Stephen Lendman

Mandela on Israeli apartheid by Latuff

Reports like the Cape Town, South Africa-based Human Sciences Research Council's (HSRC) May 2009 one titled, "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid" highlight what many others understand, including former UN Special Human Rights Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, John Dugard, stating in January 2007:

"Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories). At the same time, elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law."

Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court calls apartheid a crime, stating:

"For the purpose of this Statute, (a) 'crime against humanity' means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

The crime of apartheid" includes murder, extermination, enslavement, torture, arbitrary arrest, illegal imprisonment, denial of the right to life and liberty, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and other abusive acts imposed by one group on another.

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Dimitri Tsiodras

Une tragédie grecque, dans la meilleure tradition d’Euripide, se joue depuis des années sur la scène économique du pays. Depuis peu, elle attire l’attention de toute la planète, car elle est arrivée à son point culminant. A moins qu’elle ne se change en comédie, car les « statistiques grecques » deviennent un objet de railleries en Europe. Sans oublier la bureaucratie, la corruption, le manque de compétitivité, qui dessinent les traits de la croissance « à la grecque »... Même au sein de feu la Communauté européenne, il était accepté que le Sud européen – Grèce incluse – ait de caractéristiques spéciales. Cela n’avait jamais provoqué de problèmes auparavant, car le pays ne représente que 2,5% du produit intérieur brut (PIB) de l’Union.

Il est impossible d’analyser les événements récents sans revenir sur les origines du problème, et notamment sur le poids déterminant des partis politiques pour tous les aspects de la vie publique : administration, régions, syndicats ; même le système judiciaire opère sous la surveillance du parti au pouvoir. Plus important encore, l’activité économique est contrôlée par l’Etat, de telle sorte qu’au lieu d’améliorer la qualité de leurs produits, les entrepreneurs ont toujours trouvé plus facile de nouer des amitiés avec des dirigeants politiques pour gagner des contrats comme fournisseurs, sous-traitants, constructeurs etc. De quoi leur assurer des recettes satisfaisantes, mais pas améliorer la compétitivité dans une économie mondialisée. Au contraire : une ouverture du marché leur faisait peur. Le secteur public, pour sa part, souffre de la bureaucratie et de la corruption ; il est gonflé par des places inutiles obtenues grâce aux relations de clientélisme politique.

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Rodrigue Tremblay

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." ~Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist

"Certain hierarchs of the Catholic Church in Latin America used prayer as an anesthesia to put the people to sleep. When they cannot dominate us with law, then comes prayer, and when they can't humiliate or dominate us with prayer, then comes the gun." ~Evo Morales, President of Bolivia (July 13, 2009)

"The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate." ~Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) German philosopher

Why do political leaders seem to be lying most of the time? Why is uncontrolled greed so prevalent in corporate rooms? Why do wicked men wage wars of aggression and become indifferent to the killing of innocent people? Why does materialism seem to trump everything else? Why do we have the uneasy feeling that our society is going in the wrong direction? The very fact that we have to raise such questions may be a sign of the times.

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Clancy Sigal

While Tea Partiers protest loudly at the mess we're in progressives seem to be stewing in their own sterile politeness.

"Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred." -- President Roosevelt, Madison Square Garden, 31 October 1936

There is an astonishing lack of anger among liberals, progressives and radicals who have abandoned emotion to the right. Our role model continues to be not FDR, still less Malcolm X, but our "bipartisan" and apparently tone-deaf President Obama. In this second or third year of a devastating depression, not just recession, that has inflicted an epidemic of suffering on the lower half of the American nation, Obama is very busy being fluent and civil while being essentially untouched by the rage felt by so many of us. Our world, as we have known it, is being annihilated, and nobody in power shows signs of giving a damn.

The real anger is all on the right, kidnapped – or authentically voiced – by the all-white Tea Partiers, Palinites, Oath Keepers and "armed and dangerous" patriot groups, some but not all of whom are native-fascistic but also include pissed-off libertarians and the disappointed and dispossessed at the bottom of the pile.

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Sheldon L. Richman
The Free Market

This is the Reagan legacy. He was to be the man who would turn things around. But he didn't even try. As he so dramatically illustrated when he accepted the plant-closing bill, there has been no sea-change in thinking about the role of government.

On August 2, 1988, President Ronald Reagan announced that he had changed his mind about the pro-union plant-closing bill. He had vetoed it three months earlier, but now let it become law without his signature after intense pressure from presidential nominee George Bush and former Treasury Secretary James Baker, now Bush's campaign chairman. Reagan claimed that only this action would enable him to sign a Congressional trade bill almost unequaled in its anti-consumer protectionism.

Ronald Reagan's faithful followers claim he has used his skills as the Great Communicator to reverse the growth of Leviathan and inaugurate a new era of liberty and free markets. Reagan himself said, "It is time to check and reverse the growth of government."

Yet after nearly eight years of Reaganism, the clamor for more government intervention in the economy was so formidable that Reagan abandoned the free-market position and acquiesced in further crippling of the economy and our liberties. In fact, the number of free-market achievements by the administration are so few that they can be counted on one hand—with fingers left over.

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Stephen Lendman

Lynn is director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and author of "Too Big to Fail" about the dangers of monopoly capitalism.

He expands on the threat in his newest book titled, "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction," explaining today's peril given the power of predatory giants.

They control governments, the courts, war and peace, dominant information sources, and essential services, including health care, air and water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, and school curricula to the highest levels. They own genetic code patents, basic human life elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste, tomatoes or toilet paper.

Omnipotent, they plunder recklessly, ruthlessly at our expense. They're private tryannies, endangering humanity, basic freedoms, environmental sustainability, and planetary survival. Without exaggeration, they're unaccountable, unchecked "weapons of mass destruction."

In "Cornered," Lynn explains the danger and urgency to address it. Our lives and futures depend on it.

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