News stories by John Feffer*

It's happening in Buenos Aires. It's happening in Paris and in Athens. It's even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

It's not the topic of George Packer's latest essay that's particularly surprising. Inequality, he writes, is undermining democracy. Progressives have been hammering home this message for years if not decades.

Peace has never been a particularly popular word in Washington, DC. This is, after all, the home of the Pentagon and the major military contractors, not to mention all the think tanks and congressional lapdogs that lie in the king- size family bed with them.

Osama bin Laden didn't live to see the 10th anniversary of Sep. 11. And his organisation, according to many U.S. government insiders, is on its last legs since his death at the hands of U.S. Special Forces in May. 'We're within reach of strategically defeating Al-Qaeda,' Defence Secretary Leon Panetta recently observed. Others disagree, pointing to the strength of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

We make a bargain with our governments. We pay taxes and expect a set of government services in return. And in return for a guarantee of some measure of security, we grant the government a monopoly on legitimate violence. In theory, then, we forswear mob rule and paramilitary organisations, we occasionally accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment, we delegate the responsibility to declare and prosecute war to our legislative and executive branches, and we put guns into the hands of the army and the police.

Lady Gaga and Alice Walker don't have much in common. One dresses in red meat; the other doesn't even eat the stuff. One writes lyrics like 'I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it's free.' The other writes 'The Color Purple'.

They were both responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in causes they believed were righteous. They both occupied top spots on the World's Most Wanted list. They were both the subject of raids that were years in the making and required extensive intelligence work.