The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff
Chris Hedges
The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.
PermalinkThe Roots of Christian Zionism, Part I, The Cause of the Conflict
Charles E. Carlson
America’s war based economy depends on Christians’ support.
Christian Zionists, by whatever name, are the primary public enablers of serial wars upon Islamic states. Why? Because they have been conditioned to think of Islam as an anathema to them, much as many of us were trained to consider communists our ideological enemies a generation ago. Most Christian celebrity media leaders have allowed themselves to be used as propagandists against Islamic states with independent governments, including Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, and in the future, Islamic states of Iran and Sudan. Our purpose is to examine why and how this has been done, why it is wrong and what can be done to correct it.
Hit Me Congress, One More Time: Bailing Out the Auto Industry
by Walter Brasch
Congress should bend over, dig into the public coffers once again, and give the auto industry everything it wants—even though 61 percent of Americans oppose a bailout, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll.
A couple of weeks ago, CEOs from GM, Ford, and Chrysler, known collectively as the Big 3, revved up their corporate jets’ engines, dropped in on the Senate, and testified that without a $25 billion bailout western civilization would collapse.
With the nation in a Recession, auto sales have declined to the lowest point since January 1982. Sales are off 47 percent for Ford, 41 percent for GM, and 31 percent for Chrysler from last year. Even sales of major overseas auto manufacturers selling to the American market are down, but not as much as for the Big 3. But, Big 3 market share has plummeted from 70 percent in 1998 to only 53 percent this year, according to Autodata Corp. Equally as important, Consumer Reports has consistently given cars produced by foreign-owned manufacturers higher ratings than American-made cars, although the problem is more attributable to management decisions than problems on the manufacturing line. But, even if Big 3 Management was flawless in their business plans, sales would still be significantly down because of the Recession, partially caused by the sub-prime loan fiasco and the reality that credit is now tight for most Americans.
The Fall of the House of Rubashkin
Elizabeth Dwoskin
Photos like this, of Agriprocessors CEO Sholom
Rubashkin, are reverberating in Crown Heights.
AP Photo/Iowa City Gazette, Jonathan D. Woods.
Men in long black coats and women wearing stiff wigs crowd the benches of the courtroom at the Federal Building in Philadelphia. The room is packed, so the men remaining outside wait to take turns with the ones indoors.
Early on the morning of Monday, November 3, dozens of people had taken a charter bus from Crown Heights, the center of New York's Lubavitch Jewish community. Even more had carpooled. They had come for the sentencing of Moshe Rubashkin, chairman of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council (a powerful nonprofit) and former owner of Montex Textiles in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
When a still-unidentified arsonist started a blaze at the Montex plant in 2005, it burned down with 300 drums of hazardous chemical waste inside. Rubashkin subsequently pleaded guilty to illegally storing the waste, which had been transported from a textile factory his family owned in New Jersey. But the city says he refused to pay the $450,000 in cleanup until the EPA forced him to do so. Allentown's city solicitor, Martin Danks, says the Rubashkins still owe millions of dollars in unpaid taxes.
The Global Economic Crisis: Bad and Worsening
Stephen Lendman
In a new article, economics professor Richard Wolff explains the current crisis in Marxian terms. It "emerged from the workings of the capitalist class structure. Capitalism's history displays repeated boom-bust cycles punctuated by bubbles. They range unpredictably from local, shallow and short to global, deep and long." Clearly we're now in one of the latter and potentially the worst ever.
Wolff states that recurring crises and chronic instability come with capitalism, and only "social change to a non-capitalist class structure" will bring relief and stability. He explains how we got here:
-- since the mid-1970s, real wages haven't kept up with inflation;
-- "computerization of production displaced workers;"
-- production and service jobs (including high-paying ones) have been offshored to low-wage countries; and
-- "capitalists end(ed) the historic (1820 - 1970) rise of US wages" in real terms.
It gets worse.
Patriarch Alexy II and His Legacy
Yuri N. Maltsev
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, died at 79 on December 5, 2008 at his residence at the fashionable Moscow suburb of Peredelkino from heart failure.
During his 18-year patriarchy, which coincided with the collapse of the USSR and difficulties of the post-communist transition, the Russian Orthodox church was transformed from the persecuted and tightly controlled "legal counterrevolutionary force," as defined by Soviet authorities, to a symbol of Russia and an integral and important part of its ruling elite.
His controversial legacy reflects the tragic history of Russian people and their church, and his official image as defender of faith and savior of the Russian soul is tarnished by allegations of his being a KGB agent and the Soviet government's assistant in the destruction of the church.
BYE, BYE, CANADA! IT WASN’T NICE KNOWING YA!
Karakwine & MNN Staff
The vermin have come out of the woodwork. Now that Canada’s Parliament has been suspended, it should now be obvious to everyone, Canada is not a democracy. It never was. It is a colony that has a single person, the Queen, sitting on top as the head of state. It’s been run for the benefit of a few business interests. It only pretends to protect the people.
Canada has no land base as Ongwehonwe never gave up anything. Turtle Island and its resources belong to us.
On December 4th 2008 Canada’s Parliament was “prorogued”. In other words, the pretense of representative government of the colony was dissolved. Prime Minister, Stephen Harper presented a bogus budget to Parliament. He wanted to cut corporate taxes, slash social, education and health programs. He even wanted to cut off the election subsidies to the parties. It was outrageous. He knew it would be rejected. His party was outnumbered. Next Monday, December 8th, he would have had to face a vote of “non-confidence”, lose and then step down. Then another election would have been called with just about the same result as the last one. Harper would have had another minority government. Canadians have spoken. They don’t want him to have too much power.
The Power Elite Playbook, Fascism and False Flags = War, Part 17
Deanna Spingola
Nagata Tetsuzan, in company with Obata Toshiro and Okamura Yasuji (all three trained in military intelligence) and Prince Hirohito, had met secretly at the German spa Baden-Baden on October 27, 1921 to plan a total war against the West. With the exception of Hirohito, all were then serving at Japanese embassies in Europe. They developed strategies to purge the army of the Samurai (knightly) leadership of the Choshu clan, to reorganize and modernize the army, and a plan to dominate Manchuria. Another young officer-attendee was Tojo Hideki, the future prime minister who would launch the Pacific war, the imperial scheme.
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