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 [...]
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 [...]
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:
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
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 [...]
Russians pick best ruler of USSR and pre-Putin Russia
SOURCE: Pravda.ru Among all leaders of the Soviet Union and the pre-Putin Russia, Russians are most positive about Leonid Brezhnev. As many as 56 percent of respondents praised his work while 29 percent said that they shared a negative attitude to his persona. Did you like this? Share it:
By Paul Craig Roberts Have you ever wondered how the government’s misinformation gains traction?What I have noticed is that whenever a stunning episode occurs, such as 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombing, most everyone whether on the right or left goes along with the government’s explanation, because they can hook their agenda to the government’s [...]
The Silent Death of the American Left
Generation Leftover by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, Counterpunch Is there a Left in America today? There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement? Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained [...]
Why the ObamaCare Ruling Stinks
by DAVE LINDORFF
Looking on the bright side, the Supreme Court has ruled that something that President Obama has done is definitively not unconstitutional.
That’s probably the best that can be said of the 5-4 decision by the High Court today in upholding the ironically named Affordable Health Care Act. Continue reading »
By Joseph Kishore, WSWS.ORG
Thank you, Joe.
John Roberts on the front plaza of the Supreme Court in 2010. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
For anyone seeking to follow American politics, there is a certain professional obligation to read the New York Times, the “newspaper of record.” This obligation has less to do with the information that can be gleaned from its pages than the insight its commentaries and articles provide into the thinking of the Democratic Party milieu for which the Times speaks.
The Times specializes in serving up the lying hypocrisy of the liberal bourgeois establishment, which is then echoed by the various “left” defenders of the Democratic Party. As such, one of the newspaper’s primary tasks is to lend a progressive veneer to the right-wing policies of the Obama administration. Continue reading »
As usual, cynical opposition by the Republicans has actually helped the credibility of the Obama healthcare concoction with many liberals.
When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was voted into law in March 2010, President Barack Obama hailed the measure as a vindication of the “American dream” and proof that “government of the people and by the people still works for the people.”
Thursday’s ruling by the US Supreme Court upholding key provisions of the law met with a similar response from the president, Democratic supporters of the bill and what passes for the liberal media in the US. The basic premise of their celebration of the high court decision was that the health care law is a genuine reform that will expand coverage for ordinary Americans and implement safeguards to guarantee quality care. Nothing could be further from the truth. Continue reading »
Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of “ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.” Continue reading »
June 30, 2012
What’s a Socialist?
By STEVEN ERLANGER, The New York Times
PARIS
SUGGESTED BY GLORIA STEVENSON
Bubbly enthusiasm in France upon Hollande’s election. Suckers apparently abound in every nation, not just in America.
Editor’s Note: This is a good piece in terms of defining what “socialism” has become in modern Europe, and although Erlanger is quite accurate in equating today’s Eurosocialists with America’s Democrats, he is too polite and too bourgeois to say aloud that much of the “socialist” parties’ decline is owed primarily to their own eagerness to become managers of the welfare capitalist state, and lately, pliant shills and willing partners for a fervid “neconservative” strain of capitalism. It is indeed this kind of shameless class collaboration that has left the working classes defenseless and subject to the allure of rightwing sirens. The Kautsky-Bersteian formula of a gradual socialism—eventually conquering capitalism from within in stages and without the need of social revolution in the Leninist sense—has thus stalled. In the 21st century the choice still remains: [real] socialism or barbarism. That is degenerate capitalist barbarism, perhaps a new-minted type of fascism, and not Henri-Levy’s slanderous barbarism supposedly induced by the arrival of authentic socialism. But then, again, we know who Bernard Henri-Levy is, even if the New York Times, Charlie Rose, and platoons of bourgeois admirers on both sides of the Atlantic pretend not to see the obvious.—P. Greanville
FRANCE has elected its first Socialist president since 1988 and then given the Socialist Party and its closest allies a whopping majority in Parliament. But how Socialist is François Hollande? And what does it mean to be a Socialist these days, anyway? Continue reading »