Leid Stories holds an open forum/debate on yesterday’s discussion, focusing on the impact of Bernie Sanders’ recently declared allegiance to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party on his “revolution” and on progressive politics.
Eric Margolis – AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR GETS LONGER
Anti-Russian hysteria in America reached its apogee this week as Democrats tried to divert attention from embarrassing revelations about how the Democratic Party apparatus had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders by claiming Vlad Putin and his KGB had hacked and exposed the Dem’s emails. This was rich coming from the US that snoops into everyone’s emails and phones across …
BRYAN SCHATZ – The Obama Years Have Been Very Good to America’s Weapons Makers
The Obama years have been a boom time for America’s weapons makers. Since 2009, the United States has approved arms deals worth some $200 billion—more than under any other presidency. The deals include sending Apache helicopters to Qatar, “bunker buster” bombs and cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia, and Hellfire missiles all over the place. Predicting an increase in weapons sales …
Media blackout grows: Huffington Post pulls Vaxxed movie review
The censorship continues to grow for the documentary, “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe,” with the online news aggregator and blog site The Huffington Post removing a long-time contributor’s review of the film. HuffPo contributor Lance Simmens says he had recently submitted his article only to find it had been removed a short time later. Later, Simmens discovered he could no …
Leid Stories – 01.13.16
Forked Tongue: Obama’s ‘The State of the Union is Great’ Address
Borrowing the oratorical framework of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, in which he outlined four fundamental freedoms that should embody a global bill of rights (freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from want and fear) President Barack Obama in his final address to the nation yesterday outlined “four big questions” America must grapple with: How do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy; how do we make technology work for us, and not against us, especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change; how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy; and how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman.”
Leid Stories examines Obama’s contention that, with respect to his administration’s performance on these questions “the state of the union is great.”
Michael Payne – Planting Seeds of Fear into the American Mind
America is entering into a most dangerous time in its history as this society and its people react to and try to cope with the specter of fear that is rapidly spreading across this nation. For many years, Americans have listened to the incessant beat of the drums of war. Now we hear the drums of fear sounding across this …
Robert C. Koehler – Spiritually Rudderless
Another deep cry, followed by a shrug. The world is at war, at war, at war. But it only hurts them, the helpless ones, the anonymous poor, who absorb the bombs and bullets, who bury their children, who flee their broken countries. Sixty million people have been displaced by the current wars, the highest number of uprooted since World War …
Ramzy Baroud – War Begets War Refugees: the Moral Bankruptcy of Italy and NATO
On April 26, 2011, a meeting that can only be described as sinister took place between the then Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. The most pressing issue discussed at the meeting in Rome was how to deal with African immigrants. Sarkozy, who was under pressure from his right-wing and far-right constituencies to halt immigration originating from North …
Robert Fisk – Turkey-Kurdish Conflict: Every Regional Power Has Betrayed the KurdsSo Turkish Bombing Is No Surprise
The Kurds were born to be betrayed. Almost every would-be Middle East statelet was promised freedom after the First World War, and the Kurds even sent a delegation to Versailles to ask for a nation and safe borders. But under the Treaty of Sèvres, in 1920, they got a little nation in what had been Turkey. Then along came the …
The Poverty Machine: Student Debt, Class Society, and Securing Bonded Labor – Jeremy Brunger
At the dawn of the 20th century, very few American students attended high school, as the demands of the heavy-industrial and the agricultural economies of that period were ill-suited to an extended education beyond the family sphere. In the middle of the 20th century, most Americans who either aspired to or had to work entered the full-time workforce immediately after high school, …