Oprah Winfrey &

The Dumbing Down of America

Was Hasan's killing of soldiers proof of “terrorism”? Or did he snap under pressure while treating returning vets on a base averaging ten suicides a month? Is there an undisclosed agenda by those who want to see it as the work of “Islamofascists”?

Nicholas Sarkozy has spent the past year hammering away at the excesses of American-style capitalism. In September, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso declared that worker's rights and "social cohesion" were top priorities in Europe.

American power wanes...The bloated, increasingly dysfunctional, for-profit US military machine is unable to solve the problems or rebuild the infrastructure in Afghanistan or Iraq, and it is unable to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure in the US.

The pontification of Western leaders about corruption in Afghanistan is growing rather tiresome? In fact, the US occupation of the country is not so morally immaculate -- indeed, that the most corrupt racket going in Afghanistan is the US occupation.

Iran has not gone to war against its neighbors in modern times (Iraq invaded it in 1980). But Israel and the US have gone to war and invaded other states on a variety of pretexts more than the rest of the world combined, since the end of WWII.

Two days before the Fort Hood killings, it was reported that 16 US soldiers killed themselves in October. "An unusually high monthly toll that is fueling concerns about the mental health of soldiers after more than eight years of continuous warfare.?

By next March, we will will hit the $1 trillion mark in total Iraq and Afghanistan war spending with untold years of war-making to go. No problem. It's only the proposed nearly $900 billion for a decade of health care that we fear will do us in.

After years of flailing helplessly in a country that appears poised to re-confirm its historic title as the graveyard of empires, the U.S. occupation is facing an increasingly bold Afghani resistance supported by a civilian opposition.

Obama's Peace Prize was met with astonishment and ridicule. The decision was made sometime in February with Obama barely a month in office. The panel of judges consisted of five Danish politicians. Was it a satirical comment on US imperialism?

The crushing effects of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land continue. Israel forces the Palestinian people from their homes, separate them from their agricultural land, deny them basic humanitarian aid. It's a process of methodical genocide.

The US media have discussed health-care systems in other countries, particularly Europe. But what about about Cuba’s system, where everyone is covered, for everything, where pre-existing conditions do not matter, and no patient pays for anything?

In a manner chillingly reminiscent of the Bush regime’s buildup to the Iraq war, Obama lackeys intensified US propaganda against Iran, threatening heavy sanctions if it doesn't provide unrestricted access to its 'hidden' uranium enrichment plant.

Because America doesn't look like a militarized country, it's hard for us to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the US is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment.

There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state is inevitable.

Americans misunderstand meaningful democratic politics. We've been bamboozled into seeing democracy as making small choices in the narrow-spectrum, mass-marketed, corporate-crafted election spectacles the power elite stages every four years.

From the timing of its apparent discovery, the airline plot has been pursued not so much as a criminal matter, much less as a means of ensuring the safety of the travelling public, but as a propaganda tool in London and Washington’s “war on terror”.

Afghanistan is the historical deathbed of overreaching foreign ambition. It happened to both the Brits and the Russians. If we stay in Afghanistan, we, too, will to catastrophically lose. Think Vietnam, but an even more disastrous debacle..

There are three causes of the coming collapse: * "the moral and psychological factor and the stress on the American population;" * America's deepening financial and economic crisis; * "the increase of anti-Americanism in the world."

An air strike by US warplanes operating as part of the NATO occupation in northern Afghanistan killed more than 100 people early Friday morning, most of them civilians who were incinerated when two gasoline tankers, hit by bombs, exploded in flames.

There is a firestorm ahead in the Middle East for which neither the US government nor the US public is prepared. The storm will go from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Israel/Palestine, and in the classic expression "it will spread like wildfire."

Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them. Crippling sanctions should be applied to force it to disarm. Sanctions should also be applied because Israel is an apartheid state.

US imperialism is concealed in plain sight. Washington's funding of fifth columns, quislings, phoney 'independent' journalists and overthrow movements may be on the public record, but few know it, and even fewer are prepared to explore it further.

America's neoconservatives sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating Saddam Hussein, a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East.

Levels of teen sexual activity look remarkably similar here and in Europe, but U.S. rates of teen pregnancy, childbirth, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases are among the highest of all industrialized nations, despite recent decreases.

The recent events in Honduras and Iran, which pit democratically elected regimes against pro-US military and civilian actors intent on overthrowing them can best be understood as part of a larger White House strategy designed to reassert its power.