Posts

Showing posts from September, 2009

The Great New Iran ‘Crisis’

Dry Heaves and Sucker Ploys: Written by Chris Floyd Tuesday, 29 September 2009 00:03 http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1847-dry-heaves-and-sucker-ploys-the-great-new-iran-qcrisisq.html The new "Iran crisis" is such a sickening concoction of stupidity and lies that it almost defies comment. It certainly defies contemplation; even to think about it for thirty seconds is enough to bring on a bout of the dry heaves. Fortunately, several other writers -- with iron-clad innards, no doubt -- have boldly waded in and dismantled the deception behind the manufactured hissy fit over Iran's "secret nuclear facility." Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com gives a good overview of the case, which, shucked of all the warmongering frenzy, boils down to this little nubbin of reality: Iran was building a new nuclear enrichment facility, as it is allowed to do by international treaty. The United States and several other Western countries knew about the fa...

Labor Day in a Kleptocracy

[…] We are living through a profound global financial crisis. That crisis has many proximate causes in the governance and deregulation of Wall Street. We have seen the astounding bailout of Bear Stearns using $30 billion plus in public money—Bear Stearns – an investment bank, an enterprise that prided itself on being in the business of cowboy capitalism, business without a safety net. But the real roots of the crisis do not lie on Wall Street. The cause of the crisis can be found in the long-term weakening of the real American economy in an era of globalization—in closed factories, outsourced high tech jobs and low wage jobs with no benefits, and in the unsustainable effort to maintain middle class living standards through borrowing. It is to be found in the reality of lives like that of Kimberly Somsel of Westland Michigan, a member of the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate Working America, an unemployed single mother of two battling breast cancer and facing foreclosure due to a ballooning...