An empire collapsing under the weight of its own self-induced imbecility By David Michael Green Sometimes bad things happen to countries, and people suffer. . Other times, people suffer because countries are stupid and bring bad things upon themselves. No country in the history of the world has ever been as [...]
The Insanities of Our Times BY FIDEL CASTRO // Dateline April 25, 2010 We have no choice but to call a spade a spade. Those who still have a pinch of common sense find it easy to see how little realism is being left in today’s world. . When American President Barack Obama [...]
Sociopathic CEOs thriving in growing inequality / By Thom Hartmann Today’s modern transnational corporate CEOs-who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us-are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth. (Photo: William McGuire, United Health’s big honcho (second from L), next to former NJ Governor Tom Kean, and other Republican revelers. Billionaire pay is now the norm in the highest reaches of corporate America.
Dateline: April 12, 2010 Thought for April 15: More than 53 per cent of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military By Dave Lindorff China’s Marines of the People’s Liberation Army. We spend approximately 12.5 times what China does, and Russia spends even less than China. But policing the world for the sake of the [...]
Framing Iran for a military assault / By Mark R. Crovelli The members of the political class in the United States and Israel once again feel free to make fantastic and terrifying claims about a Middle Eastern government in order to convince us of the need to invade and kill more people who have not attacked us. This time, however, the political class hasn’t even given us the courtesy of manufacturing a false trail of evidence in order to convince us of their claims. The political classes’ contempt for the American and Israeli citizenry is apparently so overweening this time around that they haven’t even deigned to cook up a few juicy lies about, say, aluminum tubes, to substantiate their allegations of Iran’s intention to develop and use nuclear weapons…
Looting Main Street : How the nation’s biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece By Matt Taibbi April 12, 2010 “Rolling Stone” – – If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works [...]
BY DAHR JAMAIL What is happening in Iraq seems to reflect what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “atrocity-producing situations.” He used this term first in his book “The Nazi Doctors.” In 2004, he wrote an article for The Nation, applying his insights to the Iraq War and occupation. “Atrocity-producing situations,” Lifton wrote, occur when a power structure sets up an environment where “ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities…. This kind of atrocity-producing situation … surely occurs to some degrees in all wars, including World War II, our last ‘good war.’ But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly prone to sustained atrocity – all the more so when it becomes an occupation.” IMAGE: US troops in Iraq.
BY DAVID MICHAEL GREEN What this bill is, at its core, is a giant gift to massive predatory corporations who are as far removed from pursuing the public interest as regressive politicians are from the human genome. That’s really bad news, for at least two reasons. The first is that we as a society find ourselves, yet once again, crafting legislation to service the greedy few rather than the hundreds of millions of ordinary folk just trying to get by. You can see that pretty readily in this bill, which ties itself in knots of absurdity in order to avoid grappling with the obvious problem at the core of the world’s richest country spending twice what anyone else does, only to produce one of the crappiest health care systems among developed countries. The obvious, glaring, 800 pound gorilla in the room is that we do health care as an industry in America, for the purpose of profiting investors and corporate managers, not for purposes of making people well. Image: “Tea Party” opponent of Obamacare, shouting his displeasure for the bill. He’s mostly right on this, but for the wrong reasons.
VOL 29 / Since 1982
ROWAN WOLF Editor
in Chief
__________________________
• PATRICE GREANVILLE Publisher
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ED DUVIN
Editor-at-Large
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Senior Editor / European Correspondent (Rome)
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Ecoanimal Issues Editor
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ANWAAR HUSSAIN
Contributing Editor
TOM BURGHARDT
Contributing Editor
BINOY KAMPMARK
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PHIL ROCKSTROH
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WILLIAM BLUM
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