Stephen Lendman ■ Noted trends analyst Gerald Celente said it, and it's true. In fact, America's business is war, more war, multiple wars, permanent wars, pillaging one nation after another for wealth, power, and dominance, while homeland needs go begging. America never was and isn't now the "land of the free and home of the brave." In fact, it's become a "Let 'em eat cake" society. [...] The empire never sleeps or tolerates anti-war activism, threatening its quest for unchallengeable "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

PUKE READ: President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder formally announced Holder's intention to resign on Thursday afternoon in a joint and at times emotional appearance at the White House. ● In saluting Holder, the president hailed a close personal friend that he called "the people's lawyer." "Eric has done a superb job," Obama said, as he recited a long list of accomplishments in civil rights, gay rights, sentencing reform, counterterrorism, and crime reductions. For the first time in decades, the president said, both crime and incarceration rates in the U.S. had dropped simultaneously, each by around 10 percent, under Holder's watch.

Stephen Lendman ■ Holder Resigns
Washington Post: Attorney General Eric Holder to step down

Michel Chossudovsky ■ The Criminalization of the United Nations || Under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council, with president Obama chairing the Council session, the United States has called upon the international community to adopt strong measures, at national and international levels, to curtail the recruitment of Islamic State fighters. What is not mentioned in the media reports is that the heads of State and heads of government who have endorsed America’s campaign against the Islamic State, advised by their respective secret services, are fully aware that US intelligence is the unspoken architect of the Islamic State, which is part of a vast network of US supported “jihadist” terrorist entities. Countries are either coerced into supporting the US sponsored resolution or they are complicit in the US terror agenda.

Lawmakers in Britain have approved a motion allowing the country to join the US-led coalition in bombing Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) targets in Iraq. The motion was approved on Friday by 524 votes to 43 following hours of animated debate in the House of Commons. Prior to the vote, Prime Minister David Cameron made an impassioned plea for Britain to join the United States and a coalition of Western and Arab nations in air strikes meant to thwart the ISIL group in Iraq. Cameron told a tense House of Commons that there was no more serious issue than asking the country to devote armed forces to conflict. He repeatedly stressed that no combat troops were planned, but he could barely get through his statement, as lawmakers peppered him with questions about the move.

The former oil tycoon and adversary of president Vladimir Putin has launched a pro-European political platform from exile. ● The former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in jail after challenging the Kremlin, says he would be ready to lead Russia if called upon. Khodorkovsky’s statement, at the launch of an online movement called Open Russia, appears to break his promise to steer clear of politics, which he made after being pardoned by president Vladimir Putin in December.

“I would not be interested in the idea of becoming president of Russia at a time when the country would be developing normally,” he was quoted as saying by Le Monde newspaper. “But if it appeared necessary to overcome the crisis and to carry out constitutional reform, the essence of which would be to redistribute presidential powers in favour of the judiciary, parliament and civil society, then I would be ready to take on this part of the task.” Open Russia is intended to unite pro-European Russians in a bid to challenge Putin’s grip on power. “A minority will be influential if it is organised,” Khodorkovsky said during a ceremony broadcast online from Paris.

Eric Zuesse ■ On 23 September 2014, the Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy announced official civilian slavery, via an obscure press release, headlined “The Government has extended the list of community service under martial law”; and they announced it there, in bureaucratic phrases that seemed crafted so as to be ignored:

In connection with the situation in the east of the country, the Cabinet meeting today amended the procedures for the involvement of able-bodied people in community service under martial law. This was disclosed by Minister for Social Policy Lyudmila Denisova. The Minister said that the existing arrangement was approved in 2011. However, today the document needs to be improved, to meet the current socio-political challenges and necessity of liquidating consequences of possible military aggression.

[...] So, the underlying presumption here seems to be that ‘consent’ is not ‘mandatory’ in order for there to be ‘agreement,’ and that the Government has the right to “enforce” that ‘agreement’. This seems Orwellian, but that’s the way it is. America calls itself a ‘democracy’, and yet now imposes this type of government, and condemns Russia as being not ‘democratic’. So, perhaps the Obama team has been teaching its Ukrainian stooges how to be Orwellian.

Tyler Durden ■ Understanding how the power structure thinks, and how it intentionally manipulates the emotions of the masses, is key to overcoming and rolling back totalitarian ambitions. I have spent the last few posts talking about how instilling fear throughout the general populace is one of their primary tactics. Indeed, to borrow a term from Glenn Greenwald, “fear-manufacturing” has been in overdrive across the Five Eyes nations over the past several weeks. In the UK, we saw it used to convince elderly Scots to overwhelming vote against independence, thus swaying the result decisively to the NO side. In the USA, we have seen it used to drum up support for another pointless war in the Middle East, which will benefit nobody except for the military/intelligence-industrial complex. ■ While these examples are bad enough, nowhere is fear being used in a more clownish and absurd manner to strip the local citizenry of its civil liberties than in Australia. This should come as no surprise, considering that nation’s Prime Minister is a certified raging lunatic. In fact, Tony Abbott is such a little nazi in disguise, I dedicated a post to him back in June titled: Video of the Day – Meet Australia’s Creepy Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

Glenn Greenwald ■ Abbott Gives a Master Class in Exploiting Terrorism Fears to Seize New Powers

Ryan Devereaux ■ Freshly-released CIA documents show how the largest newspapers in the country helped the agency contain a groundbreaking exposé of cocaine trafficking by its Contra proxy forces.

Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism. The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head. These days, Webb is being cast in a more sympathetic light. He’s portrayed heroically in a major motion picture set to premiere nationwide next month. And documents newly released by the CIA provide fresh context to the “Dark Alliance” saga — information that paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time.