Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Glenn Beck Maps Out How Scandals Reveal Obama's Goal Of 'Fundamentally Transforming' America
Glenn Beck Maps Out How Scandals Reveal Obama's Goal Of 'Fundamentally Transforming' America
Talk Show Host Glenn Beck maps out the three major scandals plaguing
America: IRS, Benghazi and the AP wiretapping scandals. Amid the scandal
and trouble facing the White House, Glenn Beck found a way to
tie it all together, attributing it all to the grand vision of
"fundamental transformation." Citing "arrogance," Beck laid out exactly what Benghazi, the IRS scandal, and the AP/Justice Department issue all have in common.
"In the end what do these three scandals have in common?" Beck asked,
going on to offer the answer. "What they have in common is the arrogance
of transforming the world."
Monday, July 22, 2013
Iraq jailbreaks: Hundreds escape in Taji and Abu Ghraib
Hundreds of inmates have escaped from two Iraqi prisons after gunmen stormed two jails near Baghdad.
Fighting raged for several hours after the jails - Abu Ghraib
to the west of the capital and Taji to the north - came under attack.Mortar fire and suicide bombs were used to gain access to the jails, whose inmates include al-Qaeda prisoners.
At least 20 members of the security forces were killed as they struggled to regain control.
The Iraqi authorities initially said that the attackers had
failed to free the prisoners in Taji and Abu Ghraib. They said security
forces reacted quickly enough to seal the area and cut off any escape
route.
But it quickly emerged that they were wrong, as reports came out that at least 500 prisoners had indeed managed to escape. The government had to admit that "some" prisoners had escaped, without saying how many.
In the past, several attacks on prisons have resulted in dozens of inmates being freed, as well as records and precious information about them being destroyed or stolen.
In Mosul, too, the army took a painful hit, another reminder that the northern city remains one of the most dangerous for security forces in Iraq.
It is not just Mosul, however, and not just the security forces that are suffering. Continuous waves of attacks across the country have exposed the government's chronic failure to secure the country.
But it quickly emerged that they were wrong, as reports came out that at least 500 prisoners had indeed managed to escape. The government had to admit that "some" prisoners had escaped, without saying how many.
In the past, several attacks on prisons have resulted in dozens of inmates being freed, as well as records and precious information about them being destroyed or stolen.
In Mosul, too, the army took a painful hit, another reminder that the northern city remains one of the most dangerous for security forces in Iraq.
It is not just Mosul, however, and not just the security forces that are suffering. Continuous waves of attacks across the country have exposed the government's chronic failure to secure the country.
A senior Iraqi MP, Hakim Al-Zamili, said that about 500 prisoners had escaped from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Most of them were senior members of al-Qaeda who had been sentenced to death, he told Reuters news agency."It's obviously a terrorist attack carried out by al-Qaeda to free convicted terrorists with al-Qaeda," the agency quoted an unnamed security official as saying.
Abu Ghraib was used to torture opponents of the regime during Saddam Hussein's rule, and its infamy increased in 2004 when photographs were published showing detainees being abused by US guards.
Mortar rounds The prison attacks were launched at about 21:30 (18:30 GMT) on Sunday night.
Gunmen fired mortar rounds at the prisons, and then used car bombs at the entrances.
The situation was eventually brought back under control on Monday morning, with the use of military helicopters.
Iraqi authorities initially denied any prisoners had escaped in the attacks, but now acknowledge "some" prisoners escaped.
Interior Minister Wissam al-Firaiji said the attackers, whom he called "terrorists," had been well-armed.
"The attack against Taji jail alone was carried out by nine suicide bombers and three car bombs driven by suicide bombers," he told reporters.
"The attackers also lobbed more than 100 mortar shells," he added. "The inmates are now under control."
Egypt's ousted President Morsi 'abducted by army'
Morsi 'abducted by army'
Mr Morsi's son Osama spoke of his anger at his father's "kidnapping"
The family of the ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi has accused the army of abducting him.
His daughter Shaimaa told a news conference in Cairo that the family was taking legal measures against the army.Mr Morsi has been held at an undisclosed location without charge since he was removed from power on 3 July.
At least three people were killed in clashes on Monday between opponents and supporters of the former president.
Mr Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood movement has refused to recognise the new military-backed administration and continues to hold almost daily street protests.
One person died and dozens of protesters were wounded during unrest in central Cairo, medical officials said. Egyptian state TV reported that seven pro-Morsi protesters had been arrested for possession of illegal weapons.
At least two more people were reported killed in separate clashes in Qalyubiya province, north of Cairo.
'Abduction' denounced The statement from Mr Morsi's family - the first since he was deposed from office - said it held the military responsible for the former leader's "safety and security".
"We are taking local and international legal measures against Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, the leader of the bloody military coup, and his putschist group," Shaimaa Morsi told reporters.
The family was appealing to the International Criminal Court to launch an investigation into the events leading up to his removal from power, she said.
One of Mr Morsi's sons, Osama, said: "What is going on is a violation of human rights and a scandal in every sense of the word."
He described the manner in which the military were holding Mr Morsi as an "abduction".
Mr Morsi has not been seen in public since 3 July
Mohammed al-Damati, a leading Egyptian lawyer and supporter of Mr Morsi, said it was a breach of the former president's human rights to hold him without charge.
Several countries, including the United States, have called for Mr Morsi's release.
But Egypt's interim authorities insist he is being held in a "safe place".
Obama Administration and DHS Veiw Veterans as “suspected terrorist's”.
What a nice way to thank those who fought tirelessly for our country… Good grief.
The Department of Homeland Security and FBI have been monitoring white supremacists and “militia/sovereign-citizen extremist groups” for terrorist activities since 2009. Somehow, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have fallen into these closely-watched groups, on the grounds that they are possible terrorists.
This is all done through a program called “Operation Vigilant Eagle”. When the program began, it caused some controversy but was quickly forgotten and dropped by the mainstream media. Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary told NBC in an interview, “This is an assessment of things just to be wary of, not to infringe on constitutional rights, certainly not to malign our veterans.”
In February 2009 (shortly after Obama’s inauguration), a Vigilant Eagle memo was put out, saying the purpose of the program was to “share information regarding Iraqi and Afghanistan war veterans whose involvement in white supremacy and/or militia sovereign citizen extremist groups poses a domestic terrorism threat.”
Since President Obama stepped into office, the DHS has issued several reports about a “wave of terrorism” by Republicans – these reports have targeted all levels of conservatives from off-duty cops to Tea Party members. Vigilant Eagle is merely an unjust expression of these partisan preferences within the DHS.
Brandon Raub, a Marine vet, was arrested last year by FBI and Secret Service agents. He was then held for a week at a psychiatric facility… All because the vet complained about the government in blogs and on Facebook.
Then I guess I should be taken away too — I’ve made blogging about the government my fulltime job!
One of Raub’s “questionable” posts read, “The United States was meant to lead the charge against injustice, but through our example not our force. People do not respond to having liberty and freedom forced on them.”
Wow, I really feel like I’m in imminent danger after reading that…
Raub was finally released when a judge decided that the case against him was “devoid of any factual allegations.” Gee, really took a genius to figure that out. It is crystal clear that Raub’s arrest was Operation Vigilant Eagle’s attempt to stop him from criticizing the government.
Since his release, Raub has been contacted by numerous other veterans with similar stories.
The Obama Administration has managed to criminalize those in our society who should instead be honored as heros: our veterans. We cannot let this administration continue to steal freedom from our vets. Something must be done to stop this, and someone must be held accountable — are you listening, Janet Napolitano?
Israel’s use of white phosphorous in Gaza (WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT)
Israel’s recent use of white phosphorus bombs in densely populated areas of Gaza violated the rules of war, according to report issued by a leading human rights organization last week. The 71-pages-long Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, entitled “Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorous in Gaza,” states that even before the group’s researchers were able to enter Gaza, they had watched from adjacent perimeter areas in Israel as white phosphorus bombs exploded in the air over densely-packed residential areas in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops began using white phosphorus in Gaza after the ground phase of the military offensive started on 3 January, a week into the invasion of the Strip, and continued until the ceasefire two weeks later, according to HRW. The report notes that it was the first time that the Israeli military had ever used white phosphorus in the densely-populated coastal Strip, despite numerous previous ground incursions. The report also notes that Israel used white phosphorus twice in Lebanon, in 1982 and in 2006.
The Israeli military was well aware of the effects of white phosphorus and the extreme danger it poses to civilians, HRW says in the report. According to the group, if the Israeli army actually intended to use white phosphorus for its obscurant effect, it could only have done so lawfully in open areas, and not in downtown Gaza City, or downtown Beit Lahiya.
The report states that far safer alternatives are available — such as the very effective smoke artillery manufactured by Israel Military Industries, that does not burn.
Ground-exploded white phosphorous creates a much thicker and more effective smokescreen than shells detonated in the air, HRW says, but that was not the tactic Israeli troops employed.
Moreover, in the cases documented by HRW, there was no military necessity to create smokescreens because there were no Israeli troops on the ground in those areas at the time.
Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher for HRW, said in a press conference in Jerusalem last Thursday that the evidence suggests the Israeli military intentionally used white phosphorus in Gaza for its incendiary properties.
“To us, the evidence suggests that the purpose in some of these cases may have been not to create a smokescreen, but to use white phosphorus specifically for its incendiary effect. Do we know that for sure? No, we don’t. But, the evidence is suggestive that they used it for incendiary purposes,” Abrahams told journalists.
The HRW report states that “the repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus in populated areas … reveals a pattern or policy of conduct rather than incidental or accidental usage.” These circumstances demand independent investigation, HRW says, and — if warranted — the prosecution of all those responsible for war crimes.
“The Israeli military and government is repeatedly blaming Hamas for civilian deaths in Gaza. Now, do we have something to say about Hamas’ behavior in Gaza? Yes, we do … This is the first in a series of reports we will be issuing. Its rocket attacks in Israel … are a war crime. In the cases of this report … we did not find evidence of Hamas using civilians as human shields. Now, were they in the area at the time of these attacks? In some cases, we believe they were, and that is documented in the report. We state very clearly where we believe Hamas was, and where it was not. The bottom line, and the crucial point, is even if enemy forces — from the Israeli perspective, Hamas fighters — are in the area, white phosphorus should not be used in civilian neighborhoods. And that’s the bottom line,” Abrahams stated.
The Israeli military issued a statement after the release of HRW report, saying that it was nearing the completion of its own investigation. In the statement, the military claims that its use of white phosphorus had been fully consistent with international humanitarian law.
But, Abrahams said, this shows that Israel has already drawn its conclusions before the investigation was finished. The Israeli military “at first denied repeatedly that white phosphorous was being used. Publicly and to the media, they denied that it was being used. Then, faced with incontrovertible evidence, photographs, that white phosphorus was being used, they back-tracked, and they said, well all the weapons that we use in Gaza are in compliance with international humanitarian law. And now, they tell us that they’re opening an investigation. Well, quite frankly, we have a hard time accepting that at face value.”
Abrahams also said that Israel “refused to give any details about the investigation, and these are the questions we want answered about the investigation: who’s leading it? When will it be completed? What is the scope of the investigation? And, will its findings be made public? We don’t have answers to any of those questions … But, in fact, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter, because the statement yesterday concluded that the investigation already determined that the white phosphorus use was ‘consistent with international humanitarian law.’ So the findings have already been made public.”
Moreover, HRW researchers are still denied access into Gaza through Israeli border crossings, Abrahams said, “and we can only conclude that this in an attempt to prevent us from conducting our investigations.”
According to Abrahams, “In our view, the Israeli military has been infected by a climate of impunity, going back over since 2005, the disengagement [Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza]. There is an attitude that soldiers can do what and how they want in Gaza, and this has had a direct impact on civilian lives. It has caused civilians to die. That’s because soldiers believe they can get away with what they want — no one is watching. And that’s why investigations are so important, to break this climate of impunity.”
Marian Houk is a journalist currently working in Jerusalem with experience at the United Nations and in the region.
Israel Hit with EU War Crimes Sanctions
EU sanctions keep Israel guessing
Palestinian protesters confront Israeli Occupation Forces’ soldier near the West Bank town of Idna
By Gordon Duff and Press TV
In a surprise last minute move, the European Union set forth a
strong set of economic sanctions against Israel, leaving that nation
both surprised and reeling.
The sanctions, stimulated by what the EU refers to as “Israeli intransigence” regarding peace talks with the Palestinians, cover all financial dealings, loans, awards, transfer of “instruments” and severely limiting economic cooperation between Israel and all EU member nations starting in 2014.
The sanctions are against any Israeli “economic activity,” not just within what has been referred to as the “occupied territories” but broad areas of Israel that had been designated for the establishment of an “Arab State” in 1949.
Those territories extend in an almost contiguous line from the Lebanon border to the Red Sea.
Israel has referred to these territories as “Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.” The term “Judea” alone could refer to the entire Roman province including large regions of Lebanon and Jordan.
Thus, one might question why the European Union would include such broad territories, clearly intended to offset Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demands for “defensible borders.”
The EU has gone much further than imagined, an act Israel sees as an “ambush.”
ISRAELI RESPONSE
Israel has responded with a number of objections citing, initially that they feel the “EU attacks us because we are small,” as cited by Gil Ronen with Arutz Sheva, Israel National News.
The sanctions, to be published Friday, July 19, 2013, will prohibit all 28 European Union member states from any economic contacts with Israeli “entities” that operate outside the 1949 Armistice lines.
These territories differ greatly from the ceasefire lines of the 1967 war and include up to 25% of the territory of Israel, according to an article in Arutz Sheva.
According to that publication, the EU has made further differentiations based on the 1967 truce lines, clearly delineating territories seized as “occupied” and requiring Israel to identify any economic activity originating from those regions for exclusion.
EU officials have commented that there has been significant pressure to modify and limit the approve sanctions prior to their upcoming publication.
SYRIA
The decision to move against Israel falls on the eve of announcements from France and then Britain to hold back materiel support for pro-Israeli factions fighting against the Syrian government.
Germany had previously announced that no aid would be forthcoming.
The United States, although announcing, in June, that arms would be supplied, has withheld promised military aid though the Syrian government has made significant advances against rebel held enclaves.
ISRAEL’S POSITION
Quoting a high ranking Israeli official:
“The attack by the EU disproportionate and is likely to have no positive effect on restarting meaningful dialog over the Palestinian question. When it comes to disputed territories, the Europeans prefer to attack a small country like Israel instead of taking on more powerful states, because they are afraid of retaliation.
We were only informed at the last moment.”
Israel’s position was confirmed by Deputy Foreign Minister, Ze’ev Elkin. In a statement to the press, Elkin referred to the EU directive as a “mistake” likely to undermine any progress already made.
“We are not ready to sign on this clause in our agreements with the European Union.”
Elkin also cited Israel’s failure to get in front of the issues that led to this confrontation which will, as he also stated, “halt all cooperation in economics” and be extremely harmful to Israel’s economy.
CONTRADICTORY EU POSITIONS
Speaking for the European Union, David Kriss is quoted:
“These are guidelines on the eligibility of Israeli entities and their activity in the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967 for grants, prizes and financial instruments funded by the EU from 2014 onwards.
(Sanctions)It makes (sic) a distinction between Israel and the entities in the West Bank, east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.”
It’s a very worrying initiative launched at a bad time, because it only reinforces the Palestinians’ refusal to restart negotiations.”
Kriss then called for Israel to cooperate fully with the sanctions, threatening Israel with defunding of joint projects already scheduled, projects that would otherwise not be impacted by sanctions.
PALESTINIAN RESPONSE
Arutz Sheva reports that Palestinian leaders will only negotiate based on pre-1967 lines and “if Israel freezes all settlement activity in Judea and Samaria.”
Thus far, the world press has been unaware of these expanded Palestinian demands that would require Israel to not only stop all settlement activities in areas referred to as “occupied” but over wider areas now settled by up to 1.8 million Israelis.
There are already over 550,000 Israelis living in the “occupied zones,” primarily eastern Jerusalem, known as Al Quds, and the West Bank.
The EU position impacts nearly one third of Israel’s population, one third of its economic base.
ALL ABOUT MONEY
The real impetus for increased pressure on Israel has been the failure of western economies and their disastrous currencies.
The real subtext for scaling back support for Israel has been seen in the strangely unreported change in America’s deficits.
During the last fiscal quarter, the United States has shown a net budget surplus for the first time in decades. Two of the last three months have yielded surpluses in excess of $100 billion.
The message has been clear to EU leaders, as America has drawn down its role as “policeman of the world,” the real security issue, potential economic collapse, has become less of a threat.
What is unlikely to be admitted is the simple fact that the projection of military power to secure resources, when those resources are exploited by multi-national entities, offers a very poor return.
Thus, Israel’s current dilemma is much more rooted in its role as an economic liability than in any concerns regarding human rights.
The sanctions, stimulated by what the EU refers to as “Israeli intransigence” regarding peace talks with the Palestinians, cover all financial dealings, loans, awards, transfer of “instruments” and severely limiting economic cooperation between Israel and all EU member nations starting in 2014.
The sanctions are against any Israeli “economic activity,” not just within what has been referred to as the “occupied territories” but broad areas of Israel that had been designated for the establishment of an “Arab State” in 1949.
Those territories extend in an almost contiguous line from the Lebanon border to the Red Sea.
Israel has referred to these territories as “Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.” The term “Judea” alone could refer to the entire Roman province including large regions of Lebanon and Jordan.
Thus, one might question why the European Union would include such broad territories, clearly intended to offset Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demands for “defensible borders.”
The EU has gone much further than imagined, an act Israel sees as an “ambush.”
ISRAELI RESPONSE
Israel has responded with a number of objections citing, initially that they feel the “EU attacks us because we are small,” as cited by Gil Ronen with Arutz Sheva, Israel National News.
The sanctions, to be published Friday, July 19, 2013, will prohibit all 28 European Union member states from any economic contacts with Israeli “entities” that operate outside the 1949 Armistice lines.
These territories differ greatly from the ceasefire lines of the 1967 war and include up to 25% of the territory of Israel, according to an article in Arutz Sheva.
According to that publication, the EU has made further differentiations based on the 1967 truce lines, clearly delineating territories seized as “occupied” and requiring Israel to identify any economic activity originating from those regions for exclusion.
EU officials have commented that there has been significant pressure to modify and limit the approve sanctions prior to their upcoming publication.
SYRIA
The decision to move against Israel falls on the eve of announcements from France and then Britain to hold back materiel support for pro-Israeli factions fighting against the Syrian government.
Germany had previously announced that no aid would be forthcoming.
The United States, although announcing, in June, that arms would be supplied, has withheld promised military aid though the Syrian government has made significant advances against rebel held enclaves.
ISRAEL’S POSITION
Quoting a high ranking Israeli official:
“The attack by the EU disproportionate and is likely to have no positive effect on restarting meaningful dialog over the Palestinian question. When it comes to disputed territories, the Europeans prefer to attack a small country like Israel instead of taking on more powerful states, because they are afraid of retaliation.
We were only informed at the last moment.”
Israel’s position was confirmed by Deputy Foreign Minister, Ze’ev Elkin. In a statement to the press, Elkin referred to the EU directive as a “mistake” likely to undermine any progress already made.
“We are not ready to sign on this clause in our agreements with the European Union.”
Elkin also cited Israel’s failure to get in front of the issues that led to this confrontation which will, as he also stated, “halt all cooperation in economics” and be extremely harmful to Israel’s economy.
CONTRADICTORY EU POSITIONS
Speaking for the European Union, David Kriss is quoted:
“These are guidelines on the eligibility of Israeli entities and their activity in the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967 for grants, prizes and financial instruments funded by the EU from 2014 onwards.
(Sanctions)It makes (sic) a distinction between Israel and the entities in the West Bank, east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.”
It’s a very worrying initiative launched at a bad time, because it only reinforces the Palestinians’ refusal to restart negotiations.”
Kriss then called for Israel to cooperate fully with the sanctions, threatening Israel with defunding of joint projects already scheduled, projects that would otherwise not be impacted by sanctions.
PALESTINIAN RESPONSE
Arutz Sheva reports that Palestinian leaders will only negotiate based on pre-1967 lines and “if Israel freezes all settlement activity in Judea and Samaria.”
Thus far, the world press has been unaware of these expanded Palestinian demands that would require Israel to not only stop all settlement activities in areas referred to as “occupied” but over wider areas now settled by up to 1.8 million Israelis.
There are already over 550,000 Israelis living in the “occupied zones,” primarily eastern Jerusalem, known as Al Quds, and the West Bank.
The EU position impacts nearly one third of Israel’s population, one third of its economic base.
ALL ABOUT MONEY
The real impetus for increased pressure on Israel has been the failure of western economies and their disastrous currencies.
The real subtext for scaling back support for Israel has been seen in the strangely unreported change in America’s deficits.
During the last fiscal quarter, the United States has shown a net budget surplus for the first time in decades. Two of the last three months have yielded surpluses in excess of $100 billion.
The message has been clear to EU leaders, as America has drawn down its role as “policeman of the world,” the real security issue, potential economic collapse, has become less of a threat.
What is unlikely to be admitted is the simple fact that the projection of military power to secure resources, when those resources are exploited by multi-national entities, offers a very poor return.
Thus, Israel’s current dilemma is much more rooted in its role as an economic liability than in any concerns regarding human rights.
Presidential Rule by Deception: Obama, the Master Con-man
In an electoral system, run by and for a corporate oligarchy,
deception and demagoguery are essential elements – entertaining the
people while working for the wealthy.
Every US President has engaged, in one fashion or another, in ‘play acting’ to secure popular approval, neutralize hostility and distract voters from the reactionary substance of their foreign and domestic policies.
Every substantive policy is accompanied by a ‘down home’ folksy message to win public approval. This happened with President ‘Jimmy’ Carter’s revival of large-scale proxy wars in Afghanistan in the post-Viet Nam War period; Ronald Reagan’s genocidal wars in Central America, George Bush Sr.’s savaging of Iraq in the First Gulf War; ‘Bill’ Clinton’s decimation of social welfare in the US while bombing civilians in Yugoslavia and deregulating Wall Street; George Bush Jr.’s invasion and partition of Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempted coup in Venezuela and massive tax cuts for the rich; and Barack Obama’s staggering bailout of the biggest Wall Street speculators, unprecedented launching of five consecutive wars, and arrest and deportation of millions of immigrant workers. Each President has elaborated a style in order to ingratiate himself with the public while pursuing his reactionary agenda.
In rhetoric, appearance and in public persona, it is ‘de rigueur’ for US Presidents to present themselves as an ‘everyman’ while committing political actions – including war crimes worthy of prosecution.
Each President, in his ‘play acting’, develops a style suitable to the times. They constantly strive to overcome the public’s suspicion and potential hostility to their overt and covert policies designed to build empire as domestic conditions deteriorate. However, not all play acting is the same: each President’s ‘populist’ style in defense of oligarchic interests has its characteristic nuances.
The Carter Feint: ‘Human Rights’ Wars in the Post-Viet Nam War Era
‘Jimmy’
Carter was elected President at a time of the greatest mass anti-war
upheaval in US history. His campaign projected a soft-spoken,
conciliatory President from humble roots reaching out to the anti-war
electorate and solemnly pledging to uphold human rights against domestic
militarists and their overseas despotic allies. To that end, he
appointed a liberal human rights advocate Pat Derian to the State
Department and a veteran Cold Warrior, Zbigniew (Zbig) Brzezinski, as
National Security Advisor and foreign policy strategist.
Duplicity reared its head immediately: Carter openly criticized the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua – while privately telling the dictator to ignore the public criticisms and assuring him of continuing US support.[1] As the Sandinista revolution advanced toward victory, Carter convoked a meeting of Latin American leaders urging them to join in a joint military intervention with the US to ‘save lives’ and to prevent the popular Nicaraguan revolution from taking power and dismantling the dictator’s army. It soon became clear to the leaders of Latin America that Carter’s mission was a thinly- veiled ‘humanitarian’ version of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and they declined. When Carter realized that, without the fig leaf of Latin American participation, a US-led invasion would arouse universal opposition, he abandoned the project. The political climate would not support a unilateral US invasion so soon after the end of the war in Indochina .
However, Carter soon re-launched the Cold War, reviving military spending and pouring billions of dollars into funding, arming and training tens of thousands of fundamentalist Jihadists from around the world to invade Afghanistan and overthrow its leftist, secular government.
Carter’s policy of re-militarization and launching of large-scale and long-term secret CIA operations in alliance with the most brutal dictators and monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was accompanied by sanctimonious speeches about human rights and token appeals to protect ‘civilians’. In this regard, Carter became our founding father of the double discourse: a con man that publically condemned the jailing and torture by Pinochet of political opponents in Chile while orchestrating what would become a decade-long blood bath in Afghanistan with millions of victims.
Reagan: Geniality with Genocide
Up
until the ascendancy of Barack Obama, the avuncular President, Ronald
Reagan, was acknowledged as the ‘master con-man’, by virtue of his
Hollywood acting experience. Reagan was and remained a disciplined and
hardened backer of policies designed to concentrate wealth while
smashing unions, even as he entertained the flag-waving hard hat
construction workers with his jokes about ‘limousine liberals’ and
Cadillac welfare queens. The knowing wink and clever two-liners were
matched by an adaptation of morality tales from his cowboy films.
Reagan, in his role as ‘the righteous sheriff’, backed the mercenary
contras as they invaded Nicaragua and destroyed schools and clinics and
the genocidal military dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala who
murdered hundreds of thousands of Indians and peasants.
Uncle Reagan’s friendly chats would describe how he had stopped the communist ‘outlaws’ (peasants, workers and Indians) of Central America from flooding across the Rio Grande and invading California and Texas. His tales resonated with mass audiences familiar with the racist Hollywood cowboy film version of unshaven Mexican bandits crossing the ‘ US ’ border. The clean-shaven, straight-talking, ‘stand-up for America’ President Ronald Reagan was elected and re-elected by a resounding majority in the midst of CIA-backed mujahedeen victories over the government and secular civil structure of Afghanistan, Pentagon- supported Israeli slaughter of Palestinian refugees in their camps in Lebanon and the mass genocide of scores of thousands of indigenous villagers in Guatemala.
When news reports seeped out about the mass graves of poor villagers in Guatemala , Reagan resorted to colloquial language right out of a Hollywood film to defend General Rios Mont : “He’s getting a bum rap”. In defending the brutal dictator of Guatemala , Reagan replaced Carter’s sanctimonious phrasing in favor of down-to-earth macho talk of a no-nonsense sheriff.
In substance, both Carter and Reagan were rebuilding the US war machine after the debacle of Viet Nam ; they were setting up a global network of client dictators, Muslim fundamentalists and hypocritical Anglo-American humanitarians interventionists.
Bush Senior: Uni-Polarity and the Ticket to Uncontested Imperial Conquests
Following
the break-up of the Soviet Union, the US and Western Europe
re-conquered, pillaged and neo-colonized Eastern Europe . West Germany
annexed East Germany . And a predator-gangster oligarchy in Russia
seized over a trillion dollars of public assets, impoverishing millions
and laundered the illicit funds via elaborate banking operations on Wall
Street and in London and Tel Aviv.
President George Bush Sr. embraced the doctrine of a unipolar world – free from rival super-power constraints and independent Third World resistance. ‘Poppy’ Bush believed the US could impose its will by force anywhere and at any time without fear of retaliation. He believed he was heir to a new imperial order of free markets, free elections and unrestrained plunder. The first war he would launch would be in the Middle East – the invasion, massive bombing and destruction of Iraq . It was followed by an unprecedented expansion of NATO bases in the countries of Eastern Europe . The spread of neo-liberalism led to the naked pillage of public assets throughout Latin American and Eastern Europe . The Empire ruled the Muslim world through an arc of client dictators from Tunisia , Egypt , and Saudi Arabia to Pakistan .
Bush adopted the persona of the ‘happy warrior’ – the invincible American President who had triumphed over the Evil Empire. Meanwhile, the domestic economy deteriorated under the enormous costs of the massive military build-up and gave rise to a crisis that hurt the electorate. Bush’s personal rigidity and lack of theatricality prevented him from playing the con-man – unlike his predecessor, the actor Reagan. Even as he extolled the prowess of the US military, his career as an ‘insider’ corporate operative and CIA director did not provide him with the demagogic skills necessary for a successful re-election.
While Bush celebrated his overseas victories, he failed to attract a popular following: His pinched face and wooden upper-crust smile was no match for ‘Cowboy’ Reagan’s street corner geniality or even ‘Jimmy’ Carter’s pious intonations of human rights and Christian values … Deception and demagoguery are crucial elements in a re-election campaign – and so Bush, Sr. gave way for the next Presidential con-man-in-chief, Bill Clinton.
The Clinton-Con: Black Churches , Welfare Cuts and the Wall Street Warrior
Bill
Clinton, like Ronald Reagan, turned out to be a Wall Street populist
.With his folksy Arkansas intonations he preached messages of hope in
black churches while diligently applying the free-market lessons he had
learned from his Wall Street mentors. Tooting the saxophone and oozing
compassion, Clinton told the poor that he could ‘feel their pain’, while
inflicting misery on single mothers forced to leave their children and
take minimum-wage jobs in order to retain any public assistance. He
joined hands with labor union bosses at Labor Day festivities, while
fast-tracking job-killing free-trade treaties (like NAFTA) that
devastated the American working class. Bill Clinton enthusiastically
sent bombers over Belgrade and other Yugoslav cities for several weeks,
destroying its factories, hospitals, schools, power plants, radio and TV
stations and bridges, as well as the Chinese Embassy, in support of the
terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army and its separatist war against
Belgrade . Clinton bombed civilians and their vital infrastructure, a
war crime in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’, to the ecstatic
cheers of many Western liberals, progressives, social democrats and not a
few Marxists as well as many Jihadists. On the home front, this
self-proclaimed ‘people’s candidate’ ripped to shreds all restraints on
banking speculation by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, New
Deal legislation enacted to protect against massive banking swindles.
This opened the floodgates to massive financial manipulation, which
destroyed the pensions of many millions of workers.[2]
Clinton’s policies laid the groundwork for the information technology and Stock Market crash of 2000-01. His appointee, Alan Greenspan, created the conditions leading to speculative financial frenzy and subsequent economic crash of 2008. Bill Clinton’s stand-up comic performances in black churches, his back slapping encounters with labor bureaucrats and his embrace of feminists and others just raised the rhetorical bar for future aspiring Wall Street warlords in the White House. It would take eight years and the election of Barack Hussein Obama to finally surpass Bill Clinton as Con-Man-In Chief.
Bush Junior: A Yale Man with a Texas Drawl
President
George Bush, Junior’s regime launched two major wars and backed two
Israeli assaults on Palestinian civilians trapped in Gaza – the world’s
largest open-air prison. He virtually eliminated taxes on billionaires
while overseeing the geometrical growth of the domestic police state
apparatus; and he unleashed the biggest speculative bubble and crash
since the Great Depression. He lowered the living standards for all
Americans except the top 10% of the population – and despite these
disasters and despite his lack-luster performance as a con-man, he was
re-elected.
His handlers and backers did their best to market their boy: his Ivy League credentials and New England background was replaced by a transparently phony Texas accent; tinny, whiney sound bites, reminiscent of his father’s, were replaced by a Texas ‘ranchers’ homely drawl. His ‘just-folks’ grammatical mistakes may have been mocked by the liberals but they resonated deeply with fundamentalist Christians – who would never have recognized the Phillips Exeter Academy-Yale Skull and Bones boy in their Commander-in Chief.
President Bush, Jr. was decked out in the uniform of a ‘Top Gun’ fighter pilot to polish his military credentials tarnished by revelations that the millionaire-playboy had gone AWOL during his service in the National Guard. His silly ‘Mission Accomplished’ claim that the Iraq war had been won in the first months after the invasion was rudely corrected by the huge outbreak of Iraqi resistance against the occupier. Bush handed over foreign policymaking, especially pertaining to the Middle East , to a small army of Jewish Zionists, aided and abetted by notorious militarists, like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most major political events were handled by his Cabinet thugs – Secretary of State Colin Powell shamelessly fabricated the ‘evidence’ of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in his performance before the United Nations. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz invented Afghanistan ’s ties to the planners of 9/11.
Cheney
and his Zionist troika of Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and ‘Scooter’
Libby trumpeted the ‘global war on terror’ while Michael Chertoff,
Michael Mukasey and Stuart Levey conducted a domestic war against the
Bill of Rights and US Constitutional freedoms, defending torture,
jailing thousands of Muslims, punishing businesses trading with Iran and
labeling US opponents of Israel’s war crimes as ‘security threats’.
Bush, Jr. just nodded his approval, letting the “big fellas have a piece
of the action”. With Junior, there was no peace demagoguery just plain
talk to plain folks and- “Let the bombs fall and the Capital flow”. Bush
did not have to go preaching to black churches (he had a black
Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to do his dirty work
without the cant); Bush never claimed that Israel got the ‘bum rap’ when
it was charged with genocidal crimes. Under Bush, Jr., war criminals
did not have to ‘sugar-coat’ their crimes. While occupying the White
House, Bush signed off on the multi-trillion-dollar bailout for Wall
Street and then just went off to tend his cows and chop wood at the
Texas ranch.
Bush’s ‘style’ was a combination of ‘laid back’ and ‘straight forward’: he simply committed war crimes, protected Wall Street swindles and expanded the police state, without claiming otherwise. As the endless wars dragged on, as the stock market flopped under its own fraud and manipulation and the increasingly repressive legislation provoked debate, Bush just shrugged his shoulders and finished out his term in office without flourish or fanfare: “Y’all can’t win ‘em all. Let the next guy try his hand”.
Barack Obama: The Master of Deceit
From the beginning of his Presidential campaign, Obama demonstrated his proficiency as the master of all cons. He spoke passionately against torture while consulting with the torturers; he condemned Wall Street speculators while appointing key Street operatives as economic advisers. He promised a new deal in the Middle East , especially for Palestinians and then appointed a dual citizen, Israeli-US, Rahm Emmanuel (son of an Israeli Irgun terrorist) to be his most intimate Presidential advisor. Honolulu born and bred, Barack modulated his voice according to the audience, adopting a Baptist minister’s cadence for the black audiences while assuming the professorial tone of an Ivy League lawyer for his Wall Street contributors.
He hob-knobbed with Hollywood celebrities and Silicon billionaires, who bankrolled the fairy tale of his ‘historic breakthrough’ – the First Afro-American President who would speak for all Americans – nay for the entire world! Millions of giddy camp followers, white, black, old and young, the trade unionists and community activists alike were willingly deceived. They had chosen to disregard the fact that Barack Obama’s key advisers were rabid militarists, big bankers, corporate CEO’s, die-hard Zionists and Wall Street manipulators.
Indeed
Obama’s supporters were enchanted by the phony rhetoric, the demagogy,
the ‘populist style’, and the fake ‘authenticities’. Here was the man
who promised to end the wars, close the torture concentration camp in
Guantanamo , bring Wall Street to heel, repeal the Patriot Act and
restore the Bill of Rights. And he was ‘their guy’ – shooting hoops in
an urban playground – something Bush had never done! In truth, Barack
Hussein Obama did a lot that Bush never dared to do – he surpassed Bush
by far in committing war crimes against humanity – pushing for more
military adventures abroad and police state repression at home. He
exceeded by far any President in US history in assuming dictatorial
police powers, in waging multiple wars while directing the massive
transfer of state revenues to Wall Street bankers. President Obama,
hands down, will be regarded as the greatest con-man President in
American history. The Carters, Reagans and Clintons all pale in
comparison: the enormous gap between style and substance, promise and
performance, peace and war, capital and labor has never been greater.
It is President Obama’s hollow eloquence that raised the hopes of millions at home and abroad only to condemn them to an inferno of endless wars. It is the perversity of his rhetoric which attracts the Latino vote with promises of immigrant citizenship while his policy has been fill detention centers with hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers and their families. His soaring rhetoric promising justice for Muslims in Cairo was followed by the bloody bombing of Tripoli, the torture and slaughter of the Libyan patriot President Gadhafi; the broken promises to the Palestinians contrasts with the embrace of the bloody Israeli warlords.
Obama far out-paced President Bush’s drone attacks in Pakistan , Yemen and Afghanistan , bombings which targeted farmers, whole families and famished orphans in their schools. Soaring moral and ethical pronouncements accompany Obama’s arming and praising the 40,000 Muslim fundamentalist mercenaries sent to degrade and shatter the secular Syrian state. The pretexts for mass killing fall from his lips like maggots on a rotten corpse: his blatant lies about the use of poison gas in Syria as the government in Damascus confronts a foreign mercenary invasion; the lurid tales of fabricated massacres in Benghazi ( Libya ) and the false claims of stolen elections in Venezuela . Obama’s rhetoric converts executioners into victims and victims into executioners.
President Barack Obama promised a comprehensive health care overhaul for America and then presented the electorate with a confusing series of obligatory payments for plans designed by for-profit private health insurance companies. Obama ‘defended social security’ by raising the age of retirement, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of workers in hazardous occupations would die before ever receiving any benefits after a lifetime of obligatory contributions. Obama solemnly promised to defend Medicare and then proposed to reduce its budget by a trillion dollars over a decade.
Obama claims a presidential prerogative of ‘defending American interests’ by ordering the assassination of whomever his million-member secret police state apparatus designates as a security threat – including American citizens – without trial, without recourse to habeas corpus.
In the White House Rose Garden President Barack Obama strolls arm-in-arm with his wife and children, a family man, true to his promises… While in Aleppo a young teen, a street vendor, is beheaded before his parents and neighbors by fanatical ‘freedom-fighters’ praised and supported by the President. The boy’s alleged crime was blasphemy. The murdered teen has joined the scores of thousands of Syrians killed and the hundreds of thousands who will join them, as Obama has decided to openly arm the mercenaries.
Casual, open collar, President Obama jokes as he walks and talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the sumptuous estate of a California billionaire, offering friendship and peace – shaking hands for the cameras with a scorpion in his palm. The smiling Obama has ceaselessly dispatched his envoys to Asia, Latin America, Oceana and Africa to incite claims and conflicts against Beijing . Obama believes that his own ‘personal magic’ will blind the Chinese to the fact that China is being encircled by US air and maritime bases. He seems to believe that the Chinese will ignore his efforts to forge US-centered trade pacts which specifically exclude China.
The master ‘confidence-man’ sincerely believes in his power to move and mystify the public, pick the pockets of his adversaries and make his victims believe they have been in the presence of a world-class statesman. In fact, Obama has been playing the role of a street hustler living off the earnings and lives of his people while handing them over to his corporate bosses and pimps for Israel .
Obama fills internment camps with hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrant workers while promising a ‘roadmap to citizenship’ to the cheers of Mexican-American Democratic Party vote hustlers!
Obama received 95% of the Afro-American votes, while the income gap between blacks and whites widens and unemployment and poverty figures soar. Obama, the first ‘Afro-American President’, has bombed and intervened in more African countries, backing mercenary armies in Libya and Somalia and establishing more military bases throughout the black continent than the last five ‘white’ Presidents … So much for the self-proclaimed “historic breakthrough of a Black President ending centuries of racism”.
It’s enough for Obama to appoint other black police state thugs and foreign interventionists, like Eric Holder and Susan Rice, to win the cheers of liberals even as their own security files grow in the data warehouses of the world’s biggest spying agencies.
One cynic, commenting on the long-standing love affair between Obama and white liberals, observed that ‘the more he screws them the better they like him … Even as he marches them off to jail, they would take care to note on his behalf, that the barred windows have curtains – something Bush would never have allowed.’
Conclusion
For sheer span of broken promises, of systematic lies in pursuit of wars and financial manipulation in the name of peace and social justice , of consistent and bold aggrandizement of executive power over the life and death of US citizens in the name of security, Obama has set the standard of political deception and demagogy far beyond past and probable future US Presidents.
The political context of his ascent to power and his deep links to the military-financial-Zionist networks insured his success as a premier confidence man.
President George Bush, Jr., the cringing, fading war-monger engaged in prolonged, costly wars and facing the collapse of the entire banking and financial sector, provided Candidate Obama with an easy target. Obama exploited the mass revulsion of the American people, longing for change. His soaring rhetoric and vacuous promise of ‘change’ attracted millions of young activists … The problem is that in their enthusiasm and blind adherence to ‘identity politics’ with its claims that all ‘blacks’ and ‘women’ are oppressed and therefore guaranteed to promote peace and justice — facilitated Obama’s con-game and political hustle.
Obama, once in office, not only deepened and widened the scope of President Bush, Jr’s wars, massive spy apparatus and corporate profiteering; he bamboozled the vast majority of his liberal-labor supporters in the Democratic Party! Barack Obama conned the Democratic Party Congressional liberals and they, in turn, conned their constituents into supporting this fraud.
The costs of President Obama’s two-faced policies are enormous: democracy has given way to a police state openly defended by the President and Congressional leaders; Wall Street’s recovery and corporate profiteering is fast destroying public health and social security. Barack Obama’s multiple endless wars and interventions are destroying vast cities, infrastructure, entire cultures while and killing and impoverishing millions of people from Libya to Palestine , from Syria to Iran . The economic sanctions against Iran , the provocative encirclement and isolation of China , and the campaign to destabilize Venezuela are the centerpieces of Obama’s ‘pivot to empire’. These policies portend even greater world-shattering catastrophes.
Unmasking the con-man is a first step requiring that we expose the tricks of the con-game. The politics of deception and demagogy thrives by directing popular attention to style and rhetoric, not substance. The solemn and pious cant of ‘Jimmy’ Carter distracted from his launch of the rabid Jihadists against the secular administration of Afghanistan . Uncle Ronald Reagan’s geniality and populist TV patter covered-up his blood baths in Central America and mass firing of the unionized air controllers and jailing of union leaders. ‘Bill’ Clinton’s show of empathy for the poor and embrace of ‘feel-good’ politics neutralized opposition as he bombed Yugoslavia into a pre-industrial age while his domestic policies kicked vulnerable single mothers from welfare programs. They all paled before the grand con-master Obama, billed as the ‘first black’ President, a community organizer (who disowned his sponsor into the black communities of Chicago, Rev. Wright, for his anti-war, anti-imperial stand) has capitalized on his racial credentials to garner the vote of guilty-ridden, soft-headed liberals and marginalized blacks in order to serve the interests of Wall Street and Israel.
Disarming these con-men and women requires exposing the nature of their demagogic populist styles and focusing on substantive politics. The decisive criteria need to be class politics that are defined by fundamental class alignments, between capital and labor regarding budgets, income, taxes, social spending, financing and property rights. ‘Shooting hoops’ in ghetto playgrounds is a con-man’s distraction while his budget cuts close hospitals and schools in black and poor neighborhoods.
The extravaganzas, featuring sports and entertainment celebrities to promote imperial wars, are the ‘con’ to undermine international solidarity for war victims and the unemployed. President Obama, the confidence man, is still performing while sowing destruction.
It’s time for the deceived, the disillusioned and the deprived to
stand-up and shout! “We are deceived no more. Its time you were put on
trial for Crimes against Humanity!”
Every US President has engaged, in one fashion or another, in ‘play acting’ to secure popular approval, neutralize hostility and distract voters from the reactionary substance of their foreign and domestic policies.
Every substantive policy is accompanied by a ‘down home’ folksy message to win public approval. This happened with President ‘Jimmy’ Carter’s revival of large-scale proxy wars in Afghanistan in the post-Viet Nam War period; Ronald Reagan’s genocidal wars in Central America, George Bush Sr.’s savaging of Iraq in the First Gulf War; ‘Bill’ Clinton’s decimation of social welfare in the US while bombing civilians in Yugoslavia and deregulating Wall Street; George Bush Jr.’s invasion and partition of Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempted coup in Venezuela and massive tax cuts for the rich; and Barack Obama’s staggering bailout of the biggest Wall Street speculators, unprecedented launching of five consecutive wars, and arrest and deportation of millions of immigrant workers. Each President has elaborated a style in order to ingratiate himself with the public while pursuing his reactionary agenda.
In rhetoric, appearance and in public persona, it is ‘de rigueur’ for US Presidents to present themselves as an ‘everyman’ while committing political actions – including war crimes worthy of prosecution.
Each President, in his ‘play acting’, develops a style suitable to the times. They constantly strive to overcome the public’s suspicion and potential hostility to their overt and covert policies designed to build empire as domestic conditions deteriorate. However, not all play acting is the same: each President’s ‘populist’ style in defense of oligarchic interests has its characteristic nuances.
The Carter Feint: ‘Human Rights’ Wars in the Post-Viet Nam War Era
‘Jimmy’
Carter was elected President at a time of the greatest mass anti-war
upheaval in US history. His campaign projected a soft-spoken,
conciliatory President from humble roots reaching out to the anti-war
electorate and solemnly pledging to uphold human rights against domestic
militarists and their overseas despotic allies. To that end, he
appointed a liberal human rights advocate Pat Derian to the State
Department and a veteran Cold Warrior, Zbigniew (Zbig) Brzezinski, as
National Security Advisor and foreign policy strategist.Duplicity reared its head immediately: Carter openly criticized the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua – while privately telling the dictator to ignore the public criticisms and assuring him of continuing US support.[1] As the Sandinista revolution advanced toward victory, Carter convoked a meeting of Latin American leaders urging them to join in a joint military intervention with the US to ‘save lives’ and to prevent the popular Nicaraguan revolution from taking power and dismantling the dictator’s army. It soon became clear to the leaders of Latin America that Carter’s mission was a thinly- veiled ‘humanitarian’ version of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and they declined. When Carter realized that, without the fig leaf of Latin American participation, a US-led invasion would arouse universal opposition, he abandoned the project. The political climate would not support a unilateral US invasion so soon after the end of the war in Indochina .
However, Carter soon re-launched the Cold War, reviving military spending and pouring billions of dollars into funding, arming and training tens of thousands of fundamentalist Jihadists from around the world to invade Afghanistan and overthrow its leftist, secular government.
Carter’s policy of re-militarization and launching of large-scale and long-term secret CIA operations in alliance with the most brutal dictators and monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was accompanied by sanctimonious speeches about human rights and token appeals to protect ‘civilians’. In this regard, Carter became our founding father of the double discourse: a con man that publically condemned the jailing and torture by Pinochet of political opponents in Chile while orchestrating what would become a decade-long blood bath in Afghanistan with millions of victims.
Reagan: Geniality with Genocide
Up
until the ascendancy of Barack Obama, the avuncular President, Ronald
Reagan, was acknowledged as the ‘master con-man’, by virtue of his
Hollywood acting experience. Reagan was and remained a disciplined and
hardened backer of policies designed to concentrate wealth while
smashing unions, even as he entertained the flag-waving hard hat
construction workers with his jokes about ‘limousine liberals’ and
Cadillac welfare queens. The knowing wink and clever two-liners were
matched by an adaptation of morality tales from his cowboy films.
Reagan, in his role as ‘the righteous sheriff’, backed the mercenary
contras as they invaded Nicaragua and destroyed schools and clinics and
the genocidal military dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala who
murdered hundreds of thousands of Indians and peasants.Uncle Reagan’s friendly chats would describe how he had stopped the communist ‘outlaws’ (peasants, workers and Indians) of Central America from flooding across the Rio Grande and invading California and Texas. His tales resonated with mass audiences familiar with the racist Hollywood cowboy film version of unshaven Mexican bandits crossing the ‘ US ’ border. The clean-shaven, straight-talking, ‘stand-up for America’ President Ronald Reagan was elected and re-elected by a resounding majority in the midst of CIA-backed mujahedeen victories over the government and secular civil structure of Afghanistan, Pentagon- supported Israeli slaughter of Palestinian refugees in their camps in Lebanon and the mass genocide of scores of thousands of indigenous villagers in Guatemala.
When news reports seeped out about the mass graves of poor villagers in Guatemala , Reagan resorted to colloquial language right out of a Hollywood film to defend General Rios Mont : “He’s getting a bum rap”. In defending the brutal dictator of Guatemala , Reagan replaced Carter’s sanctimonious phrasing in favor of down-to-earth macho talk of a no-nonsense sheriff.
In substance, both Carter and Reagan were rebuilding the US war machine after the debacle of Viet Nam ; they were setting up a global network of client dictators, Muslim fundamentalists and hypocritical Anglo-American humanitarians interventionists.
Bush Senior: Uni-Polarity and the Ticket to Uncontested Imperial Conquests
Following
the break-up of the Soviet Union, the US and Western Europe
re-conquered, pillaged and neo-colonized Eastern Europe . West Germany
annexed East Germany . And a predator-gangster oligarchy in Russia
seized over a trillion dollars of public assets, impoverishing millions
and laundered the illicit funds via elaborate banking operations on Wall
Street and in London and Tel Aviv.President George Bush Sr. embraced the doctrine of a unipolar world – free from rival super-power constraints and independent Third World resistance. ‘Poppy’ Bush believed the US could impose its will by force anywhere and at any time without fear of retaliation. He believed he was heir to a new imperial order of free markets, free elections and unrestrained plunder. The first war he would launch would be in the Middle East – the invasion, massive bombing and destruction of Iraq . It was followed by an unprecedented expansion of NATO bases in the countries of Eastern Europe . The spread of neo-liberalism led to the naked pillage of public assets throughout Latin American and Eastern Europe . The Empire ruled the Muslim world through an arc of client dictators from Tunisia , Egypt , and Saudi Arabia to Pakistan .
Bush adopted the persona of the ‘happy warrior’ – the invincible American President who had triumphed over the Evil Empire. Meanwhile, the domestic economy deteriorated under the enormous costs of the massive military build-up and gave rise to a crisis that hurt the electorate. Bush’s personal rigidity and lack of theatricality prevented him from playing the con-man – unlike his predecessor, the actor Reagan. Even as he extolled the prowess of the US military, his career as an ‘insider’ corporate operative and CIA director did not provide him with the demagogic skills necessary for a successful re-election.
While Bush celebrated his overseas victories, he failed to attract a popular following: His pinched face and wooden upper-crust smile was no match for ‘Cowboy’ Reagan’s street corner geniality or even ‘Jimmy’ Carter’s pious intonations of human rights and Christian values … Deception and demagoguery are crucial elements in a re-election campaign – and so Bush, Sr. gave way for the next Presidential con-man-in-chief, Bill Clinton.
The Clinton-Con: Black Churches , Welfare Cuts and the Wall Street Warrior
Bill
Clinton, like Ronald Reagan, turned out to be a Wall Street populist
.With his folksy Arkansas intonations he preached messages of hope in
black churches while diligently applying the free-market lessons he had
learned from his Wall Street mentors. Tooting the saxophone and oozing
compassion, Clinton told the poor that he could ‘feel their pain’, while
inflicting misery on single mothers forced to leave their children and
take minimum-wage jobs in order to retain any public assistance. He
joined hands with labor union bosses at Labor Day festivities, while
fast-tracking job-killing free-trade treaties (like NAFTA) that
devastated the American working class. Bill Clinton enthusiastically
sent bombers over Belgrade and other Yugoslav cities for several weeks,
destroying its factories, hospitals, schools, power plants, radio and TV
stations and bridges, as well as the Chinese Embassy, in support of the
terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army and its separatist war against
Belgrade . Clinton bombed civilians and their vital infrastructure, a
war crime in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’, to the ecstatic
cheers of many Western liberals, progressives, social democrats and not a
few Marxists as well as many Jihadists. On the home front, this
self-proclaimed ‘people’s candidate’ ripped to shreds all restraints on
banking speculation by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, New
Deal legislation enacted to protect against massive banking swindles.
This opened the floodgates to massive financial manipulation, which
destroyed the pensions of many millions of workers.[2]Clinton’s policies laid the groundwork for the information technology and Stock Market crash of 2000-01. His appointee, Alan Greenspan, created the conditions leading to speculative financial frenzy and subsequent economic crash of 2008. Bill Clinton’s stand-up comic performances in black churches, his back slapping encounters with labor bureaucrats and his embrace of feminists and others just raised the rhetorical bar for future aspiring Wall Street warlords in the White House. It would take eight years and the election of Barack Hussein Obama to finally surpass Bill Clinton as Con-Man-In Chief.
Bush Junior: A Yale Man with a Texas Drawl
President
George Bush, Junior’s regime launched two major wars and backed two
Israeli assaults on Palestinian civilians trapped in Gaza – the world’s
largest open-air prison. He virtually eliminated taxes on billionaires
while overseeing the geometrical growth of the domestic police state
apparatus; and he unleashed the biggest speculative bubble and crash
since the Great Depression. He lowered the living standards for all
Americans except the top 10% of the population – and despite these
disasters and despite his lack-luster performance as a con-man, he was
re-elected.His handlers and backers did their best to market their boy: his Ivy League credentials and New England background was replaced by a transparently phony Texas accent; tinny, whiney sound bites, reminiscent of his father’s, were replaced by a Texas ‘ranchers’ homely drawl. His ‘just-folks’ grammatical mistakes may have been mocked by the liberals but they resonated deeply with fundamentalist Christians – who would never have recognized the Phillips Exeter Academy-Yale Skull and Bones boy in their Commander-in Chief.
President Bush, Jr. was decked out in the uniform of a ‘Top Gun’ fighter pilot to polish his military credentials tarnished by revelations that the millionaire-playboy had gone AWOL during his service in the National Guard. His silly ‘Mission Accomplished’ claim that the Iraq war had been won in the first months after the invasion was rudely corrected by the huge outbreak of Iraqi resistance against the occupier. Bush handed over foreign policymaking, especially pertaining to the Middle East , to a small army of Jewish Zionists, aided and abetted by notorious militarists, like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most major political events were handled by his Cabinet thugs – Secretary of State Colin Powell shamelessly fabricated the ‘evidence’ of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in his performance before the United Nations. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz invented Afghanistan ’s ties to the planners of 9/11.
Cheney
and his Zionist troika of Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and ‘Scooter’
Libby trumpeted the ‘global war on terror’ while Michael Chertoff,
Michael Mukasey and Stuart Levey conducted a domestic war against the
Bill of Rights and US Constitutional freedoms, defending torture,
jailing thousands of Muslims, punishing businesses trading with Iran and
labeling US opponents of Israel’s war crimes as ‘security threats’.
Bush, Jr. just nodded his approval, letting the “big fellas have a piece
of the action”. With Junior, there was no peace demagoguery just plain
talk to plain folks and- “Let the bombs fall and the Capital flow”. Bush
did not have to go preaching to black churches (he had a black
Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to do his dirty work
without the cant); Bush never claimed that Israel got the ‘bum rap’ when
it was charged with genocidal crimes. Under Bush, Jr., war criminals
did not have to ‘sugar-coat’ their crimes. While occupying the White
House, Bush signed off on the multi-trillion-dollar bailout for Wall
Street and then just went off to tend his cows and chop wood at the
Texas ranch.Bush’s ‘style’ was a combination of ‘laid back’ and ‘straight forward’: he simply committed war crimes, protected Wall Street swindles and expanded the police state, without claiming otherwise. As the endless wars dragged on, as the stock market flopped under its own fraud and manipulation and the increasingly repressive legislation provoked debate, Bush just shrugged his shoulders and finished out his term in office without flourish or fanfare: “Y’all can’t win ‘em all. Let the next guy try his hand”.
Barack Obama: The Master of Deceit
From the beginning of his Presidential campaign, Obama demonstrated his proficiency as the master of all cons. He spoke passionately against torture while consulting with the torturers; he condemned Wall Street speculators while appointing key Street operatives as economic advisers. He promised a new deal in the Middle East , especially for Palestinians and then appointed a dual citizen, Israeli-US, Rahm Emmanuel (son of an Israeli Irgun terrorist) to be his most intimate Presidential advisor. Honolulu born and bred, Barack modulated his voice according to the audience, adopting a Baptist minister’s cadence for the black audiences while assuming the professorial tone of an Ivy League lawyer for his Wall Street contributors.
He hob-knobbed with Hollywood celebrities and Silicon billionaires, who bankrolled the fairy tale of his ‘historic breakthrough’ – the First Afro-American President who would speak for all Americans – nay for the entire world! Millions of giddy camp followers, white, black, old and young, the trade unionists and community activists alike were willingly deceived. They had chosen to disregard the fact that Barack Obama’s key advisers were rabid militarists, big bankers, corporate CEO’s, die-hard Zionists and Wall Street manipulators.
Indeed
Obama’s supporters were enchanted by the phony rhetoric, the demagogy,
the ‘populist style’, and the fake ‘authenticities’. Here was the man
who promised to end the wars, close the torture concentration camp in
Guantanamo , bring Wall Street to heel, repeal the Patriot Act and
restore the Bill of Rights. And he was ‘their guy’ – shooting hoops in
an urban playground – something Bush had never done! In truth, Barack
Hussein Obama did a lot that Bush never dared to do – he surpassed Bush
by far in committing war crimes against humanity – pushing for more
military adventures abroad and police state repression at home. He
exceeded by far any President in US history in assuming dictatorial
police powers, in waging multiple wars while directing the massive
transfer of state revenues to Wall Street bankers. President Obama,
hands down, will be regarded as the greatest con-man President in
American history. The Carters, Reagans and Clintons all pale in
comparison: the enormous gap between style and substance, promise and
performance, peace and war, capital and labor has never been greater.It is President Obama’s hollow eloquence that raised the hopes of millions at home and abroad only to condemn them to an inferno of endless wars. It is the perversity of his rhetoric which attracts the Latino vote with promises of immigrant citizenship while his policy has been fill detention centers with hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers and their families. His soaring rhetoric promising justice for Muslims in Cairo was followed by the bloody bombing of Tripoli, the torture and slaughter of the Libyan patriot President Gadhafi; the broken promises to the Palestinians contrasts with the embrace of the bloody Israeli warlords.
Obama far out-paced President Bush’s drone attacks in Pakistan , Yemen and Afghanistan , bombings which targeted farmers, whole families and famished orphans in their schools. Soaring moral and ethical pronouncements accompany Obama’s arming and praising the 40,000 Muslim fundamentalist mercenaries sent to degrade and shatter the secular Syrian state. The pretexts for mass killing fall from his lips like maggots on a rotten corpse: his blatant lies about the use of poison gas in Syria as the government in Damascus confronts a foreign mercenary invasion; the lurid tales of fabricated massacres in Benghazi ( Libya ) and the false claims of stolen elections in Venezuela . Obama’s rhetoric converts executioners into victims and victims into executioners.
President Barack Obama promised a comprehensive health care overhaul for America and then presented the electorate with a confusing series of obligatory payments for plans designed by for-profit private health insurance companies. Obama ‘defended social security’ by raising the age of retirement, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of workers in hazardous occupations would die before ever receiving any benefits after a lifetime of obligatory contributions. Obama solemnly promised to defend Medicare and then proposed to reduce its budget by a trillion dollars over a decade.
Obama claims a presidential prerogative of ‘defending American interests’ by ordering the assassination of whomever his million-member secret police state apparatus designates as a security threat – including American citizens – without trial, without recourse to habeas corpus.
In the White House Rose Garden President Barack Obama strolls arm-in-arm with his wife and children, a family man, true to his promises… While in Aleppo a young teen, a street vendor, is beheaded before his parents and neighbors by fanatical ‘freedom-fighters’ praised and supported by the President. The boy’s alleged crime was blasphemy. The murdered teen has joined the scores of thousands of Syrians killed and the hundreds of thousands who will join them, as Obama has decided to openly arm the mercenaries.
Casual, open collar, President Obama jokes as he walks and talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the sumptuous estate of a California billionaire, offering friendship and peace – shaking hands for the cameras with a scorpion in his palm. The smiling Obama has ceaselessly dispatched his envoys to Asia, Latin America, Oceana and Africa to incite claims and conflicts against Beijing . Obama believes that his own ‘personal magic’ will blind the Chinese to the fact that China is being encircled by US air and maritime bases. He seems to believe that the Chinese will ignore his efforts to forge US-centered trade pacts which specifically exclude China.
The master ‘confidence-man’ sincerely believes in his power to move and mystify the public, pick the pockets of his adversaries and make his victims believe they have been in the presence of a world-class statesman. In fact, Obama has been playing the role of a street hustler living off the earnings and lives of his people while handing them over to his corporate bosses and pimps for Israel .
Obama fills internment camps with hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrant workers while promising a ‘roadmap to citizenship’ to the cheers of Mexican-American Democratic Party vote hustlers!
Obama received 95% of the Afro-American votes, while the income gap between blacks and whites widens and unemployment and poverty figures soar. Obama, the first ‘Afro-American President’, has bombed and intervened in more African countries, backing mercenary armies in Libya and Somalia and establishing more military bases throughout the black continent than the last five ‘white’ Presidents … So much for the self-proclaimed “historic breakthrough of a Black President ending centuries of racism”.
It’s enough for Obama to appoint other black police state thugs and foreign interventionists, like Eric Holder and Susan Rice, to win the cheers of liberals even as their own security files grow in the data warehouses of the world’s biggest spying agencies.
One cynic, commenting on the long-standing love affair between Obama and white liberals, observed that ‘the more he screws them the better they like him … Even as he marches them off to jail, they would take care to note on his behalf, that the barred windows have curtains – something Bush would never have allowed.’
Conclusion
For sheer span of broken promises, of systematic lies in pursuit of wars and financial manipulation in the name of peace and social justice , of consistent and bold aggrandizement of executive power over the life and death of US citizens in the name of security, Obama has set the standard of political deception and demagogy far beyond past and probable future US Presidents.
The political context of his ascent to power and his deep links to the military-financial-Zionist networks insured his success as a premier confidence man.
President George Bush, Jr., the cringing, fading war-monger engaged in prolonged, costly wars and facing the collapse of the entire banking and financial sector, provided Candidate Obama with an easy target. Obama exploited the mass revulsion of the American people, longing for change. His soaring rhetoric and vacuous promise of ‘change’ attracted millions of young activists … The problem is that in their enthusiasm and blind adherence to ‘identity politics’ with its claims that all ‘blacks’ and ‘women’ are oppressed and therefore guaranteed to promote peace and justice — facilitated Obama’s con-game and political hustle.
Obama, once in office, not only deepened and widened the scope of President Bush, Jr’s wars, massive spy apparatus and corporate profiteering; he bamboozled the vast majority of his liberal-labor supporters in the Democratic Party! Barack Obama conned the Democratic Party Congressional liberals and they, in turn, conned their constituents into supporting this fraud.
The costs of President Obama’s two-faced policies are enormous: democracy has given way to a police state openly defended by the President and Congressional leaders; Wall Street’s recovery and corporate profiteering is fast destroying public health and social security. Barack Obama’s multiple endless wars and interventions are destroying vast cities, infrastructure, entire cultures while and killing and impoverishing millions of people from Libya to Palestine , from Syria to Iran . The economic sanctions against Iran , the provocative encirclement and isolation of China , and the campaign to destabilize Venezuela are the centerpieces of Obama’s ‘pivot to empire’. These policies portend even greater world-shattering catastrophes.
Unmasking the con-man is a first step requiring that we expose the tricks of the con-game. The politics of deception and demagogy thrives by directing popular attention to style and rhetoric, not substance. The solemn and pious cant of ‘Jimmy’ Carter distracted from his launch of the rabid Jihadists against the secular administration of Afghanistan . Uncle Ronald Reagan’s geniality and populist TV patter covered-up his blood baths in Central America and mass firing of the unionized air controllers and jailing of union leaders. ‘Bill’ Clinton’s show of empathy for the poor and embrace of ‘feel-good’ politics neutralized opposition as he bombed Yugoslavia into a pre-industrial age while his domestic policies kicked vulnerable single mothers from welfare programs. They all paled before the grand con-master Obama, billed as the ‘first black’ President, a community organizer (who disowned his sponsor into the black communities of Chicago, Rev. Wright, for his anti-war, anti-imperial stand) has capitalized on his racial credentials to garner the vote of guilty-ridden, soft-headed liberals and marginalized blacks in order to serve the interests of Wall Street and Israel.
Disarming these con-men and women requires exposing the nature of their demagogic populist styles and focusing on substantive politics. The decisive criteria need to be class politics that are defined by fundamental class alignments, between capital and labor regarding budgets, income, taxes, social spending, financing and property rights. ‘Shooting hoops’ in ghetto playgrounds is a con-man’s distraction while his budget cuts close hospitals and schools in black and poor neighborhoods.
The extravaganzas, featuring sports and entertainment celebrities to promote imperial wars, are the ‘con’ to undermine international solidarity for war victims and the unemployed. President Obama, the confidence man, is still performing while sowing destruction.
Secret Space War V: Exopolitics
Actual
KGB file photo of crashed UFO in Sverdlovsk, Russia in March of 1969.
Note the “fusion” of the AGC’s hull with the ground which illustrates
the sophisticated anti-gravity, phase shifting quality of the craft’s
composition and anything it impacts. This is what a few survivors of the
Philadelphia experiment remarked about and stated that some deck hands
fused into the ships metal and died in that state shortly after.
by Preston James
Recently there have been well founded rumors that the USG is now in the process of setting up an official Office for Exopolitics and considering several esteemed individuals from which to choose a director to run this new office.
Exopolitics is the official, public admission by any government that that the earth is being visited by extra-terrestrial or inter-stellar alien entities and a declaration that such matters will be addressed in appropriate terms.
Exopolitics encompasses all official governmental efforts to deal with the implications of the existence extraterrestrial or extra-stellar life and its visitation or presence on planet earth.
It is difficult to fully imagine the volcanic implications of such a complete disclosure, but it is fair to assume that it can and will affect almost every single area of contemporary human society and all public institutions including all governmental agencies as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
For many years there have been rumors that the Secret Shadow Government (SSG) actually originated and developed around the Biggest USG Secret of all, that alien anti-gravity craft (AGC) had crashed and were recovered with live and dead aliens, after which their technology was back engineered as a part of several secret treaties made between the SSG and a certain alien group “visiting” planet Earth.And some insiders have stated that the SSG has had its own internal Department of Exopolitics consisting of a committee of twelve known as Majestic 12, MJ-12 or referred to as “Majesty 12″ by some. And some reports have suggested that there has been a deep internal split in this group, with younger members pushing hard for complete USG public disclosure followed by the setting up of an official USG Department of Exopolitics.
About ten years ago, the use of the word exopolitics first appeared on the scene (1).
Alfred Webre first launched the word “exopolitics” which he defined as “the study of political process and governance in interstellar society.”
Michael Salla gave two complementary definitions:
1. “Exopolitics is the study of the key individuals, institutions and political processes associated with extraterrestrial life”; and
2. “Exopolitics is the study of the political implications of the extraterrestrial presence on Earth.”
Steve Basset used the term ‘exopolitics’ in 4 different meanings:
1. The art or science of government as concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy toward extraterrestrial-related phenomena and extraterrestrial beings.
2. Exopolitical actions, practices, or policies.
3. The exopolitical opinions or sympathies of a person.
4. The total complex of relations between the human race and non-human, intelligent beings.
Wiktionary defined ‘exopolitics’ as “the art or science of government as concerned with creating or influencing policy toward extraterrestrial phenomena and extraterrestrial beings.”
Only one public official has come forward and fully disclosed.So far the only retired public officials who have come forth and publicly stated that UFOs are real and alien creatures are associated with them publicly are Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of defense Paul Hellyer and former Governor of Arizona Fife Symington.
Hellerstein to Silverstein: No more money for you, schmuck!
Judge Alvin Hellerstein has ruled that Larry Silverstein cannot keep double-dipping for billions of extra dollars in World Trade Center insurance money.
Silverstein, who bought the condemned-for-asbestos World Trade Center two months before it was struck by “Zionist lightning”* in 2001, was asking for an extra 11 billion dollars, on top of the roughly five billion dollars he has already extorted from insurers, despite his public confession to demolishing WTC-7 himself. Judge Hellerstein, who had already reduced the 11 billion dollar second claim to three billion dollars, finally got fed up with Silverstein’s outlandish chutzpah and dismissed the case.
Publicly, Hellerstein hailed Silverstein as one of the “heroes” of 9/11 who “sought to create beauty out of destruction” (“beauty” apparently meaning “an endless US war on Israel’s enemies”). Yet the judge declined to hand Silverstein the extra three billion dollars.
Hellerstein’s private memo to Silverstein – which has just been made public by Edward Snowden, who is still using his NSA backdoor algorithms to hack into everyone on earth’s private correspondence – reveals an interesting back-story.
From: Judge Alvin “Big Al” Hellerstein
To: Lucky Larry
Dated: Wednesday, July 17th, 2013
CC: Edward Snowden, Moscow Airport, Delayed Departures Lounge
Hey “Lucky Larry”
Your luck has run out, pal.
You are making the tribe look bad.
You bought a condemned property. You doubled the insurance. It burned down. Then you doubled down again with your double-indemnity claim. And now here you are, doubling down a third time.
Third time’s the charm, schmuck.
You can take those three billion shekels you’re asking for and stick them right up your keister.
The whole world knows you as “Mr. Pull-It.”
You are a world-class putz.
Mr. Rothschild is getting very, very angry with you.
You have enormous chutzpah, Mr. Silverstein. And I do not mean that in the goyish complimentary sense.
If I were you, I would stay out of tall buildings until this thing blows over.
Sincerely,
Judge Alvin Hellerstein
Mossad Special Operations – American Judiciary Infiltration Unit
32°8’35″N 34°48’15″E
Tel Aviv, Israel
*When a building burns down in New York, for no discernible reason other than insurance fraud, it’s attributed to “Jewish lightning.” Yes, we know that’s an anti-Semitic expression. The people of New York should be ashamed of themselves for talking that way.
Obama’s Ties to CIA May Explain His Totalitarian Views
By Sherwood Ross
In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky said he never expected much of President Obama, adding, ”The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don’t seem easy to explain.”
Maybe the reasons for Obama’s transformation from a Chicago law professor into a world-class totalitarian thug is that he is a creature of the Central Intelligence Agency; that both his parents were CIA payrollers; that the CIA financed his college education and gave him his first job afterwards—-so that we may well have a president beholden to this international criminal organization, an agency that has left a trail of blood, turmoil, and assassinations around the globe.
According to the May 6th The New Yorker, when General James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked at an Obama Situation Room meeting why the U.S. was building a second air force in the form of a CIA drone attack fleet, Obama told him, “The CIA gets what it wants.” That Obama holds this view is reinforced by Cameron Munter, President Obama’s former ambassador to Pakistan. Munter questioned whether the drone strikes in Pakistan weren’t having a blowback effect on the Pakistani public. Writing in the magazine, Steve Coll says Munter learned under Obama: “It was what the CIA believed that really counted.”
Reporter Coll says America’s drone war is a major factor in why U.S. relations with Pakistan have “collapsed.” Today, he writes, “the U.S. has surpassed India as the most hated nation in Pakistan.” Coll adds, “Obama seems unwilling to confront the possibility that drone strikes may be creating more enemies than they’re eliminating.”
So far, the drone strikes are believed to have killed 3,000 people, not one of whom got a fair trial in the American tradition. The attacks are being made in countries where the U.S. has never officially declared war: besides Pakistan, in Somalia, Yemen, and even in the Philippines. Obama has turned the whole world into an American shooting gallery.
In his two terms in office, President Bush authorized 48 drone strikes in Pakistan. But since 2009, Obama has okayed more than 300, reporter Coll writes. What’s more, The Washington Post reports that CIA Director John Brennan believes that targeted killings will be needed to contain Al Qaeda-related terrorism for at least another decade.
It’s a CIA dream come true: the green light for a bunch of organized crackpots and anarchist-type bomb-throwers to roam the planet with their sophisticated killing machines raining Hellfire missiles down on suspects, nearly all of them foreigners. No jury trials for them. They are treated as an inferior race of people not entitled to trials while the CIA is the Master Race that can kill whomever it wants. Remind us of anyone?
Let’s connect the dots between the Boston Marathon massacre and blowback triggered by the CIA’s overseas killings. Strange, but we don’t see Finland or Brazil under attack by terrorists. Maybe it’s because they respect other nations’ sovereignty.
On MLK Day, President Obama did his level best to wrap himself in the mantle of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But where MLK denounced the KKK thugs who murdered four little girls in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, President Obama is using his own “KKK”(CIA) to kill suspected terrorists, taking the lives of more than 100 children to date in the process. There is no question MLK would have denounced Obama’s wars.
Pentagon to offer “parole”-style hearings for 71 Gitmo prisoners
posted at 6:01 pm on July 22, 2013 by Ed Morrissey
Seventy-one detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay will get parole-board-style hearings at the Navy base in Cuba, the Pentagon said Sunday, though it did not say when the panels will meet, whether the media can watch and which of the long-held inmates will go first. …The hearings themselves aren’t exactly a surprise. As the Post notes, President Obama ordered them in March 2011, although hardly anyone gave it much weight. Obama had promised to close the facility altogether, not just give “periodic reviews” of detainee status. Even though this EO is entirely within Obama’s authority as Commander in Chief, the hearings have never taken place.
Retired Rear Adm. Norton C. Joerg, a senior Navy lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, told the lawyers that the new six-member “periodic review boards” will not decide whether the Pentagon is lawfully imprisoning their clients.
Rather, the panels will “assess whether continued law of war detention is necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” Joerg said.
At least, they haven’t until now, or very soon, anyway, at least according to the notices provided to attorneys representing the detainees. Oddly, the White House waited until late on a Friday to send out the notices and apparently didn’t do anything to alert the media. Why now, and why so quietly? Recent events are probably the catalyst:
He offered no explanation for the late-night notices, which came during a long-running hunger strike by prisoners at Guantanamo over the conditions of their detention.Three days ago, the Pentagon wasn’t as shy about talking of the collapse of the hunger strike. Criticized for force-feeding prisoners by human-rights groups, the Pentagon pointed to the return to normal meals of the prisoners as a sign of success for their strategy. That was the same day that the letters went out to the attorneys, which suggests a negotiated end to the hunger strike — one that the White House wasn’t keen on publicizing, either.
Detroit, the first domino?
posted at 6:41 pm on July 22, 2013 by Erika Johnsen
Almost immediately after they learned that Detroit would be officially filing for bankruptcy last week, some of the city’s various pension funds lost no time in filing suit against both the city’s emergency manager Kevin Orr as well as Michigan Gov. Rick Synder. Shortly thereafter, a Michigan judge tried to halt the proceedings, not merely because a municipal bankruptcy would fail to ‘honor the president,’ or something, but because the Synder administration was clearly trying to pull a run-around on the concerned pension funds — since Detroit’s utter brokeness was such a secret, and everything. A federal judge, however, has already set the first hearing in Detroit’s bankruptcy case for this Wednesday, via Reuters:
A federal court judge has set the first hearing in Detroit’s bankruptcy case for Wednesday to take up the city emergency manager’s request to put state lawsuits challenging the bankruptcy filing on hold.The sooner Detroit faces the music, the less remote the city’s chances of actual fiscal recovery, and Orr is reportedly trying to speed things along — but of course, the obligatory voices on the left are calling for the federal government to step in with a bailout and magically wipe their slate clean for them. First of all, I might venture that the federal government is currently running a yearly deficit of more than a trillion dollars, and that American taxpayers don’t have the money to spare for a city that willfully ran itself into the ground for decades. Secondly, as Mayor Dave Bing actually pointed out the other day when professing that, yeah, Detroit would “love” for Washington to bail them out, one of the biggest problems there is the precedent it sets for other cities in urgent need of financial reform. Detroit’s billions of dollars of debt perhaps sound like peanuts compared to the schemes the federal government is running, except that Detroit is hardly the only major city that’s been hovering dangerously close to the fiscal abyss with accumulated deficits and unfunded liabilities, and it could be that other cities are getting ready to follow behind. Says the Detroit Free Press:
U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Steven Rhodes agreed on Monday to the expedited hearing requested by emergency manager Kevyn Orr in response to a Michigan court judge’s order for Orr to withdraw the Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing on state constitutional grounds.
If Orr’s request is granted, top Michigan state officials, Orr and others would also be protected from litigation regarding Thursday’s bankruptcy petition.
Concerned that retirement benefits will be slashed, Detroit retirees, workers and pension funds have been running to state court in Michigan’s capital of Lansing in an effort to derail the biggest Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
From Baltimore to Los Angeles, and many points in between, municipalities are increasingly confronted with how to pay for these massive promises. The Pew Center for the States, in Washington, estimated states’ public pension plans across the U.S. were underfunded by a whopping $1.4 trillion in 2010. …Detroit may have been the biggest city to have filed for municipal bankruptcy, but it certainly wasn’t the first to do so — and it’s unlikely to be the last while major cities refuse to summon the necessary political will to stop piling up unsustainable amounts of debt and accept that it’s time to reform the extravagant pension and benefit systems for which they have no real plans to pay.
As examples of the results: Chicago recently saw its credit rating downgraded because of a $19-billion unfunded pension liability that the ratings service Moody’s puts closer to $36 billion. And Los Angeles could be facing a liability of more than $30 billion, by some estimates. …
Early this year, the Pew Center released a survey showing that 61 of the nation’s largest cities — limiting the survey to the largest city in each state and all other cities with more than 500,000 people — had a gap of more than $217 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities. While cities had long promised health care, life insurance and other benefits to retirees, “few … started saving to cover the long-term costs,” the report said. …
Last Monday, the bond rating house Moody’s also downgraded Cincinnati’s general obligation bonds, citing “budgetary pressure” from pension contributions. Its downgrade was to Aa2 — still a lot higher than Detroit’s Caa3 for its general obligation bonds — but another part of the trend.
Land of The Free - "American Resistance Movement" 1st day of the 2nd American Revolution
http://americanmilitiamovement.com/
America sold into Servatude by the Obama Admin
When the US economy collapses and it will,How do you suppose the U.S will compensate China for the trillions owed to them.Since the Dollar isn't even worth the paper it is printed on the only collateral we have left is LAND.
Obama Repeals Anti-Propaganda Law: Feds To Broadcast Regime-Manufactured ‘News’ On TV, Radio
Jul 15, 2013 1 Comment Toro520
Excerpted from Foreign Policy:
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?
Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It’s viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran; self-immolation in Tibet; human trafficking across Asia; and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.
The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 70s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky who argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”
Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public’s last defense against domestic propaganda?
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?
Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It’s viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran; self-immolation in Tibet; human trafficking across Asia; and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.
The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 70s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky who argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”
Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public’s last defense against domestic propaganda?
Ron Paul on Obama's Syria WMD Claim
“Today we heard from President Obama that the war in Syria will be escalated. He now has agreed to send weaponry in to assist the rebels. It’s escalation, that’s a proper word, because we’ve already been involved for quite a few months. We’ve been supporting the rebels for probably the past two years, supposedly for humanitarian reasons,” he said in a statement posted on YouTube on Friday.
“But now there is going to be a much more aggressive approach and we’re going to send weapons. There is a few problems with this, first off it’s war. Second thing is presidents are not supposed to start war without permission from the people through a congressional declaration of war,” Paul argued.
He also dismissed claims made by the White House that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the militants, saying the accusations are ill-founded and resemble the U.S. claims in the run-up to the Iraq war.
“The language is the same. They use the same arguments. Weapons of Mass Destruction, poison gases, hundred people died, [and] the government has done this,” he said. “To me it’s all an excuse.”
President Barack Obama is preparing to impose a no-fly zone inside Syria along with sending weapons to the militants.
The no-fly zone option came one day after White House National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons against the foreign-backed militants. Damascus denied the allegations.
On Friday, Rhodes said it would be dramatically more difficult and costly to set up a no-fly zone over Syria than it was in Libya.
U.S. officials said that the decision to arm the militants in Syria had been made weeks ago.
Meanwhile, a majority of Americans are against a military attack against Syria. A poll conducted by Gallup last month showed that 68 percent of Americans said the United States should not take any military action in Syria.
“It’s time for the American people to wake up and let their members of Congress and their senators know: stop it. Why should you sit back and let the president do these things?” Paul asked.
Someone has to be brave enough and have the moral courage to tell the truth about Obama and his evil deeds and crimes, with the hope that people will rise up in this nation and demand IMPEACHMENT.
Let us hope that more and more people will find the MORAL COURAGE to TELL THE TRUTH AND EXPOSE OBAMA’S LIES AND CRIMES.
I hope that people will watch this.
Obama is the President and the Commander in Chief and so he is responsible for the actions of people under his command. The buck stops with him. He is part of the LIES and COVER UP. HE IS PART OF THE EVIL…. MAKE NO MISTAKE HE NEEDS TO BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE AND IMPEACHED.
CONGRESS PLEASE START THE IMPEACHMENT HEARING NOW.
AMERICAN MEDIA PLEASE FIND THE COURAGE TO SPEAK THE TRUTH AND DEMAND JUSTICE FOR THESE BRAVE MEN WHO DIED AND OUR GOVERNMENT LIED AND COVERED UP THE TRUTH.
IN LIBYA, OUR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES REFUSED THEM HELP WHEN REQUESTED AND FIRED GENERALS WHO WERE TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING AND COME TO THE AMBASSADOR’S AIDE. OBAMA ORDERED THE MILITARY TO STAND DOWN AND THEN FIRED HONORABLE MEN WHO HAD THE MORAL COURAGE TO DO THE RIGHT THING.
OBAMA MUST BE IMPEACHED AND REMOVED FROM OFFICE. HE MUST BE PUNISHED FOR HIS CRIMES.
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