We in ComeHomeAmerica condemn our government’s war on Syria, prosecuted first with sanctions, then with covert support through “allies” like the dictatorial petro-monarchies of the Gulf and now with overt provision of arms for the anti-government forces and perhaps even a bombing campaign. We demand an immediate cessation of this bellicose policy by our government. Sanctions and military intervention in Syria are not in the interests of the American people; nor are they in the interests of the Syrian people.
We are far from alone in our opposition. Fully 70% of Americans are opposed to armed intervention in Syria …
History, all fifteen minutes (or is that Fame? two nuts from the same tree), came unannounced, to Town.
“They left no note,” admitted the Police Chief. “No minutes mention debts, affairs; no major fuck-ups or threats to the Security of our National land, water or free and sacred air.”
“But what about that gash” — the word alone stretched wide eyes wider– “on said tree’s side?” asked a distinguished member of the local press.
“Who tree? What tree? When tree? Where tree? How tree? Why tree?” journalists shoved to gawk.
Anyone who has paid even minimal attention to the global economic and financial crises gripping the world since 2007 has heard the name Goldman Sachs.
One of the largest banks in the United States, Goldman Sachs was central to the process of creating the housing bubble that popped in 2007-8, which led to the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. As Matt Taibbi famously documented in Rolling Stone, Goldman has been involved in “every major market manipulation since the Great Depression,” profiting along the way as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its …
“The revolution is dead. Long live the revolution,” wrote Eric Walberg, a Middle East political expert and author, shortly after the Egyptian military overthrew the country’s democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi on July 3.
But more accurately, the revolution was killed in an agonizingly slow death, and the murders were too many to count.
Mohamed ElBaradei, a liberal elitist with a dismal track record in service of western powers during his glamorous career as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a stark example of the moral and political crisis that has befallen Egypt since the ouster of former President …
Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden dossier concerning the American Leviathan’s practice of harvesting, storing and analyzing the information/conversations of its own and the world’s political, military, economic and cultural gate keepers is fascinating. This is so not due to the technological sophistication and global reach of the USA’s intelligence capabilities, but for what it implies about the current state and future of the collective nation-states known as Western Democracies. And it undercuts nearly every ideal in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, leaving the dry, functional and core text of the US Constitution as the last mooring line to—paraphrasing …
A Weapon of Mass Destruction, F-35, Also Destroys the Democratic Process
by William Boardman / July 10th, 2013
[NOTE: Written before the public meeting on July 8, about F-35 basing in Vermont, this piece predicts the outcome. The prediction is correct, but most of the post-meeting coverage has less detail, background, and context than this pre-meeting exercise. The meeting drew about 250 people, lasted almost four hours — see end for outcome.]
When the city council in a city of just 18,000 people reverses a vote it took a year earlier, it’s not usually off national significance, but if the South Burlington City Council votes as expected on July 8, in support of basing the F-35 strike fighter in …
Were it not for the razor wire, giant concrete blocks, steel gates, watchtower and standard-issue surly teenage soldier, it would be impossible to tell at what point the barren uplands of Israel’s eastern Negev give way to the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank.
The military checkpoint of Shani vaguely marks the formal demarcation between Israel and occupied Palestinian territory, but in practical terms the distinction is meaningless. On either side of the Green Line, Israel is in charge.
In recent weeks it has been intensifying a campaign to evict Palestinian farming communities summarily from their ancestral lands to replace them …
Villagers in Wadi Fukin near Bethlehem were attacked by Israeli colonists/settlers from a nearby colony/settlement, when they intentionally poured thousands of tons of sewage into the only natural water spring and onto the land.
Okay, okay – I’ll insert a conversation two DV contributors have been having around the state of the collapse, but first some musings. Interestingly, both the DV poets are Baby-boomers approaching the Magical 65 (one’s USA-rooted; the other is Canada-anchored). In the USA, 10,000 Baby Boomers a day turn 65. You get the exponential math of that stat. What it means to a society like USA and the other capitalism-is-god countries that depend on the soiled ideas of economics sharks who see every flutter of a human’s eye as potential money-making activity . . . what it …
We’re living in a cuckoo’s nest that would have baffled Ken Kesey. Consider just three items at the top of our agenda. (1) Astronomical military spending at a time when there’s nobody left in the world big enough to fight us, (2) the health care farce, which makes us the most expensive, least effective (at least #47) and largest laughingstock in the world, and finally, (3) the final triumph of corporate governance in Washington, which is icing the decline and fall of both capitalism and democracy in one fell swoop.
Witness the final humiliation: Warren Buffett, the …
Despite being a party that looks backwards, Republicans are mounting attacks on Hillary Clinton’s “politics of the past,” fearful she will become president.
At a recent conservative confab, party stalwarts took pride in representing the GOP as the party that “stops progress cold in its tracks,” “set world records to restrict healthcare,” and vowed to defeat Hillary Clinton’s attempt “to move the country forward.”
“In our attempt to annul FDR’s reforms, reverse LBJ’s civil rights laws, and take the country back to the days of the Constitution, we cannot allow Hillary to become president,” said Mitch McConnell, minority Senate leader. …
Last month, whistle blower Edward Snowden’s leaking of the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying on hundreds of millions of people in the US and elsewhere sent shock-waves around the world. Disclosures included the collection of phone records and the PRISM program, which gives the NSA direct access to nearly everyone’s stored internet activity.
Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, who played a major role in releasing the leak claimed that the aim of the NSA was the creation of “a global, ubiquitous surveillance system that has as its goal the elimination of privacy worldwide”. Further disclosure of Snowden’s NSA files brought …
Will the wave of global unrest crash on Indonesia next?
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / July 8th, 2013
Indonesia – a Southeast Asian archipelago that is home to the largest Muslim population on Earth – is a key global hot spot for corporate plundering, worker exploitation, land grabs and environmental devastation. Simultaneously, the country is becoming a tinderbox for militant labour unrest, peasant rebellion and indigenous resistance. After 500 years of domination by imperial powers, the population of Indonesia is organizing and resisting the ‘new order’ of global corporate colonization. Much like Brazil and Turkey, Indonesia has been praised by the imperial powers as a “model democracy” and the IMF hails its progress as an “emerging economy.” The …
Sad it is to see a superpower recoil in paranoia at the perceived threats posed by its smaller enemies. The quality of a foe determines the quality of the character who responds. In the mad mash of suppositions and fantasies compiled in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, North Korea – or at the very least North Korean turncoats in the South Korean regime riding on the wings of nationalist vengefulness – become their American mirrors. Their technology is supreme; their stamina and means to take control of such a structure as the White House is demonstrated. …
There has been a lot of leadership change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) of late, from the ousting of Tunisia’s Bin Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Yemen’s Ali Saleh, to the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and the ongoing attempt to unseat Syria’s Bashar Assad. We can now add to that list Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, ousted in a military junta last week.
These ousted dynastic wannabes were not royalty, however, albeit they acted like pharaohs. Royal dynastic change has been more limited of late – just Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the past several years.
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive.
— Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832
It has been a bit of a foot-in-mouth week for the constitutional lawyer who is President of the United States.
As Egypt’s increasingly autocratic and theocratic Muslim Brotherhood’s President Mohammed Morsi was rejected by the population with an estimated 33 million person demonstration and a 22 million signature petition, the US Nobel Prize Laureate cheerleading for the overthrow of Syria’s sovereign Head of State, declared he is “deeply concerned” over the ousting of President Morsi.
He called for the “ … return (of) full authority back to …
I’ve been thinking over the weekend about the issues of revolution and love of country. This is the one US federal holiday that lends itself organically to such thoughts.
I spent several hours on July 4th walking with the People’s Organization for Progress in the annual Fourth of July parade in Montclair, N.J. For years POP has been doing this and I’ve been taking part. We carry big, very readable signs that address many issues from a progressive standpoint: Bring the Troops Home Now, Health Care for All, A National Jobs Program, Justice for Trayvon Martin, End Racism, Hands Off …
History, its histories of full great good perpetuations, offers countless options to exist.
But History is hard upon its millions, billions, particularly, ones; hence, Hiroshima dropped on Tokyo — or similar threats to blow convention, such as it serves, to particles of soot and ash.
Anyway, The Revolution — in music, it was, I’m certain; maybe film as well, but I’m not sure — changed everything, as it relates to song and dance.
The Republic, while still forbidden to poets, who hypnotize tired old men in coffee shops stooped unsuspecting over news — is there no place for venerable codgers to read clear, …
Lanny Cotler and I lived the 60s. He was involved in the Berkeley Free Speech dust-up and I was Bobby Kennedy’s film crew director to the end in L.A. We were both in Vietnam, he in State and I for CARE, and saw that debacle in all its hideous depth. We were radicalized then, and it only deepened and matured over the decades of Nixon, Reagan, Clinton et al. The insane response to 911 under Bush and the congealing of Congress into an American Reichstag pushed us both into a sense that whatever we could do, however slight, we simply …
It was just a year ago, that red letter day for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In huge red letters, as a matter of fact. (1) Jerry Sandusky, an erstwhile football coach and inspirational leader and advocate of disadvantaged youth, was jailed for life several times over. (If you’d picked up a newspaper, watched television news or attended a water-cooler conversation during the previous six months, you needn’t be told why.) (2) A Philadelphia Archbishop, William Lynn, set a new precedent for a senior Catholic prelate with his conviction for shielding and conspiracy in the cover-up of raping priests. Meanwhile, (3) …
From the invasion of the western hemisphere in 1492 by Spain, to the invasion of Iraq in 1992 by the United States, the tradition of plundering other nations for their resources continues.
It’s unarguable that human nature reveals a continuum of behaviors ranging from the most wretched to the sublime, at times bordering on the saintly. At a minimum, this means acknowledging, in the words of Amin Maalouf that “There is a Mr. Hyde inside each of us. What we have to do is prevent the conditions that will bring the monster forth.”
At the righteous end of the spectrum is our propensity for empathy, a trait deeply rooted in our primate heritage. Empathy — putting oneself in another’s emotional and cognitive shoes and then acting appropriately — is now an incandescently hot …
Baghdad, ancient exotic marvel in the cradle of human civilization, Mesopotamia, ‘the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers,’ where the first cities on Earth were created. Did Independence Day bring uneasy feelings about America eventually being brought to justice for so much firing on the poor overseas and denying other nations independence from subservience to America’s Wall Street? Majority Mankind will seek justice.
The revelation that Paula Deen used the N word has cooked the celebrity chef. She has been dropped more times than an ATT&T phone call, as the joke goes. Target, the Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Sears, Kmart, JC Penney, Walgreens, Caesars Palace, Smithfield Foods, the Food Network, the shopping outlet QVC and her publisher Random House have all dropped her like a just-out-of-the-oven sweet potato. “Justice” was swiftly meted out by the corporate America that had empowered Deen and 99 percent of the nation rejoiced.
Yet corporate America ignores much more extreme racism from the NRA whose board member Ted Nugent …
A trend to shift responsibility for bank losses onto blameless depositors lets banks gamble away your money.
When Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters on March 13, 2013, that the Cyprus deposit confiscation scheme would be the template for future European bank bailouts, the statement caused so much furor that he had to retract it. But the “bail in” of depositor funds is now being made official EU policy. On June 26, 2013, the New York Times reported that EU finance ministers have agreed on a plan that shifts the responsibility for bank losses …
Do you remember the promise of the New Economy that was going to replace the lost “dirty fingernail” manufacturing jobs with innovative highly paid New Economy jobs? Well, the promise was just another deception from the elites who have stolen Americans’ future.
For the umpteenth consecutive month and year, the June BLS payroll jobs report (released on July 5) shows that the US economy has created no such jobs. The same old tired categories account for the same old lowly paid new domestic service jobs.
Of the 195,000 new private sector jobs alleged to have been created, 75,000 or 38% are accounted …
Bill Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City: Tapes reveal Anglo Irish Bank executives laughed as they manipulated Irish Government into 16 billion dollar bailout the knew they would never repay.
Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak stated in 2009: “… I also have no doubt in my heart that the IDF is the most moral army in the world.” How do Israeli military actions adduce Barak’s claim? According to Shir Hever, Israeli forces are proven to be using Palestinian children as human shields despite attempts to cover it up to protect image.
Not counting all the other bad things that have happened (e.g., Wisconsin public workers being denied collective bargaining, Michigan becoming a right-to-work state, Obama’s NLRB appointees hanging in limbo, the Democrats’ betrayal of EFCA legislation, etc.), two fairly recent AFL-CIO endeavors have failed spectacularly: (1) Organizing Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., and (2) gaining a significant foothold in the Deep South.
As for attempting to penetrate Wal-Mart, the House of Labor deserves credit. Even though they failed to organize even one of the company’s nearly 4,000 U.S. stores (with 1.3 million employees), they should be applauded for having taken on what they knew …
