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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.
(14 comments) SHARE Monday, July 22, 2013 Soft Machine: A Bright Ray of Hope for Bradley Manning
Perhaps all is not lost. In the long dark night of our military imperium, a shaft of light, of hope, has suddenly appeared -- the Court of Appeal of the Armed Forces of the United States. For it turns out that if a military prisoner has faced the least mistreatment during incarceration, even a temporary abuse of due process, then all charges against him will be dropped and he can walk free.
(16 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 7, 2013 A Low, Dishonest Decade: New Details for the Iraq War Crime Mosaic
In the media hoopla around the 10th anniversary of the invasion, no criminal in charge of the war crime, no savant who promoted it, or media sycophants who "stovepiped" the lies of the warmongers to the public, or any member of the political-media elite who by direct or collateral hand were complicit in this war crime have ever apologized for what they have done--much less been made to suffer the slightest discomfort for it.
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 1, 2012 Blanking Bradley Manning: NYT and AP Launch Operation Amnesia
For the actual details of Manning's hearing -- which actually began a few days before his appearance -- you have to turn to foreign papers, such as the Guardian, whose coverage of Manning's situation has been copious. The Times provided only the single wire story, 11 paragraphs long, during the entire week of testimony. But, you don't have to think about it. Just nod your head, shrug your shoulders, and go about your business.
SHARE 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.
SHARE Wednesday, March 13, 2019 CIA Ãœber Alles: The Spooky Loyalties of Evan McMullin
Evan McMullin is a former (presumably) CIA operative who once declared that his main job with the Agency was "to go out and convince al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us." In 2010 he left the CIA (presumably) to become an investment banker, then served as an adviser and policy director for the berserk right-wing extremists in the House of Representatives until 2016.
(75 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 5, 2015 The Unplucked Eye: Sinister Machinations Behind Kentucky's Manufactured Martyr
Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis swore an oath -- before God -- to "faithfully execute the duties of my office" when she took the post. These duties now include issuing same-sex marriage licenses, in line with the laws of Kentucky and the United States. If she now feels, upon her conscience, that she cannot do that, then she should simply resign her office.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 26, 2014 Blockading the Truth: Obama's Big Lie About Gaza
One hundred and ten bombing raids, a military incursion, 17 killings, mass arrests -- all before Hamas fired a single rocket. This is what Obama -- and every single member of the United States Senate -- call an "unprovoked attack." They say it with a straight face -- nay, with long, somber, pious faces -- but they know it's a lie.
(19 comments) SHARE Friday, November 13, 2015 Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence
Why bring up this "ancient history" when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberation of Washington's decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, July 14, 2014 Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto
A propaganda campaign was waged by the Israeli government to whip the population into a frenzy of revenging bloodlust over the "missing boys" -- even as Netanyahu and his minions knew full well the boys were dead. These efforts were redoubled after the bodies were found, and of course led to the notorious murder of a Palestinian teenager by Israeli youths inflamed by the government's cold-blooded manipulations.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 5, 2011 Day of the Dead: The Hit Man as Hero
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.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 30, 2015 Sham and Shame: Saudi-US Slaughter in Yemen Shows Truth of Terror War
We can give up the pretense that the "War on Terror" has anything at all to do with "fighting terrorism?" It is solely about power and profit, and has been from the beginning. Obama is a willing pawn in their game. Hillary, Jeb, Mario -- they will all be the same. The nightmare goes on.
(10 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 22, 2016 Eyes Wide Shut: Flying Blind in an Age of Atrocity
As long as our governments pursue the agenda of advancing and maintaining economic and political dominion in the world -- by whatever means necessary -- then the fallout, the blowback from these policies will continue. It is striking how our savants can recognize this in regard to other countries, but never our own.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 23, 2015 Fear of a Black Prophet: The Lowdown on the Takedown of Cornel West
Michael Dyson's brutal character assassination of Cornel West in the historically racist pages of the New Republic was, above all else, an application for a job in the upcoming Hillary Clinton administration. West's dissent has been useful to the Democratic Party ... and the Establishment, represented by Dyson, has now decided to tear him down.
(27 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 28, 2010 Written on the Body: The Progressive Torture of Bradley Manning
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.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 20, 2013 From Dissident Gold to Imperial Dross: The Neutering of the NSA Archives
The "debate" provoked by the Snowden documents might possibly, eventually, expand the number of corporate-bought senators and representatives who sit on the committees overseeing, in secret, the government's all-pervasive spy programs. Why, we might even get a new secret court to preside over the existing secret court that secretly approves the apparat's operations.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, September 20, 2013 Ham and Iron: America's Middle East Policies in Action
Such is the quality of mind required to reach the top rungs of the Imperium: brutal, witless, dishonest, ignorant, lacking all nuance, all common sense, all human feeling. A mind that mindlessly disgorges murderous tropes and blatant nonsense in order to obscure, frantically, at any cost, the cynical intentions and the monstrous effects of the Imperium's Domination Machine.
(24 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 10, 2012 Dead Enough: The Reality of the "Lesser Evil"
If you really are a "lesser evilist" -- if this was a genuine moral choice you reluctantly made, and not a rationalization for indulging in unexamined, primitive partisanship -- then you will know that we are ALL the losers of this election. Even if you believe it could have been worse, it is still very bad.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, November 19, 2012 Blogging and Nothingness: Progressives Turn Their Gaze from Gaza
The few sporadic and ineffective missiles from Gaza "raining down" on Israel before the attack were in fact retaliation for repeated missile strikes, mortar fire, assassinations and civilian deaths caused by Israeli military incursions into Gaza.
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, October 13, 2017 No Exit: A Grim Vision of the Post-Trump Future
An impeached Trump might be pardoned by Pres Pence, a la Ford and Nixon, as a way to bring "closure" to the crisis. Trump won't lay low for years like Nixon, but go off immediately to NBC (or FOX or Breitbart or even his own network) and keep making noise and fomenting strife and chaos.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, December 18, 2009 Dred Scott Redux: Obama and the Supremes Stand Up for Slavery
the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person."
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 16, 2018 The Gates of Hell are Closing Behind us: US-Saudi Horror Show Heats up in Yemen
The worst humanitarian crisis in the world is about to descend into an ever deeper level of hell, with the indispensable support of the United States; and the political opposition is spending their time trying to give even more political power to the Pentagon.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 17, 2011 War Without End, Amen: The Reality of America's Aggression Against Iraq
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.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, June 1, 2015 Progressive Apocalypse: Obama Opens Door to Nuclear Nightmare
The treaty review that Obama just killed would have called for a conference in 2016 on eliminating all nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Of course, only one nation in the Middle East actually has nuclear weapons. But Israel is concerned that such a conference would force it to acknowledge the existence of the large nuclear arsenal that everyone in the world already knows it has.
(13 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 22, 2017 Blood Sport: The Radical Extremism of the Transatlantic Elite
The enrichment of the rich and the empowerment of the powerful is the doctrine of these transatlantic extremists; and they don't care how many people have to die, how badly society degenerates, how low the quality of life becomes, as long as Mammon's will be done.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, March 27, 2015 Another Week, Another War: The Iron Logic of America's Middle East Madness
In some ways, attempting any kind of rational analysis of the situation and its strategic ramifications is pointless. The burning hell that the United States has made of the region with its war of aggression against Iraq and its repeated violent interventions is beyond any sensible comprehension.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, December 12, 2011 Grand Delusion: Resisting the Siren Song of Specialness
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."
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 21, 2010 Back to the Heart of Darkness in America's Unended War in Iraq
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.
(22 comments) SHARE Monday, January 24, 2011 Goonstruck: The Mysterious Mind of Modern Progressives
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.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, September 3, 2012 Shunning Evil: Tutu Sets Example in Call for Blair and Bush Indictments
Every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown the complete opposite: that high officials throughout both governments were well aware of the weakness and falsity of the "evidence" of Iraq's WMDs, and that these weak reeds were bent and shaped to fit the policy approved by both leaders: to invade Iraq, come hell or high water.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 5, 2011 A Nation Stripped Bare: Fascism Has Come to America
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 18, 2012 On the Eve: Last Thoughts Before the Latest Invasion of Gaza
Hell is coming. Hell is near. Thousands upon thousands of troops are massing for the ground invasion of a small patch of land crammed full with human beings trapped without any defense against the steel that will destroy them. Several children have already died in the preliminaries. Many, many more will die when the real feast of death begins.
(13 comments) SHARE Monday, April 6, 2015 Heart of Darkness: An Exceptional Danger
Russia's involvement in a dispute in a region on its border has been translated by the Western Establishment into an imminent, Hitler-like threat to take over Europe. Whatever one thinks of the odious Putin regime, any rational observer would have to say that Western propaganda surrounding the crisis has been absurd, exaggerated, and highly dangerous.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 7, 2015 Waltzing To Armageddon: The West's Dance With Death in Ukraine
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes from the summit between Putin, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande who met Friday to discuss a peace plan. Will the Europeans be able to derail -- or at least delay -- the American drive for confrontation? Or has the bloodlust gone too far, as it did with Iraq?
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Across the Universe: The Power of Disillusionment and the Politics of Despair
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.
SHARE Monday, September 24, 2012 In Aleppo Once: Old Allies Reunite in Syria to Foment Future War
As always, while our well-wadded Western interventionists sit safely in glitzy TV studios or cozy Congressional offices and cry havoc, it is others who are devoured by the dogs of war. A hydra-headed, multi-sided conflict has been unleashed in Syria, and our warmongers are seeking frenziedly at every turn to worsen it.
(17 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 16, 2013 Absolving Obama, or The Lamentable Sigh of the Depressed Progressive
It's depressing that America keeps going around the world fomenting war, chaos, bloodshed, instability and ruin, bankrupting its own people in the process while stuffing the pockets of war profiteers. And depressing too that none of our presidents apparently have the power to stop this from happening. They are all "hemmed in by circumstances," by the American military empire.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, May 16, 2014 Night of the Hunter: Family Values in American Foreign Policy
America policy in Ukraine -- securing control of eastern Ukraine by the Kyiv regime, and, if possible, the rollback of Russia's annexation of the Crimea -- has now become directly tied to the personal family fortunes of the American Vice President and Secretary of State. In what way is this remotely different from the corruption of the Bush Family that once stuck so painfully in "progressive" craws?
SHARE Wednesday, March 11, 2015 Master's Degree: Teaching Torture as a Western Value
The Egyptians have had decades of authoritarianism to work out their own approaches to punishment and persuasion -- but they have been aided, supplied, trained and tutored by American military and security experts every step of the way.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, September 7, 2015 A Single Answer to Every Question: Kill More People
The US is currently helping the extremist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, terrorist-supporting, head-chopping Saudi tyrants "restore" a former Yemen leader who took power in a single-candidate election. Because, as we all know, spreading freedom and democracy is the only reason we are involved in the Middle East.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 25, 2010 The FIRE Next Time: End-Game for the Elite's One-Way Class War
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.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 7, 2020 No More Masks: Pandemic Bares the Rotten Core of Anglo-American Power Elites
The vile, brutal inhumanity that lies at the core of the power systems in both the US and UK is being laid bare as never before by the pandemic. This is who they are. This is where we are. This is what we now can see: the corroded heart of the power system, and the sick, degraded character of the wretches in charge of it.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 24, 2020 The Invisible Man: Joe Biden's Deadly Abdication
The presumptive presidential nominee for the opposition party, Joe Biden, is missing in action, as silent as the tombs that Americans are being thrust into by Trump's corrupt and crazed dithering.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 4, 2018 Criminal History: BCCI, the Bushes ... and Mueller
Here's the lowdown on the Bush crime family (who make the Trump Gang look like the two-bit pikers they are) -- from 12 years ago. You probably won't see these facts mentioned in any of the upchuckings of hagiography being churned out by our tough, savvy seekers of truth in the Fourth Estate.
(29 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 3, 2010 The Silence of the Liberal Lambs: Outrage at Outliers, Hosannas for State Crime
Most of our conscience-laden progressives will be more upset about Obama's move to open up vast tracts of coastal waters to oil drilling than his intensification of the wars of dominion on the imperial frontiers. The War Machine -- and the Democrats' avid fealty to it -- is at the corroded heart of the matter.
(11 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 6, 2019 Don't Speak, Memory: Resistance Apes Trump in Weaponizing Amnesia
Trump shows us over and over, day after day, that historical facts don't matter anymore. You say whatever you need to say on any given day to scare and outrage people into turning their brains off. But it's sad to see the "Resistance" adopting this same attitude and, like Trump, continually reducing the world to a frenzied, fearful cartoon.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 19, 2015 Deadly "Dissent": Hidden Hell Lurks in New Critique of Syria Policy
The covert and overt intervention of Washington and the, er, authoritarian regimes it supports, such as Saudi Arabia, has created and maintained the conditions for an all-out civil war, spreading the chaos and hatred that is the sine qua non for jihadi movements to thrive. Now we're told we must put "boots on the ground" to fight the forces we ourselves have spawned.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 21, 2018 Stumbling Blocks: Tim Kaine and the Bipartisan Abettors of Atrocity
Kaine knows -- as does anyone who has simply read the news in the past few years -- that it is an indisputable fact that the US did not "stumble" into the Yemen war. He knows that the former leader of his party, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, very openly and deliberately and knowingly not only greenlighted the Saudi invasion but actively aided the slaughter in almost every way. When will we say enough is enough?
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 1, 2016 Castroturf: Crude Red-Baiting Hides True Trump Danger
There is only one way to deal with nations condemned as "outlaw states" by the Washington power structure: they must be taken down, one way or another, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Serbia, Syria. How can we ever negotiate in good faith with an outlaw dictator who is subverting our political process and trying to take over the world?
(52 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 6, 2018 Legends of the Fall:The Liberal Longing for a Lost Normality
I don't deny that Trump is a new level of threat, but our collective blindness to the bipartisan abnormality of our history is a key reason why an absurd monstrosity could rise to power in the first place.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, May 4, 2015 Murder's Loophole: US Cluster Bombs Rain Mass Death on Yemen
The Saudis -- and their ally, the United States, which is supplying weapons, logistics and intelligence support to the act of aggression -- have already shown they are unconcerned about civilian casualties in the conflict. More than 1,000 people have died in 2,300 airstrikes launched by the Saudis and their allies. According to best estimates, hundreds of civilians have been killed.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 14, 2017 Red Alert: Russian Focus Might Save Trump's Hide
If the focus stays largely on Moscow, don't be surprised to see Trump sitting on the White House toilet playing with his tweeter four years from now while Steven Bannon and Richard Spencer plan his re-election campaign.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 30, 2017 Opioids and Ashes: An American Ending
She had legal prescriptions for the bodily degeneration that was devouring her: but these were a paltry balm, used up within days each month. Doctors bribed and wooed by gilded, respectable Big Pharma firms were throwing out prescriptions like V-E Day confetti. Pills were flooding the streets; if you needed them, and could pay, you could get all you needed. And you always needed more.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 7, 2016 In Like Flynn: Blowback for Filth-Peddling Fascists
Little Flynn's twitter-storm is in keeping with the Trump Truth doctrine, which holds that you can make any outrageous claim you like without the slightest bit of evidence to back it up -- and it's up to other people to prove that your specious bullshit is not true.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 24, 2012 Triptych: Sugaring Over Evil, Looting the World, Opening the Ark
The world is suffering through a severe economic crisis. Governments at every level are on evangelical fire with the gospel of austerity, slashing services and people and selling off essential public goods at knock-off prices to a few rapacious elites. Everywhere, at every turn, we are told that there is simply "no money" to sustain anything remotely like the quality of life known by the past few generations before us.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 8, 2014 False Flags and Imperial Facades: Tales of "Progressives" in Power
It's odd, isn't it? In order to overthrow a repressive regime in Syria, the Peace Laureate allies himself in clandestine gun-running and the fomenting of sectarian violence with a regime, the Saudis, whose repression makes Assad's Syria look like Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 20, 2014 A Future in Hell: The Bitter Fruits of Bellicose Policy
we are now in the midst of two major military operations where American-backed governments are killing large numbers of civilians with the full approval of the West's political and media elite. The outcome of the American-backed coup in Ukraine has devolved into a civil war which has laid waste to cities and killed hundreds of people.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, July 19, 2019 No Call for Muellers: Impeachment Made Easy
Whatever Mueller did, said or meant in his Russia-gate probe has no bearing at all on the other clear, undeniable, easily impeachable violations Trump perpetrates every day. There is no wiggle room for Trump on this score, no murk, no mystery: it's cut-and-dried, cash-in-hand, unconstitutional corruption.
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 20, 2014 Sinister Illusions: Masking Tragedy in Ukraine
In the artfully hallucinated world of Barack Obama -- a fantasy-land in which the entire American political and media elite also live -- all that matters is the real agenda (which was also the agenda of George W. Bush, and Vladimir Putin for that matter): advancing the dominance of a brutal ruling class through manipulation, militarism, and deception, whenever the opportunity arises.
SHARE Friday, October 11, 2013 Chemistry Equations: the Pious Virtuosos of Violence
The widespread use of chemical weapons in the decimation of Fallujah -- including the flesh-eating horror of white phosphorous, the future-maiming deployment of depleted uranium and other chemicals, which have led to an epidemic of birth defects in the region -- is well-documented and, after years of outright lies and evasions, now cheerfully admitted by the United States government.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 22, 2016 Zero-Sum: The Savage Vision Driving a Terror-Ridden World
One must eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. There is no alternative. If "we" don't dominate--by force if necessary, doing "whatever it takes"--then it is a given that some other power will do so. Domination and power are all that exists; the only question is how they are distributed, and who controls that distribution. And there is no price too high to pay in order to gain--or maintain--that control.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 29, 2014 Mad Men: The Lunatic Fringe That Leads the West
We are led by people whose vision of reality is every bit as insane as those who think a suicide belt will send them to paradise: leaders who believe that all human activity, across the entire globe, must be bent to their will, and to their advantage -- and that they have the right, the duty, to kill or ruin anyone who stands in the way of this pathological obsession.
SHARE Wednesday, February 11, 2015 Shame and Shame Again: Obama Signs Death Warrant for Somalis
The American record in Somalia is shameful beyond measuring. Few people even know that 10 years ago, the US had a direct military involvement in Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia, which destroyed the country's first stable government in 15 years, killed thousands of innocent people, and opened the door for the radical extremists who plague the country today.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 18, 2020 Death of a Nation
The rule of law no longer prevails in the land; armed bands of extremists are roaming the streets of the nation, bellowing hatred and waiting for the order to escalate their lawless violence to the next level.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 3, 2011 Fatal Vision: Last Bad Deal Gone Down
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.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, June 13, 2014 Hell's Gate: The Iraqi Blitzkrieg and the Cult of Violence
The immediate responsibility for the death and suffering we are witnessing in Iraq right now lies squarely on those who launched (and those who supported) a war of aggression that destroyed Iraqi society and --just as was predicted -- "opened the gates of hell" to sectarian strife and world-rattling chaos.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 20, 2020 The Human Losers or the Husks in Power: Which Side Are You On?
I think of my friend whenever I hear some bullshit-bloated politician or commentator dismissing the humanity and dignity of criminals and prisoners. I think of them, and I think of my friend, a parole-violating drug-addicted repeat-offending criminal of no use to the society he lived in and I know by God, I know! which side I'm on.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 13, 2017 Dark Matter: Surrendering our Secrets to Malevolent Forces
We all have a night mind, we all have thought-dreams which, if exposed, perhaps might not get us guillotined but could well kill the image we present to others -- and to ourselves. And this is true even for the most liberated, hip or "woke" among us. Every dark impulse, passing fantasy, every perverse or unsettling notion thrown up by the imp of the mind: all of this available, in endless profusion, 24/7, all over the world.
(27 comments) SHARE Monday, January 16, 2017 Sitzkrieg on the Potomac: The Phony War Between Trump and the Deep State
as long as we all keep chasing every burp of his twitter feed or spit-spewing bluster of his public statements -- while treating every nocturnal emission of the intelligence factions as gospel truth -- we'll stay lost in the fog of this phony war ... even as our elites (Trump very much included) continue to devour the world and take us further into darkness, division, ruin and strife.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 11, 2020 Blowing in the Whirlwind: As Ye Sow, Joe Shall Ye Reap
Both Biden and Trump will lumber around the country for months, dribbling out word salad to adoring supporters who don't have the slightest interest in what the doddering old men at the rostrum are saying. Both will spout inane and barely coherent platitudes without offering anything remotely resembling actual policies or programs or solutions to the myriad of dire crises we face.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, November 17, 2017 Gallantly I Come to Roy Moore's Rescue
Alabamians have been receiving robocalls from someone claiming to be "Bernie Bernstein of the Washington Post" offering to pay for salacious stories, which, curiously enough, is the same line that Breitbart and other defenders of mall-stalking goobers are taking, i.e., that the media are paying people to smear good old Roy.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, August 17, 2012 Imperial Affront: Ecuador Will Face US Wrath for Asylum Decision
Our imperial elites (and their innumerable little yapping media sycophants on both sides of the political fence) simply cannot bear to have American power and domination resisted in any way, at any time, for any reason, anywhere, by anyone. It offends their imperial dignity.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 3, 2016 Blood Money: Four More Years of Drug War Horror with HRC
Like the Terror War, the Drug War demonstrably exacerbates the problems it purports to address, and has led to widespread chaos, death and state corruption of almost unfathomable levels. And Hillary Clinton, almost certain to be the next president, is deeply complicit in both of these malevolent enterprises.
SHARE Thursday, July 25, 2019 Witness for the non-Prosecution: Mueller, Pelosi and Trump's Likely Triumph
Robert Mueller's testimony on Wednesday was the very definition of anti-climax. After months of frantic build-up by the 'Resistance' ("At last, Mueller is going to nail Trump to the wall!") Mueller merely noted mildly, haltingly but correctly, that his report laid out evidence of obstruction of justice, and that is up to the House of Representatives to decide whether to use this evidence to impeach the president or not.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 11, 2013 Requiem for a Whistleblower
In our ultra-modern, super-savvy 21st-century world, we all know what happens to whistleblowers. But Varnadore probably thought he was still living in the kind of country he'd been told about in Civics class. He thought the federal government would want to know about these dangerous glitches, and correct them. You can guess what happened next. No remedies -- but plenty of punishment for the "troublemaker."
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 30, 2012 Hymns to the Violence: The NYT's Love Letter to Obama's Murder Racket
It is beyond all my imagining that a national leader so deeply immersed in murdering people would trumpet his atrocity so openly, so gleefully -- and so deliberately, sending his top aides out to collude in a major story in the nation's leading newspaper, to ensure maximum exposure of his killing spree.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 16, 2010 Blind Man's Bluff: Hitchens Pays Obeisance to His One True God
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,
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 12, 2019 Manliness is a Warm Gun (Bang Bang Shoot Shoot): A colloquy with David French of the National Review
You want to protect your family? Then fight against the gun culture, fight against right-wing hatred, fight against the dis-empowerment and despair you right-wing extremists have advanced for decades, fight against the militarization and brutalization of our whole society which both you and your fellow travelers, the "centrist," interventionist neoliberal Democrats, have imposed on our collapsing, corroded, corrupted land.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 20, 2010 Obama's Finest Hour: Killing Innocent People For "Made-Up Crap"
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 3, 2013 There Will Be Blood: Analogies and Analyses of the Syrian Situation
It almost certain that Congress will approve the killing of Syrians; indeed, many powerful figures in both parties are eager to kill even more Syrians than Obama is proposing to kill at the moment. So barring some unforeseen turn, the killing will come -- and the tragedy in Syria will be darkened with new blood.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 17, 2017 Infinite Jest: Liberals Laughing All the Way to Hell
I find few encouraging signs among the generations now in ascendance -- but I do see a fire and an openness to genuine change in some of the younger generations, including my children. If we can hold on until it's their time, if we can shore up enough fragments against the ruins until they can shape the world, there might be hope. We owe them that.
SHARE Monday, January 12, 2015 The Unmourned: Another Mass Killing by the Peace Prize Prez
The unilateral, illegal bombing campaign of the Peace Prize Laureate killed dozens of victims of Islamic extremism. But unlike the Charlie Hebdo case, there is no worldwide mourning for these nobodies, these brown nobodies from the back of beyond. Islamic State denied their "free speech" by imprisoning them; then Barack Obama ended it entirely, by killing them.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 3, 2011 That's the Way the Cornbread Crumbles, That's the Way the Whole Thing Ends
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 10, 2014 Breach Birth: Bipartisan Bull Brings New War
Facts are thin on the ground -- but the bull is flowing thick and fast. So it's once more into the breach, with a military intervention to solve the problems caused by the last military intervention -- which will no doubt cause problems which can only be addressed by a future military intervention.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 21, 2020 "Pre-Fascist" No Longer: Armed Trumpist Takeover of US Cities Begins
Armed, unidentified federal forces are on the streets of Portland, abducting people off the streets and shoving them into rented vans. These federal goon squads are operating against the express wishes of the city's mayor and the state's governor.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 28, 2013 Moloch's Minions: Preparing More Slaughter in Syria
These Western leaders, primarily Barack Obama and the pathetic, feckless ex-PR shill David Cameron, will knowingly murder an unknown number of people while braying all the while of their own righteousness and the strict "legality" of their acts of mass murder. They will be supported in these murders by the leaders of the so-called opposition parties.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 20, 2013 Context and Contact: Exploring Agents of Influence in the Boston Attacks
This incident will greatly strengthen the military-security apparat in the United States and Russia, helping to further demonize Muslims in general. But every political power structure that feeds on fear -- and which ones do not? -- will benefit from the crime spree in Boston, whatever its origins.
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 16, 2018 A Liberal's Confession
I've finally seen the light. Now I know that Vladimir Putin is behind every malign element in today's political scene. I have thrown off the Russian yoke and can finally sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Take that, Vladimir!
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 23, 2011 Sweet and Lowdown: A Crude Analysis of the Libyan Liberation
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.
SHARE Tuesday, February 17, 2015 The Wrong Kind of Victim: No Hashtag for Dead Hostage in ISIS War
However she died, it seems that Kayla Mueller forfeited her sacred American citizenship -- indeed, her very humanity -- by committing the heinous crime of " supporting Palestinian rights. That's all it took for her to be branded "a Jew-hating b*tch." That's all it took for inveterate foes of the "savage barbarians" in the Middle East to tweet and trumpet their jubilation at her death.
(13 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 29, 2014 Pale Riders: The Moral Blindness of our Leading Liberals
Since they cannot accept the full moral import of the death squads and dirty wars, they expend their righteous fury on the safer and more limited ground of torture. Or again, in this case, on "complicity" with torture, by covering up a report on the crimes committed years ago by the real bad guys, from the other side of the partisan divide: the Bush gang.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, November 4, 2013 Ashes to Ashes: The Downward Arc of the American Dream
The American Dream, its seeming solidity was built on sand--or ashes. Built on the death and suffering of countless, faceless "others" around the world, and in our own streets. Built on the poisonous myth of "exceptionalism," the cargo cult of "the market," and the tragic denial of our commonality. The never-ending, all-devouring, pointless, heartless psycho circus rolls on.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 18, 2012 The Way of the Drone: Emblem for an Empire of Cowards
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.
SHARE Friday, August 25, 2017 Omission of Sins: NYT Turns Away From Deeper Truth on Yemen
The story does provide some moving detail about the human suffering being caused by the war; but the eminently savvy and well-informed readers of the New York Times could walk away from the story without the slightest clue of their own government's direct and deep complicity in this humanitarian crisis.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, August 8, 2016 All-Day Permanent Red: The Living Death of Perpetual Emergency
Natural human propensity -- which has waxed and waned in various forms over the centuries -- has been magnified to the nth degree by the moral and psychological disfigurements of the Terror War. Today we also have the curse of 24/7 corporate news channels and the sleepless howling of the internet to batter the mind with an unending series of "urgent" dangers to our lives, our beliefs, our identities.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 25, 2015 Inglorious Goobers: Progressives Line Up to Defend Corrupt Clintons
What matters is that Republican "ratfuckers" trumped up charges against the Clintons 20 years ago. The sleaziness of the Clintons' enemies absolves them of all blame, apparently. Any evidence of their corruption -- financial, legal or moral -- no matter what the source, is, ipso facto, nothing more than the noxious fumes of conspiracy.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 5, 2017 End Games: The Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World
there was a nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea, the world would not end, human civilization would not collapse. Where would the other missiles that would destroy the whole world, come from? Are people assuming that if North Korea launched one of the nuclear-armed missiles it doesn't have at the US, the US would then launch its entire nuclear arsenal all over the world in a paroxysm of destruction?
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 10, 2014 Change Agents: The Curious Case of the "Responsible" NSA Revelations
I continue to be shocked at the way these revelations are being handled -- kept tightly under the control of a handful of responsible figures who happily submit them to "government stakeholders," while effectively repressing 98 percent of the evidence of criminality and moral turpitude on the part of those same "government stakeholders."
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, May 13, 2011 Yes, They Lied; Yes, a Million Died; and Yes, They Want It To Go On
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 23, 2014 Apt Pupils: Chicago Violence Reflects the Lessons of the Elite
More blacks are imprisoned than any other Americans; more blacks are executed than any other Americans. More blacks are denied loans and jobs, more blacks are relegated to substandard, underfunded schools. Subsequently, more blacks begin life several rungs down the ladder from their white compatriots. And on every rung of that ladder, there are powerful forces waiting to beat them down, repress them, belittle them.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 27, 2020 Chill Factor: Wikileaks Trial is a Trump Travesty Aimed at Killing Truth
If Assange is extradited to the US and convicted, then every single media outlet that publishes evidence of government wrongdoing will face the same threat. That is the point of his prosecution: to put a chill of fear into every journalist and editor who receives evidence of government crimes.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, December 19, 2014 Update: The Woman-Bashing Beat Goes On
So if your guy beats you up then knocks you up, you must have his baby anyway. And if he's still ornery afterward, you can always get one of those protection thingies that have worked so well for the thousands of women who've been murdered by men under restraining orders.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, June 28, 2013 Superiority Complex: The Reach and Roots of America's Stasi Regime
U.S. leaders have never acknowledged their responsibility for ruining so many lives, let alone apologized or made proper amends to the survivors. Those responsible have not been punished, but rewarded. The memory of it has been erased from national consciousness, as U.S. leaders endlessly declare their nation's, and their own, goodness.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 17, 2014 The Handmaid's Time is Here: America's Apotheosis of Woman-Hatred
The idea that in 21st century America we would put a woman in jail for being concerned enough about her baby that she informs her doctor about the full range of physical factors that might affect its development -- that we would throw someone in jail for this -- is simply astounding.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 12, 2011 Torturers R Us: The Continuity Kid Does Cairo
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 21, 2017 FUBAR, FUBAR uber alles: Careening Toward Chaos -- or Conflagration
Steve Bannon, as he openly declared last year, is using Trump as an "instrument" to push his vision of white nationalist authoritarianism. The ignorant, infantile president, Trump, is not in charge of anything at all beyond the promotion of his own brand and the aggrandizement of his sleazy, crime-ridden family and their cronies.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, July 18, 2016 "Close Your Hearts to Pity": A Security State Critic Embraces Total War
What William Arkin is doing, ultimately, is "embracing" the most extremist stance of the Terror Warriors: that we should stop all this pussyfooting around and just slaughter these wretches of "pure evil" with a savage war that "won't be pretty." This, he says -- just like Trump, Cruz and many others -- is a "better path" to peace than our "muddled reasonableness."
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 16, 2019 Pence and the Benjamins: An Eternity of Anti-Semitism
This virulent anti-Semitism which in at least one respect surpasses that of the Nazis themselves is passionately embraced by millions of Americans. Its most prominent adherent right now in terms of actual power is the vice president of the United States, Mike Pence. So we will examine Mike Pence's beliefs as an exemplar of this growing brand of anti-Semitism.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 3, 2015 Our Lives in the Larder: Celebrating Another Defeat for Freedom
The intense focus on some activities of the NSA occasioned by the Edward Snowden saga (coming soon to a multiplex near you) has totally obscured the dozens of other agencies and programs that feast on the corpse of privacy and keep our lives locked in their larders, ready to be devoured at their pleasure.
(14 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 11, 2016 Message From the Future: Your Acceptance of Evil Has Condemned Us All
You are taking a path into darkness. It began years ago, with your acceptance of crimes and inhuman practices on a vast scale. This was the nominal end of your democracy, but it was already deeply rotted from within -- rotted by your years of turning a blind eye to monstrous crimes committed in your name by both factions in your power structure.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, September 3, 2010 Mad Men: The Psychopaths of Power Play the Insanity Card
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 3, 2012 Birds of a Feather: The Hardcore Faith of the Ruling Clucks
The elite demonstrate day after day they don't care how many people must die or suffer for their power, privilege, self-image and status. This is moral psychosis on a monumental scale. It is the complete and utter repudiation of every civilized ideal, of every fragment of enlightenment wrenched from the blood-drenched slagheap of human history. Yet it passes for normality in our political discourse.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 23, 2014 Yonder Comes Sin: More Terror From the Top
In every case where Washington took a hand in events, the outcome has been catastrophe, chaos, repression and -- terror. Yes, once again, in Egypt as elsewhere, the chickens have come home, the blowback has arrived, and it's time to pay the piper.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 27, 2009 Instant Karma: New US War Target Gets Its Own Terror Icon
because we are good, because we are godly, because our heart is always in the right place, even when -- as President Obama himself admitted in his noble Nobel Speech -- we sometimes make mistakes, we have not brought down the full force of the iron rod that God himself has placed into our hands for the chastisement and right order of the world.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 29, 2019 Bipolar Disorder: America Magnetized by Despair
Perhaps, you think, what we're seeing today is not some violation of the norm in our national life (or human affairs in general); perhaps it's just a particularly vivid expression of our essential nature heightened and hyped and made more all-pervasive by technology, yes, but in no way a fundamental break from the past.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 24, 2012 Welcome to the Age of Hell: Entrenching Murder as the American Way
The sickening nature of this perpetual-motion death-machine -- and the husk-like inhumanity of those who operate it and the sycophants who applaud it -- our bipartisan elites, our whole respectable, self-righteous establishment -- have trapped us all in an Age of Hell.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 24, 2017 "Moderates" Making Inevitable Pivot to Trump as the Money Rolls In at the Top
It's time to line up behind the Donald and "make sure his presidency succeeds" -- succeeds in its mission to destroy the last few restraints on corporate, oligarchic and authoritarian state power. The Deathcare Bill is a big first step in that direction -- and "moderate" Mike Bloomberg is now on board. Look for other "moderates" and "centrists" to follow.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 8, 2010 Echoes of Mengele: Medical Experiments, Torture and Continuity in the American Gulag
If you tie someone up in a "stress position," force them to their knees and slap them around while dousing them with cold water, it's not torture. Especially if you have some modern Mengeles there with you, monitoring and measuring the degree of despair so they can use the data to "enhance" future interrogations.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 2, 2013 Dead Zone: The Deeper Poison Beyond the NSA Revelations
This arbitrary power to murder is the central political reality of our time; it is the bedrock, the foundation, of the American state as it actually exists today. The NSA surveillance program is merely an outgrowth -- a natural product -- of this system. Even if by some miracle, you could nip this single bud, the tree will continue to bring forth an abundance of poisonous fruit.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 1, 2018 Yemen: The Damning Silence of Liberals Leaves a Legacy of Shame
There is no acknowledgement that the US & UK are directly involved in the prolonged mass slaughter of civilians in Yemen and the destruction of the nation's infrastructure, which has led to famine and epidemic on a horrendous scale.
(16 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 27, 2014 Posterity Will Hate Us: Building a Lasting Legacy of Death
Future generations will look back on us in horror. They won't notice or care about the pointless, finely-meshed gradations of minute policy differences between the two parties, or between the two factions called "left" and "right"; they won't care if Barack Obama was or wasn't "two percent less evil" than George W. Bush. All they will see is a seamless record of murder, terror, tyranny and corruption.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 1, 2011 Contract With Atrocity: Flying With the Torture Profiteers
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.
SHARE Tuesday, June 16, 2020 Rapid Fire (UK edition): Send in the Clowns; BoJo in Whiteface; a Glimmer of Hope
The people in the government today are acting with studied deliberation to advance the morally depraved agenda they have pursued (often openly) throughout their lives: to destroy the very notion of a greater common good and impose the rule of unaccountable elites.
(82 comments) SHARE Friday, March 11, 2016 No Bern Notice: The Imperial Myopia of Candidate Sanders
Does Bernie Sanders know what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did to Honduras? Does he care? Last week saw yet another savage murder of a Honduran activist for democracy -- one of hundreds such atrocities since Clinton and Obama blessed a brutal oligarchical coup there in 2009. But Sanders said nothing -- says nothing -- about this damning legacy of his opponent.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 23, 2016 Black Mirror: Trump's Triumph and America's Truth
Yes, Trump is a loathsome toad, but he's no surprise, no unprecedented, out-of-the-blue eruption of a new dark turn in American politics. That darkness has always been there, and it has to be fought, again and again and again. We fought Reagan, and we survived him. We'll fight Trump, and we'll survive him too.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, November 11, 2011 Libya: The Lies That Launched Another War
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.
(10 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 12, 2014 A Matter of Principle: The True Aims of the Terror War
None of the elites can admit the truth: that the world they are making -- the world that has made them powerful, has lifted them up on a finely-meshed web of interlocking elite interests and will sustain them, and their families, among the elite for the rest of their lives -- is organized around violence and loot. Not security, not prosperity, not liberty, not democracy, not justice, not peace.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 29, 2015 Murderers Without Frontiers: An American Tradition
I don't want to be seen as part of the "Blame America First" crowd. But when it comes to fixing the primary guilt for the dark thunderclouds of fear, war, madness, extremism, instability, tyranny and chaos that loom over our time, I don't "blame America first." I blame America first, second, third, fourth, fifth and last. And I damn the bipartisan leaders who have made this so.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 4, 2011 He Who Gets Slapped: The Progressive Perpetuation of Past and Present Evil
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 10, 2012 Perverts in Power: The Torture-Lovers Who Rule Us
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.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 26, 2010 Extreme Measures: Arming the Zealotocracy, Serving the Elite
For the last 50 years, in country after country, ruling elites -- those factions which hold a disproportionate and thus illegitimate sway over society -- have fostered the growth of religious extremism for two main reasons: to distract the populace from the way their lives are unjustly diminished by the elitist agenda -- and to throttle and demonize any popular movement that might threaten the elite's hegemony.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 17, 2017 Family Planning: Trump's Trollish Housing Pick Part of Dystopian Plan
The far-right radicalism has been gathering power for years. Now it's breaking upon us with tremendous force. And there is no guarantee that the structures of our government and civil society -- already rotted by years of bipartisan corruption, warmongering, soulless neoliberalism and plutocratic rapine -- can survive the blow.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 2, 2015 Dung Beetles: Pope Denounces Davos Dominionists
Francis called the workers and peasants in his audience "social poets," creating new structures, new realities, in the ruins that "the world market" has made of their lives and their societies. They cheered, then gave him a miner's helmet, which he promptly put on. It was perhaps the most noble -- and hopeful -- headgear any pope has ever worn.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 30, 2014 An Enduring Casus Belli: The Liberal Club Hears the Truth
What is the war with ISIS all about? The most direct -- and truest -- answer could be found in a short clip from an old film, made more than 30 years ago, in a scene set in the midst of a conflict now an entire century in the past. But the answer given then is most assuredly true now.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 10, 2016 Imperial Submission: When Dissidents Take a Turn to Empire
We must support the Machine--the "culture or environment" of American militarism--that perpetrated those atrocities in order to destroy a group that would not exist without the interventions of "Western military and economic power." We must take it on trust that after decades of the brutal, inhuman, murderous operations this Machine will now save our "values" from destruction.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 3, 2010 The Altars of Fear: Wrong Turns on a Long, Dark Road
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.
(11 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 23, 2017 The Scum Also Rises: Obama-Protected Torturers Back on Top
At any time in the previous eight years, Gina Haspel could have and should have been prosecuted. But we were told by Obama that we shouldn't prosecute CIA torturers and lawbreakers; we should "look forward, not backward." Well, here we are, in the "forward" time, and what do we see?
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 6, 2020 Potomac Kabuki: Dems Deliberately Ignore Corruption for Doomed Impeachment Ploy
This has been one of the most monumental, tragic and destructive failures in American political history, an outrageous dereliction of duty that will have immense consequences for the nation and the world for decades to come.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 5, 2014 The One Percent Solution: Oligarchs to the Rescue!
Now, you rubes out there probably think that "governments" are actually prime culprits in the mass evisceration of privacy. But no; it seems our good-hearted, democracy-preserving leaders are victims: helpless babes manipulated by their sinister intelligence services, who "abuse power." (Power that has been given to them by, er, governments.)
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 20, 2018 Least Resistance: No Liberal Outrage at New Regime Change Op
the new Syrian policy will exacerbate and extend the continually widening circles of death, hatred, extremism, revenge and corruption that our bipartisan elites have set in motion -- a horrific, ruinous legacy that will doubtless bring even more evil fruit to bear for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, and the unnumbered and ignored multitudes of our victims in shattered countries across the world.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 20, 2011 First Blood: American Missiles Rain Down on Libya
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 2, 2009 A Death Warrant for the Future
we are just stomping the pedal to the floor, screeching full-throttle to the depths of hell. This is a terrible, sickening moment in American history, yet another fatal turning point in the nation's slow and agonizing demise.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 24, 2012 Grand Tradition: Obama Does it the Old-Fashioned Way in Honduras
"Barack Obama's famed 'continuity' with his predecessors goes back to the glory days of Ronald Reagan, when American-backed, American-trained death squads and military juntas slaughtered thousands of people and stripped their people to the bone with the scorched-earth economics of oligarchy."
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 18, 2018 Echoes Past and Future: Helsinki Goon Show Masks the Real Rot That Bedevils Us
If Don really has done a deal with Vlad -- as opposed to, say, simply acting out his deeply disturbed need to be stroked by tough-guy daddy figures who have killed people -- then Trump has also treated the Russian leader the same way he's treated everyone he's ever made a deal with: he's cheated him.
SHARE Wednesday, December 10, 2014 Modern-Day Mengeles: America's Terror War Torture Shrinks
They don't want to govern; they want to rule. They simply cannot be treated -- on any issue whatsoever -- as an ordinary government engaged in ordinary tussles over politics and policy. They are not a government in any traditional sense of the word. They are the criminal vanguard of a radical movement that is now holding the nation hostage.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 26, 2016 Smear-Mongering: A Mea Culpa for the Age of McCarthyism 2.0
There is only one kind of critic of US foreign policy that is not regarded as a Kremlin agent: those who criticize Washington for not being even more bloodthirsty and aggressive in its foreign policy. Those kind of outlets never land on our new McCarthyite lists. And here's another odd fact: PropORNot's list of those who peddle "fake news" doesn't include Breitbart.com, which is one of the master bullshit purveyors of the age.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 3, 2014 Hunger Games: Western Terror Warriors Spurn Their Innocent Victims
Let the refugees die. Who cares? The main thing is that the war goes on -- in Syria, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, where the hell ever. Who cares? None of these nations matter. None of these people matter. Nor do the "folks at home." Barack Obama and David Cameron -- and all of their wanna-be successors -- know that their policies are simply creating more terrorists, more extremism, more violence, more repression.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 12, 2014 Pay the Piper: Imperial Evils Bearing Bitter Fruit
America, of course, is renowned for the historical amnesia that permeates its public discourse. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our media, our educators and, above all, our elites, Americans enjoy a level of ignorance about the actions of their government that approaches the sublime.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 15, 2012 Breaking the Glass: Beyond the Cataloguing of Imperial Evils
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?
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, December 19, 2016 An al Qaeda Christmas: The Touching Tale of How Hate Figures Became American Heroes
you've lost your foothold in Aleppo, where for years you systematically persecuted people and forcibly prevented them from leaving. But America's still got your back, AQ! Even when you attack relief convoys in an attempt to scuttle a peace deal that would allow anyone who wants to leave East Aleppo to go free, the American media will fudge the headlines so no one will know that it was you who did the deed.
SHARE Thursday, October 5, 2017 Dylan's Alembic: Against the Zeitgeist of Violence and Bluster
Across a full three albums, there are none of the withering put-downs that Dylan is famous for: no hoodoo women, no backstabbers, no soul-stealers, no Miss Lonely getting her righteous comeuppance from Napoleon in rags. There's just a series of ordinary men in ordinary life, hoping to be worthy of the woman they love or long for, or else ruminating -- not raging, not ranting -- about a wonderful, beguiling woman they've lost.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, June 18, 2010 Sincerely Yours: Another Legal Triumph for the Obama-Yoo Administration
The Arar ruling upholds the "legality" of a new, universal form of slavery, i.e., the United States government can deprive anyone in the world of their freedom, and dispose of their bodies as it sees fit: torture, "indefinite detention," or even "targeted assassination."
(20 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 27, 2014 Will You Be Free: Caught in the Trap of Permanent War
The fear has come round again: another war, more mountains of dead, more cities in ruins, more hatred spread, more extremism created. Yet even if ISIS is forced back from the territory it now occupies in Syria and Iraq (thanks to the hellholes of chaos and instablity that Western actions have induced in both those countries), the question will be hanging in the blood-flecked mist: are we free now?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 23, 2018 Tell Ol' Bill: Conservative Goons Gunning for Student Survivors
We can regulate and pass laws on virtually every activity, object and substance under the sun, even if none of these laws can completely stop these elements from sometimes being misused for sinister purposes. But again, this universally applied principle seems to have only one exception in minds of our modern conservatives: guns.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 5, 2012 Runaway Train: Stop the War Against Iran -- Now
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.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, June 6, 2014 Pierre's Payday: Cashing In on a Sinister Agenda
Rupert Murdoch rules the rightwing media, Omidyar will now dominate the left, Bezos will command the overchewed cud that constitutes the "centrist" position in American politics today. All sides will be covered beneath the broader neoliberal umbrella. Our elites not only own the ball, and the playing field, and the stadium, and the parking lot; they own both teams as well.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 15, 2020 Malevolent Magic: The Voodoo of Exceptionalism is Killing Thousands in the US and UK
Lock-down without mass testing will not quell the virus; "re-opening" without mass testing will lead swiftly to further disaster, to second and third waves that, absent a vaccine, could be equal to or worse than this initial tsunami.
(13 comments) SHARE Monday, November 26, 2012 No Absence of Malice: Whitewashing the White House Murder Program
The only possible problem with the president of the United States and his deputized subordinates killing people all over the world outside any legal procedure or standards of evidence or, in many cases, without knowing anything at all about who they are killing -- is that the program might not be as open and efficient as it could be.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, March 17, 2017 Useless Eaters and Ethnic Purity: the Trump/Bannon War for Biological Nationhood
It is clear that Bannon and Trump aim to destroy the "legal country" -- the country of laws, institutions, constitutional citizenship, etc. -- and replace it with the "real country" of a more ethnically pure state: a land of blood and soil, under the hand of authoritarian leaders who act according to mystical dictates of "race wisdom," not the "alien" system of democracy and laws which apply to all citizens equally.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 20, 2018 Return of the Repressed: The Roots of a Resurgent Racist Notion
You can read any number of articles or tweets or quotes by people who have the ear of the president -- media figures, businessmen, politicians -- talking of how "the blacks" had it better under slavery than they do now. Indeed, you don't have to wade very deep into the fever swamps of the far-right (which also has the ear of the president) to find outright defenses of slavery and calls for its return.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, January 6, 2017 Langley Literalists, Economic Brutalists, Torture Protectors and More: A Month in the Madhouse
We seem to be living in a civilization that, for whatever reason or reasons, has decided to eat itself alive. GOP-controlled states are putting in even MORE restrictions on voting, as in Michigan just a few days ago. The work of restricting the vote goes on and on, without any outcry, any scandal, any opposition.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, December 6, 2010 Indecent Exposure: WikiLeaks Hounded for Showing Power Its True Face
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 5, 2010 War on the World: Obama's Surge in State Terror
Our highly intelligent and cool, pragmatic president is now vastly expanding the use of secret war, subversion, sabotage and murder into even more countries around the world, and giving America's secret, unaccountable death squads and covert operators even more power to carry out their lawless operations.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 7, 2014 All Systems Go: The Elite View of the New Iraq-Syria War
The vicious civil war we have fomented in Syria has spawned an extremist militia that is using the weapons we poured into Syria to attack the corrupt sectarian regime we installed in Iraq with our illegal invasion there earlier, which gave rise to a vicious civil war that has continued to this day, with both sides using our weapons.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 26, 2010 Domestic Disturbance: FBI Raids Bring the Terror War Home
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.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, August 9, 2013 United We Fall: Our Egregious E Pluribus Unum
Every day, all across the world -- and in the holy-moley Homeland itself -- Obama commits and countenances crimes beyond the wildest dreams of LBJ and Richard Nixon. Every day he helps tighten the stranglehold of rampant militarism and corporate power on the lives of the people. Yet there are no riots, no uprisings, no public or institutional dissent that might trouble the complacency of our overlords.
(12 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 13, 2015 Grief Without Wisdom: Joe Biden's Empty Authenticity
We have many of the same earnest progressives who fiercely opposed that war, who eloquently denounced the invasion and diligently catalogued the monstrous crimes and follies of the occupation, praising one of its chief bipartisan architects for his "authenticity" in speaking of precisely the kind of grief he helped inflict on thousands upon thousands upon thousands of innocent people.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 16, 2012 "After the Fire, the Fire Still Burns": Horror Goes on for Victims of Iraq War Atrocities
the Pentagon itself finally admitted using white phosphorus shells in Fallujah -- a chemical weapon that can inflict hideous injuries on its victims. And in subsequent years, the evidence of the chemical weapons attacks on Fallujah has been growing stronger and more extensive -- not just for the confessed use of WP, but for other weapons as well.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 16, 2011 Three Amigos: Barack and Buddies Pledge the West to Open-Ended War of Aggression
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 4, 2020 Keepers of the Condor: US Role in Evil Network Shown in Soft Light
The reason the US funded, armed, trained and protected the torture-lords of murderous right-wing dictatorships was, we're told here, is because poor little American leaders were traumatized by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, April 21, 2014 Maggie's Farm: The Roots and Fruits of Terror War
Every step taken in the blind, brutal "war on terror" has been counterproductive. Every step has increased terrorism, exacerbated hatred for America and the West, destabilized vast regions of the earth, destroyed all vestiges of constitutional government in the United States, militarized and corrupted Western democracies and visited unspeakable horror and suffering on millions of innocent people.
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 15, 2013 Dissent, Disappointment and Draconian Rule: Bradley Manning's Plea and the Fight to Be Human
Bradley Manning doesn't have to be a "hero." He doesn't have to make a stirring speech to give people a vicarious thrill for a moment before they click over to check their Facebook page or pop in another box set. He has shown clearly that he stands on the side of humanity -- and now he is paying the price for it.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, January 3, 2014 Bait and Switch: The Heavy Price of Social Progress
Social progress is a tool used deliberately by our leaders to extract more gains for the elite at the expense of the general public. Vast amounts of energy and attention, especially potentially dangerous progressive and/or populist energy, is expended on social gains -- on winning them, opposing them, maintaining them, trying to reverse them, etc. -- while the overall system of domination rolls on unopposed.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 11, 2015 The Lash and the Sword: Hebdo, Hypocrisy and the Mob-Mind
This is the voice of the master, the imperialist, the slaveowner, the sadist: "We can bomb you, we can starve you, we can torture you, we can eviscerate you, we can visit every imaginable horror on you, we can utterly destroy you -- but you are forbidden to ever attack even one of us in any manner at all."
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 28, 2010 An Unaccustomed Truth: American Commander Admits Afghan Atrocities
"We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat," said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. What do you call it when innocent, unarmed, defenseless people who "have never proven to be a threat" are gunned down in cold blood? What do you call such an act?
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 28, 2012 Post-Neoimperial Upheavals: Twilight of the Narcissists
The view now taken by the entirety of America's bipartisan political elite, its media elite, and vast swathes of its ordinary citizens, who have been marinated in this belief for generations, is they do believe -- simply, deeply, sincerely -- that the "world belongs to the United States" and that the United States has the right to order the world as it pleases.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 18, 2014 The Fatal Bargain: Oil and Blood in a Burning World
One of the most deleterious effects of fossil-fuelled civilization has been the prominence that geographical happenstance has given to Saudi Arabia. Its vast reserves of oil has meant that governments of every stripe have overlooked its horrendous oppression and its global propagation of one of the most narrow and ignorant perversions of Islam.
SHARE Monday, November 17, 2014 It's All Right, Ma, I'm Only Bleeding
As the Masters of the World gather at the G20 summit in Australia, Patrick Smith provides a fascinating look at some behind-the-scenes developments that could help make the bewildering facade of American foreign policy make more sense. You will not be surprised to find that it centers around our monied, militarized elites' desire to retain and expand their domiination of the world -- no matter what.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 21, 2012 Bringing It All Back Home: Occupied Chicago is America's New Normal
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 21, 2017 The Karamazov Question: From Iraq to a World in Hell
To mark the anniversary of the onset of the launching of the horrific war crime against Iraq, I'm reprinting a piece I wrote a month after the invasion. The question examined here is still being asked of our leaders; and regardless of party or ideology -- or even Nobel Peace Prizes -- they all keep giving the same answer.
SHARE Wednesday, July 3, 2013 Shamming into Syria
Syria is not Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan, isolated regimes on the outskirts of the Middle East. It is in the very center of the powder keg. And it has powerful allies in Russia and Iran. Expanding the civil war there could draw those countries more directly into the conflict, as well as Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, even Turkey. The risk of a wider regional war -- even a world war -- is very real.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 15, 2018 Alchemical Reactions: Transmuting Death-Dealing Dung Into PR Gold
What DID happen after the strike? Nothing. There was no dispersal of deadly chemicals, not even in the ruins of the building itself, as AFP and the Times of India report. Foreign reporters toured the site, without protective gear, in perfect safety. Obviously, there had been no chemical weapons there.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, November 28, 2014 Landmarks of Loss and Love: Being Human in Horrible Times
These are grim times. Monstrous, ugly, implacable -- and seemingly immovable -- systems of power hold increasingly brutal sway over vast areas of the earth; a monstrous weight crushing hope and light out of the future. But the only fight that matters is the struggle to deepen the meaning of what it means to be human, in ourselves and in our relation to all others.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 3, 2018 Decision Time for "Democracy": Who Will Be Our Next Unelected Arbiter-for-Life?
Why do we have a system where a defeated candidate can take the highest office in the land, then wield the power of making lifelong appointments to an unelected body which holds the ultimate sway over our public (and personal) life? What kind of democracy or republic do we have when someone who was not actually the choice of the majority of voters can reshape the nation in a fundamental way, for generations to come?
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, November 27, 2015 Word Games: False Premises Fuel Bogus Debate on Bombing Syria
The rush to bomb Syria is a cynical ploy to exploit the murderous tragedy in Paris for the benefit of the Washington-led agenda of regime change in Damascus. Bombing ISIS can help clear the way for the other militant Islamist rebels (including al Qaeda affiliates, now miraculously transformed into "moderates") whom the West and its Saudi allies favor.
SHARE Friday, May 20, 2016 Twilight of the Grifter: Bill Clinton's Fading Powers
Watching Clinton today on the campaign trail for Hillary, it seems clear that his charisma has severely decayed, perhaps rotted by the years of money-grubbing with oligarchs and despots. Or maybe it's just the natural fading that comes with age and disuse.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, February 19, 2010 Teach Your Children Well: There Is No Law but Might and Murder
the United States government announced today that there will be no penalties whatsoever for the lawyers who were ordered by their superiors, George Bush and Dick Cheney, to write memos "justifying" the tortures that Bush and Cheney wanted to unleash upon captives held indefinitely without charges, without evidence, without trial, without rights.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 12, 2011 The Essence of Modern America in Somalia's Blood-drenched Soil
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 3, 2014 Inside Job: Ex-Power Player Pounds Imperial Poobah
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, delivers a blistering attack on his former Bush Regime colleague Dick Cheney -- and the idea of rapacious empire that Cheney serves and embodies -- in language rarely seen in the mainstream press from a thoroughly entrenched Establishment figure. But wouldn't it be great if one of our highly-placed courtiers grew a conscience when they were still in power?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 8, 2012 The Lawless Roads: America's Ever-Expanding Torture Matrix
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 20, 2021 On the 18th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq
For months before the Iraq War began, many wrote about the outrageous lies that were being told by the US government and its media sycophants to bring about this mass-murdering act of aggression.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, December 17, 2010 "Bethink Yourselves!": An Ancient Voice Raised Against Modern Evil
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 1, 2011 Absence of Evidence: The Progressive Policy of Imperial Murder
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, November 25, 2011 Imp of the Perverse: Obama's Bellicose China Syndrome
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 28, 2017 Spinal Crap: NYT's Contortion to Obscure Obama's Origin of Trump's Nuke Plan
We're asked to believe that the highly intelligent and competent Barack Obama spent months, years, putting together a $1 TRILLION upgrade of the nation's nuclear arsenal in the belief that his successor would then slice it to bits. This is Trump-level nonsense from the Times. Why not simply report the truth?
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, October 15, 2012 Making a Killing: Obama-Backed Coupsters Shoot for Corporate Control
Even as our good progressives are plunging daggers into anyone who dares even suggest an alternative to the Doctrine of Lesser Evilism which has become the core of their partisan faith -- a doctrine that guarantees the perpetuation of the corrupt and brutal system they loudly abhor -- the American-approved carnage and terrorism in Honduras goes on.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 27, 2010 Leaky Vessels: Wikileaks "Revelations" Will Comfort Warmongers, Confirm Conventional Wisdom
We have already seen far too many atrocities, brutalities and acts of criminal folly countenanced, when they are not actually praised, far too many times -- over and over and over again -- in the course of the last decade to believe that these disgorgings of junk intelligence and apparatchik memos will make any difference.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 27, 2010 Say No or Surrender: Progressives Seek to Close "Enthusiasm Gap" for Evil
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?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Murderers, Cowards, Morons and Thieves: Portrait of an Empire in a Political Season
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 4, 2011 Mondo Inferno: The Endless Echoes of America's WMD Atrocity
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?
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 26, 2011 Normalizing Evil: The NY Times' Curious Take on the Gitmo Files
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.
SHARE Thursday, November 2, 2017 Don Draper Rules: Russian Ads and American Madness
If the United States was not saddled with the 18th-century elitist Electoral College, Trump would not be president. Democrats have lost two presidential elections in this century due to the Electoral College -- which means the choice of American voters has been overturned twice in past 16 years alone due to that 18th-century elitist contraption expressly designed to prevent the American people from choosing their leader.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 7, 2016 The Damned Man: Blair Scorched by Chilcot Report
The US/UK record in Iraq -- morally horrific, murderously cynical, shameful beyond measure -- goes back many decades and is thoroughly bipartisan. GW Bush and Tony Blair should pay for their contribution to this record (although of course they won't); but their war of aggression is only one chapter in this long, sickening history.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 3, 2016 Barrel Bomb: The Cataclysmic Close of Campaign 2016
After the scorched-earth tactics of bipartisan neoliberalism and the inevitable moral degradation and brutalization that comes from year after year after year of vicious aggressive war, the choice for Trump is more nihilistic. It's as if people believe positive change is no longer possible -- so let's tear everything down and see what happens.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 27, 2015 Anti-Social Media: Wealthy NY Wankers Bash the Poor
Every time a Democrat is elected mayor of NYC, the city suddenly becomes a hellhole of crime and filth where the lower orders are turned loose by hateful liberals, who shackle the noble NYPD whenever it tries to impose order and protect the propertied. When a Republican is elected, NY is suddenly transformed into a sleek, clean, efficient city where people know their place and cheerful cops keep the "bad people" in line.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 2, 2015 The Gruesome Gray Line: No Mystery in Hiring of West Point Wacko
Bradford believes that all those who are guilty of "skepticism of executive power," "pernicious pacifism" and "cosmopolitanism" -- especially among his fellow law professors and their enablers in the media -- can and should be targeted as "unlawful enemy combatants," just like the Taliban and al Qaeda.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 22, 2012 Shock Doctrine Uber Alles: Germany's New Greek Colony
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 4, 2016 No Flag Memes for Baghdad, No Hope for Terror War Respite
Both presidential candidates have proudly proclaimed they will double down on the evil idiocy of the War on Terror; Trump promises indiscriminate bombing and whole new levels of torture, while Hillary -- gathering Dick Cheney's old neocons around her -- is bent on policies that will not only exacerbate chaos and Islamist terror, but will also bring us to the brink of war (if not beyond) with Russia and China.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 15, 2015 A Game Worth the Candle: Terror and the Agenda of our Elites
Our leaders are not even beginning to take the steps necessary to even begin addressing the consequences of their morally demented agenda and at last begin the long process of reversing the current of violence and extremism that assails us. Instead, at every turn, they are adding to the flow of death and madness, despite the stark, undeniable evidence of the consequences of their actions.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 16, 2011 The Needle and the Damage Done: Toxic Fallout From the CIA's Human Shield Operation
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?
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, October 28, 2013 Choosing Murder: The True Nature of the System Laid Bare
Murder by Drone. It's not a comic book, it's not a civics book, it's a not a movie with a happy ending. It's a brutal, murderous, lawless, dangerous, out-of-control engine of destruction, encompassing the entire political establishment and all those who support it, politically and financially. This is the system we have now.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 10, 2018 Unbrinkmanship: Even Dubious Chance of Peace Rattles Militarist Elites
It's all just a reality TV show to him. He doesn't care what actually happens one way or another -- peace? war? -- as long as he's the star of the show. If he feels he needs to goose his ratings to "win" the news on any given day, he'll cancel the meeting, get big headlines.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 10, 2011 Drifting Too Far From Shore: The Unresisted Rise of the Elite
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.
SHARE Sunday, September 7, 2014 Steel and Blood: America's Racial Cancer
Following the police berzerkery in Ferguson, Missouri, America is going through one of its periodic -- but always brief and ineffectual -- moments of vague awareness about the virulent, brutal racism it carries in its body politic like an inoperable cancer.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 30, 2016 A Picture of American Policy: Waking From the Fever Dream
In the past year, a "progressive" administration -- whose policies will be continued by either of the Democratic nominees -- has been directly complicit in the deaths of TEN THOUSAND CHILDREN. And no one involved in the presidential circus -- not the candidates, not the media, not the analysts, not the horse race aficionados -- gives the slightest damn.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 26, 2011 Lost Horizons: The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, December 1, 2014 Cage Match: Gitmo Case a Snapshot of America's Imperial Soul
A man sold into captivity by crooks working with spies to facilitate the vast, endless expansion of America's imperial war state; the reality of the American state. This is what we are now, this is what we do. Yet people still get exercised, on both left and right, over the question of which bloodstained murderer will preside over this slaughterhouse of human values for the next four years.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 8, 2010 The Accomodationists: Memo to Liberals on the White House Death Warrants
"How did all those people go along with the Nazis? Why wasn't there more opposition to Stalin? How could they countenance all those obvious abominations? What kind of people were they?" Now you know. They were you. You are them.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 29, 2014 Another Murderous Milestone: 60 Years of Carnage
This week saw the anniversary of another major turning point in modern history, a campaign that became -- and remains -- the enduring template of foreign policy for the world's most powerful nation. We speak, of course, of the 60th anniversary of Washington's "regime change" operation in Guatemala, overthrowing a democratically elected government.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 16, 2014 Killing Joke: The Presidential Leadership Scholars Program
Certainly the one word that comes to mind when you think of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush is "leadership." That's why the world is so lucky that these two sages for the ages have joined together to teach the secrets of their success to a whole new generation of leaders.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 16, 2013 Barbarian Rhapsody: Ten Years Deeper Into Hell
The idea of restricting the president's power to kill any filthy foreigner he chooses is not in question anywhere in our national politics, of course; Rand Paul wasn't filibustering against that idea. No, any debate on the "ethics" of state murder is restricted to its application to Americans, who, as we know, are the only fully human beings on the face of the earth.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 26, 2017 No Comeback for Torture -- It's Never Gone Away
Donald Trump used his first nationally televised interview as president to declare his firm belief that "torture works." Of course, as innumerable studies have shown, torture doesn't "work" at all -- if by "work" you mean the gathering of credible information. But Trump will not be bringing torture "back": it's never gone away.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, December 11, 2015 Gutless Wonders: America Gladly Thrusts Its Neck Under the Jackboot
Fear is being promoted across the board to "justify" an entire political-economic system that is now geared almost entirely to rampant militarism and rapacious financial elitism. Anything to divert attention from the crimes and corruption of our own power structures, which are wreaking more destruction on "the American way of life" than any terrorist organization could ever do.
SHARE Tuesday, January 14, 2014 Shooting and Crying: The Unlearned Lessons of American Atrocity
The Iraq war was an atrocity from the beginning -- from long before the beginning, in fact. Its very conception -- the idea of launching an act of aggression against a broken-down country which posed no threat, could not defend itself, and which had already seen more than half a million of its children killed by American-enforced sanctions -- was an atrocity.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 26, 2012 Other People's Blood: New Ground for the Great Oil Game
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 30, 2012 The Naked and the Dead: Raw Hubris is Still the Rule
Still they cry, and still they are given, and still they spend, then cry for more. No one challenges them. The microscopic "cuts" (never in the actual military budget but only in its galloping growth rate) that are sometimes offered, meekly, are painfully absurd: even if enacted, they would amount to no more than throwing a sponge at Hurricane Katrina as it drove in the waters to drown New Orleans.
(11 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 30, 2011 The Age of Extremism: Mammon Worshippers Launch All-Out War
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 7, 2009 Far Beyond Torture: The Long, Dark History of an Imperial Factotum
Bybee played a key role in the still-murky moves by which the first President Bush deep-sixed any meaningful investigation into the workings of one of the largest, most extensive criminal organizations in history: BCCI, the "Bank of Credit and Commercial International," a supposed financial group that a U.S. Senate investigation called "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history."
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 18, 2012 Fever Dream: The No-Eyed Nightmare of Terror War
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 1, 2013 Pay in Blood: May Day and Modern Politics
To put it plainly, the elites don't need us anymore -- or not many of us, anyway. And thanks to runaway population growth -- and the greasy mobility of global capital -- those few of us they do still need to keep the machinery going can be easily replaced, at any moment, by some other desperate chump trying to avoid destitution.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 30, 2015 Athens Agonistes: Troika Extremists Write New Greek Tragedy
Even an economist is smart enough to see that making a bankrupt country even poorer and more desperate while preventing it from injecting bailout funds into its economy is a recipe for ruination, not a blueprint for growth. What, in the end, is at stake? Literally nothing. Numbers on a computer screen. All of it -- the debts, the loans -- are abstract notions.
SHARE Saturday, July 5, 2014 Court and Caliphate: New SCOTUS Ruling Fuels Sectarian Rise
A growing sectarian hardcore believes that secular government has no legitimacy whatsoever; a Bible-based "Dominion" is the only proper form of government. Wheaton College's objections to the government form likely has as much to do with this larger agenda as it does with the sectarian extremists' deep-seated, fear-ridden hatred of women.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, August 26, 2011 Dead Sirte: Another Murderous Twist in NATO's Coil of Lies
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 18, 2010 Howling Wind: The Unrepented Genocide
hundreds of thousands of innocent people were required to die as "payback for 9/11"; it didn't matter who they were, or where they were, as long as they were Muslims. This was the mindset of the centrist, mainstream, honored, respected American elite, as expressed by Thomas Friedman, one of its most honored and respected representatives.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 27, 2011 Oakland Police Riot: The Imperial Boardroom Strikes Back
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.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 14, 2016 Love and Desire: The Truest Resistance to Terror and Power
There is no hope that this latest incident will stop or even slow the the death spiral of the Terror War, as it circles round and round and down and down in an ever-widening gyre. There is every indication that it will make things worse, that the war-profiteers and the fear-profiteers and the power-grabbers will wring every bit of poison from it that they can to fuel the War Machine and the Domination Agenda.
SHARE Sunday, September 27, 2020 The Surrendered Land: US Institutions Won't Fight for Democracy
There are no institutional forces in American life that will stand up to a post-election power grab by Trump. They've already demonstrated this by failing to stand up to his egregious and brazen pre-election power-grabs, and his howlingly obvious, easily impeachable/prosecutable corruption.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 15, 2012 Emperor of the Air: Potomac Poobahs Squeeze the Skies
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 8, 2015 Conflict, not Cartoons: Hebdo Shows the Common Goals of Both Sides in Terror War
The military-industrial-security complex holds the commanding heights of society now, and it is utterly dependent on a steady supply of terrorist attacks (and the constant production of new terrorist entities to fight) in order to keep its power, privileges -- and profits -- going strong.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 7, 2012 Napalm in the Morning (Drones in the Afternoon): The Smell of Victory Stirs Progressives to Action
Well, you got your lesser evil. Now all we can do is hope that he will do less evil than he did in his first term. Bitter experience, and a nodding acquaintance with history -- and human nature -- mitigate mightily against such a hope, but we are where we are, and that's all we've got.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 3, 2012 Blood in my Eyes for You: The Deep Progressive Love for the Laureate's "Industrial Killing Machine"
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 28, 2017 Birchers in the Beer Joint: Trump "Resistance" Revives Old Slurs
People who "stoke outrage" over police killings by supporting the entirely peaceful, silent protest of football players are now part of a Kremlin "network." And the "Resisters" are working this trope backward into American history, trying to taint any protest movement or action for social change as "anti-Americanism" which was "stoked" by nefarious Russians.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 5, 2017 Historical Ignorance, Spineless "Dissent": The Dangers of Decorous Resistance
I don't think fascists should be treated with kid gloves. We're talking about people who, like Yiannopoulos, are openly, adamantly intent on causing real harm to actual human beings. It's not an abstract debate. It's not a game. It's not reality TV. These ugly, hate-oozing fascists mean business; and by god, so should we.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 1, 2011 Revealed! The Ancient Mystery at the Heart of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 28, 2017 The ICEmen Cometh: Madness, Blindness and the Anti-Immigrant Cargo Cult
Trump, a mobbed-up casino boss has stepped into the vacuum, promising to fix it but using hatred and chaos to distract from his real purpose: letting the same rich white All-American elites who created the situation to tear the remaining bits of meat from the American carcass to fill their own bellies while the country sinks further and world burns.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 9, 2017 Blood Will Tell: Trump and Sessions Strike Historic Blow for Civil Rights
President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order today overturning the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, saying former President Abraham Lincoln's action had been "hugely unfair" to Southern property owners. "Free enterprise more important than political correctness!" Mr. Trump tweeted immediately after signing the executive order. "Beanpole Abe should know better! Sad!"
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 31, 2011 If the Republic Had Not Died A Long Time Ago, This Would Indeed Be the Death of the Republic (Reprise)
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."
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, May 4, 2012 Distant Drums Very Present: Misfits in the Shattered Mirror of a Nation
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.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, October 16, 2015 13 Ways of Looking at the Deep State
Deep State's wars have no other purpose than keeping our masters' coffers in surplus.
Deep State doesn't mind blowing up the world, if the world won't behave like Deep State wants.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 31, 2018 Toxic Tropes: "Skyrocketing" Racism Through Respectable Journalism
The rise in "anchor babies" has actually had no discernible demographic impact at all. The only concern it can genuinely evoke is among those who can't bear the fact of even a small increase in the number of other-skinned people who have become American citizens. In other words, it is a "problem," only to racists, to extremists -- and to those who use racism and extremism to further their own political or professional careers
SHARE 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.
SHARE 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."
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, May 29, 2009 Convergence and Continuity: The American-Backed Terror Campaign in Iran
For years, Iran has endured terrorist actions--suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, open assaults by fanatical gunmen, sabotage, and "targeted assassinations" of government officials, scientists and others. Multitudes have been slaughtered in these operations, whose ferocity and frequency are surpassed only by the atrocities unleashed in the four countries that have been on the forefront of America's Terror War.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 24, 2012 Gulag Without End, Amen: Obama's Warm Embrace of Rank Injustice
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 18, 2010 Creeping Terror: The New American Way of War
The American way of war. Creep, sneak, kill, run, lie...repeat. It only makes things worse, creates more enemies, keeps the wars going. But isn't that the point? Check it out: they're piling an extra $33.5 billion prime war pork on top of the mountain of Terror War funding already laid out for this year! You need a whole lot of blood to wash down that meat-"and a whole lot of new enemies to make sure the feast never ends.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, February 9, 2015 Life of Brian: The Unbearable Lightness of American Being
Oh dear! Brian Williams. Oh, what does this say about our media, our culture, etc., etc.? It doesn't say anything. It says that Williams, like every other person in our ridiculous and pathetic public life, gilds the lily whenever he can to make himself look good. So what?
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 26, 2012 Pay in Blood: The Bipartisan Terror Machine Stripped Bare
Beyond the rare, isolated op-ed, there is no "debate" on drone warfare in American political or media circles. The bipartisan political establishment is united in its support of the practice; indeed, both parties plan to expand the use of drones on a large scale in the future.
SHARE Thursday, August 20, 2015 Panic Attackers: Grass-Roots Challenge Sparks High-Level Hissy Fit
Blair's intervention has been accompanied by similar squeaking of pips from such luminaries as Gordon Brown, the former PM who could not defeat two sad sacks of shinola like David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and by the whole range of party bigwigs who recently presided over an even bigger loss to the Tories' upper-class twits.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 1, 2010 Speech Defect: Emissions of Evil From the Oval Office
"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.
SHARE 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.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 11, 2015 Closed Circuits: Media Mooks and the Freedom Caucus Myth
There is hardly any Republican in the House today, and very few in the Senate, who would not have been considered morons, madmen and mouth-frothing goobers -- by the GOP itself -- well within my lifetime. the idea that only 40 "nuts" can hamstring a far larger majority is, well, nuts. It can only have become "conventional wisdom" in a system already so super-saturated with falsity and fanaticism.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 18, 2010 Release the Kagan: Neocon Nabob Hired by Team Obama
It goes without saying that Kagan is not an expert on "fighting corruption" or on Afghanistan, just as he knew nothing about Iraq. He is an "expert" on one topic only: churning out bullshit to justify war. And that is exactly why he has been hired by Obama and Petraeus.
SHARE Friday, February 28, 2014 "A Friend of Kafka": Sentimental Power and the Survival of the Spirit
The president and his agents kill people-or spare them-without due process of law, any oversight, without giving their victims a chance to defend themselves or prepare themselves for death. They kill in perfect safety, without the slightest threat to their own person, striking down defenseless victims who have no power to strike back. In this they are no different from the officers in the Nazi camps.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 30, 2017 Bloodsport: Trump Carries on Presidential Tradition, Notches First Child Murder
During the race for the presidency, Donald Trump said he would "go after the families" of terrorists. On Sunday, his 10th day in office, he did just that: he killed 8-year-old Nawaar al-Awlaki, the daughter of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, an accused al Qaeda operative killed by Barack Obama in 2011. "She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours," said the eight-year-old's grandfather, as Reuters reports.
SHARE Sunday, January 3, 2010 Blowback On the Border: The Purpose of the Terror War System
The Terror War is not an event, or a campaign, or even a crusade; it is a system. Its purpose is not to eliminate "terrorism" (however this infinitely elastic term is defined) but to perpetuate itself, to do what it does: make war.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 1, 2015 Road to Damascus: An Odd Quack of Truth from the Telegraph
Peter Oborne, reporting from Damascus, where, as he notes, a diverse, secular regime (repressive to be sure, but much less repressive than, say, Saudi Arabia, and far more religiously diverse than, say, Egypt -- or even Israel) is being torn apart by monomaniacal extremists backed with money, weapons, bombs and gear from the West.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 30, 2020 Lords of Misrule: UK Elites and the Rise of Global Feudalism
Until we stop treating these radical, death-dealing, society-wrecking extremists as normal politicians working within the system, we cannot effectively confront them and stop their depredations. They will continue to use the system itself to hollow out government and society until there is nothing left but their little clique.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 7, 2010 Obama's Peace Dividend: War Profiteering in the land of Gandhi
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 29, 2015 Racist Compassion: The Magical Pigmentation Protection Against "Terrorism"
There is literally nothing -- nothing -- that a white killer can do in America that will cause him to be labeled a "terrorist." Even if, like Dylann Roof, he explicitly states that he is committing an overt act of terror in order to instigate a race war and overthrow American society as it is now constituted. Even then, he's not a "terrorist;" he's a troubled young man, a "lone wolf" who wandered down the wrong path.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 24, 2014 Mr. and Mrs. America!
The AmericaForever Corporation is proud to announce the latest winners of the Mr. and Mrs. America Contest: Pippy and Poppy Longdawdle of Rumsfeld, Ohio! They're a thoroughly modern couple grounded in traditional values, upholding the best of American exceptionalism in the most exceptional way!
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, November 16, 2012 Gaza: The Gates of Wrath and Sorrow Swing Open Once Again
Gaza is a concentration camp. It is not like a concentration camp. It is not a metaphorical or figurative concentration camp. It is a concentration camp. Our culture, our political leaders, and the cacophony of voices in the media have all agreed that this truth must never be spoken. Israel imposes conditions on Gaza and its inhabitants that necessarily result in a slow, long, lingering death.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, February 14, 2014 Testament, Communion, Subversion: Remembering Pasternak
The modern era's "War on Terror" bids fair to surpass the Revolution in this regard, with its wildly inflated rhetoric and grand abstractions, its epiphanies of violence and exaltations of terror -- on both sides -- inflaming a conflict that has already devoured nations and destabilized the entire globe.
SHARE Sunday, December 6, 2009 Savvy to a Fault: Coming to Terms With Imperial Power
What on God's green earth does it matter if someone says they feel "betrayed" by Obama's decision or not? In the light of the death and destruction to come, how could that possibly be important?
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 14, 2014 Potomac Fever: Sleepwalking to the Brink in Ukraine
the Ukrainian "government" installed by the West -- a government led by the very people American officials were caught, on tape, conspiring to install -- is now relying on unabashed neo-fascist "paramilitaries" to put down uprisings by pro-Russian groups that exactly mirror what happened in Kyiv.
SHARE Sunday, December 18, 2016 Subversion Blues: Chasing Will-o'-the-wisps While the Junta Gathers Force
All the time and energy that could have been spent building a broad front of resistance has now been wasted. Trump will go on his merry way, despoiling and destroying, while Democrats keep stamping their feet and crying, "Putin did it! Putin did it! It's not fair!" And the darkness grows deeper.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, February 15, 2021 On the Acquittal of the Murderous Thug Donald Trump
Good things have happened in and come from America. But the idea so many of us had of America was lost long ago; it was never real. It was sham, and a hope, and a cheat, and a desire, and a dream of what could be but what never was.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 6, 2016 Tangled Up in Trump
The poisons that ooze from this opened carbuncle -- the racism, aggression, nativism, hatred and vulgarity that pour from Trump's mouth in a gangrenous stream -- will provoke a movement that will -- eventually, after much struggle and suffering -- cleanse the body politic at last.
SHARE 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.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 8, 2011 The Impossible Distance: A Choice to Kill
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 16, 2015 Corbyn the Kitten Eater: How Low Will Bipartisan Brit Media Go?
Looks like the Times is giving the Guardian a run for their money in the "most ludicrously trivial slanting of Corbyn coverage" contest. First the Guardian noted the lese majeste of Corbyn's lip movements (or lack thereof) during the national anthem; now the Times damns his bicycle for its associations with far-left mass murder.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 22, 2014 Cloud-Dwellers: Class War Victors Get Higher on the Hog
The elite have won the war; they've imposed a brutal occupation on the vanquished -- and now they are withdrawing beyond the clouds, to golden citadels and "specialist suites," where they can disport themselves in luxury and safety, while looking down, with a satisfied smile, on the billions and billions of worthless suckers they've left behind.
SHARE Tuesday, April 1, 2014 Dear Landlord: A Message from the Zeitgeist
I will go and sin no more. Because I sure don't want to be left languishing in obscurity. I sure don't want to be a nobody. When I walk into a room full of landlords or Yale men, I want to hear them say, "We like the cut of your jib!" I want to be acceptable. Let those who are sick, those who are in need, look after themselves. After all, it's the spirit of the age, right?
SHARE 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.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, June 3, 2016 Terror War and Trumpery Take US into Terra Incognita
Another day, another Trump delegate calling for the violent overthrow of the government. This sort of thing used to be frowned upon, I believe, but now is simply par for the political course. America has drifted deep into terra incognita -- and "here be dragons."
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 3, 2014 Sign Language: Dazzled by Atrocity's Distant Mirror
"Bring back our girls!" The girls who were kidnapped from that place somewhere in Africa by that group I'd never heard of before the story about this thing was on the news and started trending on Twitter. They took "our girls," the girls who belong to us -- our girls, the girls we have cared about for so long, living there in that country in Africa where nothing has ever happened until this thing happened.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 25, 2010 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power
The cover-up of these killings goes up to the highest levels of the U.S. government -- and it continues most forcefully to this day under the Obama Administration. It is a sickening -- but most instructive -- story.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 17, 2010 The Obscure Ruination of a Single Human Life
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?
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 18, 2010 Circle Jerks: Delaware Distraction Obscures Oval Office Atrocities
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 11, 2020 House of Death: Trump's Endgame Plan to Kill Democracy
If you are resting easy about the election result: don't. If you don't think Trump, McConnell and their party of rightwing extremists, who have already exerted every sinew in a bid to destroy the democratic process, won't keep on doing this until the very last second, with every weapon at their disposal, no matter what damage it will cause -- think again.
SHARE Tuesday, February 2, 2010 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite
Ending the imperial wars and the dismantling of America's global military empire--and its global gulag--would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from direct military spending, but from the vastly reduced need for "Homeland security" funding in a world where the US was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants--and inciting revenge and resistance.
SHARE Tuesday, February 9, 2010 The Carp of Truth: Jack Straw, Colin Powell and the Smoking Guns of War Crime
aside from Blair, Straw was the only top UK figure completely "in the loop" throughout the long, complex manipulations toward war. Along with his American counterpart, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Straw played a key role both in the transatlantic talks that engineered the act of aggression and the hugger-mugger manipulations at the UN.
SHARE Thursday, April 7, 2016 Dry Bones: Racist History Returns With a Vengeance
The self-righteous peddlers of prejudice, the hawkers of hatred, the weak and stunted souls who turn away the suffering, who cling belligerently to the accidents of their pigment and their national origin in a vain and pathetic attempt to keep their own terrors and chaos and shortcomings at bay -- they are back with renewed vigor, and we must take them on again.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 21, 2011 No-Life Zone: Deeper and Deeper Into the Mire
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 12, 2016 Seeing Ghosts: History's Nightmares Return in Syria
Having failed to dislodge Assad from power early on and impose a more compliant regime in Damascus, our leaders have decided that the dismemberment of Syria is now their next best option. Multi-sided, hydra-headed, interminable, intractable conflict -- plus continued radicalization and intermittent terrorist attacks -- will be the only result of the outside military interventions in Syria, just as it was in Iraq and Libya.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 8, 2011 Success Stories: The Imperium Strikes Back
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 7, 2010 The Lie of Law: Courts Bow to State's Raw Power
Think of that. Let it sink in. The president's war powers cannot be constrained by the international laws of war. Whatever the Leader (no points for translating this term into German) decides to do in the course of a war is thus rendered entirely "legal." He cannot be accused of international war crimes because such things do not apply to him.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 9, 2010 Blackwater Fever: High Crimes and Hired Guns
These hired killers -- gorging on taxpayer dollars as they assisted the mass-murdering invasion and occupation of Iraq -- were never going to do time. Why should they? They were just doing what they were paid, by us, to do: kill ragheads.
SHARE Sunday, July 4, 2010 The Glittering Prizes: War Crime Continues to Pay
It was announced this week that Blair would be receiving a great big bushel basket of simoleons -- a hundred thousand of them -- from some U.S. outfit called The National Constitution Center.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 10, 2012 The Crime of Truth: Obama's Persecution of the Peacemaker
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Carnival Deception: While Mitt and Barry Posture, the Imperial Beast Plods On
In fitful scraps and snatches, the story of what is actually happening in Honduras filters through on occasion, usually from foreign sources. But what of that? Mitt Romney had a bad week! Obama looked cool in the rain! Who cares if the behemoth goes lumbering on? The ludicrous, hideous, hallucinatory sideshow is all that matters.
SHARE Monday, June 16, 2014 Back to the Future: A Voice of Sanity on Iraq
If we were not ruled by bipartisan war profiteers -- if we only had ordinary, run-of-the-mill politicians trying gamely to muddle through to something better for their own people and others -- we would find there are many, many positive elements that could be supported or encouraged in these "intractable, historic" conflicts.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 6, 2015 In Brief: "Lone Nuts" and Natural Fruit; Moscow Murk
Hypercapitalism destroys social, family, community and economic bonds; it sows division, isolation, competition, greed; lauds force and violence and war as supreme values; turns rape and murder into nightly entertainment; dehumanizes and commodifies human beings at every turn ... and then we wonder why our society produces so many troubled, isolated, violent souls out there.
SHARE Thursday, May 29, 2014 Cracking the Walnut: American Amnesia and the Libyan Aftermath
In the crinkled, crumpled little walnut that constitutes America's political discourse, the question of Libya has been reduced to the petty, bitter political wranglings over "Benghazi." The hyper-partisan focus on Benghazi actually reflects the thoroughly bipartisan nature of America's fubarish foreign policy.
SHARE Wednesday, October 28, 2009 Depraved Indifference: Drone Wars, Whack Jobs and Imperial Terror
As long as the forces that drive U.S. policy are ignored or denied, as long as we do not engage this argument on those terms that are most crucial -- and as long as we will not identify the nature of U.S. actions for what they are, and in these instances, they are war crimes -- these horrors will continue without end.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 15, 2012 Intervention Blues: The Dangers of Sipping at Militarism's Cup
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 16, 2018 Sucker Punch: Screwing the Rubes in Bipartisan Comity
Maybe there will be some House committee not dominated by Democratic slumlords and tax dodgers in the next Congress, and we might see a little light on this facet of Trump's wide-ranging criminal and immoral activities. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. But I wouldn't bet next month's jacked-up rent on it.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 11, 2012 The Nightingale's Nest: Lamenting the Soul's Enclosure
In the last two decades, Clare has assumed a greater prominence in literary studies, but he retains for me that aura of a personal, private discovery -- having found out about him, many years ago, through an old and battered paperback compendium of essays by Graves, found in the stacked wooden crates of a used bookstore in a strip mall in Knoxville.
SHARE 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.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, August 31, 2012 Bloc Party: Pantomime and Power in the Imperial System
The Obama Administration announced on Thursday that it would not prosecute anyone -- no one at all -- for the murder of two prisoners in American's Terror War gulags several years ago. The one CIA agent who revealed the names of people who tortured captives is being prosecuted with the full force of the law.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 14, 2010 The Raging Revenant: Anti-Imperialism -- Past, Present and Future
No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan U.S. war machine -" 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets nearing $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 27, 2011 Over a Barrel: The Enduring Idiocies of Empire
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 23, 2012 Seepage and Suffering: Obama's Civil War Scenario for Afghanistan
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.
SHARE Tuesday, June 19, 2012 Interpreting Progressive Militarism: An Exchange with David Atkins
In order to have a local police force, making arrests with warrants, writing tickets, etc., you don't necessarily have to rip the bodies of small children to shreds. But you cannot have a "international police force" invading and "policing" whole nations and societies without killing many, many innocent people, over and over again.
SHARE Thursday, December 10, 2009 Boiling Point: Hijacking the Planet for Power and Privilege
This scenario has been playing out in the most crude and brazen fashion during the "debate" over health care "reform" in the United States, which has seen a "progressive" administration literally sell its "reform" agenda to the very corporate interests that are the ostensible target of the reforms.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 1, 2012 Air America: Under the Eye of the Imperial Panopticon
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.
SHARE 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.
SHARE 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.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, December 3, 2010 "Why Aren't You Dead Yet?" The Enlightened War Policies of the Peace Laureate
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 30, 2016 Progressive "Triumph": Neofascist Message Pusher Disappointed in Messenger
One of Trump's "top strategists," Stephanie Cegielski, has resigned in protest over his recent tweet on the atrocity in Lahore, and written an open letter to his followers denouncing her boss. Why should we respect the "insights" of someone who was inane enough to "believe" in Trump in the first place? And not only that, but eager to work for him?
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 28, 2010 Class Acts: Farewell to Chroniclers of American Reality
America lost two distinctive and important voices this week, two writers whose works dealt with absolutely vital but virtually ignored elements of the nation's history and character: the 'marginal' classes and the ruling class. Without the histories of Howard Zinn and the fiction of Louis Auchincloss, we would have a poorer understanding of the forces that form and move our society.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 24, 2012 Pups on Parade: EU Obediently Pushes Toward War with Iran
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.
SHARE 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.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 29, 2013 Hard Rain: The Progressive Principle of Collective Punishment
Global climate change is a real threat. Many millions of people in the "Deep South" -- including some farmers! -- know this. Many of them are actively working to understand and address this threat. I have personally worked with many of these people, on the issue of climate change, right there in the "Deep South," as long as 25 years ago.
SHARE 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.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 17, 2015 Bleaters and Tweeters: On Briefly Being a Political Football
Our leaders continue down the same path -- more bombing, more repression, more fearmongering and hate-fomenting -- which they well know will only lead to more death and destruction across the world. Unfortunately for the rest of us, their murderous folly is not a game.
SHARE 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.
SHARE 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.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 18, 2011 Riddle Me This: Paper of Record Puzzled by Death Count Claims
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 30, 2013 This Is Not The Age Of Defeat
In any given age, the lowering clouds can bear down more heavily than in others. Ours is indeed a very hard age, another age of iron. It is an age of loss, of grievous loss -- but it is not the age of defeat. Reality remains, the process goes on, the choice for goodness is always -- always -- there, no matter what.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 14, 2010 Trillion-Dollar Bash: Mineral Find Means More Blood Money in Afghan War
The New York Times reports the discovery by American geologists that Afghanistan contains "vast riches" in untapped mineral deposits: at least $1 trillion worth. What this discovery almost certainly portends are many more decades of war, warlordism and foreign intervention, as the forces of greed and power fight like hyenas to tear off the juiciest chunks of this windfall.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 15, 2013 Collusion Course: Machinations of the Double-Headed Beast
While continuing a fierce vigilance against the relentless encroachments of an unhinged, unrestrained and openly murderous government, let us also recognize that the "free market" is, and always has been, a rigged game where vicious predators seek tyrannical control, by hook, crook and vast corruption in every way possible to squeeze out more unjust advantage for themselves.
SHARE Saturday, February 13, 2010 The Last Station: Surging Into the Savage Past in Afghanistan
If one is attempting to galvanize public support for a long, grinding, bloody war of domination and occupation that has no discernible purpose (none that can be stated in public, anyway), why then, a nice set-piece "battle" which will end in a guaranteed, low-cost "victory" is just the ticket.
SHARE 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.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 11, 2011 Changing of the Guards: The New Road of the Occupation Movement
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.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 7, 2020 Brief note on a bleary post-election morning
It should never have been this close, with an incumbency that has literally destroyed the economy and wilfully condemned tens of thousands of Americans to needless death.
SHARE 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?
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 24, 2010 Waste Management: Congress Pushes Surge in Ongoing War Against Iran
They seek to break Iran not because it is an odious regime, but because it defies the imperial will, and balks the bipartisan imperial agenda to impose domination on the oil lands. If Iran agreed to become an American client state tomorrow, it would not matter in the least how odious its regime might be.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 8, 2009 Vile Bodies: Reagan Revenants Return to Enforce Empire's Agenda
It is remarkable to see how in every case, the Obama Administration acts as if it is a minority government which won by the slimmest of margins, and must appease a powerful opposition party in control of Congress in order to get even watered-down fragments of its putative agenda passed–when in fact it was swept into office by one of the largest electoral margins in recent years and enjoys a comfortable marjority.
SHARE 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.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 10, 2011 Silent Surge: A Shocking Act of Political Violence
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.
SHARE Saturday, September 5, 2009 Outrageous Behavior: Bogus Bluster From Bigwigs Hides Lockerbie Truth
al-Megrahi was released because the slow-turning wheels of his appeals process was about to force the release of hundreds of pages of damning documents that would confirm that he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, April 2, 2012 Fools Rush In: April Prank Launches Next American War
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 17, 2012 Strange Fruit: The Poisonous Legacy of Liberation
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 12, 2011 Profits of Doom: Managed Democracy on the March
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 26, 2010 The Taste of Hope and Change: Progressive Sensitivity in U.S. Concentration Camp
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!
SHARE Thursday, September 13, 2012 Great Expectations: Benghazi-Style Blowback an Integral Part of Terror War System
No group in the world has done more to spread violent, retrograde extremism than the Saudi royals (whose regime is far more repressive than that of the Persian devils in Tehran or the Hitler du jour in Damascus) -- yet at every turn they are courted, coddled, and lavished with billions of dollars in military hardware from the ostensible defenders of freedom in Washington.
SHARE 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.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 24, 2013 Darkness at Dawn: Tainting Democracy for Power and Profit
The outpouring of violence has shaken the moral authority of Suu Kyi, as she tries to maintain the momentum of democratization through negotiation and cooperation with the power structure. Many have found her statements on the violence to be remarkably muted.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, June 15, 2012 Intervention Uber Alles: A Forced March to Progressive Militarism
The events in Iraq get lost in the general historical flood -- just one more piece of flotsam drifting by in the bloody current. Its context is lost, subsumed in general assertions about our intractable nature. Why did these Iraqi slaughters happen? There was no cause -- just our stupid violent monkey nature. Atrocities just ... happen.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 19, 2011 Family Values: The Roman Rigor of Obama's Death Squad
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...
SHARE Monday, September 17, 2012 The Howling: Embassy Riots Pale Next to State Terror Tempest
Millions and millions of people in the West believe that the Dominationist extremists are completely -- even divinely -- justified in their terrorist actions. Set against the massively supported, millions-killing terrorism of the Dominationists, the riots are like a whisper in the howling of a storm.
SHARE 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.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 3, 2009 The Inhuman Stain: Saying Yes to State Terror
It is entirely accurate to say that "national security," as determined solely by the president and his designated minions, is now the actual constituion of the United States, the principle by which the state is shaped and governed.
SHARE Tuesday, December 15, 2009 Miraculous Organ: Blair, Obama and the Narcissist's Defense
Obama gives the game away with this line: "I face the world as it is." Those other two guys, they were just dreamers, they were unrealistic, they were unserious; they didn't "face the world as it is," they weren't savvy and pragmatic, like me.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 30, 2010 Friendly Fire: Whining Up Front, Warmongering in the Back
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.
SHARE Sunday, February 28, 2010 The Gift of the Revenant: Passing On the Truth in an Act of Mourning
the flesh and blood of the world from which these songs emerged -- the cultural, social, historical zeitgeist that formed them, and informed them with the rich, ragged detail of a lived reality -- all of this has passed from the scene now. The still-smoldering, radioactive half-life at the core of the message may linger on -- and may one day (or even now) be clothed in new forms.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 22, 2010 Brief, Bilious Discharges
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 19, 2012 Fat of the Land: Empire's Empty Offer
You love your freedom
We love it too
That's why we took it
So we can guard it for you
We'll keep it safe
Locked in the vault
Every Fourth of July
You can take it for a walk
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 17, 2010 Letter to the Editor: Stovepiping To Persia
There is literally nothing that Iran can do -" or not do -" to divert the American elite's desire to strike at their land and bring it under domination." They are of course already waging secret, slow-motion war against Iran right now, and have been for many years, with sanctions, terrorist campaigns and covert operations.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 9, 2013 Radical Notions
If their real concern was to quell "radicalization," shouldn't they be sending in people to talk up peace, tolerance, non-violence? It's almost as if they want to foment scarifying plots, keeping the public scared, obedient -- even slavishly grateful. I wonder who radicalized them into such violent extremism?
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 13, 2010 Sympathy for the Oval: Seeking Shreds to Cover the Naked Truth of Power
Obama has been intensely involved in the Afghanistan war since the very beginning of his term. Indeed, he has already masterminded not one but two "surges" of the conflict, as well as greatly expanding the murderous campaign of assassinations in Pakistan, killing hundreds of people, terrorizing hundreds of thousands, and exacerbating hatred and extremism at every turn.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, August 28, 2009 Big Brass Bull: Pentagon Deceit on Media Manipulation Confirmed
The Pentagon -- run by honest Brother Bob Gates, who is such a straight arrow that the saintly progressive Barack Obama carried him over from the Bush Regime to keep running our "overseas contingency operations -- has been caught lying through its teeth!
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 6, 2010 The Last Believer: From Omar's Mistake to Obama's Atrocities
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.
SHARE Monday, April 18, 2016 Stress Test: Childhood as a Raw Material for Investor Exploitation
who are they listening to, our leaders who care so much about education in our Big Society? In America, it is predatory investors (like the Murdochs, among many) who see the lives of our children -- their minds, their education, their very childhood -- as nothing more than so much raw material to mine for their own profit.
SHARE Wednesday, January 20, 2010 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors
Progressives and liberals will continue to insist that, bad as it is, we've got to keep supporting the Democratic Party-"because there is no alternative; otherwise, Tea Party torture mavens like Scott Brown or Sarah Palin will get elected. Keep pushing that Democratic agenda. You'll soon have Scott Browns and Sarah Palins running out of your ears.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, June 19, 2009 Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future
The recent, mysterious death of yet another captive in the Guantanamo concentration camp opens yet another door into the blood-caked labyrinth of the American gulag, where despite all the soaring rhetoric about "restoring the rule of law," torture is still very much the order of the day.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 2, 2010 Traditional Values: Obama Backs Oligarchic 'Continuity' Down South
Obama's famed "continuity" with his predecessors goes far beyond his avid, almost erotic embrace of Bush's Terror War atrocities (foreign and domestic). With the full-throated support of the world-straddling military-business regime to the north, and its hoary tradition of throttling ideas that might threaten the feudal privileges of oligarchy, the Honduran coup caudillos will likely have a good, long--and bloody--run.
SHARE 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.
SHARE Tuesday, April 16, 2013 Echoes in the Aftermath: Remembering the Victims of Violence
Let us remember the victims of violence today, those who died and those who live on in the scarred, tormented aftermath. Let us remember them in Boston, in Baghdad, in Mogadishu, in Guantanamo, in Waziristan -- and in every corner of the world where the crippled souls who live by violence seek to impose their evil dreams on us all.
SHARE Friday, July 9, 2010 Timebends: Parsing Progressive Perspectives on Power's Abuses
Imagine how great the "progressive" furor would be if the Bush Administration had suddenly denied a visa to an award-winning Colombian journalist because of his reportage on human rights abuses by his American-backed government.
What are Morris' crimes? Well, the American-trained Colombian security organs declared that the reporter had exhibited "opposition tendencies to government policies."
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 25, 2009 Wrist-slap and Tickle: Obama Goes Mild on CIA Torture
If the people have not already risen up in anger and protest at what has been done in their names, then a few more details from a heavily-censored government report dealing with only one small aspect of a massive, systemic crime is not going to move them.
SHARE Monday, November 27, 2006 All-Day Permanent Red: Alex Cox and the Long March of American Militarism
Detailed war plans are never drawn up unless there are very serious policy considerations behind them. For example, the now-advanced plans for an airstrike on Iran are not simply contingency exercises churned out by Pentagon analysts, they were ordered directly by George W. Bush, as were the pre-war plans for the Iraq invasion.
SHARE Tuesday, November 10, 2009 Talking Blues: Gitmo Gets Harsher Under "Progressive" Rule
many "respectable" figures in America's power structure are gearing up for "doing something" about the Muslims "in our midst," and especially those who dare sully the sacred military with their presence.
SHARE Wednesday, October 4, 2006 Fatal Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country - if the people lose their confidence in themselves - and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance. - Walt Whitman