Free Republic

CARACAS (Reuters) - A member of Venezuela's Socialist Party has rolled out a variation of the classic Christian "Lord's Prayer" to implore beloved late leader Hugo Chavez for protection from the evils of capitalism. "Our Chavez who art in heaven, the earth, the sea and we delegates," red-shirted delegate Maria Estrella Uribe recited on Monday at the PSUV party Congress. "Hallowed be your name, may your legacy come to us so we can spread it to people here and elsewhere. Give us your light to guide us every day," she said in front of an image of Chavez. "Lead us...

Angry protests and police violence have continued night after night in Ferguson, Mo., since the murder of an unarmed Black teenager, Mike Brown, on August 9. Despite claims by local and state authorities that they want to respect the rights of protesters, police provocations have grown more intense over the past two nights--with reports on Monday that the cops began their nightly barrage of tear gas hours before a midnight curfew. SocialistWorker.org writers Eric Ruder, Elizabeth Schulte, Trish Kahle and Donny Schraffenberger traveled to Ferguson to provide this account of a community rising up against police violence, despite a crackdown...

France has seen an explosion in the number of households requesting a deferral or cancellation of part or all of their tax bill in recent years. The country’s public finance body, the DGFiP, says there was a 22% rise in the number of such requests between 2011 and 2013, from around 177,000 to more than 216,000. Over the same period, the number of reminders for payment sent out by the French government has soared from 4.5 million to nearly 10 million. …

I wrote about Bruno Kreisky last year in the context of discussing Austria’s Islamization. There’s no doubt that Kreisky was a real demented piece of work, on a par with Norman Finkelstein or M.J. Rosenberg. Austria’s Socialist Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, despite being of Jewish ancestry, was fond of Muslim terrorists and Nazis. He had a habit of filling his cabinet with former Nazis while comparing Zionism to Nazism. His political success rested on a welfare state built with Soviet money funneled through commercial orders and turning a blind eye to terrorist attacks carried out with Soviet and Polish machine guns...

In his young pontificate, Pope Francis has begun to rehabilitate radical Latin American priests. He invited Liberation Theology founder Gustavo Guttierrez to meet with him in Rome and now has revived the priestly faculties of a priest who called Ronald Reagan a butcher.

How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA A new report was released today by the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, and it is damning. All this time that climate skeptics are accused of being in the employ of “big oil” is nothing more than a projection of their own greed. Some excerpts: Over 7.9 BILLION in funding between these groups.

As our government is insanely arranging flights at taxpayer expense for Honduran children so that they don’t have to make a dangerous trek across Mexico and pay coyotes $5,000 to invade our country illegally, their president is smiling, making no excuses for his inept and corrupt administration or the fact that this “refugee” airlift will encourage a continuous flow of illegal immigration to grow the ranks of Democrat voters in the U.S., moving large numbers of Hondurans and displacing American citizens.

Some remarkable - and frightening - photos of President Obama that show just how disengaged he's become. As crisis at home and around the world mount, the president is withdrawing and making it plain to those willing to see that the presidency doesn't interest him anymore. Peggy Noonan's July 4 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal laid out the case for the president's apparent ennui:

North Carolina’s voter identification law, which has been described as the most sweeping attack on African American electoral rights since the Jim Crow era, is being challenged in a legal hearing that opens on Monday. Civil rights lawyers and activists are gathering in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the start of the legal challenge that is expected to last all week. They will be seeking to persuade a federal district judge to impose a preliminary injunction against key aspects of HB 589, the voting law enacted by state Republicans last August. Lawyers for the North Carolina branch of the NAACP and...

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy could face up to five years in prison and a €500,000 fine on allegations of corruption and influence peddling. The embattled center-right politician was released from police custody late Tuesday (1 July) and is now under formal investigation. Sarkozy is suspected to have attempted to obstruct an investigation into the financing of his 2007 presidential campaign. He denies any wrongdoing and says the accusations are politically motivated. …

Gov. Bobby Jindal struck a chord around the nation when he voiced the sentiment held by millions: “I can sense right now a rebellion brewing amongst these United States where people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.” What Gov. Jindal did was merely vocalize the serious frustrations of a majority of Americans, namely, that we no longer have a representative government. Our elected officials don’t even pretend to represent us anymore. It’s all a high-stakes game. A scam. A con. Our politicians pat us on the head...

I ask myself, where is my country? Can I have it back? Why must we destroy everything in order to satisfy the wishes of the ruling elite, the oligarchs in power, who are busy re-writing all our laws, inviting in corruption, lawlessness, and deceit. No matter what the regime says, those in power become more prosperous and acquire more power.

Social media makes it easier and cheaper to build movements quickly – but bypassing the business of creating decision-making infrastructure means they can disappear just as fast.Where have all the chanters gone; the gospel-minded Christians and the denouncers of ‘banksters’ and tyrants; the homeless and the indebted and unemployed who filled our urban squares in 2011-12, crying out such slogans as "We are the 99 percent" and "The people want the end of the regime"? Where are the leaderless revolutionaries who turned cities around the world upside down? The simple answer is: they were dispersed. When the sometimes public parks...

These are the sorts of folks I’m talking about when I say that the “hipster fascists” are the enemy of an open sourced society. Of course it is probably fair to say that not one person in this meeting room would identify themselves as a “fascist.” In fact as this was a gathering of American socialists they would likely jump up and down swearing that they weren’t fascists and that in fact they fought fascism and everything fascism stands for. — Well clearly, just watch their open minds at work in the video. It has been my experience that many...

For We the People, Obama’s time in office has thus far been tantamount to a march through hell with the complete deconstruction of America strapped to our backs and with despair and immiseration clinched in our teeth. And for the privilege of being unwilling participants in this death march, Obama believes we should be grateful. Obama has usurped and overrun congressional authority in less time than it took for the Kudzu vine to overrun the South. Some years back I wrote: “Many in America wanted to be proud when the first person of color was elected president, but instead, they...

The city has agreed to pay nearly $600,000 to settle allegations that police wrongfully arrested a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters, marking the largest settlement to date in a single Occupy-related civil rights case, the marchers' lawyers said Tuesday. The city didn't immediately comment. City lawyers had said in court papers this fall that the arrests were lawful and police "acted reasonably, properly, lawfully and in good faith." The individual protesters are receiving $5,000 to $20,000 apiece, and their lawyers $333,000 for fees and costs, the attorneys said. But to protester Jennifer Peat, 36, "the point was never the...

Trailer Talk: Eco-Terrorism 'Night Moves' Downplays Own Subject Matter by Christian Toto 31 Mar 2014 Both The Company You Keep and The East, films which portrayed eco-terrorists in a favorable light, tanked at the box office. So is it any wonder the trailer for the new film Night Moves downplays the eco-nature of its protagonists? The thriller casts Dakota Fanning, Jesse Eisenberg and Peter Scarsgaard as three environmental radicals who decide to take action against their corporate targets. Trailers are famous for giving away too much of their stories. In the case of Night Moves, the trailer only touches on...

Secretary of State John Kerry says it's "a lot of baloney" to suggest the five Taliban prisoners released in exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will return to battle and kill Americans. Still, he tells CNN, if they try they'll likely be killed themselves.

During the 2008 election campaign, Mr. Obama made two things clear. First, that the Constitution of the United States was a reactionary document that stood in the way of socialism. Secondly, that he was going to wage war on coal.

I don’t like most of the assigned readings that now pass for the university’s seminal texts of the liberal arts. But on the other hand, I don’t believe in triggers to warn students of what is inside a book. Otherwise, I might insist that universities put a warning on Rigoberta Menchú’s or Barack Obama’s autobiographies: “Trigger Warning: these are fictive accounts that rely on occasional invention and adaption and so do not, as the authors have claimed, reflect actual events.” Nor would I want a written trigger for the book flap of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, along the...