Dusk of the Dead

John McCain: War Hero or North Vietnam's Go-To Collaborator? by Douglas Valentine

Readers of the eXile already know about McCain's traitorous history during the Vietnam war (see http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=17922&IBLOCK_ID=35). But the concept of 'traitor' is a nationalistic one, and in McCain's case ignores the fact that during the Vietnam war, the U.S. was the bad guy. If that sounds controversial to you, just know that it isn't. Killing 4 million civilians is pretty universally regarded as bad form, even if the victims weren't first rounded up into camps and even though they may have had off-white skin, non-European facial features, and may have harbored ideas about politics that are at variance with those common in the United States.

So this article actually makes McCain look good, first for admitting that he is a war criminal for killing innocent women and children (not to mention men), and then for giving the Vietnamese National Liberation Front information that saved the lives of thousands of innocent women, children and men. "As result [of the information McCain volunteered to his captors,] the US lost sixty percent more aircraft and in 1968, 'called off the bombing of North Vietnam, because of the information McCain had given to them.'"

Of course, he is a hypocrite, and very likely a psychopath as a Cuban psychologist who analyzed him noted.

This isn't an endorsement.

...

No Rest for the Working Poor by Laura Carlsen

More on neoliberalism's death, and its proponents' obliviousness to it. It's the economic ideology equivalent of Weekend at Bernie's...

"In a June 9 speech at the International Labor Organization in Geneva, [Mexican Secretary of Labor] Lozano expounded on the perils of granting living wages to the working poor: 'The legitimate aspiration of higher wages for workers should come about through increases in productivity and not artificial measures such as generalized price controls or emergency wage hikes.' As Sec. of Labor, you'd think that Mr. Lozano might have seen just one of the dozens of studies that show that Mexican manufacturing has experienced a marked increase in productivity accompanied by a fall in real wages.

But the use of the word 'artificial' belies his conviction that anything outside the dictums of the neoliberal market is 'unnatural.' So whatever reality serves up that contradicts these dictums continues to be treated as an inconvenient anomaly or ignored completely."

[Jesus preaching his blessed-are-the-poor, rich-people-can't-get-into-
heaven claptrap to neoliberal Christians.]