Obama Administration

By Dave Lindorff

By David Lindorff Sr.

By Dave Lindorff

Wanted: Sculptor who works in bronze to construct life-sized group of statues of President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, all to be mounted at the high tide line below a high cliff in Maine’s Acadia National Park.

There what’s left of American posterity can watch as the seas rise inexorably over the coming years and decades, first lapping at the feet of the statues, then the knees, then the waists, then the chests and finally cover over the heads of these “leaders” in Washington who have cynically and foolishly squandered the last opportunity to take effective action to combat climate change. 

By John Grant

Following a decade of military invasion and occupation in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the United States is becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of empires: “We get no respect!”

The undisputed post-World War Two top dog in the world, on virtually every front the United States is more and more playing catch-up with two-faced, Clintonian shuttle diplomacy around the world and a  well-entrenched regime of secrecy and sophisticated public relations aimed at keeping the dismal story of decline out of the domestic mind-space.

By Dave Lindorff

Word that the Los Angeles Police, who sent in 1200 officers in riot gear to violently rout a few hundred Occupy Movement demonstrators from their LA encampment last week, had earlier sent 12 undercover young officers into the peaceful occupation camp to spy on the activists should come as no surprise.

By Dave Lindorff

The US Congress is such a craven bunch that you really have to turn to Olde English to aptly describe them.

Consider that yesterday, by a vote of 93-7, the Senate approved a National Defense Authorization Bill that effectively defines the US “homeland” as a war zone, and that allows for the indefinite incarceration without trial of anyone, including US citizens and Green Card holders, without trial, in blatant violation of the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution and of fundamental international judicial standards.

By Dave Lindorff

The growing number of video clips and photos showing police in Darth Vader-like riot gear assaulting peaceful demonstrators with everything from tear gas and mace to truncheons, point-blank shots with beanbags and rubber bullets, and of course the ubiquitous fist and club, have made a bad joke out of claims that America is either the land of the free or the home of the brave.

By Dave Lindorff

With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending the US Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the National Parks Service to release "all their information on the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown on Occupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course of recent days and weeks."

By Dave Lindorff

The scripted excuses provided by mayors around the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting peaceful occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in wording, can be clearly seen as having been drawn up for them by some hidden hands in Washington. the same can be said of the brutal tactics used.

By Dave Lindorff

The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.

Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, Dallas, TX, Atlanta, GA, and most recently New York, NY, where the Occupation Movement began on September 17. The two most recent eviction efforts, in Oakland and New York, have been the worst.

Colonel Morris Davis, Former Chief Prosecutor Guantanamo Military Commissions. (Photo: Crimes of War)

Morris Davis speaks bluntly about some of President Barack Obama's policy decisions.

"There's a pair of testicles somewhere between the Capital Building and the White House that fell off the president after Election Day [2008]," said Davis, an Air Force colonel who spent two years as the chief prosecutor of Guantanamo military commissions, during an interview at his Washington, DC, office over the summer and in email correspondence over the past several months. "He got his butt kicked. Not just with Guantanamo but with national security in general. I'm sure there are a few areas here and there where there have been 'change,' but to me it seems like a third Bush term when it comes to national security."

Davis is "hugely disappointed" that Obama reneged on a campaign promise to reject military commissions for "war on terror" detainees, which human rights advocates and defense attorneys have condemned as unconstitutional.

The first military commission initiated by the Obama administration got underway earlier this week with the arraignment of Abd Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, who is facing terrorism and murder charges, began earlier this week. If convicted, Nashiri, one of three so-called high-value detainees that the Bush administration admitted was subjected to the drowning technique known as waterboarding and other brutal torture methods at CIA black site prisons, could be executed.

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By Dave Lindorff

When it comes to mainstream press reports about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it’s time to check the bullshit detector.

By Linn Washington, Jr.

By Dave Lindorff

What a devilishly sneaky guy that Jose Danial Ortega Saavedra is!

Why this president of Nicaragua, and former leader of the Sandinista rebels in their successful 1979 overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in order to win re-election this fall, as he appears to have done,  according to the New York Times, “shrewdly adopted policies aimed at pleasing his base of poor and working-class Nicaraguans, including supplying them with government-donated food”!

Why of all the nerve! What a crook and a scheister! Imagine catering to the needs of the poor in order to win an election. How low can a politician stoop?

By Dave Lindorff

Once again we got a cheery report from most of the media about employers hiring, albeit “not enough,” and about the jobless rate falling, albeit “it’s still too high.”

The proximate cause of this latest round of propaganda from the corporate media is the latest monthly jobless figure reported out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that employers had added 80,000 net new jobs  (actually they found that private sector employers had added 104,000 jobs while public agency employers had pink-slipped 24,000 people), and that the official unemployment rate was 9.0 percent, just a notch lower than last month’s 9.1 percent figure.

By John Grant

The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power.

-Mikhail Bakunin

It was 10:30 pm on Dilworth Plaza, the concrete apron around Philadelphia City Hall that’s home for over 100 tents in the Occupy Philadelphia movement. The air was clear and the temperature was pleasant.

By Dave Lindorff

Shanghai -- I was talking yesterday with the chief financial officer of a US-based drug firm that operates here in China, producing for the Chinese market, and got an up-close look at how bad things are for what used to be called the Almighty Dollar.  

The company in question, a joint venture between a very profitable U.S. drug company and a local Chinese company, is quite profitable itself.

Never More Proud to Be in a Courtroom

by Kathleen Kirwin

October 28, 2011

“AS THE FATHER OF A YOUNG SON, I WENT TO THE WHITE HOUSE ON MARCH 19^TH TO BE A VOICE FOR SHAHIDULLAH.” From the closing argument of Defendant Art Laffin in DC Superior Court.

By Linn Washington, Jr.

They worked many late night hours since this past spring creating a unique vehicle – part grassroots initiative and part cutting-edge technology – for countering the most corrupting force in American politics today: corporate dominance now controlling too many elected leaders on Capitol Hill.

Months before the Occupy Wall Street movement captured attention, inspiring millions across America while alarming this nation’s political/corporate class, they began fashioning plans to enable honest people to run for elected office.

Corporate welfare, subsidies, satire, humor, oil exploration, financial bailouts, mortgage crisis, agriculture subsidies, energy subsidies, Republicans

by Walter Brasch

“Got any idea how to make a frozen daiquiri?”

Saturday. 6 a.m. A question no one else would have asked at that hour. I knew it had to be Marshbaum, my faux-friend foil.

“Too early to be drinking,” I mumbled, then hung up. The phone rang again.

“It’s not for me,” said Marshbaum, but since I’m going to own a bar, I should learn how to make drinks.”

“Marshbaum,” I said, reluctantly awake, “you can’t even afford to buy soap to wash your fuzzy navel! How are you going to afford a bar?”

“The government’s going to bankroll me,” he said matter-of-factly.

“New kind of welfare?”

Last week, President Obama racked up several more broken campaign promises as he pushed through Congress three new job-killing corporate trade agreements.  The Senate Finance Committee was quite open about the fact that these agreements will kill off more jobs and eager to mitigate the damage with band aids attached to the treaties.  Some of us who were in the hearing room felt an obligation to speak up and ask why in the world the senators -- with perfect bipartisan harmony -- insisted on causing the damage in the first place.  And for that we were thrown in jail.

Imagine the denunciations of human rights abuses in Colombia if the plan for that country this week were war rather than corporate exploitation to produce impoverishment to produce drug crops to produce war.  Imagine the denunciations of human rights abuses in Iran having continued as usual if U.S. cops weren't cracking skulls in New York, Boston, Denver, and San Diego.  Maybe we wouldn't have needed the Tale of the Moronic Mexican Iranian Assassins at all.

Also last week, President Obama pretended to try to pass a weak gesture in the way of lessening the damage of his policies with separate legislation known as a "jobs bill."  But he made no serious effort to get it passed and according to many observers wanted it to fail.  It was blocked by Democrats as well as Republicans in a Democratic Senate.  Nonetheless, the purpose was apparently to create a campaign ad for what the same president will supposedly try to do in 2013 if reelected, and if tens of millions of us are still obediently filling out job applications.

(Thanks to activists Laura Leigh and Marilyn Wargo)

By Charles M. Young