BY STEPHEN LENDMAN Dateline 8-29-7

Peter Coors (standing), scion to family of reactionary tycoons that has distinguished itself for its antilabor practices and support for the most extreme rightwing politicians in the land. He ran for a seat as Colorado’s senator, but lost to Dem Ken Salazar

See Part I at https://bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=241 on this same site.

This article was written to assess the state of working America in the run-up to Labor Day, 2007. Organized labor today is severely weakened following decades of government and business duplicity to crush it.

Part I reviewed the labor movement’s rise in the 19th century and subsequent decline post-WW II and especially in the last three decades. Hope arose for some change in the Democrat-led 100th Congress. A weak effort emerged, but Senate Republicans killed it. Read the rest of this entry »

BY SHAYNE NELSON

Le Scoop: Cécilia Sarkozy (born as Cecilia María Sara Isabel Ciganer, later Ciganer-Albéniz, born November 12, 1957 in Boulogne-Billancourt) is the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy.//PARIS (AFP)—Cecilia Sarkozy is a fiercely independent former model and PR executive unlikely to fit easily into the discreet role of first lady. // Of Jewish-Spanish ancestry, Cecilia’s foreign roots match those of Sarkozy, whose father is a Hungarian immigrant and his mother of Greek Jewish origin.//

After one hundred days on the job, Sarko is being rated by the French press. He gets kudos for putting some leftist bigwigs into his government, and A for energy, but now his spouse, Cecilia, is crowding the headlines. Read the rest of this entry »

BY “ANONYMOUS” | Topical research associate: Auveline Robinson
As published on 8.17.07 by fraternal site, Truthdig


Bloodbath is not a metaphor in Iraq, thanks to the Cheney/Bush war.

Editor’s Note: The author of this article is a contractor who has lived and worked in Baghdad. His identity is known to Truthdig’s editors, but he has written anonymously in order to offer an uncensored account.

I have been living and working in Baghdad for the past 16 months and will be leaving next week for good. I am one of those overpaid Department of Defense contractors, or, as some would call me, a “war profiteer.” Yes, I have profited. I am out of debt and have money saved. But it has cost me. I am a changed man. I have become hardened. I almost feel like a zombie. Read the rest of this entry »

BY SHAYNE NELSON

One of those sonorous buses, referred to by the author.

Paris the way it really is these days—the good, the bad, the ugly, and the plain annoying. The city has changed, warns the author. It’s no longer a Vincent Minelli “American in Paris” backdrop, and probably never was.

[CLICK HERE TO WATCH ONE OF THESE BUSES IN ACTUAL ACTION, AS RECORDED BY THE AUTHOR.]
In Paris of the Fifties, cars and trucks were already a nuisance, but at least they were silent. Because honking was illegal, and drivers universally respected the law. I realize that this is difficult to believe in this day and age, but it was so. Proof of the fact was shown in an article in Life magazine in 1957. The editors asked the Paris police for permission to drive around Paris honking for an hour or two, in order to photograph peoples’ reactions in the Paris streets. They got the permission, and got the photos of shocked anger by the Parisians, and thus provided proof of how the no-honking law was generally respected in those days. It was one of the things about Paris that made living there wonderful. Read the rest of this entry »

BY STEVEN BEST

A “downed” cow dragged to slaughter. Transportation to the slaughterhouse is just the culmination of her awful fate. “Downers” are animals who have been severely injured or become ill in the process of being raised “for food.”

Other “downers”—this time a couple of hogs, one of which cannot stand at all, also waiting to be taken to the abattoir. How much suffering must transpire before humans start paying real attention to our species’ atrocious tyranny over fellow creatures? Although many will surely deny it, including quite a few on the Left, it’s clear that human supremacist attitudes easily qualify as the earliest and least recognized form for fascism. Factory farms, by treating living, breathing animals as mere cogs in an ruthless industrial profit machine, are one of its most obscene manifestations. How long are we going to allow this to go on?

“Animal liberation may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective.” —Peter Singer

“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the `final frontier.’” —Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer

Introduction: Framing the Unframed Issue

It seems lost on most of the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Left that there is a new liberation movement on the planet – animal liberation – that is of immense ethical and political significance. But because animal liberation challenges the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas that are so deeply entrenched in socialist and anarchist thinking and traditions, Leftists are more likely to mock than engage it. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PETER SINGER
DATELINE: October 2006

Most factory-farmed animals are confined for life in completely unnatural surroundings, reduced to mere abstract units denied the status of living creatures, and manipulated relentlessly to maximize profits. Alongside Big Pharma, agribusiness is one of the most corrupting influences in American politics.

For low meat prices, the animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods pay steeply.

There is a growing consensus that factory farming of animals - also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations - is morally wrong. The American animal rights movement, which in its early years focused largely on the use of animals in research, now has come to see that factory farming represents by far the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20 million and 40 million birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That might seem like a lot - and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses - but 40 million represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill about 10 billion animals each year. Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM

President Castro addressing the Cuban people in Havana.

FROM OUR APPALLING HYPOCRISY ANNALS

The existence of a revolutionary socialist government with
growing ties to the Soviet Union only 90 miles away, insisted
the United States Government, was a situation which no self-
respecting superpower should tolerate, and in 1961 it undertook
an invasion of Cuba. Read the rest of this entry »

Carl Sagan, the celebrated astronomist and distinguished humanist, who seriously objected to the notion that humans have an inherent “right” to do as they please with animals and nature.

BY KATHY FRESTON
Dateline June 29, 2007

There is a growing sense these days that the issues that plague our planet — war, injustice, and blatant abuse of nature — are intensifying and perhaps moving us toward the point of no return. And that if we don’t snap to attention and start doing things differently soon, we as a civilization, could be in real trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

BY KATHY FRESTON
Originally at ALTERNET.ORG Read the rest of this entry »

Moore speaking on health issues before sympathetic congresspeople.
C O N T R O V E R S Y

Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko (2007) has attracted its fair share of critics among the liberaloid guardians of the status quo, and, naturally, rabidly negative and mendacious reviews from the right. But a film of this importance, that has managed to touch off a desperately needed debate about the nature of the “health care” system in the US, and the grasping values underscoring it, has also elicited criticism from the left. In this series of posts we cover the more compelling arguments.

EXHIBIT 1
IN PRAISE OF “SICKO” BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE U.S. HEALTHCARE SYSTEM DIES?

By Carolyn Baker
Dateline: Sunday, 12 August 2007

It had to happen, but it took so long-indeed, too long, for a courageous filmmaker to rise up and put the abysmal U.S. healthcare system under a microscope in order to reveal how utterly pathological it has become. On one level, Moore repeated a blatant flaw in his craft so obvious in “Bowling For Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 911″ in that he almost always fails to fully connect the dots and take his work to the next level, and “Sicko” was no exception. Nevertheless, the film left me laughing, cheering, and crying and particularly gleeful regarding memos sent by management throughout the Blue Cross system warning employees of the possible side-effects of “Sicko” on their company’s image. Read the rest of this entry »