By markaprovost.
In a January 2009 ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos, then President-elect Barack Obama said fixing the economy required shared sacrifice, “Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game.” (1)
For the past two years, American workers submitted to the President’s appeal—taking steep pay cuts despite hectic productivity growth. By contrast, corporate executives have extracted record profits by sabotaging the recovery on every front—eliminating employees, repressing wages, withholding investment, and shirking federal taxes.
The global recession increased unemployment in every country, but the …

By the Editor.
It has begun. Using slashed public spending as a precursor and an excuse, the corporate whores in Whitehall are dismantling the NHS piece by piece and handing it to the private healthcare industry.
This from The UK Independent:
Under the proposals published in Health and Social Care Bill yesterday:
* GPs will become responsible for “buying” care from hospitals and will form consortiums to do so.
* Every hospital will be given independence from the Department of Health and will be allowed to fail and will be taken over by private operators …

Matthew Cassel, The Electronic Intifada, 17 December 2010.
Over the past month, journalist and activist Jody McIntyre has joined a growing number of students, workers, activists and others in the United Kingdom in protesting a government decision to cut public sector funding, especially in the field of education. Last week, as tens of thousands of students took to the streets of central London, parliament voted in favor of a plan that will raise tuition fees by 300 percent.
Jody, who spent months alongside Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip protesting …

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 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 …

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 Krugman.
I live in a very sheltered world, yet I know young people just out of college who can’t find employment; men in their late 50s who have lost their jobs and think they will never find another; and families barely scraping by, terrified by what might happen if anyone were to get sick. These days, there are terrible stories everywhere you look.
Yet some Americans who have secure jobs and rather high incomes are feeling very sorry for themselves because it’s possible …