The Great Betrayal

Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Bill Black on Obama’s great betrayal. As the Obama 2012 agenda released two days ago is to cut social programs, bringing economic and social ruin to the United States like austerity has done in Europe, Black says we must prepare to fight Obama tooth and nail. While we understandably want to keep the social monsters Romney and Ryan out of the White House, we need to remember Obama is Wall Street’s boy, and they want nothing more than to get their hands on the trillions of our dollars in the Social Security account.

Boycotts and Sanctions

Noam Chomsky discusses boycotts and sanctions of apartheid regimes like South Africa and Israel as a tactical tool that needs to be carefully considered and selectively deployed.

A Lawless Society

To be sure, I’m glad PEN and ACLU are fighting the US Government in the Supreme Court over National Security Agency spying on human rights activists, but I suffer no illusions that the NSA or FBI will cease spying on or harassing activists opposed to US domestic and foreign policy. With so much money to be made robbing the US Treasury and bombing other countries for their oil and minerals, the spying will go on, regardless of what the courts say. As the Indignados of Spain remarked, all they tell us are lies.

Bigot Hell

Ya gotta love the American Taliban. As Frederick Clarkson reports, Southern Baptist and Reformed Presbyterian heads are exploding given the choice between “The Beast and the False Prophet” for president.

Abuse of Authority

The FBI Witch Hunt against anarchists, as I observed in my letter to Leah-Lynn Plante — who was railroaded into prison yesterday by a federal grand jury prosecutor — is the logical escalation of the U.S. Department of Justice abuse of authority initiated four years ago against Quakers and other peace activists just prior to the national political party conventions of the Democrats and Republicans. As I noted in my letter today to Leah-Lynn, it appears a key objective of the earlier FBI raids against Quakers was to set the stage for isolating the anarchists as undesirables nobody would care about. In kind of a reverse psychology to the conventional Gestapo technique of attacking the most marginalized element of society first, it seems the national security apparatus targeted the more acceptable peace activists first in order to prevent them from joining a support network for anarchists later.

Whatever the psychological warfare strategy of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the fact is that a number of anti-war activists and other young people who oppose the 1% police state under President Obama are now in federal detention facilities for the crime of reading and writing about abuse of authority.  While most of us will never have our doors kicked in by federal SWAT teams because of the books we read, the fact that the United States Government is conducting a witch hunt against young people who no longer believe in our political or economic system should be of concern.

As I observed in my letter to Leah-Lynn, the college where I worked as a library assistant had some of the books she likely read, and we never once had the doors kicked in by a SWAT team, even though many of our students wore black, and had tatoos as well as piercings. Allowing the Department of Justice to treat young people as criminals because they espouse a philosophy accusing the government of systematic criminal enterprise is a neglect of our duties as citizens we can ill afford.

Machinery of Plunder

En Camino discusses the machinery of plunder exemplified by Plan Colombia, the current template for U.S. Military intervention in Latin America on behalf of transnational corporations. While the FARC guerrillas remain the excuse for militarization of indigenous territories, the consolidation of economic interests — including the military industry — is the motivation for the recolonization of Fourth World lands. Equivocal over the choice between the expulsion or the extermination of native peoples, the U.S. Southern Command continues in a long genocidal tradition begun in 1492.

Austerity and Anarchy

In Athens, poster child scapegoat of the EU, subMedia‘s Antonis Vradis reports on the efforts of anarchists to prevent a return of the fascist dictators supported by the United States during the Cold War. Having endured the Nazi occupation and subsequent CIA-sponsored free market thugs, Greek anarchists are literally fighting in the streets against neo-Nazis working in tandem with state police. As the dumping ground for unwanted immigrants deported from across the EU, Greece is a hotbed of anti-immigrant violence, where the immigrants only friends are the anarchists.