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Christmas is No Time to Talk About War and Peace

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - By Jim Rigby - Dec. 19 (Opinion) - When I heard the President speak to returning troops last week, my mind flashed back to an article I once wrote for our local newspaper. Each week a different member of the local clergy would write a column, and I had been asked to write the piece for Christmas. That year all I could hear was the drumbeat leading toward a war with Iraq. I racked my brain trying to think of a way to put faces on the people we were about to bomb.read more

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GM crops promote superweeds, food insecurity and pesticides, say NGOs

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By John Vidal - Oct. 19 (News Report) - Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of "superweeds", according to a report by 20 Indian, south-east Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups representing millions of people. The so-called miracle crops, which were first sold in the US about 20 years ago and which are now grown in 29 countries on about 1.5bn hectares (3.7bn acres) of land, have been billed as potential solutions to food crises, climate change and soil erosion, but the assessment finds that they have not lived up to their promises. The report claims that hunger has reached "epic proportions" since the technology was developed. Besides this, only two GM "traits" have been developed on any significant scale, despite investments of tens of billions of dollars, and benefits such as drought ...

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Citibank Arrests Customers for Trying to Close Accounts

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

economicvoice.com - By Richard Henley Davis - Oct. 17 (News Report) - This notion of removing money from the banks in order to bring them down is a genuine threat to the banking industry and we can expect more arrests by banks who are using the police force as their private security to prevent a collapse in their interests through mass deposit withdrawal.

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Afghanistan and Iraq wars not worth fighting, say a third of US veterans

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Oct. 05 (News Report) - One in three US veterans of the post-9/11 military believes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting, and a majority think ...Poll finds pride in military, but not for Afghanistan, Iraq wars

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'American Teacher': A Film on Education That Gets It Right

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Mark Phillips - Sep. 29 (Review) - Every policymaker should be required to see the new film “American Teacher,” which powerfully reveals the huge challenge that the country faces in attracting and keeping the best teachers to help improve public education.

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The Payroll Tax Holiday: Talk about a Ponzi Scheme!

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Wendy Mink - Sep. 09 (News Analysis) - Is President Obama trying to kill Social Security without explicitly saying so? He put Social Security "on the table" for consideration by his Deficit Commission -- even though Social Security has not contributed to creating or sustaining the deficit/debt in the first place. He kept Social Security on the table when he made a deal to delegate deficit reduction authority over entitlements to an undemocratic Super Committee. Now, in a speech reportedly about jobs, he proposed to extend and increase the ill-considered FICA tax cut he embraced last December -- a tax read more

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President Obama Joins the Cult of Economics Deniers

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Dean Baker - Aug. 15 (Opinion) - A front page story in Sunday's New York Times gave the country the bad news. President Obama is no longer paying attention to economists and economics in designing economic policy. Instead, he will do what his campaign people tell him will get him re-elected, presumably by getting lots of money from Wall Street. The article said that President Obama intends to focus on reducing government spending and cutting programmes like social security and Medicare. This is in spite of the fact that: "A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth." In other words, President Obama intends to ignore the path for getting the economy back to full employment that most economists advocate. Instead, he is going to cut government spending – because his ...

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Jesus Loves Nukes But They Have to Cool It

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Abby Zimet - Aug. 04 (News Report) - The Air Force has suspended a decades-long training course, commonly dubbed Jesus Loves Nukes, that taught "ethics" to nuclear missile launchers by referencing Biblical figures like Abraham, John the Baptist and other "believers engaged in wars."

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I Counseled All My Clients To Plead Insanity

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Christopher Cooper - Jul. 29 (Opinion) - if Breivik is crazy, a great many Americans and most of the big boys in D.C. Are crazy. But if the Norwegian shooter-bomber is sane, and culpable and should be tried and sentenced (and most would suggest executed, I imagine), then we had better get started drafting juries and hiring judges because our list of mass-murderers is a long and bipartisan one.

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Crossing The Huffington Post Picket Line

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Mike Elk - Jun. 14 (News Report) - 'Unions are looking to intensify their campaign against the Huffington Post. The National Writers has recently hired on a full-time staffer to focus specifically on the campaign against the Huffington Post. Some union members are demanding that their unions put more pressure on progressives to respect the picket line. Some have floated the idea of labeling people who cross the picket line as scabs and have floated the idea of potentially cutting off funding to organizations that continue to blog at the Huffington Post

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'The War You Don't See': A Film You Won't See

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By John Pilger - Jun. 11 (Special Report) - John Pilger Dear Noam, I am writing to you and a number of other friends mostly in the US to alert you to the extraordinary banning of my film on war and media, 'The War You Don't See', and the abrupt cancellation of a major event at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe in which David Barsamian and I were to discuss free speech, US foreign policy and censorship in the media. read more

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Are We Ruled by Second-String Psychopaths?

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By David Schwartz - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths. (The term nowadays is anti-social personality disorder.) These are terms for people who are smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences. They are not guided by a sense of right or wrong. They seem to be unaffected by the feelings of others, including feelings of distress caused by their actions. Straying from a decent way of treating people, or violating ethical codes causes no anxiety, the anxiety which is what causes the rest of us to moderate our more greedy impulses.

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End the Land Mine Plague

Sat, 14 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Ralph Nader - May. 14 (Advocacy) - Everyday around the world innocent people, many of them children, are killed or injured by millions of unexploded land mines and cluster bombs. Some of the cluster bomblets look like candy or a toy which attract a child in a field, orchard, schoolyard or by the roadside

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Obama Speaks on Manning and the Rule of Law

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Glenn Greenwald - Apr. 23 (Opinion) - 'Obama said this when justifying Manning's treatment, 'We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.' The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ('He broke the law') is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?' Glenn Greenwald, Common Dreams

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Corporate Coup d’état Coming Soon to a City Near You

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Rania Khalek - Apr. 20 (Opinion) - Disaster capitalism is on display around the country, as legislators use the debt crisis afflicting their states as an opportunity to hollow out the public sector. In Michigan it’s being packaged as “emergency financial management” by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who is looking to exploit an economic crisis that has left his state with a severe budget deficit. In March, Snyder signed a law granting state-appointed emergency financial managers (EFM) the ability to fire local elected officials, break teachers’ and public workers’ contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services, entire cities or school districts, all without any public input. He claims these dictatorial restructuring powers will keep Michigan communities out of bankruptcy. Michigan currently has unelected EFM’s in charge of the schools in Detroit, as well as the cities of Pontiac, Ecorse, and Benton Harbor.

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Who's #2 in Tax Avoidance? How About Exxon?

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Paul Buchheit - Apr. 12 (News Report) - 'Many good candidates came to our attention, because of their consistent and obvious tax avoidance. Verizon and Boeing and Dow and DuPont all made profits three years in a row, but all paid zero taxes over the three-year period. Banking leaders Citigroup and Bank of America, with a combined $8 billion of pretax earnings in 2009 and 2010, each paid zero taxes two years in a row. From 2008 to 2010, Chevron paid less than 5% a year. Merck paid 5%. Hewlett-Packard 3%. IBM 2%. Carnival 1%. But Exxon seemed to have it all, with the nation's highest pre-tax earnings three years in a row, a 2% federal income tax payment rate, and an unapologetic attitude comparable to that of GE.'

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Nuclear Power Madness

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Norman Solomon - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever. Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us -- people around the world -- to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.

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When a Country Goes Insane

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - By Robert Freeman - Feb. 21 (Opinion) - This must be what it’s like when a country goes insane, when it falls down a rabbit hole and tries to pretend that everything is normal. It can’t tell truths from lies. Hucksters pose as upright men, and people imagine they are Solons, avatars of insight come down from the ages. Sleazy operators pass themselves off as statesmen, as thinkers of deep gravitas, and the crowds, unable to distinguish sanctimony from sincerity, bravado from bullshit, lap it up.read more

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Ray McGovern Bloodied and Arrested at Clinton Speech

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - Feb. 17 (News Report) - Clearly, McGovern intended to conduct a protest in the auditorium, but it is equally evident that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed at that moment, and now, to demonstrate that there is any difference in the way civil protest is treated by the US government than it was by the Mubarak regime it supported in Egypt for decades. -- ma/RSN

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The Invisible, Growing Leaderless Revolution in America

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - By Will Wilkinson - Feb. 17 (Opinion) - out on the streets where we live, the anger is building towards a breaking point. How many Allyson’s closing down, how many home owners walking away (or being driven out), how many of us losing our savings to pay for health care, how many “confrontations with local officials and elites” will it take to finally get us out on the streets? When will the world start watching a “leaderless revolution” here in America? We don’t have a dictator to oust. For us, it’s a ruling oligarchy immune to influence by voting. It’s bankers, corporations, multi-whatillionaires, an enabling government, those with the gold, the power and no interest in us, beyond milking us everyday like the docile sheep they believe us to be.

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Pharmaceutical Industry Is Biggest Defrauder of the Federal Government Under the False Claims Act, New Public Citizen Study Finds

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - Dec. 16 (Press Release) - The drug industry has now become the biggest defrauder of the federal government, as determined by payments it has made for violations of the False Claims Act (FCA), surpassing the defense industry, which had long been the leader, according to a new Public Citizen study released today. The study found that pharmaceutical cases accounted for at least 25 percent of all federal FCA payouts over the past decade, compared with 11 percent by the defense industry.read more

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Why Wikileaks is Good for Democracy

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - Dec. 01 (Opinion) - The US has been going in the wrong direction for years by classifying millions of documents as secrets. Wikileaks and other media which report these so called secrets will embarrass people yes. Wikileaks and other media will make leaders uncomfortable yes. But embarrassment and discomfort are small prices to pay for a healthier democracy.

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Reconsidering Japan… Reconsidering Paul Krugman

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - Nov. 20 - by Steven HillThe New York Times is doing a series on Japan that it describes as an examination of "the effects on Japanese society of two decades of economic stagnation and declining prices." Reading the series is about as cheery a task as rubbernecking at a car wreck on I-95. But unfortunately the Times series simply repeats the "conventional wisdom" about Japan put out by the same economic experts who missed an $8 trillion housing bubble in the United States, and in fact have been wrong on most of the big economic issues over the past two decades.read more

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Sanders Plans Progressive Alternatives to Deficit Cuts

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - Nov. 12 (Press Release) - Senator Bernie SandersSen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced today that he will work with members of Congress, labor unions, seniors' organizations and others to develop progressive alternatives to proposals circulated by leaders of a White House deficit commission.

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Road to Corporate Serfdom

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - Oct. 30 - by Ralph NaderIt was Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, who in 1992 created the election slogan: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” For the 2010 Congressional campaigns, the slogan should have been: “It’s Corporate Crime and Control, Stupid.” read more

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