Anonymous

A pretty little girl named Suzy was standing on the sidewalk in front of her home. Next to her was a basket containing a number of tiny creatures; in her hand was a sign announcing FREE KITTENS.

Suddenly a line of big black cars pulled up beside her. Out of the lead car stepped a tall, grinning man.

- Hi there little girl, I'm Mitt Romney. What do you have in the basket? he asked.
- Kittens, little Suzy said.
- How old are they? asked Romney.
- They're so young, their eyes aren't even open yet, Suzy replied.
- And what kind of kittens are they?
- Republicans, answered Suzy with a smile.

Romney was delighted. As soon as he returned to his car, he called his PR chief and told him about the little girl and the kittens. Recognizing the perfect photo op, the two men agreed that the Romney should return the next day; and in front of the assembled media, have the girl talk about her discerning kittens.

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Stephen Lendman

(All The Names - The Lagarde List)

Doing the right thing is risky. Greek magazine publisher Kostas Vaxevanis faces charges of violating state privacy laws. Potentially he faces two years in prison.

Press freedom and whistleblowing should be inviolate. Not in today's corrupt money controlled world. More on this below.

A previous article discussed a recent Tax Justice Network (TJN) USA report. It estimates up to $32 trillion of hidden and stolen wealth stashed largely tax-free secretly. "The Price of Offshore Revisited" reveals what super-rich elites want concealed. Governments let them avoid taxes.

Societal costs are huge. Ill-gotten gains are free to make more of them. Only ordinary people pay what they owe. Many pay too much. A vast offshore industry operates out of sight and mind. Only financial interests running it and wealthy tax avoiders know what's going on. The benefit of getting rich is being able to break societal rules to get richer. When ordinary people try they're punished. When whisleblowers expose potential wrongdoing, prosecutors victimize them.

Under Obama, it's truer than ever in America. Greece operates the same way.

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Eric Peters

The movie, The Matrix, explains a great deal.

Most people are brought up from birth within the system – “the matrix” – and psychologically and socially and culturally conditioned to accept it as their world. And more, the world as it is supposed to be. What separates people like those here from everyone else? Somehow, for whatever reason, we questioned. And we saw a flaw in the pattern (the green screen with zeros and ones, if you like, as in the movie). Something clicked – and we knew. The curtain fell away. We began to realize how thoroughly we’d been lied to about almost everything. Saw the fundamental violence of the system. The lie behind the facade of “democracy” and “consent of the governed.” Once you see, you cannot unsee. The pattern becomes obvious, transparant. And all of sudden, things make sense. A bleak sort of sense, to be sure. But for the first time, you truly understand.

But the downside is you are now an outlier, more or less alienated from the society in which you live. Other people are like zombies – because in a way they are. Just as in the movie. As in real life.

I have noticed two qualities that separate the people like us here from the Clovers out there: First, the habit of conceptual thought. Of reasoning from (and accepting the necessary consequences of) principles. Thus, we understand why it is so profoundly dangerous to countenance such things as “safety” checkpoints in order to (ostensibly) “get dangerous drunks” off the road. Because it follows that if the state arrogates unto itself the power to detain (that is, to arrest) people and search/interrogate them (no matter how cursorily) for no specific reason, without actual probable cause, then a principle has been accepted – ceded – and much more and worse will inevitably follow. Clovers cannot grasp this. They only see “safety” – and “getting dangerous drunks off the road.” The same point can be applied almost universally. For instance, “taxes.” A Clover will turn up his nose at a person who stuffs a Snickers bar in his pants at a 7-11 and walks out the door with it. He sees this as theft, which it is. But he does not see that it is also theft when he (and others like him) band together at the ballot box and vote to take much more than merely someone else’s Snicker’s bar. The Clover mind is unable to make the conceptual connection. Theft is somehow transformed into not-theft when it is done under the auspices of the state.

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Stephen Lendman

What do you call a Black man who rejects equal rights for his own people and others? A racist traitor. What do you call a rejectionist leader? A criminal who should be impeached, removed and prosecuted.

Obama stands guilty on multiple counts. His rap sheet includes much more than spurning Palestinian rights. He's complicit in grand theft and war crimes multiple times over. He's unfit to serve. He should be in prison, not government. Throughout his tenure, he repeatedly violated international, constitutional, and US statute laws. He's contemptuous of fundamental rights and other democratic values. From his earliest Chicago political days, he supported ethnic cleansing gentrification. Real estate and other financial priorities trumped populism. They still do and much more. Obama fronts for wealth and power interests. As a state senator, he did it for his district. As president, he does it globally. He's in lockstep with Israel on Palestine. He supports occupation harshness. Palestinians are Muslims and don't matter. Denying them fundamental rights is policy. So is total evisceration of freedom and standing four-square against sovereign independence in any form. He also opposes full or limited UN membership.

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Andrew Gavin Marshall

This essay is the product of research undertaken for the first volume of The People’s Book Project. Please donate to help the first volume come to completion: a study of the institutions, ideas, and individuals of power and resistance in a snap-shot of the world today, looking at the global economic crisis, war and empire, repression and the global spread of anti-austerity and resistance movements.

The lesson is clear: if you are a thief, steal by the billions or trillions, and then no one can do anything about it. If you are in the drug trade: handle only billions (or hundreds of billions) in drug money, and then you will get away with it. If you don’t want to pay taxes, be a member of the top o.oo1% of the world’s super-rich and hide your billions in offshore tax-free accounts. If you want more, create a global economic crisis, demand to be saved by the state to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars, and then, tell the state to punish their populations into poverty in order to pay for your mistakes.

I would like to introduce you, the reader, to some realities of our global banking system, resting on the rhetoric of free markets, but functioning, in actuality, as a global cartel, a “super-entity” in which the world’s major banks all own each other and own the controlling shares in the world’s largest multinational corporations, influence governments and policy with politicians in their back pockets, routinely engaging in fraud and bribery, and launder hundreds of billions of dollars in drug money, not to mention arms dealing and terrorist financing. These are the “too big to fail” and “too big to jail” banks, the centre of our global economy, what we call a “free market,” implying that the global banks – and corporations – have “free reign” to do anything they please, engage in blatantly criminal activities, steal trillions in wealth which is hidden offshore, and never get more than a slap on the wrist. This is the real “free market,” a highly profitable global banking cartel, functioning as a worldwide financial Mafia.

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Stephen Lendman

Call it elevating Murder, Inc. to a higher level. A Washington Post Special Report discussed America's permanent war agenda. It includes targeted killings, Obama's secret kill list, global drone wars, and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan's new rules for war playbook. Established in 2003, Washington's National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) provides terrorist related information for America's intelligence community. Brennan initially ran the agency. It devised Washington's so-called "disposition matrix." If America had a motto it would be war is good, the more wars the better. How else can generals add stars and profiteers cash in big? Human lives don't matter. Inviolable rule of law principles are trashed. Wealth, power and dominance alone matter. Imagine national policy wanting to destroy humanity to control it. Democrat Obama has that in mind and more. Imagine what Romney's planning. Think about it November 6. Voting either major party ticket assures permanent wars, destroying social America, and cracking down hard on resisters.

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Philip Giraldi

The frequently repeated threat by the Israeli leadership to attack Iran is not a serious plan to take out Iran’s nuclear sites. It is more likely a long running disinformation operation to somehow convince the United States to do the job or a deliberate conditioning of the Israeli and US publics to be supportive if some incident can be arranged to trigger an armed conflict. If one believes the two presidential candidates based on what they said in Monday’s debate, both have more-or-less conceded the point, agreeing that they would support militarily any Israeli attack on Iran. Whether Romney or Obama is actually willing to start a major new war in the Middle East is, of course, impossible to discern.

During the Napoleonic Wars, when it was reported that the French were preparing to invade England, Admiral John Jervis said “I do not say they the French cannot come–I only say they cannot come by sea.” Barring the movement of a regiment of sans culottes across the English Channel by a fleet of Montgolfier balloons, the Jervis comment pretty much summed up the limits to French ambitions as long as Britannia ruled the waves.

A similar bit of military overreach appears to be surrounding the alleged planning by the Israelis to stage an air assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US media and even some Pentagon spokesmen have suggested that Israel cannot do the job alone, but the problem is much larger than that, leading to the question whether Israel can do it at all. Israel has over 400 fighters, but many of them are configured to establish air superiority over an opponent by shooting down opposing aircraft and disabling air defense facilities on the ground. They are fighters supporting ground operations first with a limited secondary capability as bombers.

Israel has no dedicated bomber force but it does have an estimated 125 advanced F-15I and F-16I’s, which have been further enhanced through special avionics installed by the Israel Aircraft Industry to improve performance over the types of terrain and weather conditions prevailing in the Middle East. The planes are able to fly long range missions and very capable in a bombing role but they do have their limitations.

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Peter Symonds

Like the US-led illegal invasion of Iraq, the Obama administration is preparing to launch a war of aggression against Iran. This was the chief crime for which Nazi leaders were tried and convicted at Nuremberg following World War II.

The British-based Guardian newspaper reported Thursday that American diplomats have been lobbying Britain for the use of its military bases on Cyprus as well as US bases on the British territories of Ascension Island in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for war on Iran.

The US request points to a massive military buildup against Iran. The Pentagon has already stationed two aircraft carrier battle groups in or near the Persian Gulf, along with additional minesweepers and a specialised floating base that could be used to launch special forces operations inside Iran. A squadron of advanced F-22 fighters has also been moved to the region.

Access to the bases on Cyprus, Ascension Island and Diego Garcia would significantly boost the ability of the US air force to wage round-the-clock strikes against Iran.

The British government has, to date, rebuffed the Pentagon, significantly pointing out that an unprovoked US attack on Iran could be illegal under international law, as Tehran did not currently represent “a clear and present threat”.

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Stephen Lendman

American crimes of war and against humanity perhaps exceed all other rogue states in history combined. Pound-for-pound, however, Israeli lawlessness matches the world's worst. Long ago, it graduated from a regional menace to a global one. It enforces barbaric occupation harshness. Its war machine threatens and attacks neighbors. It gets away with murder because world powers don't intervene to stop it. It wages intermittent war on Gaza. It murders innocent civilians. It uses illegal depleted uranium, chemical and other weapons. Nuclear missiles and bombs are stockpiled. It plans more war now.

Gazans know they're vulnerable to Cast Lead 2.0. Iran long ago prepared to defend itself if attacked. Rogue Israeli coalition partner unity makes it more likely. Netanyahu and Lieberman represent Israel's worst. They're out-of-control warmongers.

Netanyahu heads Israel's most extremist ever government. He exceeds the worst of Ariel Sharon and previous hardline leaders. He's unfit to serve. He spurns democratic values. He deplores peace. He menacingly threatens war.

Lieberman is an ultranationalist extremist. He represents the worst of Israel's lunatic fringe. Critics call him an embarrassment to legitimate government. He's a modern-day Kananist. Kahane headed Israel's racist Kach Party. In 1988, Israel banned it. It was too extreme to tolerate. In his youth, Lieberman was a Kach Party member. He remains true to its ideological roots.

Israel under Netanyahu/Lieberman assures institutionalized racism in its worst form. Arab hatred is promoted. Rule of law principles and other democratic values are spurned. War for regional dominance is prioritized. As long as these rogues govern Israel, Palestinians face horrific persecution short of total expulsion or outright extermination. But those possibilities can't be ruled out. Other regional states must brace for war. Even if not attacked directly, it may spill across their borders destructively.

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Wikileaks

Starting today, Thursday, 25th October 2012, WikiLeaks begins releasing the ’Detainee Policies’: more than 100 classified or otherwise restricted files from the United States Department of Defense covering the rules and procedures for detainees in U.S. military custody. Over the next month, WikiLeaks will release in chronological order the United States’ military detention policies followed for more than a decade. The documents include the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of detention camps in Iraq and Cuba, interrogation manuals and Fragmentary Orders (FRAGOs) of changes to detainee policies and procedures. A number of the ’Detainee Policies’ relate to Camp Bucca in Iraq, but there are also Department of Defense-wide policies and documents relating to Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and European U.S. Army Prison facilities.

Among the first to be released is the foundation document for Guantánamo Bay ("Camp Delta") – the 2002 Camp Delta SOP manual. The release of the ’Detainee Policies’ marks three years of Camp Delta (Guantánamo Bay) SOP manuals released by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has now released the main Guantánamo Bay operating manuals for 2002, 2003 and 2004. The previously unpublished 2002 manual went on to shape successive years in the Guantánamo Bay prison complex and other U.S. military prisons around the world, such as Abu Ghraib. "This document is of significant historical importance. Guantánamo Bay has become the symbol for systematised human rights abuse in the West with good reason," said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. "But how is it that WikiLeaks has now published three years of Guantánamo Bay operating procedures, but the rest of the world’s press combined has published none?"

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Don Knowland

Pretrial arguments began last week and continued Wednesday in the military commission trial in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba of the alleged 9/11 plotters over the US government’s attempt to suppress any testimony by the defendants on their torture at the hands of the CIA.

The five defendants, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, are charged with war crimes. Prosecutors are asking for the death penalty.

In April, the prosecution filed a motion for a “protective order.” In that motion and a subsequent court filing, the government asked the presiding military judge to exclude from evidence as presumptively “classified” any and all statements by the defendants about their detention and abuse in CIA custody. The request extends to their treatment and conditions since they were transferred to Guantánamo.

The government’s rationale is that because the defendants were “detained and interrogated in the CIA program” of secret detention, torture and abuse, they were “exposed to classified sources, methods, and activities” and therefore must be gagged to avoid revealing what the government did to them.

The reason for the government’s request is nakedly political. It wants to ensure that the public will never hear the defendants’ accounts of the rendition, torture and black site detention to which the CIA subjected them—in short, the US government’s own war crimes. A secondary government motive is to keep the defendants from testifying to possible links between their activities and US intelligence operatives prior to the 9/11 attacks.

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Stephen Lendman

Washington bears full responsibility for waging multiple wars on humanity. It planned, initiated and controls direct and proxy conflicts across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Bani Walid made headlines for three weeks. Genocide threatens its residents. Obama's dirty hands are all over this crime of war and against humanity. Media scoundrels ignore it. More on this below.

America's proxy war on Syria continues. Washington's directly responsible for recruiting, arming, funding and directing Syrian death squads. On October 24, Voice of Russia reported that Russian Armed Forces chief General Nikolai Makarov said:

"The General Staff has information that the militants, who are fighting against Syrian government troops, are armed with the portable air defence systems of various countries, including the Stinger of U.S. production."

Disclaimers notwithstanding, Washington is directly responsible for supplying them. Makarov added:

"The US denies this fact. They say that they did not deliver anything to them (Syrian militants). However, we have reliable information that Syrian militants are armed with foreign portable air defence systems, including U.S. air defence systems."

They didn't arrive out of thin air. Voice of Russia said an "informed Syrian source" said "the US had made a decision to hand over a consignment of MANPADS to (anti-Assad) militants that are fighting against Damascus." Man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) are shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).

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Adnan Al-Daini

The poor die younger and are getting poorer – and we're
happily buying into the propaganda that they somehow
deserve it. (Helen Wakefield/Tanya Gold/The Guardian)

Those who have been successful in society anywhere in the world either in business, the professions, academia or political achievements fall into two categories: either they consider themselves fortunate, or attribute their achievements to their hard work and relentless drive. 

If they belong to the first they will show compassion and concern, and endeavour to be fair in their dealings with those of modest achievement.  Those who belong to the second tend to be dismissive of the economic plight of the poor and vulnerable, and put the entire blame at their door.

Let us put the morality aspect aside for a moment and take a closer look at these two positions to find which one of them is better supported by the facts. - How good is Britain at providing equal opportunities to its citizens? 

An OECD study examines this issue through a measure termed “intergenerational social mobility” defined as:

“[Intergenerational social] mobility reflects the extent to which individuals move up (or down) the social ladder compared with their parents. A society can be deemed more or less mobile depending on whether the link between parents’ and children’s social status as adults is looser or tighter. In a relatively immobile society an individual’s wage, education or occupation tends to be strongly related to those of his/her parents.”

Where does Britain come under the above definition?  The report compares twelve developed OECD countries. Britain comes out as the most socially immobile country, followed closely by Italy and USA.  Denmark has the best intergenerational social mobility, and the two countries closest to Denmark are Australia and Norway.

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John Pilger

She has been praised for standing up to sexism but Australia's prime minister is also rolling back rights

The Guardian's description of Australia's opposition leader Tony Abbott as "neanderthal" is not unreasonable. Misogyny is an Australian blight and a craven reality in political life. But for so many commentators around the world to describe Julia Gillard's attack on Abbott as a "turning point for Australian women" is absurd. Promoted by glass-ceiling feminists with scant interest in the actual politics and actions of their hero, Gillard is the embodiment of the Australian Labor Party machine - a numbers-crunching machine long bereft of principle that has betrayed Australia's most vulnerable people, especially women.

Shortly before Gillard's lauded rant against Abbott, her government forced through legislation that stripped A$100 from the poorest single parents - almost all of them women. Even Labor's own caucus reportedly regarded this as "cruel". But that is nothing compared with Gillard's attacks on Aboriginal people, who remain Australia's dirty secret, suffering preventable diseases such as trachoma (blindness in children), which has been eliminated in much of the developing world, and scourges that hark back to Dickensian England, such as rheumatic heart disease, even leprosy. I have seen Aboriginal homes in which 30 people are forced to live, because the government refuses to build public housing for them. Indigenous young people are incarcerated in Australian prisons at five times the rate of black South Africans during the apartheid era.

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John Pilger

Obedience and servility to the mighty patron finally paid off when Australia was rewarded with a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council

The Australian parliament building reeks of floor polish. The wooden floors shine so virtuously they reflect the cartoon-like portraits of prime ministers, bewigged judges and viceroys. Along the gleaming white, hushed corridors, the walls are hung with Aboriginal art: one painting after another as in a monolithic gallery, divorced from their origins, the irony brutal. The poorest, sickest, most incarcerated people on earth provide a façade for those who oversee the theft of their land and its plunder.

Australia has 40% of the world's uranium, all of it on indigenous land. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just been to India to sell uranium to a government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and whose enemy, Pakistan, is also a non-signatory. The threat of nuclear war between them is constant. Uranium is an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons. Gillard's deal in Delhi formally ends the Australian Labor Party's long-standing policy of denying uranium to countries that reject the NPT's obligation "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament".

Like the people of Japan, Australian Aborigines have experienced the horror of nuclear weapons. During the 1950s, the British government tested atomic bombs at Maralinga in South Australia. The Aboriginal population was not consulted and received scant or no warning, and still suffer the effects. Yami Lester was a boy when he saw the nuclear flash and subsequently went blind. The enduring struggle of Aboriginal people for recognition as human beings has been a fight not only for their land but for what lies beneath it. Since they were granted a status higher than that of sheep - up to 1971, unlike the sheep, they were not counted - many of their modest land rights have been subverted or diminished by governments in Canberra.

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Bill Van Auken

The Obama administration has created a new extra-legal system known as the “disposition matrix” to institutionalize the selection and targeting of enemies of the US state for assassination, according to an article published Wednesday in the Washington Post.

The Post reports that the system is “designed to go beyond existing kill lists,” creating a centralized data base that contains “the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations.”

The data base joins “biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations” with “strategies for taking targets down.” While the article includes among these strategies “extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols,” the reality is that overwhelming preference has been given to assassination by drone strikes.

On the day the article appeared, another drone strike was reported in Pakistan. One of the pilotless aircraft fired two missiles into a house in North Waziristan near the Afghan border, killing a woman and two men and severely wounding two children. Last week, Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, reported that there have been 336 drone attacks on Pakistan over the last eight years, claiming 2,300 victims. Fully 80 percent of those killed, he said, were innocent civilians.

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Bill Van Auken

The killing of four children in a US raid and the disappearance and murder of civilians at the hands of occupation troops have provoked growing anger and protests among the people of Afghanistan.

With the US-led war now in its twelfth year, violence against the country’s population continues to mount. The latest incidents were confirmed by the office of Afghanistan’s puppet president, Hamid Karzai, on Tuesday. The worst of them took place on Sunday in the eastern province of Logar, just south of Kabul.

Citing a report from the provincial governor, Mohammad Iqbal Azizi, a statement from Karzai’s office recounted: “NATO forces carried out an operation on Sunday afternoon to detain two armed militants, but resulted in killing four innocent children who were just grazing animals.”

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) acknowledged Tuesday that civilians may have been killed in the raid. Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, offered “condolences to the families” and said officers would be sent out to “offer a condolence payment and express our deep regret.”

The slaughter of the children in Logar comes just one week after ISAF issued a formal apology for the killing of three other children in an air strike conducted in southern Helmand province’s Nawa district. A teenage girl and two young boys were killed in the October 14 strike, which the occupation command claimed had been directed against “insurgents” planting improvised explosive devises (IED). Witnesses, however, said that only the bodies of the children, who had been collecting firewood, were found at the scene.

According to estimates by the United Nations, the war in Afghanistan killed or wounded more than 578 children in the first six months of 2012. A UN report issued in August found that during the first half of this year, two-thirds of the victims of US and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan were women and children.

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Stephen Lendman

Over a year ago, he knew he had inoperable esophageal cancer. It spread to his tongue, lymph nodes and lungs. It was just a matter of time. On October 22, it took him. His journey to the spirit world began.

In August 2011, he said:

"I'm not going to argue with the Great Mystery. Lakota belief is that death is a change of worlds. And I believe like my dad believed."

"When it's my time to go, it's my time to go. I've told people after I die, I'm coming back as lightning. When it zaps the White House, they'll know it's me."

Earlier he said:

"The Universe which controls all life, has a female and male balance that is prevalent throughout our Sacred Grandmother, the Earth."

"This balance has to be acknowledged and become the determining factor in all of one’s decisions, be they spiritual, social, healthful, educational or economical."

On October 24, he'll be honored in Pine Ridge, SD, the Republic of Lakota. Other gatherings will also celebrate his life and work.

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Ben Schreiner

The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. - Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet

US Imperialism Ever Closer to a Global Military Conflagration: Unimaginable Human Misery, Suffering

With signs of a global economic downturn mounting, US aggression across the Middle East and North Africa ratchets up. Once again, US imperialism stands poised to open the gates of Hell.

According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report released last week, the “risks for a serious global slowdown are alarmingly high.” The report projects the world economy to expand just 3.3 percent this year and 3.6 percent in 2013 — both projections down from the IMF’s July forecast. As Joseph Davis, chief economist at the Vanguard Group, cautioned to the Wall Street Journal, “The odds of a global recession are not fully appreciated.”

Indeed, as the Financial Times reports, the Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery, the Brookings Institution-Financial Times index of the world economy, finds severe problems “in both advanced and emerging markets.” “The global economic recovery,” Brookings’ senior fellow and index creator Eswar Prasad warned, “is on the ropes.”

And, though the IMF continued to peddle the harsh elixir of austerity for the depressed economies of the euro zone periphery, in its latest report the Fund also came to tacitly acknowledge the limits of austerity.

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Bill Van Auken

In their debate on foreign policy Monday night, President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney voiced nearly identical positions in support of war, illegal killings and imperialist intervention across the globe.

With just two weeks until the election, this third and final presidential debate made it clear that the US political establishment is laying the groundwork for new military interventions in the aftermath of November 6, and that the American people will have no means of expressing at the ballot box their opposition to an escalation of global militarism.

While both Obama and Romney threw in empty rhetoric about “nation-building at home” and bringing back “good jobs and rising take-home pay,” the overwhelming theme of this third debate was US imperialism’s determination to utilize its military superiority to counter the decline of American capitalism’s position in the world economy and offset the deepening crisis that began with the Wall Street meltdown of 2008.

In what can only be described as a degrading and filthy political spectacle, both the questions posed by the moderator and the answers provided by the candidates of the two major capitalist parties began with the premise that US imperialism has the unassailable right to defend its interests by inflicting death and destruction on anyone or any country that is deemed an obstacle.

No attempt was made to probe the broader interests of American capitalism underlying the wars, occupations and assassination campaigns that have dominated world affairs over the past decade. The impression was promoted that opposing these policies is beyond the pale of American politics, at once forbidden and futile.

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