Big Business Strikes Back: The Class Struggle from Above By James Petras

26 October 2018 — James Petras

Introduction: Bankers, agro-business elites, commercial mega owners, manufacturing, real estate and insurance bosses and their financial advisers, elite members of the ‘ruling class’, have launched a full-scale attack on private and public wage and salary workers,and small and medium size entrepreneurs (the members of the ‘popular classes’). The attack has targeted income ,pensions, medical plans, workplace conditions, job security, rents, mortgages, educational costs, taxation,undermining family and household cohesion.

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William Blum Needs Your Help!

26 October 2018 — Anti-Empire Report

I just got a very distressing email from Bill Blum’s former wife detailing an awful fall he sustained at home that left him immobolised for perhaps 2 days before being discovered by a friend!  I wish him a speedy recovery but he needs your help with his medical expenses! Here’s the note I received: Continue reading

The Apocalypse Not Now By Edward Curtin

26 October 2018 — Global Research
It was balmy and breezy by the bench where I sat outside a public library east of Atlanta, Georgia, brooding about the state of the world.  It seemed like the end times, and I had just attended a fire and brimstone sermon, not perused the mainstream and alternative press. I had just spent a few hours on the internet, noting so many articles that announced that the world as we know it was coming to an end, or maybe just the world. 

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European Union steps up Internet censorship in the name of opposing “disinformation” By Johannes Stern

26 October 2018 — WSWS

The European Union (EU) summit on October 18 resolved to further tighten the censorship of the Internet. It also threatened with sanctions and penalties any party that diverges from the prescribed political line in the 2019 European election campaign. This is the response of European governments to growing opposition to militarism, social cuts and right-wing extremism.

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US Trashing INF – Another Reckless Blow to World Security

26 October 2018 — Strategic Culture Foundation

The United States this week gave notice it is scrapping the second of three major arms control treaties. President Trump’s announced withdrawal from the INF Treaty this week follows the unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 by his predecessor GW Bush.

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The reinstatement of North Korea: What effects on the ‘story’ of socialism?

26 October 2018 — The Saker

by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog

It seems unlikely – as it defies 73 years of ongoing aggression, warfare, the near-warfare of constant tap dancing on the border, starvation-creating sanctions, false promises, broken promises, racist caricaturing, hysterical knee-jerk anti-socialism, and more besides – but what if Washington finally allows North Korea to reintegrate into the multinational world?

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Why Washington is courting Hanoi in Vain By Martin Berger

26 October 2018 — NEO

More than half a century ago, at the height of Vietnam war US intelligence agencies were demanded to put an end to the partisan movement supporting the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. This resulted in the so-called Phoenix Program being launched which, according to historians, allowed CIA and a number of military bodies assisting it to locate and murder in cold blood more than 80 thousand people. That may have been the first time when American intelligence agencies were given a free hand in their approach to their work, which resulted in mass-executions and sadistic torture techniques getting rampant. Thus, long before the world learned about the extensive use of torture in the American prison of Abu Ghraib, American intelligence agencies were busy acquiring “peculiar anti-guerrilla skills.” And this “legacy” is hardly forgotten both in the United States, and especially in Vietnam, since the latter lost well over one million people to the unprovoked American aggression.

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Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Political Nightmare: a Neo-Nazi ‘Phenomenon’ Made in the USA By Edu Montesanti

26 October 2018 — Global Research

“Not even the military dictatorship defended an ideology which is so openly fascist like Bolsonaro does today. He does not care about being compared to Hitler,” – Michael Löwy.

“It is difficult to explain the emergence of a phenomenon best described as pathological politics on a large scale” according to French-Brazilian sociologist Michael Löwy, in an interview when asked about Jair Bolsonaro’s ascension, Brazil’s presidential candidate whose great-grandfather was a Nazi soldier.

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Nation Transfixed In Horror By Toy Bombs While Destroying Lives With Real Ones By Caitlin Johnstone

25 October 2018 — Caitlin Johnstone
Media headlines have been dominated for the last two days by the news that pipe bombs are being sent to Democratic Party elites and their allies, a list of whom as of this writing consists of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, George Soros, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, Robert De Niro, and the CNN office (addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan who actually works for NBC). As of this writing nobody has been killed or injured in any way by any of these many explosive devices, and there is as of this writing no publicly available evidence that they were designed to. As of this writing there is no evidence that the devices were intended to do anything other than what they have done: stir up fear and grab headlines.

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