Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

The ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi, following four days of nationwide mass protests, has placed power in the hands of a military junta which is committed to the defense of the economic interests of the country’s ruling class and to the geo-political aims of American imperialism.

The removal of the hated Mursi regime has evoked jubilation. However sincere and deeply felt this sentiment may be, the fact is that Mursi’s overthrow has placed the army, not the masses, in power. None of the essential demands that motivated the mass protests—for decent jobs, livable wages, adequate social services, and democratic rights—will be met by the military regime.

The military has intervened for one overriding purpose: to pre-empt and suppress the growing political movement of the Egyptian working class. The coalition government that it unveiled last night is in no way a genuine expression of the democratic strivings of the working class. Rather, the new ruling structure is a sinister coalition of reactionary forces, which includes long-time henchmen of Hosni Mubarak, various Islamic politicians, and several liberal politicians with close connections to the US-based International Monetary Fund. None of the individuals and organizations has either a mass social base or advances a popular social program.

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Bill Van Auken

The forcing down Tuesday night of President Evo Morales’s jet on suspicion that it was carrying Edward Snowden to asylum in Bolivia is part of a descent into imperialist lawlessness unprecedented since the 1930s.

France, Portugal, Italy and Spain all refused to allow the plane to cross their air space, rescinding approval of its flight plan after it had been airborne for three hours and forcing it to make an emergency landing, with its fuel running low, in Vienna, Austria.

In La Paz, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the French embassy, throwing stones, burning the French flag and shouting, “Hypocrite France!” As if to prove their point, France’s Socialist Party President François Hollande claimed Wednesday that it had all been a misunderstanding, and had he known Morales was aboard, the plane would have had no problem.

The lives of Morales and other senior Bolivian officials were placed in imminent danger as they returned from a summit of gas-exporting nations in Moscow, where the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor has been trapped in an airport transit zone for 11 days, with no country yet willing to receive him. Afterward, the Bolivian president was essentially held hostage in Vienna until the next morning, when the European countries lifted the flight ban.

These methods amount to state terrorism and air piracy. While they were carried out by European governments, there is not a shred of doubt that their real author was the Obama administration in Washington, which is waging a relentless, extralegal manhunt for Snowden in retaliation for his exposure of the NSA’s secret and unconstitutional spying program against millions of people in the United States and all over the world.

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Mike Adams

Throughout human history, most slavery has been enforced physically -- with whips and chains. You either did what you were told or they beat you into submission.

Most modern people mistakenly believe slavery has been largely eradicated across our world. They don't see people shackled in chains or being ordered what to do by their owners. Modern culture no longer accepts overt slavery, right? ...Or does it?

As it turns out, slavery is alive and well on our planet, and its shackles are made of numbers, not steel. Those who are enslaved under this new system are people who fail to understand simple math: numbers, compounding interest, loans, investments and so on. You show me a person who can't do math, and I'll show you someone who functions as a slave to the system. In this article, I show you how to escape mathematical slavery and live as a free person. But first, you need to understand how mathematical slavery really works. Let's begin with WAGES.

Wages - There's a good reason why people who earn incomes reported on IRS W-2 forms are often called "wage slaves." It's not a derogatory term; it's more of a cry for help. "Help! I'm a slave to my paycheck and I can't get ahead!"

There's a reason you can't get ahead: the banks and the government have fine-tuned your "payments" to them (taxes, loans, fees, etc.) in order to extract the maximum amount from your paycheck while leaving you so little of your own that you can never get ahead enough to stop working.

Your car payment and house payment, for example, are precisely calculated to make sure you can't pay either of them off ahead of schedule. They're mathematically selected to guarantee you can only "squeak by" and barely pay more than the monthly interest, thereby extending your loan principles into the far distant future.

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