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Monday 30 April 2012

Chris Hedges | The Implosion of Capitalism
Chris Hedges, Truthdig: "When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of 'primitive' societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology.... The war on the Native Americans ... was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic."
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Chicago to Welcome a Militarized May Day?
Yana Kunichoff, Truthout: "If there is going to be a dress rehearsal for the coming NATO summit in Chicago, May Day is it.... It will also, coincidentally or not, be the first day that police in 'battle' dress hit the streets to prepare for the summit. Operation Red Zone, a security perimeter around ... where the summits will be held ... will be patrolled by federal law enforcement carrying 'non-lethal' guns beginning Tuesday."
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The Obama Contradiction
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: "He has few constraints (except those he's internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders.... And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you ... He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.... As it happens, though, he's the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids. How could this be?"
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Noam Chomsky | May Day
Noam Chomsky, Zuccotti Park Press: "People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called 'Law Day' - a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement's organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution."
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Ahead of May Day, David Harvey Details Urban Uprisings From Occupy Wall Street to the Paris Commune
Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW!: "On Tuesday, May 1st, known as May Day or International Workers' Day, Occupy Wall Street protesters hope to mobilize tens of thousands of people across the country under the slogan, 'General Strike. No Work. No Shopping. Occupy Everywhere.' Events are planned in 125 cities. We speak with leading social theorist David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, about how Occupy Wall Street compares to other large-scale grassroots movements throughout modern history."
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Occupy Oakland, Workers Back Off May Day Plan to Shut Down Golden Gate Bridge
Susie Cagle, AlterNet: "May Day protest actions are planned across the region, state and nation, but many eyes are on the flashpoint of Occupy Oakland, where organizers say 'traditional labor and precarious workers will strike together for the first time' at Occupy's call. 'It's an interesting convergence of unorganized labor and the Occupy movement creating this pressure and momentum that encourages the rank and file to plan strikes on this day,' said Steven Angell, an organizer with Occupy Oakland."
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Obama Campaign Grapples With New Voter ID Laws
Michael D. Shear, The New York Times News Service: "Field workers for President Obama's campaign fanned out across the country over the weekend in an effort to confront a barrage of new voter identification laws that strategists say threaten the campaign's hopes for registering new voters ahead of the November election. Many of the laws in question - including the ones in Florida and Wisconsin - are the subject of legal challenges by Democratic groups ..."
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ALEC Retreats, the Right Wing Freaks
Mark Engler, Dissent Magazine: "With sponsors rapidly jumping ship, ALEC has tried to do some damage control. Last week it announced that it would be 'eliminating [its] Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues' such as Stand Your Ground and Voter ID. The purpose of the move, the organization said, is to focus more keenly on 'free-market, limited government, pro-growth priorities - read: destroying unions, eliminating environmental regulation, reducing taxes for the top 1 percent, and so forth."
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Dean Baker | Budget Bunk: The Old Pox-on-Both-Your Houses Game
Dean Baker, Truthout: "In Washington, all serious people routinely write columns in which they set themselves above the political fray and pronounce the Republicans and Democrats equally to blame for political gridlock and all that they see wrong with the world. Today, it is my turn. Of course, beating up on the Republicans is pretty easy these days; you mostly just have to repeat what they say.... The Democrats rely on their great myth: Bill Clinton made the hard choices, cutting spending and raising taxes."
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Our Hope Is in Our Struggle: Reclaiming Land and Life in Honduras
Consuelo Castillo, Beverly Bell and Lauren Elliot, Other Worlds: "In Honduras, as in most places, the government and the wealthy treat land as a commodity. In pursuit of the profits it offers, they have taken enormous tracts of land from indigenous peoples and small farmers, often through legally suspect if not outright violent means. On April 17, several thousand Hondurans set out to take back some of this land. They occupied 30,000 acres of land that day, claiming a legal right to grow crops there."
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Connecticut's Death Penalty Message
E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group: "... last week, Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy signed a law repealing the state's death penalty. There are now 17 states without capital punishment, Illinois having joined the ranks last year. What happened in Connecticut brings home the flaw in seeing everything that has happened in the states since the midterm vote as embodying a steady shift rightward."
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The GOP Knows It Can Only Win the White House by Disenfranchising Voters. Just Ask George W. Bush
Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: "If the 'felon purge' that allegedly included the purge of more than 55,000 eligible voters had not been carried out by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, Gore would have likely won the Florida election by so many votes that the Supreme Court couldn't have stolen it from him. So, for eight years, we had a president who had not been elected by the majority of Americans (Gore won the national election by approximately 550,000 votes), and had been appointed to the office as a result of the machinations of premeditated voter suppression."
Read the BuzzFlash Commentary

Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz: More on the Possibility of a Double-Dip Recession
Read the Article at The European

Krugman Debunks Claim About High Corporate Tax Rates
Read the Article at ThinkProgress

Humor Highlights From the White House Correspondents' Dinner
Read the Article at The Week

Murdoch's News Corp Has Sought to Undermine Governments
Read the Article at The Guardian UK

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&'s Sake!
Read the Article at The Daily Beast

Greenwashing the "Environmental Olympics" Big Time
Read the Article at Mother Jones

Gibbs: GOP Slogan Is "You Didn't Clean Up Our Mess Fast Enough"
Read the Article at Daily Kos

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