The American Nightmare has no boundaries as it were. I had just recently moved to a new domicile and was talking with the telephone technician working on my phone line. We were talking shop and I happened to mention I was a journalist. I told him of my exploits interviewing everyday people around the country. Then I mentioned the sad tales of the “New Homeless” and how their high tech and engineering jobs were being sent to third world countries. I also mentioned the foreclosure fiasco and all the people living in RV’s or traveling to family members or friends to live out this non recession. Then he looked at me with the all too familiar look of loss I’ve seen over these last few months.

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS - Counterpunch

It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel...The targeted victims are not Poland and France, but Iran, Syria, the remains of the Palestinian West Bank and southern Lebanon...The neoconservatives are ecstatic. Hegemony uber alles is back on track.

Led by Dick Cheney, Bush administration neocons want war on Iran. So does the Israeli Lobby, but it doesn't mean they'll get it.

Gleefully Than Shwe counts the votes in his bogus Constitutional Referendum after taking full advantage of the enormous loss of life. Granted the dead would have voted against this fetid piece of paper anyway. But what ticks me off is the fact it took a cyclone to get the worlds attention in the first place. As usual it required dead bloating bodies in numbers hard to ignore before the main stream media addressed the brutality this military junta. Where is China and their wealth of resources in this time of crisis? Oh I guess they made nice by climbing a mountain to promote their Blood Olympics.

As we prepare to celebrate Mothers Day across the Americas and abroad, for some this is a sad time. Within the Aboriginal communities in Canada, America and Mexico sorrow fills the eyes of those who lost their beloved mothers. In Canada alone over 500 Aboriginal women have been murdered and simply came up missing in the last 20 years. This statistic is shared throughout the Northern Hemisphere. This disproportionate figure is a clear sign the conquering people of the America’s have little regard for the Native populations as a whole. Of course other social issues go unaddressed as well and the “secret third world of the America’s” struggles to exist in this ambivalent world we live.

By JoANN WYPIJEWSKI; April 28, 2008

Sean Bell was dead at 23, too bad. He and a friend had had heated words with another man outside Club Kalua, an exotic dance club, after his bachelor party there. Did anyone really say he had a gun or say he was going for a gun? The testimony was inconsistent, but the judge wasn't bothered by that inconsistency. Police "perceived" that Bell and his crew might have had a gun in their car, he stated. They no more had a gun than Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

By CYNTHIA McKINNEY - May 1, 2008

...[T]he criminal justice system in [the United States] "always finds a rationale for letting off cops who kill black and brown people." Indeed, police officers seem to know that they can kill certain people with impunity...the prospects are that black and brown men and women will continue to be murdered by police officers who, fundamentally, seem scared of black people. That fear apparently extends to the larger community because juries construct ways to let murderous police officers escape just punishment.

by Chalmers Johnson - Tom Dispatch

The RAND Corporation was the ur-think tank, the Cold War granddaddy of them all, and it's still with us. In the 1950s, nuclear war-gaming a conflagration...it took the U.S. military into virtuality and science fiction long before there was an Internet to play with...In the 1960s, it helped several administrations plan and fight the Vietnam War, making antiseptic theory into an all-too-grim reality. And that's just the beginning of the work RAND did on a range of hot-button imperial issues...For a brief period in the 1960s, Chalmers Johnson was a RAND consultant.

by Don Butler - Monday, May 05, 2008

The [Stephen] Harper government is embracing tough-on-crime policies even as the United States backs away from similar approaches that have produced record levels of incarceration, huge costs and racialized prisons, says an American expert on sentencing policy...The Harper government pushed the[ir] bill through even though crime rates in Canada are falling and are now at their lowest level in 25 years.

Recently while traveling in Nebraska I stopped at the Shoemaker Truck Stop along I-80. It was a classic truck stop and it was obvious to see it’s been around for many moons. The trucker was still revered in this vintage haunt. The walls were covered with pictures depicting the golden age of trucking, farming, Ole Route 66, and other forgotten or ignored aspects of humble USA history. Curios of a wide variety filled the shelves, all depicting Americana from the early years to the present. From trucking to farming this place had history and memories for all to see.

The students at the college of Menominee Nation in Keshena, Wisconsin recently collected about two tons of electronic waste and 23 pounds of pharmaceuticals as part of the EPA Great Lakes 2008 Earth Day Challenge.

The collections brought to over four tons the amount of electronics (e-waste) recycled by members of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin as part of the challenge involving over 100 projects in eight states across the Great Lakes Basin thus helping the EPA exceed its goals many times over of one million pounds of e-waste and one million pills.
During the hours of the actual collection on campus, the students learned they had also been awarded a major recycling grant.
In both cases, they were the only tribal college out of numerous participants.
The collection was one of several Earth Week projects sponsored by the tribe including several by youngsters and teens at the tribal school.
The story includes a video detailing the college project and numerous photos.

Dock Workers' StrikeBy Fred Williams

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) carried out an eight-hour work stoppage at West Coast ports on May 1 to demand an end to the war in Iraq.

Bush administration [Department of Justice] targeting animal and environmental activists.

By Greg Palast

So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.

What was once thought to be an Asia issue, rice shortage, has hit California, New York and New England as shopper’s line up at markets to buy rice. Some stores are considering rationing the commodity as panicked shoppers buys hundreds of pounds of rice at a time. Some call it sticker shock since the looming rice shortage has increased the price of this once cheap food stuff.