Philip Giraldi

The choice for the voter comes down to how one prefers to see worldwide chaos and the death of the Constitution develop. It would be in heavy doses wrapped in the flag with Romney, while Obama would take pains to hide what he is doing as he marches down what is pretty much the same road.

Many Americans are rightly disgusted by the non-choice they are offered in the presidential race every four years. This year is no different despite the serious problems that the United States faces at home and abroad. Mitt Romney has no actual plan to fix the economy, and the record of President Barack Obama over the past four years speaks for itself. Romney is a big-government Republican, while Obama is an even-bigger-government Democrat. Either will increase the deficit to the bankruptcy point; Romney through more spending on arms, soldiers, and wars, Obama with a sorely needed health-care program that will break the bank because it was created in collusion with the health-care and insurance industries and makes no effort to limit costs.

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Stephen Lendman

A previous article discussed what perhaps is the most perilous time in world history. American-led Western societies are waging war on humanity.

Imperial war is a way of life. Social democracies are being eliminated. Freedom is on the chopping block to be crushed. Elections are meaningless and farcical. America's are the worst. They mock legitimacy. Money power controls them. It runs the country and most societies. People have no say. They're ill-served and stomped on by governments in bed with corporatist rogues.

Media scoundrels serve wealth and power interests. Managed news misinformation is featured. Former Wall Street Journal writer Greg Jaffe now writes on military issues for the Washington Post. His latest article calls the world "safer." Measured by most relevant statistics, he says, America and the world "have never been safer." No legitimate journalist would claim it. No respectable editor would publish it. At a time Western nations wage permanent war, crack down repressively against dissent, and inflict unprincipled hardships on people, Jaffe claims "global statistics point undeniably toward progress in achieving greater peace and stability." He credits massive military spending. He advocates "peace through strength." He wants more of the same at a time America spends more than the rest of the world combined.

Unprincipled amounts of dollars devoted to foreign and domestic militarism make everyone less safe. Humanity may be destroyed to save it. Nuclear war is possible. The Middle East cauldron could erupt in mushroom-shaped cloud destruction. Nuclear winter could follow. When America and other nuclear powers consider these type weapons king-sized hand grenades, the worst of all outcomes is possible.

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Justin Raimondo

Patras could be anywhere. Patras could be where you are.
Patras could be what your future looks like. Ready for it?

All the themes of incipient fascism are present, to some degree, in our present-day political culture.

Here in America we have only just begun to feel the social and political effects of the worldwide economic crisis: rising unemployment, a wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures, and a general contraction in economic activity. State and local governments are imposing austerity measures, and the federal government faces a “fiscal cliff” that may be much steeper than anyone now imagines. In Europe, however, they are already halfway down into the abyss, with Greece falling faster and harder — and several southern European countries not too far behind.

The response of governments throughout the continent has been a regime of “austerity” designed to reduce deficits piled up as a result of many decades of extravagance: populations which have come to expect government subsidies as their just due are being subjected to draconian budget cuts, and the social and political structures built up since the end of the second world war are in danger of collapse. The decline and probable fall of the euro augurs worse to come, with the spillover effect threatening us here in the US.

The last worldwide economic depression led to the rise of national socialism in Germany, fascism in Italy, and ultimately to a devastating global conflict that killed millions: could it happen again?

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Paul Craig Roberts

“He who casts a vote decides nothing. He who counts the vote decides everything.” ~ Joseph Stalin

Whether or not he said it, Stalin’s quote has entered into folklore. For a vote to mean anything, those counting the ballots must have a greater respect for the integrity of democracy than they have lust for power. Since Stalin’s time, the technology has changed.

With electronic voting machines, which leave no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary software, the count can be decided before the vote. Those who control the electronics can simply program voting machines to elect the candidate they want to win. Electronic voting is not transparent. When you vote electronically, you do not know for whom you are voting. Only the machine knows.

According to most polls, the race for the White House is too-close-to-call. History has shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation for a clear winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important, the divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner, and the stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those who stole the election can easily put on TV enough experts to explain that the divergence between the exit polls and the vote count is not statistically significant or is because women or racial minorities or members of one party were disproportionately questioned in exit polls. There have been recent reports that, because of costs, exit polls in the 2012 presidential election will no longer be conducted on the usual comprehensive basis in order to save money. If the reports are correct, no check remains on election theft.

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Stephen Lendman

Washington wages direct and proxy wars dirty. Favored allies are cold-blooded killers. Cutthroats are America's favorites. The more vicious the better. America's so-called responsibility to protect (R2P) is a license to brutalize and kill. Guns for hire willing to commit unspeakable crimes for a buck are recruited, armed, funded, trained, and deployed to commit the most heinous ones imaginable. Nothing too gruesome is out of bounds. Killing goes on daily like sport. Massacres are strategically timed. Last June, death squads murdered over 100 Houla civilians. They were executed in cold blood. Children were slaughtered like adults. Pro-government loyalists were targeted. Assad was wrongfully blamed for terrorist killings and atrocities. It wasn't the first time or last. Weeks later, death squads murdered dozens of Treimseh civilians. Assad was again blamed. Western and UN Human Rights Council reports were fabricated. Media scoundrels repeated them like gospel. Facts don't interfere with propaganda. It's standard policy.

Last March, a rare exception reported accurately. Der Spiegel discussed the "The Burial Brigade of Homs." An insurgent "executioner" said

he and comrades "kill in the name of the Syrian revolution. They leave torture (to) the so-called interrogation brigade...." "They do the ugly work." He believes in violence, he explained. He "cut the throats of four men." He machine-gunned many more. Executions happen regularly, he said.

Assad loyalists are targeted, brutalized and murdered. Women and children aren't spared. Der Spiegel's "executioner" article explained. The publication said little more by way of follow-up.

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Stephen Lendman

For years, America has been on a fast track to tyranny. Duopoly power runs things repressively. Government of, by, and for the people never existed and doesn't now. Homeland repression is policy. Police state laws target resisters. Elections are farcical, rigged, and illegitimate. People have no say. Corporate controlled electronic voting machines decide for them. Money power is firmly in charge. Democracy is illusory, not real.

Corporate/party boss-run Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) members exclude alternative voices. Money power operates secretly with no public oversight. A sham process repeats each electoral cycle.

On October 16, Green Party presidential and vice presidential candidates learned firsthand. Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala were arrested, detained, and held handcuffed uncomfortably to metal chairs in a remote police warehouse for hours. They were charged with "obstructing traffic." None at the time was visible. That's how tyranny works. Challenging authority risks prison or worse. Many are tortured and abused. Some end up dead. Obama appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. He decides who lives or dies. Romney won't change a thing. No matter who wins, expect police state America to be more repressive than ever post-election.

Alternative party presidential candidates risk arrest for showing up to watch debates. Participation is out of the question. If presidential challengers can be arrested and abused, what chance have ordinary people. Step out of line and expect the worst. Stein learned firsthand a second time. Her web site explained. She supports activists opposing the environmentally destructive Keystone XL (KXL) project. More about it below.

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Gilad Atzmon

Peter Jenkins, Britain’s former representative on the International Atomic Energy Agency, has told the debating union at Warwick University that a ‘just war’ is not a Jewish notion. Jenkins was obviously telling the truth but the Zionist Jewish Chronicle (JC) is not happy.

The retired Foreign Office diplomat, speaking in a debate on nuclear proliferation in Iran, said: “Israelis don’t practise an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, they practise ten eyes for an eye and ten teeth for a tooth.” He also added that “the idea that a just war requires the use of force to be proportionate seems to be a Christian notion and not a Jewish notion.”

The JC reported this week that the remark prompted the Zionist Federation opposition speaker Jonathan Sacerdoti to call out “shame”.

Sacerdoti spoke to the audience in a capacity of "a son of a Holocaust survivor", he said “I suggest that the speech that we heard first, laced with its subtle attempts at antisemitism, masked behind polite diplomatic chatter is exactly the problem in this debate… this is not a Jewish issue, this is not an Israel issue, this is a worldwide issue.” I actually agree with Sacerdoti -Zionist madness is the biggest threat to world peace. it is not just a Jewish issue, it is not an Israel issue, it is a worldwide issue, it is a universal concern.

Yet, I am slightly perplexed, why is telling the truth about Jewish culture anti-Semitic? Is not the Old Testament far more violent than any Quentin Tarantino film? Needless to mention the Jewish State has, also managed to buy itself quite a reputation by now.

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William T. Hathaway

Endless war … endless despair. America's military juggernaut continues to roll, crushing multitudes of soft, breathing human beings, creating more counter-violence at every turn, lumbering toward annihilation. We finally elect a leader who pledges to bring peace, and he morphs before our incredulous eyes into a war president, shifting the fighting onto mercenaries and local soldiers and claiming that's peace. We're still killing thousands of people, manipulating other nations, modernizing our nuclear weapons, forcing our financial will around the world, and jailing dissenters at home. Fortress America continues to expand globally as prison, sweatshop, and fire base. After all our years trying to change this country, how could we end up with this?

To answer this question and avoid falling into catatonic despondency or self-destructive rage, it might help to review the history of the age we live in. More than revolution or reform, what has shaped our times most strongly is revanchism. Rolling back change and reinstating the old order has been the dominant current.

This began immediately after the Russian Revolution, when the USA, Britain, France, and Japan sent in soldiers to try to reverse it. Although they failed, this marked the beginning of 70 years of military and economic warfare. The capitalist powers were so threatened by communism that they pulled out all the stops to overthrow it, unleashing an offensive of sabotage, espionage, and armed conflict that killed millions in Korea and Vietnam, brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and eventually brought the Soviet government to its knees. If communism hadn’t been under this relentless attack, it might have developed into a much different system.

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Chris Floyd

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.

In other words, it involves expanding and varying the menu of arbitrary murder, mixing the blunderbuss of drone blasts and night raids with more selective "bullet-in-the-brain," "bomb-in-the-car-engine," "polonium-in-the-pea-soup," and "doping-and-defenestration" approaches. Arbitrary murder by unaccountable elites and their spies, paid for by money taken from ordinary citizens who have no say in and no knowledge of what is being done in their names (and who will be the victims of the inevitable blowback from the state terror and murder campaign): this is now being "codified," officially, formally, as the American way.

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Stephen Lendman

Perhaps one day they'll arrive over a neighborhood near you. Drones are becoming America's weapon of choice. Domestically so far, they're used only for eyes in the sky spying. Big Brother wants to watch everyone all the time. Don't bet against eyes not being weaponized one day to punish as well as spy. That's how rogue states operate.

America is by far the worst and most dangerous. Waging war on humanity is policy. Imagine living in a country run by officials who think war is good. The more the better. Permanent ones. Wage them while pretending it's done for peace. Few question why America is always at war somewhere. Scant attention is paid to the trillions of dollars spent at the expense of vital domestic needs gone begging.

Militarism is prioritized. Budgets are virtually open-ended. America's duopoly assures it. Imagine policy makers deciding on which country they'll ravage next. It makes no difference whether Obama or Romney takes charge. Both major parties are in lockstep on all issues mattering most. Corporate empowerment, serving America's 1%, cracking down on resisters, and imperial dominance top their list. Hell hath no fury like an out-of-control hegemon. If analyzed on a couch, it would be called sociopathic or worse.

A Washington Post Special Report discussed America's permanent war agenda. A previous article discussed Obama's Disposition Matrix. It called it elevating Murder, Inc. to a higher level. Anyone can be targeted anywhere in the world for any reason or none at all. Obama has final kill list authority. John Brennan is his counterterrorism maestro of murder. His "playbook" makes up rules as he writes them. He designates kill targets. He calls it a strategy to persist 'till the end of time.

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Wayne Madsen

A match made in hell: Mormonism and Zionism

A Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan administration would bring back to American foreign and domestic policy all the worst elements of the Bush administration, along with a greater degree of militarism, home-grown fascism, and a greater likelihood of war with such countries as Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, China, and Russia.

In fact, the most alarming aspect of a Romney administration would be the appointment of members of the Mormon Latter Day Saints Church, a sect that is not considered Christian by most traditional Christian denominations, to senior government positions.

Mormons believe in the imminent apocalypse and would have no problem pushing the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation as a fulfillment of their prophecies of a band of 19th-century con-men who convinced their followers that Jesus ministered in North America and that the Garden of Eden was located in what is now the state of Missouri.

The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, believed that one day the United States would become a theocratic nation run by the Mormon Church. Romney, a former Mormon missionary and bishop of the sect, has referred to Smith’s prophecy as “not official church doctrine,” but he has refused to condemn it outright.

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