Source: The Indypendent by Arun Gupta January 8, 2010 If one case encapsulates the disaster that is the Obama administration, it may be the dustup over the A.I.G. bonuses last March. Recall that extreme gambling by A.I.G. Financial Products nearly crashed the world in 2008, necessitating a taxpayer bailout of $182.3 billion (and counting). Following this, A.I.G., now [...]

Source: ZNet by Farooq Sulehria January 3, 2010 When reasoning ends, believing begins. In case, religion does not offer self-serving explanations, fantastic conspiracy theories come in handy. Like religion, conspiracy theories by over-simplifying complex political questions, save you the mental labour. Why, for instance, strain one’s nerves to understand Marx’s dull essays on economy to understand the current [...]

Source: TomDispatch by Michael T. Klare January 5, 2010 As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all.  If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like [...]

Source: Democracy Now! January 6, 2010 In Afghanistan, hundreds have taken to the streets of Kabul and elsewhere to protest the US killing of civilians. The incident that has sparked the most outrage took place in eastern Kunar on December 27th, when ten Afghans, eight of them schoolchildren, were killed. According to the Times of London, US-led [...]

Source: Christian Science Monitor From smoky halls to the rugged mountains of Yemen, locals are worried that their country – threatened more by poverty and water shortages than terrorism, they say – could turn into another Afghanistan. by Michael Horton January 5, 2010 Sanaa, Yemen – Amid an intensifying US effort to curb Al Qaeda activity in Yemen, locals [...]

Source: TomDispatch by Tom Engelhardt & Nick Turse January 3, 2010 According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger.  We don’t name our years, but if we did, this one might prospectively be called the Year of the Assassin. We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable kingdom.  After all, the shock [...]

Source: New Stateman by John Pilger December 30, 2009 In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.” Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. [...]

Source: Sydney Morning Herald by Anne Davies January 2, 2010 WASHINGTON – Just before Christmas, the US President, Barack Obama, signed into law one of his country’s biggest aid pledges of the year. It was bound not for Africa or any of the many struggling countries on the World Bank’s list. It was a deal for $US2.77 billion ($3 [...]

Source: Truthdig by Chris Hedges December 28, 2009 Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo [...]

Source: Hornberger’s Blog by Jacob G. Hornberger December 28, 2009 To justify the federal government’s massive post-9/11 infringements on civil liberties, the proponents of Big Government have sometimes said, “There hasn’t been another major terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11. ” I have responded with the following: “But if there had been another major terrorist attack, you [...]