Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould: Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism

Dandelion Salad

Apr 22, 2012 by Grailwerk

The Real Colombia Scandal: When Bedding Prostitutes Is Worse Than Crimes Against Humanity by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
East Africa
April 19, 2012

Get caught with a hooker in your hotel room and it’s a firing offence; get caught desecrating the corpses of dead Afghans and – nothing.

Two scandals emerging this week involving immoral conduct of US Secret Service and military personnel reveal starkly different reactions and priorities among the American ruling elite.

Norway: NATO Rehearses For War In The Arctic by Rick Rozoff

Norway-map (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Rick Rozoff
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
April 21, 2012

The largest military exercise in the High North, inside and immediately outside the Arctic Circle, since the end of the Cold War (and perhaps even before) was completed on March 21 in northern Norway.

Except for the crash of a Norwegian military transport plane in Sweden during its course the world would have been unaware of it.

The Prisoners in Gaza – Their Blackout Nightmare by Ralph Nader + Why Gaza’s Healthcare Fails Thousands of Injured

Dandelion Salad

Updated: April 23, 2012 added a video

by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
April 19, 2012

Image by gloucester2gaza via Flickr

Have you heard much lately about the 1.5 million Palestinians illegally imprisoned by the Israeli government in the world’s largest open-air Gulag? Their dire living conditions, worsened by a selective Israeli siege limiting the importation of necessities of life – medical items, food, water, building materials, and fuel to list a few – has resulted in an 80 percent unemployment rate and widespread suffering from unlawful punishment, arbitrary arrests and imprisonment in Israeli jails.

Andrew Gavin Marshall: Class War and the College Crisis

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
http://andrewgavinmarshall.com
April 17, 2012

Andrew Gavin Marshall joins us to discuss his latest three-part essay on “Class War and the College Crisis.” We talk about how the education system is used to create and maintain national identity, how this process is used for the benefit of the ruling class, and possible ways that students, academics, and the public generally can use this knowledge to empower a meaningful critique of the dominant social hierarchy. If you appreciate Marshall and his work, don’t forget to support his People’s Book Project.

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 24th Installment: Chapter Twenty 2048: Progressive Attack Politics, Part 4

Note: The Preface and Chapters One through Twenty can be found here: The 15% Solution

by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on TPJmagazine.us
April 22, 2012

This is the twenty-fourth installment of the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Herein you will find “Part 4” of Chapter 20. (This chapter is very long, and so it will be presented in five parts.) From the perspective of the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of U.S. Constitutional Democracy in 2048, this chapter discusses “what might have been done” to prevent the fall of the old United States into fascism.

Report on Iran’s Nuclear Fatwa Distorts Its History by Gareth Porter

by Gareth Porter
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted at ISP
April 18, 2012

WASHINGTON, Apr 18, 2012 (IPS) – The Barack Obama administration’s new interest in the 2004 religious verdict, or “fatwa”, by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banning the possession of nuclear weapons, long dismissed by national security officials, has prompted the New York Times to review the significance of the fatwa for the first time in several years.

Palestine’s Tragedy Commemorated by Felicity Arbuthnot

Warning

This article may contain language depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be read by a mature audience.

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
London, England
20 April 2012

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.” (Martin Luther King, 1929-1968)

Many dreams have been rained on since peace was declared at the end of the Second World War, on 8th May 1945.(i) Two veritable historic hurricanes were commemorated on 9th April, as was the burial of the man who dreamed: Martin Luther King.

Greg Palast: Preventing Death By Pipeline (fracking)

Detail of Tower for drilling horizontally into the Marcellus Shale Formation for natural gas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

with Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com

Apr 17, 2012 by RTAmerica

With soaring gas prices, companies seek alternative ways to try to get energy sources in the US. On Tuesday the battle over energy continued on Capitol Hill. The Environmental Protection Agency met to finish up plans for regulations that should cut down on pollution from oil and gas drilling. Environmentalist claim hydraulic fracturing leads to toxic waste, but companies who use this practice say regulators are taking it too far. Greg Palast, investigative journalist, joins us with his take on fracking.

Student Strikes, Debt Domination, and Class War in Canada: Class War and the College Crisis, Part 4 by Andrew Gavin Marshall

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
http://andrewgavinmarshall.com
April 17, 2012

Part 1: The “Crisis of Democracy” and the Attack on Education

Part 2: The Purpose of Education: Social Uplift or Social Control?

Part 3: Of Prophets, Power, and the Purpose of Intellectuals

There is a process under way in Canada, led by the corporate and financial elite, and directed against the general population, the poor, and the young, intending to provide for the rich and powerful, to punish the poor and steal from the rest, to plunge into poverty, to repress, control, and dominate: this process is called ‘Class War’ and it’s waged by the super-rich against the supposedly superfluous rest. It’s objective is simple: to preserve, protect, and expand the control and domination of the wealthy over the majority.

War Is A Racket – A Song by Ed Ciaccio

by Ed Ciaccio
Dandelion Salad
Featured Writer
April 18, 2012

Image by tsweden via Flickr

“War is a racket,” warned the retired Marine,
Veteran of wars, sick of what he’d seen.
Planned and ordered by the callous and mean,
It’s brutal and savage, and truly obscene.

“A gangster for capitalism” is what he became,
In his own words, years later, after his fame,
The book “War Is A Racket”, above his name,
Told how he was used in that deadly greed game.

They Can’t Stop Building Walls by Franklin Lamb

by Franklin Lamb
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Beirut, Lebanon
April 21, 2012

It may be that researchers would want to examine as long ago as the period from the 3rd century BC until the beginning of the 17th century in order to find a regime so frenetically building walls and barriers in a hopeless quest to hold onto stolen lands as we in Lebanon may soon witness in the south of the country.  It was back in 221 BC that in order to protect China from the land claims of the Xiongnu people from Mongolia, the Xiongnu tribe being China’s main enemy at that time who sought the return of lands they claimed the Chinese had stolen, that the emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the construction of a wall to guard China’s territorial gains.

NATO Baltic Buildup Threatens Belarus And Russia by Rick Rozoff

by Rick Rozoff
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
April 21, 2012

The defense ministers of Belarus and Russia, jointly the Union State, met in the Belarusian capital of Minsk on April 18 and underlined the need for the two countries to strengthen military cooperation in response to the qualitative intensification of North Atlantic Treaty Organization deployments and operations on and near their borders.

Blessed are the peacemakers by Philip A. Farruggio

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Philip A. Farruggio
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 21, 2012

However fortunate are we who live in the Southeastern corner of Volusia County, Florida. Imagine, with all the apathy throughout America, we actually have three ongoing weekly peace demonstrations. The numbers, sadly, are too small for this writer’s and this activist’s taste. Yet, look at the few who do come out, and have come out for going on eight years:

Ending the War on Drug Users by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
April 17, 2012

Image by iVoryTowerz via Flickr

On April 8, 2012, our esteemed Editor/Publisher at BuzzFlash@Truthout, my good friend Mark Karlin, published a column entitled “The US War on Drug Cartels in Mexico Is a Deadly Failure” (1). In his column he noted that: “Approximately 50,000 or more Mexicans have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a so-called war on drug cartels. (In a recent appearance in Toronto, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta claimed 150,000 people have died in the drug war in Mexico, but the timeline Panetta was referring to was unclear, as was the origin of the figure he cited.).” Mark went on to say: