By the Editor.
Hat tip to Scott Creighton over at American Everyman for posting this video.
Recently assaulted activist and demonstrator Jody McIntyre, verbally demolishes a BBC reporter live on air in this video interview. After the condescending, patronising interviewer’s repeated attempts to paint Jody and his fellow protesters as violent and threatening, Jody responds:
“Do you think that I could have, in any way, posed a physical threat from the seat of my wheelchair, to an army of police officers armed with weapons? This whole line of argument is absolutely ludicrous …

By Ann Talbot.
British mercenaries are to be deployed in Somalia, according to the London-based Sunday Telegraph. The Telegraph, which is well informed on military matters, revealed last week that the Foreign Office has been in talks with a firm that employs former members of the Special Boat Service (SBS).
The ex-SBS men will work with local warlords to take control of the coastline along the strategic shipping route that runs around the Horn of Africa. Ostensibly the plan is an anti-piracy measure responding to the kidnapping of a British couple who …

By Stefan Steinberg and Barry Grey.
In a revealing admission concerning the relationship between capitalist governments and international financial interests, the Financial Times on Tuesday wrote of “Europe’s dirty secret.”
The newspaper editorialized against the plan of the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund to loan Ireland tens of billions of euros in order to guarantee in full the investments of international bankers and bondholders in the country’s failing banking system.
Under the plan, Ireland will effectively surrender sovereignty over its economic policy to the EU and …

By John Pilger.
“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall’n on you:
Ye are many – they are few.”
These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” may seem unattainable. I don’t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spreadsheet.
Born of the “never again” spirit of 1945, social democracy has surrendered to an …

Morning Star, Wednesday 10 November 2010.
Over 50,000 workers and students shook the Westminster halls of power today with a march against the raising of tuition fees.
Anger at the Con-Dem cuts and fee rises spilled over just hours after the march with 300 protesters occupying Tory HQ at Millbank.
Windows were smashed and small fires started inside with nine protesters and two police officers reportedly injured.
Riot police were so overwhelmed by the 2,000-strong protest outside Millbank that as the Star went to press the building remained occupied and they had abandoned plans …

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 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 Paul Craig Roberts.
Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?
Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?
Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.
Does anyone remember that …