BY NOAM CHOMSKY Dateline: July 29th, 2007

If the Bush-Cheney/Neocon manufactured war against Iran becomes a reality, Tehran could quickly end up in a heap of radioactive rubble.
Published on Saturday, July 28, 2007 by Zmag.org

The following is an excerpt from Noam Chomsky’s new book Interventions published by City Lights Books.

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington’s basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important.

As was the norm during the Cold War, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq-a country otherwise free from any foreign interference, on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world. Read the rest of this entry »

BY JOHN BUCHANAN
Originally at The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003

Jokes may not be too far from the mark when one studies the historical record, most of it carefully kept under wraps for decades.

PART ONE

WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his “enemy national” partners. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington DC
Dateline: Saturday September 25, 2004 / The Guardian (UK)

Far-fetched satire or irrefutable revelations?

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president

Read the rest of this entry »

BY CHIP BERLET
Originally at The Public Eye - Vol. 18, No. 3

Introduction

John Calvin (Jean Cauvin), the main architect of one of protestantism’s most severe sects, and moral inspiration for New England’s Puritans. The curious thing is that while Calvinism, in general, provided a big legitimacy boost to capitalism, the Puritans hewed to a doctrine that had much more in common with old Catholic doctrine in regard to commerce.

Why are increased sentences and the severe punishment of those convicted of crimes so popular and prevalent in U.S. culture? Since the late 1970s our society has accepted increasingly rigid and vengeful ways of punishing those convicted of crimes. Behind this trend is the momentum of 250 years of a strain of religious philosophies brought to our shores by Pilgrims, Puritans, and other colonial settlers influenced by a Protestant theology called Calvinism. Today, many ideas, concepts, and frames of reference in modern American society are legacies of the history of Protestantism as it divided and morphed through Calvinism, revivalist evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. Even people who see themselves as secular and not religious often unconsciously adopt many of these historic cultural legacies while thinking of their ideas as simply common sense. Read the rest of this entry »

BY CHARLEY REESE

Many Jews oppose Zionism, including some belonging to highly orthodox religious groups, such as Neturei Karta, who are well noted for their valor in protesting Israeli policies.

One of the myths created by the Israeli lobby is that Jews around the world are unanimous in their support of Israel, regardless of what it does. That’s not true and never has been true. Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM

“People on the March” (quarto stato)—An idealization tableau of the working class in Italy.

Editors’ Note: This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. In our view this chapter by Blum raises a perennial question, namely, who gives the US the “right” to interfere at will as if it owned the world? American exceptionalism, inculcated among the US population by ubiquitous indoctrination, is nothing more than a malignant form of collective narcissism, a runaway case of selfishness blocking a decent analysis of our own actions. How would Americans feel if a superpower many, many times stronger than the US chose to meddle in US elections to the extent we routinely have done in other countries, and even openly threaten military action if the outcome of said elections was not to its liking? Is that the way to spread democracy and build good will around the world?

As Blum himself puts it:

“If you flip over the rock of American foreign
policy of the past century, this is what crawls out …

invasions … bombings … overthrowing
governments … suppressing movements
for social change … assassinating
political leaders … perverting
elections … manipulating labor unions …
manufacturing “news” … death squads …
torture … biological warfare …
depleted uranium … drug trafficking …
mercenaries …

It’s not a pretty picture.
It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.”

Chapter 2. Italy 1947-1948—Free elections: Hollywood style

“Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States,” declared the American Attorney General, Tom Clark, in January 1948.{1} Read the rest of this entry »

PAUL HARRIS, New York Correspondent Dateline: The Observer (U>K>)| Sunday July 22, 2007


Henry Kravis, Jewish-American financier of legendary fame for his LBO sleight-of-hands, and loyal Bush/GOP supporter. The cesspoool of high finance has rarely produced an specimen as disgusting as Kravis, and all his millions can’t hide that simple fact. He more or less personifies the mores of the American plutocracy. Unfortunately, he’s got plenty of playmayes and imitators

The American Dream of riches for all is turning into a nightmare of inequality. But a backlash is brewing, reports Paul Harris in New York.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Be sure to read our companion article by Michael Parenti, “The Rich are Our of Sight,” right on this journal.

On the surface, Mark Cain works for a time-share company. Members pay a one-off sum to join and an annual fee. They then get to book holiday time in various destinations around the globe. But Solstice clients are not ordinary people. They are America’s super-rich and a brief glance at its operations reveal the vast and still widening gulf between them and the rest of America. Read the rest of this entry »

BY MICHAEL PARENTI (Originally published in December 2002)

Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen is rich, very rich, and he’s not afraid to show it. Just like fellow softcom billionaire Larry Ellison’s boat, “Rising Sun”, which boasts a 452 ft displacement, at 416 ft long (approx. 1.5 city blocks), ‘The Octopus’ is one of the world’s largest yachts (it’s more like a cruise liner) and cost a whopping $200 million. [The Octopus] has a permanent crew of 60, including several former Navy Seals. It has two helicopters, seven boats, a 10 man submarine and a remote controlled vehicle for crawling on the Ocean floor. The submarine has the capacity to sleep eight for up to two weeks underwater.

On average, owners must spend a minimum of 10 percent of the purchase price every year to keep these yachts in good working condition and cover crew salaries. Therefore “Octopus” which cost Allen US$200 million requires a US$20 million annual budget.
Read the rest of this entry »

Courtesy is one thing, but did Pelosi have to applaud so…enthusiastically?

NOTE from CJO editors: When it happens, Americans won’t be able to say they didn’t get enough warnings. The lights are being shut off in this nation, one by one, while most of the public remains glassy-eyed, glued to the latest idiocy performed by one of the innumerable decadent movie starlets of this patethically self-indulgent culture. And as the Constitution gets torn asunder, piece by piece, don’t count on that old hypocritical whore, the corporate media, or the US Congress, to sound the alarm. If anything, given their abject careerism, incurable stupidity, and disconnection from the realities that define life for most people, they can be counted on to compound the problem by serving as propaganda megaphones for the tyrants in the making. Here’s some of the accumulating signs that catastrophe is imminent unless we serve notice to the usurpers in Washington that the American people will not allow the Constitution and what remains of our democracy to be buried under a wave of manufactured pretexts. Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM
This is a chapter (the Introduction) from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum, 1987 edition

American troops parade in Vladivostok, Siberia, in 1918, as part of a multinational intervention force to overthrow the new Soviet government.

Our fear that communism might someday
take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.–Michael Parenti(1)

It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: “You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was “to be as rich and as wise as an American”. What happened?” (2) Read the rest of this entry »