Israeli court convicts two soldiers (for using child as human shield)

from Al Jazeera

An Israeli court-martial has found two soldiers guilty of forcing a nine-year-old Palestinian boy to search for suspected booby-traps on their behalf during the 2008-2009 war in the Gaza Strip.

The conviction on Sunday, which could carry jail time, was Israel’s latest legal reckoning over a three-week offencive that enjoyed domestic support but was widely criticised abroad for its toll on Palestinian civilians.
 
The two infantry brigade sergeants helped seize control of an apartment building in the Gaza City suburb of Tel Al-Hawa district on January 15, 2009, while under gun and rocket fire from guerrillas, according to a summary of the verdict.

Rounding up residents, they came across bags in a bathroom and ordered a nine-year-old boy from the group of civilians to check if the bags contained explosives.

[read the rest, here]

Banks foreclose on homes that they don’t own

(H/T to What Really Happened)

“Waiting for Superman” Is Just Neoliberal Propaganda Marketing Pinochet’s Class Based School System to the American Left

by Scott Creighton

There are billions upon billions of dollars to be made by the corporate elite and 1%ers who are currently waiting for superman to come along and help sell the privatization of every public school system in America.  The privatization of public schools has been a mainstay in the neoliberal economic reform platform since Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys tripped down to Chile to run their “experiment” after Henry Kissinger and the CIA killed their elected president on Sept. 11th, 1973 and installed the ruthless dictator Augusto Pinochet in his place. 

In third world countries they use dictators and psychopaths to rule with an iron fist (and the occasional CIA death squad and drone strike) while their economic reforms cripple the lives of the vast majority of the indigenous population and their privatization policies sell off the public assets for pennies on the dollar.  In America, they use fraudulent politicians, billionaire celebrities and smug sellout tools like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Davis Guggenheim to spin up sappy, propaganda laden Madison Ave. multi-million dollar PR campaigns designed to fool the American people into thinking a corporate system of institutionalized inequality is actually the “progressive” solution to a carefully orchestrated ”problem”. 

Israeli Propaganda in US Media