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Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 Seepage and Suffering: Obama's Civil War Scenario for Afghanistan (1 comments)
The NATO summiteers sent out an array of mixed messages at their meeting this week in Chicago: the Afghan war is over, the Afghan war is going forward, NATO forces are withdrawing from Afghanistan, NATO forces are staying in Afghanistan for years to come.
Monday, May 21, 2012 Bringing It All Back Home: Occupied Chicago is America's New Normal (1 comments)
The dissonance between the global pretensions of the summit this weekend and the local realities of Chicago could not be more striking. Nato claims its purpose is to secure peace through security; in much of Chicago neither exists.
Friday, May 4, 2012 Distant Drums Very Present: Misfits in the Shattered Mirror of a Nation (4 comments)
There is no attempt or desire within either party to make any kind of deep or serious changes in the increasingly corrupt, imbalanced and now almost totally dysfunctional structures of power. Neither party holds out any kind of alternative vision or ideal or aspiration, other than that what we have now should go on and on, and that their particular faction should be in control.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 The Way of the Drone: Emblem for an Empire of Cowards (3 comments)
This hideous program of murder and terror has been fully embraced by the political elite and by society at large. And our rulers are now bringing it back home with a vengeance, putting more and more Americans under the unsleeping eye of government drones watching their every move, looking for the "signature" of "suspicious" behavior.
Sunday, April 15, 2012 Emperor of the Air: Potomac Poobahs Squeeze the Skies (3 comments)
New rules require British Airways and other airlines flying to certain airports outside America to submit passengers' personal data to US authorities. The information is checked against a 'No Fly' list containing tens of thousands of names. Even if the flight plan steers well clear of US territory, travelers whom the Americans regard as suspicious will be denied boarding.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012 Perverts in Power: The Torture-Lovers Who Rule Us (4 comments)
They love how tough torture makes them feel. Like child abusers, they enjoy their full, unchallengeable physical power over the bodies of their defenseless victims. They get off on it. They love how powerful it makes them feel. Torture is being carried out because our leaders want it to be, because they like it. There are no reluctant torturers -- neither at highest levels nor among those actually doing the deed.
Sunday, April 8, 2012 The Lawless Roads: America's Ever-Expanding Torture Matrix (2 comments)
Obama has adamantly refused to prosecute clear, credible and copious allegations of war crimes by his predecessor. He is now applying acknowledged torture techniques to the general American population. For Americans to be strip-searched when taken into custody for even the most minor infractions is clearly to humiliate and "break" the citizen, and is itself -- torture.
Monday, April 2, 2012 Fools Rush In: April Prank Launches Next American War (1 comments)
Not that anyone cares, but the United States committed itself to yet another war on Sunday -- yes, April Fool's Day -- as the ever-bellicose Hillary Clinton teamed up with the extremist tyrants in Saudi Arabia and other international humanitarians to supply moolah and military materiel to the rebels in Syria.
Saturday, March 24, 2012 Gulag Without End, Amen: Obama's Warm Embrace of Rank Injustice (1 comments)
Apologists for the current manager of this evil system will say, "Oh, Obama tried to close Guantanamo, but those mean old Republicans wouldn't let him." The truth, of course, is that Obama completely and wholeheartedly embraced the gulag system set up by Bush, extending its reach in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Thursday, March 15, 2012 Intervention Blues: The Dangers of Sipping at Militarism's Cup (3 comments)
We can see here how powerful the poison of militarism is. Take even a small sip -- "just this one time, in this one case; well, maybe that one too, but that's all, really" -- and the taint begins to seep in: the coarsening, the blind spots, the dehumanization of those who don't agree.
Saturday, March 10, 2012 The Crime of Truth: Obama's Persecution of the Peacemaker (1 comments)
Every scrap of evidence presented about Manning's alleged crimes makes it clear that he was acting from rational, well-considered motives, based on the highest ideals. If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today.
Sunday, February 26, 2012 Other People's Blood: New Ground for the Great Oil Game (3 comments)
Oil? Oil driving the ruthless geopolitical strategies of western politicians behind a cynical facade of humanitarian concern? Boy, that's a new one! Yet hard as it is conceive of such a thing, it seems to be the case. For our patricians and peace laureates -- and all the other grubsters atop the world's greasy poles -- that's a prize well worth fighting for. With other people's blood, of course.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 Shock Doctrine Uber Alles: Germany's New Greek Colony (2 comments)
There is always a "justification" for war profiteering. There is always an "existential threat" that requires a vastly expensive war machine. (Whether the machinery actually works or not is of little importance -- as long as the cash registers are ringing in good order.)And there is never any "debate" about these "threats." Actual facts would just spoil the chow-down at the trough.
Saturday, February 18, 2012 Fever Dream: The No-Eyed Nightmare of Terror War (1 comments)
That splatter -- those guts -- that dead girl in the ditch over there, with the flies and the dogs -- that's what power is. That's the foundation, the base, of civilization. It ain't pretty, but I just have to believe that we're a special nation. We're special. Our grease is special. Our bunkerbusters are special. Our pissbags are special. Our splatter is the most special thing of all.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 Breaking the Glass: Beyond the Cataloguing of Imperial Evils (7 comments)
The media are misinforming -- miseducating -- the American people in the most egregious way, preparing them for yet another pointless war of aggression and domination that will only degrade their own lives, and kill thousands of innocent people ... now what?
Sunday, February 5, 2012 Runaway Train: Stop the War Against Iran -- Now (3 comments)
Almost every day brings some new barrage of fear-mongering lies and vaporous accusations from leading members of the Obama Administration and other nabobs at the top of the political-media elite, all of them aimed relentlessly at one goal: justifying military action against Iran.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 Air America: Under the Eye of the Imperial Panopticon (1 comments)
Iraqis were outraged this week to find they are being spied upon by a fleet of American drones hovering constantly in their supposedly sovereign skies, long after the supposed withdrawal of American forces.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 Pups on Parade: EU Obediently Pushes Toward War with Iran (2 comments)
There is the hope that ever-tightening sanctions will provoke a violent response from the victim, thereby "justifying" a war of "self-defense" against the "unprovoked" attack. The series of escalating provocations being carried out by Washington and its allies, chiefly Israel -- including an increasingly open program of assassinations -- is clearly designed to goad the Iranians into a casus belli retaliation.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 Strange Fruit: The Poisonous Legacy of Liberation (2 comments)
The bipartisan American power elite have openly yearned to impose on Iraq since the days following the 1991 Gulf War: a strongman regime, corrupt, brutal, but open for business to Western oil interests and American war profiteers -- Saddamism without Saddam. And that is exactly what they have achieved.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 Blood in my Eyes for You: The Deep Progressive Love for the Laureate's "Industrial Killing Machine" (2 comments)
The reality of children being torn to shreds by drone bombs at the order of a Democratic president is no less evil than children shredded by Republican neo-cons or libertarian extremists -- or by the worst kind of psychopathic child-murderer stalking some city street somewhere.
Thursday, December 29, 2011 The Wormwood Express: American War Crime Rolls On
It requires no specialist knowledge, no insider connections, no secret sources to know and see the horrendous reality that the Americans and their accomplices have created in Iraq. The poison we have served to others -- and poured into our own veins -- will eat through the walls of the hallucination and stain the future deep with horror.
Saturday, December 17, 2011 War Without End, Amen: The Reality of America's Aggression Against Iraq (6 comments)
The Iraq War has not ended. Not for the dead, not for their survivors, not for the displaced, the maimed, the lost, the suffering, not for all of us who live in the degraded, destabilized, impoverished world it has spawned, and not for the future generations who will live with the ever-widening, ever-deepening consequences of this irrevocable evil.
Monday, December 12, 2011 Grand Delusion: Resisting the Siren Song of Specialness (3 comments)
Our government, and all our leading commentators, still maintain that the end justifies the means -- and that even the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no moral consequence, provided a sufficient number of people can delude themselves into believing the final result is a "success."
Saturday, December 3, 2011 That's the Way the Cornbread Crumbles, That's the Way the Whole Thing Ends (2 comments)
Whatever the outcome of this particular bill, the reality will remain the same: the President of the United States will continue to claim -- and exercise -- absolute arbitrary power over the life and liberty of every person on earth.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 The Age of Extremism: Mammon Worshippers Launch All-Out War (11 comments)
Still, today's strike is a hopeful sign -- a one-day "Occupy Everything" movement that is clearly just the beginning of a long, fierce pushback against the Mammonists. Even so, things are going to get much darker as the extremists fight with equal fierceness to preserve their feudal privileges.
Sunday, November 27, 2011 Over a Barrel: The Enduring Idiocies of Empire (2 comments)
This is what passes for Establishment thought on the most respected newspaper in the land. This complete and utter moral perversion -- like unto an act of sexual congress with the beasts of the field -- is now the conventional wisdom of the chattering classes, the 'public intellectuals,' and the powerful elites whom they so cravenly serve.
Friday, November 25, 2011 Imp of the Perverse: Obama's Bellicose China Syndrome (4 comments)
What is at stake between China and the United States? This could be asked about any aspect of America's aggressive and -- in Pfaff's apt phrase -- absurd foreign policy. And the answer would be the same: bragging rights and an utterly meaningless sense of "domination" -- a frantic, compulsive gnawing on tattered, blood-soaked rags.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 Reality Check: Practical Protesters and Extremist Elites
Anyone with a smattering of history could see that the hubristic capitalism of the past 20 years was programmed to self-destruct. The notion that the world's disparate societies could be corralled into a worldwide free market was always a dangerous fantasy.
Saturday, November 12, 2011 Profits of Doom: Managed Democracy on the March (1 comments)
Berlusconi's fate was sealed when Italian bonds broke the 7 percent mark, thereby threatening to lower, slightly, the gargantuan profit margins of the rapacious speculators who gorge themselves on chaos and suffering. Now the Italian government is to be led by a "technocrat" -- i.e., an unelected apparatchik of the global financial elite.
Friday, November 11, 2011 Libya: The Lies That Launched Another War (7 comments)
This sorry episode takes on heightened importance as the world enters yet another round of ratcheted-up tensions based on hearsay, exaggeration, supposition -- and outright, deliberate deceit -- aimed at instigating violent regime change in Iran.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 Oakland Police Riot: The Imperial Boardroom Strikes Back (1 comments)
Has there even been such a gaggle of fourth-rate poltroons, of shallow, witless, gormless goobers as the leaders of the "developed" world these days? Sarkozy, Cameron, Merkel, Berlusconi, Obama ....? It's like the last tribal council on Easter Island. All they have left are lies, delusions -- and brutality.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 Family Values: The Roman Rigor of Obama's Death Squad (3 comments)
Last week, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki -- an American teenager -- was ripped to shreds by an American drone missile in Yemen. The boy, like his father, Anwar al-Awlaki -- had not been charged with any crime whatsoever, much less convicted and sentenced. So what was his offense? He missed his father...
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 Changing of the Guards: The New Road of the Occupation Movement (3 comments)
The Occupation movement is in essence, and in practice, very much its own thing, its own moment, its own upsurging through the silt into the open air. It will make its own breakthroughs, its own spectacular mistakes, its own many permutations, all formed by the younger generation's unique experiencing of the world which older generations can never fully know, having been formed in a different time, under different conditions.
Saturday, October 1, 2011 Absence of Evidence: The Progressive Policy of Imperial Murder (3 comments)
We are certain to hear loud, full-throated praise of Barack Obama's murder of uncharged, untried American citizens. And most of these encomiums will come from heart-sworn, true-blue "progressives" -- the very people who savagagely denounced George W. Bush for his "murderous tyrannny" when he carried out the very same crimes, in the very same way, in the very same place.
Sunday, September 18, 2011 Riddle Me This: Paper of Record Puzzled by Death Count Claims (2 comments)
The Times doesn't bother to add up the various regional body counts it throws around in the story, but a very rough estimate from this rigorous and detailed reporting would put the overall death total somewhere around 5,000 or so. Yet over and over, NATO's new nabobs in Libya declare that tens of thousands of people were killed by government forces in the conflict.
Monday, September 12, 2011 The Essence of Modern America in Somalia's Blood-drenched Soil (2 comments)
No nation has the right to determine its own destiny. Only the American power elite can make that decision: it can "allow" a government to rule, if it suits American interests -- or else it can institute "regime change." This is the bedrock principle that informs and determines American foreign policy across the board, across both parties, and across many decades.
Sunday, September 4, 2011 He Who Gets Slapped: The Progressive Perpetuation of Past and Present Evil (1 comments)
These vast outpourings of innocent blood literally do not matter to our serious, savvy progressives. The only thing that really matters is Obama's re-election, his chance to continue grinding up bones and bodies with his beloved War Machine and his runaway Security Organs for another four years.
Thursday, September 1, 2011 Contract With Atrocity: Flying With the Torture Profiteers (6 comments)
As long as there is money to be made from atrocity and aggression -- and as long as this blood-soaked system retains the tacit approval of a society that puts profit before people -- then the bipartisan Terror War, in one form or another, will go on.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011 Dead Letters: More Confirmation of the Mass Murder that Marks the Modern World
The often murderous home invasions developed in Iraq are now the meat and drink of the occupation in Afghanistan. They have become the American way of war: storming and bombing family homes with massive, obliterating firepower, in the poverty-stricken villages of lands ravaged and shattered by the Washington war machine.
Friday, August 26, 2011 Dead Sirte: Another Murderous Twist in NATO's Coil of Lies (2 comments)
However they twist and torment the facts, the truth remains what it is. And the truth is that we are seeing, yet again, in Libya is the murder, in our name, of innocent people by the preening, lying, self-righteous, silk-suited thugs of NATO.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 Sweet and Lowdown: A Crude Analysis of the Libyan Liberation (4 comments)
The Times headline says, "The Scramble for Access to Libya's Oil Wealth Begins." But the latter is just incidental, of course -- a spandrel, a happy accident, an unintentional by-product of a noble deed done by noble men for noble purposes. Only the dead -- the uncounted, forgotten dead, mangled and buried under tons of liberating metal -- might demur.
Sunday, August 21, 2011 Process of Elimination: The West's Rapid Slide Into Slaughter
There are ugly things afoot -- an acceleration of the already long-accelerating on-rush of the nations of the West into the hardest, most brutal kind of authoritarianism. It is happening on an array of fronts, aggressively, simultaneously, from every direction.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 Fatal Vision: Last Bad Deal Gone Down (2 comments)
Obama had many options for avoiding this "crisis," long before it came to a head. He didn't take those options because, like all good disaster capitalists, he wanted and needed a crisis of this sort to enact the brutal economic agenda he has openly advocated from the beginning.
Sunday, July 31, 2011 If the Republic Had Not Died A Long Time Ago, This Would Indeed Be the Death of the Republic (Reprise) (6 comments)
Behind all the flim-flammery of this manufactured "crisis," we are watching the creation of a new form of government -- or rather, the further mutation of the new form of government that the United States has been crawling toward for a long time. The one thing you cannot call it is a "republic."
Saturday, July 16, 2011 The Needle and the Damage Done: Toxic Fallout From the CIA's Human Shield Operation (3 comments)
What was the upshot of this "creativity"? I mean, sure, they put the poorest children in Abbotabad at grave risk of suffering, and yeah, they endangered vaccination and health programs and medical workers all over the world -- but hey, the fake vaccine thing worked, didn't it? It helped them get bin Laden, didn't it?
Sunday, June 26, 2011 Massaging the Monolith: Confusing Signals from the Persian Devils
How confusing this all is! For one thing, whom are we supposed to demonize in the usual cartoonish rendering of reality favored by our own noble leaders and our leading organs of information, where there must be, always, everywhere, "good guys" and "bad guys" to help or hinder?
Tuesday, June 21, 2011 No-Life Zone: Deeper and Deeper Into the Mire (2 comments)
A "no-life" zone is what we have in Libya, as the latest story of civilian casualties from NATO bombs makes clear. In this case, the slaughter was so open and egregious that NATO actually had to admit killing Libyan civilians for the first time; previously, we've been asked to believe that dumping tons of high explosives in the middle of a heavily populated city had not harmed the hair of a single innocent head.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 The Impossible Distance: A Choice to Kill (3 comments)
The bullets whizzed across the distance -- the impossible distance, which no stone could traverse. The bullets threw up clouds of dirt, they struck flesh. I saw bodies twisting and going down. The march became a rescue party. The dead and wounded were lifted onto sheets and stretchers as the bullets kept coming: dull, intermittent, careful. Pop. Pop. Parp.
Friday, May 27, 2011 Borderline Case: Some Real News Beyond the "Reset" Rhetoric
Obama's soaring rhetoric about America changing its policy of supporting dictators in favor of boosting democracy in the Middle East could have been taken word for word from several major landmark historic speeches that George W. Bush made on the same subject. But these words -- the ones Bush used to mouth and the one mouthed by Obama these days -- are always belied by the facts on the ground.
Friday, May 13, 2011 Yes, They Lied; Yes, a Million Died; and Yes, They Want It To Go On (5 comments)
They did it for the oil. They did it for the dominance. And they are doing their damnedest to keep doing it. Anyone who supports and champions the elites who seek to perpetuate this abominable gorging on innocent blood -- including cool, progressive Peace Laureates -- is knowingly making themselves morally complicit in this ongoing atrocity.
Thursday, May 5, 2011 Day of the Dead: The Hit Man as Hero (6 comments)
Already the story is starting to unravel, mutate, transmogrify. Government statements that were presented as gospel truths in every media outlet in the world, and which served as the basis for ten thousand earnest, serious commentaries, turn out, one day later, to have been false.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 What If Bush Did It? A Nation Celebrates What It Is Told
Bush said the weapons and the laboratories have been completely destroyed, to avoid any of the material falling into the wrong hands.
"These instruments of evil have been obliterated and scattered to the four winds," the president said. "No trace of them remains. Let this be a lesson to all those who would raise their hands against the peace and security of humankind: they will be wiped from the face of the earth."
Sunday, May 1, 2011 The Joker is Wild: Imperial Party Masks Murder Abroad
As the media mavens and the glitterati and the fightin' progressive keyboarders were lapping up the imperial schtick, Libyans were digging the eviscerated bodies of three young children out of the ruins of the private home where they were killed by NATO missiles Saturday night. They were the grandchildren of Moamar Gadafy, who was the target of the attack, which also killed his youngest son.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 Normalizing Evil: The NY Times' Curious Take on the Gitmo Files (3 comments)
There is no room for the notion that it is a monstrous evil to kidnap people, buy them from bounty hunters, round them up in city streets all over the world, and dump them in a concentration camp where they can be tortured, abused, driven mad and abandoned without any legal recourse for years on end -- or years without end.
Thursday, April 21, 2011 A War for Oil? Why, Yes, It Was
Oil was always a prime factor in this poisonous mix. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the same kind of "conversations" revealed in the Independent are going on right now, hugger-mugger, between politically connected oil companies and the great statesmen of the West as they seek "a fair slice of the action" in Libya's oil fields.
Saturday, April 16, 2011 Three Amigos: Barack and Buddies Pledge the West to Open-Ended War of Aggression (2 comments)
Across the length and breadth of freedom's land, scarcely a bit of notice has been paid to this open commitment to a policy that was unequivocally condemned as a "supreme" evil back in the Nuremberg Trials. It seems that nobody bats an eye anymore when an American president adopts Hitler's policies.
Sunday, April 10, 2011 Drifting Too Far From Shore: The Unresisted Rise of the Elite (1 comments)
Adhering blindly (or even with grudging, gritted-teeth "savvy") to organizations and leaders -- such as the Democratic Party and its bloodstained standard-bearers -- who have demonstrated, time and again, beyond all doubt, their willing, eager embrace of the elitist agenda, will only further entrench and empower the very forces that are devouring and degrading the world.
Friday, April 8, 2011 Success Stories: The Imperium Strikes Back (1 comments)
The American imperium has indeed found its feet after being stunned for a few weeks by the outbreak of the Arab Awakening. Now it is moving full-speed ahead on a variety of fronts to strangle the regional uprising against corrupt, oppressive elites.
Sunday, March 20, 2011 First Blood: American Missiles Rain Down on Libya (9 comments)
The leader of the opposition was, until just a few weeks ago, an integral part of Gadafy's use of "brutality against his people." If he and his clique are the ones who take power after an intervention, we will have merely exchanged one faction of Gadafy's regime for another.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Across the Universe: The Power of Disillusionment and the Politics of Despair (2 comments)
All we can do is to keep looking, working, trying to clear a little more space for the light, to let it shine on our passions and our confusions, our anger and our hopes, informing and refining them, so that we can see each other better, for a moment -- until death shutters all seeing forever.
Saturday, March 5, 2011 A Nation Stripped Bare: Fascism Has Come to America (4 comments)
The president -- the cool, savvy, modern, hip, educated progressive president -- can throw you in jail, subject you to torture, deprive you of sleep, and finally strip you naked in front of cameras to break you down and humiliate you in their efforts to dehumanize you, to grind you down into a piece of meat.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011 Revealed! The Ancient Mystery at the Heart of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy (2 comments)
You see now why our hip-joined bipartisan elites are so fierce in their efforts to save us from Commie-ism and force us all to "have some skin in the game" by "sacrificing" little things like entitlements, bargaining rights, benefits, vacations, family life and personal freedoms to keep Wall Street living high on the hog.
Saturday, February 26, 2011 Lost Horizons: The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (4 comments)
Today, even "progressive" Democrats are waging all-out class war on workers, the old, the sick, the vulnerable -- on any and all of us who stand outside the tiny golden circle of the rapacious oligarchy and the militarist security/media apparatus that defends it.
Sunday, February 20, 2011 Mideast Meets Midwest: Joining the Surge Against Corrupt Elites
There is a seamless continuum running from the provincial twerp in Madison to the suave global statesman in Washington. They serve the same masters. They seek the same goals. May these first American ripples of the global surge of dissent against corrupt elites grow quickly into a flood.
Saturday, February 12, 2011 Torturers R Us: The Continuity Kid Does Cairo (4 comments)
There were no worries at all about the coming of Obama. No need for those involved in the torture of thousands and the custodial killing of dozens of captives to start digging deep holes and sealing their tapes and papers beneath concrete. They knew well how Obama would treat them: like heroes.
Thursday, February 10, 2011 Cry Freedom: Cairo Crowds Shred the Lies of the Power Players
This has been a great day in Egypt -- a day when truth tore through the lies and made fools of the killers, thieves and torturers trying to impose their cankered will on free people. May we see more such great days ahead -- in Egypt and around the world.
Saturday, January 29, 2011 Egypt Rising: Potomac Power Plays and Progressive Anxieties
Even the third-rate poltroons on the Potomac can see that Mubarak is a now a decidedly dead duck, destined to end his days in luxurious exile in Saudi Arabia or some other friendly tyranny.
Monday, January 24, 2011 Goonstruck: The Mysterious Mind of Modern Progressives (22 comments)
Where did today's belief in the power structure's inherent worthiness -- if we can only get a few plucky guys and gals in there to work the gears -- come about? Somewhere along the line, the "progressive left" became imbued with the same worship of power that we are constantly, and rightly, told is a hallmark of the Right.
Friday, January 14, 2011 Speech Pathology: Rain Puddles in Heaven, Hellfire on Earth
What really matters? Not the shredded viscera of eight defenseless human beings, not the further destabilization and radicalization of a nuclear-armed nation suffering from vast natural disasters and mind-boggling levels of corruption in its American-sponsored elite. What really matters is our bipartisan American elites are pledging to be more civil to each other as they rain death, murder and chaos all over the world.
Monday, January 10, 2011 Silent Surge: A Shocking Act of Political Violence (1 comments)
This latest "surge" is a way to increase troop numbers now so that a few troops can be withdrawn later in a symbolic act that will still leave the pointless war-profiteering boondoggle operating in high gear until the cows come home.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 Mondo Inferno: The Endless Echoes of America's WMD Atrocity (3 comments)
O where are our great American progressives, who stood so tall and proud against the American war machine when it was led by an embarrassing vulgarian, but now occupy themselves with handwringing and bead-counting about the political fortunes of his bloodstained predecessor, now perpetrating his own mini-Fallujahs week after week against defenseless villagers in Pakistan?
Friday, December 31, 2010 Obama's Selective Outrage: Rage Against Russia, Silence at Indian Injustice
The grand poo-bahs of the Potomac lined up to condemn the Russian government for its barbaric treatment of Khodorkovsky--even while their own government was subjecting a 23-year-old soldier to KGB-style torture for the "crime" of telling the truth about outrageous atrocities committed by the US government in an act of aggression that unleashed--and empowered--a living hell that has left more than a million dead.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 Written on the Body: The Progressive Torture of Bradley Manning (27 comments)
The government of the United States is torturing a young man -- one of its own soldiers -- whom it has incarcerated but not indicted. He is denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes -- all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to "confess" to a broader "conspiracy" against state power.
Friday, December 17, 2010 "Bethink Yourselves!": An Ancient Voice Raised Against Modern Evil (3 comments)
They are doing evil. Do not be part of it. Support instead those who try to speak the truth. Stand with them. It is their fate -- not the fate of the petty, brutal power-seekers -- which will determine the meaning of our times and the future of our species.
Monday, December 6, 2010 Indecent Exposure: WikiLeaks Hounded for Showing Power Its True Face (2 comments)
Julian Assange is now being hounded -- perhaps to his eventual death -- not for revealing war crimes and atrocities, but for showing us a glimpse of our leaders as they really are: stupid, vain, petty and savage.
Friday, December 3, 2010 "Why Aren't You Dead Yet?" The Enlightened War Policies of the Peace Laureate (1 comments)
The US denies the allegation of the killings, but admitted that they don't investigate the vast majority of the complaints because they assume them to be "Taliban propaganda." The commander of the Marines is the district says that the Taliban are to blame for "every single instance" of a civilian casualty in the district.
Thursday, November 25, 2010 The FIRE Next Time: End-Game for the Elite's One-Way Class War (4 comments)
entering the end-game of a decades-long process of wealth transference in which the entire burden of sustaining society a degraded, hollowed-out, inhumane society and a bloated, belligerent militarist oligarchy falls entirely on working people and the poor, while the elite reap all the profit.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 The Obscure Ruination of a Single Human Life (4 comments)
It's just a small story; what does it matter? It's just a tiny incident, far from the worst, in a vast, world-roiling conflict; what does it matter? It's just the scarcely noticed ruination of one obscure child's life; what does it matter?
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 Blind Man's Bluff: Hitchens Pays Obeisance to His One True God (2 comments)
Hitchens has somehow convinced himself that the rape of Iraq has prevented what he has seen happen right in front of his eyes, year after year after year. This present reality has come about precisely because and only because of the invasion and occupation which he still defends,
Sunday, November 7, 2010 Obama's Peace Dividend: War Profiteering in the land of Gandhi (1 comments)
If Obama wins re-election in 2012, it will not be because he "made a mid-course correction" or "learned the lessons" of the 2010 vote or "moved to the center" or any such witless expectoration of conventional wisdom. It will be because his militarist backers have judged his arms deals and Terror War operations sufficiently profitable to justify his retention.
Monday, November 1, 2010 First Bad Deal Gone Down: Origins of the Current Democratic Debacle
The instant the Democrats regained Congressional power in 2006, they immediately jettisoned all talk of impeachment, all investigations of war crimes and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, all impetus for real health care reform, all their previously vociferous opposition to Bush's tax cuts for the rich, and a host of other "dissenting" positions that they had cynically trumpeted.
Friday, October 29, 2010 The Good Corporal: To the Exposers of Power and the Troublers of Dreams
A fabulous tribute to Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Sibel Edmonds, and "all those who speak the hard truth to the state." written and performed by the courageous Chris Floyd, who stands tall among those who dare to speak truth to power.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 Say No or Surrender: Progressives Seek to Close "Enthusiasm Gap" for Evil (4 comments)
You are standing with tyrants, with those who strip and abuse innocent citizens, with those who wage ceaseless, needless war, who kill the innocent, torture the captive, and drive millions of innocent people from their homes. Will you, at last, say No to this bipartisan cycle of horror?
Monday, October 25, 2010 Atrocity Now: Wikileaks Release Puts Spotlight Back on Continuing War Crime in Iraq
Wikileaks has done us all a great service by putting this vast war atrocity -- which is still going on -- back on the front pages, forcing the murderers and their accomplices and "continuers" in the halls of power to scurry around like rats caught in the light, twisting and squealing, trying to find some way to obscure the gobs of blood dripping from their hands and lips.
Friday, October 22, 2010 Brief, Bilious Discharges (1 comments)
The more one learns about the political roots of our economic meltdown, the more the Democratic Party stands revealed as an equal partner with the Republicans at the center of corruption.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 Obama's Finest Hour: Killing Innocent People For "Made-Up Crap" (4 comments)
If you support Obama and the Democrats you are supporting the outright murder of innocent people who have never done anything against you or yours. You have walked into a house, battered down the bedroom door, put the barrel of a gun against the temple of a sleeping child, and pulled the trigger. That is what you are supporting, that is what you are complicit in, that is what you yourself are doing.
Sunday, October 3, 2010 The Altars of Fear: Wrong Turns on a Long, Dark Road (4 comments)
While the Europeans protest for jobs and dignity, Americans pour out into the streets in angry demonstrations against the very idea of helping the poor and the economically devastated, or putting the slightest restraint on the rapacious super-rich.
Thursday, September 30, 2010 Friendly Fire: Whining Up Front, Warmongering in the Back (4 comments)
The operations of the Terror War are obscured by so much deliberately fomented murk, so many factions with various covert agendas, and so much "plausible deniability" that specific events can rarely be discerned with any clarity.
Sunday, September 26, 2010 Domestic Disturbance: FBI Raids Bring the Terror War Home (2 comments)
Literally thousands of people, many of them foreigners, that the United States government now pays to roam various regions of the earth killing people: blowing them up in their houses, murdering them in their beds, machine-gunning their children, drone-bombing their neighborhoods, knifing them on street corners, pushing them out of windows, poisoning them in restaurants, whatever.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Murderers, Cowards, Morons and Thieves: Portrait of an Empire in a Political Season (2 comments)
This is raw terrorism, pure and simple, nothing but terrorism, terrorism on the grandest of scales, terrorism without end -- no one-time "spectacle," but a grim, steady, relentless, mechanical process. It is also the terrorism of cowards, murdering at a vast distance, by remote control, in sneak attacks against defenseless people.
Saturday, September 18, 2010 Circle Jerks: Delaware Distraction Obscures Oval Office Atrocities (1 comments)
Hey, it's all good fun, right? The tribal partisans get to jerk their knees in orgiastic spasms, drawing oceans of newsprint and TV airtime, while the real business of empire -- slaughtering, torturing and repressing human beings -- goes on unnoticed and unabated.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010 "Dizzy With Success": The Accelerating Degeneration of Life in America's Afghanistan
after a near-decade of American occupation -- and hundreds of billions of dollars ostensibly poured into the country in the form of "aid" that mysteriously ends up almost entirely back in American pockets -- there are more hungry people in Afghanistan than before the invasion, with the situation worsening all the time.
Thursday, September 9, 2010 Provocative Behavior: Pertinent Concerns Over the Burning of Korans
American policy, at the highest levels of state, is specifically and deliberately designed to kill, despoil, dispossess, insult and outrage Muslims, in operations all over the world. That's what the Terror War is all about.
Monday, September 6, 2010 The Last Believer: From Omar's Mistake to Obama's Atrocities (1 comments)
The dossier of "hard proof" of bin Laden's guilt promised by Colin Powell in the few remaining days of peace after 9/11 never materialized (and still has not materialized). And so, despite Mullah Omar's touching faith in the American system, the war came.
Friday, September 3, 2010 Mad Men: The Psychopaths of Power Play the Insanity Card (5 comments)
Manning will perhaps escape the extremities of torture doled out to Padilla; he has at least been formally charged and has access to legal counsel -- something denied to Padilla for years during this torment. But make no mistake: the depraved minds in charge of our morally insane empire seek to break him, one way or another -- as an example to us all.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 Speech Defect: Emissions of Evil From the Oval Office (2 comments)
"We have met our responsibility!" No, Mister President, we have not. Not until many Americans of high degree stand in the dock for war crimes. Not until the United States pays hundreds of billions of dollars in unrestricted reparations to the people of Iraq for the rape of their country and the mass murder of their people.
Thursday, August 26, 2010 The Taste of Hope and Change: Progressive Sensitivity in U.S. Concentration Camp (1 comments)
Now what about that, all you progressive critics of Obama? He only force-feeds those held for years in indefinite captivity after the sun goes down during Ramadan. What exquisite tact, what a remarkable sensitivity to human rights, eh? Why, they ought to give this guy a Nobel Peace Prize or something!
Saturday, August 21, 2010 Back to the Heart of Darkness in America's Unended War in Iraq (2 comments)
Just this week, buried in the hoopla over the "end of combat operations" in Iraq, we saw fresh proof of the war's true intentions, in a small business story from AP: Halliburton gets letter of intent for Iraq oil.
