Archive for the ‘American Empire’ Category
Washington Signals Deep Concerns Over Dollar
A perfect storm has been prepared for America. Real interest rates are negative, but debt and money are being created hand over foot. The dollar’s demise awaits the world’s decision how to get out of it. The Federal Reserve can print dollars with which to keep the bond and stock markets high, but the Federal Reserve cannot print foreign currencies with which to keep the dollar afloat. When the dollar goes, Washington’s power goes, which is why the bullion market is rigged. Protect the power. That is the agenda. Is it another Washington over-reach? http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/05/18/washington-signals-dollar-deep-concerns-paul-craig-roberts/
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Extremism Watch: U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars — That It Will Publicly Admit
Today US military operations are involved in scores of countries across all the five continents. The US military is the world’s largest landlord, with significant military facilities in nations around the world. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/u-s-currently-fighting-74-different-wars-that-it-publicly-admits.html
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The United States is Fighting How Many Wars?
Altogether, that makes 74 nations where the US is fighting or “helping” some force in some proxy struggle that has been deemed beneficial by the nation’s masters of war. Beyond that, there are Special Operations forces in countries. Jeremy Scahill in Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, writes, “By mid-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations forces from sixty countries to seventy-five countries. SOCOM had about 4,000 people deployed around the world in countries besides Iraq and Afghanistan.” http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/06/the-united-states-is-fighting-how-many-wars/
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Filling the Empty Battlefield
In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation to heart — that we Americans can’t see our world as it is. And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows. As two administrations in Washington arrogated ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making. In the process, they transformed an increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military. In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state — and no one else. Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end. It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2013/04/23/filling-the-empty-battlefield/
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If You Want to Go to Heaven, You Had Better Get Busy Overthrowing Syria
by Paul Craig Roberts. Washington’s eleven years of illegal aggression against Muslim countries–war crimes according to the Nuremberg trials of Nazis–have resulted in civilian deaths far in excess of military casualties and in a domestic American police state that has destroyed the rule of law and the constitutional protections of US citizens. Washington and its presstitutes have emphasized that these costs are necessary to save Americans from al-Qaeda terrorists, none of whom have ever been apprehended in the United States. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/04/21/if-you-want-to-go-to-heaven-you-had-better-get-busy-overthrowing-syria-paul-craig-roberts/
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How Empires Fall
Comparing the American Empire with the Roman Empire in its terminal decline is a popular intellectual parlor game. The comparison is inexact on a number of fronts, starting with the nature of empire: Rome ruled a territorial empire, while the U.S. is a hegemony that doesn’t need to hold territory (other than key overseas military bases); its dominance is based on the global projection of hard and soft power, diplomacy, finance and the monetary regime of the reserve currency. Despite the apparent difference, the two empires share the key characteristic of all enduring empires: they extract the cost of maintaining the empire from client states and/or allies. The mechanisms differ, but the results are the same: the empire’s cost is distributed to those who benefit from its secure trade routes. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-17/guest-post-how-empires-fall
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The Enemy-Industrial Complex
All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror.” We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow. From our police to our borders, we’ve up-armored everywhere. We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.” And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home. Few in this country have found this striking. Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2013/04/15/the-enemy-industrial-complex/
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Iran Represents a Deathblow to U.S. Global Hegemony
George Kennan, who was one of the main architects of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Second World War era, also noted with candidness and prescience: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” Thus we see how after the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union collapsed the U.S. has been flailing to contrive a replacement “enemy” and pretext for its essential militarism. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent “war on terror” has fulfilled this purpose to a degree, even though it is replete with contradictions that belie its fraudulence, such as the support given to Al Qaeda terrorist elements currently to overthrow the government of Syria. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34586.htm#.UWqkAgqcgcc.email
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The Great Deformation
David Stockman rocketed to fame as Ronald Reagan’s chief of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), his name loosely associated with the “trickle down economics” of the supply-siders, but his recent book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, will correct the record: Stockman is not only a libertarian critic of the Milton Friedman school of monetarism and supply side economics, he is also a principled opponent of American militarism. His new book is a massive 700 pages-plus, but don’t let that deter you: inside you will find a scintillating analysis of where, why, and how America went wrong, starting with the New Deal and ending with the Great Recession of ’08 and the subsequent Obama-Bernanke attempts to re-inflate the bubble of America’s debt-driven “prosperity.” http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/04/14/the-great-deformation/
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Alternate History
Politically, the Establishment — which includes most members of both parties and almost all office-holders — cannot come to grips with America’s decline. It can act only within a narrow range, limited by controlling interests at court that feed off the country’s decay. Its range of action is too narrow to conceive and implement policies that might reverse decline. Intellectually, the Establishment has been reduced to parroting the shibboleths of political correctness … After 1945, America was the West’s great hope. Undamaged by the world cataclysm, it rose to vast heights. But the 1950s proved to be its last normal decade. The counterculture revolution of the 1960s undermined its institutions: the family, the schools, even the churches. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/alternate-history/
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Nothing New Under the Sun, Especially With Leviathan
It’s become a truism that America is following the road to depravity, dictatorship, and brutality that ancient Rome paved. As the Feds sped down that path in 2001 with their War on Terror, a Canadian writer perused Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon was “a rich and rewarding read,” Morgan Wade tells us in his Author’s Note for The Last Stoic. “But what struck me most, in passages describing how the ancient ‘golden age’ had passed from prosperity and relative peace to decay and continual war, is how closely the trajectory of the contemporary American empire mirrors that of the Roman empire.” Indeed, after more research, Mr. Wade “wondered how far one could go” with the parallels. The Last Stoic is his novelistic answer. http://lewrockwell.com/akers/akers202.html
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The Militarization of American Life
As the American Empire transforms itself from a constitutional republic into a social democratic monstrosity – where everyone is “equal,” and no one is free – egalitarianism is the fuel that runs the engine of imperialism. A perfect example is the recent announcement that the US military is getting with the times and allowing women in combat. What’s pretty disheartening is that not even the woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Neanderthals of the “traditionalist” camp even bothered to oppose this: for them, a more efficient war machine is much more important than any attachment to such “archaic” ideas as the men do the fighting while the women wait at home. This innovation was followed up pretty quickly by a new proposal: that as long as we allow gays in the military we ought to allow transsexuals in, too. After all, the usual objections to women in combat don’t apply to them: they have the genetic makeup of men, and the sexual equipment of women (or as close as surgical science can conjure) – so why not? In America, everyone has the “equal right” to kill, torture, maim, and otherwise abuse those who dare defy the wishes of our wise and benevolent rulers. This is what happens when egalitarianism displaces liberty at the core of the American psyche. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/03/26/the-militarization-of-american-life/
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Americans’ Economic Prospects and Civil Liberties Have Been Stolen
by Paul Craig Roberts. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, governments in the US and Great Britain chafed under the requirement that government, like the people, is ruled by law and took steps to free government from accountability to law. Appleton says that the result is a “tectonic shift in the relationship between the state and the citizen.” Citizens of the U.S.and UK are once again without the protection of law and subject to arbitrary arrests and indictments or to indefinite detention in the absence of indictments. In the U.S., citizens can be detained indefinitely and even executed without due process of law. There is no basis in the U.S. Constitution for these asserted powers. The unconstitutional powers exist only because Congress, the judiciary and the American people have accepted the lie that the loss of civil liberty is the price paid for protection against terrorists. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/03/24/americans-economic-prospects-and-civil-liberties-have-been-stolen-paul-craig-roberts/
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Eric Holder: If the President Does It, It’s Legal
No better example is there of the perversion of the office of the AG than its current occupant Eric Holder, who was appointed by President Obama in 2009. Hailed by civil liberties and watchdog groups alike for his pledge to “reverse the disastrous course that we have been on over the past few years” and usher in a new era of civil liberties under Obama, Holder has instead carried on the sorry tradition of his predecessors, going to great lengths to “justify” egregious government actions that can only be described as immoral, unjust and illegal. Indeed, Holder has managed to eclipse both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, whose tenures under George W. Bush earned them constant reproach by Democrats and other left-leaning groups for justifying acts of torture, surveillance of American citizens and clandestine behavior by the government. Holder, however, has largely been given a free pass by these very same groups in much the same way that Obama has. http://original.antiwar.com/jwhitehead/2013/03/22/eric-holder-if-the-president-does-it-its-legal/
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Selling Death and Buying Assassins in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia
As President Obama enters his second term with a new Cabinet, the foreign policy legacy of the past four years weighs heavily on their strategic decisions and their empire-building efforts. Central to the analysis of the next period is an evaluation of the past policies especially in regions where Washington expended its greatest financial and military resources, namely the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. We will proceed by examining the accomplishments and failures of the Obama-Clinton regime. We will then turn to the ongoing policy efforts to sustain the empire-building project. We will take account of the constraints and opportunities, which define the parameters resulting from imperial military ambitions, Israeli-Zionist influence in shaping policy and the ongoing anti-imperialist struggles. We will conclude by examining likely polices and outcomes resulting from current strategies. http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/03/selling-death-and-buying-assassins-in-the-middle-east-north-africa-and-south-asia/
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Illusion of Triumph
The Empire, on the other hand, cannot win. All else aside, its publicized goal of world domination is simply out of reach. All the guns in the world are useless if the other side cannot be compelled to submit. Force can only settle the matters of power, not right. Like Athens of antiquity, the Atlantic Empire crushed the Melians because it could, and squandered its strength on a misguided Syracuse expedition. Yet not only did Athens lose the war to Sparta, its vaunted democracy was lost as well. http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2013/03/21/illusion-of-triumph/
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Barbarian Rhapsody: Ten Years Deeper Into Hell
Yes, it has certainly been, as Barack Obama memorably characterized it, a “remarkable achievement.” It is also, more and more, a forgotten “achievement.” America’s amnesia regarding the war crime in Iraq and its continuing ramifications — not only the repression and death still going on there, but also the catastrophic impact of this atrocity on America itself, including the tsunami of suicide, homelessness and PTSD among its soldiers, and the back-breaking costs of this orgy of corruption and war-profiteering — is indeed remarkable. It is no longer a reality — a living, anguished, ongoing human tragedy — but simply fodder for commentary, for partisan point-scoring, for barroom blather. This has always been the case with our misbegotten wars of imperial domination (for an especially acute and egregious example of our chronic amnesia, see this review of Nick Turse’s new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam), going back to the 19th century. And the “paradigm-changing” iadvent of the internet has done nothing to change that; despite today’s easy access to unprecedented levels of information about the realities of the Iraq war (and other high crimes and atrocities), the amnesia and willful ignorance remains as profound as ever. So here we are. Ten years on from the frenzied paroxysm (or was it an orgasm?) of mass violence — which was itself the culmination of years of the bipartisan war-by-sanctions that American officials have openly acknowledged killed more than half a million Iraqi children — what is the central “moral” issue of our national politics today? This once-unimaginable, horribly depraved and obscene question: Should the president be allowed to murder any American citizen he chooses, or should there perhaps be be some kind of secret Congressional oversight of the secret killing program? (The idea of restricting the president’s power to kill any filthy foreigner he chooses is not in question anywhere in our national politics, of course; Rand Paul wasn’t filibustering against that idea. No, any debate on the “ethics” of state murder is restricted to its application to Americans, who, as we know, are the only fully human beings on the face of the earth.) http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2310-barbarian-rhapsody-ten-years-deeper-into-hell.html
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Attorney General Eric Holder: If the President Does It, It’s Legal
Since the early days of our republic, the Attorney General (AG) of the United States has served as the chief lawyer for the government, entrusted with ensuring that the nation’s laws are faithfully carried out and holding government officials accountable to abiding by their oaths of office to “uphold and defend the Constitution.” Unfortunately, far from holding government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the attorneys general of each successive administration have increasingly aided and abetted the Executive Branch in skirting and, more often than not, flouting the law altogether, justifying all manner of civil liberties and human rights violations and trampling the Constitution in the process, particularly the Fourth Amendment. No better example is there of the perversion of the office of the AG than its current occupant Eric Holder, who was appointed by President Obama in 2009. Hailed by civil liberties and watchdog groups alike for his pledge to “reverse the disastrous course that we have been on over the past few years” and usher in a new era of civil liberties under Obama, Holder has instead carried on the sorry tradition of his predecessors, going to great lengths to “justify” egregious government actions that can only be described as immoral, unjust and illegal. http://www.lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead76.1.html
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The Politics of Anti-Interventionism
Libya, the ongoing intervention in Syria, and all the rest is a continuation of the Bush administration’s “Sunni turn,” in which we allied with the very elements that make up al-Qaeda’s base against the alleged threat emanating from Iran. As the consequences of the Iraq invasion coalesced into an Iraqi-Iranian de facto alliance, the tactical turn that started with the “Anbar Awakening” morphed into a full-fledged strategic turnaround – so that, today, Washington is contending with the black-flag-flying Al Nusra and its allies for control of the Syrian opposition. Limbaugh-style conservatives, who are incapable of re-examining their own past positions, are understandably baffled by this. And they’re angry: but they don’t have any answers. Rand Paul, on the other hand, does have answers, and more: he has the gumption to stand up and say “No more!” That’s what has Rush denouncing the McCain-Graham “old bulls,” who are just plain “jealous” of the conservative movement’s newest folk hero, and “I’ll tell you why, he says. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/03/14/the-politics-of-anti-interventionism/
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The Emperor Worship Cultus, and The American Sniper
Militarily, the tie-one-for-the Gipper outcome in the Korean War and the military disaster of Vietnam, have now paled in comparison to the eroding cancer of America’s Israeli-driven War on Terror in the Middle East and Central Asia. The final tally for the invasions and losing wars of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan in lost lives and casualties remains to be tabulated, as do the final economic numbers for these miserable ventures. Steiglitz of the World Bank speaks of a $3-5 trillion dollar expenditure on these quixotic efforts, even apart from new ventures in Syria and the threatened war with Iran. Add the eventual tally for the Empire’s military competition with China in Africa for raw materials and minerals, and the larger picture emerges. Paul Craig Roberts wryly observes that dying Empires run out of both men and money before the life support plug is pulled. Politically, the United States continues to be downgraded in the eyes of the global community, even as its adoption of Israeli police state philosophy and methodologies connect the War on Terror to a War on the American Constitution. And culturally, a Zionist-run America has produced the full blown acceptance of abortion-on-demand, homosexuality and every other form of sexual perversion, and the replacement of a lawful society with one soaked in lawless and violence. http://mark1marti2.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/patmos-the-emperor-worship-cultus-and-the-american-sniper/
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The Worst Mistake in U.S. History — America Will Never Recover From Bush’s Great Foreign Policy Disaster
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we — and so many others — will pay the price for it for a long, long time. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/worst-mistake-us-history-america-will-never-recover-bushs-great-foreign-policy
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Obama’s Failed State
Obama’s State of the Union address didn’t surprise. It reflected rogue leadership. It was beginning-to-end demagogic boilerplate. Defending the indefensible took center stage. Rhetoric substituted for progressive policies. Bombast assured business as usual. Priorities include waging war on humanity, force-fed austerity, ignoring public needs, institutionalizing a repressive police state apparatus, and cracking down hard on non-believers. Doing so assures growing despotism, lawlessness, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and deprivation. http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-failed-state/5322840
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Endless War?
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” So said Richard Nixon in his interviews with David Frost. Nixon was talking about wiretaps and surreptitious entries to protect lives and safeguard national security in a violent and anarchic war decade. The Nixon haters pronounced themselves morally sickened. Fast forward to our new century. For, since 9/11, we have heard rather more extravagant claims by American presidents. Under George W. Bush, it was presidential authority to waterboard, torture, rendition and hold enemy aliens in indefinite detention at Guantanamo. Under Barack Obama, we don’t have a Nixon “enemies list” of folks who are not to be invited to White House dinners. Rather, we have a “kill list” — a menu from which our constitutional law professor president selects individuals to be executed abroad. Not only in Afghanistan, but Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and who knows where else. And not just foreigners, but Americans, too. http://www.humanevents.com/2013/02/08/buchanan-endless-war/
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Is America Ensnared in an Endless War?
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” So said Richard Nixon in his interviews with David Frost. Nixon was talking about wiretaps and surreptitious entries to protect lives and safeguard national security in a violent and anarchic war decade. The Nixon haters pronounced themselves morally sickened. Fast forward to our new century. For, since 9/11, we have heard rather more extravagant claims by American presidents. Under George W. Bush, it was presidential authority to waterboard, torture, rendition and hold enemy aliens in indefinite detention at Guantanamo. Under Barack Obama, we don’t have a Nixon “enemies list” of folks who are not to be invited to White House dinners. Rather, we have a “kill list” — a menu from which our constitutional law professor president selects individuals to be executed abroad. http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2013/02/07/is-america-ensnared-in-an-endless-war/
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A Return to Realism?
If one goes by Obama’s own words (a dangerous proposition when dealing with any politician), the United States will revert to a traditional, less assertive international role embracing a more humble Pax Americana rather than repeatedly intervening militarily to set things right. It will mean abandoning the idea that America is and should be perpetually at war, which was the Bush Doctrine, and is largely a result of diminished resources rather than any desire to relinquish leadership. The first test case will be Afghanistan, which surely will see a major or even total drawdown in 2014. If the country falls to the Taliban shortly thereafter, a la Vietnam, the hawks will try to force a reversion to the old global strategy but Obama is almost certainly banking on the situation continuing to be manageable at least until he is out of office. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/02/04/a-return-to-realism/
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The American Empire, RIP
When will historians of the future date the beginning of the decline and fall of the American empire? The question may seem presumptuous. The idea that the American Century is a relic of the past, and we are entering a “new world order” of divided rather than hegemonic power, is relatively new, and still controversial. There are those who insist it ain’t necessarily so, primarily neocons of the second mobilization such as Robert Kagan, who are quick to reassure all right-thinking patriotic Americans that we’re still Number One and warn against the fatal lure of committing “superpower suicide.” To the rest of us, however – that is, to everyone outside the neocons’ cultic universe – the signs of the Great American Contraction are everywhere, most noticeably in the incomes, productivity, and general economic well-being of ordinary Americans. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/01/29/the-american-empire-rip-2/
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America’s Role in a Darkening Age
The Berlin Wall fell. Eastern Europe was suddenly free. The Soviet Union disintegrated. China abandoned Maoism for state capitalism. Now, 20 years on, the wheel has turned again—toward darkness. No longer do we hear chatter about “The End of History” and triumph of democratic capitalism, of America imposing her “global hegemony” or leading mankind into “a second American century.” “When did the internal affairs of foreign nations become the portfolio of American diplomats?” The hubris is gone, and triumphalism has given way to anxiety, apprehension, alarm. http://takimag.com/article/americas_role_in_a_darkening_age_patrick_buchanan/print#axzz2JJIRsRSX
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France, Qatar, and the New World Disorder
According to investigative journalist Silvia Cattori, the barbaric bombing of Aleppo University on January 15 has been officially claimed by the terrorist group the Al Nousra Front. This confirmation should not come as a surprise to those who have been following closely events in the Levant since March 17, 2011, when unknown snipers opened fire in the Southern Syrian town of Deraa killing several policemen and innocent protestors. Since then, snipers and jihadist death squads from Libya, Chechnya, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and even France and the UK inter alia, backed by NATO intelligence and Gulf petro-monarch cash, have waged a genocidal non-conventional war upon the Syrian people which has relied heavily on a sophisticated international disinformation campaign in the corporate controlled press, whereby all crimes committed by the terrorists are systematically blamed on the Syrian government. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33716.htm
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The Death Throes of the Glorious Imperial Multicultural Empire
The unwanted Empire is irreversibly going down. http://xrepublic.tv/node/1842
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The Petro-Dollar Sunset
A Paradigm Shift is taking place, and the ASEAN-China summit gave proof positive in a seminal event of the vast changes in progress. The United States just suffered its worst humiliation ever as a nation on the Eastern global stage. It was exceeded only by the humiliation for a U.S. president personally. The story went uncovered by the lapdog inept U.S. press. The late November Asian summit meeting held in Phnom Penh included 15 Asian nations, which represent half the world’s population. They decided to form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that excludes the United States. The Asians are pushing to isolate the United States. Regard it as punishment for hegemony, or a reaction to prevent further capital drainage, or to protect from central bank abuse, or to wall off continued bond fraud export, or to defend against military aggression. Regard it as confirmation that China is the regional leader in Asia, even for military security. Regard it as a response to banker criminality, or simply for being totally full to the brim of American corruption and arrogance and abuse of position, led by creation of the U.S. dollar as an elaborate weapon and credit card whose balance is never to be repaid. Abuse of power and sponsored financial corruption will have extreme consequences in the reshaping of global commerce and banking. The U.S. will be isolated, so as to protect the rest of the world from its fascist exhibitions and deep manifestations. http://www.silverdoctors.com/jim-willie-the-coming-isolation-of-usdollar/
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Militarization of America and Newtown Massacre: Cause and Effect
Perhaps, in fact, it is not pretend violence that is causing this crescendo of violence in our culture. Maybe it has something to do with very real killing being perpetrated by our government. Every day — literally every day — an American serviceman sitting in front of a screen somewhere guides a drone toward a target and fires a missile that kills an “alleged” militant, as well as several innocent bystanders, including children. None of these targets is ever named, and the bodies often go uncounted. As Anthony Gregory of the Independent Institute writes: America is a militarized society, seat of the world’s empire. The U.S. government is always at war with a handful of countries. We glorify killing and dying in our patriotic parades. Our Nobel Peace Prize winning president has bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/14235-militarization-of-america-and-newtown-massacre-cause-and-effect
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Attack On Sovereignty
Those concerned about “The New World Order” speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which China, Russia, and Iran complain, is all about. Washington has demonstrated that it has no respect for its own laws and Constitution, much less any respect for international law and the law and sovereignty of other countries. All that counts is Washington’s will as the pursuit of hegemony moves Washington closer to becoming a world dictator. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/01/15/attack-on-sovereignty-paul-craig-roberts/
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America’s Strategic Stupidity
In the present age, strategy as such has become a dangerous chimera. Strategy sustains the illusion that the United States can and should determine the course of world events, thereby keeping America in the global driver’s seat. Yet whatever is coming down the pike, you can count on one thing: it’s going to be something other than what General Dempsey anticipates as a result of his strategic seminars. Nor should we expect Secretary of State John Kerry (or Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, if he wins confirmation) to do any better. When it comes to looking round the bend, the civilians are no more adept than the soldiers. As always, the United States — like every other nation — will be left to cope as best it can. The one thing that the US actually could do to secure its future is the one thing that it refuses to do: demonstrate a capacity to manage its own affairs; live within its means; set its own house in order. In Washington, talk about global strategy provides an excuse to avoid doing what needs to be done. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8814591/americas-strategic-stupidity/
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Drones are Fool’s Gold: They Prolong Wars We Can’t Win
The greatest threat to world peace is not from nuclear weapons and their possible proliferation. It is from drones and their certain proliferation. Nuclear bombs are useless weapons, playthings for the powerful or those aspiring to power. Drones are now sweeping the global arms market. There are some 10,000 said to be in service, of which a thousand are armed and mostly American. Some reports say they have killed more non-combatant civilians than died in 9/11. I have not read one independent study of the current drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the horn of Africa that suggests these weapons serve any strategic purpose. Their “success” is expressed solely in body count, the number of so-called “al-Qaida-linked commanders” killed. If body count were victory, the Germans would have won Stalingrad and the Americans Vietnam. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/10/drones-fools-gold-prolong-wars
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How Government Grows
Every known form of government is inefficient but nevertheless exists primarily to grow and protect itself. We Americans have witnessed in the short space of eleven years a government that has metastasized built around a fiction that the American people are somehow under serious threat from foreign enemies. This has produced two large and a number of smaller wars coupled to a US military and intelligence footprint that now extends to every corner of every continent. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/01/02/how-government-grows/
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Oliver Stone: U.S. Has Become an Orwellian State
There has been a blind worship of the military and patriotism. I strongly believe in the strong military, but to defend our country, not to invade other countries and to conquer the world. I think there is a huge difference that has been forgotten: morality. Once you take the laws away, as Einstein once said famously, the country does not obey its laws, the laws would be disrespected. So it seems that the fundamental morality has been lost on us somewhere on the way recently and now it is what is effective. http://rt.com/news/oliver-stone-us-orwellian-022/
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Where Did We Go Wrong?
The predominant issue of the liberal left is that people are not able, or capable of fending for themselves, and need government and politicians to aid in their survival. This is the true mantra of all socialists, whose primary modus of operation is to help others with your money. This false Jewish conceptualization of society now permeates every issue of public discourse. The worst part of this is that it, through Jew control of mainstream media, has taken over the entire American and British news, TV, radio, and newsprint. http://www.a2zpublications.com/blog/54/Where-did-we-go-wrong
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’Tis the Season Not To Be a Commie
Religion is in decline, tradition takes a backseat to fashion, and same-sex marriage is now looked upon as normal. What were previously taboos—swearing on television, watching films of flesh-eating zombies and blood-sucking vampires feasting amidst car crashes and explosions, and nonstop onscreen violence—are all now accepted, if not outright encouraged. How to balance the ethical with entertainment seems to have been lost forever among the creative types our media takes so seriously. But it’s once again Christmas time. The Christian religion preaches we should live in peace with our fellow man, which makes Christianity one hell of a failed doctrine. http://takimag.com/article/tis_the_season_not_to_be_a_commie_taki/print#axzz2G0zJwCaI
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Pentagon Announces Troop Deployment in 35 African Nations
The Pentagon currently has plans for over 100 military and training exercises across Africa as part of its touted Africom effort. The “carefully calibrated” plan to move into Africa was announced in 2007 despite “misgivings across the continent that it could spawn American bases or create the perception of an undue U.S. military influence there,” according to the AP. http://www.infowars.com/pentagon-announces-troop-deployment-in-35-african-nations/
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Hey You
Pink Floyd released The Wall 33 years ago. It was a concept rock opera album that explored the issues of ababdonment, isolation, alienation, authoritarianism, the brutality of war, a tyrannical conformist educational system, and the walls individuals and society build to protect themselves from having to confront reality and deal with the consequences of their actions. I attended the Roger Waters Wall Concert this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with my three sons. Three decades later, the message is more powerful than ever. The government oppression and never ending wars waged by the American Empire around the world have created a society built upon fear and loathing. Roger Waters’ vision is colored by Orwell’s 1984 dystopian nightmare of lies, misinformation, propaganda and brutality. The missing piece, which Waters didn’t see coming in 1979, was the ability of the oligarchs to use their control of the credit system to entrap the masses by convincing them to love their servitude and become so consumed with material possessions and the love of money that they would become nothing more than passive egotistical consumers. http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=28764
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Sympathy from the Devil
Obama wiped away a non-existent tear as he pronounced the familiar, facile phrases of selective sympathy. After ordering that U.S. flags be flown at half-mast for a week, Obama said that he and his wife would hug their children a little closer tonight as he empathizes with the parents whose children were murdered in Newtown. It’s doubtful that he was moved to similar thoughts of vicarious bereavement as he contemplated the parents in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan who have been left childless because of his actions. http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w294.html
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The Amash Rebellion
Congressman Justin Amash
Americans are sick and tired of war, they are incredulous when they see their own country going down the tubes while our preening politicians plot “regime change” in faraway lands, and they positively hate “foreign aid. So why – if the US is a “democracy,” and government reflects the popular will — are we threatening Iran, training Syrian “rebels,” and increasing military and economic assistance to key allies? The reasons are rooted in our two party system, and the “left-right,” red-state/blue state mindset that dominates our politics. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/12/13/the-amash-rebellion/
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How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor
Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. http://mises.org/daily/6312/FDRs-Pacific-War-Before-Pearl-Harbor
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The Winter of Conservative Discontent
Our economic course is unsustainable. And our regnant elite are more arrogant than the establishment of the 1960s, though less able to satisfy the clamors of their bawling constituencies for more and more from a country that is approaching an end of its tolerance and an inevitable crash. http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan284.html
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The True Costs of Empire
Mars? Venus? Earth-like bodies elsewhere in the galaxy? Who knows? But here, at least, no great power, no superpower, no hyperpower, not the Romans, nor imperial China, nor the British, nor the Soviet Union has ever garrisoned the globe quite the way we have: Asia to Latin America, Europe to the Greater Middle East, and increasingly Africa as well. Build we must. If someday Washington took to the couch for therapy, the shrink would undoubtedly categorize what we’ve done as a compulsion, the base-building equivalent of a hoarding disorder. And you know what else is unprecedented? Hundreds of thousands of Americans cycle annually through our various global garrisons, ranging from small American towns with all the attendant amenities, including fast-food joints, PXes, and Internet cafes to the most spartan of forward outposts, and yet our “Baseworld,” as the late Chalmers Johnson used to call it, is hardly noticed in this country and seldom considered worthy of attention. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/12/11/the-true-costs-of-empire/
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Obdurate Washington
by Paul Craig Roberts. The holier-than-thou presence that Washington presents to the world is so phony and shopworn that Washington is becoming not only despised but a laughing stock. Peoples cease to fear the “superpower” when they laugh at its folly, hypocrisy and utter stupidity. Certainly, the Russians are not afraid. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/12/11/obdurate-washington/
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The Fall of the American Empire (Writ Small)
Afghanistan followed as he maneuvered to box a new president, Barack Obama, into a new “surge” in another country. Then, his handpicked war commander General Stanley McChrystal, newly minted COIN believer, “ascetic,” and “rising superstar” (who would undergo his own Petraeus-like media build-up), went down in shame over nasty comments made by associates about the Obama White House. In mid-2010, Petraeus would take McChrystal’s place to save another president by bringing COIN to bear in just the right way. The usual set of hosannas — and even less success than in Iraq — followed. But as with Saddam Hussein’s mythical WMDs, it seemed scarcely to matter when there was no there there. Even though Afghanistan’s two COIN commanders had visibly failed in a war against an under-armed, undermanned, none-too-popular minority insurgency, and even though the doctrine of counterinsurgency would soon be tossed off a moving drone and left to die in the Afghan rubble, Petraeus once again made it out in one piece. In Washington, he was still hailed as the soldier of his generation and President Obama, undoubtedly fearing him in 2012, either as a candidate or a supporter of another Republican candidate, promptly stashed him away at the CIA, sending him safely into the political shadows. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33135.htm#.ULIbojm7-zs.email
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The America That Was is Now the United (Police) State of America
The seeds of destruction were already sown at the very beginning – with the Alien and Sedition Acts being perhaps the first highly visible step in the wrong direction. Then came the forceful assertion of one national government, with states reduced to administrative regions via the War of Southern Secession, from 1861-’65. I’m no fan of state governments, incidentally, but at least they’re smaller and closer to their subjects than the federal government. Another major step in the wrong direction occurred with the Spanish-American War of 1898, where the US acquired an overseas empire by force. The next major step downhill was the creation of the Federal Reserve and the income tax, both in 1913, just in time for World War I. It took time for these things to make the system crash, because it was still a fairly free economy. http://lewrockwell.com/casey/casey139.html
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Tribal America
Everyone talks about this demographic transformation as if it’s a natural phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, I notice that many of those exulting in the inevitable eclipse of “white America” are the same people who assure me that demographic arguments about the Islamization of Europe are completely preposterous. But in neither the United States nor Europe is it a natural phenomenon. Rather, it’s the fruit of conscious government policy. http://www.amren.com/news/2012/11/tribal-america/
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Washington’s Profligate ‘Nation Building’ Abroad Continues
The Afghan war may be a disaster, we may have the white elephant of all embassies in Baghdad to show for our efforts in Iraq, our Benghazi consulate may be in ruins, and American policy may be unraveling in the post-Arab-Spring Middle East, but the Pentagon remains in the grips of an imperial compulsion and so is as busy in the region as the proverbial beaver. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/11/15/america-profligate-nation-building-abroad-continues/
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American Immorality is at a Peak
Has the United States, the hero of the cold war, become in its behavior and motivations the enemy it overcame? Why does Washington want hegemony over the world? Why does Washington want this hegemony so badly that Washington is willing to murder women, children, aid workers, husbands and fathers, village elders, anyone on earth including its own American heroes? What is the evil that drives Washington? http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/11/13/american-immorality-is-at-a-peak/
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Silencing General Petraeus
The evidence that Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the author of the current Army field manual, Princeton Ph.D. and, until last week, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was forced to resign from the CIA to silence him is far stronger than is the version of events that the Obama administration has given us. http://www.lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano77.1.html
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Petraeus and the Fierce Struggles for Imperial Power
Oh, of course, such things cannot happen in the happy Let’s Pretend land of the U.S., no matter what happened to people like JFK and Nixon who tried to get control of the brass and CIA and negotiate a withdrawal from Vietnam and a detente with the Soviets that they fiercely opposed. Things like that can’t happen in the U.S. any more than Great Financial Crises and military defeats by small peasant nations can. Perish such thoughts and have a nice day. http://lewrockwell.com/douglas/douglas67.1.html
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Winter of Discontent
As for the Empire, it may bask in the afterglow of electoral triumph for the moment, but the systemic problems will still be there after it wears off. Unable to solve them, it will turn to war as a distraction. Back in May, the Emperor told the outgoing Russian president he would have “more flexibility” on issues after the election. Indeed, Washington has been reluctant lately to embark on any interventionist projects that might backfire at inopportune times. With opposition to imperialism denied a voice in the corridors of power, expect the re-energized regime to start another little war somewhere, and soon. Options are open as to where, from “liberating” Mali to escalating the civil war in Syria or attacking Iran. In any case, China and Russia will soon find out if all the hostile rhetoric in the past months has been mere campaign posturing, or a true bipartisan consensus about maintaining Imperial dominion. One place to watch for the reaction is the Balkans. There are already signs of discontent in Moscow, with prominent analysts doubting the good faith of the regime in Belgrade. As well they should – but the question is, what do they intend to do about it? http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2012/11/09/winter-of-discontent-2/
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Germany’s Desire to See America ‘On Its Knees’
There is hardly an issue about which Germans as so united as they are by their desire to see America on its knees. It unites both the left and the right. Wherever they look, they see decay, a lack of culture and ignorance. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-10/germanys-desire-see-america-collapse-and-its-infantile-crush-obama
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America Wages Financial War on Europe
Everyone knows that a major reason for the dominant position of the USA after World War II was that Europe and Asia were left in rubble. The 8th Air Force in Europe and the 20th Air Force in the Pacific did a thorough job. “Bomber” Harris of England pitched in, and Curtis LeMay’s B-29 fire bombings in Japan were so effective that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared so that the new atomic weapons would have pristine targets. When peace arrived in 1945, the Cold War suddenly broke out, and that took Russia, East Europe, and China out of the picture. Combined with a strong dollar that was much in demand and a matchless military, U.S. manufacturing made the transition from war to peace and emerged stronger than ever. This enabled the post-WWII U.S. economic boom. Flash forward to today. Now our manufacturing base is in ruins and the dollar is a shadow of its former self. However, our military is still matchless, our provocateurs are global. Putting aside the issue of why and how our manufacturing and dollar were gutted, the question is…what now? I look at the spread of financial fraud from our shores to Europe and see two “air forces” carrying the bomb loads: New York and London – a repeat from WWII. We have teamed up once again to level Europe. And once again, the peripheral countries go down first: Greece, France, Italy, et al. This time, though, Spain and Portugal did not get to declare “neutrality.” Once again Germany is putting up a ferocious fight. http://maxkeiser.com/2012/11/09/america-wages-financial-war-on-europe/
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The Sun Sets on American Empire
Throughout the campaign season, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama alike insisted that the 21st century must be another American century—that the U.S. should continue to be the world’s predominant military, economic, and political power for generations to come. After ten years of shattered hegemonic dreams, leaders of both parties still feel compelled to declare their loyalty to the vision that inspired the follies of the Bush era. Foreign-policy debate continues to turn on the question of how to preserve American hegemony, rather than how to secure U.S. interests once America is no longer so dominant. What nobody in Washington can acknowledge is the subject that this book addresses: the American Century, to the extent that it ever was real, is now definitely at an end. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-sun-sets-on-american-empire/
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A Surrender of Sorts
Something alike happens in America, and one wonders—I wonder, anyway—how can this be? In little more than a decade, the Constitution has died, the economy welters in irreversible decline, we have perpetual war, all power lies in the hands of the executive, the police are supreme, and a surveillance beyond Orwell’s imaginings falls into place. These observations are now commonplace. It is almost boring to read of them—yet they proceed apace. Where we go, we go fast. Already against the authorities there is no recourse. Should you talk back to the police, you will spend the night in jail. I sometimes wonder whether there is not some malign force in play, some diabolical miasma with a sense of humor that, having brought the Soviet Union down, amuses itself by turning the United States into the same thing. Or maybe it is just that if any state that can become totalitarian, it will. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32932.htm
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Obama’s Secret Wars
One of the most important changes in world politics over the past decade is that the US has failed to win two wars, one in Iraq, the other in Afghanistan, despite deploying large and vastly expensive land armies. Equally telling, these failures were against relatively puny forces of guerrillas. For American hardliners and neo-liberals these wars were designed to lay the ghosts of Vietnam and Somalia, enabling the open use of US military might, but they turned out to be Vietnam and Somalia revisited. American popular and establishment support for military intervention abroad using ground troops is at a low ebb. The use of unmanned drones seems to avoid these problems. First of all there are no direct and immediate American casualties. The attacks also sound as if they are carrying the fight to the enemy in the shape of al-Qa’ida, with its top 20 operatives in north-west Pakistan being regularly eliminated – only to be mysteriously replaced by another top 20 operatives. Drone strikes have been difficult for the Republicans to criticise during the presidential campaign without opening themselves up to charges that they are soft on terrorism. In one of the few sensible remarks on foreign policy in the presidential debates, Mitt Romney said “we can’t kill our way out of this”, but later added that this did not mean he was anti-drone. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/02/obamas-secret-wars/
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Journalism in the Obama Age Shows the Real Media Bias
Ample ink is spilled over debating whether the U.S. media is biased in favor of Republicans or Democrats. It is neither. The overwhelming, driving bias of the U.S. media is subservience to power, whoever happens to be wielding it. That is what explains why the U.S. media has been so obsequious first with George Bush and now with his Democratic successor … The central function, the religion, of the U.S. establishment media is adulation of those who wield power, especially military power. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/26/journalism-vanity-fair-obama
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Welcome to the Age of Hell: Entrenching Murder as the American Way
The Washington Post has just laid out, in horrifying, soul-slaughtering detail, the Obama Administration’s ongoing effort to expand, entrench and “codify” the practice of murder and terrorism by the United States government. The avowed, deliberate intent of these sinister machinations is to embed the use of death squads and drone terror attacks into the policy apparatus of future administrations, so that the killing of human beings outside all pretense of legal process will go on, year after year after year, even when the Nobel Peace Laureate has left office. They have even come up with a new euphemism for state murder: “disposition.” The new “counterterrorism matrix” is “designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the ‘disposition’ of suspects beyond the reach of American drones,” the Post reports. http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2291-welcome-to-the-age-of-hell-entrenching-murder-as-the-american-way.html
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Drone-murders of Americans ‘Totally Right, Totally Constitutional’: Homeland Security Chairman
Peter King
And if you question it, you are “a horrible moron,” concludes Peter T. King, Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security. This 2-minute video from We Are Change Luke Rudkowski powerfully captures what US “leadership” has become. The good news is their arrogance and evasion is only tragic-comic sideshows to the “emperor has no clothes” obvious facts of their massive crimes centering in war and money. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/drone-murders-of-americans-totally-right-totally-constitutional-homeland-security-chairperson.html
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A Failed Formula for Worldwide War
In one way or another, the U.S. military is now involved with most of the nations on Earth. Its soldiers, commandos, trainers, base builders, drone jockeys, spies, and arms dealers, as well as associated hired guns and corporate contractors, can now be found just about everywhere on the planet. The sun never sets on American troops conducting operations, training allies, arming surrogates, schooling its own personnel, purchasing new weapons and equipment, developing fresh doctrine, implementing novel tactics, and refining their martial arts. The U.S. has submarines trolling the briny deep and aircraft carrier task forces traversing the oceans and seas, robotic drones flying constant missions and manned aircraft patrolling the skies, while above them, spy satellites circle, peering down on friend and foe alike. Since 2001, the U.S. military has thrown everything in its arsenal, short of nuclear weapons, including untold billions of dollars in weaponry, technology, bribes, you name it, at a remarkably weak set of enemies — relatively small groups of poorly-armed fighters in impoverished nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen — while decisively defeating none of them. With its deep pockets and long reach, its technology and training acumen, as well as the devastatingly destructive power at its command, the U.S. military should have the planet on lockdown. It should, by all rights, dominate the world just as the neoconservative dreamers of the early Bush years assumed it would. Yet after more than a decade of war, it has failed to eliminate a rag-tag Afghan insurgency with limited popular support. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/10/25/a-failed-formula-for-worldwide-war/
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How Did Christians Become Warmongers?
So, what has happened to turn the most peace-loving institution the world has ever known (the New Testament church) into the biggest cheerleaders for war? I’m talking about unprovoked, illegal, unconstitutional, unbiblical–even secret–wars of aggression. The biggest cheerleaders for the unprovoked, unconstitutional, pre-emptive attack and invasion of Iraq were evangelical Christians. Ditto for the war in Afghanistan, the bombing of Libya, the attacks in Yemen, drone attacks in Pakistan, etc. Who is calling for the bombing of Iran? Evangelical Christians. Who cheers for sending more and more troops all over the world to maim and kill more and more people (including innocents)? Evangelical Christians. Most evangelical Christians didn’t even bat an eye when the federal government sent military and police personnel to murder American citizens, including elderly men, women, and children–Christian elderly men, women, and children, no less–outside Waco, Texas. Neither have the vast majority of them piped a peep of protest against the federal government’s murder of Vicki and Sammy Weaver. http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin724.htm
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Disaster on Autopilot: America’s Overwrought Empire
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious. Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush. It was victory with a capital V. The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet. It had a military beyond compare and no enemy, hardly a “rogue state,” on the horizon. It was almost unnerving, such clear sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for the ages nonetheless. Within a decade, pundits in Washington were hailing us as “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.” And here’s the odd thing: in a sense, little has changed since then and yet everything seems different. Think of it as the American imperial paradox: everywhere there are now “threats” against our well-being which seem to demand action and yet nowhere are there commensurate enemies to go with them. Everywhere the U.S. military still reigns supreme by almost any measure you might care to apply; and yet — in case the paradox has escaped you — nowhere can it achieve its goals, however modest. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175602/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_disaster_on_autopilot/
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Will Obama Strike Libya in Delayed Pre-Election War?
Speaking on conditions of anonymity, four administration officials have commented that they are actively seeking a target and readying strike forces and drones as retribution for the Sept 11 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. As AP reports, if the administration does find a target, officials say it still has to weigh whether the short-term payoff of exacting retribution on al-Qaida is worth the risk that such strikes could elevate the group’s profile in the region, alienate governments the U.S. needs to fight the group in the future and do little to slow the growing terror threat in North Africa. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-16/will-obama-strike-libya-delayed-pre-election-war
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Imperial Global Empire Watch — Beware Those Wicked Malians
Welcome Mali, our newest crisis! Open your maps. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32745.htm
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When Officers Become Criminals
William Ward
Accepting fraud and waste as part of doing business during America’s global war on terror has bred a climate in which no accountability and stretching the rules have become the norm. Military officers in both Afghanistan and Iraq became accustomed to having large quantities of cash on hand to hand out as needed. And when something goes wrong, the military’s response also reveals that a separate standard of justice for senior officers has become the status quo in the U.S. armed forces. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/when-officers-become-criminals/
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America’s Moral Degeneracy
by Paul Craig Roberts. Once again we see that Muslims are easily dominated and slaughtered by Western countries, because Muslim countries are incapable of supporting one another. Instead of supporting one another, Muslim governments accept payoffs to support instead the Christian/Zionist forces of the Western bloc. Washington knows this, which is one reason why Washington began its assertion of world hegemony in the Muslim Middle East. In the West, the Ministry of Propaganda continues to talk about the “Syrian revolt.” There is no revolt. What has happened is that the US and Israel have equipped with weapons and sent into Syria Islamists who wish to overthrow the secular Syrian government. Washington knows that if the Syrian government can be destroyed, the country will dissolve into waring factions like Iraq and Libya. America’s European and Japanese puppet states are, of course, part of Washington’s operation. There will be no complaints from them. But why is the rest of the world content for Washington to interfere in the sovereign affairs of nations to the point of invading, sending in drones and assassination teams, and murdering vast numbers of citizens in seven countries? http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/10/10/americas-moral-degeneracy/
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Overwrought Empire
After the last decade of military failures, stand-offs, and frustrations, you might think that this would be apparent in Washington. After all, the U.S. is now visibly an overextended empire, its sway waning from the Greater Middle East to Latin America, the limits of its power increasingly evident. And yet, here’s the curious thing: two administrations in Washington have drawn none of the obvious conclusions, and no matter how the presidential election turns out, it’s already clear that, in this regard, nothing will change. Even as military power has proven itself a bust again and again, our policymakers have come to rely ever more completely on a military-first response to global problems. In other words, we are not just a classically overextended empire, but also an overwrought one operating on some kind of militarized autopilot. Lacking is a learning curve. By all evidence, it’s not just that there isn’t one, but that there can’t be one. Washington, it seems, now has only one mode of thought and action, no matter who is at the helm or what the problem may be, and it always involves, directly or indirectly, openly or clandestinely, the application of militarized force. Nor does it matter that each further application only destabilizes some region yet more or undermines further what once were known as “American interests.” http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/10/09/overwrought-empire/
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Cynthia McKinney On Leadership
Cynthia McKinney
by Paul Craig Roberts. Those who have followed the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination and current contest between Romney and Obama know that the United States has no political leadership in Washington. Billions of dollars have been spent on political propaganda, but not a single important issue has been addressed. The closest the campaign has come to a political issue is which candidate can grovel the lowest at the feet of Israeli prime minister Netanyahu. Romney won that contest. But for the rest, well, it is like two elementary school children sticking their tongues out at one another. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/10/02/cynthia-mckinney-on-leadership/
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The Impossibility of American Empire
The Empire of the United States was launched in 1898, and has since traversed a mere century, experiencing increasing ambition, and suffering increasing difficulties. Could it too last 406 years? The current evidence is not reassuring … This is what the War on Terror has come to mean. It is an attempt to create a universal empire that exists only in the American imagination, by an effort that, because its aim is impossible to achieve, is unlimited in the damage it could do to Americans and others. http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=265
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The Politics of Fear in America: A Nation at War With Itself
Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams. America is entering a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of the content of their Facebook posts, and law-abiding Americans are being subjected to the latest in government spy technology. These threats to our freedoms are not to be underestimated. Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language they are couched in—the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. http://us4.forward-to-friend.com/forward/show?u=f6eb78f457b7b82887b643445&id=eee624c22a
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Why the American Imperium is Under Siege
Those angry Muslims from Morocco to Bangladesh are not rioting and burning because they hate Christianity, fast food, America’s consumer society, democracy, or feminism, as we are endlessly misinformed by politicians and media. The mass fury does not come because Muslims are somehow irrational, primitive, violent beings. Nor is the hate video, which was actually seen by only a limited number of the world’s one billion Muslims, the real cause of the violence we have been witnessing: it is merely the spark that ignited the combustible haze of anti-Americanism that overlies over much of the Muslim world. Many Americans believe they are innocent bystanders in the Muslim world, or involved there on an altruistic “mission” to uplift the benighted natives, to selflessly shoulder the heavy burden of policing the unruly globe, or abroad to wage an unending struggle against the dark forces of what we call “terrorism.” What they do not at all understand is that the American imperium’s goal is to advance its own strategic, economic and political goals and keep much of the planet under its influence. http://ericmargolis.com/2012/09/why-the-american-raj-is-under-siege/
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Globalist Think Tank Suggests Using Engineered Event as Excuse For War With Iran
What is interesting about this discussion by the Washington Institute For Near East Policy, a neo-con (Globalist) think-tank, is that its primary purpose is not necessarily to debate the current political elements of the Iranian question. They aren’t contemplating the viability or morality of a war with Iran. Instead, they are attempting to devise strtegies by which the government could CONVINCE the American public and the world that a war with Iran is the “right thing to do”, even if it means fabricating their own justification. For them, the war is a forgone conclusion, and they will do anything to make it a reality. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-26/guest-post-globalist-think-tank-suggests-using-engineered-event-excuse-war-iran
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America’s Last Crusade
With America headed for bankruptcy, with new debt of $1 trillion piled up each year, perhaps John Quincy Adams’ counsel may commend itself to a country weary from a century of crusades. “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2012/09/24/americas-last-crusade/
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The Hollow Empire
That’s just how the War Party likes it. They don’t want anyone asking uncomfortable questions about future wars, especially the looming conflict just around the next corner. (Turn right at Election Day, and head straight to Tehran.) But my question is broader, and it’s this: when was the last time the US actually won a war? No, no, I don’t mean Grenada, fer chrissake: I mean a real honest-to-goodness all-out bang ‘em up war, with an opponent who had at least a fighting chance. Before the recent spate of attempted conquests, there was Vietnam — a flat out defeat: and Korea — a draw. On a smaller scale, none of the “anti-communist” insurgencies we sponsored in the 1980s in Nicaragua and El Salvador succeeded in producing anything but trouble for us and untold misery for the inhabitants of those unfortunate countries — all in all, our efforts in Central and South America during the cold war era amounted to the Bay of Pigs writ large. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/09/23/the-hollow-empire/
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Obama Against the World
The question of the political season, then, has nothing to do with Mitt. It’s this: Can the Greater Middle East be managed effectively enough for any potentially embarrassing thing to be swept under some rug until November 7th? And that’s just one region on a planet aboil. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/09/23/obama-against-the-world/
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The Tide of Power
Presently, our consciousness is focused on the increased effort of the world’s biggest powers to enforce subjugation of their populations. Historically, this is always an endgame move, as the powers grow nearer to the end of their run. In the coming years, we would do well to regularly assess the opening-up of other jurisdictions as the old leaders decline. http://lewrockwell.com/thomas-jeff/thomas-jeff9.1.1.html
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Rumors of Wars
Jobs and the economy are rightly the focus of the upcoming election because of their immediate impact on every American, but it is also essential to address the issue of how a dysfunctional and horrifically expensive foreign and defense policy has made every American poorer and even threatened the continued existence of our republican form of government. It is a discussion that must take place even if the two major parties do their best to avoid it. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/09/19/rumors-of-wars/
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The Howling: Embassy Riots Pale Next to State Terror Tempest
Sparked by a deliberate provocation put together by Christian extremists, riots by groups of Islamic extremists are spreading across the world — a convenient symbiosis for both groups, as they use each other’s actions to “justify” their hysterically constricted worldviews. There is an added layer to the reaction in the Muslim countries, as the extremists there can draw on the seething resentments built up by the depredations and atrocities inflicted indiscriminately on Muslims by the Western powers in recent decades, particularly since the launch of Terror War. But of course these depredations and atrocities are the work of yet another group of sectarian extremists gripped by a hysterically constricted worldview: the Western power elites, who are maniacal adherents to the Dominationist cult. This bizarre but very powerful sect holds that American domination of the world, militarily and economically, is part of the divinely ordained structure of the universe. Those who adhere to Dominationist dogma and obey the dictates of the sect’s high priests in Washington are rewarded; but unbelievers, heretics and apostates are to be cast out, cursed, attacked and, when possible, destroyed. In the last 11 years alone, state-backed Dominationist terrorists have killed far more innocent people than their counterparts among the scattered clumps of Islamic extremists around the world. More than a million people have been killed as a result of the Dominationist terrorist attack on Iraq, for example. Hundreds of innocent people in Pakistan have been murdered by the drones fired by Dominationist terrorists. Dozens are dying monthly in violent Dominationist attacks in Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and elsewhere. The senseless violence of the Dominationist sect is well-attested. The sect’s leaders brag openly about their use of violence; indeed, in the constant factional jockeying for power within the sect (a characteristic of all religious and ideological cults, of course), would-be leaders vie to paint themselves as the one most willing to inflict massive death and destruction on all those who dare challenge the Dominationist faith. All would-be leaders trumpet their willingness — their eagerness — to eschew mere man-made laws as they do “whatever it takes” to defend the faith and advance Dominationist supremacy over the earth. Torture, kidnapping, assassination and mass destruction are all considered divinely justified by the Dominationist extremists — and by the millions of people who actively support the factions within the sect. http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2281-the-howling-embassy-riots-a-teapot-in-state-terror-tempest.html
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No Hope
Today the United States is the planet’s major predator, in historical company with Halter, Mao, Stalin, the British empire, Napoleon the French Hitler, the Hapsburgs, Ottomans, the Plantagenets, various Persians, thousands of men leading thousands of armies, all butchering and burning and raping and looting. It is what men do. We are still at it. We think we have reasons: We are combating terror, or protecting our allies from evil, or disseminating democracy. No, actually. We are doing what is built into our nature. Empires expand like bubbles, collapse like bubbles, fight the rising new empires. The losses in lives and unhappiness and treasure far exceed anything gained, which is irrelevant. We fight because it is a biological imperative. We cannot not fight. http://lewrockwell.com/reed/reed241.html
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America Paying the Price for Ignoring Ron Paul-Type Foreign Policy
With protests in over 40 locations worldwide against the U.S. in the past week, America should be re-evaluating its foreign policy. American diplomats appear dumbfounded. The UK Guardian posts a headline report that reads: “U.S. media angrily marvels at the lack of Muslim gratitude.” The Guardian article goes on to say: “One prominent strain shaping American reaction to the protests in the Muslim world is bafflement, and even anger, that those Muslims are not more grateful to the U.S. Attacks in Libya that left four U.S. diplomats dead – including Ambassador Christopher Stevens – and a mob invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, in which the U.S. flag was torn to shreds, have left many to wonder: How can people the USA helped free from murderous dictators treat it in such a way?” But Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian’s political commentator, says: “That it was the U.S. who freed Egyptians and ‘allowed them’ the right to protest would undoubtedly come as a great surprise to many Egyptians. That is the case even beyond the decades of arming, funding and general support from the U.S. for their hated dictator. http://lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi239.html
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How to Correct the Course of America
For every person, answering the question how to correct the course for America, there is a personal viewpoint that often varies upon circumstance. However, the underlying premise is that something is wrong that needs fixing. The couch potatoes drift through life voluntarily removing their involvement from the political process as much as possible. All one needs to upset this tranquility is to strike up a conversation with a stranger and dare bring up any political or social issue and ask for their opinion. Most seldom reflect upon specifics and even fewer are able to lay out a sound and cogent thought for righting the ship of state. Moreover, to the horror of any intelligent citizen, a very significant segment of the public is content with the status quo and sees no reason to change anything. http://batr.org/gulag/091612.html
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Blasphemy and Empire
Americans are baffled: why oh why are Muslims up in arms over a YouTube video, one which no one in America even knew about prior to the attack on our Libyan consulate and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens? Having abandoned their own religion sometime in the last century or so, they just don’t understand why someone would get all hopped up over a little thing like blasphemy — after all, all one has to do is turn on the TV or view the latest Madonna music video and you’ll get a full dose of it. Of course, this isn’t true for everyone: in Flyover Country, the rubes still persist in the faith of their fathers, and our elites pander to that whenever they must. However, the Georgetown cocktail party circuit and the world of the Washington power brokers isn’t a notably devout milieu: it is instead decidedly secular, and tinged with more than a little contempt for those Flyover Folks who must be pandered to around election time. This is one major reason for Washington’s incomprehension when it comes to understanding the wave of hatred for the US currently sweeping the Middle East. That complete cluelessness is endemic, too, in the US media, where reporters are no different than the elites they cover in their militantly secular outlook. So when a deliberately insulting video depicting the prophet Mohammed goes out over the internet, after its makers made a determined effort to get Muslims to view it, they scratch their heads and say they just don’t get it. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/09/16/blasphemy-and-empire/
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Monopolizing War? What Washington Knows How to do Best
Think of it another way: in the post-2001 era, along with two disastrous wars on the Eurasian mainland, we’ve been regularly sending in the Marines or special operations forces, as well as naval, air, and robotic power. Such acts are, by now, so ordinary that they are seldom considered worthy of much discussion here, even though no other country acts (or even has the capacity to act) this way. This is simply what Washington’s National Security Complex does for a living. At the moment, it seems, a historical circle is being closed with the Marines once again heading back into Latin America as the “drug war” Washington proclaimed years ago becomes an actual drug war. It’s a demonstration that, these days, when Washington sees a problem anywhere on the planet, its version of a “foreign policy” is most likely to call on the U.S. military. Force is increasingly not our option of last resort, but our first choice. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32437.htm
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Staging World War 3 For a Mutually Desired Outcome
I watched the movie Pearl Harbor last week and it struck me how impossible it would be for Japan or anyone to pull off such an attack today. In the age of satellites that can read license plates from space, the days of a fleet of aircraft carriers sneaking up on anyone are long past. In fact, there will never be another battle like Normandy where thousands were killed while storming forward directly into the enemy’s line of fire either. That type of warfare is as obsolete as brigades lining up in formation as they did during the Revolutionary War in America. Even occupations like Iraq and Afghanistan are proving to be completely ineffective and outdated. Additionally, because of advanced weaponry, the entire idea of conventional war seems utterly ridiculous. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/09/staging-world-war-3-for-mutually.html
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The Declining West: Tragedy or Comedy?
by Paul Craig Roberts. During the Vietnam War, Sweden was an independent country with a moral conscience, and Sweden gave sanctuary to US war protestors who refused the draft. Washington realized the cost to itself and purchased the Swedish government in order to prevent a reoccurrence of moral conscience on the part of any Western government. In the aftermath of World War II and during the subsequent decades of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the Western nations presented themselves as the moral conscience of the world. It turns out that this was largely a hoax. The “Western nations” are merely pawns complicit in Washington’s crimes as Washington attempts to shut down all information in its pursuit of world hegemony. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/09/10/the-declining-west-tragedy-comedy-paul-craig-roberts/
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That Villaraigosa Moment
This is the face of our political class: arrogant, authoritarian, and on the level of some banana republic south of the border. Welcome to the New America, where leader-worship has taken the place of politics, Team Red and Team Blue battle it out to see who gets to be El Supremo for the next four years, and politics resembles a prolonged soccer game. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/09/09/that-villaraigosa-moment/
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Leading From the Front of the Bus
Condi has expounded and put into practice what she describes as “transformational diplomacy.” Rejecting traditional diplomatic approaches, she advocates a missionary form aimed at molding the rest of the world into political clones of American democracy. In her speech to the GOP convention, she said that unless we “lead from the front” and make our ideological goals explicit, the world is doomed to “chaos” and confusion. Peace can only be assured if we impose our human-rights vision everywhere. Rice points with pride in her 1995 book Germany Unified and Europe Transformed to the success of our “democracy-building” in Germany after World War II. Presumably if it were not for our reconstruction of the German psyche in the image of our social engineers, we’d now be seeing a new Hitler swallowing up countries in Central Europe. Instead the Krauts have been turned into lobotomized antifascists who follow our lead and do nothing conspicuous to assert their national identity. http://takimag.com/article/leading_from_the_front_of_the_bus_paul_gottfried/print#axzz2663a7oMV
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Spinning Bad Financial News Into Good
by Paul Craig Roberts. The “powerful American economy” is an economy that cannot produce its own clothes and shoes, or the manufactured products, including high technology products, that it consumes, or its own energy, all of which it imports by issuing more debt. The “great hegemonic American economy” is on the verge of total collapse, because the only way it can pay for the imports that sustain it is by issuing more debt and printing more money. Once the debt and money creation undermine the dollar as world reserve currency, the US will become overnight a third world country, much to the relief of the rest of the world. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/09/08/spinning-bad-financial-news-into-good-paul-craig-roberts/
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The Dumbing Down of American Foreign Policy
Only one thing makes Obama’s policy look geopolitically smart — and that’s Mitt Romney’s prospective foreign policy. On global issues, then, the November elections will offer voters a particularly unpalatable choice: between a Democratic militarist and an even more over-the-top militaristic Republican, between Bush Lite all over again and Bush heavy, between dumb and dumber. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175589/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_the_dumbing_down_of_american_foreign_policy/#more
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Bloc Party: Pantomime and Power in the Imperial System
But the fact is we have only one party, the Imperial Bloc. You may find one faction more distasteful than the other, but both fully support the moral insanity of the militarism outlined above. Whichever faction wins, more people will die horrible deaths — and no one will answer for it, no one will be prosecuted. And the firestorm of hatred and blowback that both factions of the Imperial Bloc keeps stoking against our country will continue to build. So be clear: if you vote for one of these factions, that is what you are supporting. Perhaps you may feel that such a dreadful moral compromise is necessary; that’s your choice. But if so, you should know — and feel — just what that choice means. http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2276-bloc-party-pantomime-and-power-in-the-imperial-system.html
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Sovietizing America
Looking at the policies embraced by both the incumbent and the challenger, however, an outside observer must wonder what all the fuss is about. Obama and the Democrats have already demonstrated they have no intention of dismantling the Empire to tackle the problems at home; rather, they want to double down on both. Well, so do Romney and the Republicans that endorsed him. Ron Paul’s calls to audit the Federal Reserve and the Pentagon were treated as heresy, and the party bosses went so far as to change the rules in order to sideline and suppress Paul’s supporters. Both parties wish to tax and spend, both favor conflict and conquest, both believe the current expanse of government power is good and necessary. The only real difference is which special interest groups will get better rations at the government trough for the next four years, at everyone else’s expense. Whether it’s butter and bombs, or bombs and butter — either way, the country ends up broke, and a lot of people around the world end up dead. Or, in Imperial parlance, “liberated” and enjoying the fruits of democracy. http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2012/09/02/pussy-riot-politics/
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Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars
The most urgent political challenge to the world today is how to prevent the so-called “pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like the 19th-century so-called “pax Britannica” before it, into major global warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” in its final stages, became less and less peaceful, less and less orderly, more and more a naked imposition of belligerent competitive power based on inequality. To define this prevention of war as an achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are above all achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic reassessment and progressive scaling back of two discredited policies that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive. http://lewrockwell.com/orig11/scott-pd17.1.html
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The Rot Runs Deep 3: The Capture of the Professional Class
A rotten-to-the-core system continues grinding on because it has effectively co-opted (captured) the professional/managerial class with promises of phantom wealth and security. The Status Quo depends on the professional/managerial class to maintain order and keep the machine running. Since this class has more options in life than less educated lower-income workers, their belief in the fairness and stability of the Status Quo is essential: should their belief in the Status Quo weaken, so would their commitment to positions that require long work days and abundant stress. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-rot-runs-deep-3-capture-professional-class
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Imperialism as Spectacle
In the age of empire, the politics of celebrity are ubiquitous. Which is why a politician like Ron Paul, for example, could never make it to the White House: he’s the exact opposite of a movie star. He is, instead, a character actor in the drama — the spectacle — of American politics, the Cranky Old Uncle not to be taken seriously. It’s also the reason why an empty vessel like Mitt Romney can capture the presidential nomination of a major party: he, after all, looks the part, and in a thoroughly decadent culture such as ours, where surface appearances are signifiers of power and prestige, a good hairdo is worth far more than the brain it adorns. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/08/26/imperialism-as-spectacle/
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The Best-Laid Plans
You undoubtedly know the phrase: the best laid plans of mice and men. It couldn’t be more apt when it comes to the American project in Afghanistan. Washington’s plans have indeed been carefully drawn up. By the end of 2014, U.S. “combat troops” are to be withdrawn, but left behind on the giant bases the Pentagon has built will be thousands of U.S. trainers and advisers, as well as special operations forces to go after al-Qaeda remnants (and other “militants”), and undoubtedly the air power to back them all up. Their job will officially be to continue to “stand up” the humongous security force that no Afghan government in that thoroughly impoverished country will ever be able to pay for. Thanks to a 10-year Strategic Partnership Agreement that President Obama flew to Kabul to seal with Afghan President Hamid Karzai as May began, there they are to remain until 2020 or beyond. In other words, it being Afghanistan, we need a translator. The American “withdrawal” regularly mentioned in the media doesn’t really mean “withdrawal.” On paper at least, for years to come the U.S. will partially occupy a country that has a history of loathing foreigners who won’t leave (and making them pay for it). http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/08/26/the-best-laid-plans/
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America’s Long-Standing Campaign to Destabilize Russia
Although the attacks of this week are tragic, their real significance is political in nature. There has been a sustained destabilization campaign waged by the West, particularly the United States, and aimed at President Putin going back to last December and the beginning of the so-called protest movement. The attempt by the Western imperialists has been to isolate Putin, demonize him, and erode his support within the country in hopes of toppling his government, thereby removing the biggest obstacle they face in implementing their hegemonic agenda. However, despite the financial backing, political demagoguery and media inundation, the attempts have entirely failed. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32442
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Can Animosity Sustain America and Israel Forever?
For the first time in American history, when an African colored man walked into the White House, he promised to change the U.S. belligerent policies and practices and showed interest to make peace across the globe. But it was all delusional politics to win the elections. Paul Craig Roberts called him “The World’s Least Powerful Man – the Obama Puppet,” rescinding all his commitments to “Yes We Can” and global peacemaking. Obama and Netanyahu both have serious problems of self-awareness and intellectual consciousness of the realities of prevalent culture and civilizations if they wish to pursue animosities and preemptive war attacks. http://www.pkarticleshub.com/2012/08/25/can-animosity-sustain-america-and-israel-for-ever/
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A perfect storm has been prepared for America. Real interest rates are negative, but debt and money are being created hand over foot. The dollar’s demise awaits the world’s decision how to get out of it. The Federal Reserve can print dollars with which to keep the bond and stock markets high, but the Federal Reserve cannot print foreign currencies with which to keep the dollar afloat. When the dollar goes, Washington’s power goes, which is why the bullion market is rigged. Protect the power. That is the agenda. Is it another Washington over-reach? http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/05/18/washington-signals-dollar-deep-concerns-paul-craig-roberts/
