The poor and the working class in the United States know what it is to be Greek. They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas and electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills. They know the crippling weight of debt. They know being sick and unable to afford medical care. They know the state seizing their meager assets, a process known in the United States as "civil asset forfeiture," which has permitted American police agencies to confiscate more than $3 billion in cash and property. They know the profound despair and abandonment that come when schools, libraries, neighborhood health clinics, day care services, roads, bridges, public buildings and assistance programs are neglected or closed. They know the financial elites' hijacking of democratic institutions to impose widespread misery in the name of austerity. They, like the Greeks, know what it is to be abandoned.

The Greeks and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because they are being assaulted by the same system—corporate capitalism. There are no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few external constraints that existed have been removed. Corporate capitalism, manipulating the world's most powerful financial institutions, including the Eurogroup, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve, does what it is designed to do: It turns everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse. In the extraction process, labor unions are broken, regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate lobbyists to legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public utilities are privatized. Secret trade agreements—which even elected officials who view the documents are not allowed to speak about—empower corporate oligarchs to amass even greater power and accrue even greater profits at the expense of workers. To swell its profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and drives into bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It ultimately demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism possible. But this is of little consolation for those who endure its evil. By the time it slays itself it will have left untold human misery in its wake.

Moscow hopes the US will fulfill its promise not to develop a system of missile defense in Europe after a deal with Iran has been reached, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in Vienna on Tuesday.

"We all probably remember that in April 2009 in Prague [US] President [Barack] Obama said that if the Iran nuclear program issue is sorted out, then the task of creating the European segment of the missile defense system will disappear," Lavrov said at press conference in Vienna.

He said that Tehran and the P5+1 powers (the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China) have agreed on "joint all-inclusive plan of actions, which consists of the main document and five very detailed technical appendices."

The United States trumpets education as one of its shining successes of the war in Afghanistan. But a BuzzFeed News investigation reveals U.S. claims were often outright lies, as the government peddled numbers it knew to be false and touted schools that have never seen a single student.

Here in the birthplace of the Taliban, children would climb up on Joe DeNenno and hang off his Army-issued rucksack as if it were a jungle gym. "Ruckriders," he called them.

The 24-year-old first lieutenant didn't just play with the kids. He also tutored them. He even convinced his commanding officer to spend some of the money the military had earmarked for winning hearts and minds on building the children a school.

In that summer of 2011, as he helped negotiate with local elders and the Afghan Ministry of Education, the fighting intensified. Three men in his unit fell to gunfire, and three more were blown up by roadside bombs. And Afghans who helped the Americans, he recalled, lost their lives "in just brutal torture, decapitated, terrible ways."

Still, by early October, a dozen of DeNenno's students — a few no taller than the shovels in their hands — smiled alongside U.S. soldiers, local security forces, and government officials, all gathered to break ground on a new school in the little village of Kandalay.

An Army press release lauded the groundbreaking as important "for the future of the children." For DeNenno, it was an "antidote" to the bloodshed and "the rut of chasing this specter of victory." It felt, he said, "like progress."

Nearly four years later, water seeps through the leaky roof and drips onto students in this more than $250,000 construction. Doors are cut in half; some are missing altogether. There is no running water for the approximately 200 boys — and zero girls — who attend. But the school did enrich a notorious local warlord. In exchange for donating the land on which the school sits, he extracted a contract from the U.S. military worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Pentagon announced Monday that it is moving forward with a plan that aims to end the military policy that prohibits transgender individuals from serving openly.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in a statement that a working group will be established to explore the issue over the next six months. The group will operate under the presumption that transgender individuals, or those who identify with a different gender than the one they were born as, can serve openly in the military "unless objective and practical impediments are identified."

If no negative consequences are found and the ban is lifted, it would go into effect sometime early next year.

"Transgender men and women in uniform have been there with us, even as they often had to serve in silence alongside their fellow comrades in arms," Carter said in a statement.

U.S. officials said the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel...

The United States has been running a particularly reckless and transparent bluff on the world.

'We must defeat ISIS' has been the repetitive mantra bellowed from pulpits and podiums by deceitful US officials. But this bit of shameless Orwellian newspeak is coming from the very same rogue policy makers who have been the primary source of arms and largesse to that group and its sordid affiliates across Syria, Libya, Iraq and elsewhere.

Republican Senator Rand Paul called his own party's bluff in a summer 2014 interview with CNN, telling the incompetent host that "we [the US government] are allied with ISIS in Syria."[1]

"[ISIS] would not be empowered in Iraq if we hadn't been providing them a safe haven in Syria by arming their allies," the Senator said, adding that "we are where we are because we armed the Syrian rebels," the preponderance of whom are Wahhabi-Salafist extremists.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on Friday ratified a resolution on starting its expansion procedures and passed a comprehensive blueprint for the bloc's development in the next decade.

The leaders of the SCO states ratified the resolution on starting the procedures of granting India and Pakistan full membership of the organization, according to a declaration issued after the 15th SCO summit held in Ufa, capital of Russia's Bashkortostan Republic.

The SCO also elevated Belarus to the status of observer from dialogue partner, and took in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia and Nepal as new dialogue partners, read the document.

Meanwhile, the leaders approved the SCO Development Strategy until 2025, which set targets and tasks for the organization's development in the upcoming 10 years.

The strategy maps out goals for the SCO member states to conduct cooperation in the areas including politics, security, trade and economy, people-to-people exchanges in the next decade.

What few people inside or outside the United States grasp is the fundamental transformation of US politics, especially since the 1970's, from political parties with stable mass-based constituencies to two parties bought lock, stock and barrel by a handful of American oligarchs with one agenda—the advancement of the interests of those same oligarchs regardless of the social consequences. Next year, 2016 is a Presidential election year. Already so-called front-runners are being proclaimed by mainstream media. It has nothing to do with genuine voter support but rather with the money behind Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Jeb Bush.

To understand this transformation makes clearer why the United States and their Washington politicians have become some of the most despised and ridiculed in the world today and why recent presidents from Ronald Reagan through to Barack Obama have been so morally rotten.

A key part of the transformation of America has come from extraordinary Supreme Court rulings. The country has gone from a country and political system where bipartisan consensus and cooperation on legislation in Washington was the hallmark of Washington politics, to the present undemocratic state. Today ultimately there is not a dime's difference between major candidates—Democrat or Republican. This is because there has been a series of Supreme Court rulings and laws that virtually eliminate what used to be strict limits on how much money individuals and special interest groups could give to get their candidate elected.

Health Impact News Editor Comments

In a brazen act of medical tyranny, California recently became the first state in the U.S. where lawmakers removed religious exemptions to those opposing vaccines for their children. The bill now signed into law, SB277, faces legal hurdles in court next.

Now, legislators in California want to pass the "first US adult vaccine mandate with NO personal exemptions and CRIMINAL penalties for failure to comply." SB 792, would eliminate an adult's right to exempt themselves from one, some, or all vaccines, a risk-laden medical procedure.

Will California soon become a medical police state?

This conversation took place before the deal

Harry Lambert: So how are you feeling?

Yanis Varoufakis: I'm feeling on top of the world - I no longer have to live through this hectic timetable, which was absolutely inhuman, just unbelievable. I was on 2 hours sleep every day for five months. ... I'm also relieved I don't have to sustain any longer this incredible pressure to negotiate for a position I find difficult to defend, even if I managed to force the other side to acquiesce, if you know what I mean.

HL:What was it like? Did you like any aspect of it?

YV: Oh well a lot of it. But the inside information one gets... to have your worst fears confirmed ... To have "the powers that be" speak to you directly, and it be as you feared - the situation was worse than you imagined! So that was fun, to have the front row seat.

HL:What are you referring to?

YV: The complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe's democracy. The quite clear understanding on the other side that we are on the same page analytically - of course it will never come out at present. [And yet] To have very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say "You're right in what you're saying, but we're going to crunch you anyway."

Barclay's bank froze a Rossiya Segodnya news agency account without explaining its reasons. The agency's head Dmitry Kiselyov has called it "censorship."

"To close the account of one of the world's leading news agencies is censorship, the direct obstruction of journalists' work," Dmitry Kiselyov said. "What kind of press freedom and democracy can Britain claim to have if it prevents one of the world's largest news agencies from working in the country?"

No formal notification of the move or justification for it was immediately provided. A source in the banking sector told the agency the Exchequer has put Dmitry Kiselyov on an anti-Russian sanctions list, which could have led to the news agency's account being frozen.

"This is illegal," Rossiya Segodnya's Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan tweeted. "The sanctions imply that Kiselyov cannot travel to Europe and have personal bank accounts there. No sanctions were imposed on Rossiya Segodnya news agency."

Kiselyov is one of the people subjected to financial and travel sanctions in the EU. These restrictions have been imposed on a number of Russian officials in connection with Moscow's stance over Ukraine crisis.

The sanctions list, which includes the head of Rossiya Segodnya news agency, was published on March 21. It characterizes Kiselyov as "central figure of the government propaganda supporting the deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine."

Russia's ambassador in the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, tweeted that the move is an example of using censorship against media that provides an alternative point of view.