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 [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • Obama's War on Free Expression

    Obama’s War on Free Expression

    by Stephen Lendman It’s the most fundamental right. Without it all others are endangered. Obama’s waging war to destroy it. He’s done so throughout his tenure.  He targeted AP. He did so unjustifiably. A previous article discussed it. Did you like this? Share it:

  • The Jesuit Pope – Who is Francis and who he pretends to be

    The Jesuit Pope – Who is Francis and who he pretends to be

    Written by Esquerda Marxista editorial board Wednesday, 15 May 2013 The election of Pope Francis marks a turn in the prolonged crisis of the Catholic Church. It is important for revolutionaries to understand the reasons for the ongoing struggle within the Church. Far from moving to the left, Francis is trying to entrench the Church in [...]

  • Apple CEO defends multi-billion-dollar tax dodge

    Apple CEO defends multi-billion-dollar tax dodge

    By Andre Damon, wsws.org   Apple CEO Tim Cook used his appearance Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—called to investigate Apple’s evasion of billions of dollars in taxes—to call for a sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate. The senators on the committee, Democratic and Republican alike, agreed with Cook [...]

Chronicles of Inequality —[Too Much, July 30, 2012]

 ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, DEBATING POINTS, FINANCE CAPITAL, GREAT HYPOCRISY, INDECENT SLIMEBALLS  Comments Off
Jul 302012
 
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Too Much July 30, 2012
THIS WEEK
Every summer the United Nations releases a survey on how well efforts to help the world’s poor are going. The just-released latest World Economic and Social Survey doesn’t have much good news on that score. In 2011, the UN reports, aid to the world’s poor fell $167 billion shy of what developed nations had promised.But UN analysts aren’t just wringing their hands over this shortfall. They’re talking up an array of “innovative financing” maneuvers to help tackle global poverty, everything from a speculation tax to a 1 percent tax on billionaire net worth.A tax at that modest level, the UN estimates, would raise $46 billion a year from the world’s 1,200-plus billionaires. Average billionaires who paid this tax would have to spend $1,000 a day for the next 10,000 years to exhaust their fortunes.The new UN survey readily acknowledge that a global tax on billionaire wealth remains, for the moment, no more than “an intriguing possibility.” In this week’sToo Much, we explore some other intriguing possibilities. Come explore with us. Continue reading »
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 Posted by at 6:56 pm

The Next Stage in the Destruction of Syria

 ANNOTATED NEWS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CITIZEN TOOLS, CORPORATE CRIMES, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, GOVERNMENT CRIMES, GREAT HYPOCRISY, IN RESERVE, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA  Comments Off
Jul 302012
 

By Shamus Cooke, Workers’ Action

The Western media lies continue and a whole nation is again immersed in chaos and bloodshed. Haven’t we seen this before?

Despite the inevitable confusion and violence injected by a state of growing civil war, a solid majority of Syrians support the Assad regime, especially now that they see what is in store in the event of an American style “regime change”.

The U.S. media has made its intentions clear: the ‘rebels’ attacking Syria’s government must have more support to advance Syria’s “revolution.”  This was the result of the much-hyped advance of Syria’s rebels into the country’s two largest cities, which the western media portrayed as a defining moment in global democracy. But “journalists” like these have blood on their hands, with much more in the works.

The systematic dismantling of Syria has more to do with western media lies and geo-politics than “revolution;” and the more that the U.S. media cheers on this bloodletting, the more politicians feel enabled to spill it.   Continue reading »

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Hit us when we’re down.

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTI-COMMUNISM, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, CONSERVATIVES & REACTION, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, INDECENT SLIMEBALLS, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA  Comments Off
Jul 302012
 

By Rowan Wolf,  Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Today

Ronald Reagan, one of the biggest phonies and international bullies in American history. Mean-spirited, too. Remains the great saintly icon of the right, whom all ambitious reactionary politicians must invoke to polish their own credentials.

There are headlines that I just hate to see because what follows is just formulaic. “Investigations” into public employee benefits, pay, or retirement funds are a sure fire bet that big pressure to cut all of the above are coming. Instead, they should be asking, “How to we improve all worker’s wages and benefits?” Likewise, I cringed when I saw the headline “Ballooning food stamps likely to face deep cuts” – part of a larger article Big jump in food-stamp enrollment drives farm bill debate (Oregonian, 7/22/2012). Continue reading »

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Olympics: a celebration of globalized conformity to vulture capitalism

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Jul 302012
 

By Wayne Madsen

The Olympic Games, particularly the 2012 London Summer Olympiad, are a celebration not of amateur sports and universal human competition but of corporate greed, international conformity to the “new world order,” and global oligarchs and elites.

The modern Olympics were the brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a member of French royalty, who believed that when he organized the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, it might help forestall a repeat of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Coubertin was not able to prevent another Franco-German war and in 1914, war broke out in Europe pitting the French and the Russian and British empires (and later, the Americans) against the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. In 1936, the Summer Olympics in Berlin actually honored a resurgent militarized Germany under the Nazis. Continue reading »

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The Return Of The King – Tony Blair And The Magically Disappearing Blood

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, INDECENT SLIMEBALLS, PLUTOCRATS, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA  Comments Off
Jul 302012
 

By David Cromwell, MediaLens

Blair: The war criminal and political crook in a well-rehearsed “statesmanlike” pose.

How many war crimes does a western leader have to commit before he is deemed persona non grata by the corporate media and the establishment? Apparently there is no limit, if we are to judge by the prevailing reaction to Tony Blair’s return to the political stage.  On July 11, it was announced that Blair would be ‘contributing ideas and experience’ to Labour leader Ed Miliband’s policy review. He will apparently provide advice on how to ‘maximise’ the economic and sporting legacies of the 2012 London Olympics.

The Guardian described the announcement mildly as a ‘controversial move’; not necessarily in the country at large, the paper claimed, but ‘perhaps especially within the Labour party’. One Guardian headline declared ‘Return of the king’. Continue reading »

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WHAT’S LEFT—Richard Seymour: Hallucinating revolutions, pacifying resistance

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTIWAR, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, IMPERIALISM, SYRIA  1 Response »
Jul 302012
 

By Stephen Gowans, What’s left

Assad: with the American-led pack closing in on him, his life expectancy is now measured in months, perhaps weeks, and if the brutal death of Gaddafi is any example, we know the fate reserved for the enemies of the empire at the hands of its many jackals.

While it may stir hopes that a popular rebellion is sweeping away oppression, the Syrian revolt, whatever its origins and proclamations, is hardly that. Its likely destination is a new US client regime in Damascus; its probable outcome the dismantling of what’s left of Syrian socialism, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. Would that it were all that romantic leftists fervently wish it to be, but a sober look at the rebellion, and recent history, strongly points in another direction.

Following blogger and author Richard Seymour, the views of many leftist who side with the rebels can be summarized as follows:

•    All genuine popular liberation movements should be supported.
•    The Syrian revolt is a genuine popular liberation movement.
•    Western countries are intervening to tilt the balance in favour of an outcome they want.
•    There is no sign they can achieve this.

Since few would disagree with the first point, we can move quickly to the second. Is the Syrian revolt “genuine” and is it “popular”?

If by genuine we mean the revolt is intended to advance popular interests, and that it doesn’t represent the pursuit of narrow interests under the guise of achieving popular goals, then the answer must surely be that the rebel movement’s genuineness depends on what section of it we’re talking about. Continue reading »

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