G.E. paid no taxes on $5.1 billion in profits

 As Washington worries about the United States' growing deficit problem, there's mounting evidence the government is failing to collect taxes from wealthy individuals and corporations. A piece in today's New York Times by David Kocieniewski outlines how G.E. skirted paying any taxes on $5.1 billion in profits in 2010--in addition to claiming a $3.2 billion tax credit.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110325/ts_yblog_thelookout/g-e-paid-no-taxes-on-5-1-billion-in-profits

BP Oil Disaster: Obama Administration Tightens Lid on Dolphin Death Probe

by Leigh Coleman 

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/26-3

Omar Barghouti: I Wish You Egypt

Omar Barghouti: I Wish You Egypt
"No! We do not want to select the least wrong answer. We want another choice altogether that is not on your damned list." Given the choice between slavery and death, we unequivocally opt for freedom and dignified life -- no slavery, and no death.

Economist Debates: Arab revolutions: Statements

Economist Debates: Arab revolutions: Statements

AS'AD ABUKHALIL:

"There are many reasons why Western governments cannot be trusted in their intervention in Libya. The Arabs are defying decades-long stereotypes about their passivity and fatalism, and yet the entire Western club seems intent on preserving the Arab tyrannical order that has served its political, economic and military interests. Saudi Arabia and Egypt were the linchpins of the American regional system. It is not that democracy cannot be imposed from outside—as liberal critics of George Bush often put it—but the notion that Western governments ever pushed for democracy and enlightenment in the Middle East is dubious at best."

Marjorie Cohn: Stop Bombing Libya

Marjorie Cohn: Stop Bombing Libya

Dave Lindorff: Raymond Davis Walks

Dave Lindorff: Raymond Davis Walks

Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon and Murder in Bahrain | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon and Murder in Bahrain | TomDispatch

"The Pentagon’s relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries has been cemented in several key ways seldom emphasized in American reporting on the region. Military aid is one key factor. Bahrain alone took home $20 million in U.S. military assistance last year. In an allied area, there is the rarely discussed triangular marriage between defense contractors, the Gulf states, and the Pentagon. The six Gulf nations (along with regional partner Jordan) are set to spend $70 billion on weaponry and equipment this year, and as much as $80 billion per year by 2015. As the Pentagon looks for ways to shore up the financial viability of weapons makers in tough economic times, the deep pockets of the Gulf States have taken on special importance.

...

Human Rights Watch would later report that Redha Bu Hameed died of a gunshot wound to the head.

That incident, which occurred on February 18th, was one of a series of violent actions by Bahrain’s security forces that left seven dead and more than 200 injured last month. Reports noted that peaceful protesters had been hit not only by rubber bullets and shotgun pellets, but -- as in the case of Bu Hameed -- by live rounds.

The bullet that took Bu Hameed’s life may have been paid for by U.S. taxpayers and given to the Bahrain Defense Force by the U.S. military. The relationship represented by that bullet (or so many others like it) between Bahrain, a tiny country of mostly Shia Muslim citizens ruled by a Sunni king, and the Pentagon has recently proven more powerful than American democratic ideals, more powerful even than the president of the United States. "

Ralph Nader: Public Broadcasting's Cowardly Executives

Ralph Nader: Public Broadcasting's Cowardly Executives

"PBS’s Charlie Rose has had war-loving William Kristol on thirty one times, Henry Kissinger fifty five times, Richard Perle ten times, the global corporatist cheerleader, Tom Friedman seventy times. Compare that guest list with Rose’s interviews of widely published left of center guests—Noam Chomsky two times, William Grieder two times, Jim Hightower two times, Charlie Peters two times, Lewis Lapham three times, Bob Herbert six times, Paul Krugman twenty one times, Victor Navasky one time, Mark Green five times and Sy Hersh, once a frequent guest, has not been on since January 2005."

Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Mummies and Models in the New Middle East | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Mummies and Models in the New Middle East | TomDispatch

The Egyp

"Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin -- widely respected across the developing world -- suspects that, whatever the hopes of the Turks and others, including so many Egyptians, Washington has quite different ideas about Egypt’s destiny. It wants, he believes, not a Turkish model but a Pakistani one for that country: that is, the mix of an “Islamic power” with a military dictatorship. It won’t fly, Amin is convinced, because “the Egyptian people are now highly politicized.” "

Saudi Arabia police open fire at protest in Qatif

Police in Saudi Arabia have opened fire to disperse protesters in the eastern city of Qatif, a day before planned countrywide anti-government protests.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12708401

 

Obama's Comfortable Shoes

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (2007): And understand this: if American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody’s standing in their corner.

Defying Gov. Walker, Wisconsin Protesters Refuse to Leave Capitol Building

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/28/defying_walker_wisconsin_protesters_refuse_to

The Atlantic on the New Global Elite

The Rise of the New Global Elite

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/

It's the Inequality, Stupid: Eleven charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Alain Badiou on the Arab Revolt

Tunisia, Egypt: When an Eastern Wind Sweeps Away The Arrogance of The West

Alain Badiou

Isn’t it laughable to see certain intellectuals on duty, disconcerted soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that stands as a shabby paradise for us, offering themselves to the magnificent Tunisian and Egyptian peoples in order to teach these savage populations the basics of “democracy”? What a distressing persistence of colonial arrogance! Given the miserable political situation that we are experiencing, isn’t it obvious that it is us who have everything to learn from the current popular uprisings? Shouldn’t we, in all urgency, closely study what has made possible the overthrow through collective action of governments that are oligarchic, corrupt and—possibly, above all—humiliatingly the vassals of Western states?

...

As Jean-Marie Gleize poetically puts it: “a revolutionary movement does not expand by contamination. But by resonance. Something emerging here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something emerging out there”. This resonance, let’s name it “event”. The event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities.

...

The political and symbolical places of uprising had to be kept by paying the price of fierce combat against the militia and the police of the threatened regimes. And who has paid with their own lives if not the youth from the poorest classes? The “middle classes”, of whom our inspired Michèle Alliot-Marie has said that the democratic outcome of the movement depended on, and on them alone, should always remember that during the crucial moment, the duration of the movement has only been guaranteed by the unrestricted commitment of the people’s militia. Defensive violence is inevitable. It still goes on, in difficult conditions, in Tunisia, after the young provincial activists have been sent to their destitution.

http://www.elkilombo.org/tunisia-egypt-when-an-eastern-wind-sweeps-away-the-arrogance-of-the-west/

Hardt and Negri on the Arab Revolt

Arabs are democracy's new pioneers

The leaderless Middle East uprisings can inspire freedom movements as Latin America did before 

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 

And given that these uprisings were sparked by not only widespread unemployment and poverty but also a generalised sense of by frustrated productive and expressive capacities, especially among young people, a radical constitutional response must invent a common plan to manage natural resources and social production. This is a threshold through which neoliberalism cannot pass and capitalism is put to question. And Islamic rule is completely inadequate to meet these needs. Here insurrection touches on not only the equilibriums of north Africa and the Middle East but also the global system of economic governance.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/24/arabs-democracy-latin-america

Coalition Apologizes for Deaths of Afghan Children

 Nine related boys ages 8 to 14 were killed while collecting firewood in a remote part of Kunar province, according to Afghan officials and family members. "I don't care about the apology," Mohammed Bismil, the 20-year-old brother of two boys killed in the strike, said in a telephone interview. "The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] or a suicide vest to fight."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704728004576176644160681276.html

Tomgram: Chris Hellman, $1.2 Trillion for National Security | TomDispatch

"Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year."

Dave Lindorff: Blowback From the Arrest of the CIA's Raymond Davis

"The reality is that the US, which as required, on Jan. 25 submitted to the Foreign Office its annual list of those employees of the US Embassy whom it classified as "diplomats" warranting diplomatic immunity. The list had 48 names on it, and did not include Davis. Only after Davis's Jan. 27 shooting of the two Pakistani motorcyclists, on Jan. 28, did the US submit a "revised" list, to which Davis's name had been appended.

The US initially said Davis was an employee of the Lahore Consulate, and Davis himself told arresting police officers that he was a contractor working out of the Lahore Consulate, a role that would not afford him any diplomatic immunity, as consular workers, under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations only receive immunity for their "official duties," and in any case lose even that limited immunity in the case of "grave crimes."