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 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”
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 [...]

The GOP Savages Itself, While Wall Street Backs the Black Guy, Again

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Jan 042012

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The Republican Party presidential campaign has been relegated to a sideshow in the American power game. The white nationalist masses recoil at the scent of Wall Street denizens like Mitt Romney. “A deeper atavism is at play in Republican ranks, a far less malleable strain of reaction that is no respecter of the GOP establishment’s brand of bling.” Wall Street money is once again betting on Obama, the man that delivered them “resurrection from the 2008 meltdown and a pipeline in perpetuity to the financial innards of the U.S. treasury.”

“Why in the world would Wall Street consider for one second trading in Obama for whatever wounded animal emerges from the Republican presidential menagerie?” Continue reading »

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Obama: To The Right of Reagan

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Jan 042012

by BAR editor and columnist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, PhD

Barack Obama has not just dribbled away the progressive mandate of 2008, he has emerged over the past three years as a politician “to the right of President Ronald Reagan, the Tea Party hero” on at least some issues. The U.S. continues its steady decline in all the indices that count for the average person. “Only three developed countries – Albania, Russian and Moldova – had a worse maternal mortality rate.” African Americans are in free fall under the First Black President.

“Of 891 promises made, Obama has kept 233, broken 116 and failed to address 61 percent.” Continue reading »

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Obama and the Art of the Cave-In

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Jan 042012

Putting Themselves on the Defensive

by RALPH NADER

Ezra Klein, the bright, young, economic policy columnist for the “Washington Post” believes that Obama came out ahead last year in the “administration’s bitter, high-stakes negotiations with the Republicans in Congress.”

He cites four major negotiations in 2011 with the Republicans that Obama won. Obama won the game of chicken played in February by the House Speaker John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to avoid a government shutdown. He won the battle to raise the customarily supported debt ceiling on government borrowing. He avoided an embarrassment after he had to concur in the formation of a “Supercommittee” on deficit reduction when Congress couldn’t come to an agreement. And he won all of a two-month extension of the social security payroll tax cut and extension of unemployment compensation benefits. Continue reading »

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Pounding the War Drums Against Iran

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Jan 042012

There They Go Again

Despite its capabilities, Iran’s navy is no match for a combined imperial assault.

by JAMES ABOUREZK

I watched another news program today—this one on MSNBC—with Dylan Ratigan shouting into the camera that if Iran shuts down the Strait of Hormuz through which 40 per cent of the world’s oil flows, it is an act of war.

That’s true.

However, like most everything we watch on news programs, history does not begin with the latest reaction of someone who feels aggrieved. Much like a football referee seeing only the last fist flying, blind to the first punch, the retaliating party is the one who gets the penalty. Continue reading »

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OpEds: Former “Dumbest Member of Congress” Scorches Romney

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Jan 042012

The Deranged Chorus

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN, Counterpunch

A Catholic former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania once rated the dumbest man in the US Congress crested Tuesday night in Iowa’s see-saw battle among candidates for the Republican nomination and ran a virtual tie with Mormon millionaire Mitt Romney. Well after chilly midnight on caucus night in the Midwestern state, Iowa’s Republican Party declared Romney the winner by 8 votes, a count that Santorum will inevitably question and perhaps contest. Each hovered just below 30,000 votes, with libertarian Republican Ron Paul of Texas running third with a respectable 26,000-plus votes. IMAGE: Rick Santorum
Continue reading »

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Many topics to choose from

There’s violence and there’s violence

Revolutionary Violence vs Institutionalized Violence

"There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves..." —Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution.

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