All posts tagged: Barack Obama

Russiagate: A Moral Reckoning is Due

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Renee Parsons With Russiagate, the Democrats created some powerful karma to answer for; especially for the likes of Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Calif.), both of whom persist in the mindless search for the Holy Grail. After cheating Bernie out of the nomination in 2016, the Dems had not yet learned their karmic lesson when they lost the Presidential election. The Mueller Report is but the latest of that karmic reckoning. There is no pride in being one of those who “got it right” that there was no evidence, not a scintilla of material fact to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the dastardly Russians. As the country has been torn asunder by a two year politically tainted investigation begun with no evidentiary standard and no probable cause, there is little satisfaction to be gained. That being said, I am royally pissed off at all the players who supported this unprecedented farce as an attack on the country’s rule of law. How could the autocratic digital giants, the intel community (which missed …

Three Neo-Nazis Lead Ukraine’s Presidential Contest

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Gallup Finds Ukrainians Despise All the Candidates Eric Zuesse Gallup headlined on March 21st, “Ukraine’s Election: Voters Disenchanted Ahead of Key Vote”, and “World-Low 9% of Ukrainians Confident in Government”. Might the reason for both be that no candidate in the contest is respected by the Ukrainian public, and that only three — the candidates with the least-low public approval — are the only ones who have even a remote chance of winning, and that all three of those candidates are racist-fascists, or hold the ideology of nazism? This will be documented here: Nazism, which is the ideology of fascism but with a heavy added component of racism, has been doing well in post-‘revolutionary’, or post-2013, or post ‘Maidan’ ‘revolution’, Ukrainian politics. The form of racism that dominates today’s Ukraine is against Russians more than against Jews, and so though the ideology is the same as was Germany’s nazi ideology, its main ethnic target isn’t the same. Some of Ukraine’s leading nazis are, in fact, Jews who hate Russians. Whereas Germany’s nazis wanted to exterminate …

Guardian getting behind Beto O’Rourke?

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Headlines are important, sometimes they’re the only part of any story people will read. They scan over the words, assume they got the gist of the article, and move on. It’s why they’re almost always the most dishonest part of any story in the mainstream news. Case in point: Beto O’Rourke, one of a crowded field of democratic hopefuls for the 2020 Presidential bid, raised 6.1 million dollars for his campaign, in 24 hours. This “stunning sum” apparently “smashes” Bernie Sanders’ record. If you read the article you’ll find, near the bottom, that Bernie raised 5.9 million in 24 hours. How 6.1 million “smashes” this record I’m not sure. I don’t have the dictionary definition of “smashed” memorized, but I’m fairly positive it isn’t “increase by slightly over three percent”. This sort of language is an indicator that O’Rourke is going to be the Guardianista pick. Well meaning liberals will rejoice in his ability to sound good whilst saying absolutely nothing of any value. His nice smile, his youth, and the fact he is as …

How Chrystia Freeland Organized Donald Trump’s Coup in Venezuela

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Eric Zuesse On Monday, February 5th, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the 14 countries of the Lima Group have now been joined (though she didn’t say to what extent) by the EU, and by 8 other individual countries. The Lima Group had actually formed themselves under her direction into this new group on 8 August 2017 in order to overthrow and replace Venezuela’s current President Nicolás Maduro. She stated in her February 5th announcement: Today, we have been joined by our Lima Group partners, from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Saint Lucia. We have also been joined in our conversations with our partners from other countries, for this Lima Group ministerial meeting. These include Ecuador, the European Union, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.” She, along with U.S. President Donald Trump, had, all along, been the actual leaders of this international diplomatic effort, to violate the Venezuelan Constitution blatantly, so as to perpetrate the coup in Venezuela. Her …

The War on Populism

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Remember when the War on Terror ended and the War on Populism began? That’s OK, no one else does.

It happened in the Summer of 2016, also known as “the Summer of Fear.” The War on Terror was going splendidly. There had been a series of “terrorist attacks,” in Orlando, Nice, Würzberg, Munich, Reutlingen, Ansbach, and Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, each of them perpetrated by suddenly “self-radicalized” “lone wolf terrorists” (or “non-terrorist terrorists“) who had absolutely no connection to any type of organized terrorist groups prior to suddenly “self- radicalizing” themselves by consuming “terrorist content” on the Internet.

Mass Psychosis and The Church of Humanitarian Interventionism

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David Penner for The Saker Blog, January 3, 2019 Ask any American liberal aged sixty-five and older what they think about Franco, Mussolini, or Hitler and they will vehemently denounce these men as tyrants, murderers, and despots. Ask them what they think about the Vietnam War and they will say it was a tragedy, not only for the Vietnamese, but for the poor American soldiers who were drafted and used as cannon fodder. Liberals also once defended the civil rights movement and the New Deal while vigorously opposing McCarthyism. That these same people would go on to support de-unionization, re-segregation, and Russophobia while enthusiastically backing barbarous wars and interventions in Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine constitutes not only a betrayal of leftist principles, but is indicative of a rejection of reason and the reality-based world. Like the proverbial general always fighting the last war, liberals remain trapped in the past, unable to adapt to rapidly unfolding kinetic developments. The problem is that not only is this general fighting the last war, this is a general …

USA – The World’s Invasion Nation

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Or How Big Brother Grips Americans’ Minds to Support Invasions Eric Zuesse On November 29th, Gallup headlined “Democrats Lead Surge in Belief US Should Be World Leader” and reported that “Three-fourths (75%) of Americans today think the United States has ‘a special responsibility to be the leading nation in world affairs,’ up from 66% in 2010. The surge is driven by Democrats, whose belief in this idea has increased from 61% eight years ago to 81% now.” This finding comes even after the lie-based and catastrophic US invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011 (and of so many others, such as Afghanistan, where the US and Sauds created the Taliban in 1979). Americans — now even increasingly — want ‘their’ (which is actually America’s billionaires’) Government to be virtually the world’s government, policing the world. They want this nation’s Government to be determining what international laws will be enforced around the world, and to be enforcing them. Most Americans don’t want the United Nations to have power over the US (its billionaires’) …

The Nobel Peace Prize in Support of War

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On December 10, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will be held in Oslo, the capital of Norway. This analysis will try to look at how the prize fits in the bigger picture, but first, some general background is appropriate:

Norway is a member of NATO and has close ties to the United States and Great Britain. The political, economic and bureaucratic elites are firmly integrated in transatlantic networks, a nexus of economic connections, think tanks, international institutions, media and a thousand other ties that bind. They tend to identify with the liberal wing of the empire, (i.e. the Democrats, not the Republicans), but will work with any US administration. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are selected by the Norwegian parliament, and the Committee is nominally independent.

Building Bridges vs. Buying Bombs

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Eric Zuesse China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is famous as an extension of their domestic infrastructure investments, but Russia is also investing heavily in infrastructure. Both countries need to do it in order to improve the future for their respective populations, and both Governments have avoided the Western development model of going heavily into debt in order to pay for creating and maintaining infrastructure. Both are, in fact, exceptionally low-debt Governments. According to the “Global Debt Clock” at Economist, China has a public debt/GDP of 17.7%, and Russia’s is 8.0%. For comparison, America’s is 93.6%. (Others are: Germany 85.8%, Spain 91.2%, Italy 122.6%, Greece 147.1%, India 54.2%, Pakistan 47.0%, and Brazil 55.0%.) The United States isn’t going into public debt in order to finance building or maintenance of infrastructure, but instead to finance expansions of its military, which is already (and by far) the world’s largest (in terms of its costs, but not of its numbers of troops). While the U.S. Government now spends around half of the world’s military expenditures and plans to conquer …

Oceania is at War with Fascism

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CJ Hopkins If you’re a critic of global capitalism (sometimes referred to as “globalism”), I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is, you’re not a “peddler of Russian propaganda” anymore. The bad news is, you’re an anti-Semite. You’re probably also a domestic terrorist, or an “emboldener” of domestic terrorism, or at least some sort of terrorism-apologist. And not good old-fashioned Islamic terrorism like we used to get during the War on Terror, because that ended in the Summer of 2016, right around the time Trump won the nomination. No, the brand of terrorism you are probably emboldening by criticizing global capitalism is anti-Semitic, fascist terrorism … the most terroristic form of terrorism there is! Up until recently, you might have just been going about your normal business, criticizing global capitalism, completely unaware of your anti-Semitic, white supremacist terrorist activities, but from now on there will be no denying them. Your hate thoughts are right there for everyone to read. Go back and check your Facebook posts and your …

Facts and Questions in the “MAGABomber” Case

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Two days ago, suspicious packages were allegedly delivered to the homes of George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Later that day, and into the next, more people were “targeted”: Eric Holder, John Brennan, Robert De Niro, CNN. The list is still growing. So far, no one has claimed any credit for the packages, and none of the alleged bombs have gone off, or even got anywhere near their respective targets. Fortunately, no one has been hurt. We set down the basic facts, and the unanswered questions, here.

IRAN: US Regime Change Project is Immoral and Illegal

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Contemptuous of international law, the US makes no secret of its plots to overthrow the leaders of internationally recognized governments that reject the neoliberal New World Order. Iran is at the top of the US enemies list. The US has been at it since the 1979 Iran Revolution, when the Iranian people overthrew the US’s “our boy”, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah had become the US’s “our boy” as CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt referred to him in 1953, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower overthrew the popular democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Overthrowing governments is illegal according to US law and international law. It is also immoral if one believes in democracy, self-determination, and the sovereignty of nations, respect for human life, and the rule of law.

Obama v. Trump: How the New York Times Lies About Lies

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Eric Zuesse Although the New York Times says that President Donald Trump lies vastly more than did President Barack Obama, the definite liar in that comparison — based on the factual record, to be presented here — is the New York Times itself. It lies in alleging this, which isn’t to say that either President lies more frequently than the other, but instead, that the Times’s calculation fails to count, at all, but instead altogether ignores, some of President Obama’s very worst lies — ones that were real whoppers. These were lies that were essential to his maintaining support among Democrats (such as the owners of this corporation, the NYT, are), and that would keep Democrats’ support only if they judged him by his words and not by his deeds: failed to judge him by his actual decisions and actions (such as the NYT’s owners do — or else they secretly know the truth on this, but prevent this truth from being published by their employees). Even to the present day, Obama is evaluated by Democrats on the basis of his lies …

Gina Haspel and the Normalising of Torture

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Gina Haspel is almost certainly going to be the next director of the CIA. This shouldn’t happen, but it will.

For those unfamiliar: Haspel was deputy head of the Agency under now-secretary of state Mike Pompeo. But that wasn’t her first job. She also oversaw the CIA torture programme in a secret black-site in Thailand. In 2005 she was promoted (probably because she’s really good at torturing people), and was then in charge of the CIA’s global network of torture sites.

This makes her a terrible person, but probably quite a good CIA agent.

Systematic News Suppression in Today’s U.S.

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Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and in the 1980s chaired the National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief. But now retired, he’s a critic of the very same government he had spent his career representing, and especially of its virtually fully controlled press

Mueller Indictments: truth v lies in“The Observer View”

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Today’s Observer View focuses on the Announcement by Robert Mueller that they are indicting 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies for “interfering” in the 2016 Presidential election. It is, unsurprisingly, full of misleading language, lies by omission and just straight up lies.

Olympic Games Make US Regime Paranoid and Unpredictable

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Despite all the efforts of a paranoid and unpredictable US regime, the Koreans are making peace not war during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The US is furious and pulling out all the stops to tarnish the Games, and it is trying to put South Korea back on the US colonial leash. South Korea’s democratically elected peace-president Moon Jae-in is showing signs that he is not an America poodle on a short leash.

The Washington Post’s Shoddy Defense of the Russiagate Investigation

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Clearly, the Washington Post, from the top on down, is propaganda. Their ‘news’ is heavily colored because that’s what the owner requires; it’s one reason why reporters are hired and fired: to promote war against Russia.They’ll do anything to pump Russiagate, regardless of what the actual facts are. It’s what they are paid to do.

are our political leaders any more real than the narratives they sell?

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How much reality is there in modern politics? Yes, the narratives rolled out are almost routinely false, at least in part, but what about the personalities presented to us as movers and shakers? How real are they? We’ve all seen David Cameron cringingly forgetting which soccer team he allegedly supports, and it’s pretty easy to figure out this is not because of “brain fade” but because Cameron’s love for Aston Villa/West Ham is just a creation of his PR team. We’ve all seen the video about Obama and the water bottles. As it’s edited here the performance looks completely scripted. But then again people must faint at rallies pretty regularly, and maybe it’s not that surprising someone like Obama develops a habitual way of handling it. There is also footage of Bill Clinton handling fainters here and here, as well as Sanders and Trump doing the same, which both look reasonably real. Then again when Hillary Clinton has a go it looks, well, like this… As many of you may know, back in 2003, while …

Pentagon Think-Tank Praises Al Qaeda as ‘Moderate’ Islamists

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by Eric Zuesse An October 24th article by Colin P. Clarke of the Rand Corporation — the main think-tank for the Pentagon — is headlined “The Moderate Face of Al Qaeda”, and a section of it is headed “A Moderate Alternative,” presenting Al Qaeda as the moderate alternative to ISIS. That article praises the 5 July 2005 decision, by Al Qaeda’s then #2 leader — who now is their #1 leader after the killing of Osama bin Laden — Ayman al-Zawahiri; Clarke’s article praises there Zawahiri’s decision to chastise the founder of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was then in Iraq. Zawahiri chastised Zarqawi for slaughtering Shia Muslims. However, if one looks at the Zawahiri letter, Zawahiri actually says there that Shia ought to be slaughtered, but not now, because most Muslims won’t understand why Shia deserve death. The matter is presented by Zawahiri as a severe PR problem for jihadists at this stage of building the fundamentalist Sunni movement to establish a global Islamic Caliphate or theocracy, if they slaughter Shia Muslims (such as …