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 [...]

Qaddafi, From Beginning to End

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
Oct 212011
 

NATO’s Agenda for Libya

By VIJAY PRASHAD

On the dusty reaches out of Sirte, a convoy flees a battlefield. A NATO aircraft fires and strikes the cars. The wounded struggle to escape. Armed trucks, with armed fighters, rush to the scene. They find the injured, and among them is the most significant prize: a bloodied Muammar Qaddafi stumbles, is captured, and then is thrown amongst the fighters. One can imagine their exhilaration. A cell-phone traces the events of the next few minutes. A badly injured Qaddafi is pushed around, thrown on a car, and then the video gets blurry. The next images are of a dead Qaddafi. He has a bullet hole on the side of his head. Continue reading »

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“Steve Jobs, we hardly knew ya”

 ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 212011
 

Steve Jobs Biography Reveals He Told Obama, ‘You’re Headed For A One-Term Presidency’. In general, he wasn’t exactly Mr. Nice Guy.

Newsletter: October 21, 2011 (AT&T/T-Mobile; Jobs)

In one of the most hotly-anticipated biographies of the year, “Steve Jobs,” author Walter Isaacson reveals that the Apple CEO offered to design political ads for President Obama’s 2012 campaign despite being highly critical of the Administration’s policies. 

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Barack Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the President personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that President Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days.

Continue reading »

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JIM HIGHTOWER: Knee Jerks Defend Wall Street

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 212011
 


IF YOU HAD ANY DOUBT about the seriousness of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that is springing up from America’s grassroots like hardy wildflowers, just note the frantic fulminations against it by assorted Wall Street toadies.

The corporate cheerleaders on CNBC, for example, reached back to the nasty days of McCarthyism to smear the youthful protesters as “aligned with Lenin.” Little Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader who loyally serves the banksters as their Washington lapdog, yapped in alarm about “the growing mobs occupying Wall Street.” Then came Mitt Romney, himself a former Wall Streeter, to warn darkly against the protesting rabble: “I think it’s dangerous – this class warfare.” Continue reading »

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Imperial Massacres

 ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Oct 212011
 

CounterPunch Diary—

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Denied post mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world now has at its disposal photographs of Muammar Qaddafi, dispatched with a bullet  to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte. Did the terminal command, Finish Him Off, come via cell phone from the US State Department whose Secretary, Hillary Clinton,  had earlier called for his death, or by dint of local initiative?  At all events, since Qaddafi was a prisoner at the time of his execution, it was a war crime and I trust that  in the years of her retirement Mrs Clinton will be detained amid some foreign vacation and handed a subpoena. Continue reading »

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Class War in America

 ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE, Uncategorized  Comments Off
Oct 212011
 

By Stephen Lendman

Obama swearing to serve us...in vain.

Class war has raged for decades. Business and America’s super-rich always win. In his 1925 short story titled “Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early…They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we..”

“Even when they enter deep into our world….they still think that that they are better than we are. They are different.” Continue reading »

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US and NATO murder Muammar Gaddafi

 ANNOTATED NEWS, HISTORY, IMPERIALISM  2 Responses »
Oct 212011
 

By Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG

To prepare for a direct imperialist takeover, they followed a well-worn path, vilifying the country’s leader and promoting the idea that only outside intervention could save innocent civilians from a looming massacre…<> Libya stands as a warning to the world. Any regime that gets in the way of US interests, runs afoul of the major corporations or fails to do the bidding of the NATO powers can be overthrown by military force, with its leaders murdered…”

As usual, British papers have been as vile as their American counterparts, if not worse.

THE SAVAGE KILLING THURSDAY OF DEPOSED LIBYAN LEADER MUAMMAR GADDAFI served to underscore the criminal character of the war that has been prosecuted by the US and NATO over the past eight months.

The assassination follows NATO’s more than month-long siege of Sirte, the Libyan coastal city that was Gaddafi’s hometown and a center of his support. The assault on this city of 100,000 left virtually every building smashed, with untold numbers of civilians dead, wounded and stricken by disease, as they were deprived of food, water, medical care and other basic necessities.  Continue reading »

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