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 »

Michael Moore and former Sen. Geo. McGovern

C O N T R O V E R S Y

BY DAVID WALSH \ Dateline 7 July 2007 | Originally at WSWS

Sicko, written and directed by Michael Moore (2007)

NOTE: Please search for other articles on this same subject on Cyrano’s Journal’s archives.

Sicko is documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s critique of the American health care system. Despite the director’s undoubted sincerity and flair for showmanship, it’s a terribly limited work, weaker than Fahrenheit 9/11, his 2004 response to the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Read the rest of this entry »

BY JOHN PILGER
DATELINE August 8, 2007

WITH A BONUS PIECE BY ERIC ALTERMAN (THE NATION)

The truth about most modern journalism: You first become a career media worker, you start climbing the ladder, and then you prostitute yourself. It’s as common as it’s straightforward.

The following is a transcript of a talk given by John Pilger at Socialism 2007 Conference in Chicago this past June:

The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”. Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM \ DATELINE: August 10, 2007
Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life
Simulpost at author’s site: www.killinghope.org

On several occasions I’ve been presented with the argument that contrary to widespread opinion in the anti-war movement and on the left, oil was not really a factor in the the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq. The argument’s key, perhaps sole, point is that the oil companies did not push for the war.

Responding to only this particular point: firstly, the executives of multinational corporations are not in the habit of making public statements concerning vital issues of American foreign policy, either for or against. And we don’t know what the oil company executives said in private to high Washington officials, although we do know that such executives have a lot more access to such officials than you or I, like at Cheney’s secret gatherings. More importantly, we have to distinguish between oil as a fuel and oil as a political weapon. Read the rest of this entry »

perspective \•/ BY ANDREW FEINSTEIN
Dateline: 07/27/2007 Denverpost.com

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) protesters carry signs and shout slogans calling for the suspension of Atlanta Falcons football player Michael Vick, outside the NFL’s headquarters in New York, Friday, July 20, 2007. Vick was indicted by a federal grand jury on Tuesday for his alleged involvement with dogfighting. (AP / Bebeto Matthews)

Like most of you, I was appalled when reading the ghastly details of the indictment against Michael Vick, which accused the Atlanta Falcons quarterback of violating federal laws against dogfighting, procuring and training pit bulls for combat and conducting this illegal enterprise across state lines. 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 »

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 »

BY CHALMERS JOHNSON [Tomdispatch.com]
Posted on May 17, 2007, Printed on July 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51975/

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

BY RALPH R. ACAMPORA
July 22, 2007

The story many Long Islanders have followed during the past few weeks of an escaped steer on the North Fork whose notoriety landed him a refuge away from the abattoir gets more perplexing the more you think about it. From a strictly agribusiness point of view, of course, the fugitive livestock presented only the problem of recapturing an ornery investment before its due harvest. Bad cow - get back into the pen. Read the rest of this entry »