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IS IT TIME TO DISBAND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?
By Mike Whitney
Surely, the events of the past week suggest that the G.O.P. has outlived its shelf-life and needs to be conveyed pell-mell to the nearest dumpster.
First, there was the Joe Wilson flap, where the indignant representative from South Carolina barked "You Lie" to President Barack Obama during his prepared remarks to Congress on health care. This is the very same Wilson who applauded all the bogus allegations about imaginary weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaida made in countless speeches by ex-president George W Bush. Now we are expected to believe that Joe is acting in "good conscience" in opposing minimal health care to a larger swath of uninsured Americans?
Militarizing Latin America
Noam Chomsky
The United States was founded as an "infant empire," in George Washington's words. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. From the earliest days, control over the hemisphere was a critical goal. Ambitions expanded during World War II, as the US displaced Britain and lesser imperial powers. High-level planners concluded that the US should "hold unquestioned power" in a world system including not only the Western hemisphere, but also the former British Empire and the Far East, and later, as much of Eurasia as possible. A primary goal of NATO was to block moves towards European independence, along Gaullist lines. That became still more clear when the USSR collapsed, and with it the Russian threat that was the formal justification of NATO. NATO was not disbanded, but rather expanded, in violation of promises to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not even fully extend to East Germany, let alone beyond, and that "NATO would be transforming itself into a more political organization." By now it is virtually an international intervention force under US command, its self-defined jurisdiction reaching to control over energy sources, pipelines, and sea lanes. And Europe is a well-disciplined junior partner.
US Census Bureau Confirms Rising Poverty, Falling Incomes, and Growing Numbers of Uninsured
by Stephen Lendman
In early September, The US Census Bureau released its new report titled, "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2008" showing disturbing data that portends much worse ahead under a president and Congress doing nothing to address it. In 2008, poverty reached 13.2% of the population, its highest level in 11 years, the result of millions losing jobs during the first year of the gravest economic crisis since the 1930s. For blacks, the figure was nearly double at 24.7%, and 31% of all Americans were impoverished for at least two months between 2004 and 2007, years of economic expansion.
The new GOP: Civility optional
Mary Shaw
Today's GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, the party of Eisenhower, or even the party of Reagan. Today's so-called conservatives are anything but conservative in their seemingly desperate displays of anti-Obama sentiment.
Indeed, their behavior in 2009 makes their 2004 anti-Kerry chants of "flip-flop" seem almost charming by comparison.
It was bad enough when some of the needlessly frightened sheep started bringing loaded guns to health care town hall meetings -- even including a meeting where President Obama was the featured speaker. (Remember how George W. Bush's handlers would systematically banish -- and sometimes actually arrest -- citizens who merely sported tee-shirt slogans that they disagreed with?)
Late Breaking—Sometimes Broken—News
by Rosemary and Walter Brasch
WNEP-TV, a large regional station in northeastern Pennsylvania, led its noon news, Friday, Sept. 11, with the announcement that there was finally a compromise on the state budget.
The legislators have been playing politics, stalling, and delaying for more than two months, leaving Pennsylvania the only state without a budget. To the viewer, it seemed that the executive branch and the legislative branch finally figured out that the people's money needed to be budgeted and used. This would have been great news--except that in the same story, we also learned there were still some details to be worked out.
Freezing Israeli settlements is only leading to their expansion
Daoud Kuttab
[CLICK ON MAP TO ENLARGE] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to approve new Jewish settlements on the eve of a possible settlement freeze is the latest round in a cycle that has been repeated so many times over the past 40 years that it would seem mundane if it were not so dangerous. The cycle goes something like this:
American or international pressure mounts on Israel to stop settlement activities in the Occupied Territories. Israeli settlers and their supporters then gather even more energy to expand onto more Palestinian land, build more exclusively Jewish settlements, and destroy more Arab homes before the so-called "freeze" comes into effect. The peace process, not surprisingly, becomes a joke while this happens. Eventually, world pressure subsides and the freeze fails to materialize. In the end, more Jewish settlements appear. Indeed, the great paradox of this cycle is that more settlements are built during times of negotiations than during times of conflict.
It's the Hypocrisy, the Financial Collapse, the War Crimes
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Where were the 'tea baggers' when Nixon was selling us out to China?
Where were the 'tea baggers' when Ronald Reagan's incompetent policies would plunge the nation into the greatest depression since Hoover's 'Great Depression' of '29.
Where were the 'tea baggers' when it has since become clear that the US has not really ever recovered from the Reagan 'recession' in which were lost several major US industries to Japan and, most recently, China to whom we are but vassals. Thank you GOP!
President Obama's Nuclear Opportunity: Dialogue with Iran and Blow Israel's Ambiguity
eileen fleming
The wind from Iran changed on September 12, 2009, when Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced that he welcomes broad talks with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council [America, Russia, France, Britain, China, and Germany] and he offered the olive branch of "comprehensive, all-encompassing and constructive" talks on a range of security issues, including global nuclear disarmament. [1]
The U.N. Security Council has issued resolutions requiring Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment, which is a possible pathway to nuclear weapons.
Meet the new boss: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
by chycho
The word from The White House’s Briefing Room is that Obama is going to continue the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001 by the Bush administration.
The full briefing is available below, but before reading it, it might be worth while reading the following quote from George Orwell's 1984, it should help put things into perspective.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.
In Wal-Mart's Image
Harold Meyerson
The story isn't part of the official Wal-Mart creation epic, but it tells us almost all we need to know about the company's approach to the interests of its employees and the laws of the nation. Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.
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