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.

More »

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.

More »

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.

More »

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.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

God help them if Obama and Romney ever had to participate in a real debate about a real issue at the Oxford Union. They would be massacred.

The “debates” revealed that not only the candidates but also the entire country is completely tuned out to every real problem and dangerous development. For example, you would never know that US citizens can now be imprisoned and executed without due process. All that is required to terminate the liberty and life of an American citizen by his own government is an unaccountable decision somewhere in the executive branch.

No doubt that Americans, if they think of this at all, believe that it will only happen to terrorists who deserve it. But as no evidence or due process is required, how would we know that it only happens to terrorists? Can we really trust a government that has started wars in 7 countries on the basis of falsehoods? If the US government will lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to invade a country, why won’t it lie about who is a terrorist?

America needs a debate about how we can be made more safe by removing the Constitutional protection of due process. If the power of government is not limited by the Constitution, are we ruled by Caesar? The Founding Fathers did not think we could trust a caesar with our safety? What has changed that we can now trust a caesar?

More »

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.

More »

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.

More »

Susanne Posel

As our Constitutional Republic descends into a total Fascist Dictatorship, there is a clear emergence of a police state to facilitate the instillation of this incredible takeover. Americans are monitored at every point of their existence; surfing the internet, speaking on the phone, text messages, emails, social media routines, CCTV cameras on every street corner, TSA internal checkpoints, Stasi networks through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) See Something, Say Something campaign. And the list goes on and on . . .

Coinciding with the severe restriction on our freedoms afforded us by our Constitution; the US government is amassing unmistakable amounts of armory designed for protection against an unknown threat. The DHS have acquired an estimated 2,500 heavily armored vehicles under the cover of Police Rescue.

More ammunition has been solicited by the DHS. Within the next 4 years, they expect to acquire 200,000 million rounds of .223 rifle bullets.

For training snipers, DHS have ordered two types of .308 caliber rounds – blanks and 168 grain hollow point boat tail ammunition. This new purchase adds to the 1.8 billion rounds of ammunition they have solicited for months in preparation for – something.

The amount of ammunition purchased by the federal government is estimated at more than 1 billion rounds in 2012 as well as riot gear, bulletproof checkpoint outposts equipped with red and green stoplights, human shaped paper targets for practice – not to mention the LRADs and other crowd control and containment equipment.

More »

Wayne Madsen

Wayne Madsen Report has discovered CIA files that document the agency’s connections to institutions and individuals figuring prominently in the lives of Barack Obama and his mother, father, grandmother, and stepfather.

President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965.

Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.

Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960 Reuters report from London.

The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.

More »

James Cogan

Australia was elected last Friday by 140 of the 193 member-states to a temporary seat on the UN’s 15-member Security Council. The vote was held after a four-year campaign by the Australian Labor government against rival bids by Finland and Luxemburg. The decision ensures that Washington, which unquestionably played the major role in lining up the necessary votes for Australia, will have a vocal advocate for US foreign policy on the Security Council over the next two years.

From outside the Security Council, the Gillard government played a significant role in drumming up support for the no-fly zone against Libya in 2011, which was exploited by the US and the NATO powers to bombard the country and bring about the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

In her official statement hailing the vote, Prime Minister Julia Gillard wasted no time signalling the pro-US agenda that Australia will aggressively advocate once it takes its seat at the beginning of 2013. She made clear that Australia would insist that the UN “deal with the scourge of [nuclear] proliferation in our world, and particularly the circumstances in Iran and North Korea.”

Gillard’s speech to the UN General Assembly on September 26 echoed US and Israeli warnings that time was running out for Iran to answer the myriad unproven allegations about its nuclear programs. The Australian government is already supporting crippling economic sanctions against the country, and if the US does attack, Australia will undoubtedly back yet another illegal US-led war, this time from inside the UN Security Council.

More »

Gilad Atzmon

The recent attack on Free Gaza’s Greta Berlin and Colonel Ann Wright suggests that we have crossed a red line -- Jewish domination within the Palestinian solidarity movement belongs to the past. We are now, it seems, under Zionist occupation, and we are subject to all the symptoms of Israeli abuse and Zionist brutality.

The expulsions - The exclusions and the cleansings that are inherent within Zionism, Israeli and Jewish politics, are now alive and kicking within the Palestinian solidarity movement itself. On a daily basis we are notified about more and more people who ‘must be’ expelled from the ‘movement’: earlier this year we learned that the Palestinian poet and writer Nahida Izzat had first been harassed and later expelled from her local Palestinian solidarity group by a Liverpool Jewish activists' gang. Next, Dr Francis Clark Lowes, former Chairman of the UK PSC was expelled from the organisation, for allegedly being an ‘Anti Semite’ and a ‘holocaust denier’. Norman Finkelstein, probably the leading pro Palestinian Jewish scholar, has also been subjected to repeated smears and attempts at character assassination for voicing some legitimate criticisms re BDS being a cult, and recently, the greatly admired Greta Berlin, co-founder of Free Gaza, has also been subjected to harassment and abuse in the last few weeks. Berlin was labeled 'an anti Semite' and 'a Holocaust Denier' -- and yet, up until the present time, there has not been a shred of evidence provided by her detractors to support such accusations. And now, the respected peace activist Colonel Ann Wright has also been 'purged', and expelled from the current attempt to break the siege on Gaza -- simply for being associated with Mrs Berlin. The pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim is also subject to a BDS boycott. And six months ago I too, faced a call for a disavowal -- by people who were foolish enough to confess that they had not even read a single line of my work.

The message here is clear – some elements within the Palestinian solidarity movement have obviously adopted the most repellent and brutal Zionist symptoms, and we are now engaged, caught up in, and beset by a sinister series of expulsions, purges, crude witch hunts, exclusions, smears, character defamations and cleansings.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Washington's war on Libya rages. Fighting didn't stop after NATO said its seven-month 2011 "mission" ended. Ravaging a nonbelligerent country wasn't good enough.

Occupation harshness inflicts more pain. Jamahiriya Green Resistance is strong. Its struggle continues. It won't stop until Libya regains freedom. Loyalists want no part of NATO control, puppet leaders, imperial plundering, and ordinary Libyans used and abused.

Frequent freedom fights erupt. Tribes are involved. Local militias have their own agenda. Insurgents battle each other and Green Resistance for control. Government forces serve Washington and key NATO partners.

Since early October, Bani Walid's been besieged. Thousands of militiamen are involved. Food, medical supplies, fuel and other essentials are in short supply. Armed men block vehicles with medical and other essential supplies from entering.

Residential neighborhoods are attacked. Nearby villages were looted and burned. Libya's so-called General National Congress (GNC) approved the assault. Puppet rulers want residents to hand over individuals allegedly responsible for killing Omran Shaaban. He's an insurgent involved in Gaddafi's capture and death.

More »

Wendy McElroy

America's mainstream media does not seem to see the children victimized by American drone attacks. The West still tolerates the wounding and murder of children when it is done by the United States in the name of the war on terror.

Some news stories break your heart. On October 9, in Pakistan, 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot twice in the head by Taliban gunmen. She is being treated in a hospital in Birmingham, England, where she was moved for specialized care and personal safety. Doctors say they expect a “good recovery.”

Malala was targeted for assassination because of her prominent role in promoting education for girls in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan, which has served as a base for the Taliban. Several times, as power flowed back and forth, the Taliban outlawed the education of girls in the Swat.

Malala became prominent in 2009, at 11 years old, when she wrote a series of blog posts for the BBC in which she chronicled life under the Taliban and pleaded for peace.

More »

Robert S. Dotson, M.D.

■ “Mitt Romney is a wolf in a wolf’s clothing. Barack Obama is a wolf in a sheep’s clothing, but they both essentially have the same agenda.” – Jill Stein
■ “Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” – George Carlin
■ “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of controversy.” — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, remarks at the 2010 Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties prior to passage of PPACA

October has brought the mini-series that accompanies our quadrennial exercise in faux democracy, the Presidential Debates. As has been usual for many decades, the public was entertained by carefully vetted corporatist representatives of War Party A and War Party B via the televised game show format that is sold as “serious debate” here at the End of Empire. Nothing illustrated the silliness and irrelevance of such spectacle better than the inane exchanges between Obama and Romney concerning healthcare. The charade was played out yet again when the Vice Presidential candidates, Biden and Ryan, performed in another nondebate on October 11th.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, aka Obamacare, aka Romneycare or, most accurately, Obamneycare) is the 21st century poster child for social legislation in our corporatist state. Despite its origins, Obamneycare is simply another hand-out to the ruling oligarchy. In true New Speak fashion, despite the title patients will not be protected nor will healthcare become “affordable”.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

In the guest section there is a new contribution by Dr. Robert S. Dotson. He points out that Obamneycare is two versions of the same thing. A person has to be gullible and uninformed to believe the claims of Obama and Romney that their replacements for Medicare will save money and improve care. What the schemes do is convert public monies into private profits.

The exploding costs described by Dr. Dotson and the rising profits for private corporations are paid for by reducing health care. For example, Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York, writing in Investors Business Daily reports that “On Oct. 1, the Obama administration started awarding bonus points to hospitals that spend the least on elderly patients.” The result will be fewer knee and hip replacements, angioplasty, bypass surgery, and cataract operations. These procedures transformed aging by allowing the elderly, who formerly languished in wheelchairs and nursing homes, to lead active lives.

Obamacare rolls back the clock. “By cutting $716 billion from future Medicare funding over the next decade and rewarding the hospitals that spend the least on seniors, the Obama health law will make these procedures hard to get and less safe.” Doctors will be paid less to treat a senior on Medicare than to treat someone on Medicaid, a poverty program that is not financed by the payroll tax. McCaughry reports that doctors will be paid only one-third as much for treating Medicare patients as for treating a patient with subsidized private insurance and that Obamacare means that hospitals will have $247 billion less over the next decade to care for the same number of seniors.

According to McCaughey, prior to Obama raiding Medicare in order to subsidize the price of health policies sold by private insurance companies, Medicare was already paying hospitals only 91 cents for every dollar of care provided. The way Obamacare saves money is by cutting back care for the elderly and shortening their lives. As I pointed out in my last article, Obamacare is a death panel.

More »