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Hoping without Sleeping in El Salvador: The 2009 Presidential Elections, an International Observer's Perspective
Photos and Text by Luis Rivas, May 2009
"My delegation was made up as follows: Perla (unsure of her profession), Gaily (UCLA film student), Romél (UCLA film student), Claudia (Oakland/Bay Area lawyer), Parish (lawyer), Carla (unsure of her profession), Eyvin (lawyer with the Los Angeles County Public Defender, with a Ché tattoo on his shoulder like mine) and myself (sex shop worker, though I made it a point to tell most that I work in a regular video store)."
An American Outrage: Bernie, AIG, and Us
by Rosemary and Walter Brasch, April 2009
"We, as a nation, are outraged that executives at failed insurance giant AIG are receiving millions in bonuses paid for by taxpayer funds. In Congress, conservatives and liberals, many of whom were part of the problem of the subprime mortgage crisis, have united for the first time in years and have expressed their outrage. The President, who inherited this mess, is outraged. The media who had failed to adequately report this mess are outraged."
The Semantics of Illusion
by Jeff Gore, April 2009
"It was easy to be fooled into thinking that our financial system was a legitimate enterprise with "solid foundations." After all, the system seemed to work well for our parents. When it was our turn to invest, we were dazzled (and confused) by complicated terms typed on elaborate contracts printed on expensive letterhead, which were pushed across a rich mahogany table by men in crisp, clean suits with large salaries and offices in glassy skyscrapers."
Left Out of Obama's Health Care Summit
by Helen Redmond, April 2009
"Watching the breakout sessions streaming live over the Internet was both infuriating and surreal. The "stakeholders" sat side by side at the same table, laughing and smiling — among them, CEOs responsible for a health care crisis that has left 50 million Americans uninsured and that causes the needless deaths of 18,000 and 100,000 people every year, depending on who is doing the estimating."
Hip-Hop in the Crosshairs
by Tolu Olorunda, April 2009
"It must be clearly understood that the Hip-Hop industry has neither the will nor the desire to promote prophetic voices within the Hip-Hop realm — history has taught us that bitter lesson. Hip-Hop executives, disproportionately White and over 50-years of age, would rather have mega-star puppets, masqueraded as artists, who provide comfort to White Supremacist ideologies..."
Louise in Afghanistan
by Louise Landes Levi, March 2009
"In Kandahar, as said, you meet the beautiful boy from the train and you and him and his traveling companions all live together in a yellow room on a side street of the city. Osama Bin Laden isn't there yet. No one is there, only the Medieval Afghanis. One day you go to a village built on stilts. All the men and all the women and all the children are living on houses built on stilts. and all the men and all the women and maybe even all the children are smoking hashish, but not you."
A New Afghanistan Nightmare
by Ramzy Baroud, March 2009
"When US envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke met with Afghanistan's 'democratically' installed President Hamid Karzai in Kabul on February 14th, he may have just learned of the historic significance of the following day. February 15th commemorates the end of the bloody Russian campaign against Afghanistan (August 1978-February 1989)."
The Problem with "A Nation of Cowards"
by Bill Noxid, March 2009
"The most disturbing consequence of the election of the first African-American president is the delusional rush to pretend that this country that was founded (and continues to function) on genocide and slavery, is somehow 'past' racism. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth, and the fact that society as a whole still refuses to face it is — as Attorney General Eric Holder stated clearly — nothing less than cowardice."
Toxic Plans for Toxic Assets
by Stephen Lendman, March 2009
"'What Geithner should have said was we have a horrible problem of too much borrowing, too much debt, and too much consumption. You know what we are going to do — we're going to borrow more, go deeper in debt, and consume more....These guys don't know what they're doing (and it's why) I'm shorting' the market."
Spirituality vs. Ecology: The Myth of Spiritual Ecology
by Andrew P., March 2009
"'After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.' These words were supposedly uttered in a public testimony to the US Congress by former President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. Although there is no evidence that he actually said this, his testimony is often repeated in progressive circles as it succinctly encapsulates the environmentally-destructive perspective of America's religious right."
Labouring on Labour Day
by Barry Pomeroy, February 2009
"In order that your ability to pick potatoes might be examined more closely than an interview can give credence to, in order that you might gain the experience necessary to get a potato picking job in the future, in case you are too young to be a serious potato picker and are therefore not worth wasting the effort of a generous boss in training you, I ask you now to pick some potatoes."
Islamic Rationalism and Environmentalism
by Zeeshan Hasan, February 2009
"So monotheist faith requires us to ultimately give up on rationality as a means of understanding reality. This may seem like a high price to pay, but the only thing that we actually lose is metaphysical speculation; metaphysics being the philosophical investigation of reality through pure logic. However, the fact is that metaphysics never had a strong basis to begin with."
World Bank Help For Pakistan's Education — A Poisoned Chalice?
by Pervez Hoodbhoy, February 2009
'A 2006 World Bank report on the HEC's performance, issued by a team led by Benoît Millot, reads like a paean to the HEC. Written in impeccable English, and embellished with impressive charts and diagrams, this 109-page report finds no fault, nor questions any assumption of the-then prevailing authorities, and proclaims that "HEC has placed quality improvement of the higher education sub-sector at the centre of its agenda".'
The Celebration Will Not Be Televised
by Daniel Barenblatt, February 2009
"A number of people I spoke with in New York said they could not remember experiencing anything like the collective, heartfelt expressions of euphoria: The cheers, applause, dancing, group hugs, whooping and cheering, curb-side partying, strangers high-fiving, puffing victory cigars down sidewalk strolls and all-around champagne-popping involving everyone in sight, into the wee-hours of the morning."
Beyond Left and Right: A Spectrum of Ideological Vapidity
by C. Derick Varn, February 2009
"The language of human rights is fundamentally either dishonest or imperialist: dishonest in that it assumes universality when there is almost no way to justify it without appealing to the God (or, more subtly, natural law) or it is imperialist in that framework of rights given by the state should be exported to the world."
Focus On The Family's Toxic Corn Pone Letter From 2012
by Robert Weitzel, December 2008
"Commander in Chief Obama proves to be a total wimp, which emboldens Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists who eventually seize control of Iraq, imprisoning, torturing [imitation is the ultimate form of flattery] and putting to death millions of "American sympathizers" in that country."
Is There Such a Thing As Society?
by Aseem Shrivastava, December 2008
'The question is far from rhetorical. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister during the 1980s, and one of the chief architects of the economic policies that lie discredited on the heap of economic history today, once dared to say that "there is no such thing as society." She added: "there are individual men and women and there are families." That's all. We live in a world of Robinson Crusoes, each maximizing private gains for themselves and their separate families.
Bankers' Banks: The Role of Central Banks in Banking Crises
by Sam Vaknin, December 2008
"Ultimately, the state is the mother of all insurers, the master policy, the supreme underwriter. When markets fail, insurance firm recoil, and financial instruments disappoint — the government is called in to pick up the pieces, restore trust and order and, hopefully, retreat more gracefully than it was forced to enter."
Where have you been all these years?
by Elisha Porat, December 2008
"They won't need to wait, like me, ten years and more. They owe nothing. Not to the communal farm, not to the sheepfold, not to the young family that I had established. They won't have to hide, won't have to flee the call that prods them to sit down with a notebook and write. They are students, single, free, flitting between the centers of Hebrew literature."
When Spencer Met Hannibal: Recreational Cannibalism in the New American Century
by Jonathan Penton, December 2008
"It is the styleless, the stuttering, and the slovenly that Tom Bradley, expatriate, has championed with Lemur . And since it goes without saying that the ultimate American ambition is to become a newsworthy serial killer, it is only natural that he should choose this milieu for his heroic call to the average."
Some Thoughts on Obama
by David Rovics, November 2008
"Whether South or North, the prisons are filled with mostly dark-skinned people from places where you can graduate from high school without having learned how to read, where you can get asthma from breathing the air, where the police shoot first and ask questions later. They're in prison, but Barack Obama's not, he's on the TV giving a humble victory speech, quoting Lincoln."
Kill Jim Liebowitz
by Olde English, November 2008
This film is a work of satirical fiction. Any resemblance to any actual politicians, industries, or human behavioral patterns is purely the fault of somebody else.
Wrecked Iraq: What the Good News from Iraq Really Means
by Michael Schwartz, November 2008
"Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple — usually front page — reports on the country, replacing them with meager meals of mostly inside-the-fold summary stories. On broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went by without a mention of the war."
World Food Day: Global Crises' Double Standards
by Ramzy Baroud, November 2008
'The 25th annual World Food Day, marked on 16 October, was an occasion whose arrival and passing received little media attention or governmental fanfare. Evidently, much of the world media and governments are consumed with an economic crisis of epic proportions, which is perceived in the US as the worst such upheaval since the Great Depression. In the rest of the world, it's depicted as the worst economic crisis in recent memory or, as the BBC termed it, "the most tumultuous times on record in the global financial markets."'
This Time Is Different
by Stephen Lendman, November 2008
"Mountains of debt and multiple imploding bubbles are the problems. The housing one especially crucial for millions and the states where they live. It hits property tax revenues. Sales taxes from furniture, appliances, construction materials and other housing related products. Incomes taxes also from employment cutbacks at the same time demand for city services is increasing. Instead they're being cut for public health, education, the indigent, the elderly and disabled, and public workforces. All of which makes a bad situation worse. And according to some astute observers, it's only the beginning."
Bringing R-Evolution to Poetry: Roque Dalton et. al. for the 9/11 World
by Leigh Herrick, November 2008
"A poetry that fails to come into consciousness about the forces that will oppose it as a counter-force is a poetry that will fail to assist in any profound and permanent social change for those suffering under the oppressive structures within such a paradigm that the poetic consciousness would hope to address. Only by changing these structures will the inhumanity involved in them ever be arrested; only through an evolution in thinking can there exist an evolution in being that would lead to processes lending themselves to the dismantling of non-egalitarian society."
an excerpt from Art and Technology
by Michael Harold, November 2008
"Sometimes we call it entertainment. Sometimes we call it education. Sometimes we call it politics, or business or religion. But regardless of what we call it, we never allow people to become complacent in their response to the stimuli around them. We are always introducing new categories of stimulation and stimulus response. That is why the world loves our culture and wants to emulate us. Even when they hate our government, they still love our culture, our capacity to make people watch TV, for example."
It's the Derivatives, Stupid!: Why Frannie, Freddie, and AIG All Had to Be Bailed Out
by Ellen Brown, October 2008
"The Fed is buying an insurance company? Where exactly is that covered in the Federal Reserve Act? The Associated Press calls it a "government takeover," but this is not your ordinary "nationalization" like the purchase of Fannie/Freddie stock by the U.S. Treasury. The Federal Reserve has the power to print the national money supply, but it is not actually a part of the U.S. government. It is a private banking corporation owned by a consortium of private banks."
The Marriott Bombing: Pakistan's '9/11?'
by Beena Sarwar, October 2008
"The attack was symbolically timed. It overshadowed the newly elected President's maiden address to the joint parliamentary session of the National Assembly (elected representatives of the federal parliament) and the Senate (upper house) hours earlier. Beefed up security ahead of the address is believed to have deflected the attack from the National Assembly, which may have been its original target."
Getting Out the Bling Vote
by Joe Bageant, reprinted October 2008
Joe Bageant, a citizen of the United State of America known as Virginia, moved to Belize in January, 2007 to escape America's lifestyle and worldview. In January 2008, he wrote this article about the February 2008 national elections in Belize. We reprint it now, a month before the U.S. elections, in the hopes that our readers will take discomfort in the different perspective.
Subverting Democracy Through Electoral Fraud
by Stephen Lendman, October 2008
"Even though the Constitution, Amendments, other laws and High Court rulings prohibit voting discrimination, violations, in fact, are common and abusive. In addition, no law ensures the universal right to vote under one uniform standard the way it is in most countries. States instead can set their own procedures and norms as long as they set don't conflict with federal laws, but this created a patchwork of 50 different systems no democracy should tolerate."
Leaving It to Beaver: Not the Best Idea
by Timber Masterson, August 2008
"Take the time the boys sent away for a genuine, Florida alligator, and conspired to keep it in the bathroom of the family house. Predictably, the 'gator outgrew the bathroom, and they relocated it to the basement and, to the neighborhood kids, charged ten cents for a quick peek. They named him after Captain Jack, a man who owned an alligator farm, and freely dispenses critical information on the care of this new installation to the family."
Peace Is Unpatriotic
by Hogeye Bill, August 2008
"Those of us who want peace, and are not devoted to serving the state's rulers or bleeding for their ambitions, are decidedly unpatriotic. We think the State is wrong, we think the rulers are criminals, we loathe the state — the mass-murdering institution of war and plunder."
Ya Gotta Believe?
by Mickey Z., August 2008
"Humans behave in accordance with how they perceive their surroundings. They perceive their surroundings in accordance with how they've been taught. How they've been taught helps to cultivate beliefs. Like many aspects of human psychology and neurology, however, the origin of our beliefs is a topic up for grabs."
A Defence of Religion
by Iftekhar Sayeed, August 2008
"Above all, the great innovation of the French Revolution was the creation of the citizen-soldier-voter nexus. The Declaration 'consecrated the principle of election by or through the People'. The deification of the people had begun: the French people deified, the Germans soon reacted by deifying the German people. Finer quotes Heine as having anticipated Nazi Germany 100 years before the event..."
Becoming Posthuman: Toward a Redefinition
by Brandon Chan-Yung and Louise Norlie, July 2008
"The posthuman resembles a human like a stunt double resembles an actor performing some dangerous feat. However, the stunt double and actor are both anonymous, both acting for a hidden camera, and both watched only by an absent eye. The actor is acknowledged and credited by the simulation, and becomes simulated. The stunt becomes an event that is carbon copied and exported across information superhighways. The original stunt is not representation; it is a true story."
The Money Game
by Andrew Peterson, July 2008
"Is it any wonder that most nations, including the United States and the Third World, have spiraling debt, despite large increases in productivity over the past few decades? And this growing national debt, of course, further increases our tax burden as we are the ones who ultimately have to foot the bills for the interest."
Economics - Psychology's Neglected Branch
by Sam Vaknin, July 2008
"Economics—to the great dismay of economists—is merely a branch of psychology. It deals with individual behaviour and with mass behaviour. Many of its practitioners sought to disguise its nature as a social science by applying complex mathematics where common sense and direct experimentation would have yielded far better results."
Disaster Statism: A Review of Naomi Klein's Book The Shock Doctrine
by Hogeye Bill, July 2008
"Klein makes a big deal out of Milton Friedman's assertion that reforms are best made during crises. This is puzzling, since virtually every reformer/revolutionary, from Tom Paine to Margaret Sanger to Karl Marx, has said the same thing—that you need to strike while the iron is hot. Klein tries to construe the crisis can be opportunity idea as unique to Friedman and evidence of evil intent. It is neither."
Hope Is for Suckers
by Mickey Z., June 2008
"McDonald's doesn't waste time hoping things will go its way when its days are chock filled with brainwashing, killing, poisoning, destroying... and counting its profits. Hope never enters into the equation."
Pope Benedict Solves Mystery of Pedophile Priests ... Sort of
by Robert Weitzel, June 2008
"In 2002, when the scope of the pedophile priest scandal in the United States was becoming too obvious for even the Vatican to continue to ignore, Rottweiler Ratzinger claimed that the sexual abuse allegations against Catholic clergy were part of a 'planned campaign' that was 'intentional [and] manipulated' to discredit the church."
