contributions

The Bush administration is subverting the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
On January 31, the People for the American Way publicly protested that the Justice Department claimed it would cost the group a minimum of $372,999 for the feds to search their files (in response to an FOIA request from the group) for cases in which the Justice Department requested secret proceedings in court involving immigrants arrested and held after 9/11.
This is typical of the how the Bush administration is (…)

Three Dead American soldiers in Iraq
Iraq is George Bush’s waterloo and he is dragging all of us with him into this black hole of deceit, hubris, humiliation and heartache : Allen L Roland 7/30/05, ICH, The Muqtada al-Sadr followers say they have collected the signatures of one million Iraqis asking that U.S. and other Coalition troops leave the country immediately.
In his sermon at an East Baghdad mosque, Shaikh Abdul Zahra al-Suwaidi told the congregation, "We obtained the Iraqi (…)

He’s backed by the bully-boys of big business, by the industrial and financial clout of organised capital, by the mighty corporate unionism flexing its muscles at the big end of town.
Now that Howard, their hard-hatted, hard-hearted, heavy-hitting henchman, has achieved a closed shop in the Reps and the Senate, black-banning anyone and anything his comrades among the CEOs don’t like, it’s time to strike. Against what’s left of the trade unions; against those millions of Australians (…)

Lula’s "Workers’ Regime" : plummets in Stew of Corruption
By JAMES PETRAS
"Nobody has the moral authority to discuss ethics with me" President Lula da Silva
Corruption has devastated the Lula regime in Brazil. Every sector of Lula’s "Workers Party"(PT) has been implicated in bribery, fraud, vote buying, theft of public funds, failure to report illicit campaign financing and a host of other felonious behavior, revealed almost daily between May-July 2005. All of Lula’s closest and most (…)

The new hard-left grouping in Germany, the Left Party, is sending tremors across the political landscape. But, the party’s economic program has industry groups and economists shaking their heads, and worrying.
It calls itself the Left Party, die Linkspartei in German, and it’s making an already unusual election campaign even stranger. Made up of the successors to East Germany’s communist party, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), and disaffected left-wingers who split off from the (…)

The Tribal Mind
By David Dale
Australians are going through a period of anxiety and pessimism, eager to escape their lives but afraid to travel. So they are cocooning themselves in suburbia and retreating into fantasy. And now you know why Desperate Housewives has taken our land by storm.
When this column wondered last week why Channel Seven’s Monday night dramedy was more popular here than anywhere else in the world, we didn’t realise the answer was in the annual Ipsos Mackay report (…)

By Clayton Hallmark
Have our Italian friends consumed too much of MSG or prions in their pepperoni? Have they thus taken leave of their senses that they allow the US CIA to get away with kidnapping persons from Italy? Have they taken so many steroids in bulking up for the soccer game that they are so deficient of testosterone that they will not bring the 19 US spies in the Abu Omar opera to justice? Surely if the US can kidnap persons it wants from Milan’s ancient streets, then Italy (…)

We all know that Bush & Co Lied to start this war, that the nation would be outraged if not for the $$ media. Still, we know that nothing else matters- Bush shouldn’t be appointing judges or ambassadors, he should be in behind bars.
We need to ask each and every one of our CongressCritters why they are not outraged by the revelations of the Downing Street Memo, by the looting of our tax dollars by Halliburton- why did the House investigate steroids but ignore the $9 Billion ’lost’ by (…)

WORLD TRIBUNAL ON IRAQ � ISTANBUL 23RD -27TH JUNE 2005
27th June 2005, Istanbul
In February 2003, weeks before an illegal war was initiated against Iraq, millions of people protested in the streets of the world. That call went unheeded. No international institution had the courage or conscience to stand up to the threat of aggression of the US and UK governments. No one could stop them. It is two years later now. Iraq has been invaded, occupied, and devastated. The attack on Iraq is an (…)

HOW MUCH DO I LOATHE THEE 2?
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
Part Two
By Peter Fredson
August 1, 2005
I was puzzled by the ascension of George W. Bush to the highest office of our country. After perusing hundreds of stored files pertaining to his life, I am still puzzled. There is a missing element.
I believe it has to do with the Far Right penchant for secrecy, coupled with a strategy of stealth, misdirection, and simple imposition. At sometime in the indoctrination of Bush by a (…)