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The Empire Loses a Publicist: The Epitaph of an Ideologue
By James Petras
The recent death of one of the United States’ most prominent sociologists, Harvard Professor Daniel Bell, and the effusive eulogies that have accompanied his obituaries highlight the importance of ideological utility over scientific rigor. Typical of the mass media’s hagiographic write-ups is the obituary in the Financial Times (2/12-13/1, p. 5), which claimed that “Few men are given the gift of seeing into the future, but Daniel Bell … was one of them … with uncanny accuracy”. Further on, the ‘puff’ piece pronounced that, “Few thinkers in the second half of the 20th century managed to catch the social and cultural shifts of the times with such range and in such detail as he did”. No doubt there are some important reasons why Bell warrants such effusive praise, but it certainly is not because of his understanding of the political, economic, ideological developments which transpired in the United States during his intellectual life.
A mass murderer named Muammar al-Qaddafi
By Khalid Amayreh
In Libya , the Qaddafi regime's mercenaries, thugs and henchmen have been massacring peaceful demonstrators protesting political tyranny, economic deprivation and the shocking absence of human rights and civil liberties.
In the capital Tripoli, helicopter gunship and even air force fighters have been machineguning unarmed protesters, killing and maiming hundreds.
The scenes of the disfigured bodies of victims, hit from above, can't be described in words. Mercenaries recruited from some African countries have been firing on every moving thing, even ambulances.
Morgues are filled to capacity with dead protesters, most of who with gunshots on the back sides of their bodies, suggesting that the regime's forces had been ordered to shoot to kill anybody moving, including fleeing demonstrators.
Wisconsin: Ground Zero to Save Public Worker Rights
by Stephen Lendman
Ronald Reagan was right saying:
"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem."
His type governance, that is, and from administrations that followed, Democrats as ruthless as Republicans.
For decades, bipartisan consensus governed lawlessly, waging imperial wars, trashing human rights and civil liberty protections, unabashedly backing monied interests, letting them loot the federal treasury, fleecing working Americans, and targeting organized labor for destruction.
Waging War on Chicago Workers
by Stephen Lendman
In Washington, Obama, Democrats and Republicans are doing it. In Wisconsin and other states, so are Governor Scott Walker, other governors, and mayors across America - planning major social benefits cuts and other ways to address budget shortfalls through layoffs, fewer services, and other draconian measures on the backs of working people, ones least able to afford them.
At the same time, America's aristocracy is thriving, benefitting largely from tax cuts, other benefits, and bipartisan complicity to reward them by exemption from planned austerity when stimulus, job creation, and other populist measures are needed, including for Chicagoans facing hard times. Instead, all major mayoral candidates promise worker sacrifices to benefit business and city elites.
The Money Party on the Road to Ruin
Michael Collins
The Money Party is destroying the United States. For ten years, there have been no new jobs with flat income. Unemployment and poverty are making a big comeback. The party consists of those who own and control concentrations of great wealth and the select few who serve them (their Mandarins). Based on the efficiency of the demolition job, you have to wonder, is this is by design? If greed, ignorance, and paranoia constitute a plan, then they are master planners. (Image)
Look at the glaring problems below. Then ask yourself, has there been one single program implemented to address any of these problems, just one? Our elected representatives enable the relentless process of driving down the United States. They bicker and fume at the edge of issues. However, when it comes to neglecting the real needs of citizens and the country, they are as one. All rewards and resources flow to their patrons and owners, the made men and women of The Money Party. We are nothing to them.
The Security Budget vs. the Necessities of Americans
By Kevin Zeese
President Obama and the Congress have taken 66% of discretionary spending in the federal budget off the table – the Security Budget – while proposing a freeze to the rest of the budget and deep cuts to some programs that provide necessities for the American people. His budget crystalizes a choice that U.S. presidents have been making since President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex – investment in the military vs. investment in the civilian economy.
The bloated and sacrosanct security budget – the military, domestic security and intelligence budgets –all saw rapid growth under President Bush when the DoD doubled its budget. Under President Obama the trend has continued with record military, intelligence and domestic security budgets.
WORLD WAR III / A CLASS WAR BETWEEN THE PEOPLE AND CORPOCRACY
Allen L Roland
World War III has already started. It is not a military war but instead an economic class war by the people against the corporate global elite whose puppet spoke person is President Obama. The economically oppressed masses of people in Egypt realized they could literally shut down the government and that empowering message has reached the United States where the masses of enraged people in Wisconsin are taking to the streets in a revolt against their own corporate welfare state. Obama take note ~ this is the beginning of world wide shift in consciousness which will culminate in 2012 and politically sweep away the Oligarchy in the process.
Wikipedia defines Oligarchy as a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, corporate, or military control. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy. As such, my use of the term corpocracy should be taken in the same context as the Oligarchy and plutocracy ~ rule by the privileged few or global elite.
Egypt Wins Freedom
Mahboob A. Khawaja, Ph.D.
“Tyranny begins where reason ends.”
Egypt is people, nation, culture, history and civilization, the progressive and conscious combination unparallel in human history. Not too many knew in the modern world that Egypt can generate a momentous history of freedom from man-made evil and oppression. First, the Western media described the Freedom Movement as “unrest” as usual in the Western corporate owned news media’s portrayal “unrest” is always colored, not white. Then it upgraded its status to “Egyptian Uprising.” After persistent sit-ins at the Tahrir Square, it was defined as “People Revolution.” If Islam was the system of governance, it would have been a consequential outcome of the people’s movement for change and reformation of the old and obsolete governance.
Silvio Berlusconi Underneath the Arches of Rubygate
By Gaither Stewart
Noemi Letizia, one of Berlusconi’s scandals with a teenager, and
protagonist of “Noemi Gate”.
Not too improbably, what may have kept Berlusconi afloat is that he’s “all too human” in the eyes of many Italians. His penchant for nubile girls is certainly proof of that.
(Rome). Rubygate it’s called. The final act of the Berlusconi saga. Over fifteen years of comedy for the outside world. A comedy played out against a background of non-government and misery for many Italians. For years now, each new scandal, each new act of corruption, is identified with the suffix “gate”. Deriving from the original Watergate, even though the latter was not actually a “gate” as used today to pinpoint scandalous behavior and the resultant cover-up. During these last stages of the Berlusconi era there has been Noemi Gate, named for another of Sultan Silvio’s teenage favorites. Then, the Bunga Bunga Gate, in reference to the sex games and “orgies” in the Sultan’s luxurious private residences in Milan and Rome. In Italy, in Commedia dell’Arte fashion, the gate suffix means scandal, speculation and gossip.
"Want fries with that budget crisis?" (OpEdNews 404 – Repost)
By Robert Singer
Click here to read why “this article is not currently available” at OpEdNews.
Want fries with that budget crisis?
Instead of cutting jobs and services to solve California’s budget crisis, why not eliminate the state water subsidies that allow McDonalds and Colonel Sanders to market burgers and chicken for a dollar? Reducing the consumption of water by the livestock industry would benefit almost every economic facet of the California economy.
A recent analysis done by the Pacific Institute, “More with Less: Agricultural Water Conservation and Efficiency in California - A Special Focus on the Delta,” was presented at a briefing to legislators in Sacramento along with recommendations on how farmers can grow more food and use less water. What the report doesn't mention is the dramatic water saving that could be realized by limiting livestock production in California.
Our federal and state governments subsidize the meat industry's water consumption at every stage of the process. Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) consume particularly egregious quantities of water.
Cornell economists, David Fields and his associate Robin Hur, have studied the fiscal consequences of water subsidies to the meat industry:
“Reports by the General Accounting Office, the Rand Corporation, and the Water Resources Council have made it clear that irrigation water subsidies to livestock producers are economically counter productive. Every dollar that state governments dole out to livestock producers, in the form of irrigation subsidies, actually costs tax payers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs, and reduced business income.
The 17 Western states receive limited precipitation, yet their water supplies could support an economy and population twice the size of their present ones. But most of the water goes to produce livestock, either directly or indirectly. Thus, current water use practices now threaten to undermine the economies of every state in the region.”
You might think that all this water consumption would at least create jobs. But no other industry comes close to the meat industry’s paucity of jobs created per gallon of water consumed. Every job created by livestock production in California uses 30 million gallons of water a year, far more than any other industry.
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