Supreme Court Legalizes Influence Peddling: McDonnell v. United States by Rob Hager

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

by Rob Hager
Writer, Dandelion Salad
July 3, 2016

The Supreme Court has mostly completed its decimation of any anti-corruption law that might have caused any more than the slightest inconvenience for the plutocracy’s political investments. Therefore the Court has now picked up its judicial supremacy ax to perform a similar demolition of laws that regulate the other side of the corruption equation. In a decision announced on June 27, timed as one of three final opinions of its 2015-16 term, the Court turned its attention to protecting the influence peddlers – who are installed by and otherwise benefit from the now freely flowing plutocratic investments – from prosecution for their delivery of the peddled policies.

Capitalism Kills by William T. Hathaway

Image by Alan Levine via Flickr

by William T. Hathaway
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Germany
June 29, 2015

“The world can only be changed by people who don’t like it,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in explaining why radicals have a negative attitude about the society we live in. We don’t like the way things are. Sometimes our dislike can even become loathing.

Jump Out of the Pot! Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed From the Inside by William T. Hathaway

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

by William T. Hathaway
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Germany
April 9, 2015

“I’m getting hot,” croaked the frog as he floated in a pot of water from which steam was beginning to rise.

“Me too,” croaked the other frog as she paddled listlessly. “This water used to be warm. Now it’s too hot.”

“Oh well…nothing we can do about it. Maybe it’ll get better.”

The Nature of Reality by Tristan A. Shaw

Image by Art4TheGlryOfGod by Sharon via Flickr

by Tristan A. Shaw
Writer, Dandelion Salad
British Columbia, Canada
December 28, 2014

I write these words for those interested in the esoteric domain of philosophy (real philosophy). Certain truths, in seeming contradiction, may be reconciled with a novelty of perspective – and so may this short piece help one’s struggle with the many difficulties which inexorably lay ahead.

A War Crime In Progress by Jason Farbma

Image by Eoin O’Mahony via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

by Jason Farbma
socialistworker.org
July 14, 2014

ISRAEL’S RELENTLESS pounding of a trapped civilian population in Gaza entered a frightening new phase as its bombing campaign continued into its seventh day. On July 13, the Israeli military dropped leaflets warning the residents of northern Gaza that whoever stayed behind risked being caught in an intensifying barrage of air strikes, prompting a panicked exodus of tens of thousands from the area.

Black Oak Down, by Shepherd Bliss

Image by Scott Hess via Flickr

by Shepherd Bliss
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Santa Rosa, California
June 26, 2014

A loud, crashing sound startles my young farm-hand Emily Danler awake in the dark of the night. She camps out in order to start picking berries at sun-up. My dog, inside, barks. After a physically-demanding day farming, I sleep through it all.

Looking down the boysenberry field to the bottom of Kokopelli Farm the next morning, tears come to my eyes. The tall, old black oak had split right down the middle of its deep, wide trunk. I would never again see its crimson leaves announcing the beginning of Spring.

Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Richard D. Wolff Respond to Thomas Paine’s Question: What Is To Be Done? by Jill Dalton

Cornel West, Chris Hedges, Richard D. Wolff photo by Jill Dalton

by Jill Dalton
Writer, Dandelion Salad
recoveringarmybrat
June 5, 2014

A Report from the Left Forum (6-1-14) with: Chris Hedges, Dr. Cornel West, and Richard Wolff

Moderated by: Laura Flanders

This seminar was part of the Left Forum’s three day symposium, Reform and/or Revolution: Imagining a World with Transformative Justice, held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City (May 30 – June 1). The turn out at this conference was their largest to date, which I consider a very good sign.

NATO’s Incremental But Inexorable Absorption of Ukraine by Rick Rozoff

by Rick Rozoff
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
April 25, 2014

A version of this feature will appear in the forthcoming volume Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks Global War, edited by Stephen Lendman and to be issued by Clarity Press. As more information becomes available it will be posted at Stephen Lendman’s website.

With almost 1,500 miles of land and sea connecting the two nations, the border with Ukraine is the longest along the western frontier of Russia, with that of Finland next in length.

Until the end of the Cold War only one member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization directly adjoined Russia: Norway, and that for only 135 miles, land and sea. (Though Turkey bordered other Soviet republics.)

FCC Proposal for a Payola Internet Would End Net Neutrality by Timothy Karr + Stop the Internet for the 1%!

Dandelion Salad

Updated: May 16, 2014

Freepress
April 25, 2014

Contact Info:
Timothy Karr, 201-533-8838

Image by Melissa St. Hilaire via Flickr

WASHINGTON — The Wall Street Journal reports that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler will on Thursday propose a new set of rules issued in response to a January federal court decision that tossed out the agency’s prior open Internet rules.

The new rules would allow Internet service providers to charge an extra fee to content companies for preferential treatment, guaranteeing their content reaches end users ahead of those that do not pay. The rules are now circulating among the FCC commissioners and are expected to be be voted on at the next public FCC meeting on May 15.

Global Economy Confounds Washington’s War Mentality by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from Strategic Culture Foundation
April 25, 2014

Capitalism and its imperialist proclivity have been associated with the structural causes of conflict and war over recent centuries. But given today’s imperative realities of a globalized economy, capitalism – or at least large sections of it – cannot afford such a conflict or desire it. In this regard, we may be witnessing a seminal shift, whereby Washington’s threatened sanctions towards Russia, and the war that that entails, are seen as an untenable political agenda divorced from the all-important economic realm.

In pushing this agenda, Washington may be the one that finds itself isolated, not Moscow.

Capitalism: The Systematic Poverty and Exploitation of Human Beings by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
April 26, 2014

Image by Infinite Ache via Flickr

Workers in Western countries are now paid so badly that businesses are reportedly finding it profitable to return from China – having relocated to Asia in the first place to exploit cheap labor there.

It is an astounding indictment of how capitalism has created a global race to the bottom of misery for workers – yet the Western corporate news media actively conceal this abomination.

Washington’s Trans-Pacific Power Play by Ashley Smith + TPP Raises Fears of Global Internet Censoring

Dandelion Salad

[Please scroll down to find the Action Alerts and sign them.]

by Ashley Smith
socialistworker.org
April 23, 2014

Image by Mike Chickey via Stop FastTrack via Flickr

The U.S. military wants it, and so does Corporate America–which is why we should beware

BARACK OBAMA is headed to Asia for a four-country tour designed to revive diplomatic and economic attention on the region that Washington’s imperial strategists believe is crucial to the future.

Obama will travel to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines, the U.S. government’s main allies in the region. But looming over each stop and every meeting will be a country that definitely isn’t on the presidential itinerary: China.

Doomed US Targets China and Russia by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
April 23, 2014

US President Barack Obama kicks off his East Asia tour this week with a threat of military aggression towards China at the same time that vice president Joe Biden was stepping up similar provocations to Russia over the Ukraine crisis.

That is because the so-called American “pivot to Asia” is intimately connected with the crisis in Ukraine and the increasing tensions between Washington and Moscow. Both cases are the result of US imperialist aggression aimed at postponing the collapse of American global hegemony. Although in the laughable way that the Western corporate media invert reality Washington’s vice is turned into a virtue.

General Mark Kimmitt’s Easter Day Mistruths and “The Sound of Freedom” by Felicity Arbuthnot

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London, England
April 13, 2014

“We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected round the world.” (President Barack Obama, State of the Union address, 24th January 2012)

As Easter was celebrated in the US and UK with, for believers, the message of hope, Fallujah, the region and much of the country is again under siege, not this time by US mass murderers, but by the US proxy government’s militias armed with US delivered weapons.

The Changing Face of Labor by Rivera Sun

by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Popular Resistance
April 18, 2014

Image by Michael Fleshman via Flickr

Depending on one’s proximity to wage and workplace issues, the term Labor Movement may conjure up images of 19th century Wobblies with rolled-up shirtsleeves, Detroit autoworkers, or Walmart strikers. The face of labor evolves through the decades and with each change in the workplace, our identity as a populace of laborers has shifted.