By Patrick Martin.
US President Barack Obama was interviewed for nearly half an hour on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” broadcast Sunday night. The discussion with correspondent Steve Kroft was conducted on Thursday, November 4, and was the only extended public interview with Obama since the rout of the Democrats in last Tuesday’s congressional election.
These circumstances make the content of the discussion that much more remarkable. Obama has given no accounting of the debacle for the Democrats. He has not explained how his administration managed to restore the political standing …

By Chris Hedges.
American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.
More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning …

By Julie Hyland.
Budgetary constraints notwithstanding, the aim of London and Paris is to preserve their ability to continue military involvements in Afghanistan, where they supply the second and fourth largest military contingents respectively, and throughout the world. Their intent is to combine forces in order to secure their global predatory ambitions.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron have signed treaties on defence and nuclear co-operation, in what was described as a “new chapter” in military relations between the two nations.
The framework agreements include:

Plans for a combined joint …

By Barry Grey.
In what has become a regular feature of American public life—especially on the eve of major elections—the airwaves were taken over Friday by breathless reports of a new terror threat. It is impossible to determine how much is fact and how much is fiction in the ever-expanding claims being made regarding two packages from Yemen allegedly containing high explosives and addressed to two synagogues in Chicago.
But the very fact that the decision was made, undoubtedly at a very high level, to give such massive media coverage to the …

By Joseph Kishore.
On Saturday, US comedic television hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert organized a demonstration that drew over 200,000 under the slogan “Rally for Sanity.”
Participants included many young people, along with families and retirees. The general mood was one of hostility toward the right wing, and the rally was in part organized in response to one held by Fox television host Glenn Beck in August. The event was heavily promoted by liberal supporters of Obama, including the Huffington Post, which spent $250,000 to bus people in.
Many of those participating …

By Chris Hedges.
The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for …

By Patrick Martin.
Air cargo shipments across the Atlantic and along the US East Coast were brought to a standstill Friday in a terrorism scare that included searches of cargo planes and hangars in New York, Newark and Philadelphia.
Fighter jets escorted a passenger jet from the United Arab Emirates to New York’s JFK airport, allegedly because of a single package from Yemen in the aircraft’s cargo. Canadian Air Force jets first intercepted Emirates Airways Flight 201 as it entered North American airspace, and F-16s picked up the plane at the US …

By Barry Grey.
The element of manipulation in US elections is immense. Under conditions of a political monopoly of two right-wing big business parties, legally enforced by ballot access restrictions and a host of other barriers to third party campaigns, torrents of corporate campaign cash, and the exclusion of anti-capitalist views by the corporate-owned media, elections in America have far more to do with the ruling class’s recalibration of policy and changes in its governing personnel than with the democratic will of the people. The sentiments and desires of the people …

By Ann Talbot.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s autumn spending review has introduced the most savage package of public spending cuts ever seen in Britain. Half a million public-sector jobs will be lost as £83 billion, or $128 billion, is cut from the budget. Another half million private-sector jobs will go as a result.
Spending for welfare benefits will be slashed by a total of £18 billion between the cuts contained in the spending review and those already made in the emergency budget earlier this year.
The military faces an 8 percent average cut …

By Patrick O’Connor.
Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday declared that Australian forces, working with their US and NATO allies, would maintain operations in Afghanistan for at least the next decade. The government’s commitment to the indefinite occupation of the Central Asian state marked the opening of what is to be a two-week parliamentary debate on the neo-colonial war.

Some context for less-informed readers

Mining in Australia is a significant primary industry and contributor to the Australian economy.
Afghan mineral wealth could top $1 trillion: Pentagon | Reuters.

~ empirestrikesblack | Follow @nit2am on Twitter
Gillard …