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America’s Murdered Elders: Day of the Dead
By Janet Phelan
You would have thought you were at a Harvest Festival.
The road leading up to the gated city is lined with food and refreshment booths. Other tables feature small, inexpensive toys. Bouquets of flowers are for sale, everywhere. The usual hawkers-for-donations circulate through the throngs, Red Cross dominating the polite requesters for money, young men in white shirts shaking their red and white containers at passersby. I drop in a few pesos.
You walk through these gates, however, and you enter another world. It is a gated compound, the city of the dead in San Cristobal de las Casas. Today, the doors to the tiny houses are flung open. Relatives sit on the small porches and share lunch, their faces gentled and softened. Candles flicker on the inside of the crypts. Through a door, I see one of the crypts has a bed in its spacious interior. It is empty.
Yellow and orange bouquets line the streets, bloom in the window boxes of the tiny houses and are extravagantly strewn on top of the smaller gravesites. Children squeal as they race between the houses. Their parents have brought special food, in remembrance of the residents of this city. Someone has left an uncorked bottle of champagne in front of one of the houses. You might think this was homecoming, or even Thanksgiving.
American hunger and the Christian right
Mary Shaw
I have seen hunger, up close and personal, right here in the richest nation on the planet. And, despite what the so-called "Christian" right keeps telling us, I know that laziness does not explain why poor people are poor.
I grew up in a small, depressed Appalachian town. My family had enough to eat because we had a large garden that yielded enough fruits and veggies to last throughout the year, and because my Italian grandmother, who lived with us, knew how to turn some cheap flour and yeast into wonderful homemade baked goods.
We also regularly fed many of the kids from the neighborhood, who would flock to our house when they smelled the delicious aromas emerging from the kitchen, where Grandma held court each day.
But we couldn't feed them three meals each and every day. So much of the time I saw my less fortunate friends and their siblings munching on mayonnaise sandwiches, or, if they were lucky, SpaghettiOs with buttered bread.
Iraq Today: America's Genocidal Legacy
by Stephen Lendman
America came to Iraq to stay. Contingents of US forces remain. America's embassy cost over a billion dollars to build. It's the world's largest.
It's inside Baghdad's Green Zone. It includes 21 buildings. Extraordinary security measures protect them. They're on 104 acres of land. It's the equivalent of 80 football fields.
Democracy is verboten. So-called liberation is a convenient illusion. Iraq was ravaged and destroyed. Daily violence rages out-of-control. Unemployment, poverty and human misery are extreme.
An epidemic of birth defects, cancer and other war related diseases plague the country. So do tens of thousands of US and other Western private military contractors, advisors and security personnel.
The Bank Guarantee That Bankrupted Ireland
by Ellen Brown
The Irish have a long history of being tyrannized, exploited, and oppressed—from the forced conversion to Christianity in the Dark Ages, to slave trading of the natives in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the mid-nineteenth century “potato famine” that was really a holocaust. The British got Ireland’s food exports, while at least one million Irish died from starvation and related diseases, and another million or more emigrated.
Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika—the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.
The official unemployment rate is 13.5%—up from 5% in 2006—and this figure does not take into account the mass emigration of Ireland’s young people in search of better opportunities abroad. Job loss and a flood of foreclosures are leading to suicides. A raft of new taxes and charges has been sold as necessary to reduce the deficit, but they are simply a backdoor bailout of the banks.
Gaza Running Out of Fuel and Medicines
by Stephen Lendman
Gaza's suffocating siege persists. Israel imposes it illegally. It's been ongoing since June 2007. It began a year earlier in less extreme form. It constitutes collective punishment. Fourth Geneva’s Article 33 states: "No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."
"Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited."
Fourth Geneva mandates protecting civilians in time of war. Doing so includes letting goods and people move freely.
When Will You Say “Enough is Enough”?
by Phillip Faruggio
You don’t have to search the internet for the truth. Sometimes it is right in front of you… inside the mainstream newspapers:
The Friday, October 18, USA Today main section, page 4A ran this story: “Army warns of trouble handling even a single war”.It goes on to say that “budget restrictions could render the Army at high risk to meet even one major war, a warning the Army is sounding because it sees another war as inevitable before long.” Did you catch that last part? The masters of this Military Industrial Empire are not only doing their best to scare the shit out of us with “declining budget cuts putting our Army at risk”, but they are sounding the alarm that we are going to get another war sooner than not! They further tell us that plans to reduce the number of active duty soldiers from a wartime high of 570,000 to 450,000 (as planned by 2017) is “too small and too risky”. Now this is not from some comic book story. No, this is really being hyped up to get YOU out there on board with the propaganda to NOT cut our bloated and obscene military spending (close to 600 billion of yours and mine hard earned dollars). Question is: are you going to sit back and let this happen?
Israel Buys the US Congress: Sabotaging the US-Iran Peace Negotiations
James Petras
“Pro-Israel Policy groups such as AIPAC work with unlimited funding to divert US policy in the region (Middle East)” Jack Straw, Member of Parliament and former Foreign Secretary of the British Labor Party
“The United States should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran to spur the country to end its nuclear program” Sheldon Adelson, biggest donor to the Republican Party and major fundraiser for pro-Israel political action committees, speech at Yeshiva University, New York City, October 22, 2013.
Georgia's Saakashvili
by Stephen Lendman
Wall Street Journal editors call him "Georgia's Washington." Turning truth on its head is official editorial policy. More on how they reinvented a first class thug below.
On October 27, Georgians elected Giorgi Margvelashvili president. He won decisively. He'll replace Mikheil Saakashvili.
He'll have less power. Constitutional amendments shifted it more to the prime minister and parliament.
Sunday's vote marked the end of an era. It didn't come a moment too soon. Georgians deplored Saakashvili's ruthlessness. Despotism defined his rule.
He backed David Bakradze. He finished second with less than 22% of the vote. Former parliament speaker Nino Burdzhanadze got slightly over 10%. Margvelashvili got over 62%.
Appeals Court Stays Stop and Frisk Ruling
by Stephen Lendman
Stop and frisk is longstanding NYPD policy. It reflects brazen racial profiling. It affects hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino New York city residents annually.
No evidence proves it's effective. Plenty shows it's racially motivated. It violates core constitutional rights. It's one of many abusive practices.
On August 12, US District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Shira Scheindlin issued a landmark ruling. It was scathing.
She said NYPD "adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling." Doing so violates "violated their constitutional rights in two ways:
(1) they were stopped without a legal basis in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and
(2) they were targeted for stops because of their race in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment."
Israel Attacks Syria and Gaza
by Stephen Lendman
Israel gets away with daily crimes of war, against humanity and slow-motion genocide. It does so with impunity. It does it because world leaders able to act do nothing.
Failure to hold Israel accountable reflects complicity with crimes too great to ignore. They've persisted for decades.
They show no signs of ending. On October 30, reports said Israeli warplanes struck Latakia. It's Syria's principle port city. Damascus was attacked. An administration official confirmed what happened.
Washington partners with Israeli crimes. Annual billions of dollars in military aid supports them. Going along with attacking Syria shows Obama's true intentions.
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