Links between the Council on Foreign Relations and various U.S. corporations and institutions

Immanuel Wallerstein - China and the United States: Rivals, Enemies, Collaborators?

The relations of China and the United States are a major preoccupation of the chattering classes (bloggers, the media, politicians, international bureaucrats). The analysis is usually posed as the relation between the declining superpower, the United States, and the rapidly rising “emergent” country, China. In the western world, the relation is usually defined negatively, China being seen as a “threat.” But threat to whom, and in what sense?

There are some who see China’s “rise” as the resumption of a central position on the globe, a central position that they once held and are now resuming. There are some who see it as something very recent – as China’s new role in the shifting geopolitics and world-economic relations of the modern world-system. FULL STORY

Richard Wolff - Capitalism Hits the Fan (Lecture)

Comparison of news coverage of Occupy Wall Street protests and Tea Party protests on April 15, 2009

Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Occupy Wall Street (Transcript)

We are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.

We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, "Hey, look down!" FULL STORY

Hate Groups Active in United States in 2008

What Special Interests are Bankrolling the 2012 Presidential Candidates?

By: Michael Beckel & Brad Hooker (opensecrets.org)

Last month, most presidential candidates released their first fund-raising reports in what's likely to be the most expensive presidential election in history and the first in which neither majority party candidate participates in the nation's public financing system.

So how do the major candidates stack up in terms of who is bankrolling their campaigns?

A new Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has raised more than 25 percent of his funds this year from the finance, insurance and real estate sector. That's $4.65 million from the financial sector out of $18 million in overall receipts. FULL STORY

Reading List: William Blum - Killing Hope (PDF)

Killing Hope is an exhaustive yet comprehensible look at U.S and CIA interventions since the Second World War. Offering not only a thorough and complete guide, Bloom's work also succeeds at proving that not a single intervention has resulted in greater autonomy or peace.

Both emotional and extremely well grounded in hard evidence, Killing Hope is an excellent resource for the already well read, and the newly interested alike. Bloom offers background information, as well as deeper insight, and never fails to point out the flaws that have been strategically kept secret within the CIA's own files.

WILLIAM BLUM - KILLING HOPE - PDF

US builds drone bases in Africa & Arab Peninsula

By: JoAnne Allen (reuters.com)

The United States is building a ring of secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of an aggressive campaign against al Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing U.S. officials.

One base for the unmanned aircraft is being established in Ethiopia and another base has been installed in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, the newspaper reported. FULL STORY

Maoist Rebel News - China Converting US Debt To Gold

September 17 - Occupy Wall Street

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?

The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.

This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind. If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations. MORE INFO

Mumia Abu-Jamal - Corporate Supremacy Still

Noam Chomsky - U.S. Economic Crisis (Interview)

CNN’s Tea Party partnership: ‘odd’ at best, ‘unethical’ at worst

By: Dylan Stableford (yahoo.com)

Handicapping how presidential candidates perform in debates is a tricky proposition. But in this case, the pundits agree: The co-hosts of Monday night's Republican debate--CNN and the Tea Party Express--made for "one of the oddest political matches in recent memory." FULL STORY

Percentage of U.S. Citizens Under 18 Living in Poverty

Census Data Shows Rising Poverty in U.S.

By: Catherine Dodge (bloomberg.com)

The U.S. poverty rate rose to the highest level in almost two decades and household income fell in 2010, underscoring the lingering impact of the worst economic slump in seven decades.

Data released by the Census Bureau today showed the proportion of people living in poverty climbed to 15.1 percent last year from 14.3 percent in 2009, and median household income declined 2.3 percent. The number of Americans living in poverty was the highest in the 52 years since the U.S. Census Bureau began gathering that statistic. Those figures may have worsened in recent months as the economy weakened. FULL STORY

Jeremy Scahill - Triple Canopy replacing Blackwater in Iraq (Interview)

October 2011 - Stop the Machine! Create a New World!

Stop the Machine! Create a New World!

A Call to Action - Oct. 6, 2011 and onward
October 2011 is the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the 2012 federal austerity budget. It is time to light the spark that sets off a true democratic, nonviolent transition to a world in which people are freed to create just and sustainable solutions.

We call on people of conscience and courage—all who seek peace, economic justice, human rights and a healthy environment—to join together in Washington, D.C., beginning on Oct. 6, 2011, in nonviolent resistance similar to the Arab Spring and the Midwest awakening.

A concert, rally and protest will kick off a powerful and sustained nonviolent resistance to the corporate criminals that dominate our government.

Forty-seven years ago, Mario Savio, an activist student at Berkeley, said, "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

Those words have an even greater urgency today. We face ongoing wars and massive socio-economic and environmental destruction perpetrated by a corporate empire which is oppressing, occupying and exploiting the world. We are on a fast track to making the planet unlivable while the middle class and poor people of our country are undergoing the most wrenching and profound economic crisis in 80 years.

"Stop the Machine! • Create a New World!" is a clarion call for all who are deeply concerned with injustice, militarism and environmental destruction to join in ending concentrated corporate power and taking direct control of a real participatory democracy. We will encourage a culture of resistance—using music, art, theater and direct nonviolent action—to take control of our country and our lives. It is about courageously resisting and stopping the corporate state from destroying not only our inherent rights and freedoms, but also our children’s chance to live, breathe clean air, drink pure water, grow edible natural food and live in peace.

As Mother Jones said, "Someday the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit!"

We are the ones who can create a new and just world. Our issues are connected. We are connected. Join us in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6, 2011, to Stop the Machine.

October2011.org

WikiLeaks: U.S. Troops Executed Iraqi Children In 2006 Raid, According To U.N. Sources

(huffingtonpost.com)

An unclassified U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks contains claims that U.S. forces executed ten Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children aged five or younger, in 2006 and then tried to cover it up.

McClatchy reports that questions from a local U.N. investigator in Iraq, and from Philip Alston, the organization's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions to U.S. military were ignored and have still not been addressed, five years later.

Alston's memo noted that the bodies of the dead civilians, who had all been shot in the head, were handcuffed.

Digital Journal notes that at the time the executions took place:

"U.S. military officials in Iraq said eyewitness accounts of the incident were likely false, and later said the matter warranted no further investigation. The officials refused to reveal unit identities which might have taken part in the killings."

The Pentagon has not commented on the allegations raised by the new cable. FULL STORY

The New American Fascism and the Tea Party

Commenting on how the German working class movement could have stopped his debased regime from gaining power, Hitler once exclaimed, “Only one thing could have stopped our movement - if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.” Today, as capitalism breaks apart, the working class is left with the historical task of organizing itself as a force. Not only against capitalism, but against a radical right-wing that will also attempt to constitute itself as an alternative to the current state of affairs.

Today a new movement in the U.S., commonly known as the “Tea Party,” is finding its place in the back rooms of community centers, in the pews during Sunday church service, and the offices of corporate elites and business owners. And, it is time for its adversaries to respond in kind. Fascist movements, however skewed and modernized, are alive and well in present times. It is foolhardy not to take note of their mobilizing, however juvenile it may look to people aware of the issues. The Tea Party Movement is a neo-fascist movement. FULL STORY