From 1948 to 1973, hourly compensation grew instep with the productivity of the typical American worker. This means that, for about a generation’s time, economic prosperity amongst workers in the United States virtually reflected productivity. In the ensuing forty years, however, inequality exploded. The Washington Post has reported that income for the bottom 90 percent of American households has only nominally grown since 1973, when this group commanded nearly 70 percent of national income. In her article entitled “The Capitalist Machine: Computerization, Workers’ Power, And The Decline In Labor’s Share Within U.S. Industries”, sociologist Tali Kristal evinces the dismal disconnect …
Organic food is more healthful than conventional food by a long way, many studies are now showing. There are two main reasons why: pesticides and nutrients. Conventionally produced food is sprayed with numerous forms of pesticides, from insecticides to herbicides to fungicides and more. In large scale agriculture, these pesticides are petrochemical derivatives. In other words, they are made from industrial chemicals which are powerful and dangerous enough to kill bugs and mold, but which can also cause you serious illness if they end up in your body – which they do, since most food which is sprayed absorbs the …
Milton Freidman (1912-2006) labeled it the “Miracle of Chile,” as his “Chicago Boys,” a considerable group of Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago, established his neoliberal principles under the tutelage of General Augusto Pinochet from 1974-90.
The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.
Thereafter, Chilean economic policy “deregulated and privatized,” including the breakdown of state-controlled pension systems, state industries, and state banks (sound familiar, …
Over the past 30 years, wealth has grown exponentially and has become increasingly concentrated foremost in the upper .01%, then the .1%, followed by the 1% and the upper 10%-20%.
The large scale, long-term concentration of wealth has continued through booms and busts of the real economy, the financial and IT crises. Wealth grew despite long-term economic recessions and stagnation because the so-called recovery programs imposed austerity on 80% of the households while transferring public revenues to the rich.
Yes it's us: y'all need to change, and that Right Soon
by Daniel Patrick Welch / December 4th, 2014
White Americans have essentially never internalized the Kenner Report. Assembled by Lyndon Johnson to address what was laughably referred to as the Negro Problem, the panel very quickly saw that this was a joke. There is no Negro Problem in the US, but rather a white people problem. FIFTY years ago (let that sink in), it opined, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white–separate and unequal… Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.” The report explained that the race riots were rooted in …
History is like a flowing river whose motions can be interpreted from any angle, since it is not static. As social activist Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States, “the historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports…some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual…[the] inevitable taking of sides…comes from selection and emphasis in history.” Gerald Horne took the side of the oppressed in his recent books by challenging the traditional and conventional history of …
(The Red Summer of 1919; Destruction of Tulsa's 'Black Wall Street in 1921; and Decimation of Rosewood, Florida in 1923)
by Herb Dyer / December 4th, 2014
Author’s note: In light of the current so-called “riots” inFerguson, Missouri, I thought it might be instructive to give some perspective as to what “race riot” really means. This is written especially for those legions of “holier than thou” white people who may be heard, seen and read as they rail against the “looters” and “rioters” in Ferguson in the aftermath of the murder of unarmed teen Michael Brown at the hands of now non-indicted white killer-cop, Darren Wilson.
And, this history is also meant to serve as an object lesson to black people, a reminder, a remembrance – …
The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers… A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of news-writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.
— Thomas Jefferson
Freedom of the press is another of the principal slogans of pure democracy…The capitalists have always use the term freedom to mean freedom for the rich to …
A recent New YorkTimesarticle offered another textbook example of the spectacular bias the U.S. employs to undermine those that might pose a challenge to its global hegemony. It also nicely illustrated the willingness of the media to serve as little more than a relay station for state propaganda. Yet it was but the latest in the glossary of deceits that characterize America’s relationship with Iran.
The front-page article from two Saturdays covered the Iranian nuclear program negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1, which includes the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Russia. It was titled, …
Raed Mu’anis was my best friend. The small scar on top of his left eyebrow was my doing at the age of five. I urged him to quit hanging on a rope where my mother was drying our laundry. He wouldn’t listen, so I threw a rock at him.
I didn’t mean for the rock hit him, but it did. My father dragged to me to his house kicking and screaming, while carrying a colourful rubber ball and a doll for gifts. I was mostly embarrassed that I hurt my best friend.
Several years later, Raed, now 15, was shot by Israeli …
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.
— Che Guevara ((“Che Guevara Reader” p. 383, Ocean Press; Second Edition; Edited by David Deutschmann)) To my children (1965)
I think Che must surely be spinning in his grave. The Cuba for which he risked his life has surely fallen short of his hopes and aspirations; and now, as time takes its inevitable toll on the Castros, I believe the country is in some danger of losing the few real advances it’s made and may join the competition with many other desperate third world countries …
Those who claim the Nazi crimes were unique and beyond comparison hang those crimes so high that they get out of reach. How can anyone think or talk about something that cannot be compared; i.e., a virtually ahistorical singularity? Those, on the other hand, who want to repress German history in an attempt to draw a final stroke can comfortably hide behind the theory of uniqueness and content themselves with formulistic avowals instead of a necessary serious analysis. Avowals “against right-wing extremism”, “against anti-Semitism” and “for Israel” will suffice to show correctness. They don’t hurt and sound well, even if …
Sunday, November 30, Ferguson, Missouri. The governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency on November 17, and this is what’s been happening in Ferguson and St. Louis County, Missouri:
You drive past a major traffic and commercial intersection like Chambers and West Florissant and you see the cross-street barricaded by a half-dozen or so police cars with bubble lights flashing, crime scene tape, a military Humvee, armed soldiers, and more police in the Walgreen’s/mini-mall across the street. You often hear helicopters circling overhead, at night sometimes you can see their searchlights sweeping nearby. Meanwhile, the airspace has been closed off …
On the weekend of November 16th, the G20 leaders whisked into Brisbane, posed for their photo ops, approved some proposals, made a show of roundly disapproving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and whisked out again. It was all so fast, they may not have known what they were endorsing when they rubber-stamped the Financial Stability Board’s “Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution,” which completely changes the rules of banking.
Russell Napier, writing in ZeroHedge, called it “the day money died.” In any case, it may have been the day deposits died as money. Unlike coins …
Vimes knew how you could own a pub, but he wondered how you could own a trout stream because, if that was your bit, it had already gurgled off downstream while you were watching it, yes? That meant that somebody else was now fishing in your water, the bastard! And the bit in front of you now had recently belonged to the bloke upstream; that bloated plutocrat of a fat neighbour now probably considered you some kind of poacher, that other bastard! And the fish swam everywhere, didn’t they? How did you know which ones were yours? Perhaps they were …
As dead black bodies continue to pile and mount up across this nation-state after being murdered at state- and societally-sanctioned hands, it does an old Baby Boomer’s body and soul good to see that yes, finally, a new generation has blown the whistle, and picked up the mantle that my own generation dropped not so long ago. (For the record and for the curious, I’m 65, and have been on the racial battlefield my entire adult life. That means that I’m what we used to call back in the day a “race man” when it comes to …
I once lived in Peru’s southern Andes, in the majestic corn belt of the royal Inca. The dimensions of the surrounding sierra were enough to quiet my ambitious, over-sized and over-active American ego. Moreover, those rural and ancient environs were truly the agemates of eternity. The indigenous populace that stippled the earth there—my neighbors—kept it all alive. Andahuaylillas, my temporary hometown in the mountains, was a maize-growing hamlet of maybe three thousand people. Neighbors there were kind, and they constantly sought me out to share life with me.
I did not always reciprocate. I think about one friend and neighbor …
imperialism: noun – A policy of extending a country’s power and influence through colonization, use of military force or other means.
— Oxford Dictionary
Betsy Ward, president and CEO of the USA Rice Federation, was fuming recently when the Iraqi Grain Board (IGB) neglected, once again, to purchase American rice from corporate behemoth Archer Daniels Midland and opted instead for more expensive varieties from Brazil, Uruguay and Thailand. It was the third consecutive strikeout for U.S. rice producers in Iraq.
“The results make no sense,” said Ward, according to Politico. “The U.S. is price competitive, the quality is excellent, the logistics …
And the prospects for a comprehensive agreement with Iran
by Alan Hart / November 30th, 2014
If a non-Jew had coined the phrase “Judeo-Nazism” he or she would have been verbally crucified by Zionism’s attack dogs and the mainstream Western media. The actual coiner of it was Yeshavahu Leibowitz, one of the most outspoken and controversial Jewish intellectuals of modern times. He was once described as “the conscience of Israel.” Before he died in 1994 he said “Judeo-Nazis” were on the rise in Israel. If he was alive today I imagine he would say, “They are now in control.”
The question awaiting an answer in the coming days and weeks is whether or not those who do …
This over-organized, techno-urbanized 21st century: we “live,” as it were, within enveloping enclosures — an ever-tightening mesh of interlocking institutional structures (1000’s of corporations, mega-banks, power plants, DoD, NSA, the Internet, etc.). Such is the over-arching scope and complexity of this “Mega-System” that a mere individual finds her unique identity virtually obliterated by the standardizing forces which surround her (“technology,” “finance,” “media,” “messages,” etc., etc.) Daily “life” has become a stream of stimulus-response reactivity—as her latitude for spontaneous, self-directed activity shrinks. As these institutional structures engulfing her have hypertrophied—through endless mergers and consolidations, as well as constant technological transformations—her autonomous …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / November 28th, 2014
Former labor organizer Bill Barry discusses the tenuous relationship between the working class and undocumented workers, and the forces that keep these groups at odds.
When discredited Missouri prosecutor Robert P. McColloch recently defended his calculated manipulation of a grand jury which led jurors to free the policeman who fatally shot Michael Brown last summer, McColloch declared piously that eyewitness accounts must “always match physical evidence.”
McColloch, however, did not apply that ‘always match’ standard in the case of Antonio Beaver, a St. Louis man wrongfully convicted by in 1997 of a violent carjacking case tried by McColloch.
That carjacking victim had told police her attacker was younger, shorter, and weighed less than Beaver. McColloch’s office secured a first-degree robbery conviction and 18-year sentence for Beaver despite …
Few, if any, of the correct questions were asked in the grand jury hearing to decide whether policeman Darren Wilson would be indicted for killing Michael Brown.
The most important unexamined question is whether police are trained to use force immediately as a first resort before they assess a situation or determine if they are at the correct address. Are the police trained that the lives of police officers are so much more valuable than the lives of possible suspects, or a houseful of people into whose residence a heavily armed SWAT team enters, that police officers must not accept the …
If you’re white, you’re all right.
If you’re yellow, that’s mellow.
If you’re brown, stick around.
If you’re black, get back!
– Ancient ghetto proverb
This image Looks like two different women, right? Wrong. Pictured above is the “before” and “after” effects of the constant application of “skin lightening” oils, creams and “treatment” by former model Irene Major. Major is originally from Cameroon, where some of this earth’s darkest people reside.
As quoted by Naturallymoi.com, Major explained her obsession with light skin thusly: “When my skin is lighter, I …
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 28th, 2014
Tai Chi, Thai Stick: Hash and Cheese to Go (hold the Mule)
Roger Golden began studying Tai Chi and other martial arts forms after graduating from high school in the mid-1960s. A classic ‘clown,’ in the folk-lore sense of the cunning trickster who gets over on Power, as opposed to collaborating with, endorsing and representing it, he laughed his way from low-level street deals of the then ‘new thing,’ marijanna, to become one of the major ‘importer-exporters’ of this particular herb, in the United States (after the CIA, of course) until his incarceration for ten years in the early 1990s. With …
Sixty-six years after the establishment of the State of Israel, even the most ubiquitous term employed to describe the political nature of Israel as a “Jewish democratic state” is no longer valid. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing coalition partners are preparing a law, which will exclusively define Israel as a “Jewish State” for the “Jewish people”. For independent observers, who do not wear rose-colored Zionist propaganda glasses, Israel was never a democracy in the classical Western sense of the term, but always a Jewish democracy or a democracy sui generis, i.e. full democratic rights for Jews only. Jewish …
It is funny to see how sometimes the same story can be perceived differently. I was back in the nineteenth district of Paris for some few days, last week. It was without surprise that I could still witness the direct signs of the catastrophic situation of the French economy, as it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to be served at the local post office. But what worried me more, though, were the protests and demonstrations that had been taking place for weeks in different cities across France. Paris, Toulouse, Nantes and in many other cities, for days, images …
I wish there could be a Thanksgiving for the applied bounty that could come from the hundreds of thousands of political scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.
I am referring especially to those social scientists who are full-time, tenured professors at universities, colleges and community colleges who are not indentured to commercial moonlighting. Those of us who look for ways to get things done for the betterment of society seek such contributions from people who spend their days studying what is happening in our country, and to whom. Other than …
The Jewish activist Max Blumenthal wrote an expansive book on Israeli racism, but he failed completely and categorically to grasp the culture that drives Jewish supremacy within the Jewish State, Jewish politics and beyond. Interestingly enough, Blumenthal has a lot to say about ‘German pathology,’ German people, the colour of German people’s skin and their ‘sickening society’. If anyone still had hope that there was something positive that Progressive Jews could add to the discourse, Blumenthal’s latest interview will end that idea. He exhibits the ultimate form of Jewish racism, goy hatred: in fact, far more insidious than hard-core right …
When law is treated as an exercise of sterile objectivity, one where vision matters less than procedure, citizens can best forget that they play any viable role. Seen through a naked prism of law and order, Ferguson, Missouri simply looks like black indignation against white order. While it would be deceptive to tarnish all arguments with the colour divide, it is unavoidable in parts of a country where authority and policing are inextricably linked to race. Slavery, after all, co-existed with enlightened notions of human equality for decades.
The conservative press outlets, and certain commentators, have resorted to various tricks of …
