A bill passed Monday in the US House of Representatives and Thursday in the Senate would make it a felony—a serious criminal offense punishable by lengthy terms of incarceration—to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Several commentators have dubbed it the “anti-Occupy” law, but its implications are far broader.
...at least a few manufacturing jobs are suddenly coming back to America, and the same CEOs, economists and politicians who have tried to squelch any honest discussion of exploitation are inadvertently admitting that exploitation has always been the manufacturing economy’s invisible hand. They are admitting it when they concede that jobs are returning primarily because American wages are precipitously dropping at the same time Chinese minimum wages have slightly risen–from awful (in some places, $100 month) to a mere terrible (still just a $240 a month).
Ultimately, we need to understand that this isn't just a few bad corporations -- this is capitalism doing what it naturally does, exploiting people and land for profit. Even Adam Smith warned of the inherent tendency of capitalism toward ceaseless growth and monopoly power. Whether you're for revolution or reform, let's be honest about the system we're dealing with. Capitalism is unraveling, undermining even its own interests with its tireless demand for more growth, more profits, endless new markets with no protections for local industry, more corporate consolidation and monopoly power over both economics and politics.
My hunch is that the Bushes and the real establishment (that’s not the Tea Party, not the Santoriacs or the Gingrichites, folks) just love how bad the GOP field is. Obama is almost certain to be reelected. Which is just fine. Like Clinton, he’s played ball on all the big issues that really matter to the One Percent of One Percent—foreign intervention, oil, Wall Street bailouts.
Saudi Arabia’s record is no better than Iran’s when it comes to respect for human rights. Yet the international community always manages to overlook the Wahhabi monarchy. Could this be connected with Saudi Arabia’s status as top oil-producing country and trusted ally of the US? Saudi Arabia can intervene in Bahrain, crush democratic protests there, execute 76 people in 2011 (including a woman accused of “sorcery”), threaten to execute a blogger who posted an imaginary conversation with the Prophet on Twitter, sentence thieves to amputation, announce that rape, sodomy, adultery, homosexuality, drug trafficking and apostasy are to carry the death penalty, and nobody except the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights seems to care.
A new and alarming paper in the prestigious journal Science [behind a paywall] reports today that the world's oceans may be acidifying faster now than at any time during the four major extinctions of the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring as much as 6 degrees C (10.8 degrees F).I keep wondering how catastrophic climate extremes have to become before the political operatives of the One Percent's capitalist system acknowledge that there is a problem which the system cannot deal with. Likewise I wonder how long before the 99 Percent allow the One Percent to go on their merry way destroying our habitat. Should we of the 99 percent allow the growth addicts of the One Percent take us all down because they cannot get enough of their fossil fuel fix?
...the one percent would not be capable of building a propaganda apparatus slick enough, nor be able to hire enough cops, nor assemble armies with enough troops, nor build prisons rapidly enough nor large enough to keep us enslaved–if only enough of us awoke to the reality of our common plight.
Therefore: “I’m worried now but I won’t be worried long.”
Wall Street and major European banks usurped unprecedented money making power. With complicit politicians, they make it the old fashioned way. They steal it.In the 19th and 20th centuries the industrial capitalists stole from workers and slaves the wealth they produced. Nowadays, the capitalist ruling class consists mostly of people connected to the central banks which are privately owned (sometimes with a thin veneer of government accountability) that are now exploiting working people through debt slavery throughout the world.
As a result, ordinary people are harmed. They've lost jobs, homes, savings, and futures to let privileged elites get richer and more powerful at their expense.
While neither the Russians nor any other player is likely to have its full agenda in the Middle East fulfilled, the bargaining that is undoubtedly raging in secret will seal the fate of the region, at least for the near future.
Occupy Wall Street has brought the issue of class inequality to the forefront of American politics in a way that unions have not. Hence, organized labor and the Occupy movement would appear to be natural allies, but their relationship is not seamless. Radical Occupy participants and union organizers Angela MacWhinnie and Adrian Maldonado talk about successful collaborations between trade unions and Occupy, the places where friction has emerged, and the challenges that the Occupy movement faces in reaching out to most working class people.I found the comments of the San Francisco Bay labor activist to be particularly interesting.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria had peace and calm until Washington intervened belligerently.This strategy was most clearly promoted and articulated by neoconservative think-tank Project for the New American Century which has been recently reorganized under Foreign Policy Initiative. Their influence has always been to extend the dominance of the US Empire throughout the world, but, of course, always under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights.
Strategies and tactics vary. Objectives are consistent. They involve replacing independent regimes with pro-Western ones by any means, including war.
The elites that own the governments behind the world’s largest economies are gathering with NATO in Chicago on May 19-20, 2012 to discuss global political and economic policy.Specifically, I am referring to the police-state type policies being promoted by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to stifle dissent and protest of this meeting. Rahm Emanuel, the former White House Chief of Staff in the Obama administration, is one of those US political operatives who serves Israeli interests.
Under the rule of former White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, police powers are being extended, along with public surveillance without oversight, restrictions on public activity, amplified sound, morning gatherings, and parades.
With one and a half million (1.5 million) American children now homeless, reporter Hilary Andersson meets the school pupils who go hungry in the richest country on Earth.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most powerful lobby organizations in the country. AIPAC's clout helps fuel a never-ending cycle of violence in the Middle East.
A decades-old territorial squabble over the South China Sea is entering a new and more contentious chapter, as claimant nations search deeper into disputed waters for energy supplies while building up their navies and military alliances with other nations, particularly with the United States.
Just think about it. It’s 2012. And most of us are living fast food, junk food lives. Oblivious to what’s out there beyond the fast food information sent to us by the big media corporations.Today's capture of the minds of ordinary people by the boob-tube (TV) and all the other corporate media is very much like a wet-dream that Joseph Goebbels probably had during the late 1930s. It is so powerful in its influence that few ordinary people are conscious of its control of their ideas, values, and behaviors.
The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.
— J.Edgar Hoover, 1895-1972
When CNN interviews a U.S. Army corporal preparing for his third deployment to Afghanistan, should TV viewers be permitted to hear him out on a front-burner issue like Iran’s alleged threat to Israel? For those who might think so, watch what happens when 28-year-old Cpl. Jesse Thorsen touches a neuralgic nerve by suggesting that Israel can take care of itself.
(Ehud Eiran is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of International Relations at the University of Haifa in Israel and a faculty affiliate of the Middle East Negotiation Initiative at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.)For those of you not familiar with this publication, it is a prime outlet for issues being discussed by political operatives of the US ruling class. Of course, being for public consumption, it is carefully modulated to be a presentable and legitimate type of discourse.
Thanks to all the noise and confusion over the debate, the general public has only a vague idea of what the debate is really about, and only about half of Americans think global warming is real or that we are to blame
Jane C. S. Long, associate director-at-large of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is convinced that the only sensible way to combat climate change is to work toward “a zero-emission energy system as fast as possible.” But as chairwoman of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s 18-member task force on geoengineering, the hydrologist and energy expert realized two fundamental things: that the world has still not come to its senses on global warming, and that science would be remiss if it didn’t consider the possibility that CO2 emissions will continue to soar for decades.Because educational institutions are controlled by the One Percent, I suppose one ought to forgive US scientists for not understanding that the social-economic system which is dedicated to securing profits and power for the One Percent is the source of the problem, and needs to be changed. In any case, it appears that US scientists are left with dreaming up desperate fantasies for engineering the Earth's climate.
