Legendary journalist I. F. Stone said, “Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” But it used to be the case that if they were caught in a flat out lie, they paid at least some price, at a minimum in some form of public shaming and the lie usually was not repeated. But that no longer seems to be the case and we now have zombie lies that never die and zombie liars who don’t stop repeating them.
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The US Supreme court issued on its last day two decisions that went against women and workers. In one case, they asserted that certain classes of companies had the right to not pay for contraceptive coverage as part of their health insurance offering to their employees while in the other they limited the rights of people to form unions. In both cases, they were continuing the steady process of chipping away at the rights of women and workers.
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He delivers a righteous rant on the absurd way that most Americans have this incredibly unrealistic sense of optimism about their future economic prospects and thus actually support the things that keep them poor, breed income inequality, and feed the greed of the rich. He notes how American politicians, including president Obama shy away from the idea that they are promoting class warfare. I personally am in favor of it and promote it every chance I get.
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Uri Avnery decribes in detail the harrowing sequence of events that have happened in Israel recently, starting with the murder of three Israeli youth, an atrocity that ignited a fire that was fanned by Israeli politicians to create massive anti-Arab anger that then led to the horrific burning alive of a Palestinian teenager and the vicious beating of his American cousin by Israeli security forces (video), the launching of missiles at Israel by Hamas, and then the massive assault by Israel on Gaza, the latest in a long series, resulting in over one hundred deaths of Palestinians and the numbers still increasing, with even a hospital and a home for the disabled being bombed.
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I have written before that one of the biggest sources of government corruption is the revolving door that takes people from the private sector that serves big business and puts them into government agencies that are supposed to monitor and prosecute those businesses and then those people return to the grateful arms of that sector. The revolving door between the Treasury Department and Wall Street is the most notorious but it goes on at all levels.
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While the media obsessively covers Hillary Clinton as if she was a shoo-in for the 2016 Democratic nomination, there are others who could challenge her, other than vice-president Joe Biden. One such person is the current governor of Maryland Martin O’Malley. I wrote about him before back in January.
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The Republican National Committee has selected Cleveland to host the 2016 party nominating convention. This was not an obvious choice. For one thing, while Ohio is a swing state and somewhat conservative in general, the Cleveland area is one that is a liberal Democratic stronghold in which minorities dominate. The only competitive elections here are those in the Democratic primaries.
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Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain have published an article that identifies five individuals whose emails were intercepted by the NSA, out of 7,485 listed on a spreadsheet. This is the first time that the targets of the NSA spying have been identified by name. All of them were people who, as far as anyone can tell, had led lives that were free from any suspicion of being involved in wrongdoing. Their main ‘crime’ seems to have been that they are all Muslims.
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For all the talk about family values in the US, it is appalling how badly children can be treated in this country, either by parents thinking that children are their possessions and subjecting them to abuse or by employers taking advantage of the laws to exploit them for their labor. Samantha Bee turns in another fine report on the scandalous way that children are made to work is appalling conditions. I had not realized that child labor laws were so lax in this country that you can make them work under such harsh and even dangerous conditions.
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