Russians Take After U.S. and Saudis, Bomb Doctors Without Borders Hospital

Man, Médecins Sans Frontières can't catch a break. First the U.S. attacks their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, four times in an hour, paying special attention to destroying the surgical facilities. Then the Saudis attack their facilities in Yemen, among over 70 medical sites bombarded by Saudi flying terrorists in their U.S.-supplied jets, dropping the cluster bombs and other munitions Obama gladly sells to them. (Presumably the Saudis are satisfied customers.) Actually that's not quite right. Obama has to allow U.S. "defense" manufacturers to make the sales.

And  now Russia has destroyed yet another MSF facility, in Syria, in several strikes from the air.

Russia, being no more moral or punctilious about observing international law then the U.S. or Saudi Arabia, has been helping their semi-client Bashar al-Assad cling to power (the power to terrorize, anyway) by using their air power to pummel both combatants and civilians. (Which, come to think of it, is starting to look a lot like the standard of warfare, beginning with the Nazi bombardment of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, then the destruction of cities by aerial bombardment in World War II, which the U.S. did more than any other nation, then on through Vietnam, and the Russian razing of Grozny, Chechnya, and now the Saudis over Yemen and the autodestruction of Syria by the Syrian "government."

I think it's time for MSF to heed my previous advice, and give their enemies WRONG GPS coordinates for their locations! They're only providing them targeting information as it stands. These are no "accidents,"(or "mistakes," as the mendacious U.S. government and media claimed the obviously deliberate attack on the Kunduz hospital was). That attack deprived an entire Afghan province of a trauma center, and was followed up by a U.S. tank crashing through the gate in a blatant act of intimidation. (Obama has a pattern of such thuggery, including the murder of the teenage son and nephews of Anwar al-Awlaki, the breaking of the arm of Medea Benjamin, and the intensifying assaults I have been experiencing at the hands of U.S. "intelligence."

For more on Russian war crimes against medical facilities in Syria, see "Russia Outdoes U.S. Five-Fold In Bombing Hospitals," October 27, 2015.

For the story of the deliberate U.S. attack on the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, see
Why Did the U.S. Launch a Sustained Aerial Bombardment of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital?, October 5th; "U.S. Military Changes Its Story- Again- On Bombing Doctors Without Borders Hospital," October 6th;  "WikiLeaks Invites Obama to Bomb It," October 8th; and "What Happens When One Nobel Peace Prize Winner Bombs Another Nobel Peace Prize Winner?" Oct. 9th.

Anti-Democratic Election Stealer Scalia Hailed as Great Man, Deep Thinker

The good news of the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a lifelong fanatical enemy of human rights, is tempered by the spewing of tributes to the deceased reactionary. The flood of grotesque propaganda hailing this evil creature spoils the pleasure his victims are entitled to take from his demise. [1]

 

Scalia, an arch-reactionary, is being lionized in death, even by the Democratic Party president Barack Obama, who inexplicably deemed him a "great thinker," based on no evidence whatsoever. Scalia's opinions were just that- the opinions of an extremist. But in the U.S., being a right-wing extremist qualifies one as a serious intellectual, it would seem. (See for example William F. Buckley, Jr, a fascist, racist, and gay-hater who had a penchant for threatening "left-wing" guests on his talk show with physical violence.) [2]

Scalia's "doctrine," in fact was mere rhetorical assertion. He presented himself as some kind of legal fundamentalist, who "interpreted" the Constitution "literally." In fact, Scalia started from his preferred outcomes, then crafted legerdemain and polemics to claim "originalist" Constitutional justification. Increasingly his "legal decisions" were heavily larded with insults directed at his colleagues on the bench.

Scalia was a fierce enemy of women, racial "minorities," and gay people, dedicating himself to relentless assaults on their attempts to at least be treated equally to relatively privileged white male heterosexuals.
Scalia also was part of the reactionary gang on the high court that greatly increased the political power of billionaire plutocrats by ruling that their wealth was “speech” that Congress had no right to put limits on. (Too bad American dissidents get no protection for their actual speech.) I refer of course to the notorious Citizens United case.

Scalia's “place in history” is assured by his notorious role in the theft of the 2000 presidential election, arguably the most consequential of his “judicial” (political) acts. As part of a cabal of five GOP agents on the high court, he and they illegally stopped the Florida vote recount, handing the election to their party's man, Bush the Younger. (2004 was stolen too, in Ohio.) The result was the destruction of the three buildings in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, a plot between the Saudis, Bush, Cheney, and fascist deep state operatives, using al-Qaeda as foils to take the blame for the awesomely photogenic collapsing towers (which al-Qaeda was eager to do, as the plotters correctly calculated). Then the long-planned Iraq invasion, the ramming through of overt police state legislation (“the PATRIOT Act was the law I proposed!” cried Joe Biden in vindication) and the ramping up of a global kidnapping network that was actually initiated by Bill Clinton, followed by the far-flung Houses of Horror of the U.S.' own gulag archipelago.

Oh, how much we owe Scalia. He did his part.

Scalia's carcass was barely cold before Republican Senators were threatening to refuse to allow Obama to appoint a successor, as is the president's right and duty. Instead they want to keep the seat vacant for the next 11 months on hopes of the next president being a member of their party who will appoint another arch-reactionary, instead of a conservative, as Obama will do. (One of the Big Lies of U.S. establishment discourse, which is mindlessly adopted by foreigners and domestic progressives who should know better, is that the Supreme Court is split between "conservatives" and "liberals." This is nonsense. The split is between reactionaries, who want negative change, greater repression, increased power for police and large corporations and impunity for them, and conservatives, who want to preserve the status quo. Reducing discrimination, or allowing someone a right that others already have, like the right to marry, isn't really "liberal." It's recognizing what is already mandated in theory, that everyone supposedly has equal rights. That's another Big Lie, of course.)

As the Gang Of Plunderers (GOP) currently controls the U.S. Senate, which must approve Federal judicial nominations, it would seem that they have the power to keep the Scalia seat vacant until after the November presidential election. That leaves the court with 8 members, divided between four conservatives (called “liberals”) 3 reactionaries (“conservatives” in the grossly misleading parlance) and a “swing vote,” Anthony Kennedy, who is pretty reactionary but just not as consistently as the harder core ones.

Of course Obama should nominate a replacement for Scalia. Presidents have nominated Supreme Court justices 17 times in their last year in office, including in 1988, by Bush the Elder. But starting with Clinton, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) has regarded Democratic presidents, and indeed the Democratic Party, as illegitimate. This has intensified with Obama. So they regard any exercise of power by a Democratic president as illegitimate. Thus the attacks on Obama's executive orders, and recess appointments, which have been routine until the GOP cabal on the Supreme Court just ruled Obama isn't allowed to make recess appointments. [3]

Or maybe it goes back to the assassination of JFK. Obviously HE was illegitimate if he needed to be removed by force. (At least in the minds of the fascists at the heart of U.S. power, in this case people like J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. And their fellow travelers like Nixon and Bush the Elder.)

Looks like if the right of women to control their own bodies and terminate pregnancies isn't to be eliminated in most of the U.S., the Democrats will have to win a third presidential election in a row. And then nominate a justice who is strong on abortion rights. (Unlike Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Scalia's “best friend” and fellow opera buff, as the establishment media never tires of reminding us, who thinks Roe v. Wade was a bad decision.)

1] A couple of examples of the fawning guff being lathered thickly onto Scalia's posthumous image, like pancake makeup on a corpse:

First words out of the mouth of David Greene, one of the hosts of U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR, on the morning “news” show, Morning Edition, starting at 5 A.M. Washington, D.C., time capital of the empire from where it originates:

“A legal titan. Ruth Bader Ginsburg calls him best buddy. Filling the very big shoes of...” blah blah. Actually should be easy to “fill his shoes.” Reactionary ideologues, polemicists, and political hitmen like Scalia are a dime a dozen in the U.S. And if you need one with a law degree, just go to the Federalist Society, a cabal of far right-wing lawyers dedicated to seizing control of the Federal judiciary through gradual infiltration.

By noon, however, NPR was saying “a partisan dispute is intensifying” over who gets to appoint Scalia's successor. (I mean, pick someone to fill those very big shoes.)

Remember, the guy only died two days ago.. That “partisan dispute” sure is intensifying rapidly.

Female hostess on Michael Bloomberg Billionaire's radio station, just before 3 P.M.:

“What do you make of Justice Scalia's legacy. Everyone [sic] says he's larger than life.”

I guess I must be nobody.

But I know one thing: Scalia is smaller than life now. Now he's nothing. Literally. It's called death.

Makes sense for one of Bloomberg's propagandists to gush over Scalia. Given Scalia's ferocious 
dedication to increasing the power of billionaires, Bloomberg has reason to be appreciative.

2] The Democratic Party habitually acts as the handmaiden of reaction, by legitimizing it and treating it as respectable. Notice that the reactionaries, including their party, the Republicans, don't return the favor. The Democrats are partners in domestic repression and external imperialism with the Republicans.

3] A recess appointment occurs when the president makes an executive branch appointment that ordinary requires Congressional approval, while Congress isn't in session. The appointments are temporary.

Comedian Andy Borowitz milks the GOP drive to emasculate Obama for a laugh at the New Yorker. “G.O.P. Warns Obama Against Doing Anything for Next Three Hundred and Forty Days,” February 15, 2016. His political humor eases the pain of U.S. politics a bit.

Turkey Bombards America's Kurds in Syria

The wars in the Middle East are looking more and more like a free-for-all. What a Pandora's Box the Bush-Cheney regime recklessly ripped open when it invaded Iraq!

The would-be Sultan of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dreams of Ottoman Empire glory, has been attacking armed Kurds wherever he can find them. First he restarted the war of extermination against the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization that arose as a reaction to the extreme repression of Kurds in Turkey. (For decades, Turkey sought to eliminate Kurdish identity completely, which is to say, the Kurds were subjected to a genocidal assault under the legal definition of genocide. There is a popular misunderstanding that genocide necessarily means physical extermination. It actually is defined as destroying a people by whatever means, or attempting to.) Then he extended his war over the border into both Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government has feebly protested the invasion of Iraq by Turkish troops attacking Kurdish forces. Those Kurds have been the main bulwark against the advance of the hated ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State, reviled for their Saudi-style beheadings.

The latest Turkish attacks against the Kurds is the aerial and artillery attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria. The BBC, and thus we can assume by extension the British government, supports, given today's reporting, which was sympathetic to the Turkish position. For exanple, they hauled on air a woman from the reactionary U.S. Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, to say that the PKK and the other Kurds the Turks are now attacking are birds of a feather. [1] Of course, the Kurds the Turks are now trying to destroy in Syria are also the main U.S. proxy ground forces against ISIS in Syria.

So Obama gave his vice president, Joseph Biden, an errand, to ask Erdoğan to please stop bombing the U.S.' Kurds. Erdoğan, predictably, refused to comply. Which Obama probably foresaw and sought to avoid being humiliated, thus the delegation of the task to Biden.

So where do we stand? The U.S. and whoever it can get is fighting ISIS. The U.S. is also against the Assad regime, but isn't fighting him and doesn't want its proxies to fight him. ISIS is fighting Assad. The Russians are fighting "terrorists," using the Assad regime definition of that word- namely anyone opposing Assad or even living in areas not under regime control. The U.S. is fighting "terrorists," namely ISIS, the al-Nusra front, and the always-mentioned-but-never specified "associated forces." (Being vague gives the U.S. the freedom to attack anyone they suddenly decide they don't like.)

The Iranians are fighting everyone Assad and the Russians are fighting, in Syria. So they're a U.S. Enemy in Syria, even though they're fighting ISIS.

In Iraq, the Iranians are allied with the same government the U.S. is backing, and against ISIS. But they're still an Enemy.

U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey is hosting U.S. warplanes that are bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, in support of the Kurds that Turkey is bombing and shelling.

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oiligarchies support Sunni extremists like al-Nusra. But they're U.S. allies, and Saudi Arabia has supposedly offered to contribute "special forces" (commandos) to fight in Syria against- well, the Sunni extremist ISIS. They've even contributed a few warplanes to bombing. (Most of their forces are tied up destroying Yemen at the moment.) Britain, France, all the usual suspects, are pitching in with bombing and/or aerial surveillance, although Canada, under a new liberal regime, will no longer drop bombs, just help look for targets. (The new prime minister Trudeau is apparently a peacenik.)

Is that all clear now?

I didn't think so.



1] The Wilson center is named for a former extremely racist president of the U.S., who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act (under which people who spoke against Wilson's entry into the First World War were imprisoned, First Amendment "free speech rights" be damned), the Palmer raids, in which thousands of leftists were rounded up without any judicial involvement- carried out by one J. Edgar Hoover, heading the precursor of the FBI, which he went on to run as the top secret police chief in America- and other depredations against human rights. The actual history of Wilson's regime- which is to say, truth- has been replaced by an absurd myth of Wilson as a noble idealist and liberal who believed in self-determination for people! Thus is the power of propaganda manifested yet again.

The lady "scholar" from the Wilson Center made sure to carry out her political and ideological duties by cueing us in on which side is the Good Guys and which the Bad in the Turkish bombing of Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting "a NATO army" for a decade, she gratuitously put in. I suppose that's one (twisted) way to look at it. Or the Turkish army waged a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign against the Kurds for a decade, "disappearing" people, torturing them, razing villages, and killing tens of thousands of people. People who would have settled for being allowed to speak their own language, publish their own newspapers, broadcast in their own tongue, and just allowed to be Kurds. But that was asking too much, various Turkish regimes decreed. The BBC forgot to mention the reality of Turkish state oppression of the Kurds. And commonly the death toll is blamed on the PKK, or on "the conflict," even though it was Turkish state forces that killed theoverwhelming majority of the now-dead.

By the way, that NATO army also invaded Cyprus and imposed its will on the Greek inhabitants there, supposedly to aid Turkish residents. Greece is in NATO too.

Woman Who Helped Murder Half a Million Children Reserves "Special Place in Hell" For Women Who Don't Vote for Clinton

"There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other."

Thus spake Madeleine Albright, directing her comment at female supporters of Bernard Sanders, Hillary Clinton's rival for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the U.S., trying to morally blackmail women into voting for Clinton on the basis of vaginal-solidarity, I suppose.

This happens to be the same Madeleine Albright who in 1996 was asked point-blank on television if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was "worth it."

Albright's answer: Yes. [1]

No one in the U.S. media- or any media I'm aware of- has asked the obvious rhetorical question: how did killing their children "help" the mothers of those victims? Were not those mothers women?

Is there a special place in hell for someone who helped murder them, maybe even more special than the place for women who don't vote for Hillary Clinton? (Whose husband, by the way, killed most of those children, with the help of his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.)

Former CIA infiltrator Gloria Steinem, Official Establishment (read: safe) Feminist, also went to bat for Hillary C., by sneering on comedian Bill Maher's show that young women who support Sanders are just looking for boys. Maher went Whoa, if I said that, but Steinem brushed off the obvious (and ironic) sexism of her comment. (Perceiving it soon after as a political goof, Steinem later "apologized," like she could just erase what she revealed about her own cynical attitude.) [2]

Of course, where does a "progressive" like Steinem get off campaigning for a right-wing imperialist warmonger, vicious class warrior, and recipient of millions of dollars in "speaking fees" from oligarchs appreciative of her servie to their class interests? (And how much did the Clinton's assault on the crumbs dribbled down to poor women "helped" those women. Some people actually resigned from Bill Clinton's regime as a result, and it takes a lot for political types to give up a government gig.)

Hopefully those with a larger audience than I will take up the nauseating cynicism of mass murderer Madeleine.

1] View the video clip of Albright on "60 Minutes" with Leslie Stahl.

2] The feminist collective Redstockings long ago documented Steinem's CIA work in India. Even the New York Times reported it one day, back in the 1970s. Later Steinem and her ally Bella Abzug got the publisher of the Redstockings' book to suppress the information in later editions. On a rare moment when she wasn't relying on establishment media to make knowledge of her CIA work go away, Steinem said “In my experience the agency was completely different from its image: it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

Right. It's just a smear that the CIA has directed the torture and murder of literally millions of people around the world.

See, for example, "A Word From Our Sponsor," New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 20, 2008.

167,000 Iowan VIP's Render Key Verdicts in U.S. Presidential Race

A select elite of Iowans, only 167,000 out of all the 3,124,000 people who live in Iowa (in other words, about 5% of the residents, one in 20), have steered the direction of the presidential race- or so the U.S. media would have it. This select group, 0.052 percent of the U.S. population of 321,419,000 (about 1/20th of 1 percent), after months of media anticipation, have finally spoken. And the media brays- the winner is Ted Cruz! With 27.7% of the caucus "vote." (In other words, 72.3% didn't vote for Cruz.) Donald "I Love Me!" Trump came in second, with 24.3% of the GOP caucus vote. [1]

But the "surprise" was Marco Rubio, third with 23.1%, declared the virtual winner by some, such as Don Gonyea of NPR (the U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network), who explained to us this morning that Rubio was a "winner" because he "exceeded expectations" [of the media, he neglected to say] and this "gives him momentum going into New Hampshire."

Ah yes, the Big Mo. I remember decades ago Hunter S. Thompson describing this "momentum" trope of election "coverage" with sly contempt. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Bernard (I refuse to call him "Bernie," he's not my uncle) Sanders were virtually tied- but the U.S. media insisted on declaring Clinton the "winner." Martin O'Malley was nipping at the duo's heels with 0.6%. Okay, he was left eating dust. (He then "suspended" his campaign for president.) At 6 of the Democrats' caucuses, coins were tossed to pick a winner. This is what "the" media wants us to take seriously! Clinton won 6 of 6 tosses, enabling her to slightly edge Sanders 49.9% to 49.6%. Thus is the Fate of the Republic determined. (The news of the coin tosses came from alternative radio/website democracynow.org. Not on NPR, which has been "covering" the Iowa show to the exclusion of almost all else.)

Now the horses are racing towards the next post, New Hampshire, another virtually all-white state, with the "journalists" providing more breathless commentary. So much artificial excitement! As if anything fundamental is at stake. Even if Bernard Sanders were to run, nothing of the deep power structure would change in the U.S. Any deep changes Sanders attempted would simply be blocked. Even a moderate change like universal health care is seemingly impossible to achieve. Or limiting the amount of money billionaires can deploy to fix elections! A mere five reactionaries, who happen to wear the robes of Supreme Court Justices, overturned the will of Congress and something like 80% of the American people on that score.

Notice how it takes more than a year of hype to get people worked up over their election! I wonder what that is symptomatic of.

1] Population figures latest from U.S. Census, as of midyear 2015, rounded off to nearest thousand. Vote percentages from New York Times. Of course, not everyone is eligible to vote, such as people under 18, and the one out of eight black men branded "felons." So the electorate is somewhat smaller than the population. But the point doesn't change. 167,000 is a tiny number of people to be handed such outsize influence in choosing the president of the U.S.

You might want to read the report, "State-Level Estimates of Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 2010," by The Sentencing Project. Here's the first sentence: "The United States is one of the world’s strictest nations when it comes to denying the right to vote to citizens convicted of crimes. A remarkable 5.85 million Americans are forbidden to vote because of 'felon disenfranchisement,' or laws restricting voting rights for those convicted of felony level crimes."

Power Establishment May Be Hoist On Its Own Petard In Iowa

For decades, the U.S. media, propaganda arms of the power structure, has set two early tests for the "viability" of candidates for president. Would-be presidents of the U.S. (a role like chief executive officer of U.S. Imperialism Inc.) have to do well in two very white, rural, reactionary states, Iowa and New Hampshire. Both have small populations and are unrepresentative of the U.S.

These initial filters obviously are designed to eliminate progressives and force candidates to the right. (New Hampshire has changed some in recent years, but Iowa is if anything even more reactionary now than formerly. But New Hampshire's main newspaper is still the rabidly reactionary New Hampshire Union-Leader.)

Well, it looks like Donald Trump is set to win or at least come in second in Iowa.

The power establishment has made no secret of its disdain for Trump. This is because he is a loose cannon, with no fixed ideological positions and no commitment to making himself subservient to the U.S. national security state. This doesn't mean he's an anti-imperialist. But he isn't someone under the control of the Council on Foreign Relations, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on domestic policy.

Trump swings wildly between diametrically opposite sentiments (it overly dignified the verbal stream that spews from his maw to call them "positions"). One day he doesn't care about ISIS, the next day he'll smash them to pieces and bar all Muslims from the U.S. And horror of horrors, for a day he and Putin had a little mutual admiration society thing going between them.

Trump of course is a narcissistic personality who has degenerated into demagogy. He would be an "irresponsible," and unpredictable, president. Which frankly I would find entertaining. And only people who worship U.S. power should fret that he might "damage" America. Unfortunately it appears that America has to be damaged if it is ever going to be forced to reform itself.

Birds Come Home to Roost in Pakistan

Or make that, giant pterodactyls come roosting.

The recent murderous assault on a university in northwestern Pakistan by some Islamofascists comes about a year after the massacre at the school for children of army personnel, in which 130 people, mostly children, were slaughtered.

Once again we are reminded that the Pakistani military created a Frankenstein's Monster when they birthed the fanatical jihadist movement. Now it has come back to bite them. The rabid dog has slipped its leash and turned on its master.

Pakistan's feckless civilian elite also shares some blame. By refusing to provide normal schools for the poor, parents send their boys to madrassas, brainwashing centers of the most primitive, backward Islamic indoctrination, where future "martyrs" are bred. When you convince people they will live eternally in paradise if they kill themselves for your cause, the seeds are sown for terrorism.

The Pakis occasionally whine these days that they are suffering great casualties from terrorism. Well, whose fault is that?

They've been forced against their will to fight the beast they created. Good luck to them.

Here's an idea: learn to hate India less. The last time the civilian leadership of Pakistan and India reached out to one another, the Paki military sabotaged the meeting between the two heads of state by launching yet another terrorist attack in Indian Kashmir, using one of its proxy cat's paw puppet terror groups.

Too bad the government of Pakistan doesn't actually control the military of Pakistan.

Obama Proves You Can Fool Some of the People All of the Time- Again

Barack "DroneMan" Obama just announced that it's harmful to lock juvenile prisoners in solitary confinement, and therefore Federal juvenile prisoners will no longer be subjected to such mind-damaging treatment.

It only took Obama, an intelligent, well-informed man, 7 years into his presidency to figure this out, and do something about it. Which should rightly make us suspicious of his motives. Is it really that he's a humanitarian and reformer? His record of violent assaults on human rights and institutionalization of greater repression is ample grounds to reject such a possibility. [1]

This announcement was nothing more than the latest salvo in a propaganda cum "legacy"-building campaign, Obama The Merciful. Previously it was announced with great fanfare that Obama was "pardoning" (actually commuting the sentences of) 6,000 Federal prisoners. (As usual with the "Good" Obama, there was less- much less- there than met the eye, and ear. Only 1,000 prisoners were actually let out of prison, or more accurately, scheduled to be let out of prison a bit sooner then they would have been anyway. The others were in half-way houses or on probation. And many more than 6,000 Federal prisoners are released yearly as a matter of course, replaced of course by the newly-incarcerated. Obama's drop-in-the-bucket gesture barely moved the dial on the total number of Federal prisoners, around 200,000, and was imperceptible against the total U.S. prison population of over 2 million, most of whom are prisoners of the 50 individual states. And that doesn't count "illegal" immigrants imprisoned for deportation.)

This Mercy Offensive by the Kinder and Gentler Oppressor is part of Obama's "legacy-building." In the last of his eight years in power, Obama wants to be judged by "history" (bourgeois opinion-manipulators) on just his last year, so like Bill Clinton he can give a vague impression of liberalism.

Some people, but fewer and fewer as time has gone by and experience has wised up "folks," are falling for this. My impression is fewer are hailing it than hailed his "pardons." (Pardoning means erasing the conviction; commutation is shortening the prison sentence. Obama has been commuting sentences, often by only a few months.) So, pace Lincoln, there are still those being fooled by Obama- because they want to be.

1] In brief, Obama's anti-human rights record includes: signing into the law the power to declare American citizens "terrorists" and imprison them indefinitely in a military prison, without charges or appeal, so they can enjoy the same treatment non-Americans get in places like Guantanamo Bay and, formerly, Bagram and other military torture sites and the CIA's "black sites"; waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers and journalists; overseeing the world's most massive and total surveillance system, run by the NSA and utilitized by the FBI, CIA, and DEA, which then launder the information to hide its source and bring trumped-up criminal charges against their targets; issuing orders requiring every Federal employee to be a spy and informer on their fellow employees; blowing up hospitals and using drones to wipe out wedding parties and etc.; his obvious indifference to the system of police repression of blacks and Latinos, the murders of whom are merely the most visible aspect of that repression; the FBI coordination of the repression of the Occupy Movement; and various individual acts of violence, such as the assassination of Al-Qaeda polemicist/propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki's teenage son and nephews; the murder of Obama bin Laden (yes, it was murder; even if the victim is a "scumball" who "deserved it," it's still murder); the CIA assassination of journalist Michael Hastings, who was investigating a very very sensitive state secret at the time (who planted the explosives that blew up those three buildings in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001? Who ordered it?); allowing the FBI to cold-bloodedly execute Ibragim Todashev, and arrange the murder of Sandra Bland; having the Egyptian dictator Sisi doing him the favor of breaking Medea Benjamin's arm, for having the effrontery to interrupt one of his self-righteous speeches; and other victims unknown. [See also TODASHEV.]

Speaking of victims, a note to my non-secret police readers: I was about to embark upon a project that would have taken up my time and focus, namely digitizing video tapes of past performances by a friend of mine, a non pareil songwriter and singer. These one-of-a-kind performances represent art that was only preserved on those tapes. My secret police persecutors, monitoring my computer research on digitizing, and with the advantage of hidden camera in my home, stole the box in which those tapes were stored. This is the most malicious thing they have done to me in over four decades of persecution, which had included false arrests, scores of illegal surreptitious burglaries, a chilling death threat, acts of sabotage and vandalism, the standard warrantless wiretaps and bugs, and the theft of thousands of dollars. So going forward I will be sharing my experiences of persecution which will illustrate the methods typically used by U.S. secret police against people they don't like. I also have specific information collected over these decades of persecution on FBI activities, use of Mossad agents, CIA locations, personnel identities, photos, and etc. If my tapes don't "reappear," I will do my best to make that information publicly available, and spread around to organizations with an interest in such information. Perhaps my tormentors will prefer that to my political analyses. [Just leave them downstairs.]

What persecuted American dissidents need is greater visibility. Why is there no organization and website for the victims to share their experiences and learn from one another? There are various reasons for that, including the heterogeneous nature of the victims, and the suffocating ideological power of U.S. lies that the U.S. is "free" and there are no dissidents here. (Just as there are no homosexuals in Iran, I suppose).

Now It's "Official"- Russian Assassins Murdered Alexander Litvinenko

It certainly took the British establishment long enough to arrive at that long-obvious conclusion. [1]

Ten years ago, two ruthless Russian FSB agents, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, tricked Litvinenko into meeting with them, and spiked a cup of green tea with radioactive polonium-210. Litvinenko then died a slow, agonizing death over the next three weeks.

Traces of polonium were found in the drain of Kovtun's hotel room, in spots around London where the killers had passed through, even on the airplane they flew on.

The new report concludes that Vladimir Putin "probably" ordered the hit. [2]

I'd make that very very probably. How about virtually certain.

Litvinenko, who became a British citizen, was himself a former FSB (Russian secret police) agent who had become a whistleblower about corruption and murder by the FSB. Worse, he exposed the false flag apartment building bombings in Moscow, pinned on Chechen separatists, as actually being FSB terrorist acts to justify the subsequent all-out war on Chechnya, during which the capital of Grozny was reduced to pulverized rubble. (Litvinenko wasn't the only one to make the claim about the true authors of the Moscow apartment bombings. Unfortunately I haven't seen hard evidence of the claim, or the factual underpinnings of it. So I have to be agnostic about it.)

The Russian state and media have, predictably, scoffed at the British announcement. They also cite their Constitution, which bars extradition of Russian citizens in any event. (The British in the past demanded the extradition of the two known culprits, and were refused.)

The murderous Lugovoi has gone on to bigger and better things than merely being a hitman. He's now a parliamentarian, a member of the Duma, Russia's legislature. And he received an award for his services to the state. Figures.

Two years before Litvinenko's murder, Yasser Arafat was also murdered by polonium poisoning, obviously by Israel. Ariel Sharon had just washed his hands of Arafat, who was blamed for blocking "peace" (Palestinian surrender). Arafat's replacement was Mahmoud Abbas (also styled as Abu Mazen), who had proved a quite willing collaborator with Israel, having the CIA train his "security forces" to oppress the Palestinians in the West Bank, and aid and abet Israeli kidnappings and murders of Palestinians there. But the weapon used to assassinate Arafat only became known recently when Al-Jazeera undertook an investigation and polonium was discovered on Arafat's personal effects. Then Abbas stalled an exhumation and proper autopsy and testing of Arafat's remains. (Gee, I wonder why.)

The Palestinian people always assumed Arafat was poisoned. They just didn't know by what.

What's still unknown is exactly who. But as Arafat was at the time trapped in his headquarters in Ramallah by Israel, and got his food from the Israelis, we know generally who. And we know the order would have had to come from the very top- from prime minister Ariel Sharon.

Polonium, by the way, is produced in nuclear reactors. So it is no garden variety murder weapon readily available to any killer.

1] According to the UK Guardian, it was Litvinenko's widow, who forced the British government to even hold an inquiry, battling for 10 years to expose his killers. The Guardian says" "Her biggest obstacle has been the Conservative government and its coalition predecessor: it initially refused her request for a public inquiry, only agreeing after defeat in the high court and the shooting down, apparently by pro-Russian forces of a civilian jet,  Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17." (My emphasis.) ["Litvinenko inquiry: the key players," Guardian, 21 January, 2016.]

So I guess the Russians are right. This is "political." Which doesn't make it false. There is quite a large volume of evidence, available at the Inquiry's website, linked below.

2] "Litvinenko 'probably murdered on personal orders of Putin'," UK Guardian, 21 January, 2016.
To read the actual report, go to The Litvinenko Inquiry. For a description of the background and the conduct of the inquiry by the government, go to Publication of the Inquiry Report.

"Who, me?" The cutthroat Andrei Lugovoi.

The polonium poisoned teapot.

Islamofascist Brush Fires Breaking Out All Over, and the Dismal Outlook in the World Today

The last week or so has seen a spate of jihadist attacks in widely scattered locales- symptomatic of the transnational nature and ambitions of this violent totalitarian movement.[1] 

In Turkey, a clutch of German tourists were blown to kingdom come, or heaven, or Valhalla, their spirits liberated from their physical molecules (if indeed spirit can exist apart from its material manifestations).

In Mogadishu, Somalia, first a hotel was attacked, then a base of African Union foreign troops. The attackers claim they killed 100, and they took some prisoner. (Or "hostage," if you prefer.)

On the other (western) side of Africa, jihadists struck a "soft target" in Bamako, Mali, a hotel.

Also, in the capital of Burkino Faso, 28 civilians were killed and 50 wounded in attacks on a hotel and a cafe. Six were Canadian missionaries headed to a village to do aid work. It took 12 hours to polish off the four attackers. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb were proud to take responsibility.

In Afghanistan, a welcome home party for a freed prisoner of the Taliban was spoiled by a party-pooping suicide bomber, who killed 13 people and wounded 14 others. And the "Islamic State," a recent arrival in Afghanistan, attacked the Pakistani consulate in Jalalabad, killing seven. (One is tempted to say "serves you right, Pakis." But I'll restrain myself.) And a rocket hit the the Italian embassy in Kabul, injuring two guards.

Speaking of Islamic State (I'd rather not, but they make themselves hard to ignore), in Deir al-Zor, Syria, which they just overran a few day ago, they slaughtered a bunch of people Saudi-style, beheading them, and kidnapped 400, according to the well-regarded Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Finally, in Pakistan, one of the plethora of primitive fanatic terror groups just killed 14 people, mostly police protecting vaccination workers. (Contra Noam Chomsky, these barbarians aren't violently opposed to modern medicine because a few years ago the CIA used a fake vaccination program to try and surreptitiously gather DNA samples from people in the compound in Abbottabad where they suspected Osama bin Laden was holed up, after a Pakistani officer told them about it to collect the reward the U.S. was offering. They obviously oppose vaccination, period. That's why they consistently murder the mostly-female government vaccination personnel. Of course, the CIA's underhanded little ruse gives the Talibanoids a ready-made "justification," at least in their minds.) And some Taliban group ("Taliban" is an umbrella term in Pakistan) attacked a university in northwest Pakistan, killed 22 students and instructors. One Talib took "credit," and another denied it was Taliban.

But lest we forget, far greater violence is meted out from U.S., Russian, French, British and other warplanes trying to beat back either ISIS and/or challengers to the Assad regime in Syria, and by Saudi and other Gulf state warplanes destroying what's left of Yemen, where over 70 medical facilities have been hit, and mosques and weddings are fair game. We hear much, much less about that violence, and never graphically, in U.S. media, nor in some other western media either, such as the British government's main propaganda outlet, the BBC. [2]

Over fourteen years after the arranged events of September 11, 2001, the second "Pearl Harbor" used to put in motion the invasion of Iraq and a suffocating secret police state in the U.S., the "terrorist" problem is far more widespread now. It's hard to see how the U.S. is "winning." Which, like the "wars" on drugs, and on crime, is besides the point. The point is to maintain the increased state power that a state of war gives to those in power, indefinitely. [3]

The Western toleration of Saudi and Pakistani (military) extremism has led to the Islamofascist chickens coming home to roost.

Al-Qaeda was birthed in the U.S.-sponsored jihad against the Soviet Union and the regime backed by it in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is the granddaddy or first generation of the Islamist "terrorist" groups the U.S. and its "partners" is waging war against. It of course was created in the ideologically red-hot political furnace of the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan fueled by the U.S., Saudi and other Gulf arab states, and Pakistan. It spawned an unruly son it couldn't control, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, after the American invasion smashed that country into sectarian pieces. Out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq sprang ISIL, which seized territory, declared a caliphate, and became IS, the most virulent form of the Islamofascist movement yet. So what the U.S. is fitfully battling has become both more virulent and move geographically widespread and dispersed.

There are many reasons for this. One is the increased number of weak states and failed states. Afghanistan and Somalia were the first. Since then we can add Mali, Libya, Nigeria, and parts of Egypt. In some cases the U.S. helped destroy the state (Afghanistan and Libya being prime examples), and then lost interest, leaving a power vacuum. In the case of Iraq, the U.S. knocked Humpty-Dumpty off the wall, and all its drones, gunships, and armored vehicles (and braggart bloodthirsty snipers) couldn't put the pieces back together again.

Venal, repressive, corrupt regimes, as in Egypt and Nigeria, provoked extremist resistance in the form of violent jihadi movements. The U.S. consistently supported (and armed) the repressive regimes, sometimes justifying this as pragmatic necessity, which does nothing to avoid the crises that have come to pass.The more the U.S. has gone down the road of supporting repressive regimes, the more it has painted itself into a corner.

The refusal to support democracy and human rights (and cynical lip service to those things while creating death squad regimes, such as in Latin America, does not constitute support) has created what the CIA terms "blowback," and not just in the form of Al-Qaeda growing out of the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan. The horrible societies in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras (where the Obama regime supported the anti-democratic coup that has plunged that nation into a nightmare of murderousness and insecurity for the populace) has created a relatively minor blowback problem for the U.S. in the form of refugees (mostly women and children) fleeing to the U.S., where the U.S. denies them their rights under international refugee law and has a public relations headache on its hands as it once again needs to paper over its repression, contempt for human rights and international law in practice, by once again spouting cynical rhetoric, a threadbare velvet over a mailed fist of cruelty.

As the economic state of growing numbers of Americans continues to decay, it seems a day of reckoning for the U.S. itself lies a few decades in the future. The more astute individuals within the establishment elite, including some economists, have lately fretted about the long-term threat to the stability of the system from what is euphemistically called "growing inequality," i.e., increasing concentration of wealth at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid.

Still, as an empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery, and spread relentlessly around the globe with military force and secret police crimes, the U.S. has had a spectacular run.It grew rapidly in geographical spread and power, and came to closest to any empire in history to achieving literal world domination. But even the fall of the Soviet Union did not allow for complete world hegemony, and the rise of China puts paid to that dream. Yet the struggle for ever more anti-human power is an addiction that the U.S. ruling elites cannot kick, because they don't want to. We are living with the consequences of that. Meanwhile the propaganda system helpfully shields our eyes from the sight of Yemen reduced to destitute rubble by Saudi bombing, beheadings of protesters by the Saudis (somehow not at all horrifying, unlike beheadings by ISIS), and the usual U.S. atrocities and war crimes. (Bombed a hospital? Just a mistake.)

Caught between U.S. imperialism and its lackeys and grotesque clients on the one side, and the intolerable Islamofascism on the other, the populations of both the countries in the fire, and we who live outside it yet are conditioned to be afraid by lurid media emphases on the few and far between terrorist attacks in our "homelands" such as San Bernardino, Charlie Hebdo, and the recent Paris massacre, are faced with an unpalatable choice and no obvious alternative option- especially since attempts to create alternatives, whether in Egypt, or in the U.S. (such as the Occupy Movement) are vigorously repressed and suppressed. [4]

All in all, not a very hopeful situation. So Obama feeds us upbeat messages in a "State of the Union" address, and the narcissist and demagogue Donald Trump plays on fear and despair and promises a "return to greatness." Pick your poison.

An antidote will only arise if somehow a pro-human mass movement can arise. The continued refusal of  most "whites" in America to see "blacks" as fellow  human beings, to not be outraged even at the most outrageous police murders, such as the gunning down of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, playing with a toy gun in a park, by cops who zoomed up in their car, leapt out, and shot him dead in two seconds, (and then manhandled and "arrested" his 14-year-old sister who tried to help him as he was left to die on the ground like a rabid dog), does not bode well. If a populace cannot unite around even such a blatant atrocity on their home turf, much less support a movement like the Black Lives Matter one, it's hard to see them uniting coherently on any ethical grounds. Instead there will be a fragmented collection of single-issue interest grouplets on what pathetically constitutes the "left" in America (capital L in the fevered imaginations of fascists such as the National Review crowd, who seems to included establishment pillars such as the New York Times and Washington Post in "the Left,")

1] I say totalitarian not as an epithet, but as a factual descriptive. Islamofascism insists upon total control of every aspect of people's lives, including their thoughts and beliefs, enforces strict conformity to its dictates, tolerates no opposition or dissent or political force other than itself, and rules without democratic consent. Not that such consent would legitimize it. No majority group has the right to impose oppression on individuals who do not wish to be part of such a system. U.S. racial segregation and oppression was "democratic" in that the majority- whites- supported it.

As far as the fascist part, I wrote previously about the commonalities between "classical" fascism- all fascism, really- and the jihadists. Couldn't find it so don't have a link. In brief, what they have in common are a total lack of moral limits, great ruthlessness, an easy resort to extreme violence, fanatical dedication to achieving their desired ends (by any and all means), utter untrustworthiness, refusal to genuinely compromise (they always double-cross those they do deals with, eventually), and maybe there was some other stuff I forgot.

You could say that it sounds like any imperialism, for that matter, but imperialisms often have a veneer of civilization, which makes them more viable as systems that can last.

2] I'm not a pacifist. Unfortunately violence is part of life at the current backward stage of evolution of our species. Pacifism can only work when everyone's a pacifist, and maybe someday they will be. Personally I'm not a violent person, and like most people I don't enjoy physical fighting.
What's wrong with Saudi violence inflicted on Yemen is both its criminal nature (targeting civilians, hospitals, etc.) and its immorality (no moral justification). And blaming Iran is absurd.

Even some U.S. violence has been justified. Helping the Libyan people overthrow Qaddafi was morally proper. Unfortunately, Qaddafi had destroyed the institutions of state and society, so with his fall there was nothing except people with guns.

The U.S. was very late to put an end to Serbian depredations in the former Yugoslavia, but in that case it proved to be better late than never.

In Syria it's been a case of too late. There was a year of opportunity after Assad turned an outbreak of non-armed protest into an insurrection by his vicious, murderous repression. During that year, U.S. military support for the uprising could have succeeded in toppling Assad. After that it was too late. It has taken the inroads of IS to provoke a serious U.S. military intervention, but at this point a bad outcome is guaranteed.

So we must reject the simplistic thinking which attempts to apply the same lesson and a single rule to every situation, as the anti-war people on the left do and the John McCain bomb everybody establishment right does. A situational analysis is necessary. Reality, and Life, is more complicated than that,

3] Some of us, such as dissidents as myself, have never had any rights. No warrants were ever needed for phone taps, surreptitious home burglaries, room bugs, and searches of medical and financial records. Now under such legislation and the PATRIOT Act, the population generally has no rights. Every year the FBI issues tens of thousands of "national security letters" to search all kinds of personal records held by banks and any other institution under the excuse of "investigating terrorism." Under the rubric of the NDAA signed into law by Obama, any U.S. citizen labeled a "terrorist," no evidence or court finding necessary, can be indefinitely imprisoned without charges, much less trial and conviction, by the military. So far the U.S. courts have upheld this. And currently the number of people officially branded as "terrorist" on various lists is around a million.

Meanwhile the U.S. has expanded military operations to numerous nations. So the "war on terror" has no end in sight. But the very term misunderstands what the adversary is. As even the occasional establishment figure points out, terrorism is a tactic. One cannot wage war on and defeat a tactic. The root from which jihadi violence springs is an ideology. Western propaganda so far as proven ineffectual in defeating that ideology. It deals only with the surface. Nor should we expect that to change, as the U.S.' "allies" in its war are Saudi Arabia, the taproot and spreader of the intolerant and oppressive Wahhabist fundamentalism from which Islamofascism springs, and Pakistan, whose military has been using terrorism as a strategy against India and in Afghanistan. Thus all three nations- those two and the U.S.- are deeply enmeshed in their own contradictions.

4] A "terrorist" attack is one with a specific ideological content, namely jihadist. If the ideological content is, say, opposition to abortion, as in the Colorado Springs attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic there, in which three people were murdered, including a police officer, and nine wounded, it is NOT "terrorist." Got that?

Another Big Blast of Bombastic Blather From U.S. Emperor Barack Obama

The yearly U.S. state ritual, the “State of the Union” address to Congress, was performed last night by the Federal politicians of America- the president, U.S. senators, and representatives in the House. [1]

Perhaps you've forgotten about it already. I'm a bit tardy since I've been under stress and distraction thanks to my U.S. secret police persecutors. I think I will start posting about that.

This speech, delivered by the president to Congress, is an increasingly empty political show, put on in an attempt by the elites (political and media) to reinforce the indoctrination of the populace. An empty display of pseudo-democracy, it is in part a self-report card by the president, who brags of alleged achievements, and in part yet another injection of America Is Wonderful and Getting Better propaganda.

No doubt the vast majority of the American populace does not sit in front of their TVs to watch this boring, anodyne political spectacle, yet the establishment propaganda system (“the media”) treat it as a Big Event, which it is decidedly not. So they will “analyze” it (make obvious, non-incisive comments about it) and the rival politicians of the Other Party (in this case the GOP, Gang Of Plunderers) will carp in ways that avoid mention of the real crimes of Obama. [2]

Bad enough I am forced to waste any part of my life thinking about Obama and his crimes against humanity.

Obama just this past week cruelly unleashed police state goons to round up endangered Central American women and children to forcibly deport them to what for at least some will be death at the hands of gangs. Some apologists for Obama on the left see this as an attempt to appease the right. But having deported over 2 million people during his reign- a record for any president- and failing to stop rightists from ignoring that fact completely (the white racists and xenophobes insist that “their” country is being “taken over” by Hispanics) I'm confident that Obama, an intelligent (and immoral) man, realizes that deporting a few hundred more won't win him any kudos from rightists, and from the racists and demagogues who insist he is a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist (cf. Donald Trump, e.g.).

Let's remember, Obama is never going to run for office again for the rest of his life. So what he does now isn't determined by electoral considerations. No one should still pretend that he's doing anything he doesn't really want to do.

Obama does these things because he is an oppressor. He has shown this in many ways. Under him, the civil liberties and human rights holocaust begun under the Bush regime has intensified, not abated. This has come about

Obama has treated the outrageous cases of police murders of blacks, even of 12 year old Tamir Rice, gunned down in broad daylight in Cincinnati, a crime captured on camera and yet exonerated by “the authorities,” with malign neglect. At most, he has tried to pour oil on troubled waters to trick the aggrieved into cooling out, to pacify them while doing nothing at all about the “problem.” Obama (and his “black” Attorneys General, first the millionaire corporate lawyer Eric Holder, Jr., and now Loretta “The Confiscator” Lynch) instead act as all their predecessors have, as aiders and abettors of police repression of the black underclass. The reason “bad apple” killer-cops are supported by state power is because the low level of terror these murders create is seen as a useful intimidation tactic to keep the black underclass submissive.

Once again, we see that class trumps race in determining political loyalty and action by particular individuals. And that the power system is so structured that only those dedicated to its underlying values and interests can rise within it.

But I do believe that Obama only fooled those who wanted on some level to be fooled. Unlike people who should have known better (prominently among them directors Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, and the very intelligent Christian philosopher and activist

Here's another massive ongoing crime against humanity that Obama is assiduously aiding and abetting: the relentless Israeli campaign to suffocate the Palestinian people. Obama currently is making a deal with Israel that will run for ten years after he leaves office to increase the handout of free military “aid” to Israel by 50%, to $4.5 billion a year.

By the way, it's “illegal” for Palestinians to even collect rainwater. The Israeli army, the so-called “Israeli Defense Force,” destroys cisterns and anything else constructed to collect rainwater. This on top of the “settlements” taking atleast 75% of the water of the West Bank for their own use.

One thing Obama said in his televised oration that was so outrageous in its brazen cynicism was his vow to “close Guantanamo,” the U.S. military prison-torture center in occupied Cuban territory.

He certainly has his nerve. When he was elected, seven years ago, way back in 2008, he vowed to close the prison within a year. What he has done instead is refuse to release even prisoners “cleared for release” years ago. [And it has just been revealed that the military- which he is the commander-in-chief of, as per the U.S. Constitution- has been deliberately obstructing the release of “cleared” prisoners for years by being uncooperative with foreign officials whose countries have agreed in principle to accept “detainees” for “relocation.” Tactics include refusing to provide medical records (with the cynical excuse of “respecting the prisoner's privacy”!) refusing to allow delegations to stay overnight at the sprawling base, and other forms of stonewalling.]

Once again, Obama posed as a Friend of Immigrants- even placing a “dreamer” as a prop next to wife Michelle- while in the midst of launching vicious predawn raids on the abodes of refugee mothers and children. He's going to “continue the work that needs to be done- fixing our broken immigration system,” applause from Democrats starts- and a laundry list of faux-liberal items off a checklist- gun control, minimum wage, etc. In fact, in almost every case, he never lifted a finger to do a thing, except when he actively worked to make things worse, as in the case of the millions of immigrants forced to live quasi-underground existences in the U.S. In other cases he did very little. [3]

This is the same tune he sang during his national debut, the speech he delivered at the Democratic Party's national convention in 2004. I was revolted by that phony speech at the time, as it was standard Democratic Party deceit that could have been cribbed from an endless series of Democratic Party con men- Mario Cuomo, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, et al, who always talk liberal and behave as reactionaries in practice. (Cuomo's sole achievement as NY State governor was a massive prison expansion; Humphrey was a cheerleader for the criminal Vietnam war as LBJ's vice-president; Stevenson was a Cold War Democrat.)

He had to put in a boast about ordering the assassination of Osama bin Laden (he didn't phrase it like that, of course- he's far too dishonest for that) in the context of talking about how much he was “bombing” ISIS. These acts he labeled “bringing to justice,” the usual sinister euphemism he uses for violent retribution.

A sample of Obama's breast-beating bragging from The Speech: “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin. Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead. They call us.” Note the combination of national chauvinism and the implied self-serving compliment to his own “stewardship” of the empire this boast displays. This “pride” in their destructive power is surely scary to many of the world's people, who have been on the receiving end of the U.S. “big stick.”

His hosannas for the Greatness of the U.S., and his own fabulous achievements, naturally would have been spoiled by mentioning how the U.S. (and him) rushes bombs and bullets to Israel every time it devastates Gaza yet again, or now it is currently making possible the destruction of large parts of Yemen, and the starvation conditions there, by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf state lackeys, flying planes purchases from the U.S., and dropping bombs supplied by the U.S. The Saudis have bombed medical facilities 70 times in Yemen, including a facility for the blind. Taking after the U.S., they just bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital (Médecins Sans Frontières). MSF keeps giving out their GPS coordinates, thinking that will spare them attacks. They need to start giving out FALSE coordinates, for empty lots and such, instead. It's obvious that evil nations like Saudi Arabia and the U.S. only use the information for accurate targetting! [4]

I suppose I should mention his ''ruefulness'' about what is called partisan gridlock, the refusal of the rival imperialist capitalist parties (the Democrats and Republicans) to come together in one happy ruling clan. That's been a recurring theme throughout his reign. All I'll say is it is entirely due to GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) fanaticism.

Obama's eighth and last State of the Union speech. I'm glad that's over with. Another ritual of the power class we can do without, being force-fed their guff.

1] The U.S. has a bicameral national legislature, consisting of the “House of Representatives,” with 435 members, elected from 435 electoral districts roughly equal in population and encompassing all the area of the 50 states, and the Senate, with 100 senators, each state having two. Thus, the U.S. Senate is one of the most profoundly anti-democratic elected institutions on earth. The approximately 20 least populous states have forty senators, while California, with the same population as those states, gets two. As the least populous states are mostly very reactionary, such as the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming (Cheney-Land) and so on, this is yet another device that makes and keeps the U.S. a rightwing nation.

2] Here's a typical example of anodyne media “reaction” from the next morning's (January 13) “news” broadcast on U.S. government radio propaganda network, “Morning Edition,” as orated by co-host Steven Inskeep from his script. According to Inskeep, Obama's speech was “both sweeping and relaxed. He [Obama] offered a defense of his record along with a long term vision” blah blah.

Inskeep just last week did a brown-nosing “interview” with Obama, aired over two days on NPR. One thing the weaselly propagandists of NPR know how to do is genuflect before their political masters.

3] The “dreamers” are those cruelly duped young offspring of immigrants, who lack citizenship and grew up in America, whom Obama tricked into believing that somehow their status would be “regularized” and they could live in America without the constant fear of summary deportation (sans possessions and money), be able to go to college, work, live what is considered a normal life.

4] See “A Hospital Bombedin Yemen,” The Atlantic, January 10, 2016

Vicious Maiming of Black Children in Flint, Michigan, by GOP (Aided by Obama EPA)

In an example of both racist contempt and ruthless, remorseless class warfare, the Republican Party rulers of the State of Michigan have been relentlessly poisoning the people of Flint, Michigan, with lead and bacteria-contaminated tap water.

Lead is a neurotoxin, which causes permanent brain damage, especially in children. Scores of children in Flint have been found with greatly elevated levels of lead in their blood. Lead has also harmed the health of adult residents in the city. And lead damages other organs of the body.

The victims of this violent assault are the mostly poor, mostly black (somehow it usually works out that way in America) residents of Flint, one of a number of cities and towns (all but one majority black) in Michigan that have been placed under Tsarist-like rule of appointed “emergency managers,” imposed by Republican Governor Rick Snyder. Under these arrangements, in which the residents and elected officials of the towns thus seized have no say, the local governments are stripped of their powers, and the “emergency manager,” the GOP local Tsar, has all power, including abrogating labor contracts.

In Flint, one of the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) hitmen was put in charge of the water system by the “emergency manger,” Darnell Earley. This assaulter, Howard Croft, figured that a great way to save money would be to stop paying for water from Detroit, and pump it directly from the Flint River, into people's homes. Only problem was, that water is highly corrosive and would leach lead and iron from the pipes and into the water and from there, into people's bodies. The iron contributed to the growth of bacteria, apparently leading to an outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease in Flint, which killed ten people. But the professional penny-pincher Croft figured he could save another $100 a day by not treating the water with chemicals that would prevent the corrosion of the water pipes. You know what they say: a penny saved is a pound (or dollar) earned -for “upscale” taxpayers. (Or in this case, a few billion from the Federal government to tear out the corroded pipes and replace them, if Michigan gets a bailout its Governor is asking for. Funny, Republicans hate bailouts for everyone but themselves and rich plutocrats.) [1]

Anyway, the most important thing in life is that bondholders get paid every dime they were promised,NOT that workers get the pensions they worked a lifetime for, or people get essential services, and not be deliberately poisoned.

The residents knew something was wrong right away, as the water was quite obviously noxious. Their GOP masters and overseers repeated lied through their teeth and said nothing was wrong, the water was fine. A resident instigated two tests of her water. They showed 100 and 400 ppb (parts per billion) lead in the tap water. The Federal “action level” is 15 ppb, meaning something should be done about it immediately. So this water was extremely dangerous. (There's actually no “safe” level of lead.)

These test results were taken to the local EPA office, and an EPA employee did his job, confirmed the lead contamination, and reported his findings to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, naively expecting they would do something about the “problem.” (The fundamental problem is the criminal behavior of the political bosses in the U.S., and the upper classes they represent. That's what causes the smaller “problems” that are focused on while ignoring their causes and contexts, applying either band-aid solutions, palliatives, or doing nothing at all. For example, the “over-incarceration” “problem” is dealt with by highly-publicized releases of small numbers of prisoners “early.” The accompanying hoopla is supposed to impress.)

For his trouble, the EPA employee was rebuked by his EPA superiors, reassigned, and a letter of apology was sent to the GOP-controlled state agency! So the “black” president's EPA aided and abetted the maiming of black children. Nice. [2]

The facts in the previous paragraphs are suppressed by the establishment media to pretty-up the picture. That enables them to pretend it was all a big “mistake,” or a series of errors, regrettable lapses in competence. Hey, to err is human! Maybe these guys are just very very human! The New York Times and others are so mendacious that they simply suppress or virtually ignore the fact that the state apparatchiks deliberately dropped high lead test readings from the official reports to cover up their ongoing criminal assault.

Thus the establishment media is falsely portraying this as a series of “mistakes” by the GOP bosses and their apparatchiks in Michigan. (Not to worry: the GOP state attorney general says he'll be “investigating” the matter. I'm sure he'll get to the bottom of things and clear them up.) 

The facts clearly indicate deliberate, malicious intend. The way the New York Times and Michigan newspapers pull this off is by banning the most damning facts from their pages (and websites). [3]

Governor Snyder and his minions are now trying to toss the hot potato into the laps of the hitherto powerless local politicians. Good luck with that. [4]

For the information on the EPA quashing the uncovering of the high lead levels, and its malfeasance, and detailed information about the struggle to force the Snyder regime to admit that the water was contaminated at all, go to Democracy Now! Democracy Now! has given this story of an atrocity the coverage it deserves, on several days. Go to democracynow.org and search “Flint Michigan.” Or just click on the link I helpfully provided for the stories.

Another good source is “Michigan Knew Last Year That Flint’s Water Might Be Poisoned But Decided Not to Tell Anyone,” Slate, January 11, 2016. This article contains links to more information. It turns out the ACLU- the ACLU! is partly responsible for uncovering this story. (That's the American Civil Liberties Union, a private organization that mainly brings lawsuits against the U.S. and state and local governments in defense of civil liberties. Apparently they're having to take on more and more responsibilities.) See “Lead Astray: An ACLU of Michigan Investigation Has Found a Stream of Irregularities in Flint’s Water Tests,” ACLU of Michigan, September 14, 2015.
Also “Expert says Michigan officials changed a Flint lead report to avoid federal action,” michiganradio.org, November 5, 2015.

And don't pay any attention to all that GOP screeching about the "job-killing" EPA, which they all vow to abolish. It's just another lapdog "regulatory" agency that is the captive and servant of the industries they purport to "regulate," like the FDA, USDA, SEC, et al. 

I'll tell you what actually kills something: pollution. And it isn't jobs it kills. It's you and me.

1] But Flint City Tsar Earley has- surprise surprise!- landed on his feet with yet another unelected position of power, this time running the school system of Detroit. Hey, cream rises! (Or as the late Hunter S. Thompson once put it, in a takeoff on a famous literary title, “The Scum Also Rises.”) I mean, the man has proven he can Do The Job. Indeed. Calling him “incompetent” is to fail to understand what his assigned task was. Just as calling the “drug war” a “failure,” or mass incarceration a “failure,” or the “war on terror” one, fundamentally misunderstands their true purposes. (Too long to expand on that now. Read some of my other stuff and you'll find out.) Meanwhile, Flint has another GOP-Tsar imposed on it, Jerry Ambrose, who refuses to return to using the Detroit water system. Too expensive, he says.

Oh.

Here, have a bottled water! Now it's free!

By the way, Earley blamed the powerless Flint city officials whose authority he and Snyder usurped, for the move to use Flint River water. The man, typically of hustlers, is shameless. [“Ex-emergency manager says he's not to blame for Flint River water switch,” mlive.com, October 27, 2015.]

2] “The EPA Also Knew Flint's Water Might Be Poisoned Last Year But Didn't Tell Anyone,” Slate, January 14, 2015. Also reported by DemocracyNow!

The mouthpiece for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, one Brad Wurfel, denied just on December 22 that the high lead levels found in children's blood in Flint had anything to do with the tremendous lead levels in the water. It's like comparing “apples and cars,” he said. (“'Gov. Snyder Should Be Arrested': Flint Residents Demand Justice over Water Poisoning,” Democracy Now!, January 8, 2016.

3] The New York Times has run just a few articles, turgid and verbose as is their method, using lots of understatement (which we're supposed to mistake for objectivity), which blurs and obfuscates the stark reality. This is a standard way the Times protects “authority” in America. They dread the loss of “legitimacy” by the power structure. God forbid you should stop respecting the power-wielders. Of course key facts are omitted, despite the running river of words that impart relatively little information but are great at creating a “color” of hand wringing “concern.” I read them; they're not worth linking too. The sources I cite above are the places to go to inform yourself.

A particularly noxious piece of corporate media propaganda in defense of Snyder is on the website for the Michigan newspapers owned by Advance Publications, “Flint water probe may unleash flood of findings on mistakes,” The hack who wrote it combines an absurd portrayal of the “problem” as a series of Keystone Kops blunders, “mistakes” and “bungling,” not deliberate actions, and pretends Snyder was somehow unaware, and clearly takes a dim view of “critics,” which allows him to dismiss damning facts as mere allegation and opinion, By the way, that “probe” is the Governor's own, controlled gambit.

Not till almost the very end of the piece does this vile propagandist deign to mention this key element of this criminal saga:
“The critics contend the EM was more interested in saving money, and because the Flint water was less expensive, he shut off the Detroit pipeline.” 
 
That's it, the entire reference to a key FACT. “Saving money” is also why the Governor's appointed henchmen refused to spend $100 per day to add chemicals to the system that would have prevented the leaching of lead and iron into the water.

The propagandist is Tim Skubick, “Politics Columnist for Mlive.com.” He's so talented that he has another job, as host of "Off The Record" on PBS. (That the U.S. government TV propaganda network, the Public Broadcasting System.) Since “Off The Record” is obviously on the record, I guess the idea is to trick you into thinking you're getting the “inside dope,” as you're being indoctrinated in their twisted way of thinking by being allowed to “listen in.”

Advance Publications is one of the biggest owners of newspapers across the entire U.S. It is owned by the Newhouse family, who also have a stable of slick, bourgeois magazines (the euphemism is “upscale”) collected in another family corporation, Conde Nast, which includes Vanity Fair (a sort of high-toned gossip mag about elite people with occasional investigative news articles) and “The” New Yorker. As with “The” New York Times, my habit is to omit the capital T, as it feels too much like genuflecting to royalty. They ain't so special.

Still, the website for the Newhouses' Michigan newspapers has numerous articles on the unfolding scandal, “STORIES TAGGED Flint-Water,” mlive.com. One article outrageously calls the Flint Water Department “embattled” in its headline. I think it is the people of Flint who have been besieged.

4] “Gov. Snyder calls for return of powers to Flint Mayor Karen Weaver,” January 15, 2016, mlive.com.

 Earley scored lifetime health insurance for a 6-year stint as Saginaw, MI, city manager. The corrupt city council voted the benefit. There's how you belt-tighten! [click for source]

Earley with water hatchetman Howard Croft

What better tools for a racist assault than people of the same race as the victims? It's perfect camouflage. [Cf. Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Jr., Loretta Lynch, Jeh Johnson, et al. To be fair, they oppress plenty of whites too. And Hispanics! But if you ever had any doubt that blacks can oppress blacks, you're not familiar with African governments.]

Oh you Devil, you!

[sorry about the screwy type and spacing. I've spent hours trying to get the display page to match the draft page- it's impossible. I keep stripping the formatting, even retyping- and stinking greedy Google has no help. Wasted time searching their "help" forums -absolutely useless. What is typed in the draft page simply doesn't display correctly, no matter what.]