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
  • 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 [...]

  • Dissent or Terror: New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide

    Dissent or Terror: New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide

    MADISON, WI — DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details [...]

  • Chronicles of Inequality [TOO MUCH, 20 May 2013)

    Chronicles of Inequality [TOO MUCH, 20 May 2013)

    May 20, 2013 THIS WEEK Oh, please, spare us any more pious declarations. After a week of “IRS scandal,” we simply can’t bear another bogus claim that we’re witnessing one of the “most shameful abuses of government power in 20th-century American history.”We’re witnessing no such thing. Let’s be clear about what’s really happened: An understaffed and overburdened IRS office [...]

  • America: A Modern-Day Sparta

    America: A Modern-Day Sparta

    BY STEPHEN LENDMAN  Permanent war is longstanding policy. America deplores peace. Throughout its history, it’s waged war annually at home and/or abroad. Today it does so globally.  Giving peace a chance is loathed. Direct or proxy wars rage in multiple countries. Did you like this? Share it:

  • The decomposition of American democracy

    The decomposition of American democracy

    BY TOM CARTER, WSWS.ORG  On Thursday, Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the war on terror would continue at least another 10 or 20 years. Alluding to last month’s lockdown of Boston, he said the president and the military would continue to assert “wartime” powers, unchecked by Congress or [...]

  • Connecticut May Let Students Opt Out of Dissection

    Connecticut May Let Students Opt Out of Dissection

    by Alicia Graef Connecticut students who have a conscientious objection to dissection may soon have the right to opt out if lawmakers pass An Act Concerning Dissection Choice. Students have come forward to express their discomfort and objections to learning about the study of life by wasting the lives of innocent animals. Some are met with [...]

  • Russia Catches CIA Spy Red-Handed

    Russia Catches CIA Spy Red-Handed

    by Stephen Lendman America never permitted the bipolar rivalry to die down, and now given its taste for world domination it is wantonly creating new flashpoints for lethal confrontation. The upshot may be another arms race and a world that much closer to WW3. CIA agents operate most everywhere. They don’t promote friendly relations. They’re [...]

  • America Honors Its Worst

    America Honors Its Worst

    by Stephen Lendman Presidential Medals of Freedom are awarded annually. They mock what they claim to represent. Many go to deplorable recipients.  Previous dishonorees include GHW Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Shimon Peres, Margaret Thatcher, Alvaro Uribe, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Alan Greenspan among others. Did you like [...]

Movement Strategy Brunches: “Campaign Season” Never Ends for the Professional Left “One Big Progressive Cluster-F–k”

 AMERICAN STUDIES, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, LIBERAL BETRAYALS, PLUTOCRATIC POWER, TACTICS & STRATEGIES  Comments Off
Nov 142012
 

by The INSIDER, Counterpunch


Van Jones: Though dissed by Obama in one of his habitual betrayals, Van Jones has stuck to his guns on account of indomitable ambition. He’s likely to become a professional apparatchik in the Democratic party, following in the steps of Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. He appears to be interested in creating an external platform like Operation Push to apply pressure on the party bigwigs.

President Barack Obama was elected merely a week ago in a presidential campaign that ran a bill of $6 billion.

“Campaign Season,” as its called by the electioneering professionals and most journalists, has officially come to an end in the eyes of most citizens and the press, both mainstream and “independent media” alike. For the “Professional Left” though, “campaign season” never actually ends, which explains why they refer to their form of activism as “campaigns.” It’s truth in advertising, at last! Continue reading »

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Aleksandr Tarasov: THE INTELLECTUALS’ BETRAYAL

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANTI-CORPORATISM, ANTIWAR, BETTER HUMANITY, CLASS STRUGGLE, CULTURE & CRITICISM, KULTURKAMPF, PHILOSOPHY  Comments Off
Nov 142012
 

VOICES FROM RUSSIA
Aleksandr Tarasov
SPECIAL DISPATCH FOR THE GREANVILLE POST
Moderated by Gaither Stewart


The betrayal of public intellectuals is now almost universal, especially so in the West, where they scramble to serve established power and imperialist ends while retaining currency in an utterly prostituted culture. Their tool, as usual, is cynicism and sophistry. In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a professional decadent and shameless fame-addicted narcissist, who is now clamoring for outright war against Syria, was also a vocal supporter of French intervention in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. For his part, another famous “nouvel philosophe” — André Gluckman—has spoken out against human rights abuses by Russian forces in Chechnya. That their pronouncements serve as propaganda gifts for the American-led alliance is apparently of no concern to them at all.

Ten Years of Shame: Arguments About Blame
THE INTELLECTUALS’ BETRAYAL
A critique of Soviet intelligentsia and its counterparts abroad

The 1990s were the years in which the intelligentsia gave up its identity and its autonomy. The intellectual [intelligent] – if he is authentic and not a pseudointellectual (an intellectual by status, a bureaucrat, a clerk, a narrow specialist in a nonindustrial sphere such as education, management, or information technology) – is a creator: a creative individual, a genius, a person engaged in the search for truth through rational (scientific) or emotional (artistic) understanding and assimilation of the world. True intellectuals comprehend their individual role as thinking subjects and their social role as enlighteners and emancipators. Genuine intellectuals are paragons of critical thinking, opposed to conformity and parochialism. Continue reading »

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The Real Winner of the 2012 Elections: The Global Electioneering Industry

 AMERICAN STUDIES, ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTI-CORPORATISM, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, Political Vermin  Comments Off
Nov 142012
 

by STEVE HORN

Editors’ Note: Below some of the most notorious spinmasters in America today.  There are many others, as “political consultancy” is now a growth industry as American democracy’s substance dissolves ever more rapidly into pure formality without meaning. Akin to public relations, and very much a form of marketing, political consultancy shares a profound indifference, even hostility, to anything resembling principles, the latter almost an alien word in modern American culture.

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Clockwise: Mary Matalin, David Plouffe, James Carville, Dick Morris, Karl Rove, David Axelrod, David Gergen
__________________________
The pundit class has offered a slew of postmortems in the attempt to extract meaning in the aftermath of the 2012 elections.

Missing from the majority of these analyses altogether: the real winner of the 2012 election. No, not Democratic Party President-elect Barack Obama nor Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but rather what Portland State University Professor of Urban Studies and Planning called the “Global Electioneering” industry in his 2005 book by that namesake. Continue reading »

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Saving the Planet or Fixing the “Debt”?

 AMERICAN STUDIES, ANTI-CORPORATISM, ANTIWAR, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CONSERVATIVES & REACTION, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES  1 Response »
Nov 142012
 

“Shut Up and Gut Social Security and Medicare…”

by DEAN BAKER
Imagine Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and our political leaders responded by debating the best way to deal with the deficits projected for 1960. This is pretty much the way that Washington works these days.

The political leadership, including the Washington press corps and punditry, were already intently ignoring the economic downturn that is wreaking havoc on the lives of tens of millions of people across the country. Now, in the wake of the destruction from Hurricane Sandy, they will intensify their efforts to ignore global warming. After all, they want the country to focus on the debt, an issue that no one other than the elites view as a problem. Continue reading »

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