austerity

Investigative journalist Robert Parry talks about Russia’s move to invade Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and the role of the US and the west in fomenting crisis there.

You occasionally read a totally mind bending book that opens up a whole new world for you. The Failure of Nonviolence  by Peter Gelderloos is one of them, owing to its unique evidence-based perspective on both “nonviolent” and “violent” resistance. It differs from Gelderloos’s 2007 How Nonviolence Protects the State in its heavy emphasis on indigenous, minority, and working class resistance.

Bill Moyers of Moyers & Company, on February 21, 2014, interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member, who, during the interview, confirmed what many Americans already suspect: America has become a corporate state, or to use Lofgren’s words, a “Deep State,” which he defines as a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state.

Although they do not teach classes, at most universities and four-year colleges the Presidents of those institutions are remunerated with a six-figure salary and a comprehensive benefits package. Presidents occupy positions within the hierarchy of the university that correspond to those of corporate CEOs in business, and they are compensated accordingly.

David Cronin’s book Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War (Pluto Press) is based on his years as a journalist in Brussels looking at the way in which the European Union’s institutions really work. I also spent thirteen years in Brussels, working at the European Parliament and, before that, five years working as an advisor to the late Tom Megahy, an EU-critical left Labour Euro-MP, back in the North of England.

I expect that by now you've been hearing about the Wall Street Journal OpEd by grotesque, clueless Belvedere billionaire Thomas Perkins whining about how working families are Nazis who want to put the makers Wall Street predators in concentration camps. One of the worst avatars of gentrification of working class neighborhoods, Perkins bought the top of the Millennium Tower on Mission St.

“Are Adjunct Professors the Fast-Food Workers of the Academic World?” Is this provocative, evocative, adversarial, or emblematic of an age of casino capitalism, corrupted Admin Class, and a see/ hear/speak no evil compliant groups of people who are in the 20 percent?

1. The integration of Greece into the EU is the real cause of its catastrophic crisis

It’s been 97 years since Lenin first wrote what has since become a “classic” of Marxism — The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, hereafter referred to as SR. I propose to discuss the significance of this work for today (the beginning of the 21st Century) and so will not spend a lot of time discussing its relevance to the world of 97 years ago.

Hoyer: Two portions for K Street, drippings for working familiesMembers if Congress tell me if Hoyer ever gets the gavel every single bill will go through K Street for revision and nothing worthwhile will veer get done. Hoyer is the worst kind of centrist and has always fought for his wing of the Democratic Party-- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.