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HR 2749: A Stealth Agribusiness Empowering Act
by Stephen Lendman
America is the truest example of what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few." Obama is upholding the tradition and then some.
In fact, in less than six months, he's done the impossible. With congressional Democrats, he's compiled a worse record than even his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush, straight across the board on both domestic and foreign policies that include:
Blackwater/Xe: How did it happen that the U.S. came to rely on mercenaries?
The Rev. Gordon C. Stewart
A cagey professor used to provoke his students’ curiosity by asking, “Does anything bother you about that?”
Since the private “security” contractor Blackwater (re-branded last February as “Xe”) hit the news last fall for allegedly killing unarmed civilians in Iraq, the professor’s question has led me to a more important question for a constitutional republic: When, why, and how did the United States of America become the land of mercenaries?
My grade-school teachers taught us to be proud that the land of the free and the home of the brave was not the home of mercenaries, professional soldiers who rent themselves out for any cause for the right price. Our national security rested in a standing Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and Coast Guard under civilian oversight, accountable to the people through an elected government.
Obama's Rollback Strategy: Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan (and the Boomerang Effect)
James Petras
The recent events in Honduras and Iran, which pit democratically elected regimes against pro-US military and civilian actors intent on overthrowing them can best be understood as part of a larger White House strategy designed to rollback the gains achieved by opposition government and movements during the Bush years.
In a manner reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s New Cold War policies, Obama has vastly increased the military budget, increased the number of combat troops, targeted new regions for military intervention and backed military coups in regions traditionally controlled by the US. However Obama’s rollback strategy occurs in a very different international and domestic context. Unlike Reagan, Obama faces a prolonged and profound recession/depression, massive fiscal and trade deficits, a declining role in the world economy and loss of political dominance in Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and elsewhere. While Reagan faced off against a decaying Soviet Communist regime, Obama confronts surging world-wide opposition from a variety of independent secular, clerical, nationalist, liberal democratic and socialist electoral regimes and social movements anchored in local struggles.
NSA Security running amok to plug leaks about 9/11
Wayne Madsen
We have learned that the National Security “Q” Group, responsible for security, has grown to an immense security and counter-intelligence force, with an estimated one thousand government employees, contractors, and paid informants. NSA’s Security force is reportedly primarily tasked with plugging any leaks of classified or other information that points to U.S. government’s involvement with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
NSA Security has doggedly pursued a number of NSA employees, some in “sting” operations, others in frequent polygraphs and repeated security interviews where threats are made by thuggish NSA security agents with and without the presence of FBI agents, and others in constant surveillance operations at their homes, churches, and other locations away from the Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the agency.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Dick Cheney?
Helen Philpot
To solve a problem, you have to know what causes the problem. For example, to understand Dick Cheney you have to understand that his name is Richard but people call him Dick for a reason. To understand Ann Coulter, you have to understand what it must be like to go through life with a ginormous foot in your mouth. To understand Rush Limbaugh, you have to understand how a frontal lobotomy works. To understand George W. Bush, you have to…. well there really is no understanding that. But I am sure you get the point.
As Americans, many of us just can’t understand why terrorists from the Middle East would want to destroy us. The very idea of their hating us so much is almost unfathomable. Never mind that we have been occupying their homelands for more than 60 years. Never mind that today we have dozens of “enduring” military bases just in Iraq and dozens more in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar… Is that really so terrible? We’re just there looking to send back a little oil to help run our cars and our factories back home. Why do they hate us so much? I don’t know, but I wish it was a problem we could finally solve.
POPE ENDORSES "WORLD POLITICAL AUTHORITY"
Cliff Kincaid
Some in the media are calling it just a statement about “economic justice.” But Pope Benedict XVI’s “Charity in Truth” statement, also known as an encyclical, is a radical document that puts the Roman Catholic Church firmly on the side of an emerging world government.
In explicit and direct language, the Pope calls for a “true world political authority” to manage the affairs of the world. At the same time, however, the Pope also warns that such an international order could “produce a dangerous universal power of a tyrannical nature” and must be guarded against somehow.
The New York Times got it right this time, noting the Pope’s call for a world political authority amounted to endorsement of a New World Economic Order, a long-time goal of the old Soviet-sponsored international communist movement. Bloomberg.com highlighted the Pope’s call for a new world order with “teeth.”
Real ID: A Real Warning on the Danger of Government
James Bovard
There was no reason to pass Real ID, and there is no reason to enact a replacement after state legislatures shot REAL ID to pieces. Nothing has happened since 2005 to make the government more trustworthy or to make liberty less valuable.
The REAL ID Act may be on the verge of receiving its final coffin nails. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is pushing a replacement bill that poses many of the same threats as REAL ID. The history of REAL ID should inspire friends of freedom to once again vigorously oppose any and every federal grab for their personal information.
The feds had sought legislation to create national ID cards in the 1990s but were rebuffed by a Republican Congress. But, after 9/11, “everything changed” — at least in Washington. Regardless of the reasons why the CIA and FBI failed to stop the hijackers, the solution was far more snooping and the potential creation of hundreds of millions of dossiers on American citizens. Almost overnight, it became widely accepted that the government must have unlimited powers to search anywhere and everywhere for enemies of freedom. The worse the government’s failure to protect Americans, the further it permitted itself to intrude.
If Paulson's a national hero, I'm Batman
Matt Taibbi
“Hank Paulson is a national hero. I said it last October and I’m sticking by it. And now, there’s actual evidence to back me up. The TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over.” -Evan Newmark, It’s Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as National Hero
If anyone besides Paulson had been running Goldman Sachs earlier in this decade — if a person with a serious brain injury had been in his place, for instance, or a horse, or a head of lettuce — we’d all be better off today, because there wouldn’t be so many toxic Goldman-underwritten mortgage-backed CDOs on the market.
So here’s the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading Evan Newmark’s paean to Hank Paulson last week:
McNamara’s Evil Lives On
Robert Scheer
Why not speak ill of the dead?
Robert McNamara, who died this week, was a complex man—charming even, in a blustery way, and someone I found quite thoughtful when I interviewed him. In the third act of his life he was often an advocate for enlightened positions on world poverty and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. But whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him.
To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense. Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.
Israel calls on Jewish fanatics to “save” Galilee from its own Arab citizens
Jonathan Cook
Israel’s housing minister has called for strict segregation between the country’s Jewish and Arab populations last week as he unveiled plans to move large numbers of fundamentalist religious Jews to Israel’s north to prevent what he described as an “Arab takeover” of the region.
Ariel Atias said he considered it a “national mission” to bring ultra-Orthodox Jews – or Haredim, distinctive for their formal black and white clothing – into Arab areas, and announced that he would also create the north’s first exclusively Haredi town.
The new settlement drive, according to Mr Atias, is intended to revive previous failed efforts by the state to “Judaise”, or create a Jewish majority in, the country’s heavily Arab north.
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