1. “While to many in the political arena, 9/11 was proof that we “could no longer afford to do things as we had” and a rationale for increased censorship, security, and new laws to combat this mysterious phantom, there is a growing belief that a government which would pass laws such as the Patriot Act is not above murdering it’s own citizens to increase it’s power over their lives.
…
These attitudes, amongst others, are what distinguish the 9/11 generation from the radical youth of a half century ago, whom they might otherwise resemble; there is no sympathy for even the most idealistic of tyrannies, and an almost spiritual reverence for the concept of individual freedom. There is a general attitude that our problems come from a government which won’t obey it’s own Constitution, it’s own rules, and not from any one political party or policy, but an out of control State, mechanized to constantly expand and encroach on the common man. Perhaps, after much introspection, America will find that after sixty years of fighting foreign wars in the name of damaging the Soviet Union, she has begun to resemble it, with her state socialism and her disregard for human rights so rampant, that the very founding principle of this nation, Human Liberty, has become counter-cultural.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/22141
2. “One War Obama May Curtail
Meanwhile, former heads of state in Latin American countries are urging decriminalization, if not full legalization, as a solution to the bloody, cartel-driven drug war throughout the hemisphere. Mexico relaxed its own criminal statutes for drugs this year in an attempt to stem the violence, most of which is spurred by U.S. demand for illegal drugs.
Finally, while there is hardly widespread support for reversing criminal restrictions on drugs such as cocaine and heroin, American attitudes about marijuana have softened in ways not seen in this country since the 1960s. But even then there was a seemingly impenetrable cultural and political divide between conservative prohibitionists and socially liberal users. Today, a clear majority of Americans (representing both sides of the aisle) consider the medicinal uses of pot quite valid, and more than ever, they are open to decriminalization generally (some recent polls show over 50 percent in favor).”
http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2009/12/14/one-war-obama-may-curtail/
3. Good:
“China wins struggle for Pipelinestan
A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington’s interest in Central Asian fuel sources– natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political Right in the US actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order.
If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead, China has landed the big bid to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to Beijing. Turkmenistan had strongly considered piping the gas to Moscow instead, but developed conflicts with Gazprom.
So the US is bogged down in an Afghanistan quagmire, and China is running off with the big regional prize.”
4. “The Obama administration now insists that courts must dismiss lawsuits alleging presidential lawbreaking whenever the CIA Director claims the lawsuit would jeopardize state secrets; or, as the ACLU Brief puts it, “torture victims must be denied a day in court based on an Affidavit submitted by their torturers.” The Obama DOJ has gone on to invoke that same Bush-created version of the secrecy theory to demand dismissal of numerous other cases alleging various types of lawbreaking by the Executive Branch.
…
Notably, Wizner emphasizes that — in light of the DOJ’s announcement that it will not prosecute anyone who tortured in accordance with the Bush-OLC torture memos — cases of this type are now the sole remaining avenue for obtaining a judicial ruling as to whether the Bush torture program was illegal. If the Obama DOJ succeeds in blocking any such judicial adjudication, it means that some future administration (or even the current one), armed with its own John Yoo, can once again claim that torture is legal and the President has the power to order it. That’s one reason why it’s so vital to obtain judicial rulings on whether these Bush programs were illegal: because only judicial rulings of that type can prevent similar arguments from being invoked in the future.
…
One last point: when the Obama DOJ first began invoking the very same version of the “state secrets” privilege that infuriated progressives for years (as well as Obama himself), two defenses were typically offered by some Obama supporters: (1) Obama was only doing this because he secretly hoped to lose and thus give us the gift of good precedent; and (2) this was the fault of hold-overs from the Bush DOJ, not Obama appointees. Yet now, the Obama DOJ is aggressively seeking to have vacated one of the best judicial rulings ever that limits the state secrets privilege. Moreover, its own internal guidelines now require the personal approval of Eric Holder before the “state secrets” privilege can be asserted in a judicial proceeding, meaning that Holder himself approves of the positions on this appeal. That ought to conclusively prove how wrong those excuses were. There’s simply no getting around the fact that — as TalkingPointsMemo thoroughly documented — the Obama DOJ is vigorously advocating the exact same “state secrets” privilege as the Bush DOJ created, and is doing so with the same result: to shield the Executive Branch from judicial review when it breaks the law.“
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
5. “I have spent enough time inside the American military to have tasted its dark brutality, frequent incompetence and profligate ability to waste human lives and taxpayer dollars. The deviousness and stupidity of generals, the absurdity of most war plans and the pathological addiction to violence—which is the only language most who command our armed forces are able to understand—make the American military the gravest threat to our anemic democracy, especially as we head toward economic collapse.
Barack Obama, who is as mesmerized by the red, white and blue bunting draped around our vast killing machine as the press, the two main political parties and our entertainment industry, will not halt our doomed imperial projects or renege on the $1 trillion in defense-related spending that is hollowing out the country from the inside. A plague of unchecked militarism has seeped outward from the Pentagon since the end of World War II and is now sucking our marrow dry. It is a familiar disease in imperial empires.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24180.htm
6. “American Fascism
By political definition the US is now fascist, not a constitutional republic
Look in any textbook or encyclopedia and compare US policy (not rhetoric) to the definitions of fascism and constitutional republic. I’ll explain it here, but check my work.
…
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24181.htm
7. “ Are Americans a Broken People?
Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
…
Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the “Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy.”
Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don’t know themselves — and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or “museumize” other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24184.htm
