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 Real I.R.S. Scandal

 ABOMINATIONS, AMERICAN STUDIES, BIG BROTHER, BOUGHT POLITICIANS & PHONIES, CONTROVERSY, CORPORATE MENTALITY, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, INDECENT SLIMEBALLS, OpEds, PLUTOCRATIC POWER  No Responses »
May 172013
 
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OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

NYTimesLogo

By SHEILA KRUMHOLZ and ROBERT WEINBERGER
[Note we reproduce this NYT's piece here for reasons of compelling public service.—Eds]

WASHINGTON

Hieronymus
ROOM FOR DEBATE

The I.R.S. is in the hot seat for scrutinizing conservative groups applying for tax exemption. But do all 501(c)(4)’s need a second look?

NEWS that employees at the Internal Revenue Service targeted groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their name for special scrutiny has raised pious alarms among some lawmakers and editorial writers. Continue reading »

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OpEds: Gandhi on the creation of Israel

 HISTORY, MORAL BACKWARDNESS, NEOCOLONIALISM, OLVIDADOS, OpEds, PALESTINIANS, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA  Comments Off
Apr 022013
 
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By Ruth Eisenbud

mohandas-karamchand-gandhiGandhi understood the fallacy of creating the religious state of one people at the expense of another.

These are some of the words of Gandhiji on the creation of Israel…They are from a book called Soul Force – Gandhi’s Writings on Peace.  (pages 373-386). They also appear as noted below:
“No wonder that my sympathy goes out to the Jews in their unenviably sad plight. But one would have thought adversity would teach them lessons of peace.Why should they depend on American money or British arms for forcing themselves on an unwelcome land. Why should they  resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?…” Continue reading »
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Ex-US president indicts Obama as assassin

 ANNOTATED NEWS, Obama, OpEds, POLEMICS, Policies & Politicians, SCUMWATCH  Comments Off
Jun 272012
 
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By Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG
27 June 2012

Jimmy Carter receiving his Nobel in Oslo.

A column published Monday in the New York Times by Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, constitutes an extraordinary indictment of the Obama administration for engaging in assassinations and other criminal violations of international law and the US Constitution.

Titling his column “A Cruel and Unusual Record,” Carter writes: “Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended.” Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 9:19 am

Pure Transformation or Persistent Deterioration? What Next Wisconsin? America? The World?

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, EDITORIALS, HEADLINERS, OpEds  1 Response »
Jun 092012
 
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By Kristine Mattis

And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end
That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names …

Paul Weller (The Jam)

Scott Walker's triumph reflects not only the enduring power of money in US politics, but the confusion among voters in all parts of the nation, and a general disgust with Democratic party politics due to numerous betrayals.

We all know the old Albert Einstein adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. What does that say about Wisconsin? June 5th 2012 saw an exact rematch of the 2010 gubernatorial election between Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett – and the exact same result, the only difference being that Walker won by an even wider margin than before.

While pundits have been pontificating about the causes of such a seemingly absurd victory by Scott Walker after the enormous groundswell of citizens fighting for sixteen months against the governor and his Tea Party Republican administration, most of the discussion has been shallow and fraught with inaccuracies. Furthermore, mere speculation on the causes of the Walker win only point to the ease with which our society retreats back to often unfounded conventional wisdom. Walker outspending Barrett 7 to 1, an ignorant electorate hell bent on voting against their own interests, and poor “messaging” by the Democratic party/candidate may all have played a part in the crushing Walker win, but these observations only scratch the surface of the problems facing Wisconsin, the country, and the world and serve to fuel the media’s incessant focus on the horse race. This insistence on focusing on the superficial always serves, by design, to impede the discourse on substantive issues. Continue reading »

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OpEds: Adrienne Pine on nonviolence in the imperial context

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, OpEds, OWS, POLICE & REPRESSION, PROPAGANDA, TACTICS & STRATEGIES  Comments Off
Mar 312012
 
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Resisting the Cult of Non-Violence

ORIGINALLY AT QUOTHA.NET / Suggested by J. Timperio


People who enshrine Gandhi’s tactics forget the entire context of struggle and the fact that British Raj, brutal as it was in repressing the natives, was a far cry from the sadistic ferocity of a Pinochet, the Argentinian junta or the Salvadoran oligarchy and its death squads. Nonviolence as the solution to grave social problems in all places and climes is a myth, especially when the change connotes a deep change in class  relations. —Eds.

Check out this letter from comrades in Cairo. What a relief to see Egyptians speaking out in English against the ICNC spin, as one after another “leader” of the Egyptian revolution is trotted out to represent Nonviolent Egyptian Youth in “solidarity” with Occupy Wall Street protesters, with their neutered Gandhis and MLKs (no anti-imperialism/anti-capitalism here) and “turn-the-other-cheek” blather. Regardless of who is actually behind this letter (it is signed “Comrades from Cairo”), it speaks some very important truths about what happened in Egypt. Here’s a quote:

We faced such direct and indirect violence, and continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 4:39 pm

OpEds: Recovering from Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS)

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, OpEds, OWS, POLICE & REPRESSION  Comments Off
Dec 152011
 
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“Because the cops don’t need you and man they expect the same”

By Phil Rockstroh
 

Witnessing the acts and utterances of Republican presidential candidates can be regarded as a helpful psychological exercise, a type of “exposure therapy” involving the development of methods used to bear the presence of unbearable people who insist on evincing the history of human ignorance, duplicity and insanity.

“I can’t go on; I go on.”–Samuel Beckett

All alive are tasked with the challenge of, not only proceeding through life despite these kinds of insults to common sense and common decency, but to make a stand, in one’s own unique way, against prevailing forms of madness and oppression. Continue reading »
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 Posted by at 11:37 am
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