Stephen Lendman

Lendman: Bahraini State Terror Continues

Al-Khalifa despots run Bahrain. State terror is official policy. Washington supports it. Generous aid is provided. King Hamad remains a close US ally. Double standard hypocrisy defines America's foreign and domestic agenda.

King Hamad calls peaceful protests "foreign plots." He banned them earlier. Unauthorized public meetings and seminars were prohibited. On October 30, public gatherings were again banned. Authorities call them illegal. Participants face severe harshness. That's how police states operate. Fundamental rights are criminalized. Daily nonviolent protests still continue. Participants brave severe repression. Some end up dead.

Bahrainis want democratic change. They want popularly elected leaders. They want despotic monarchal rule, ruthless persecution, widespread corruption, and Shia discrimination ended. For many months, they've braved tear gas, beatings, rubber bullets, live fire, arrests, torture, imprisonments, and disappearances. They won't quit. The price of freedom is high.

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Paul Craig Roberts

In the Western world truth no longer has any meaning. It its place stands agenda.

Agenda is all important, because it is the way Washington achieves hegemony over the world and the American people. 9/11 was the “new Pearl Harbor” that the neoconservatives declared to be necessary for their planned wars against Muslim countries. For the neoconservatives to go forward with their agenda, it was necessary for Americans to be connected to the agenda.

President George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neil, said that prior to 9/11 the first cabinet meeting was about the need to invade Iraq.

9/11 was initially blamed on Afghanistan, and the blame was later shifted to Iraq. Washington’s mobilization against Afghanistan was in place prior to 9/11. The George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) occurred on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Every military person knows that it is not possible to have mobilization for invading a country half way around the world ready in three weeks.

The Orwellian “PATRIOT Act” is another example of planning prior to the event. This vast police state measure could not possibly have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. The bill was already written, sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity. Why? Who wrote it? Why has there been no media investigation of the advanced preparation of this police state legislation?

Evidence that responses to an event were planned prior to what the government said was a surprise event does suggest that the event was engineered to drive an agenda that was already on the books.

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Patrick Martin

SOS: Participants in a rally in Salem. Bargaining broke down over a state
proposal that could cut in half the number of home care workers eligible
for employer-provided health coverage. (Photo: nwlaborpress.org)

...Democrats, Republicans prepare major cuts in workers’ wages, benefits

Four days before the New Year triggers a series of tax increases and budget cuts, both the Obama administration and congressional leaders are whipping up a crisis atmosphere to justify attacks on the social benefits and living standards of working people.

Whether or not there is a last-minute deal to postpone some elements of the so-called fiscal cliff, the outcome of the political charade in Washington is not in doubt. The political representatives of the super-rich, Democrats and Republicans alike, are orchestrating events to insure that the main burden of the crisis falls on those least able to defend themselves, including the unemployed, the sick, the elderly and the poor.

All the proposals from the Obama administration and the Republican leadership to address the “fiscal cliff,” as measures that could take effect at the New Year, are premised on an historic attack on social programs that benefit the working class.

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