by Bill Van Auken

US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday and Thursday expose the close collaboration between the US government, top American politicians and Muammar Gaddafi, who Washington now insists must be hunted down and murdered.

Washington and its NATO allies are now determined to smash the Libyan regime, supposedly in the interests of “liberating” the Libyan people. That Gaddafi was until the beginning of this year viewed as a strategic, if somewhat unreliable, ally is clearly seen as an inconvenient truth.

by Ron Ridenour

Leading black-skinned representatives of the “hegemon”, as Cynthia McKinney calls President Barak Obama and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, could hardly expect to win any votes from the standing-room-only crowd at her anti-war tour last night at Calvary Church in Philadelphia.

Speaking before nearly 300 people–two-thirds of them black, the remainder white and hispanic–in her T-shirt proclaiming that “war kills”, the former U.S. congresswoman said:

“We need someone in the White House who thinks like us and not just one who looks like us. We have to act like we’re free if we want to be free. We have to liberate ourselves from war-mongering political parties.”

by Tom Burghardt

We live in an age where insider deals, conflicts of interest, revolving doors between “regulators” and the “regulated” (lubricated with oceans of cash) accompanies the generalized looting of social wealth by deviant capitalist elites.

That such behavior by our corporate masters no longer raise an eyebrow, let alone elicit action by authorities charged with stopping criminal miscreants destroying other people’s lives, is an unmistakable sign that the much-vaunted “free market” system, staring into an abyss of its own creation, has entered a terminal phase.

by Paul Craig Roberts

In a few days it will be the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. How well has the US government’s official account of the event held up over the decade?

Not very well. The chairman, vice chairman, and senior legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission wrote books partially disassociating themselves from the commission’s report. They said that the Bush administration put obstacles in their path, that information was withheld from them, that President Bush agreed to testify only if he was chaperoned by Vice President Cheney and neither were put under oath, that Pentagon and FAA officials lied to the commission and that the commission considered referring the false testimony for investigation for obstruction of justice.

by Raul Rodriguez

One in four California households with children reported food hardship, according to a new analysis of Gallup data released last Thursday by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

“It’s disturbing, but not surprising,” said Kelly Hardy, director of health policy at Children Now.

The report analyzed data gathered as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index project’s responses to the question: “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”

by Danny Schechter

Already the projections are in—not for who is going to win the election in 2012—but for how much it is likely to cost.

Public Radio International concludes: “Campaign spending in the 2012 US election could reach $6 or 7 billion dollars as outside groups pay for electoral influence.”

Here we are in the middle of a deep recession that’s getting deeper by the day, with austerity the unofficial slogan du jour while Republican scheme up new ways to trim, cut and decimate government spending, and parties are spending billions on political horse races.

by Prof. James K. Galbraith

In early January 2009 two White House-bound economists — Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein — predicted that if the stimulus bill were passed, unemployment would peak at 8% by midyear and then start coming down. If there were no stimulus, they said, joblessness might hit 9% and not peak until 2010.

Romer and Bernstein had the risky job of hyping policy, but they weren’t alone in their optimistic views. Forecasters at the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve and most private banks all thought that the economy had a natural tendency to right itself, sooner or later. What it needed, the activists urged, was a push.

by Danny Schechter

What is Michelle Bachmann wearing?

And so it came to pass, as predicted, projected, and warned about, that the economy is about to tank again. No less an authority than Nouriel Roubini, once dismissed as “Dr. Doom” for his accurate predictions of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, is shaking his head and pointing his finger again.

In intellectual circles, there’s more and more talk about the fall of America. Even Noam Chomsky who wrote some of his 150 books about the rise of the American empire sees the handwriting on the wall.

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

If Russian prime minister Putin’s recent description of America as “a parasite on the world” were reported by the US media, little doubt that most Americans would be infuriated. We are the virtuous people. Without us good guys to police the world there would be mayhem and wars everywhere, not merely the ones we started in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Without the American white hats people everywhere would be starving and dying from natural disasters. It is us chosen ones who provide the rescue operations and good deeds. How dare the former KGB monster to slander our country!

by Devon DB

There can be no debate anymore; it is now a fact that the American economic elite have lost their minds. These people are not stupid in any sense of the word, yet it seems they have truly gone off the deep end.

In the 1990’s, it seemed as if all was well, yet many companies were pushing for a new economic theory called globalization in which the world would become more economically interconnected. It was presented as a good thing for both the US and the world, however, as we can now see, only the companies are doing well and offshoring is destroying the US economy. It has led to a dismantling of the American manufacturing sector and with it large amounts of unemployment and lowered national GDP.