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  • InI 12:59 on December 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Barack Obama, , , , ,   

    Ten Thoughts About Julian Assange and WikiLeaks By Andy Worthington 

    14 December, 2010 — Andy Worthington

    1.

    Since its founding in December 2006, WikiLeaks, which was established as, essentially, a secure information clearing house for whistleblowers around the world to provide sensitive information, some of which would then be released to the public, and which was reportedly set up by “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa,” has declared that its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.” From the release of a single document in December 2006 — a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, which “had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China,” and which “called for the execution of government officials by hiring ‘criminals’ as hit men” — WikiLeaks has received millions of documents, and has, amongst other achievements, exposed corruption in Kenya, made available the Standard Operating Procedure for Guantánamo from 2003 and 2004 (and compared the changes), attacked Scientology, exposed Sarah Palin’s emails, and published a membership list of Britain’s far-right BNP.

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  • InI 11:31 on September 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , , , , ,   

    VTJP Palestine/Israel Newslinks 4 September, 2010: The 2010 Palestine Peace talks – a Sylvester Stallone remake? 

    4 September, 2010 — VTJP

    News

    International Middle East Media Center

    Barghouthi: “Construction Continues In Dozens of Settlements”
    IMEMC – 4 Sep 2010 – Saturday September 04, 2010 – 18:10, Palestinian Legislator, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, stated that while Israel is heading to peace talks with the Palestinians, its government continues its illegal settlement activities in the occupied West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem.

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  • InI 12:12 on August 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , ,   

    CounterCurrents Newsletter 16 August, 2010: Obama’s Gulf Swim Was Fake 

    16 August, 2010 — CounterCurrents

    Press Release
    http://www.countercurrents.org/pressrelease.htm

    Action Alert
    http://www.countercurrents.org/actionalert.htm

    Obama’s Gulf Swim Was Fake
     By Stephen Lendman

    On August 15, AP reported that Obama gave his “personal assurances of (the) Gulf’s safety,” saying: “Beaches all along the Gulf Coast are clean, they are safe, and they are open for business. He lied.Obama and his daughter, Sasha, swam in a private Panama City Beach, FL beach off Alligator Point in St. Andrew Bay, not part of the Gulf
    http://www.countercurrents.org/lendman160810.htm

    Mumbai Oil Spill: Key Issues- Action Required
    By Steven L D’ Souza

    The collision between MSC Chitra and MV Khalija III on August 7 th 2010, near Prongs Light, a lighthouse off the coast of Mumbai, between JNPT and Mumbai ports , two of the nation’s busiest ports that handle nearly 40% of sea bound traffic, and 75%(JNPT) of container traffic, raises many key issues that need to be addressed as well as call for some immediate as well as long term remedial action
    http://www.countercurrents.org/dsouza160810.htm

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  • InI 10:20 on August 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama,   

    Military Resistance 8H7 9 August, 2010: Blinding Flashes 

    9 August, 2010 — Military Project

    Military Resistance 8H7.pdf

    A Blinding Flash Of The Obvious #2:
    “American Public Support For The Afghan War And US President Barack Obama’s Handing Of The Conflict Has Hit An All-Time Low”

    MilitaryResistance8H7.jpg
     

  • The Editor 13:18 on July 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , , , , ,   

    Information Clearing House Newsletter 26 July, 2010: US Marines Sanitised Bloodbath 

    26 July, 2010 — Information Clearing House

    Afghanistan War Logs:
    Massive Leak of Secret Files Exposes Truth of Occupation

    By Nick Davies and David Leigh

    Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops · Covert unit hunts leaders for ‘kill or capture’ · Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato · Read the Guardian’s full war logs investigation
    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26016.htm

    How US Marines Sanitised Record of Bloodbath

    By Declan Walsh

    War logs show how marines gave cleaned up accounts of incident in which they killed 19 civilians.
    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26024.htm

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  • InI 18:19 on January 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, ,   

    Haiti’s Robespierre: The Tragedy of Toussaint L’Ouverture By BJÖRN KUMM 

    19 January, 2010

    Toussaint.jpgWhile the mass graves are being filled up in Haiti and international opinion devotes some fleeting moments of attention to this unhappy nation, all we hear about is misery, poverty, corruption, chaos. This of course was to be expected. Haiti is seen as simply another “failed state” one can only feel sorry for and which will need international intervention. Few people remember – if they ever knew – that Haiti has a glorious past. It was the people of Haiti who two hundred years ago made the first serious attempt to turn the lofty principles of the French into palpable reality.

    Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Haiti, in those days Saint Domingue, was France’s richest colony. Haiti’s sugar-plantations and Haiti’s African slaves provided the economic backbone also of revolutionary France. After the fall of the Bastille, both Haiti’s white slave-owners and emancipated Haitian mulattoes sent representatives to the revolutionary convention in Paris. Haiti’s slave and plantation owners were relieved that the French monarchy and French commercial controls had collapsed which opened up an interesting new market in neighboring United States. Haiti’s mulattoes were enthralled by French revolutionary principles. A Haitian mulatto leader, Lacombe, insisted that freedom, brotherhood and equality were principles which ought to be observed also in Haiti. He was immediately hanged by irate French slave owners.

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  • InI 17:54 on December 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , , ,   

    Obama's War: Why is the Largest Military Machine on the Planet Unable to Defeat the Resistance in Afghanistan By Sara Flounders 

    2 December, 2009 — Global Research – Workers World – 2009-11-15

    Just how powerful is the U.S. military today?

    Why is the largest military machine on the planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan, in a war that has lasted longer than World War II or Vietnam ?

    Afghanistan ranks among the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world today. It has one of the shortest life expectancy rates, highest infant mortality rates and lowest rates of literacy.

    The total U.S. military budget has more than doubled from the beginning of this war in 2001 to the $680 billion budget signed by President Barack Obama Oct. 28. The U.S. military budget today is larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. The U.S. arsenal has the most advanced high-tech weapons.

    The funds and troop commitment to Afghanistan have grown with every year of occupation. Last January another 20,000 troops were sent; now there is intense pressure on President Obama to add an additional 40,000 troops. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. More than three times as many forces are currently in Afghanistan when NATO forces and military contractors are counted.

    Eight years ago, after an initial massive air bombardment and a quick, brutal invasion, every voice in the media was effusive with assurances that Afghanistan would be quickly transformed and modernized, and the women of Afghanistan liberated. There were assurances of schools, roads, potable water, health care, thriving industry and Western-style “democracy.” A new Marshall Plan was in store.

    Was it only due to racist and callous disregard that none of this happened?

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    • The Editor 18:51 on December 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      The reason? Because occupying Afghanistan and utilizing the country as part of a string of ‘forward’ bases that are designed to push the Empire East, is the objective, not ‘winning the war’. The ‘war’ is of course an economic necessity for the US’s warfare state. So longer it goes on, the more money the combined military/media/security/energy complex makes. This is the reason there are around three times as many Private Military Contractors as there are soldiers of the various barbarian states.

      War and preparing for one is an economic necessity for imperialism. The real question to ask is why are we, the citizens of Empire not putting a stop to it? (I think the answer is in the question.)

      Bill

  • InI 09:41 on August 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, ,   

    Joe Bageant: Obama's Fight for Reform 

    26 August, 2009 — Joe Bageant

    Lay off the footwork and throw a punch!

    Almost a year after the Great Giddy Swarming of the Obamians last November, some of the revelers are waking up with one booger of a hangover. And they are asking themselves, ‘What were we thinking when we had that tenth drink of Democratic Party Kool-Aid?’ It was a clear cut case of seduction and date rape. The spike in the drink was, of course, hope. Poor pathetic American liberals. Forever doomed to be naive freshmen at the senior beer bash.

    We try to take comfort in that we won’t have to listen to or look at John McCain or Sarah Palin for four years, except in the American Legion Magazine and in Palin’s case, as a centerfold in the next issue of Middle Aged Skin. OK, we really are grateful. But could the pathetic McCain-Palin clown act possibly have created much more havoc than what we are seeing?

    Case in point: I got up this morning to the headline: ‘Social Security Checks to Shrink.’ Surely this makes a slew of Generation Xers cackle with glee. But some of us are trying to stay drunk on that check until our date with a heart attack or one of those death panels the Republicans are yammering about. Since January I’ve been telling my wife we could expect Social Security to start shrinking. Ever the concerned citizen, she replies ‘Can’t you find another jag to get on? Eight months for god sake!’

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  • InI 16:18 on August 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , , , , , , , , ,   

    Barack Obama, front man for the ‘man’ By William Bowles 

    15 August 2009 — williambowles.info

    I contend that ever since the first slave ship left the shores of Africa, the ideology of racism has been central to the success of capitalism. Without it and the wealth that slavery produced, Europe and its bastard offspring, the United States, would never have accumulated the capital that made today’s world possible. And if the corrosive and utterly destructive effects of the ideology of racism were not apparent to you before the election of Barack ‘Hope & Change’ Obama, then surely by now they should be, and especially its effects on the ‘left’.

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  • InI 15:56 on August 14, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , ,   

    Tons of Imperial Fun: Hellfire Hillary Pours Oil on Somalia's Fire By Chris Floyd 

    14 August, 2009 — Atlantic Free Press

    SomaliaThere is apparently no path blazed by George W. Bush that Barack Obama will not eagerly follow. Surges, assassinations, indefinite detention, defense of torture, senseless wars and rampant militarism — in just a few short months, we’ve seen it all.

    To this dismaying record of complicity and continuity, we can add an increasing direct involvement in the horrific, hydra-headed conflict in Somalia, whose latest round of fiery hell was instigated by the American-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in late 2006. Under Bush, U.S. forces were deeply and directly enmeshed in the murderous action, dropping bombs on fleeing refugees, ‘renditioning’ other refugees to the tender mercies of Ethiopia’s notorious prisons, and even sending in death squads to clean up after missile strikes and bombings. (For background, see ‘Silent Surge: Bipartisan Terror War Intensifies in Somalia.’)

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  • InI 06:25 on August 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Barack Obama, , , , , , ,   

    Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army By Rick Rozoff 

    9 August, 2009 — Stop NATO

    Two months before the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of NATO’s first-ever ground war the world is witness to a 21st Century armed conflict without end waged by the largest military coalition in history.

    With recent announcements that troops from such diverse nations as Colombia, Mongolia, Armenia, Japan, South Korea, Ukraine and Montenegro are to or may join those of some 45 other countries serving under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), there will soon be military personnel from fifty nations on five continents and in the Middle East serving under a unified command structure.

    Never before have soldiers from so many states served in the same war theater, much less the same country.

    By way of comparison, there were twenty six (higher, and looser, estimates go as high as 34) national contingents in the so-called coalition of the willing in Iraq as of 2006. In the interim between now and then troops from all contributing nations but the United States and Great Britain have been withdrawn and in most cases redeployed to Afghanistan.

    In 1999 NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington, D.C. welcomed the first expansion of the world’s only military bloc in the post-Cold War era, absorbing former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, in the course of conducting NATO’s first war, the relentless 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia, Operation Allied Force.

    Two years later, after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., NATO activated its Article 5 – “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” – for the first time in the bloc’s history and launched a number of operations from deploying German AWACS to patrol the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. to launching Operation Active Endeavor, a naval surveillance and interdiction program throughout the Mediterranean Sea which continues to this day.

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  • InI 06:25 on August 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Barack Obama, , , , , , ,   

    Afghan War: NATO Builds History's First Global Army By Rick Rozoff 

    9 August, 2009 — Stop NATO

    Two months before the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of NATO’s first-ever ground war the world is witness to a 21st Century armed conflict without end waged by the largest military coalition in history.

    With recent announcements that troops from such diverse nations as Colombia, Mongolia, Armenia, Japan, South Korea, Ukraine and Montenegro are to or may join those of some 45 other countries serving under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), there will soon be military personnel from fifty nations on five continents and in the Middle East serving under a unified command structure.

    Never before have soldiers from so many states served in the same war theater, much less the same country.

    By way of comparison, there were twenty six (higher, and looser, estimates go as high as 34) national contingents in the so-called coalition of the willing in Iraq as of 2006. In the interim between now and then troops from all contributing nations but the United States and Great Britain have been withdrawn and in most cases redeployed to Afghanistan.

    In 1999 NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington, D.C. welcomed the first expansion of the world’s only military bloc in the post-Cold War era, absorbing former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, in the course of conducting NATO’s first war, the relentless 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia, Operation Allied Force.

    Two years later, after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., NATO activated its Article 5 – “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” – for the first time in the bloc’s history and launched a number of operations from deploying German AWACS to patrol the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. to launching Operation Active Endeavor, a naval surveillance and interdiction program throughout the Mediterranean Sea which continues to this day.

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  • InI 09:56 on August 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama   

    Continuity Of Administrations Seems On Deck In DC By Danny Schechter 

    Why Does Barack Obama Follow The George W Bush Playbook?

    Do the initials C.O.G mean anything to you? That acronym stands for Continuity of Government. We heard about it back in 2001 when Dick Cheney was taken to that undisclosed location just in case the White House went up in smoke again like it did in 1812 (Reference from the must see new Britfilm, “In The Loop”). The government’s main commitment in times of disaster is preserving itself. (God forbid that people find out that the country could go on without the government in its present humongus configuration!)

    But who would have thunk that C.O.G would morph into C.O.A., (Continuity of Administration) with the Obamatons building rather than destroying the agendas they inherited?

    Everyday brings news of the latest Presidential two-step: one step forward, one and a half steps back. Despite the loonies who denounce him as a Socialist (of the Kenyan variety, no less) the man at the top is about system maintenance more than system change. In policy after policy, he seems to feint left before moving right.

    George Bush must be beside himself yukking it up as he smokes his doobies down in Texas, laughing at how the WHO were once again proven wrong. (He is now being quoted as calling his dog Barney the “son I never had.”)

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  • InI 10:29 on July 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , ,   

    US-Israel Relations: New Horizons or Same Matrix of Control? By Iqbal Jassat – Pretoria 

    30 July, 2009 — Palestine Chronicle

    The current standoff between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue of ‘settlements’ has raised the prospect of defining a new chapter in US/Israel relations.

    Media reports suggest that since Obama’s administration took office a new sense of optimism prevails regarding a “peace deal” between the Zionist state and the Occupied Palestinians.

    Yet, many skeptics have justifiably raised the question about whether America’s first black president is the harbinger of real relief for Palestinian quest for freedom or merely an excuse for a new false dawn.

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  • InI 09:28 on July 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply
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    MICHAEL, WALTER AND NELSON IN AN ERA OF ICONOMANIA By Danny Schechter 

    Worshipping Heroes Is Not The Same As Learning Their Life Lessons


    New York, New York: What a time for Iconomania, none of it critical, none of it questioning, none offering deeper perspective or leading to very revealing coverage.

    Politicians may rule but celebrities dominate in a culture where every pol dreams of shaping an aura that inspires hero worship and adoration. That was Barack Obama’s trump card with his eloquence often blinding us to the substance of his stances.

    First there was Michael Jackson’s death with wall-to-wall coverage dominated by our info-tainment media where show biz and news biz merges more easily than media companies.

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  • InI 10:30 on July 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , ,   

    U.S. Press Misses Honduran Official's Racist Assault on U.S. Prez By Steve Rendall 

    13 July, 2009 — Black Agenda Report

    Enrique Ortez Colindres may be a coup plotter from the original ‘banana republic,’ but as a white man he feels comfortable calling the president of the United States a ‘little black sugar plantation worker’ and other Spanish variations on ‘nigger.’ Ortez’s comments were not deemed newsworthy by most of the U.S. Media.

    ‘Ortez referred to Obama as ‘that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing.”

    On June 29, the day he was installed by Honduran coup leaders as the country’s new interim foreign minister, Enrique Ortez Colindres repeatedly used racist slurs to describe U.S. president Barack Obama.

    Using the word ‘negrito,’ a well-recognized and profoundly racist epithet, whose literal translation means ‘little black man’ or ‘little black boy,’ Ortez referred to Obama as ‘that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing’ ['ese negrito que no sabe nada de nada'] and ‘a little black man who doesn’t know where Tegucigalpa is’ ['el negrito, no conoce donde queda Tegucigalpa']. In another case, he told the Honduran newspaper El Tiempo (translation from DailyKos):

    “I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, leftists, blacks, whites. This is my job; I studied for it. I am not racially prejudiced. I like the little black sugar plantation worker who is president of the United States.”

    For more than a week after they were uttered, Ortez’s slurs were a big story in Latin American and around the world: The Chinese and French wire services Xinhua and Agence France Presse covered them, among others . But besides online sites like Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, the story was mostly ignored by U.S. journalists, who otherwise freely quoted Ortez about Honduras’ coup and constitutional crisis.

    ‘Ortez’s slurs were a big story in Latin American and around the world.’

    That wasn’t the case when Hugo Chavez called George W. Bush the devil in an address at the U.N. in 2006. Then the arguably lesser insult was discussed for days in the U.S. media.

    Wednesday, July 8, offered big new developments in the story when a U.S. diplomat in Honduras complained about the slurs and Ortez offered a brief apology. Then, later that afternoon, Ortez was fired and replaced by the coup government’s president.

    But today, two days later, the New York Times has yet to mention any aspect of the story, and the Washington Post only ran a brief 120-word Associated Press report about the apology (though nothing about the resignation) on July 9–its readers only then learning about the original slights.

    And so it would appear that, at least in this case, few U.S. journalists think it’s much of a story when a high-ranking foreign official, otherwise in the news, launches a racist attack, even one that targets the president of the United States.

    BAR Editors’ Note: The New York Times belatedly reported the story of Ortez’s blatant slurs on July 11, following the FAIR piece. The Times noted that Ortez was installed in a new job – as minister of justice and government of the majority non-white country!

    This article was previously published in the blog of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

     

  • InI 11:04 on June 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama,   

    OH BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? – PT. 2: The Many Sides of Barack Obama, The TOO Many Sides by Mark S. Tucker 

    A few months back, in “From State Secrets to War to Wiretaps: Two Sides of the Same Coin”, former FBI language specialist and also the founder / director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, Sibel Edmonds reflected upon the first leg of the Obama administration. It was not a settling pensivity.

    She first noted the perpetual “rationalizing…defense …[and] illogical excuses [of] ‘He’s been in office for only 20 days, give the man a break!’ and ‘He’s had only 50 days in office, give him a chance!’ and currently, ‘be reasonable – how much can a man do in 120 days?!’” before asking if we mightn’t call it all a “swindling of the voters”. Her real gripe was the State Secrets Privilege statute because, appropriately enough, she was historically “the first recipient of this ‘privilege’ during the now gone [Bush] Administration”. Her use of “privilege” was, of course, a properly snide irony, and she was now targetting the slim black man who promised an end to Washington DC secrecy (“When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution” – candidate Obama, 2007). She also was irate that Obama was allowing his admin to use the act (statute, whatever) in three important judicial cases: “Al Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, and Jewel v. NSA”. More than a little outraged, she noted that “[i]n the Al Haramain case, Obama’s Justice Department has threatened to have the FBI or federal marshals break into a judge’s office and remove evidence already turned over in the case”, an explicit example of the old we have the might; thus, we have the right Mr. Obama pledged to exterminate in America’s legal affairs.

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  • InI 08:29 on June 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama   

    Obama’s Emerging Legacy: Wars, Bankers and For-Profit Healthcare By Glen Ford 

    24 June, 2009 – Black Agenda Report

    The first Black president has racked up some impressive victories. Barack Obama has quarantined single-payer healthcare advocates, crushed dissent against the war in Congress, and transferred more money to the finance capital class than at any time in planetary history. Not bad for just five months in office. ‘At some point in the near future Barack Obama will become inextricably associated in the public mind with Big Capital – and deservedly so.’

    ‘The ‘Obama Effect’ has led to the near-total collapse of the Left.’

    As of this writing, the Progressives for Obama website still exists, a relic of Left delusion that should have died of embarrassment months ago. Barack Obama has, indeed, grown in the presidency – but not into the FDR-like figure of his leftish supporters’ imaginations. Nor has his presence in the Oval Office served to spur Blacks and progressives to dramatic action, creating the ‘push’ that Left Obamites had predicted would allow their champion to act on his more ‘liberal’ instincts. Quite the contrary. The ‘Obama Effect’ has led to the near-total collapse of the Left– both its white and Black wings – and made the nation safe for rule by finance capital and militarists.

    The military, finance capital and healthcare corporations (insurers are a branch of finance capital) are winning every important battle because, on fundamental issues, President Obama is on their side. It is he who crushed the anti-war bloc in the US. House; who silenced and marginalized single payer advocates, while fawning over health profiteers; who engineered the greatest transfer of wealth in human history to bankers, leaving them free to once again ruin themselves and the rest of us.

    So let us give President Obama his due. He not only smashed the Left opposition, he humiliated them.

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  • InI 16:34 on June 22, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Barack Obama, ,   

    A Civil War: Obama's Gift to Pakistan By Liaquat Ali Khan 

    17 June, 2009 – Counterpunch

    A civil war is brewing in Pakistan. Thanks to President Barack Obama, who is shifting the American war from Iraq to ‘the real enemies’ operating from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Cash-strapped Pakistan could not defy Obama persuasion and decided to wage a war against its own people, the Pashtuns inhabiting the Northern Province and the tribal areas of Waziristan. Decades ago, Pakistan waged a similar war against its own people, the Bengalis in East Pakistan. In 1971, the Pakistani military charged to wipe out Mukti Bahini, a Bengali resistance force, paved the way for the nation’s dismemberment. In 2009, the military is charged to eliminate the Taliban, a Pashtun resistance force. History is repeating itself in Pakistan—as it frequently does for nations that do not learn from past mistakes.

    With a willful caricature of the Pashtuns, who are successfully resisting the occupation of Afghanistan, Obama advisers are forcing Pakistan, a subservient ally, to help win the war in Afghanistan. This help is suicidal for Pakistan. The civil war will unleash intractable sectarian, ethnic, and secessionist forces. As the warfare intensifies in coming months, Pakistan will face economic meltdown. If the civil war spins out of control, Pakistan’s nuclear assets would pose a security threat to the world, in which case Pakistan might forcibly be denuclearized.

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  • InI 11:27 on June 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barack Obama, , ,   

    Jonathan Cook, "How the Media Annexed East Jerusalem to Israel" 

    3 June, 2009 – MRZine – Monthly Review

    Talks between Barack Obama and the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships over the past fortnight have unleashed a flood of media interest in the settlements Israel has been constructing on Palestinian territory for more than four decades.

    The US president’s message is unambiguous: the continuing growth of the settlements makes impossible the establishment of a Palestinian state and therefore peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

    It is one he is expected to repeat when he addresses the Muslim world from Cairo tomorrow.

    The implication of Mr. Obama’s policy is that, once Israel has frozen the settlements, it will have to begin dismantling a significant number of them to restore territory needed for a Palestinian state.

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