"Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive's private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.
In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans."
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Nick Turse: The Pentagon's New Power Elite
Nick Turse: The Pentagon's New Power Elite
Saturday, August 6, 2011
The S&P Downgrade: Still the Best Poliitcal System Money Can Buy?
America in Decline
by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed
'What remains of political democracy has been undermined further as both parties Composehave turned to auctioning congressional leadership positions, as political economist Thomas Ferguson outlines in the Financial Times.
“The major political parties borrowed a practice from big box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy or Target,” Ferguson writes. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.
The result, according to Ferguson, is that debates “rely heavily on the endless repetition of a handful of slogans that have been battle-tested for their appeal to national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources.” The country be damned.'
Obama: Cutting Social Welfare to Save the Pentagon
The administration's stated budget priorities
By Glenn Greenwald'Just think about that for a minute. We have a Democratic administration installed in power after millions of liberals donated large amounts of their time and money to help elect them. Yet here we have a top official in the President's cabinet demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to protect the military budget from further reductions. That's the position of the Democratic administration.'http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/05/military
Gar Alperovitz: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima
Gar Alperovitz: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima
Here is how General Dwight D. Eisenhower reports he reacted when he was told by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that the atomic bomb would be used:
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
In another public statement the man who later became President of the United States was blunt: "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Prashad: California Dreamin'
Obama and the 2012 Elections
Primary Lessons
By VIJAY PRASHAD"The California Progressives have taken a strong stand for the immediate period. I hope that others in the Democratic Party will take a similar position and push their colleagues into a public political discussion on the future of progressivism in America. Come the day when progressives in the Party such as Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, Bernie Sanders and Donna Edwards, Emanuel Cleaver and John Conyers, Barney Frank and Bobby Rush, Maxine Waters and Jose Serrano consider how best to fight against the lunatic Right and the neo-liberal Right, to articulate a clear path to a progressive future that is not hampered by the Democratic Party's progressive mirage."http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad08022011.html
Obama: The Master of Winning by "Losing"
August 2, 2011
http://www.counterpunch.org/levine08022011.html
Gratuitous Capitulations
Obama Surrendered (But Got What He Wanted Too)
By ANDREW LEVINE"[Obama] did not exactly stumble into this latest, spectacular defeat; rather he took advantage of the situation the Republicans presented, and made the most of it.
...
That is what Obama is about. And so, in the preposterous episode of political theater our political class staged in the past few weeks, he gave his all. He did negotiate badly enough that Business Schools could make a case study of his machinations, but he was more disingenuous than inept. Obama surrendered for one overwhelming reason --because he wanted to; because he is not just in the game to win, but to win for Wall Street. The time is long past due for liberals to face that reality, and to deal with it not, not as Obama and his advisors expect, by acquiescing out of fear that the alternative is even worse, but in a constructive way. If a Dump Obama cannot get going now, then when?"
http://www.counterpunch.org/levine08022011.html
Twain: I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.
http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance/?page=entire
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