Browsing PBH By Articles

Disposable Citizens: Corporate America’s Greatest Achievement

The Article: The Corporate Achievement Of Disposable Citizens To Enhance Profits in Sinclair News.

The Text: Nature’s havoc has an uncanny ability to peel back the facade of an evil government and lay bear the darkness of its soul. There has never been a more insidious environmental cover-up that will ultimately sacrifice or harmfully alter millions of lives in the future for the sake of profit than the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The ongoing cover-up jointly managed by the governments of Japan and the United States over the facts and future consequences of the ongoing global radiation poisoning emanating from the Fukushima nuclear site reflects the depth of evil that both governments are capable of.

For the United States, this is just another in a long series of environmental disaster cover-ups designed to protect the profits of corporations. The political process that appoints corporate insiders to key government management and policy positions has been put in place to protect corporate interests at the expense of the public. The incestuous relationship that exists between the government and corporations is the tap root of a poisonous vine wrapped around the global economy whose nourishment is derived from Federal Reserve monetary policies, tax avoidance as well as the exploitation of the global environment and global working class.

Much of the evil that permeates American society is streamed through the abuse of government power on behalf of corporations and is perpetrated on innocent people by the ability of the corporate lobby to corrupt government power for self interest, suffocate democracy and thereby molest societies as they see fit. This is the evil lurking behind the Republican Faustian quest to dismantle regulations, the last road block preventing corporations from having free reign to abuse the environment, the rights of individuals, and the heritage of Americans for the sake of profits that pay no taxes.

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Santorum 101: He’s More Complex Than We Think

While everyone knows that the world is a much different place now than in the Dole-Gingrich era of American politics, no one could have imagined the motley crew of candidates currently vying for the 2012 Republican nomination. Among the contenders are a Mormon, a libertarian, a father of a lesbian, and a Catholic with seven children.

Perhaps, in light of these rapidly changing political waters, that’s why staunchly conservative voters have chosen to support the least memorable candidate of the bunch: Rick Santorum. Although Santorum has not won as many delegates as Romney and may not win the party’s nomination, as a figurehead of a formidable conservative sect he is worthy of study.

Santorum has carried a respectable number of states in the 2012 Republican Primaries: Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and now Louisiana. In other words, Santorum owns middle America.

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The ‘Land Of The Free’ Is A Farce

The Article: The myth of freedom in the land of the free by John Stoer in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: In 1893, a massive financial panic sent demand for the Pullman Palace Car Company into a downward spiral. The luxury rail car company reacted by slashing workers’ wages and increasing their work load. After negotiations with ownership broke down the following year, the American Railway Union, in solidarity with Pullman factory workers, launched a boycott that eventually shut down railroads across the US. It was a full-scale insurrection, as the late historian Howard Zinn put it, that soon “met with the full force of the capitalist state”.

The US Attorney General won a court order to stop the strike, but the union and its leader, Eugene V Debs, refused to quit. President Grover Cleveland, over the objections of Illinois’ governor, ordered federal troops to Chicago under the pretense of maintaining public safety. Soldiers fired their bayoneted rifles into the crowd of 5,000, killing 13 strike sympathisers. Seven hundred, including Debs, were arrested. Debs wasn’t a socialist before the strike, but he was after. The event radicalised him. “In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle,” Debs said later on, “the class struggle was revealed”.

I imagine a similar revelation for the tens of thousands of Americans who participated in last fall’s Occupy Wall Street protests. As you know, the movement began in New York City and spread quickly, inspiring activists in the biggest cities and the smallest hamlets. Outraged by the broken promise of the US and inspired by democratic revolts of Egypt and Tunisia, they assembled to protest economic injustice and corrupt corporate power in Washington.

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Why Austerity Measures Are Failing The UK’s Economy

The Article: U.K. Conservatives Come Up Short in Austerity Experiment by Clive Crook in Bloomberg News.

The Text: Since 2010 Britain has been a laboratory for an important experiment in economic policy. The question: When economies slump and public borrowing soars, can fiscal restraint speed the recovery? Preliminary findings: No, and whatever made you think it could?

The unemployed weren’t asked whether it was all right with them, but Britain was a good place for the experiment. For a start, its government actually controls fiscal policy. On Wednesday, Finance Minister George Osborne will set out his new budget in the House of Commons and, strange as it seems in Washington, that will be that. Osborne won’t call for Parliament to change tax rates or urge it (perhaps seriously, perhaps not) to do one thing or another. He will set policy, period.

As a place for this test, Britain had another advantage. Like the U.S. but unlike France or Germany, it has its own currency and runs its own monetary policy. Osborne doesn’t have to frame his budgets knowing, as governments in the euro area know, that interest rates will be set somewhere else according to somebody else’s needs.

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Free Speech Under Fire

The Article: Free Speech Under Fire by Jonathan Turley in The L.A. Times.

The Text: The recent exchange between an atheist and a judge in a small courtroom in rural Pennsylvania could have come out of a Dickens novel. Magisterial District Judge Mark Martin was hearing a case in which an irate Muslim stood accused of attacking an atheist, Ernest Perce, because he was wearing a “Zombie Mohammed” costume on Halloween. Although the judge had “no doubt that the incident occurred,” he dismissed the charge of criminal harassment against the Muslim and proceeded to browbeat Perce. Martin explained that such a costume would have led to Perce’s execution in many countries under sharia, or Islamic law, and added that Perce’s conduct fell “way outside your bounds of 1st Amendment rights.”

The case has caused a national outcry, with many claiming that Martin was applying sharia law over the Constitution — a baseless and unfair claim. But while the ruling certainly doesn’t suggest that an American caliphate has gained a foothold in American courts, it was nevertheless part of a disturbing trend. The conflict in Cumberland County between free speech and religious rights is being played out in courts around the world, and free speech is losing.

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