A weekly 30 minute review of news and opinion, recorded from a shortwave radio. With times and freqs for listening at home. 2 files- broadcast and slow-modem streaming. Free to rebroadcast. Netherlands, Cuba, and Russia.

Israel, like the US, condones and practices torture routinely

CHICAGO, 11/15/07 – Attorneys for a south suburban gay man filed suit in federal court today over an alleged Memorial Day police gay bashing that included breaking into the man's home with shotguns drawn, followed by a prolonged public humiliation mixed with anti-gay epithets in front of his neighbors as he sat handcuffed to a chair at the home's entrance.

Just a couple of weeks ago, America's government tax collectors, the Internal Revenue Service, issued a new report. The IRS found that the richest 1% of Americans earned a record 21.2% of all income in 2005, up from 19% the year before. At the same time, the bottom 50% earned just 12.8% of all income in 2005, down from 13.4%. This was a record. IRS data only go back to 1986, but other academic research suggests that the last time wealthy Americans had such a high percentage of the national income was in the 1920s.

And there's more. The IRS data show that the incomes of people right in the middle of all the income brackets (where half earn less and half earn more) fell 2% between 2000 and 2005 when adjusted for inflation, to $30,881. At the same time, the income level for the top 1% grew 3% to $364,657, or over ten times as much!

This shows that capitalism is not only a breeder of economic crisis, war and waste, but is also a system of grotesque exploitation and injustice. When Marx wrote Das Kapital around 150 years ago, he argued that "pauperism (poverty) forms the condition of capitalist production and of the capitalist development of wealth... in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse".

For immediate release

* As part of the 2.300 delegates in the second Zapatista and indigenous community’s international reunion, which took place last July in Mexico, members of the wayuu community delivered a truly important message: Venezuelan indigenous community’s situation is very different than the declared by the government people in Caracas. El Libertario talked about the experience with Jorge Montiel, member of the Maikiralasa’lii.

* Various organizations and individuals within Venezuela, each with a history of social struggle and each bringing with them diverse proposals from the anti-authoritarian and critical left, have assembled in the space of INSURGENTES (INSURGENTS) to forge a position against the proposed constitutional “reform” offered by the republic’s President, Hugo Chavez Frias.

Aunt Benazir's False Promises

A never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military's Guantánamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002.

Alderman Smith has put forward a new plan to close
Senn HS