease.com/new-book-released-blogothon-by-danny-schechter-the-news-di-pr-396898.html)   recounting your experiences as a network TV insider turned independent media outsider. The essay offered a case study of how the nominally non-commercial network, PBS, turned its back on a human rights TV series I co-produced. It is about the challenges progressives face in offering a counter-narrative to parochial mainstream thinking.

My critical correspondent wondered what I was whining about:

“Complaining that the old media is getting more and more monopolized is… who cares about old media?,”  he wrote, “Nobody in my inner circle under 30, watches old media any more. Bye.”

Take that, old man. Hahaha. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 8:52 pm

Too Much: Chronicles of Inequality [21 May 2012]

 ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, CITIZEN TOOLS  Comments Off
May 212012
 

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Too Much

 May 21, 2012
THIS WEEK

Here at Too Much we like numbers. But the best ripostes against apologists for inequality sometimes carry no numbers at all. What may be the best assault on inequality ever written — R. H. Tawney’s 1920 classic, The Acquisitive Society — goes pages upon pages without stats. Yet no one who ever peruses these pages will ever again think about inequality quite the same way.

Attorney Henry Banta, writing for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, has just updated this Tawney spirit. His target: Edward Conard, the private equity kingpin whose new book argues that the super rich deserve their good fortune. People prosper, Conard argues, because markets reward success.

Politicos who carry rich people’s water love this logic. Henry Banta skewers it. If America’s rich fully deserve the riches they’ve amassed over recent decades, he observes, then our middle class people must — by the same logic — fully deserve their last 30 years of stagnant incomes. They must be marketplace failures.

The rich and their handlers, needless to say, never dare make this logical leap, at least not in public. If they did, the absurdity behind their defense of privilege would stand instantly exposed. Ready for another absurdity? How about those newly minted Facebook billionaires? More on them in this week’s Too Much. Continue reading »
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 Posted by at 8:42 pm

OpEds: What Is ObamaCare?

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, GREAT HYPOCRISY, HEALTH & MEDICINE, SCUMWATCH  Comments Off
May 212012
 

By Paul Craig Roberts

While we think Obama's healthcare reforms are a betrayal of the public interest, and deserve to be scrapped to start anew with a clean slate, this absolutely deranged view of the program by tooconservative.com (a Northern Virginia Republican pod) is sheer and absolute nonsense. Leave it to the rightwing to turn reality upside down.

Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 8:34 pm

OpEds: Gary Sinise “supporting the troops”

 Uncategorized  Comments Off
May 212012
 

Bob Smith, Hipographia

“I’m kind of sick of celebrities who go around hugging and entertaining the troops without realizing they’re also selling the wars.”

Sinise: He apparently never saw Born on the Fourth of July, Coming Home, or All Quiet on the Western Front. All Hollywood products, but masterful antiwar films. And if he did, he seemingly learned nothing from them.

 GARY SINISE is one of those actors who seems to believe that actively “supporting the troops,” doing morale-boosting tours in the warzones where the Empire has deployed them, is the right and patriotic thing to do.  Sinise of course hardly invented this kind of exhibition. Actors performing for the troops is an old tradition going back at least to the Spanish-American war.  In the 1950s Bob Hope and his generation practically recreated the schtick, perfected it into a regular act, with theme and all.  Now, America is not alone in sending entertainers to war theaters, the Germans and Japanese did it too, among others, but as usual America does it with far more fanfare, its production values are way more elaborate. And, for a very long time, thanks to Hollywood and television it can tap on celebrities with global appeal. 

In any case, Hope and other celebrities of the “old school” could be forgiven for their wish to entertain what soon became our imperial troopers fighting wars of “counterinsurgency” in remote places most Americans never heard of. (Please don’t call them “warriors”—an adulatory term favored by the system’s whores and those who still believe in fairytales.) Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 5:08 pm

Double whammy by Paul Craig Roberts

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, HEADLINERS, HUMBUG CENTRAL, IMPERIALISM, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA  Comments Off
May 212012
 

Editor’s Note: Below we present two of Paul Craig Roberts’ provocative columns. A certifiable establishmentarian, a “system mechanic”, a self-defined conservative, Craig Roberts served at one point under the scoundrel Ronald Reagan (who, phony that he was, seems quaintly genuine by today’s cynical standards) and as editor with the Wall Street Journal. Since that time he has experienced something of an epiphany and “unplugged from the Matrix” as he aptly calls it.  He’s now one of the more lucid and courageous voices alerting the American people about the creeping imposture taking over the nation and shredding the Constitution.

But this “epiphany” by his own admission is not what we might expect. Typical of the man, he claims to be doing this not to move the nation to the left, but supposedly to revert to a capitalist system whose soundness remains a fantasy.  In that he’s being typically ahistorical, a trait of the bourgeois mind predominant among libertarians who cavalierly disregard the evolution of institutions. In  keeping with that idealist logic, Craig Roberts also argues that there was a substantive difference between Ronald Reagan’s presidency and that of George W. Bush.  This conclusion is impossible to prove or disprove but the thrust is to absolve Reagan and Co. for a multitude of crimes. Still, as said earlier, Roberts is a compelling, recognizable voice in a field far too often crowded with prostitutes and cowards.—PG

» Recovery or Collapse? Bet on Collapse

By Paul Craig Roberts| May 20, 2012

The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.

In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled “police brutality” and up came 183,000,000 results. (Here are two recent brutal assaults, one deadly, by police on hapless individuals: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/kelly-thomas-video-dad-they-are-killing-me-.html and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31364.htm ) Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 2:19 pm

Tribunal finds Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their lawyers guilty of war crimes

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, GOVERNMENT CRIMES, GREAT HYPOCRISY  Comments Off
May 212012
 

By Kéllia Ramares-Watson

Justice Robert H. Jackson, at Nuremberg. What would he have thought of Bush's crimes? And can you judge a whole system?

…the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.

Justice Robert H. Jackson, Chief of Counsel of the United States, Opening Statement, Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, November 21,1945 Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 12:04 pm