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The Big Rip: Low Wage Corporations Spent Half a Trillion Inflating CEO Pay

Most of us believe in fair pay for honest work. So why aren’t low-wage workers better paid?

After 30 years of research, I can tell you it’s not because employers don’t have the cash. It’s because profitable corporations spend that money on their stock prices and CEOs instead.

Lowe’s, for example, spent $43 billion buying back its own stock over the past five years. With that sum, the chain could’ve given each of its 285,000 employees a $30,000 bonus every year. Instead, half of Lowe’s workers make less than $33,000. Meanwhile, CEO Marvin Ellison raked in $18 million in 2023.

The company also plowed nearly five times as much cash into buybacks as it invested in long-term capital expenditures like store improvements and technology upgrades over the past five years.

Lowe’s ranks as an extreme example, but pumping up CEO pay at the expense of workers and long-term investment is actually the norm among America’s leading low-wage corporations.

Was Osama Bin Laden Really Behind 9/11?

Twenty-three years ago this month the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon shook the United States and horrified the world.  Almost three thousand Americans died. The US launched attacks across the Muslim world in what the media called ‘the War on Terror.’ The repercussions of these events continue today. Washington quickly blamed Saudi/Yemeni jihadist Osama bin Laden for these attacks and vowed to hunt him down. But was he really guilty? As a veteran of the Afghan Wars and Mideast struggles, I still don’t believe most of Washington’s claims, most notably that the perpetrator was Osama bin Laden. It was subsequently revealed that the 9/11 attacks were likely planned in Germany and Spain, not Kabul, Afghanistan. The head of Pakistani intelligence told me he believed bin Laden may have known in advance of the planned attacks but was not personally involved. Let’s recall that bin Laden was a CIA asset during the war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – which I covered.  Other senior Afghan mujahidin leaders concurred with this view. They believed the 9/11 attacks originated from Saudi Arabia.

“He put a gun to my head” Trump’s vigilantes choose bullets over ballots

“He said, ‘Help me! Help me!’ and he stuck his hand inside his coat.  When I tried to help him, he pulls out a gun. That’s when he told me to get on the ground.”

Mark Anthony Aguirre, a vigilante vote-fraud hunter, ran an air-conditioning repair truck off the road. Then Aguirre put a gun to the repairman’s head—and demanded the driver, David Zuniga, open up the back of his truck. Aguirre believed that Zuniga was smuggling 750,000 forged absentee ballots, all “voting” for Biden, enough to win Texas.

Zuniga, rightly frightened for his life, opened the back of his A/C repair truck to reveal…A/C ducts and pipes. No forged ballots.
 
The gunman was not some lone crazy: In October 2020, he was paid a stunning $266,400 by a right-wing Texas billionaire, Steven Hotze, who had hired dozens of vigilantes in the hope of proving that Joe Biden was trying to steal the election by stuffing ballot boxes with forged ballots.
 
In Houston, I met with the man who supposedly forged these 750,000 ballots, Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis. Harris County is better known as Houston, Texas.

Zionism vs Zionism - Ben-Gvir and the Acceleration of the Collapse of Israel

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir vowed, on August 26, to build a synagogue inside the Muslim holy site Al-Haram Al-Sharif. 

 Ben-Gvir, as a representation of Israel's powerful religious Zionist class in the government and society at large, has been candid regarding his designs in occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine. 

 He has advocated a religious war, calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the starvation or killing of prisoners and the annexation of the West Bank. 

Knowledge Is Power. Gaza War Supporters Don’t Want Students to Have Both.

With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.

 In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.

Calling Harris A Communist Is An Insult To Communism

Republicans called Obama a communist, when all his worst actions as president were continuations and expansions of Bush’s policies. Democrats called Trump a Nazi when his worst acts were continuations and expansions of Obama’s policies. Now we’re back to calling Harris a communist, while she supports a genocide that Republicans also support.

Calling Kamala Harris a communist isn’t wrong because it degrades Harris, it’s wrong because it degrades communism.

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The Biden-Harris administration is knowingly helping the Israeli government wage a campaign of extermination in Gaza that has shocked and horrified the entire world, so obviously the real villain we need to focus on here is Jill Stein.

No serious person believes a bunch of socialists and peaceniks are going to vote for a capitalist warmongering party. Democrats don’t bitch about the Green Party because of lost votes, they do it because they hate being reminded that their party’s a lie and their values are fake.

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