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
  • Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Guest Editorials— By Andre Damon, wsws.org The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report Monday showing that electronics giant Apple Inc. uses offshore tax shelters to avoid taxes on the majority of its income and cheated the US government out of $9 billion in 2012 alone. That same day, a tornado leveled the town [...]

  • 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 [...]

  • Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric

    Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric, Congo war crimes, Jailed for silence, DOJ assault on Fox Source: RT.com On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin and political commentator Sam Sacks go over the Orwellian rhetoric in Obama’s latest foreign policy speech. Abby highlights a recent UN investigation bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by a [...]

  • Dr. Noam Chomsky breaks the set on war, imperialism and propaganda

    RT’s Abby Martin interviews Noam Chomsky on current issues stemming from pseudo-democratic governance in the United States. On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to philosopher, linguist, professor, political critic and author of over 100 books Dr. Noam Chomsky about the Boston bombings, US terror inflicted abroad, drones, Obama’s rebranding of Bush [...]

  • OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    By Pepe Escobar, RT.com  Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent. US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’ from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it.  Did you like this? Share [...]

  • Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    AlterNet [1] / By Sean McElwee [2] Last week two important stories about U.S. foreign policy broke. First, the White House released some 100 pages of e-mails confirming a dastardly scandal: rather than call the Benghazi attack a “terrorist act,” President Obama, in a Nixonian power grab, called it an, “act of terror.” Did you like this? Share it:

  • Religious Barbarians

    Religious Barbarians

    From Tbilisi to Worchester by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI (With report & VIDEO by PressTV, see addendum below) It was humanity at its best.  Showing compassion for the quick and the dead.  The quick made news in Tbilisi, Georgia.  The dead made news in Worcester, Massachusetts. Did you like this? Share it:

  • The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    Despite Annulment, Genocide Trial a Breakthrough for Justice and Truth by LUZ MENDEZ The sentence of 80 years in prison against former de facto president Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during Guatemala’s armed conflict, emitted on May 10, 2013, was annulled by the Constitutional Court ten days later. The court’s [...]

Mercenaries for Empire: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch

 ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, CULTURE & CRITICISM, GREAT HYPOCRISY  Comments Off
Jun 072012
 

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“Human rights” has become a tortured term. The most prominent names in the western human rights business behave, essentially, as “weapons in the imperial arsenal. Their value to the empire increased exponentially when Barack Obama adopted humanitarian intervention as a pillar of American war doctrine.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch spend much of their energies “advocating that the U.S. and its friends trample on the national sovereignty of weaker states – as if human rights can exist outside the framework of international law.” Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 7:00 pm

Freedom Rider: Bloodthirsty Americans

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS  Comments Off
Jun 072012
 

 

Barack Obama, who lots of deluded people not too long ago imagined was a man of peace, wants the American people to think of him as a cold killer. He’s betting that’s the kind of president his countrymen desire. Violence-wise, the U.S. is the home of the depraved. Conclusion: “Our president is a totally amoral psychopath, and the revelation of his condition has not hurt his popularity.”

by Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Barack Obama was certain that news of his personal ‘kill list’ would benefit his chances of being re-elected, and he was not wrong.“

What can one say about people who continue to support war criminals among their elected representatives? It is easy to blame the presidents and the Congress and the media for endless war and rising body counts around the world. They are indeed responsible for promoting mass killing as an acceptable, indeed beneficial means of living among the world’s people. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 6:44 pm

Eye of the Drone

 ANTIWAR, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
Jun 072012
 

From Harper’s magazine
Reproduced from Black Agenda Report

The United States, indicted as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” by Dr. Martin Luther King, 45 years ago, is today the main purveyor of high-tech terror on the planet. President Obama’s real “Kill List” is full of men and women whose names and lives are unknown to their executioners, including about 40 tribal leaders slaughtered by drones in Pakistan, last year. So traumatized are the surviving villagers, “people in the same family now sleep apart because they do not want their togetherness to be viewed suspiciously through the eye of the drone,” and “few children attend school because they fear for their lives walking to and from their homes.” Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 2:18 pm

Wisconsin: What Happens When Movements Turn Into Campaigns

 ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, CLASS STRUGGLE  2 Responses »
Jun 072012
 

 

by Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

How did we get from hundreds of thousands in the streets of Madison, Wisconsin demanding union rights for everybody and fundamental economic justice for all, to a desultory set of Democratic campaigns for the candidates who, as they say, sucked the least, and ended up losing.

Sixteen months ago the eyes of the nation and the world were on Madison, Wisconsin. Crowds in the tens of thousands surrounded, occupied and refused to leave the state capitol building. Local cops ignored orders to disperse them, and when authorities finally evicted protesters from hallways, offices and legislative chambers, their numbers grew, reaching the hundreds of thousands multiple times before the crisis was over. Local schools were shut down because teachers called in sick en masse. For a short while a general strike, localized in Madison, but with wide and visible support around the state and country seemed a real possibility. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 1:53 pm

Chomsky: America’s Rank Hypocrisy

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
Jun 072012
 

Why Is it Only an “Atrocity” When Other Countries Do It?

By Noam Chomsky

 In his penetrating study “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights,” international affairs scholar James Peck observes, “In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are always committed by somebody else, never us” – whoever “us” is.

Almost any moment in history yields innumerable illustrations. Let’s keep to the past few weeks.

On May 10, the Summer Olympics were inaugurated at the Greek birthplace of the ancient games. A few days before, virtually unnoticed, the government of Vietnam addressed a letter to the International Olympic Committee expressing the “profound concerns of the Government and people of Viet Nam about the decision of IOC to accept the Dow Chemical Company as a global partner sponsoring the Olympic Movement.” Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 1:46 pm

FROM the ARCHIVES—US: Patriotic pride and fear

 BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, GREAT HYPOCRISY, HUMBUG CENTRAL, KULTURKAMPF  Comments Off
Jun 072012
 

Front Page

By Ritt Goldstein
Editor’s Note: When it comes to those who profit from war, and who cynically manufacture them for conquest, the idea that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel is perfectly apt. Except that “patriotism”, a nebulous concept at best, is usually the first refuge and pretext of the scoundrel, as it is far too often used to manipulate the citizenry into criminal mobilizations. Though written in 2004, this essay contains many insights which are as true today as when they were first committed to publication.—PG
While some critics of US President George W Bush have charged that his administration is pursuing policies of madness, such a charge is clinically incorrect, but it may convey an extraordinarily disturbing reality. Both an eminent psychologist and a noted political scientist perceive a particularly virulent social pathogen as the basis for much of the present global strife, with Washington at the center of the epidemic. Continue reading »
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 Posted by at 10:30 am
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