Michael Rectenwald

To avoid being co-opted or crushed, the Wall Street Occupation must become Occupy Main Street. It must attract the many layers of the 99% that are not yet literally represented within its ranks.

The world economic order is in the throes of severe crisis, a crisis for which economic or political experts and advisors have no answers at all. The crisis is the direct result of the contradictions of capitalist production and exchange, which have come to a head as capitalists have reached (perhaps temporary) limits in global labor exploitation and resource acquisition. The political establishment is also hostage to the same capitalist crisis. It has nothing on offer for the vast majority within existing conditions, and certainly cannot propose anything beyond them. Reformers have no new tricks left in their bag and the reforms that haven't been enacted are beyond the reach of the system.

The Occupy Wall Street movement represents the long-standing, brewing and boiling over of anger, disillusionment, dispossession, and growing despair of the many millions affected by this systemic crisis. Indeed, the movement represents, at least figuratively, the cry of the vast majority of the nation’s and the world's population – "the 99%." The movement thus contains the germ of revolutionary potential – a potential, however incipient and faint -- to completely overthrow the existing state of affairs and to commence the long revolutionary process of inaugurating a successor social order.

More »

Wayne Madsen

[Codename: Operation Enduring Turmoil - Zionist Neocon Plans for Pakistan and rest of the World. Read this document to understand the game plan.]

Paraphrasing the old anti-Vietnam War song,

"And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Pakistan"

It does appear that for some Pentagon brass, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta; the CIA under former U.S. Central Command and Afghanistan commander General David Petraeus; and top Republican and Democratic politicians that, indeed, Pakistanis next on the target list of nations that will soon be feeling the military muscle of the United States. Unlike other Muslim nations that have been subjected to U.S. military intervention, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya, Pakistan’s ultimate prize for the West is its nuclear weapons arsenal…

A number of observers, including former senior figures with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, have made no secret of western contingency plans, which appear to be going active, to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the nation as a nuclear weapons power. The plans have been coordinated between the CIA, India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence service, and Israel’s Mossad.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Major Wall Street banks occupy and control Washington. They recycle their officials in and out, make policy, and enforce it with money power supremacy for virtually everything they want.

Political Washington salutes and obeys. Money power in private hands and democracy can't co-exist. It buys what it wants at the expense of government of, by and for the people. It never was and isn't now.

On December 23, 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, violating the Constitution's Article 1, Section 8, giving Congress sole power to coin (create) money and regulate the value thereof.

Abolishing or nationalizing the Fed and giving people money power back through Congress is step one to regaining rights not possible under banker controlled government.

That's issue one Occupy Wall Street protesters and others spreading across America in dozens of cities must address.

Occupy Together is an "unofficial hub" for burgeoning initiatives heading everywhere "in solidarity with Occupy Wall St."

Word spreads. Hidden anger surfaces. Small numbers grow. So does commitment to stay the course. Activists and ordinary people know something's wrong they want changed. Key is understanding money power in private hands. Change depends on ending a system destroying futures for working Americans.

More »

Gilad Atzmon

"The Wandering Jew," by Joseph F. Keppler, 1901

Two days ago I referred to a critique of ‘The Wandering Who?’ written by Mark Gardner. Gardner is a rabid Zionist and Jewish supremacist who tends to conflate Jewish Nationalism (Zionism) with Jewish ethnicity. However, Gardner’s criticism of my book was, in the main, intelligent and fair, though certainly not free of error.

Yesterday, I found out that The Occidental Observer, a White Supremacist magazine, also published a lengthy review of ‘The Wandering Who?’ written by Prof. Kevin MacDonald. Like Gardner, MacDonald also conflates Jewish ideology and culture with ethnicity. His most controversial claim is that a suite of traits that he attributes to Jews, including higher-than-average verbal intelligence and ethnocentrisms, have eugenically evolved to enhance the ability of Jews to outsmart non-Jews in the competition for resources while, at the same time, undermining the power and self-confidence of the white majorities in Europe and America who, he insists, Jews seek to dispossess. Just like Gardner, MacDonald produced an interesting text, though Macdonald’s was somewhat more scholarly.

Although both are supremacist and ethnocentric thinkers, Gardner and MacDonald seem to be in a kind of dispute.

More »

Sheldon Richman

[A picture taken on March 30, 2007 shows an Iraqi woman walking past a US soldier with 4-9 Cavalry 2BCT 1 Cavalry Division B-troop as he patrols Sheikh Ali Muslim Sunni neighbourhood in Baghdad. Al-Jazeera released "startling new information" from US documents obtained by WikiLeaks on October 22, alleging state-sanctioned Iraqi torture and the killing of hundreds of civilians at US military checkpoints. (Patrick Baz/AFP/CSM)]

In October WikiLeaks released close to 400,000 U.S. classified military documents relating to the Iraq war. The American people, the theoretical masters of the government, were not supposed to see them. The government preferred that they not know. So just as when the website released 77,000 documents on the Afghan war in August, government officials and apologists for the empire’s war policies roundly condemned WikiLeaks. Apparently, the greatest breach of decorum is to let the American people know how their government conducts its wars. In November WikiLeaks began to release more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables, creating even more heat for the organization.

In December the U.S. Justice Department was deliberating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be charged with conspiracy to obtain government documents. The government was looking for evidence that Assange assisted or encouraged Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is in custody on charges of leaking the information, rather than being merely a passive recipient of the information. The website Daily Beast said that “the U.S. effort reflects a growing belief that WikiLeaks and organizations like it threaten grave damage to American national security....” Or, at any rate, to the government’s ability to shape public opinion by withholding the truth of its wars.

More »