It is happening, again. The grotesque similarities are haunting. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States, along with its faithful, evangelically led air craft carrier in the form of Britain, decided to treat the United Nations as a body of opinion rather than worth. Efforts made to bring to light Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (more totem than taboo), had not been successful. The reserved and ever cautious Hans Blix of the UN Weapons Inspectors team urged restraint in the name of empirical certainty. There was, as it were, no smoking gun. There were, instead, hallucinations …
The West is apparently gearing up for an imminent invasion of Syria, an act which can ignite World War III.
Washington hawks have already warned of a strike as early as Thursday. Senior US officials told NBC News on Tuesday that Washington could “hit Syria with three days of missile strikes, perhaps beginning Thursday, in an attack meant more to send a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad than to topple him or cripple his military.”
The idea of attacking Syria was initiated and augmented by the US State Department when it announced that it was already “crystal clear” that Assad’s government …
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a satirical novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.” In the book, a democratically elected President transforms the country into a totalitarian, ruthless regime, relying upon patriotic rhetoric and fear to dominate and control a docile populace.
Just as Lewis predicted it would, it has happened here:
1) Those who identify and expose government misconduct are labeled as traitors and criminals.
2) The bankers and corporations who gambled with the money entrusted to them get off Scot free for the theft of untold trillions of dollars, while the world’s people are forced into conditions of austerity and economic survival. The poor are prosecuted for trying to survive, while the rich are immunized from …
How many Egyptians have been killed since the January 2011 revolt? My pursuit for exact figures has proven to be futile. Various sources suggest all sorts of numbers, some scrambled in such a way as to make a political point. It is as if the life of the ordinary Egyptian doesn’t matter on its own, as an absolute value that must be guarded aside from any political considerations. If it does matter at all, it is only within a larger context to simply prove a point.
But the deaths are certainly in the thousands, with many more maimed and wounded. On …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / August 28th, 2013
Educator and activist Brian Jones: Obama admin. promoting privatization, competition and attacking unions instead of aiming for universal access to quality public education.
It seems many have forgotten the last two-and-a-half years of western sabre-rattling and covert military aggression against the Syrian state. It is worth reiterating that without the vast amount of military, financial, and diplomatic largesse the west and their regional clients have thrown at the “revolutionary rebels” in Syria – who have now beyond doubt been exposed as sectarian extremists, lead and dominated by Al Qaeda ideologues – the violent insurgency in Syria would have been defeated long ago by the Syrian army.
I wrote a few years ago that corporate social responsibility (CSR) “is mostly a façade — to divert the public’s eye from corporate misdeeds and corporate welfare.” ((Gary B. Brumback. The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch. Author House, 2011, pp. 144-145.)) Not that there is much of a difference in the meaning of the two nouns, but I write here that CSR is also a charade, the pretending of being socially responsible while being socially irresponsible.
CSR Buzz Word: The “Triple Bottom Line”
The “triple bottom line” has become a fashionable term in corporate circles …
“The Nationalists Now Wear Panties”. This sentence was grafittied onto a wall on a major artery, a street called Baho Lam, never used by tour buses and mostly unknown to expats and tourists. Yet, Baho Lam, which stretches from near downtown Yangon all the way to the outskirts of Rangoon alongside the vein of the Ayerwaddy River up to places where land exists as it must have existed during colonial times, hosts quite an interesting representation of Rangoon and its working class. There are many areas of green-forested tracts off the road with ram shackled and tilted old wooden shacks …
Despite a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that only 9% of Americans support military intervention in Syria, the White House today assured the public that a more recent and reliable poll leaves no doubt that the President’s constituency favors war.
The poll was conducted by Defense Industries Systems Information, Inc. (DIS Information). It shows that 99.9% prefer increased U.S. military intervention. The poll has a .1% margin of error. DIS Information spokesperson Lyon Daly spoke to this reporter about the polling methodology and findings.
Lyon Daly: We use the same scientific polling methods as Reuters/Ipsos, but our job is to come up with …
Almost one-third of Louisiana Republicans blame President Obama for the slow and largely ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast, Aug. 31, 2005. More than 1,800 were killed in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; estimates of property damage exceeded $100 billion.
Public Policy Polling reveals that 29 percent of the state’s Republicans blame Obama. Only 28 percent blame George W. Bush. The rest, according to the poll, don’t know who to blame.
The disaster occurred in the first year of George W. Bush’s second term. Barack Obama did not become president until more than three years later
The administration seems to be surpassing previous regimes in bloody hypocrisy as it feigns shock and awe at alleged crimes committed in Syria. After we have been told that more than 100 thousand Syrians have been killed in a civil (?) war mostly the responsibility of outside forces capitalizing on legitimate internal concerns, we are supposed to believe that shooting, stabbing, decapitating, bombing and burning are all tolerable forms of slaughter, but chemical weapons are shockingly inappropriate forms of murder. What’s a civilized nation do?
President Boobama works to make the previous pinhead look smart by comparison as he first steps …
The soldier in the bush does not forgive. All is not well with us, not always – what do we know from love? To reach informed decisions among fraudulent sources; that momentary rapprochement with the species – after all it is our planet, in some ways, but we are only the people, our leaders, responsible adults, architects of our…
…the photograph of my mother in a drawer somewhere I never saw again…I know there is a center and I’m walking toward it: union …
The Holy Land may be the cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the three Abrahamic faiths that share much in common – but Israel has preferred to draw on a tradition that imagines the region in terms of a clash of civilisations.
Theodor Herzl, the father of Israel’s national ideology, Zionism, averred that a Jewish state should act as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”. On this view, Israel is on the fault line between a Judeo-Christian west and the barbarian hordes of the Islamic east.
IPS — After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the U.N. to call off its investigation.
The administration’s reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between Syria and the U.N., was reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday and effectively confirmed by a State Department spokesperson later that day.
In his press appearance Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who intervened with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to call off the investigation, …
It was the news of the day on August 20, 2013 — or was it news at all?
The corporate-state media is well known for its “breaking news” but showing news clips of an event before it is alleged to have taken place is a stretch even for it.
That’s presumably what happened on August 20, 2013 when articles and videos appeared in Al Jazeera, (once considered a credible source for Middle East news but now another mouthpiece for the Qatari regime and “the West”), Reuters, and other media outlets, showing victims alleged to have been killed by a gas attack carried …
Apart from the seriousness of attacking a fine musician who was speaking the truth, then having his words censored from any future broadcasts by the BBC, the video looks into the activities of the Jewish lobbies in the United Kingdom in attempting to suppress the vicious activities of the Jewish, Apartheid State of Israel against the Palestinian people.
It takes a real man to shoot trapped and caged animals for the pure fun of killing. Real men like former NRA Executive Director John Sigler who was photographed participating in a canned pigeon hunt at the Philadelphia Gun Club in Bensalem, PA in 2012. The caged pigeons, tossed into the air and shot by he-men, are not killed for food but “rather for the hunting equivalent of dog-fighting,” says the Daily Kos. They are left “to die agonizingly over the course of hours and days,” as disturbing videos show.
Live pigeon shoots like the one at the Philadelphia Gun …
by Felicity Arbuthnot and Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey / August 27th, 2013
Below we pose several questions, the basis of this article, which intends to reveal the whole truth behind the issue of the Syrian civil war. These questions have been sent to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the US State Department. Their answers, if they have any, will be revealed to our readers.
Question 1: Why has the west been supporting Syrian terrorist forces for two years?
Question 2: Do you not entertain the notion that to solve the Syrian issue, it would suffice for the west to cease arming, financing and aiding the Syrian terrorist forces fighting President Assad?
What do xenophobia, bigotry, racial profiling, apartheid, torture, mass incarceration, private prisons, and 21st-century slavery have in common? They are all intimately linked, featured prominently, in a web of lies, greed, and capital. Welcome to the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave, the 21st-century U.S. of A.
Wednesday, the ACLU published a report titled “Muslims Need Not Apply,” depicting the extent to which our xenophobic, racist government goes to prevent Muslims and those from Muslim-majority countries from immigrating to the US. The ACLU writes (all emphases mine) “the government excludes many applicants from Arab, Middle Eastern, …
An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there’s no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don’t get one rude shock after another.
— Professor Richard Lewontin, Professor of Genetics, Harvard University, speaking of genetically engineering nature!
So, the article on genetically altered food, or SOYA, posted for less than 24 hours and I received quite a lot of hate mail, but some smart mail, which will …
Giant bank holding companies now own airports, toll roads, and ports; control power plants; and store and hoard vast quantities of commodities of all sorts. They are systematically buying up or gaining control of the essential lifelines of the economy. How have they pulled this off, and where have they gotten the money?
In a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke dated June 27, 2013, US Representative Alan Grayson and three co-signers expressed concern about the expansion of large banks into what have traditionally been non-financial commercial spheres. Specifically:
[W]e are concerned about how large banks have recently expanded their …
A lot of my recent writing has been on the subject of economics – but I never had any formal training in the subject. I didn’t even do it at school let alone university. However, my quite considerable understanding of economics has been acquired through a combination of circumstances that makes my knowledge of it second to none. Let me explain.
For the last few years I’ve done a lot of reading about economics. This grew out of the few years of self-education I did before that on the subjects of history and politics which, apart from many other fine …
With most major provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly and often pejoratively referred to as “Obamacare,” set to go into effect in January, 2014, union members across the country have been wondering how the PPACA will affect the health care benefits already laid out in their union contracts.
Although it’s a bit unnerving how few people in positions of authority (plant managers, HR reps, health care administrators, etc.) seem to know exactly how the PPACA will work, the answer to the question, “How will Obamacare affect my union health care benefits?” is fairly clear. …
It makes no sense we blow billions buying bombs or bailing out banks, but can’t afford to end world hunger. It makes no sense we pay to see a movie and then are forced to sit through commercials before it starts.
“It makes no sense.” I’m using these words more and more often.
The tyranny of idiot capitalism has become so ridiculous that it must be a sign the system is in crisis. The outrageous lies and distortions told to defend it have got to mean capitalism is finally obfuscating on thin ice.
At a minimum, please tell me other people have noticed …
Eight years after Katrina, nearly a hundred thousand people never got back to New Orleans, the city remains incredibly poor, jobs and income vary dramatically by race, rents are up, public transportation is down, traditional public housing is gone, life expectancy differs dramatically by race and place, and most public education has been converted into charter schools.
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. The storm and the impact of the government responses are etched across New Orleans. A million people were displaced. Over a thousand died. Now, thanks …
Toby Hemenway, host of the video Redesigning Civilization — with Permaculture, defines permaculture as a branch of ecological design that employs natural ecosystems as a model. Although most permaculture design relates to food production, its principles can be applied to the management of all human needs, including water, shelter, waste, energy, finance, culture/spirituality and even sports and security. Permaculture-based food production focuses on returning to a “horticultural” method of food production with “food forests” and other self-maintained food systems, as opposed to our current mechanized, open field method of food production. Permaculture relies on ecologically designed gardens, rather than open fields, …
With the important role that technology has played in making better dissidents, it is time for revolutionaries to stop looking at technology as a momentary convenience. Rather, everyone must be on the lookout for liberation technologies, and a brand new perspective is needed for this. Not just communication media empower us all at the individual level. We are also set to be empowered by several potent new technologies that will outgrow the designs of their own creators. Such is the case argued in much greater depth in my recent futurist title, Catalyst: a Techno-Liberation Thesis.
The United States today assured the world that the “red line” against chemical weapons use applies equally to both the Assad government in Syria and the rebel forces. “We are not hypocrites,” said White House spokesperson Janus Touphaisse. “We have the same standards for everyone.”
I met later with Mr. Touphaisse for further details.
Barb Weir: Does this mean that the U.S. no longer has a “high level of confidence” that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including sarin, as you said on June 13, 2013?
Janus Touphaisse: No, of course not. We still have just as high a level of confidence. It’s …
“U.S. prepares for possible retaliatory strike against Syria,” announces a Los Angeles Times headline, even though Syria has not attacked the United States or any of its occupied territories or imperial forces and has no intention to do so.
Quoth the article:
The president made no decisions, but the high-level talks came as the Pentagon acknowledged it was moving U.S. forces into position in the region.
Forgive me, but who the SNAFU made that decision? Does the commander in chief have any say in this? Does he get to make speeches explaining how wrong it would be to attack Syria, meet with …
Class struggle is central in framing the issues of political rule, the relations of classes, the economic structures and strategies, and the distribution of wealth.
Especially in the era of imperialist globalization, the class struggle takes on an international character, as multi-national corporations, international financial organizations and imperial states directly intervene, or act through proxy collaborator states, in ‘the class struggle between labor and capital’. This is especially evident in Latin America with the ascendancy of …
