Category Archives: politics

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Truthdig – Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All

Posted on Nov 19, 2012

By Chris Hedges

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.

The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place.

Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400 civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining 5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Continued:

via Truthdig – Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All.

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Scandal Rocks Washington by Eric Margolis

Scandal Rocks Washington

by Eric Margolis

The US has lost one war and is fast losing a second, yet what really upsets Americans seems to be a juicy sexual scandal; beautiful female general groupies; US brass in Tampa, Florida, living like potentates; the FBI investigating CIA; and the fall of America’s most important intelligence official, former top general, David Petraeus.

After America’s ugly, dreary election, it’s fun seeing the great and good caught with their pants down. Petreaus’ slinky paramour, the ambitious femme fatale, Paula Broadwell, is easy on the eyes. So are voluptuous Tampa temptresses Jill Kelley and her sister who ignited this scandal by sending catty emails to the FBI.

What business has FBI in monitoring extra-marital escapades of the military brass – provided they are not bedding Chinese or Russian agents?

This combined boudoir farce and inter-governmental feud raises serious questions about the emergence of America’s surveillance state.

We see the FBI reading thousands of Petraeus’ emails and those of another senior officer dragged into the scandal, Marine Gen. John Allen, the US commander in Afghanistan. This is the same FBI long locked in bitter institutional rivalry with CIA.

Meanwhile, CIA is being transformed from an intelligence gathering and analysis agency into a militarized outfit with its own fleets of lethal drones and combat units that will rival that other top secret military organization, the Joint Special Operations Command – America’s version of Britain’s elite killers, the SAS.

Thanks to legal changes made by the Bush administration during the post-9/11 hysteria, the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency can read emails and text messages of anyone vaguely termed a “threat to national security.” Anyone who has ever sent a message to the person of interest can also be investigated, and anyone who has sent them email, and so on.

Welcome the era of Big Internet Brother.

There’s an even bigger question. Every war produces generals glorified into heroes by government, media and their own public relations efforts. Gen. Petraeus, who commanded US occupation forces in first Iraq, then Afghanistan, continues to be hailed as a “military genius” and “war hero.”

Look again. Petraeus and his fellow generals used every weapon in the US arsenal against Iraq’s eleven resistance groups (deceptively misnamed “al-Qaida” by Washington), including the mass ethnic cleansing of two million Sunni Iraqis, death squads, torture, and brutal reprisals.

UN officials assert that some 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, died due to the US-led blockade under Saddam Hussein. At least another half million died from the US 2003 invasion until 2011. Yet after all this, the US forces were forced pull out of Iraq at the end of what Saddam Hussein vowed would be the “Mother of All Battles.”

Cost of Iraq: $1.6-2.4 trillion; almost 5,000 US soldiers dead, 35,000 seriously wounded. Some triumph. America has yet to accept the painful fact that while it won all the tactical engagements in Iraq, it lost the bigger war.

Petraeus was then sent to work his magic in Afghanistan before returning to Washington to head CIA. There, the brainy general, who had a knack for self-promotion and public relations, tried again to crush the Pashtun resistance by massive bombardments, billions in high tech gear, reprisals that wiped out entire villages, search and destroy missions. Torture and executions were as common as during the Soviet occupation.

A disgusted American public now wants out of the endless 11-year conflict, the longest in US history. Most of the US garrison is supposed to withdraw by 2014. Petraeus and other senior US commanders had the audacity to publically criticize President Barack Obama’s withdrawal plans. They should have been dismissed at once, but the president lacked the nerve to stand up to the ever-more powerful military establishment. The incoming US commander in Afghanistan just said he wants to keep US troops there after 2014.

Cost of Afghan War: $1 trillion and rising. Afghan dead unknown. US military, some 2,100 dead, 17,000 wounded.

The US military has clearly been fought to a standstill in Afghanistan by medieval tribesmen with AK-47’s, reconfirming its name – “graveyard of empires.”

As for the military genius of Gen. Petraeus, recall the famous cry of King Pyrrhus, “one more such victory and we are lost.”

via Scandal Rocks Washington by Eric Margolis.

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Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History by Gary North

Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History

by Gary North

GaryNorth.com

On Wednesday, November 14, Ron Paul delivered his final speech at the podium of the United States House of Representatives. It was covered by C-SPAN live, and was later posted on C-SPAN’s site. It was soon posted on YouTube, and from there was posted on numerous sites.

Within hours, various media outlets began to comment on it, both from the Right and from the Left. From the ones that I saw, all of them were generally favorable. This was remarkable. In thinking about it over the weekend, I began to perceive just how remarkable it was.

I searched Google for “Ron Paul” and “farewell address.” I got almost 200,000 hits.

In the history of American politics, I can think of only four farewell addresses that ever got into the textbooks, and one of them was a fake. The most famous one was George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, and it was not an address. It was a newspaper article. The second came in 1961, which was Dwight Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex speech. The third one was Richard Nixon’s announcement after his defeat in 1962 when he ran for governor of California against Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. I’m not sure that it should be regarded an address; it was more of a press conference, but it counted as a farewell address . . . for six years. In it, he uttered the immortal words, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” It was aimed at the media. Then, a dozen years later, he gave a real farewell address, the day before he resigned in disgrace from the presidency.

Ron Paul’s farewell address was the fifth. This is extraordinary. The media did not ridicule him as arrogant for having delivered such an address. On the whole, the media seemed interested in what he had to say. Yet his speech began with a statement of the fact, namely, that he had never had any measurable political influence in the House in his entire 22 years. He had never had one of his bills passed into law.

His farewell address was taken seriously as a statement of principles, precisely because he never had any direct political influence in passing legislation. He stood as a representative of a constitutional tradition that has had only two other representatives at the national level ever since the end of the Civil War: President Grover Cleveland and Congressman Howard Buffett, who served in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Virtually nobody remembers Buffett, although almost everybody in the financial world has heard of his son Warren.

Whatever the impact of Ron Paul’s farewell address, it is safe to say that no other congressman has ever delivered such an address at his retirement, at least not where the media took him seriously. It is unheard of that any Congressman would deliver such an address, and especially a Congressman who had no political power or the ability to spread election money around to his colleagues.

I regard this as a major historical indicator. I don’t know if it would be legitimate to call it a turning point. We don’t know at this time whether his career will be marked as an ideological turning point. What we do know is that he had a great deal of publicity, despite the fact that nobody believed that he would ever exercise direct political power. For a nationally known politician to build a career based on his never having attained political power, never wanting to attain political power, and never having anybody suggest that he was going to attain political power, is one of the great anomalies in the history of American politics. His career deserves a brief mention in the textbooks for the reasons I have just outlined. Who ever heard of a politician who received widespread publicity precisely because he never had any political power? This is a unique case.

via Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History by Gary North.

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Keiser Report: Tourettes Traders & Bleeping Bankers (E366) (ft. Teri Buhl) – YouTube

Be sure to listen to the second half…

In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss foul mouthed foreigners with banker tourettes in Singapore, while in America, traders at Barclays send each other expletive-filled emails admitting to manipulating energy prices down in order to have their big bets on declining prices pay off. They also discuss financial activists creating a rolling jubillee reverse vulture fund designed to liberate the population from unpayable debts. In the second half, Max Keiser talks to Teri Buhl about the investigation into fraud at Sun Trust Bank where whistleblowers allege the bank mis-sold mortgages to Fannie Mae, the government sponsored enterprise. Max and Teri also talk about recent developments in the case of residential mortgage back securities fraudulently sold to investors by JP Morgan’s Bear Stearns holding and Teri proposes a million man march on the SEC and the NY Fed.

 

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[46] Police State 101, Torture Impunity, Obama’s Second Chance? – YouTube

On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to Ian Freeman, Host of “Free Talk Live”, about the police state and the erosion of American civil liberties. Abby then talks to RT Arabic Correspondent, Reema Abu Hamdieh, about the polarized views of Arabs in the Middle East toward a second Obama Administration. BTS wraps up the show with a look at torture, murder and rape by US military contractors going unpunished.

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Hey, Rush Limbaugh: ‘Starting an Abortion Industry’ Won’t Win You Female Voters | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

Hey, Rush Limbaugh: ‘Starting an Abortion Industry’ Won’t Win You Female Voters | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.