Robert Stevens
WSWS

"A warning must be made. The US government and its accomplices have gone a long way towards crippling WikiLeaks and creating the conditions where Assange will likely end up spending a long time in prison. Their ability to do so testifies to the vast erosion of democratic rights in the US and internationally."

The ruling by Judge Howard Riddle at Belmarsh Magistrates Court in London that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden represents a grave threat to his liberty and even to his life.

The decision is only the latest episode in a massive, internationally coordinated campaign headed by the Obama administration and US intelligence agencies to discredit and destroy WikiLeaks.

Assange is the victim of a politically motivated attempt at character assassination and legal frame-up based on trumped-up charges of sexual misconduct. Washington’s chief collaborators are the British government and courts, the Swedish government and its legal system, and the Gillard government in Australia, which has done nothing to defend one of its own citizens.

Julian Assange has emerged as a major figure in journalism, fighting for a genuinely independent press. As opposed to the New York Times and the rest of the establishment media, which routinely and systematically collaborate with the state to conceal the truth and keep the public in the dark, he has worked to expose the crimes of American imperialism. For this reason he has been targeted for destruction.

The frame-up is aimed at silencing WikiLeaks, which has made public thousands of secret US military documents exposing the criminal character of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and US diplomatic cables documenting the filthy conspiracies that have been carried out against the world’s people by Washington and its allies.

The determination of the United States to destroy Assange has only grown as the revelations made by WikiLeaks have helped spark mass popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries, cutting across the efforts of the US and Europe to portray themselves as benevolent advocates of democracy.

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Stephen Lendman

Photo courtesy of Amber Appelbaum

"Fascism landed in Wisconsin under Walker and his cronies, aiming to turn the whole state into Guatemala in the worst sense of its meaning. More than ever, exposing and stopping him is crucial. It's no exaggeration saying, as Wisconsin goes, perhaps also America, a possibility too grim to allow."

Egyptians want it. So do Palestinians, Arabs throughout the region, protesting East and West Europeans, others across the world, and growing numbers in America, especially in Wisconsin - ground zero to save organized labor.

At issue is freedom v. tyranny, what Aaron Russo's 2006 film called "Freedom to Fascism," identifying America's money system as inimical to liberty and justice for all. Along with American-style corporatism, it lets banking giants control money, credit and debt for private self-enrichment, colluding with government for laws favoring them, as well as others destroying democratic principles, fast eroding and disappearing throughout the country.

It produces:

● pervasive public and private corruption;
● concentrated wealth;
● government serving America's aristocracy, not popular interests;
● alliances with global despots, replaced when they forget who's boss;
● America's war machine and imperial arrogance;
● subjugation, not freedom;
● mass impoverishment and human misery;
● a war on dissent; and
● another preventing constructive change, forcefully when other ways fail.

It makes America and similar societies unfit to live in, heading them for tyranny and ruin. It also fuels popular anger, bubbling eventually to the surface, growing and now spreading across the Middle East and parts of America.

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Paul Craig Roberts
Vdare

"As long as the American population remains proud that their relatives serve as cannon fodder for the military/security complex, war will remain a racket."

The United States government cannot get enough of war. With Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime falling to a rebelling population, CNN reports that a Pentagon spokesman said that the U.S. is looking at all options from the military side.

Allegedly, the Pentagon, which is responsible for one million dead Iraqis and an unknown number of dead Afghans and Pakistanis, is concerned about the deaths of 1,000 Libyan protesters.

While the Pentagon tries to figure out how to get involved in the Libyan revolt, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific is developing new battle plans to take on China in her home territory. Four-star Admiral Robert Willard thinks the U.S. should be able to whip China in its own coastal waters.

The admiral thinks one way to do this is to add U.S. Marines to his force structure so that the U.S. can eject Chinese forces from disputed islands in the East and South China seas.

It is not the U.S. who is disputing the islands, but if there is a chance for war anywhere, the admiral wants to make sure we are not left out.

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Ann Talbot
WSWS

New Hardwick Hall seen from the window of old Hardwick Hall

It is said by the locals that the ghost of Thomas Hobbes can be heard grumbling to himself and singing out of key as he walks along the lower terrace of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, where he died in 1679 at the age of 91. It is a hard and undignified fate for a convinced materialist who denied the existence of all boggarts, goblins and sprites, to be posthumously converted into an immaterial spirit, but Hobbes’s reputation has suffered worse indignities at the hands of posterity. An article by Corey Robin in the Nation last year lined up Hobbes alongside the Italian Futurists and Friedrich Nietzsche as a “blender of cultural modernism and political reaction”. [1]

Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Fear: the History of a Political Idea, [2] which aims to cover topics as diverse as the fear of Communism during the Cold War, the fear among black Americans of the police, white fears of black revolt under segregation, the fear a woman feels towards her abusive husband, or an employee might feel towards an employer. Robin self-consciously identifies with the sense of panic that afflicted sections of the American intelligentsia after 9/11.

Robin’s Nation article purports to be a review of Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes and Republican Liberty, [3] but the points of contact with the book are slight to nonexistent. It is really a vehicle for his “fear” theme. For Robin, Hobbes is one of the great purveyors of fear in the modern era. Hobbes used to say that he and fear were born twins, so he would seem to be the ideal figure for Robin’s purposes.

Hobbes, in point of fact, had a good deal to be afraid of, since most of his adult life was dominated by the Thirty Years War, which was the bloodiest European war until the twentieth century. An estimated 30 percent of the population of what is now Germany was killed. Neighbouring France was rent by the Fronde, and, in the 1640s, two civil wars consumed England, Scotland and Ireland. As if that were not enough for one lifetime, Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. His mother was said to have given birth to him prematurely when she heard that the invasion fleet had already arrived. That was what he meant by saying fear was his twin.

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Stephen Lendman

In 2003, an ACLU report warned that "Big Brother" no longer is fiction, America having advanced to where total surveillance is now possible. Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program said:

"Given the capabilities of today's technology, the only thing protecting us from a full-fledged surveillance society are the legal and political institutions we have inherited as Americans. Unfortunately, the September 11 attacks have led some to embrace the fallacy that weakening the Constitution will strengthen America."

As a result, civil liberties fast eroded. In 2007, another ACLU report warned about America being six minutes to midnight "as a surveillance society draws near...." Powerful new technologies potentially make total monitoring possible under a president, a compliant Congress and courts that believe national security takes precedence over constitutional freedoms.

As a result, "we confront the possibility of a dark future where our every move," transaction, and communication is "recorded, compiled, and stored away" for ready access for whatever authorities may want.

One of several earlier articles on institutionalized spying can be accessed through this link.

It reviewed undiscussed police state tools used without congressional authorization, oversight, or legal standing - state-of-the-art technology, including satellite imagery, to spy on unsuspecting Americans.

In his article titled, "Creating the Domestic Surveillance State," Alfred McCoy explained that Obama embraced the same executive powers as Bush, including NSA surveillance, CIA renditions, drone assassinations, indefinite military detentions, and more - virtual lawlessness across the board. As a result, constitutional Law Professor Jack Balkin believes bipartisan affirmation of unchecked executive powers could "reverberate for generations," subverting constitutional freedoms.

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