With the coming of Barack Obama in 2009 we got an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, increased levels of drone strikes and missile attacks now to include Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, increasing numbers of JSOC raids and the killing of innocents, the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) in 2010 authorizing the president to have the military detain anyone indefinitely, including American citizens till the end of hostilities (in effect a life sentence), and the intentional assassination of American citizens in Yemen ( and of course justified and made "legal" by Justice Department memos and kept secret for reasons of national security). Let's also not forget Obama's collaboration with Israel unleashing the "Stuxnet" worm that disabled Iranian computers controlling the enrichment of uranium in 2010.
Let's not forget our "governments" collaboration with the big banks and the trillion dollar bailout of the financial industry that perpetrated the 2008 financial meltdown and subsequent great recession, rapacious "government" acts that resulted in no real accountability, and no renewed regulation or oversight of these institutions "too big to fail".
Now with the NSA revelations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden and the "agencies" surveillance of all electronic communications foreign and domestic and the latest revelations of the NSA's "back door" entry into American made software systems sold to foreign clients, its illegal, unconstitutional actions clearly convey our "governments" mendacity has no bounds.
Then lately the threats to bomb Syrian government installations over allegations Assad authorized chemical weapons again without the U.S. seeking U.N. Security Council legal authorization depicting it as "legal" even if the Council rejects it reveals a government ready to act in a rogue, sinister manner and answerable to nothing.
For sure the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia know first hand the sinister nature of the U.S. government being as they've been on the receiving end of U.S. drone attacks and missile strikes as well as nightly JSOC raids as they slept in their beds.
Intentionally not included in this piece are U.S. "government" actions that could not be classified as being sinister i.e. arming the Mujahedin and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1980 or Obama aiding the Libyan rebels fighting against Qaddafi and preventing his tank assault and impending massacre in Benghazi in 2011. The same could be said of the "humanitarian" intervention preventing the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo by Serb forces under Serbian President Milosevic in the 1990's.
Then what of the "government's" collusion and militarization of American local and state police forces along with its infiltration perpetrating violence before it encouraged the disbanding the Occupy Wall Street encampments by local authorities two years ago? Were these not sinister actions?
Here's another seeming truth; things are dire for many Americans but they are essentially forgotten. Most others in America have been "bought off", propagandized by their "government" and the corporate media, made docile and passively indifferent, mesmerized and distracted by technological gadgetry, sports mania, and excessive consumerism beyond all need. Such people do not make for radical revolutionaries ready to confront and take on its "government", regardless of that "government's" mendacity.
However, if history has taught us anything, all empires rise and eventually fall, whether overtaken or overthrown.
This too will surely happen with the American empire, though it's hard to say who of us will still be around to see it.
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