1. “Can we anticipate extrajudicial killing of American citizens in America as part of the war on terror? Of course we can.
Three strikes and you’re out, Mr. Obama. Your government stands for preemptive killing and missile strikes on people living in countries with which America is not at war, lets torturers and torture enablers go free, and has asserted the right to assassinate its own citizens anywhere in the world based on secret evidence. Ronald Reagan once described his vision of America as a shining city on a hill. Over the past ten years the shining city has become the ultimate rogue nation, pumped up with power and hubris in spite of the clearly visible signs of decline and moving inexorably towards a catastrophic fall.”
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/03/10/the-rogue-nation/
2. “Anthrax and the WMD Fear Lobby
Tallying up all of the world’s bioterrorism attacks to date, the final score is five killed from anthrax, plus one Bulgarian assassinated by being injected with ricin. That brings the world total of bioterrorist fatalities up to half a dozen — a bizarre concept of “mass destruction,” and a feeble excuse for dispensing billions more federal dollars to those using scare tactics to raid the empty Treasury. “
http://original.antiwar.com/alan-reynolds/2010/03/10/anthrax-and-the-wmd-fear-lobby/
3. “An Oscar for America’s Hubris
Yes, it is true, as Chris Hedges is quoted in the beginning of “The Hurt Locker”: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” That’s from his book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” and the most positive thing to come out of this film might be that some people will be encouraged to read his brilliant book. But the film itself is otherwise an enlightened Rambo story: War is hellish but entertaining, and real men are those who will rise to the task no matter if its larger aim is absurd.
But the real addiction to war is not that of hapless soldiers, those troops that the filmmakers insisted on applauding as they clutched their Oscar statuettes. Rather, that addiction lies in the lust for power and profit among those who sent the soldiers to Iraq to kill and be killed in a war known to our leaders to have been undertaken for false purposes. Invading Iraq became the obsession of the Bush administration after 9/11, as opposed to dealing with Afghanistan, where, as then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, there were no good targets. The Taliban hardly provided as worthy an adversary as Saddam Hussein in our quest to replace the Soviet empire as a reason for our massive military expenditures. And there was the wan hope that the oil in Iraq would pay for it all. That oil hasn’t paid for any of it, but while U.S. taxpayers get stuck with the bill, the multinational corporations swarming over the place will do very well.
Bringing up such crass motives presents an inconvenient truth for those who believe that American foreign policy is driven by higher goals. For them I would point to the example of Clinton-era Ambassador Peter Galbraith, who became a cheerleader for George W. Bush’s war. His hawkishness was supposedly based on concern for Iraq’s Kurdish population even though that group was living outside of Saddam Hussein’s area of control. After the U.S. invasion Galbraith was an active adviser on the writing of Iraq’s constitution and lobbied to include language that gave the Kurds control over the oil in their region. Galbraith was at the time advising a Norwegian company that secured oil rights from those same Kurds, and he, in turn, received 5 percent of one of the most promising oil fields, worth an estimated $100 million.
Don’t you think at least one of the soldiers in “The Hurt Locker” would have known that kind of stuff was going on? If so, it’s disrespectful to our troops to have censored such innate GI wisdom.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/an_oscar_for_americas_hubris_20100310/
4. “Toronto Restricts Academic Freedom: ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ Not Permitted to Take Place “
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18050
5. “Carville/Greenberg strategists and national security
Identically, we now have Obama trying to explain why civilian trials and closing GITMO are so necessary and just at exactly the same time he sets up military commissions and systems of indefinite detention. He tries to explain why transparency in releasing OLC memos is so vital at the same time he guts FOIA to allow the concealment of torture photos and blocks courts from adjudicating the lawsuits from torture and eavesdropping victims, etc. etc. It’s not nuanced, smart or “pragmatic”; it’s craven, unprincipled, cynical and weak. And it’s not hard to see. For that reason, aside from being loathsome on the merits, it doesn’t work politically; quite the opposite. How many times do Democrats need to learn that lesson before it seeps in? On national security, civil liberties and Terrorism, could Barack Obama possibly deliver this line credibly: ”Even when we don’t agree, at least you know what I believe and where I stand”? Please.
At exactly the time when the Obama White House is clearly signaling its intent to move even further toward embracing the Bush/Cheney Terrorism/civil liberties template, up pops Carville/Greenberg to warn that they are appearing Weak on National Security, and simultaneously up pops a slew of articles warning that Obama’s problems are due to his failures to follow Rahm Emanuel’s Centrist advice, including on Terrorism.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/11/democrats/index.html
6. “ Billionaires and Mega-Corporations Behind Immense Land Grab in Africa
20+ African countries are selling or leasing land for intensive agriculture on a shocking scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24965.htm
7. “Tea Partyers Are White Nationalists, Pure and Simple
Corporate media go through all manner of contortions of logic and historical gymnastics to sanitize the Tea Party phenomenon – anything to avoid calling the people grouped under the Tea Party umbrella by their proper name: White nationalists. White nationalism is a taboo subject in most corporate circles – and even among some on the Left. The continued appeal of a loud and boisterous White Nationalism threatens the prevailing American mythology, shared by the likes of corporate Democrat Barack Obama and corporate Republican John McCain: the myth that racism is not endemic to American life and history.
…
The GOP is, at its core, a Rich Man’s Party that relies for its mass support on people who want to vote for a White Man’s Party. The two are not necessarily the same thing, as the White Nationalists of the GOP discovered with the bi-partisan Wall Street bailouts of 2008 and 2009. Anti-Wall Street sentiment runs deep in White Nationalist ranks, much of it rooted in anti-Semitism: the association of bankers and Jews. Republican Party leaders have good reason to fear that the Rich Man’s Party is losing control of some of its most fervent White Nationalist troops.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24962.htm
8. “Decoding The Language Of Social Control
(Democracy Is Communism and Must Be Destroyed)
The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful.
…
Similarly, rare are the people, without organic brain disorders, who do not have some fear of being made fools of when matching wits with more polished, more educated, more experienced, more charismatic or simply a luckier class of people. Lastly, we are all racists. As highly evolved monkeys, we instinctively identify with our monkey troop of people with similar appearance, existential outlook, language, culture, place of origin, the economic neighborhood we imagine we deserve a place in, and the socio-political fantasy we have been imprinted with and trained to take as the thread of history that expresses us.
…
The Hypnotic Message (“watch the watch…”):
You lack… stuff (money, brains, looks, youth, education, a nice location, a desirable mate, successful children), so you resent paying for others who get it free; others who are inferior, threatening, strange, unclean, unwholesome, wasteful, disrespectful of your importance (as a real American), and of your precedence in “our” traditional system of social rank. You resent these others polluting and degrading the system you expect to provide for you, to profit you, to honor you, to hold still and not progress beyond your capacity to understand, and to preserve the order of social rewards so no unworthy others pass you by and push you back.
You must fight back, don’t let them have free things which your work has paid for, don’t let them have advantages that makes it easier for them to advance ahead of you, and makes it harder for you to maintain your superiority without learning anything new, without becoming smarter or richer on your own. Don’t let these others have advantages that crowd the places you expect to occupy as you move on in life; crowd them with more unwholesome unworthy competitors, whose increasing number threaten to diminish your standing, and end your way of life.
The Internalized Message:
I lack stuff, and it is these unclean others who have degraded the system that previously would have moved me up faster and more comfortably. So I want to exclude these others, keep them from crossing “our” borders, and taking our advantages without paying as much as I did; even worse, creating problems my tax dollars have to pay for and which wouldn’t even happen if those people weren’t here, so I would have more of my own wealth. I have to stand up for the people like me who run for office and are willing to get the government to take care of the real Americans, who deserve the benefits that they paid for, and their parents and grandparents paid for; that will push out the unclean ones and ensure there are no extra moochers sapping our wealth, and bringing me down. Because I lack stuff, I don’t want to pay for other people to have stuff, and because I don’t want the government to take more of my money, I’m voting for the people who want to cut down the government, and cut down taxes. I’m voting to stop the give-aways, because the politicians who will do that care about me, a real American who makes a real contribution to the country, and deserves not to have it pissed away on wasteful others.
And so are fools serenaded into the abattoir.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24966.htm
