A Return to Humanity

By Chris Pratt
COTO Report

Our inaction, our passivity, our naivety and the ease with which we can be manipulated has fueled the forces of fear, power, greed and suppression. Most U.S. citizens now walk around in self-induced comas, too ignorant to question, too afraid to ask and too numb to feel.

Is our government capable of killing its own people?  Look … at what we have done to the environment and the poor for oil.  Look … at the brutal dictators we have brought to power and continue to fund.  Look … at the wars we have manufactured.

May the Fourth Be With You

By Volaar

I first began my journey to understand Kent State as a result of a woman who confided in me regarding her husband’s wartime PTSD. She was at that time working with Alan Canfora on his life-long project to bring the Kent State Massacre back into the national spotlight. For Alan and his friends who were either maimed, wounded like him, or slaughtered, justice has yet to be served for the heinous offenses of May 4, 1970.

Has America Been Crippled by Intellectual Idiots?

By Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Universities are today’s centers of connection.  They are one of the last vestiges of American tribalism and community in an age of self isolation and artificial technological cultism.  Adults do not meet face to face much anymore to share knowledge, or discuss the troubles of the day.  The academic world provides such opportunity, but at a terrible price.  A Bachelor’s Degree in the US allows the ruling class to construct a kind of automaton class, which has been taught not to learn independently, but to parrot propaganda without question, writes Brandon Smith.

Without Unions America Would Red, White, & Blow

By Lee Camp
Moment of Clarity

Everybody arguing against unions says that they don’t allow America to be competitive globally. So you’re fighting to bring us down with the sweatshops? I can’t wait until we’re competitive.

30 Years Ago Today: The Day the Middle Class Died

By Michael Moore

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, “When did this all begin,America’s downward slide?” They say they’ve heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent’s income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how “lowly” your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.

Young people have heard of this mythical time — but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, “When did this all end?”, I say, “It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981.”

Lifeboats: Alternative Markets, Barter Systems, and Local Co-ops

Interview with Brandon Smith, founder of Alt-Market.com

By Eric Blair
Activist Post

More and more people are becoming aware of the complete system failure we’re experiencing in the United States and around the globe. As the true nature of the control system is revealed, people tend to feel as Howard Beale did in Network when he said, “first, you’ve got to get mad…and scream, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

But once that anger at being lied to for so long subsides, then we must get on with the business of taking action to make the world more just and hopeful for our children. Many people will take to the streets to protest certain aspects of the current system. Others will do everything in their power to inform or warn their peers of the coming iceberg. Those are good and necessary functions, but they won’t stop the Titanic from sinking.

Controversial ag spending bill defunds local food systems, promotes meat monopoly

By Rady Ananda

Plutocrats aimed another weapon at the nation’s poor and at small and midsized farmers, this time thru the 2012 agriculture appropriations bill, H.R. 2112, which the House passed on June 16. The 82-page bill returns some federal spending to 2006 levels and others to 2008 levels.

Now being reviewed by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, the final version of HR 2112 will lay the terrain on which the 2012 Farm Bill will be crafted. The House Agriculture Committee began preparatory hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill this week, reports NSAC.

Key sections provide deep cuts to domestic food programs, threatening food banks, low-income seniors, women and children, and farmers markets supported by WIC vouchers issued thru the Women, Infants and Children program.

Midwest Floods: Both Nebraska Nuke Stations Threatened

By Rady Ananda

June 20 UPDATE: On June 17, the NRC published another Event Report by Fort Calhoun. A hole in the floor (caused by what?) has led to flooding, threatening the pumps. “Flooding through this penetration could have impacted the ability of the station’s Raw Water pumps to perform their design accident mitigation functions.”
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About 5 million* acres in the US corn belt have flooded, which will spike the cost of gas and food over the next several months. Worse, several nuclear power plants sit in the flooded plains. Both nuclear plants in Nebraska are partly submerged and the FAA has issued a no-fly order over both of them.

On June 7, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant filed an Alert with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after a fire broke out in the switchgear room. During the event, “spent fuel pool cooling was lost” when two fuel pumps failed for about 90 minutes.

On June 9, Nebraska’s other plant, Cooper Nuclear Power Station near Brownville, filed a Notice of Unusual Event (NOUE), advising it is unable to discharge sludge into the Missouri River due to flooding, and therefore “overtopped” its sludge pond.

Blair Mountain Project demands Obama end regulated manslaughter in mining industry

By Jeff Biggers
AlterNet

Hundreds of marchers are peacefully re-enacting the historic March on Blair Mountain this week in a nonviolent celebration to remind the nation that the safety and health of coal miners and coal mining communities must be placed above the profit interests of union-busting absentee coal companies.

If the safety, health and civil rights of all Americans are protected by the same laws, then our nation’s President and lawmakers are obliged by the staggering health and human rights crises and mounting deathtoll in the central Appalachian coalfields to call for an immediate moratorium on all mountaintop removal operations.

Home Rule takes a beating as Maine defeats food freedom bills

By Rady Ananda

In the state that made international news this year when three towns passed a food sovereignty ordinance, two bills that would have bolstered them at the state level met with defeat in Maine’s legislative Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee.

Sponsored by Rep. Walter Kumiega, LD 366 was rejected by the Ag Committee on May 11. The raw milk bill would have obviated licensing for the direct sale from farmer to consumer and protected small operations from overly burdensome rules recently imposed at the bureaucratic level.

“Requiring someone with two cows or a handful of goats to invest ten thousand dollars or more to build an inspectable facility doesn’t make economic sense,” Kumiega told Food Freedom. “Hand milking is a perfectly acceptable method and does not need the same facilities that a machine milking operation does. LD 366 seeks to restore an exemption that was a standard practice up until two years ago, when it was changed by an administrative decision.”

Resurrection and the Sociopath

Rand, Hickman and Greenspan: United in Common Purpose

By Volaar

Last year about this time I found myself steeped in a post-graduate rhetorical analysis of the front pages of the website Stormfront.org and two Patriot Movement sites.  The details of contemporary rhetorical analysis go beyond the mere study of words, so I won’t bore you.   But the “a-ha” moment I received at the end of my qualitative analysis is worth mentioning, at some point, in light of all the ballyhoo surrounding the latest remake of Ayn Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged, and Rand’s many “contributions” to the neo-conservative movement of the post-industrial, post-modern United States of America.

Joe Bageant Passes; Review of his last book on agrarian democracy

Joe Bageant, 1946-2011

After a vibrant life, Joe Bageant died on March 27 following a four-month struggle with cancer. He was 64. Joe is survived by his wife, Barbara, his three children, Timothy, Patrick and Elizabeth, and thousands of friends and admirers. He is also survived by his work and ideas. According to Joe’s wishes, he will be cremated. His family will hold a private memorial service.

Here’s his last post, on January 4, 2011, announcing his cancer.

Some Fight Back

A Review of Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir

By Michael Donnelly

This book is all about the post WWII shift from Maw and Pap’s agrarian democracy to the urban-dominated/techno/bureaucratic/ military/security/consumer Empire of today, showing how that shift and the resulting class stratification has led us to the brink of economic and ecological collapse, writes Donnelly.

A Perfect Storm of GMOs, Chemicals and Cancer

By Rady Ananda

Several books, including Seeds of Destruction and Corrupt to the Core, along with the film, The Idiot Cycle, lay out the framework for and evidence of a concerted effort to sicken and then treat humanity, while earning obscene profits. When we factor in other recent actions taken by transnational corporations and lawmakers, the conspiracy adopts a more ominous tone.

Authors William Engdahl and Shiv Chopra appear in Emmanuelle Schick Garcia’s powerful film, The Idiot Cycle: What you aren’t being told about cancer. Both writers provide detailed evidence of a corporate-government conspiracy to adulterate the food and water supply with dangerous substances linked to a host of illnesses. The Case Against Fluoride, a book using hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, provides more evidence. In David Gumpert’s Raw Milk Revolution, we get a peek at the US government’s war on the natural dairy industry.

Healthcare Reform – Abandoning the Self Employed

Michael Collins

Before it ever arrived at the president’s desk for signature, the health reform act contained a fatal poison pill.

The most creative sector of the business community has a dagger at its heart in the form of the relentless, unyielding, and over burdening cost of health insurance. The self-employed and very small businesses have seen their insurance premiums climb 20% to 75% since 2009. To purchase an adequate family plan, a self-employed person will pays an amount 50% to 70% of the nation’s median personal income, $32,000 a year, for family health plan. This includes premiums, deductibles, and out of pocket expenses. That is twice the cost for relatively generous plans at medium to large size companies. Very small businesses, two to twenty employees, pay about the same (Image: Paul Henman)

Wasn’t health reform supposed to take care of just this sort of inequity? Didn’t the title of the bill say it all? The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act. There is no protection for the self-employed when they have these stark choices facing them due to unaffordable insurance rates. They can give up working for themselves; buy adequate insurance and take a huge hit to income; buy a substandard plan and hope that whatever comes up is covered; or, abandon insurance at real risk to their health and, in some cases, their lives.

MLK: A Time to Break Silence

Intro by ICH

By 1967, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,” and the Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

Zeitgeist: The Transition Begins

By Brett Mullins
Seismologik

“War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in a monetary system. That is, there will be very little significant change. It’s going to take the redesign of our culture and values and it has to be related to the resources of the earth.” – Jacque Fresco

The above quote is an illustration of the ideas held by The Zeitgeist Movement and the Zeitgeist film series.  Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, the third installment in the series, by director Peter Joseph, will be released, globally, on January 15th.

Leaked Cable: Hike food prices to boost GM crop approval

By Rady Ananda
Food Freedom

In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

‘Tis The Season To Be Stripped Bare

Lady Liberty at Christmas, 2010 C.E.

By Volaar

Texas can be a nutty place, especially this time of year.  Rushing people whirling and spinning, stepping around, over and through one another where before an air of southern gentility prevailed.  Politeness might once again prevail, but not until the headlong masses have secured their place among the lucky fifty percent who will find this year’s festivities close enough to par to call it a wonderful day. 

Class War: Obama goes after little old ladies

Obama, Captain of the USS Titanic, Willing to Throw Older Women Out of the Lifeboats First By Raising Retirement Age

By Libby Liberal
Corrente

Raising the retirement age to a whopping 70 is more than a twinkle in the eyes of Obama and his Gucci-loafered-Austerian-Commission-sadists from both sides of the aisle. They are about to stick it once again to all of us, but particularly to struggling low-income older women in physical jobs!

Foreclosures accelerating; Unemployment at 22.5 pct

By RealEconTV

Thanks to ever-increasing foreclosures – and the numbers are about to get even worse – there is a glut of supply on the market. Meanwhile, it’s been many decades since the American consumer has been in such bad shape. How bad are things out there? The October 11 issue of Barron’s magazine puts the real, uncooked US unemployment figure’s at a sobering 22.5%.