contributions

Since the beginning of recorded time, history has taught one immutable lesson: Evil is resilient, and even when it appears to be vanquished, it often reemerges in a different form. This resiliency is dramatically increased in environments where people who dream of a better world are unable to speak because nobody can hear them, or unwilling to speak due to fear or intimidation. In such milieus any hope for progress or positive social change is more illusory than real.
The people of the (…)

Cockburn Visits Brother in Afghanistan: CBC News
"It’s a long discussion on whether we should be in Afghanistan - whether anyone should be in Afghanistan. But since we are and since we’ve come this far, I don’t think it’s appropriate to leave.."
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/...

The word from The White House’s Briefing Room is that Obama is going to continue the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001 by the Bush administration.
The full briefing is available below, but before reading it, it might be worth while reading the following quote from George Orwell’s 1984, it should help put things into perspective.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth (…)

The Boomers are Out of Time – And Out of Money
By Bill Bonner, 09/08/09 London, England
Clowns to the left of us…jokers to the right…
The Simpleton’s Analysis:
Consumers cut back. The economy sank.
Now, government must take action. It must help people out and take up the slack.
The downturn took $12 trillion off Americans’ net worth. The feds have pledged about $12 trillion to fix the problem.
But wait, where does government get any money?
Hey, they borrow it, just like (…)

China to Issue Government Bonds in Hong Kong
By Tang Xiangyang, 2009-09-11
China will sell 6 billion yuan of government bonds in Hong Kong for the first time later this month, according to a statement posted to the Ministry of Finance’s (MOF) website on Tuesday.
The 6 billion yuan (＄876 million US dollars) worth of bonds will be yuan-dominated and sold on September 28. But the ministry did not provide any detail about who would handle the bond issue.
China has recently expressed its (…)

Moroccan Association for Human Rights
CENTRAL OFFICE. Communiqué
In solidarity with the 850 SMESI workers suspended from work, the MAHR is organizing a caravan of solidarity towards Khouribga The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (MAHR) followed with concern at both local and central levels the file developments of the 850 SMESI society employees who worked permanently since 2001 in this society belonging to the OCP Group. In consequence of the suspension of all workers and (…)

The business of death and destruction is booming for weapons manufacturers operating in the United States of America.
As reported in the New York Times, according to a new Congressional study, “the United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar.” This is 10-times more than their closest rival, Italy, at $3.7 billion.
Keep in mind that this boom in business is occurring during a global economic (…)

I went to school with a guy who became big in the art world, and that’s how he pronounced it: awe’t. He was from New York. He called himself Reggie in those days, but now he prefers Reginald, thinking it I suppose more befitting of his age and social status. I can understand that. I had an aunt that everybody called "Baby" until she died, in her late 70s, which must have been hard. But Aunt Baby didn’t die in a penthouse, in fact never lived in one, though she did once invest in a racehorse. (…)

It is often pointed out that antisemitism (or anti-Semitism), meaning "anti-Jewish," is a misnomer since the word Semitic, strictly speaking, refers to a number of peoples, including Jews and Arabs, and a number languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. In the case of 9/11 conspiracy theories, however, the term is properly inclusive, since both Arabs, or Muslims, and "Zionists," or Jews, have been fingered as the culprits. The US government conspiracy theory, of course, is that 19 Arabs did (…)

By David Glenn Cox
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A U.S. warplane summoned by German troops fired on hijacked fuel trucks in Afghanistan before dawn on Friday, killing as many as 90 people in an incident that could trigger a backlash against NATO.
A friend of mine was a Vietnam vet and had told me his story of a young Vietnamese child who had run towards the lead armored personnel carrier in the column directly ahead of his own. The boy was perhaps nine or ten, and as he ran towards the (…)