By Chauncey DeVega - September 18, 2011

They cheer at the thought of an uninsured person dying. They cheer at the thought of state-sponsored murder. In all, the 2012 Tea Party Republican debates have revealed that they are a death cult...[I]n the age of Obama, contemporary conservatism has surrendered to a virulent, dystopian and pathologically hyper-individualist state of nature...[C]ontemporary conservatism has fully embraced a politics that are utterly and totally bereft of human empathy.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011 - Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

Millionaire Rob Ford, and right wing councilors at Toronto City Hall are meeting on September 19, in an executive committee meeting to recommend cuts to public services and job lay offs [of] upwards of $800 million dollars...Public services for many of us are the difference between abject poverty, and just being able to get by. We do not want cuts, we want more services!...These cuts are about poor bashing. They are about further displacing people of color and indigenous people...It is time to TAKE TORONTO BACK.

By MAXIMILIAN C. FORTE - August 31, 2011

I wish to...remind readers of the role of ideologically-motivated fabrications of “truth” that were used to justify, enable, enhance, and motivate the war against Libya — and to emphasize how damaging the practical effects of those myths have been to Libyans, and to all those who favored peaceful, non-militarist solutions...[These myths] threaten to severely distort the ideals of human rights and their future invocation, as well aiding in the continued militarization of Western culture and society.

August 24, 2011 - Intercontinental Cry

Another fifty-two environmental activists were arrested on Monday for taking part in the Tar Sands Action, a peaceful two-week protest that's urging President Obama to reject a permit for the risky Keystone XL pipeline.

By Harvey Thompson - 24 August 2011

At around 18:30, eight officers arrived at the second floor flat of Dale Burns, 27, the father of two young children, and sought to arrest him. During the arrest one officer discharged a Taser device a number of times and another officer deployed pepper spray...Burns complained of feeling unwell following the arrest and was taken to Furness General Hospital where his condition deteriorated. At around 21:00, he was pronounced dead.

By Maidhc Ó Cathail - Dissident Voice

Back in 1998, the Project for a New American Century wrote to President Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power...Thirteen years, hundreds of thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, and no weapons of mass destruction later, three of the signatories of that infamous PNAC letter...are among a gang of Israel partisans and their lackeys who have signed another open letter to an American president urging regime change in yet another one of Israel’s Arab neighbours.

By Marie Diamond - AlterNet

Former Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams is running for Congress on a staunchly anti-Obama, anti-government platform. He recently came out with a new video ad called The Donkey Whisperer that’s raising a lot of eyebrows for conflating Democrats with welfare recipients and comparing them to donkeys.

By Rady Ananda - August 23 2011

The surviving family members of Kelly Thomas, who was brutally murdered by Fullerton Police (Orange County, California) in July, rejected an offer of $900,000 not to pursue civil action...On July 5, 2011, closed circuit TV caught six Fullerton cops brutally murdering a homeless, mentally ill man. Kelly Thomas, age 37, died after being taken off life-support five days later.

"Karl Marx had it right. At some point capitalism can destroy itself because you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand, and that's what's happening." -- Nouriel Roubini

By Alexander Billet - August 20th, 2011

Perhaps the players have been switched out, along with some minor script changes, but the story remains the same: moral depravity, tied up to one degree or another in hip-hop culture, seeking to invade a respectable, mannerly western civilization and rot it from the inside. It doesn’t take a political mind to see how racist this is...Fortunately, this line of thought hasn’t gone unchallenged.

August 14, 2011 - Linchpin

"The motivation behind the formation of Hamilton CopWatch is...the same drive which has given rise to CopWatch groups across this continent and beyond for over the past 20 years: a deeply felt need to construct cooperative sources of protection against police abuse. In the face of a local police force whose daily operations threaten the safety, well-being and dignity of our communities, we have been compelled out of necessity to seek out our power in numbers, as an organization dedicated to placing a greater degree of accountability upon cops in our neighbourhoods."

By Michael Truscello - Dissident Voice

The world is dying, and capitalists are making record profits as it dies. There are more slaves and billionaires than ever before. The military-industrial complex is the largest it has ever been...In this context, poor and working people have been [told]...to reduce their expectations for the future and for their quality of life in the present...Now is not the time to "restore the middle class," the message from Big Labour; now is the time to restore human dignity and prevent the current crisis from being our last...We need a revolution, not a reformation.

Saturday, August 13, 2011 - Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

...George Orwell provided a useful general starting point for how anarchists view riots, writing..."I have no particular love for the idealised 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on." What happened in London and spread elsewhere was not some idealized glorious proletarian uprising, but the very real explosion of anger that occurs when years of poverty, police repression, and racism finally reach bursting point.

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN - August 12-14, 2011

[The] endless wars on crime and drugs...have engendered not merely 2.3 million prisoners but a vindictive hysteria that pulses on the threshold of homi­cide in the bosoms of many of our uniformed law enforcers. Time and again, one hears stories attesting to the fact that they are ready, at a moment's notice or a slender pretext, to blow someone away, beat him to a pulp, throw him in the slammer, sew him up with police perjuries and snitch-driven charges, and try to toss him in a dungeon for a quarter-century or more.

SchNEWS - Friday 12th August 2011 | Issue 783

It seems to us that everyone is asking the wrong question – why did they riot? When in fact the more obvious question would be – why did it take ‘til now? A toxic combination of neo-liberalism and the gangsterism that goes with the criminalization of drugs has created ghettos in London and throughout the U.K. Everyone knows it – and the ‘feral underclass’ has become the acceptable focus of snobbery, hate and fear.