Tag: OWS

Scientists are racing the clock to find a cure for the Pinnochio Effect, as Republican fabulists contend with a frightening and inexplicable period of rapid skull expansion in the post-Trump era.

If you thought the Republican Party couldn't possibly win the upcoming midterm elections in the face of The Moron Presidency and the vaunted Blue...

Facebook is in the tyranny and oppression business now, and business is good. Remember how Donald Trump outraged America last year by leveling anti-fascists with...

Painful Truth 911 Gazillion: There is absolutely zero Liberalism in today’s "NeoLiberalism." The phrase has become a disingenuous euphemism for savage capitalism and class warfare. One...

Americans adopted New York City as a symbol of national grit after 9/11 without realizing we were also adopting its virulent strains of affluenza, class warfare and political corruption.

Used to be that when a strong American leader pushed through necessary reforms they did so even against the tide of public opinion, as Lincoln...

Ever notice how pharmaceutical ads targeting senior citizens always feature younger people with a little fake gray in their hair, who couldn't possibly be over...

Wall Street's treasonous sonsabitches are now destroying U.S. energy security in their locust-like quest for profit growth. Their latest move is to sell America's fossil fuel reserves to the highest bidder and export them for foreign consumption. Our sellout Congress cleared the way during the Christmas dark period with a discreet rider buried in a big appropriations bill, ending the ban on oil exports enacted after the 1973 oil embargo. The U.S. energy industry has used "energy security" for the past 40 years to justify pushing drilling rigs into sensitive environmental areas, like The Arctic and offshore coastal regions such as the Gulf of Mexico. It's also been their justification for fracking - a geographically destabilizing process whereby huge amounts of water are injected into rock formations to fracture them and release the oil and gas trapped within them. Fracking is so volatile that it causes localized earthquakes and leaves local residents with flammable drinking water coming out of their kitchen faucets. Those hefty negatives make sense in the context of national security. Not corporate greed. The premise behind energy security has always been that if we produce enough fossil fuel to meet our own needs we will no longer have to live in fear of the huge economic weapons wielded by The House of Saud and the rest of the OPEC price-fixing cartel. However, that premise always assumed we would consume American oil and natural gas here at home. Why would Wall Street sellout their fellow Americans like this? Because the U.S.-based energy companies playing this game are no longer American. They're multinationals with no national loyalty whatsoever in a new global economic order in which corporations are people, executives and political hookers are royals, and working stiffs like you and I are a perishable commodity to be used up and discarded. (Click here for the rest of this article)

It's hard to believe Osama bin Laden will go down in history as the architect of our democratic society's downfall, but this painful truth is becoming clearer with each passing day as fearful Americans continue to abandon the moral compass that made us great.

What Bin Laden (shown with National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1979, at left) lost on the battlefield after 9/11 he won on U.S. streets and in our living-rooms as we traded in our precious civil liberties for the false security of a venal police state devoted to savage capitalism. Tyranny and corporate greed won the day as institutions as disparate as the Republican and Democratic parties, the American Medical Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce took advantage of that climate of fear to advance Wall Street's message of "unrestricted profit growth by any and all means."

Why did this happen? When did this happen?

To quote U2: "You plant a demon seed, you raise a flower of fire." 

That’s us.

Nothing illustrates these painful truths more clearly than the entitled, hateful trash now seeking the presidency in the sordid Reality TV Show our electoral process has become since Citizens United. To look at hate-mongers like Trump and Cruz and Wall Street sellouts like Clinton is to know, without question, that Osama won his showdown with America and the average American lost. Big-time.

 

At least 93 protesters were arrested this weekend in Chicago when thousands of members of the Occupy Wall Street movement descended on the city to protest a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Two people also were detained by the Secret Service for allegedly attempting to scale protective fencing around the summit at McCormick Place.

Sixty heads of state converged on Chicago for the two-day NATO summit, where they discussed the conflict in Afghanistan and other global issues behind closed doors Saturday and Sunday. Similar meetings of global elites, notably those held each year by the World Economic Forum, have helped funnel jobs to low-wage economies while keeping prices high in the developed economies where the displaced workers live.

Protesters sought to highlight those imbalances and to shine a spotlight on the continuing Afghan War, which began after the 9/11 terror attacks and continues to require 130,000 foreign soldiers. The vast majority are U.S. citizens.

“There’s just a great resonance with the Occupy movement, because if we weren't spending such outrageous amounts on war, we have money for human needs," said Lillian Moats, 65, of Downers Grove, Ill. "It seems like our country's priorities are upside down."