NewsTrust - World - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Corporations Are Stealing Billions in Tax Breaks, While the Confused, Screwed Citizenry Turn On Each Other

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Robert Reich - May. 20 (Opinion) - As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

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Being a Democracy Hating, Corporate Power-Defending Newspaper Owner Runs Deep in the Koch Family

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Yasha Levine - May. 19 (Opinion) - There’s a rumor going around that the Koch brothers are interested in buying up the Tribune Company, which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun… And there’s a lot of speculation about what would happen if they did. Some worry, and rightly so, that the Kochs—whose combined wealth makes them the biggest billionaires on the planet—would integrate the Tribune Co. with the rest of their free-market thinktank-industrial complex, and turn its newly acquired news media property into a gigantic business propaganda machine. Half the reporters at the Los Angeles Times even took a vote saying they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper

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The Lost ‘Trifecta of Scandals’

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Beverly Bandler - May. 16 (Opinion) - the mainstream news media is abuzz about “the trifecta of scandals” besetting the Obama administration, a narrative that fails to assess the actual significance of the three “scandals.” They don’t measure up to the many important scandals that the media neglects

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Dick Cheney, Benghazi, and White House Lies

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - May. 15 (Opinion) - Dick Cheney has never been short on chutzpah. Jumping aboard the GOP scandal-mongering machine, the former vice president appeared on Fox News (where else?) and declared to Sean Hannity (who else?) that President Barack Obama and his aides "lied" about the attack in Benghazi last September that left four Americans dead. "I think it's one of the worst incidents frankly that I can recall in my career," Cheney huffed—as if 9/11 had never happened. The former veep went the full Monty and echoed (discredited) right-wing charges that the Obama administration refused to deploy military forces to help Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans when they were assaulted in Benghazi.

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Nuclear Weapons Will be Used -- If We Don't Do Something to Get Rid of the Damn Things

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Tom Engelhardt - May. 13 (Opinion) - Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible weapon of all, the atomic bomb, that city-buster, that potential civilization-destroyer, was used as soon as it was available. Depending on your historical interpretation, it was either responsible for ending World War II in the Pacific or rushed into action before that war could end. In either case, it launched the atomic age.

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Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - May. 12 (Opinion) - the conviction of Reagan’s old ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, for genocide means “Ronnie” must face history’s judgment as an accessory to the crime,

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The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - May. 09 (Opinion) - Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade"). The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's ...

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Eduardo Galeano, Chronicler of Latin America's "Open Veins," on His New Book "Children of the Days"

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - May. 08 (Interview) - One of Latin America’s most acclaimed writers, Eduardo Galeano is out with the new book, "Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History." Galeano's classic "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent," made headlines when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave President Obama a copy at the Summit of the Americas in 2009. Since its publication in 1971, "Open Veins" has sold over a million copies worldwide despite being banned by the military governments in Chile, Argentina and his native country of Uruguay. While in exile after the Uruguayan military junta seized power in a 1973 coup, Galeano began work on his classic trilogy, "Memory of Fire," which rewrites five centuries of North and South American history.

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Sen. Chase talks about the importance of fair trade - YouTube

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

YouTube - By Maralyn Chase - May. 08 (Opinion) - video

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The Cancer-Stage Of Capitalism

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

talkradionews.com - By Thom Hartmann - May. 06 (Opinion) - Unregulated capitalism is cancer on our nation. Like tumors, greed has metastasized, strangling once-healthy parts of our economy, and our social safety net. A new piece on Alternet lists several ways this cancer capitalism has taken hold. For starters, the hoarding of wealth by the banksters and the 1% has diverted resources away from nutritional aid programs. Twenty people in our country collected a whopping $73 billion in investment income – all taxed at a lower rate than working Americans. Compare that with the fact that President Obama couldn’t even get $1 billion to improve childhood nutrition in our schools.

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5 Ways That Raw, Unregulated Capitalism Is Acting Like a Cancer on American Society

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Paul Buchheit - May. 05 (Opinion) - The uncontrolled growth of investment wealth is diverting resources away from vital programs, effectively smothering them.

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We Decide How to Share Gains

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stan Sorscher - May. 02 (Opinion) - Multinational employers steadily move work offshore, and lay off thousands of workers. We've cut funding for education; student debt is over a trillion dollars. We've terminated pensions, weakened unions, made work more contingent and more precarious. Wal-Mart cuts hours to avoid paying for health care. Some elected officials demonize teachers, and public employees, and turn public opinion against any regular worker daring to hope for a higher standard of living. Globally, workplace insecurity and inequality are at historic levels.

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Would we give up burgers to stop climate change?

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - May. 02 (Opinion) - In case you missed the news, humanity spent the Earth Day week reaching another sad milestone in the history of catastrophic climate change: For the first time, measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million, aka way abo

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Something America and China Could Do Together

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Apr. 29 (Opinion) -

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Explaining the upper crust’s preference for austerity economics

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

seattletimes.com - By Paul Krugman - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics. Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics?

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In Gasland sequel, fracking saga’s pressure ratchets up

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Sarah Laskow - Apr. 27 (Review) - Gasland Part II shows how much higher the stakes have grown in the battle over fracking since Josh Fox made its predecessor.

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Yemeni Activist Farea al-Muslimi Urges U.S. to Stop the Drone War on His Country

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 25 (Interview) - Yemeni activist and journalist Farea al-Muslimi delivered a moving plea before a Senate hearing this week for an end to U.S. drone strikes inside his country. Speaking at the first-ever public congressional hearing on Obama's secret drone and targeted killing program, al-Muslimi offered a rare first-hand account of the suffering that drone warfare wreaks on ordinary people's lives. His family's village of Wessab was hit by a U.S. drone strike last week, leaving five people dead. Educated in the United States as a teenager, al-Muslimi says the drone attacks are turning Yemenis against the country that embraced him.

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277 Million Boston Bombings

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Scheer - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - I list all those dreary statistics to drive home the point that the horror of two pressure cooker bombs in Boston that has so traumatized us should help us grasp the significance of the 1.8 million bomblets dropped in Iraq over a three-week period. Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians?

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Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dave Gilson - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings Perhaps the most unusual thing about the Boston Marathon bombing is that it happened at all. While we've seen all manner of terrorist bomb plots since September 11—the Times Square bomber , the underwear bomber , even the guys who fantasized about destroying the Sears Tower —all have been thwarted by the FBI, the perpetrators' own bumbling, or both . If one or both of the suspects in last week's attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were motivated by radical Islamic beliefs , then they will have the dubious distinction of being the first domestic jihadists to have set off a bomb on American soil since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. While America has been fixated on the threat of Islamic terrorism for more than a decade, all but a few domestic terror plots have failed. Between September 11 and the end of 2012, there were no successful bomb plots by jihadist terrorists in the United States. Jihadists killed 17 ...

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‘Political groups in Washington downplayed Chechen threat’

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

rt.com - Apr. 22 (Opinion) -

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American Right-Wingers Are No Longer Conservative — They're Extremists

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Joshua Holland, Ian Millhiser - Apr. 21 (Interview) - when North Carolina says they are not bound by the First Amendment, what they’re saying is that this -- and this is the most revolutionary moment in American history – it changed our conception of what it means to be a person living under a government. No longer are we saying that there are these governments and they have different powers and they fight out amongst themselves and that’s how we figure out what our liberties are. Now, we live in a world where everyone has rights just because they are a human being, and that’s what North Carolina is rebelling against.

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Something America and China Could Do Together

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Psychology Today - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - Confucius taught that a harmonious relationship is one in which both partners take care to protect each other’s dignity. To affirm dignity is to confirm belonging and grant a voice in decision-making while disallowing exclusion, paternalism, and coercion

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Authoritarian Allies & the Myth of U.S. 'Leverage'

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Peter Hart - Apr. 20 (Opinion) - The most notable part of the article is the fact that Whitlock has a U.S. official essentially agreeing with a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy: "The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass," acknowledged a senior U.S. official who specializes in Africa but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. "Whereas other countries that don't cooperate, we ream them as best we can."

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USA Today: Venezuelans Voted for High Unemployment and Food Shortages

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Peter Hart - Apr. 20 (Comment) - Venezuelans know a different reality. As noted by FAIR, poverty was cut in half from 2002-10; extreme poverty was even more dramatic. Access to healthcare and free education increased. As Mark Weisbrot argued in the Guardian, this record was a notable turnaround from the pre-Chavez years. Unemployment is currently estimated to be 8 percent in Venezuela–but it was above 14 percent when Chavez took office in 1999. Inflation is estimated at 20.9 percent–but it peaked near 120 percent in 1996. That's not to say there aren't significant problems in the country. But a news report that chooses to ignore this part of the Chavez legacy is a bit like saying Venezuelans have been fooled about the state of their own lives.

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What These Tweets Tell Us About Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dana Liebelson, Adam Serwer - Apr. 19 - More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings Dzhokhar Tsarnaev apparently maintained an active Twitter account. A high school classmate of the at-large Boston Marathon bombing suspect has confirmed to BuzzFeed that the @J_tsar Twitter account belongs to Tsarnaev, and multiple Twitter users who say they are friends of Tsarnaev have pointed to this Twitter feed as his. The tweets on the @J_tsar account cover a variety of topics, including religion and pop culture, and contain much trash talk about women. The user of this account kept on tweeting after the bombing. On April 15, hours after the attack, he tweeted, "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people." On April 17, he tweeted, "I'm just a stress free kind of guy." Here's a sampling of odd, mundane, and chilling tweets from the account from the past year, including one in which the user laments, "the value of human life ain't shit nowadays." I'm a stress free kind of guy — Jahar (@J_tsar) April 17, ...

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