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Gaither Stewart
Precariousness looms like a black cloud over the continent of Europe. The fragility of human life and of the life style generations of westerners are accustomed to today rages like a modern plague. Precariousness is a contagious disease. It leaps from worker to worker, from class to class. No wonder that life in our times has never seemed more temporary. Permanence belongs to another age.
(Rome) A popular Italian evergreen from the 1970s depicts a contemporary conundrum for many Europeans: “Chi non lavora, non fa l’amore” go the lyrics. The woman tells her man, “If you don’t work, there will be no love-making in this house. If you strike and don’t bring home pay, I will strike too. No love-making here!” The worker goes back to his job and strikers beat him up and call him a scab. No sex if he strikes, beatings if he works. He is truly the superfluous and precarious man. His only hope is that the capitalist boss relents and grants the pay increases the union demands and lets love into his house again. But that, he must realize, is highly unlikely.
Yousef Al-Helou
Includes a Salem-News.com video produced by Tim King, on the Israeli attack on Gaza.
During Israel's 3-week long offensive on Gaza launched on December 27th, the Israeli army used internationally banned weapons according to foreign military and medical experts.
American made white phosphorus shells were used in populated areas across the Gaza strip, home to about 1.5 million people.
Nafez Abu Shaban, head of burns department at Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest medical center, has treated dozens of patients who suffered sever burns, he is keeping a piece of phosphorus covered under sand in jar to prevent it from exposing to oxygen.
Khalid Amayreh
Khalid Amayreh From Occupied Palestine
[URUKNET] I have been under fire of late from two diametrically opposite quarters. First, the fanatical, self-worshipping Zionists who think that non-Jewish suffering should never ever be compared with Jewish suffering.
Needless to say, this psychotic attitude stems from deep-seated convictions that a Jew is a special creature whose life is worth more than the rest of humanity. Haven’t we noticed, for example, how Israel has made "Gilad Shalit", the Israeli soldier imprisoned by Hamas, a household name all over the world, while next to nothing is mentioned about the estimated 10,000 Palestinian political and resistance prisoners languishing in Israeli dungeons and concentration camps?
Eric Walberg
[URUKNET] Recall the self-satisfied EU celebrations of recent years — the inauguration of the euro and the famous blue Euro passport, the accession of all the Eastern European and ex-Soviet statelets, the gloating as the euro steadily revalued. Fortress Europe was strong and united at last. The 21st century belonged to the new Old World.
But then a few cracks began to appear in the shiny facade. The Poles, especially, carped about just about everything — the thought of giving up their precious zloty (boy, are they sorry now), the EU farming rules, the lack of Euro-support for US wars, and the Euro-cowardice in facing down the Russian bear. They and the Czechs revealed Fortress Europe for what it was by welcoming US missile bases, provoking the Russians into threatening to make Europe once again the world’s nuclear battlefield. Kosovo managed to divide even the big boys, with Spain refusing to recognize this latest US-German plaything, and ratcheting up the tensions between Serbs, Croats — even the Slovenes. The Balkan cauldron is as hot as ever.
Margaret Kimberley
“Every norm of civilized behavior and international law was violated.”
Despite the best efforts of the American corporate media, the Israeli lobby, and compromised politicians, the true nature of Israel’s barbarity towards the Palestinian people is not easily hidden. The massacres of Gaza’s civilian population that were recently carried out by the Israeli Defense Force created a turning point in worldwide public opinion. Only the Israeli and American governments try to deny that war crimes were committed.
The IDF barred the world’s media from witnessing the killings of more than 1,400 people. Every norm of civilized behavior and international law was violated, including the Geneva Conventions prohibition of acts of revenge against civilian populations. Israel kept the borders of Gaza sealed, and would not even allow the population to flee and save their lives. The IDF takes the term “shooting fish in a barrel” very seriously.
Xymphora
I've been thinking more about the peculiar relationship of the Jewish power structure that controls America and the various hangers-on like Cheney and Rumsfeld. What's the connection?
I think it is just power. Political types are always looking for the most powerful star to which to hitch their wagons. They have far better instincts that the average person when its comes to sniffing out power structures, and thus were able to see the rise of the New American Establishment before it was obvious to everybody (except those who still choose not to see). People who aren't Zionists who ride with the Jews do so because their perception is that riding with the most powerful group is the best way to increase personal power. In the short run, they are right. There is also a peculiar element of circularity to this thinking: the New American Establishment is powerful because other powerful people think it is powerful.
Gaither Stewart
A little bit of Leninism for breakfast gives you the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard.
(My adaptation of a Paul Bowles’ Arab adage)
And then this, straight out of the horse’s mouth:
“It is more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of the revolution than to write about it.” (Vladimir Lenin)
(Rome) Leftists like to cite Lenin. To quote Marx is to delve into the theory of Socialism/Communism. But Lenin is another cup of tea. You get into Lenin and you’re already in revolution. When you read Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which contains the core of Leninist thought, you are no longer in the world of socio-economic theory. This powerful text offers insights into Leninist policies and elaborated Lenin’s interpretation of Marxism, above all the class conflict, but also the crushing of the bourgeois state and the establishment and role of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Stuart Littlewood
Stuart Littlewood argues that, as president of an internationally hated terrorist state that is godfather to thuggish and criminal regimes like Israel, President Barack Obama should stay at home and save our hard-earned tax money from being wasted in a frenzy of ridiculous security measures to protect the pretentious pomp and circumstance of his sinister presidential circus.
You have to laugh.
Mr Obama comes to London for the G20 summit with 500 hangers-on, including 200 secret service goons and a guy with America's nuclear missile launch codes in his briefcase. He arrives in Air Force One accompanied by cargo planes bringing an estimated 35 vehicles for the presidential visit including “The Beast”, the president’s armour-plated limousine.
Sarah Coleman
In a homeless shelter in Dayton, Ohio, three young men gather nervously to pose for photographs. There’s Rob, who wears two wool caps over each other like a helmet on his head, and Antwuan, whose crisp white shirt signals his determination to rise above his circumstances. The third young man, who introduces himself only as Agent Thunder, is an aspiring poet and artist. He stares at the camera through wide, weary brown eyes that make him seem older than his eighteen years.
For Larry Price, the man behind the camera, the shoot feels familiar. The Olympus Visionary photographer, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, has a track record of documenting social causes in the United States. While a staff photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1980s, he spent six months photographing inside a fetid, dangerous housing project – a story that led local government to demolish the project two years later.
Robert W. Barker
Shut down Guantanamo, arrest the liar Cheney, bring Bush to deposition and hearings for war crimes, fire Halliburton and abandon the war in Iraq now, not tomorrow, not next year...now.
The scent of self-indulgence and insatiability raises the ire.
Incompetence and cronyism permeate the public being, and draws our anger. Blatant lies perpetrated by the government we fund - covered up by censorship - sponsored by corporate run media; it all drives us to irritation.
My mind turns to thoughts of possible retribution when I see the sick policies of the last administration dragging on. Differences mingle between the two parties as the distinctions betwixt the two once held sway, now fade into the quest for power, greed and pay offs, bail outs and ravenous spending. Where did we go wrong or were we ever right?
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