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The Left: Business Accommodation and Social Debacle
James Petras
Prologue
In 2004 I wrote Brazil and Lula: Year Zero (Edifurb: Blumenau, Sao Paolo 2005), in which I presented my analysis of the V (PT) regime in Brazil undergoing a Grand Transformation with the first stage represented by the PT’s incorporation into a government apparatus led by of bankers and exporters (the agro-mineral elite). Two year earlier, my colleague, Henry Veltmeyer, and I had published Cardoso’s Brazil: A Land for Sale (Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD 2003) where we described how President Cardoso had sold off the major public resources, banks, petroleum and iron resources to foreign capital for rock bottom prices. The 2002 election of President Lula DaSilva of the Workers’ Party did not reverse Cardoso’s sell-out. Indeed, Lula accepted his predecessor’s neo-liberal policies – embellished them – and set about forging an alliance between the Workers’ Party and the economic elites, replacing Cardoso’s Party! For the next few years, we were attacked by the Left academic and pundit world for having dared to advance such a critique on their ‘worker president’! The consequences of what we had described as the PT’s pact with the Right are clear to everyone today: Brazil is enmeshed in swindles, scandals and coups.
Cruz Concedes: Trump the Presumptive GOP Nominee
Stephen Lendman
Trump’s overwhelming defeat of Cruz in Tuesday’s Indiana primary knocked his only serious challenger out of the race.
GOP primary season climaxed yesterday. Cruz is out, Kasich no more than a footnote. The Wall Street Journal put it succinctly, saying “Mr. Trump will now be the Republican nominee for president.”
The New York Times said the “once unimaginable” aspirant is “all but certain to roll into the Republican convention in July with the party establishment’s official but uneasy embrace.”
Trump Supports Expanding Illegal Israeli Settlements
Stephen Lendman
Israel is an outlaw state, a serial human rights abuser, asserting the right to occupy and colonize Palestine - a lawless act enforced by military might.
Settlements violate international law, prioritize land theft and prevent peace. Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 states:
“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
Displacing Palestinians, destroying their homes, other property and personal possessions, stealing their land, along with letting settlers occupy it directly contravenes Article 49.
Leaked TTIP Documents Reveal a Stealth Corporate Coup
Stephen Lendman
The so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), like its Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) counterpart, isn’t about growth-promoting trade benefitting everyone equitably.
Just the opposite!! Both assault personal freedoms. They’re anti-consumer, anti-public welfare, anti-ecosanity business sweetheart deals, giving corporate predators control over the lives of populations in all countries agreeing to these deals.
It lets them operate unaccountably, overriding sovereign legal restraints at the expense of societies fit to live in.
Greenpeace leaked 248 pages of classified documents being negotiated, saying TTIP “threaten(s) to have far-reaching implications for the environment and the lives of more than 800 million citizens in the EU and US.”
Departing NATO Commander Hypes Nonexistent Russian Threat
Stephen Lendman
Thousands more US-led NATO forces are being provocatively deployed near Russia’s borders.
Interviewed by Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter broadsheet, Sergey Lavrov accused NATO of “inching closer and closer to Russia’s borders. But when Russia takes action to ensure its security, we are told that Russia is engaging in dangerous maneuvers near NATO borders. In fact, NATO borders are getting closer to Russia, not the opposite.”
The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act prohibits provocatively deploying Alliance forces near Russia’s borders. US history shows a flagrant disregard for agreement terms.
Hyping a nonexistent Russian threat is part of US-led NATO fear-mongering, a pretext for greater military spending at a time demilitarization should be prioritized - resources used for vital social and other domestic needs gone begging.
US-Backed Terrorists Shell Aleppo Hospital
Stephen Lendman
All terrorist groups in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere are US-backed, armed, funded, trained and directed to commit atrocities and other war crimes. Civilians are willfully targeted.
All attacks on residential areas, schools, hospitals, infrastructure and other nonmilitary targets are carried out by US-supported terrorists, Pentagon warplanes, Israel or other coalition partners.
Government forces and Russian aircraft have nothing to do with attacking nonmilitary targets. Accusations otherwise are fabricated.
The Obama Doctrine: America Should Rule the World
Stephen Lendman
In his May 2 Washington Post op-ed, Obama pushed for adopting the anti-consumer, anti-labor, anti-environment, pro-corporate predation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to let America write the rules on global trade and everything else.
He hyped “a boon to American businesses…” He lied claiming benefits to “American workers.” TPP’s adoption would be major step toward relegating them to neo-serfdom.
It gives America “a leg up” on China, excluded from TPP. Obama lied, claiming US standards are consumer and eco-friendly, unlike its Asian rival.
America was thirdworldized on his watch, accelerating a race to the bottom begun under his Republican and Democrat predecessors.
Bank of North Dakota Soars Despite Oil Bust: A Blueprint for California?
Ellen Brown
Despite North Dakota’s collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. This article looks at what California, with fifty times North Dakota’s population, could do following that state’s lead.
In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, was more profitable even than J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author attributed this remarkable performance to the state’s oil boom; but the boom has now become an oil bust, yet the BND’s profits continue to climb. Its 2015 Annual Report, published on April 20th, boasted its most profitable year ever.
The BND has had record profits for the last 12 years, each year outperforming the last. In 2015 it reported $130.7 million in earnings, total assets of $7.4 billion, capital of $749 million, and a return on investment of a whopping 18.1 percent. Its lending portfolio grew by $486 million, a 12.7 percent increase, with growth in all four of its areas of concentration: agriculture, business, residential, and student loans.
TPP & TTIP Harmful, Economic Studies Find
Eric Zuesse
Presently, three supposed ‘trade’ deals are being proposed by U.S. President Barack Obama, to be signed by major trading nations (except Russia, China, and the other BRICS nations): TPP with Asia, TTIP with Europe, and also (but only for financial and other services) TISA with Europe. The promised benefits in all three cases are said to be economic.
Three independent economic studies have been done, two of Obama’s TTIP treaty with Europe, and one of his TPP treaty with Asia, and all three independent economic analyses find that the publics in each participating country will suffer, and that the owners of international corporations (especially in the U.S.) will benefit, if the proposed ‘trade’ deal goes into effect.
Remembering Daniel Berrigan
Stephen Lendman
On April 30, famed Jesuit priest, poet, anti-war activist Daniel Joseph Berrigan died days short of his 95th birthday.
He taught theology at the Jesuit Brooklyn Preparatory School. Later was Professor of New Testament studies at Le Moyne College, taught theology at Cornell and Fordham universities.
Best known for his anti-war activism, he co-founded an interfaith coalition against the Vietnam War with his brother Philip and Thomas Merton.
They campaigned passionately for its end. In 1967, he and Philip were arrested for pouring blood on draft records. Philip was sentenced to six years in prison for defacing government property.
In 1968, Daniel and Howard Zinn traveled to Hanoi during the January Tet Offensive to bring home three released US POWs.
In 1968, he, Philip and seven other priests (known as the Catonville Nine) burned hundreds of draft files with homemade napalm in the Catonville, MD draft board parking lot.
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