Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields
  • The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

    The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

    The controversies over the IRS and especially the AP phone records appear to have long-lasting effects By Glenn Greenwald,  guardian.co.uk  Barack Obama Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ’s attack on AP’s news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record [...]

  • Argentina’s General Videla and the “war on terror”

    Argentina’s General Videla and the “war on terror”

    By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla died May 17 at the age of 87 as the result of injuries suffered from a fall in a prison shower. He was remembered as the head of a savage military dictatorship that between 1976 and 1983 murdered and “disappeared” some 30,000 Argentine workers, socialist militants, [...]

  • Rise Up or Die

    Rise Up or Die

     By Chris Hedges Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion [...]

  • The Tornado and Other Man-Made Disasters

    The Tornado and Other Man-Made Disasters

    Our Economic System is Driving Climate Change by KEN KLIPPENSTEIN The ancient Greeks attributed weather to the god Zeus; today we can safely attribute it to industrial capitalism and its voracious consumption of fossil fuels. The carnage left by a tornado in Oklahoma yesterday is just the latest in our economic system’s daunting body count. [...]

  • Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

    Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

    By Barry Grey and Nick Barrickman, wsws.org Twenty-seven-year-old Ibragim Todashev was shot and killed early Wednesday morning while being interrogated by police and intelligence officials in an Orlando, Florida, apartment. Todashev, a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and, like Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, was reportedly being questioned by a Federal Bureau of [...]

  • Classical Essays: The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte - Part One

    Classical Essays: The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte – Part One

    PART ONE OF FOUR Editor’s Note: The core truth about Napoleon is still a matter of debate. Napoleon, opportunist or usurping though he may appear to a modern Marxian obswerver, not to mention Anglo-American mainstream historians tainted with Francophobic hatred and contempt for the French and their revolution, was also seen as a threat by [...]

  • PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary "Citizen Koch" To Appease Koch Brothers

    PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary “Citizen Koch” To Appease Koch Brothers

    By Brendan Fischer, PRWatch | Report “Citizen Koch,” a documentary about money in politics focused on the Wisconsin uprising, was shunned by PBS for fear of offending billionaire industrialist David Koch, who has given $23 million to public television, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The dispute highlights the increasing role of private money in “public” television and raises [...]

  • Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

    Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

    by Pascal Robert, Black Agenda Report Don’t worry about Barack Obama. He’s far too useful to the rulers of America to be derailed by scandal, or even a combination of scandals. “Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have [...]

Taking liberties

 CLASS STRUGGLE  Comments Off
May 022011
 

The royal wedding will bolster the monarchy’s popularity once again. But after the bunting is put away, the powers of the institution still need a thorough examination

Prince Charles: the presumptive heir to the throne.

One of the very first things Eric Pickles did on his arrival at Eland House, the headquarters of the department for communities and local government, was not to draw up a list of charities he wanted to drive out of business. No, it was to insist that pictures of Her Majesty the Queen were affixed to the office walls. As an ardent royalist, he views himself as a minister of the crown, serving in a cabinet which is, in effect, a sub-committee of the Queen’s privy council. Continue reading »

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BILL BLUM: Reflections on the US assault on Arab lands

 CITIZEN TOOLS, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
May 022011
 

The Anti-Empire Report

May 2nd, 2011
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

Incredibly, things were much better under Saddam.

Iraq: Let us not forget what “humanitarian intervention” looks like.

Libya: Let us not be confused as to why Libya alone has been singled out for “humanitarian intervention”.

On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of “war criminal” and “torturer”. (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can’t Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: “Aren’t you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?” She also threw in another line that’s become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that’s used when all other arguments fail: “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.” 1 Continue reading »

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The killing of Osama bin Laden

 ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, GOVERNMENT CRIMES, IMPERIALISM  1 Response »
May 022011
 

Patrick Martin and Alex Lantier | 2 May 2011

Obama's approval is likely to bounce upon the death of "America's" arch-enemy. Apparently, not even a Harvard law professor remembers that there is such a thing as an international court of law for all putative criminals.

President Barack Obama announced Sunday that US special forces had killed Osama bin Laden, the long-time leader of Al Qaeda, in a raid on a residence in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Obama issued the statement after 11.30 p.m. Eastern time in the United States, more than an hour after the major media news networks announced that he would be making within minutes a major statement relating to national security.  Continue reading »

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The Death Of A Mass Murderer

 CLASS STRUGGLE, IMPERIALISM  1 Response »
May 022011
 

Osama bin Laden

Editor’s Note: We publish this piece because we approve of the author’s revulsion at the crass jingoistic celebrations supposedly cropping up all over America upon the death of Osama bin Laden. The death of a human being is no cause for crass celebration. We note, however, that if really dead, (a) it’s not proven that Osama died as officially declared, and (b) that his guilt for 9/11 is similarly not fully established. Many people around the world doubt in good faith that Osama and his band of suicide attackers was really behind the tragic events of 9/11. That Osama did hate the US, there’s little doubt. He also hated the Russians, and for similar reasons. bin Laden hated any and all civilizations that would defile his idealized Islamic world.  Inasmuch as he hated what he justly regarded as “occupiers” of his world, he was more morally in the right than our government, by any measure a brutal invader. Indeed, with the US leading the pack of criminal meddlers in the Middle East and Central Asia, he found the ultimate antagonist. But all of that fails to prove that he was in fact the chief cause of 9/11.  Continue reading »

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A more militarized CIA for a more militarized America

 CLASS STRUGGLE, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
May 022011
 

BY GLENN GREENWALD |  THURSDAY, APR 28, 2011 09:29 ET

Gen. David Petraeus

The first four Directors of the CIA (from 1947-1953) were military officers, but since then, there has been a tradition (generally though imperfectly observed) of keeping the agency under civilian rather than military leadership. That’s why George Bush’s 2006 nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to the CIA provoked so many objections from Democrats (and even some Republicans).

The Hayden nomination triggered this comment from the current Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein: “You can’t have the military control most of the major aspects of intelligence. The CIA is a civilian agency and is meant to be a civilian agency.” The then-top Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, said “she hears concerns from civilian CIA professionals about whether the Defense Department is taking over intelligence operations” and “shares those concerns.” Continue reading »

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