Stephen Lendman

Promising change after eight Bush/Republican years, Obama delivered betrayal. With congressional Democrats, he exceeded Bush's harshness, lawlessness, belligerency, and public trust betrayal. He violating every major domestic and foreign issue promise made.

As a result, he's been complicit in:

● looting the nation's wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;
● giving Wall Street crooks greater money power, disguised as financial reform;
● waging multiple imperial wars and occupations, spending more on militarism than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;
● belligerently ousting Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and Libya's Gaddafi;
● promoting regime change in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and elsewhere against independent leaders, while continuing support for the world's most ruthless, corrupt tyrants;
● presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;
● continuing Bush's worst lawless policies; adding more of his own, including indefinite detentions without charge, and deploying Special Forces death squads in over 120 countries to kill targeted suspects, including Americans;
● targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;
● illegally spying on Americans more aggressively than Bush;
● destroying decades of hard won labor rights;
● waging class war to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public and private pensions, as well as other New Deal and Great Society gains;
● wanting more aggressive media control than Nixon, according to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas;
● stiff-arming budget-strapped states and distressed households;
● four years into a Main Street Depression, none of the millions of promised new jobs were created at a time real unemployment approaches 23%.
● imposing austerity when vital stimulus is needed;
● planning new cuts to sustain Wall Street, militarism, favoritism, waste, fraud, and other rewards for America's top 1%;
● wanting education commodified, government's responsibility for it ended, and making it another business profit center;
● enacting healthcare reform that taxes more, provides less, places profits above human need, and leaves a broken system in place; and
● promoting "shared sacrifice," forcing worker sacrifices to let America's super-rich share.

As a result, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests fill hundreds of cities nationwide, raging against an unjust system too corrupted to fix. OWS activists "protest for an American revolution," because nothing less will work. Mayors deploy goon squads against them. Violent police crackdowns follow.

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William Blum

On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: "We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. ... Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair."[1]

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.[2] ... Then came shock and awe!

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Gilad Atzmon

Please read the following Haaretz report and ask yourself why does Israel need so many nuclear bombs? Why does it need ‘transcontinental missiles’? Why does the Jewish State think it terms of ‘second strike nuclear option’?

I am afraid that the answer is pretty devastating. Israel defines itself as the Jewish State. It is shaped by Jewish culture and driven by Jewish ideology. Israeli militarized madness is devastatingly consistent with the Biblical Samson story.

God granted Samson supernatural strength in order to combat his enemies but it didn’t take long before he killed himself in action while committing a genocide. 'Let me die with the Philistines!' (Judges 16:30) says Samson as he pulls down the temple killing thousands of elders, women and children. Devastatingly enough, ‘suicidal genocide’ is [inherent] in the Israeli strategic and tactical vision.

But Israel is also driven by a unique collective mental condition namely the Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Pre-TSD). Israel’s actions in the present are shaped by a future imaginary phantasmic trauma.

I guess that the combination of Samson’s ideology, Pre-TSD and hundreds of nuclear warheads may as well mean an inevitable disaster.

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Stephen Lendman

Anything ahead is possible. None of it will be humanitarian or socially beneficial. Expect new broadsides any time when least expected. That's how rogue states operate.

State terror embraces many forms of lawlessness, duplicity and depravity. They include violence; war; conquest; colonization; plunder; targeted killings; torture; financial, political and social terrorism, and more.

Washington and Israel fine-tuned it. Both nations redefined the degeneracy of Western societies. They and others benefit from death, destruction, exploitation, and human misery.

Their policies spurn core democratic values, including life, liberty, equity, justice, truth, and government of, for and by the people. All are non-starters.

Ordinary people are exploited, not served. Only wealth and power matter, regardless of the body count to accumulate maximum amounts and secure more of both.

Wickedness has no bounds. Practitioners seek new ways to do malevolent things to more people. Nothing is off limits. Rhetoric masks sinister destructive agendas.

Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization. "I think it would be a good idea," he responded. Maybe he had Washington and Israel in mind. Both give new meaning to rogue state depravity.

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William Blum

"We came, we saw, he died."
— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: "We came, we saw, 3,000 died ... ha- ha."

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands ... this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a "bloodbath" in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn't intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi's army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)[1]

The New York Times (March 21) observed:

...the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.

The Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels' media operation:

It's not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:

• No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
• No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
• No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
• No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That's [Qaddafi's] propaganda.)

The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels' trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for "humanitarian" intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can't get much more humanitarian than that.

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