This year's Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America's divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory.
President Barack Obama said he doesn't "begrudge" the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
What we have now is not a free market. It is rather one of the most complete (and awful) instances ever of savvy businessmen capturing a state and the minds of the people who run it. Is this really what the president seeks to endorse?
With trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, policymakers need to scour the federal budget for departments to cut and eliminate. They should start with ones that are not just wasteful, but actively damaging to the economy. Top of the list would be the $60 billion Department of Housing and Urban Development...
Barack Obama was going to be different, or so my fellow antiwar liberals — and a few antiwar conservatives — hoped. He was to herald the end of that uncompromising and unilateral era of preventive war. The hundreds of thousands who joyously greeted the president-elect in Grant Park or the 1.5 million at his inauguration were ecstatic with anticipation. Left-wing pundits wrote excitedly about FDR’s One Hundred Days and projected great plans onto the new Man From Illinois. In countless articles, Republicans were declared brain dead, and the Bush-Cheney policies that got us into Iraq, Afghanistan, and the torture business were buried. One year after those celebrations, it’s the neocons cheering, seeing in Obama’s policies a vindication of the late administration... (for publication 03/01/10)
President Obama proposed last month to freeze government spending on everything other than defense, veterans benefits, homeland security, Medicare and Social Security. The New York Times reported that administration officials depicted the initiative as proof of the president’s ‘seriousness about cutting the budget deficit.’ Such spin may fly in Orwell’s Oceania or Washington, D.C., but if you happen to live in the real world, basic arithmetic tells a far more accurate tale about what is ‘serious.’ The non-defense discretionary spending that Obama aims to reduce now totals $477 billion a year — or just 14 percent of the federal budget. Freezing this outlay would save $25 billion a year, or about 2 percent of the annual $1.4 trillion deficit. Had this plan been part of a government-wide belt-tightening effort, the White House might have been able to call itself ’serious about cutting the budget deficit.’ But the announcement came as the Politico reported that the administration was telling defense contractors of its commitment to ‘steady growth in the Pentagon’s budgets’ — budgets that now top $700 billion a year...
Prepare for an apocalyptic anarchy ending Wall Street's toxic capitalism
By Paul B. Farrell
Be prepared for a massive meltdown. Yes, already the third major bubble-bust of the 21st century, triggered once again by Wall Street's out-of-control Fat Cat Bankers. And it's dead ahead.
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment.
California and states in the Northeast and Midwest are piling up debt, and the economic outlook for many of these states is weak. See how your state stacks up.
There's going to be another crash. The commercial real estate bubble hasn't burst yet. That's going to burst. The credit card debt is so huge right now, it will never be repaid. That's a house of cards waiting to fall. So the crash of '08 is going to look like coming attractions. And we're in for a much, much worse time.
Nato and Afghan troops are preparing for a major offensive against Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan. Ahead of the operation, thousands of civilians have fled their homes. . Many will be going to displacement camps near the capital, Kabul. But as Al Jazeera's David Chater reports, conditions there are dismal.
The bombing of countries and of cities has almost become an everyday occurrence, rationalized not only by our political leaders but also presented by our media as an effective military undertaking and as a perfectly legitimate means to achieve supposedly worthwhile objectives.
While the overall budget deficit will balloon to a staggering $1.6 trillion in 2011, the result of massive tax cuts for the rich, declining revenues, a by-product of capitalism's economic meltdown, imperial adventures abroad and general corporate malfeasance (the old tax-dodge grift), the administration plans to cut $250 billion over three years from non-military "discretionary spending" on domestic social programs.
Could trillion dollar debt kill Obama health care reform?
Hawaii Reporter
by Kathryn Nix
02/10/10
It seems the President’s spending habits have finally caught up with him, threatening to kill a government overhaul of health care. Though President Obama and congressional Democrats continue to insist that health care reform is on the horizon, the increasing national concern over the rising public debt presents an undeniable obstacle...
Last week, the House approved another increase in the national debt ceiling. This means the government can borrow $1.9 trillion more to stay afloat and avoid default. It has been little more than a year since the last debt limit increase, and graphs showing the debt limit over time show a steep, almost vertical trend. It is not likely to be very long before this new ceiling is met and the government is back on the brink between default and borrowing us further into oblivion...
"Last week, when President Obama requested the largest-ever military budget since World War II, hardly anyone batted an eyelash. The Bush years immunized many of us to the shock of colossal defense spending bills skating across the table - and zipping through Congress to sure passage - regardless of shriveling public approval."
When all of these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the Pentagon itself, they increase the fiscal 2009 total by nearly half again, to $901.5 billion.
What is to be done about the idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House, deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of former Vice President Dick Cheney: that Guantánamo was teeming with hardcore terrorists, who couldn’t wait to ‘return to the battlefield’...
The Republican War on...
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rudkla - 12. Jun, 05:44
With FBI Reportedly Investigating...
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