Dismissively Ignoring Hard Times

Stephen Lendman

Despite a deepening global depression, Washington, Wall Street and America's media remain largely in denial, for how much longer isn't certain as hard times get tougher for growing millions worldwide.

Tough enough, in fact, for angry demonstrators to strike and protest austerity measures across Europe in Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Georgia, and elsewhere, as well as others scattered across America against budget cuts, tax and tuition hikes, and layoffs when workers more than ever need jobs.

Trends expert Gerald Celente calls it "the greatest depression," warning months ago that when anger erupts, unrest will cause governments to "take draconian measures to prevent total economic collapse and panic." Nonetheless, he expects massive bank failures, bank runs, and a bank holiday, preventing easy access to deposits as dire conditions worsen.


Needed: An Antiwar Movement That Puts Peace Over Politicians

Medea Benjamin & Charles Davis

After campaigning as the candidate of change, the man awarded a Nobel Prize for peace has given the world nothing but more war. Yet despite Barack Obama's continuation – nay, escalation – of the worst aspects of George W. Bush's foreign policy, including his very own illegal war in Libya, you’d be hard-pressed to find the large-scale protests and outrage from the liberal establishment that characterized his predecessor's reign (and only seems to pop up when a Republican's the one dropping the bombs).

That's not for a lack of things to protest. Since taking office, Obama has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan and now looks set to break his pledge to begin a significant withdrawal in July. He has unilaterally committed the nation to an unapologetically illegal war in Libya and in two years has authorized more drone strikes in Pakistan than his predecessor authorized in two terms, with one in three of their victims reportedly civilians. In Yemen, he has targeted a U.S. citizen for assassination and approved a cluster bomb strike that, according to Amnesty International, killed 35 innocent women and children.

But these war crimes, which ought to shock the consciences of the president's liberal supporters, haven't spurred the sort of popular protest we witnessed under Bush the Lesser. At a recent congressional hearing on the bloated war budget, a handful of CODEPINK activists were the sole dissenters. Thousands poured into the streets to cheer Osama bin Laden's death, but no Americans were in the streets decrying the drone attack that killed dozens of Pakistani civilians weeks earlier.

While die-hard grassroots peace activists continue to bravely protest U.S. militarism, with 52 people arrested last month protesting outside a nuclear weapons factory in Kansas City – if they'd been Tea Partiers protesting Obamacare, you may have heard of them – there's no denying that the peace movement has taken a beating.


Arab League should expel Assad regime

Khalid Amayreh
AhramOnline


Assad's regime of torture: In addition to military sieges
and assaults in Syrian cities, those critical of the regime
face the possibility of imprisonment and rampant torture.

Hair-raising reports that keep coming out from Syria speak of the Syrian army, whose raison d’etre is to protect the country from external aggression, ganging up on Syrian population centers one after the other, using T-72 tanks, helicopter gunships and other lethal weaponry that would be used in real war between armies.

Hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians have been riddled with bullets, children tortured in barbarian gangland style before they are handed over to their respective families for a hasty burial, and women raped by soldiers in order to deter male relatives from taking part in pro-democracy protests against the tyrannical regime in Damascus.

Interestingly, the bulk of this campaign of murder, terror and rape is carried out be the so-called elite forces led by Maher Al-Assad, the president’s brother, which is made up mainly of recruits from the Alawite and other non-Sunni minorities.

Soldiers refusing or showing the slightest reluctance to shoot to kill are themselves summarily executed by the Shabbiha thugs, or murderous death squads. Hundreds of such soldiers have been murdered and the killing blamed mendaciously on “infiltrators, fifth-columnists, and Jihadi fundamentalists.”

One human rights activist in the occupied Palestinian territories intimated to this writer that in 44 years of ruthless Israeli military occupation he never witnessed even a semblance of the barbarianism and sadism displayed by the Syrian regime against its own people.

“But Israel is our enemy and whatever war crimes or crimes against humanity the Israeli occupation army perpetrates against us happens in the context of this enduring enmity between the occupied and the occupier. The Syrian regime, however, is slaughtering its own people, including children, in order to keep a small junta of Alawite officers at the helm of power in Damascus.”

The Syrian regime seems to have exhausted its inventory of shameless disinformation about the popular revolution engulfing the country, but no one is quite sure. It blamed every conceivable and presumed foe, from Wahabbis to Mossad, for fomenting trouble against the regime.However, more and more ordinary Syrians, many of whom previously gave the regime the benefit of the doubt, have now discovered the bitter truth; namely that the regime is lying and killing the people.

There is no doubt that the sectarian regime in Syria is the main enemy of the Syrian people. This Syrian people is as entitled to liberty and freedom from tyranny and the police state apparatus as any other people under the sun, including Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans and Yemenis.So why is the Arab League silent?


Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law

Stephen Lendman

It is not the law that counts in America, it's enough clout to subvert it.

At the state and federal levels, pro-business/anti-worker rulings are nothing new. US Supreme Court history is rife with them since the 19th century, and no wonder.

From inception, America was always ruled by men, not laws, who lie, connive, misinterpret, and pretty much do what they please for their own self-interest.

In 1787 in Philadelphia, "the people" who mattered most were elitists. America's revolution substituted new management for old. Everything changed but stayed the same under a system establishing illusory democracy at the federal, state and local levels.

Today, all three branches of government prove it's more corrupt, ruthless, and indifferent to fundamental freedoms and human needs than ever, including worker rights to bargain collectively with management on equal terms. Forget it. They're going, going, gone.


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