Archive for the ‘terrorists’ Category
Turkey Downs Russian Fighter to Draw NATO and US Deeper into Syrian Quagmire by MIKE WHITNEY
Merica! Some idiots vandalized a bookstore named ISIS after Paris attacks — Society’s Child — Sott.net
“We believe that everybody is right when it comes to the way that they express their spirituality as long as it’s a positive path,” Charboneau-Harrison said.
“We’re all very heartbroken (about the Paris attacks) so I don’t know if somebody walking down the street just saw our name on the sign and kind of lost it for a moment and threw a rock through it,” Charboneau-Harrison said. “Or if it was an ignorant person who actually thought this was a bookstore for terrorists, I don’t know.”
“It apparently means a bigot who chooses to be violent, which describes them much better than using an Egyptian goddesses name,” Charboneau-Harrison said.
“They should come in and we can help them with meditation and we can explain to them how they can empower themselves instead of throwing rocks,” she said.
Merica! Some idiots vandalized a bookstore named ISIS after Paris attacks — Society’s Child — Sott.net: http://www.sott.net/article/306700-Merica-Some-idiots-vandalized-a-bookstore-named-ISIS-after-Paris-attacks
The U.S. and Chemical Weapons: No Leg to Stand On
By , May 2, 2013
Watch Out…We’re Surrounded! by Frank Scott
Watch Out…We’re Surrounded!
legalienate.blogspot.com/2013/03/watch-outwere-surrounded.html
Sandy Hook massacre: Official story spins out of control-Repost
Source: Veterans Today
The massacre of 20 children and 7 adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday was one more in a long line of atrocious mass murders committed in the USA. By now, five days later, an official version of events has more or less solidified to explain the chain of events. The familiar ‘lone gunman’ narrative has once more stoked the hot-button issue of gun control and left the general population as clueless as ever as to why people suddenly ‘go postal’ and target the most vulnerable members of society.
On closer inspection, however, there is clearly more to many of these mass shootings than meets the eye. Very often the earliest reports present information that directly contradicts key foundations of the final ‘official’ analysis of events. Granted, confusion is natural when a story breaks, but some of the initial reports conflict so completely with the lone gunman narrative that I’m going to compile them here and then try to put this tragedy in a more objective context. In his speech at the Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut on Sunday night, President Obama quoted the following biblical passage:
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
~ 2 Corinthians 4:18
The traumatised Newtown community deserves the facts without the spin. Everyone touched by this brutal event deserves to know what really happened, so let’s fix our eyes on what remains unseen…
A 20-year-old ‘tech geek’ named Adam Lanza is supposed to have snapped early last Friday, December 14th, shot dead his mother Nancy Lanza, loaded her car up with her guns and ammo, then driven it across town to his former school, the Sandy Hook Elementary School, shot dead 27 people in two classrooms and an adjoining hallway, then turned one of his guns on himself.
That’s how most will now remember the shooting, but is that actually what happened?
All the child victims were first-graders between the ages of 6 and 7. If there’s any saving grace to be found in this event, it’s that it was all over within minutes. Police were reportedly on the scene “instantaneously”, according to Connecticut State Police Commander, Lt. Vance and by then the shooting had ended. Listed among the slain school teachers and administrative staff was the school principal, 47-year-old Dawn Hochsprung. Right here we encounter our first problem:
The Newtown Bee
December 14, 2012
Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Hochsprung told The Bee that a masked man entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shots – more than she could count – that went “on and on.”
© The Newtown Bee
How could the principal have survived to give this statement to local press describing what happened … if she was one of the first to be killed? Incidentally, The Newtown Bee‘s article was taken down on Monday December 17th. Of course, a plausible explanation is that a reporter mistook another teacher for the principal.
We were initially told that two handguns – a Glock and a Sig Sauer – were found next to the body of the dead shooter, while a third weapon, a .223-caliber rifle was also recovered “in the trunk of a car” later, in the school’s parking lot. All of the weapons were allegedly legally bought and registered in Nancy Lanza’s name. The car was later identified as a black Honda, also registered in her name. More weapons have since been introduced to the story but we’ll get back to those later on.
Besides anonymous ‘law enforcement officials’ telling the media that Adam Lanza was a former pupil at the school, they also said his mother was currently a teacher there, that she was found among the dead and that her son had specifically sought out her classroom first. But when it emerged that teaching staff at the school had never heard of a Nancy Lanza, it was suggested that she was a substitute teacher whose name therefore mightn’t appear on staff lists.
But this claim too has disappeared down the memory hole because it’s now known that Nancy had no connection with the school. Adam Lanza was in fact home-schooled. Nancy Lanza has since been painted as a “survivalist” who loved firearms, taught her sons how to shoot and was “stockpiling” because she was “worried about economic collapse.”
Daily Mail, UK
December 16, 2012
Last night it also emerged Nancy was a member of the Doomsday Preppers movement, which believes people should prepare for end of the world.
Her former sister-in-law Marsha said she had turned her home ‘into a fortress’. She added: ‘Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense.
‘She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.’
It’s not difficult to see that their efforts to insinuate that Nancy Lanza was somehow responsible for this massacre by being an irresponsible mother also serve to rile the large contingent of gun owners in the country, particularly the far-right who see a conspiracy on the government’s part to “take back our guns.” More on that later, but for now I just want to note that all of the Lanza family members seemed to live more or less normal middle-class lives. Yes, the parents were divorced, but it was apparently amicable and both put their own needs second to those of their children (and anyway, divorce in the US these days is decidedly ‘normal middle class’).
Despite “family insiders” claiming that he was a “deeply disturbed kid”, Adam Lanza, like so many other alleged ‘lone(r) gunmen’ before him, does not fit the profile of a mass-murdering maniac. His 24-year-old brother, Ryan Lanza, said he hadn’t seen his brother since 2010. This fact brings into question Ryan’s claim that his younger brother may have had his identity card on his person at the school shooting. Although perhaps the question that needs to be asked here is, why would a person bother to carry identification with them after going to the trouble of dressing up in a bullet-proof vest, mask and black camouflage gear and going on a killing spree …
The live emergency services audio feed from the scene reveals some interesting observations from first responders that have been completely overlooked by the mainstream media. Note that the unedited version lasts over two hours, so the abridged version I’m going to quote from has a compressed sequence of events that are not in real time. In this abridged version, we hear at 1.38′ a report that gunfire is still being heard, even though the shooting was supposed to have ended by the time police arrived. The next report at 2.35′ says that the shooting has stopped and the school is “in lockdown”. At 3.23′, the police relay a teacher’s report that she saw “two shadows running past the gym”. This is followed by another officer on the scene who says, “Yeh, we got ‘em, they’re coming at me! … [inaudible] … coming up the driveway real slowly!” That same officer at 5.40′ says he has them “proned out”, which presumably means he has apprehended them and they are laid out on the ground, before another officer comes on to say, “be aware that we do have a second [inaudible] …”
Later on, at 19.10′, an officer who sounds out of breath, like he’s just given chase, reports what I think sounds like “these guys” followed certainly by “multiple weapons, including long rifles and shotgun”. If these were found so early on, why were they not included in the initial press reports which stated that three firearms had been found – the above mentioned Glock, Sig Sauer and Bushmaster AR-15 rifle? Further conflicting, and possibly planted evidence was thrown into the mix by ‘law enforcement officials’ when they published video footage of a long weapon being retrieved from the trunk of a car. Look closely and you’ll see that it’s a shotgun, not a rifle. In addition, this ‘discovery’ was made late in the day (it’s dark outside), while the Bushmaster rifle was first reported found “in the trunk of a car” much earlier in the day. This would logically suggest that the rifle and shotgun were found in the trunks of two different cars.
Besides the above two suspects “proned out” in front of the school, another suspected gunman was apprehended after he gave chase, this time in the woods next to the school:
This fleeing suspect, wearing camouflage gear, a bulletproof vest and armed with four guns, has since disappeared from media coverage. Who was this person and how did he know what “it” was when he protested that “I didn’t do it”?
Perhaps most astonishingly, this suspect arrested in the woods was named in an Associated Press report as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The original report has long since vanished of course, but you can see it referenced here. This was despite the fact that Ryan had already been named as the deceased suspect inside the school, lying next to two handguns.
Ryan Lanza was actually at work in Hoboken, New Jersey, that morning when his name and photo began circulating in the media. And so, for most of Friday, the ‘lone shooter’ was erroneously reported as “Ryan Lanza, confirmed dead.” At the same time, we were being told that Ryan’s girlfriend and a room-mate were reported missing, also from Hoboken, New Jersey.
So this isn’t just a case of mistaken identity, as later claimed when it was suggested that Adam had a piece of identification belonging to his brother on his person. Not one, but BOTH Lanza brothers were being placed by ‘law enforcement officials’ at the scene of the shooting. It could be that Ryan’s quick reflexes to leave his workplace to get on a bus to go back to his apartment while protesting innocence via his Facebook page may have saved his life.
Now remember, all of this confusion somehow resulted from a single guy going into a school and shooting children and teachers and then shooting himself, all within three to five minutes. Surely it should have been fairly easy to rapidly and concretely identify the details of such a crime and a rough layout of the scene?
What it’s starting to look like is that the Lanzas were framed for this mass shooting in advance. Long before any suspects were named, and even as we were being told that Nancy Lanza was among the dead at the school, we were told that police were investigating a murder in … Hoboken, New Jersey, where a body had been found at the home of … Ryan Lanza! An older “confirmed” version of events had RYAN, not Adam, travelling to Hoboken that morning to murder his father before going to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. Other variants had Ryan OR Adam going to both their divorced parents’ homes and killing them before going to the school.
The narrative has now settled on the younger brother killing his mother in Newtown then going to the school. So what about the rest of it? Do we just put it down to ‘keen’ journalism that was having a field day last Friday as media outlets sought to bring us the latest ‘breaking news’? Confusion and ‘Chinese whispers’ undoubtedly play a part in the early stages of national media events, but I think back to those news anchors reading scripts about Osama Bin Laden within minutes of the first plane being hit on 9/11 and I think, ‘Wait a minute!’ All these misleading reports had to have been issued by someone or some people “confirming” to Associated Press and other media outlets that the Ryans’s father had been murdered [he wasn’t even aware that the shooting at the school had taken place until journalists turned up on his doorstep], or that Ryan’s girlfriend had gone missing from Hoboken, or that either Ryan or Adam were pulled out of the adjacent woods in handcuffs yelling “I DIDN’T DO IT” to assembled parents. These aren’t just ‘little details’ that can be confused for other details, these are detailed narratives. So how, or why, would any member of the press come up with such details? They strike me as a set of alternative scenarios that might have found their way into the official narrative had facts on the ground turned out differently.
Watch this snippet of State Police Lt. Paul Vance at the press conference he gave the day after the shootings. His answer is as bizarre as it is revealing. When asked whether Nancy Lanza had any connection with the school, he replied defensively about something that is both unrelated and arguably the most significant fact that completely undermines the official narrative: the arrest of a second gunman in the woods:
Most of the initial mainstream media reports have since been rewritten to fit ‘new’ facts proclaimed by ‘law enforcement officials’. Here’s an example from Business Insider. The following excerpts are the opening paragraphs from the ‘same’ article, one earlier original version, followed by the later revised version:
The massacre […] was reportedly perpetrated with a .233 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol.
The Bushmaster rifle was found in the trunk of the shooter’s car. The Sig Sauer and Glock pistols were the only weapons used in the shooting, according to CBS. Now the question is what kind of magazine would allow a shooter to fire “100″ rounds in such a short period.
Indeed, I was wondering the same thing. How could two pistols do so much damage? The report was updated as follows:
The massacre in Connecticut that’s taken the lives of at least 26 people was reportedly perpetrated with a .223 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol, according to NBC:
The shooter was using one Sig Sauer and one Glock pistol, according to CNN. Later details emerged that the primary weapon was the Bushmaster “assault-style” rifle.
Altogether, though, it doesn’t matter what type of weapon the shooter used. The bottom line is that it was likely a magazine fed, semi-automatic, with enough rounds to shoot “100 shots” in a matter of minutes, as quoted in USA Today.
What actually happened may not matter to some, but surely a journalist’s role is to at least try to find out?
The three guns Adam Lanza is supposed to have brought to the school with him. © New York Daily News. The rifle was left in the trunk, leaving ‘Adam Lanza’ just the two handguns to let off “hundreds of rounds”… firing .233 caliber bullets that belonged to the rifle… which was left in the car
This Associated Press/Newsday article on Saturday, December 15th, reported that “Only the rifle was used on the victims“, a statement that is supported by Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, Connecticut state’s chief medical examiner. Of the seven autopsies he personally performed on Sandy Hook victims, all of them had “three to 11 wounds apiece”. He also said that the ‘gunman’ used a military-style rifle rigged to quickly reload, and that the ‘shooter’ was able to reload so quickly because he had “taped two magazines together.” Even before the State Chief Medical Examiner had given these statements, it had been stated that spent shell casings from .233-caliber (rifle) bullets were found inside the school.
So all the victims’ wounds were the result of rifle-fire, specifically from “the rifle”, the one we were told in early reports was found in the trunk of a car in the parking lot! This is simply not credible.
Remember that only “the rifle” was used on all the victims. If only this rifle was used, and if we try to make this claim fit into the (admittedly fluid) official version of events, then the alleged lone gunman would have had to leave the school, place the rifle back in his trunk, then return inside the school and shoot himself. No one reported any such maneuver on the part of any gunman or gunmen. What we do have, however, is live emergency services radio feed in which we hear that two men have been apprehended and are “proned out” AND live video footage supported by eyewitness testimony showing what appears to be a THIRD man being arrested by police in the woods.
We can see how the authorities’ hands are tied because they need to fit all the facts into the usual ‘lone gunman’ narrative. For that, there can only be ONE rifle and a couple of handguns. The problem is that they have already claimed to find that solitary Bushmaster rifle in the trunk of a car in the school parking lot, so the earliest police reports of a cache of long arms being found inside the school will no longer fit with the lone gunman narrative, especially as they’re now saying that he had already opened fire as he burst into the school.
Could “scrawny” 20-year-old Adam Lanza have stormed the school, solo Rambo-style, while carrying “multiple long arms, including rifles and shotguns”? Only one person was wounded. Everyone else who was shot was killed. How could Adam Lanza achieve such deadly accuracy, in such a short length of recorded time?
Initial reports put the beginning of the shooting in the school administrators’ office, where someone, reportedly the school principal, had a confrontation with the gunman(men). We know this because someone supposedly turned on the school intercom system, alerting the teaching staff to the loud swearing and commotion in the principal’s office and probably saving many more children from being gunned down as teachers took measures to hide the children in closets.
Similarly heavily armed men wearing black combat gear from head to toe… their job is to kill ‘terrorists’ to keep us safe, which they do by terrorising us all
One brave teacher, Kaitlin Roig, bundled a bunch of children into a bathroom and locked the door. What’s interesting about her testimony to ABC News is that when police arrived and asked her to open the door, she refused, saying that “if they were really cops, they’d know where to find keys to open the door.” In addition, she requested that they slide their badges under the door.
Now, this is generally a smart thing to do in any and all interactions with the police, especially in the U.S. But to have the wherewithal to do so under such traumatic circumstances strongly suggests that Ms. Roig had logically deduced by that point that multiple perpetrators were involved, and that they were either impersonating police officers or were indistinguishable from SWAT team police commandos, either in the way they dressed or the way they behaved upon entering the building. It also reminds us just how narrow the time window of the actual shooting was. The shooting appears to have barely ended when men knocked on that bathroom door and told Ms. Roig they were police.
There are also conflicting reports about how the gunmen entered the building. We were told initially that they came in through the main front entrance and proceeded straight to the administrators’/principal’s offices. But Sandy Hook elementary school has a security system with a video monitor, which allows staff to screen visitors before buzzing them in. A “masked gunman dressed in black tactical combat gear” from head to toe would kinda raise red flags, don’t you think?
Another possible anomaly is that Victoria Soto, one of the teachers killed at the school, appears to have had an ‘in memoriam’ Facebook page created in her name four days before the shooting.
Regarding this alleged ‘LIBOR scandal’ connection between this shooting and the Aurora theater shooting, there is as yet zero evidence to support the claim that either father of Lanza or Holmes were going to testify to anyone about anything, so for now this must remain just another rumor. I rather think that this is being spread to create the impression of a direct link that can be easily refuted, as in a straw man argument. The obvious and direct link staring everyone in the face is that the official accounts of these events are hocus-pocus. The glaring connection between these two shootings, the Sikh Temple shooting and the Fort Hood shooting is that multiple gunmen were reported at the time by eyewitnesses, but they are now all officially claimed to have been carried out by ‘lone gunmen’. This logically tells us that the real perpetrators are being protected with cover stories of what really happened because if the truth were known, some section of the U.S. government would be implicated.
Wade Michael Page, the ‘lone gunman’ in the Sikh Temple shooting in Wisconsin in August this year, was a highly decorated U.S. army psychological operations specialist, according to the Pentagon. But what happened to the three other gunmen seen by witnesses? It can’t surely be coincidence that Wade was (former?) military psy-ops. The thought has crossed my mind more than once during the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting. Others too have suggested this was a ‘false-flag’ event, or that Lanza was some sort of Manchurian Candidate.
But maybe there’s a simpler explanation (albeit more outrageous) than that? Was that really Adam Lanza they found inside the school? Do we even know for a fact that one of the gunmen was found dead inside the school? What we have instead are reports of two or three masked gunmen, apparently all dressed similarly in black tactical gear from head to toe, being wilfully forgotten about at best, or protected by the Federal Government at worst. Based on the authorities’ persistent but futile efforts to connect the Lanzas to this school, the multiple eyewitness reports of two shooters, the Connecticut State Medical Examiner’s report that all the victims were riddled with bullets from a rifle that we’re simultaneously being asked to believe was in the trunk of a car the whole time, similar reports of multiple shooters in previous mass shootings in recent years and the media focusing the emotional outcry onto the hot-button topic of gun control … I’m left wondering if this was actually the work of some highly trained professional hit team?
Was the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a psy-op, using what amounts to a ‘death squad’ and a carefully planned mission to terrorise people on behalf of the government, in combination with perception management to shape the narrative and vector the emotional fallout?
Gun control isn’t really the issue here. Control – period – is the issue. The U.S. government would long since have taken measures, quietly, to limit the supply of weapons, the 2nd Amendment of the constitution be damned (it’s “just a goddamned piece of paper“, remember?), if it was really concerned with limiting civilian access to weapons. That we’ve seen gun sales increase in the last few days to the point where Wal-Mart is all out of assault rifles is wholly unsurprising.
The psychopaths in power have absolutely no compunction about using state terrorism, in this case organising the deliberate massacre of innocent children, to control people. In effect, this is little different from what the U.S. government calls counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism in foreign countries, where it attacks innocent civilians to create the impression that they were killed by ‘communists’, ‘terrorists’, ‘insurgents’ or ‘militants’, with the aim of generating public support for the illusion that the common people need a strong, ruthless government to protect them from the ‘evil-doers’. When the common people buy into this manipulation, the end result, as history shows repeatedly, is an overt and brutal police state.
Newtown school shooting story already being changed
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) The national media is ablaze today with coverage of the tragic elementary school shooting in Newtown, CT, where 27 people have reportedly been killed, including 18 children.
As always, when violent shootings take place, honest journalists are forced to ask the question: “Does this fit the pattern of other staged shootings?”
One of the most important red flags of a staged shooting is a second gunman, indicating the shooting was coordinated and planned. There are often mind control elements at work in many of these shootings. The Aurora “Batman” shooter James Holmes, for example, was a graduate student actually working on mind control technologies funded by the U.S. government. There were also chemical mind control elements linked to Jared Lee Loughner, the shooter of Congresswomen Giffords in Arizona in 2011.
According to multiple eyewitness reports from Aurora, Colorado, including at least one caught on camera by mainstream media news reports in Colorado, James Holmes did not operate alone. There was a second shooter involved. But the media quickly eliminated any mention of a second shooter from its coverage, resorting to the typical cover story of a “lone gunman.”
Today, the exact same thing is happening with the Newton, CT school shooting.
Eyewitness reports of a second shooter now being “scrubbed” from the news
As the story of this shooting was first breaking, the news was reporting a second gunman.
FoxNews reported that this second gunman was “led out of the woods by officers” and then questioned. The original source of this report was the Connecticut Post.
A local CBS affiliate was also reporting the existence of a second gunman and said “Police believe there may be a second gunman and are looking for a red or maroon van with its back window blown out…”
ABC News also originally reported, “A second gunman is apparently at large. Car-to-car searches are underway.”
A local CT CBS affiliate was also reporting, “CBS News reports that a potential second shooter is in custody and that SWAT is now investigating the home of the suspect. A witness tells WFSB-TV that a second man was taken out of the woods in handcuffs wearing a black jacket and camouflage pants and telling parents on the scene, ‘I did not do it.'”
But the more recent stories being put out by the media are scrubbing any mention of a second gunman and going with the “lone gunman” explanation, which holds about as much water as the “lone gunman” explanation of the JFK assassination.
“A lone gunman killed 27 people at an elementary school here, including 18 children, in a terrifying early Friday morning shooting spree,” reports USA Today. It makes no mention whatsoever of a second gunman.
NBC News is also now chiming in with the “lone gunman” version of the story, eliminating any mention of a second gunman from its coverage of the tragic event.
Another story authored by NBC News carries the title, “26 dead after lone gunman assaults Connecticut elementary school.” Once again, no mention of a second gunman as reported by eyewitnesses.
When key elements of the story keeps changing, something is fishy
Journalists are trained to ask questions, and one of the questions I have right now is: Why was the second gunman suddenly dropped from media coverage after the first few hours of this story developing?
And why is there always a second gunman in these recent mass shootings that seem to be engineered to maximize emotional shock value due to the sheer horror of all the innocent deaths?
This story is continuing to develop, and we’ll keep asking questions here on Natural News. Our hearts and prayers go out to the children and families impacted by this violent tragedy. Given the terrible loss of life that has taken place here, shouldn’t we all seek to get to the bottom of WHY these shootings all seem to fit a common pattern of multiple mind-controlled shooters followed by an almost immediate media cover-up of the facts?
For the sake of those children who were killed today, I want to get to the bottom of this and expose the REAL story, for the purpose of stopping this violence from targeting yet more innocents in the future.
naturalnews.com
Originally published December 14 2012
ABC News
20 Children Died in Newtown, Conn., School Massacre
OUTLETS ISSUE CONFLICTING REPORTS ABOUT SHOOTER
Petraeus scandal is reported with compelled veneration of all things military | Glenn Greenwald
On the resignation of Gen Petraeus.
It’s a mess and a rabbit hole, that goes very, very deep. I find it strange that folks can go around killing innocents, drone striking, torturing, destroying infrastructures on other people’s land, dropping depleted uranium on towns and villages, messing up the water and electric infrastructure, cause all manner of birth defects, cover up rape and abuse towards military women, deal very poorly with the veterans upon their return, declassifying PSTD to other than a medical issue, have these veterans homeless and suicidal, fund and support terrorists militias, cover up and enhance the opium production, drop bombs on people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, arm the insurgents in Syria, yet, when they pull their little dingy out and flash it around, inserting it here and there, NOW THEY MUST RETIRE?????
Something is seriously and morally wrong with American ethics. Dude done did something else other than fool around with a drama queen, and that’s for sure!!! NB
Obama-Mania? Cult of Personality? Politics Or Theater?
Dear Crystal Lucas Perry,
Okay, political parody, satire, or even cartoons, but this romanticizing of the President is a bit much for me. They are so memorized they care not to look at the true picture, the real deal and that means they are dangerous. That Obama Kool Aid is really powerful.
I don’t particularly agree with all that is presented in this movie, but the song does kind of say it all for me.
Cult of Personality Links
“A personality cult appears whenever an individual uses mass media propaganda to create idealized, quasi-heroic public personae arising from unquestioned flattery and praise. Personality cults aim to make the leader and the state synonymous, so that it is nearly impossible to make a distinction between them.” Read more here GeeeeeeZ! OBAMA: Cult of Personality
Cult of personality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThis article is about the political phenomenon.
For the song by Living Colour, see Cult of Personality (song).
A cult of personality arises when an individual uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods, to create an idealized, heroic, and, at times god-like public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. Sociologist Max Weber developed a tripartite classification of authority; the cult of personality holds parallels with what Weber defined as “charismatic authority“. A cult of personality is similar to hero worship, except that it is established by mass media and propaganda.
Etymology
The term Cult of personality or Personality Cult first appeared in Nikita Khrushchev‘s Secret Speech in 1956[1]. Cult of the individual is a more accurate translation[2].
Background
Throughout history, monarchs and heads of state were almost always held in enormous reverence. Through the principle of the divine right of kings, for example, rulers were said to hold office by the will of God. Imperial China (see Mandate of Heaven), ancient Egypt, Japan, the Inca, the Aztecs, Tibet, Thailand, and the Roman Empire (see imperial cult) are especially noted for redefining monarchs as god-kings.
The spread of democratic and secular ideas in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries made it increasingly difficult for monarchs to preserve this aura. However, the subsequent development of photography, sound recording, film, and mass production, as well as public education and techniques used in commercial advertising, enabled political leaders to project a positive image like never before. It was from these circumstances in the 20th century that the best-known personality cults arose. Often these cults are a form of political religion.Purpose
See also: Secular religionPersonality cults were first described in relation to totalitarian regimes that sought to alter or transform society according to radical ideas.[3] Often, a single leader became associated with this revolutionary transformation, and came to be treated as a benevolent “guide” for the nation without whom the transformation to a better future couldn’t occur. This has been generally the justification for personality cults that arose in totalitarian societies of the 20th century, such as those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Not all dictatorships foster personality cults, not all personality cults are dictatorships (some are nominally democratic), and some leaders may actively seek to minimize their own public adulation. For example, during the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime, images of dictator Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) were rarely seen in public, and his identity was under dispute abroad until after his fall from power. The same applied to numerous Eastern European Communist regimes following World War II (although not those of Enver Hoxha and Nicolae Ceaușescu, mentioned below).
Che Obama: the new cult of personality
“It is doubtful that anyone ever thought to wear a t-shirt with George Bush’s image splashed across it, except to deride him. Now, wearing the image of the president is not only popular, it has become almost obligatory in some circles.
An Obama T-Shirt |
Obama’s image is not just appearing on t-shirts. There are Obama hats, Obama pencil cases, Obama hoodies, Obama screen savers, Obama jewellery, Obama coffee cups and Obama street murals. And Obamamania has gone mainstream. Today in DC we can buy metro tickets sporting Obama’s image. Numerous buildings are decorated with huge banners welcoming the new president. Even the National Portrait Galley has got in on the act, snapping up Shepard Fairey’s original collage for the gallery walls long before the new president’s official portrait will be commissioned.
Such is the strength of the cult surrounding Obama’s image that vendors at the inauguration were hard pushed to find new ways to commemorate the day. Many tried, of course. On my own walk into the city I saw Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street, a local landmark, displaying a huge red, white and blue ice sculpture of the letters OBAMA. A church on 16th Street offered hot cocoa and a chance to be photographed with a life-sized Obama cut-out. On the Mall itself everything from Obama special inauguration bandanas to Obama dollar bills (with President Lincoln’s image replaced with President Obama’s) to my own personal favourite, Obama water, was on offer.”
The media’s new Messiah is a mania and fad like the hula hoop
“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”
…Barack Obama just seems to get cooler and cooler. He’s the most popular topic on the New York Times topics page…Internet widgets allow you to see what great thing Barack Obama has done for you…on the New York subway Friday morning, one of our copy editors…heard one woman joke to another: “Obama, will you pick me up after my noninvasive minor surgical procedure?” To which the other replied: “Obama, will you hold my hair back when I puke?”…
Many spiritually advanced people I know…identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul…
John Lewis, the venerable civil rights hero and congressman, put words to this feeling recently. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” he said, suggesting that he might switch his superdelegate vote from Hillary Clinton to Obama. “Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”…On Facebook, people write about dreams featuring Obama. There is only one correct reaction to the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video and that is to start chanting along…
There was the woman in New Hampshire who compared him with Christ. There was Maria Shriver’s comparison of the candidate with the state of California, with the rhetorical fervor usually seen only after a preacher shouts, “You are healed!”…
“Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat.”
The Obama cult
“Recently I have noticed an interesting but disturbing phenomenon in New York City. On the streets, subways and buses, you can see people still wearing Barack Obama buttons even though the election is long over. I wonder to myself whether these buttons express an inchoate political/psychological yearning. In some ways it reminds me of how people wore pictures of the fifteen year old guru Maharaj-ji, who counted former 60s radical Rennie Davis as one of his main followers.
When I spoke to a fellow radical in my department at Columbia University about my concerns, his eyes lit up and he said:
At some point I will ask one of these Obama button wearers the same kind of question. What’s up with the Obama button? What are you trying to say? I once asked someone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt the same kind of question. Trust me; they did not decide to wear the t-shirt after reading “Socialism and Man in Cuba”.
It’s Official: Liberals and Conservatives Becoming Zombies
Anthony Freda Art |
Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/11/its-official-liberals-and-conservatives.html
In the wake of the 2012 Presidential election, the expected gloating over Obama’s victory and sulking over Romney’s defeat by their respective supporters is taking its typical turn toward the absurd, at least for those who are aware of the true lack of choice that was presented in this election.
As every other failed presidential campaign in history has done, the Romney camp will soon come to grips with their loss. The Obama camp, however, will now be presented with four more years of a President who has been and will continue to be identical to the President they claimed to have hated for so many years.
As Obama continues to execute, for another four years, the very same policies implemented by Bush (and by Romney had he been elected), individuals who call themselves “liberals” or “progressives” will be faced with the challenge of defending what they perceive to be “their candidate” irrespective of reality, facts, and common sense.
Like the first four years, self-proclaimed progressives will continue to support the wholesale slaughter of innocent people in foreign countries, indefinite detention, banker bailouts, free trade, and a gross violation of civil liberties and Constitutional rights. While these very acts were once what liberals claimed was fueling their hatred of George W. Bush, it turns out that what passes for a progressive in 2012 is a rejection of war and totalitarianism directed by Republicans – not war and totalitarianism itself.
Indeed, when asking your average Obama fan their reason for such irrational support, one can scarcely receive an answer that does not have its root in false and divisive social paradigms such as his party, his race, or his age. Simply put, Obama supporters main reason for their allegiance to Barack Obama can be boiled down to two words – “He’s Obama!”
Even so, when Obama was first elected in 2008, and in the face of his obvious support for the banker bailout, continued war, and blatant disregard for civil liberties, we critics were met with pleas to “just give him time.” After all, he can’t fix eight years of Bush in one year of his own. This was the same statement that was repeated after Obama’s second year. And then his third. Even his fourth year as President still held echoes of the argument to just “give him time.”
Nevertheless, with Obama’s re-election there now appears a small shred of potential silver lining to this dark cloud. Namely, it will eliminate the argument posed by so-called Progressives for the last four years that Obama did not have equal time to right the wrongs of Bush or that he was not given a fair shot at the Presidency which now consists of, according to party hacks, an eight-year reign.
At the end of the Obama regime, it will be apparent to every Democrat that “their” candidate was every bit as bad as the one belonging to the “other team.”
There will be no more excuses echoed from the chambers of the Obama supporters that do not highlight an already delusional perspective and unwillingness to face reality. In 2016, like Bush supporters in 2008, the defense of Obama will appear more and more to be a mental illness than a political opinion. Unfortunately, one does not have to go much further for this to be the case.
This statement is not meant to pick on Obama supporters alone of course. In fact, Republicans and so-called Conservatives showed their own true colors this election by flocking to a full representation of the candidate they claim they are so opposed to. The differences between Romney and Obama, besides ethnicity and political party, were virtually non-existent. Indeed, those differences that did appear to exist were merely propaganda pieces for public presentation.
Republicans, by no means, have a leg to stand on when it comes to the issues mentioned above, be it economics, war, civil liberties, or any other issue for that matter.
Regardless, it is a fact that Liberals and Progressives, once the majority of the anti-war, 9/11 Truth, and freedom movements, simply dissipated with the election of Obama. What is worse, however, is that they never reappeared after Obama proved that, as President, he would not only be as bad as Bush, he would be worse.
While rumblings amongst true Liberals of Obama’s treachery are indeed beginning to take place, the fact is they have remained dormant for far too long. In truth, it is a shame that they were ever silent to begin with.
Thus, with Obama firmly locked in to another four years and with no possibility of his own re-election in 2016, Progressives are now given an opportunity to return to the principles they have neglected for the last four years. With no possibility of costing Obama the election, you can now be free to oppose the killing of innocent men, women, and children. With “your team” squarely in office, you can now meekly ask for your right to privacy, to a trial, and even to life without worrying about your chosen party losing the White House. As Obama takes over in his second term, you can now acknowledge the worldwide economic depression and perhaps take some steps to avoid a total collapse and return to real American standards of living without the fear of reflecting poorly upon “your President.”
A four-year vacation from your principles was long enough. Now, however, your country and the rest of the world needs you to return to the fight.
You can only blame “those other guys” for so long. Whether you like it or not, it is an unfortunate reality that both you and those on the other side of the falsely constructed aisle are more alike than you think. Likewise, Republicans must realize that economics, war, and civil liberties are issues that effect Americans regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in office.
Both Conservatives and Liberals are equally responsible for the moral, intellectual, and rapidly physical wasteland we now find ourselves inhabiting. Because both groups are divided only because they have been subjected ad infinitum to scientific propaganda in order to make such an environment possible, it is high time they both become responsible for repairing it.
Read other articles by Brandon Turbeville here.
Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of three books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, and Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident. Turbeville has published over 175 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.
The Special Interests Won Again
Cory Michael Skaaren Art |
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
The Special Interests Won Again
Paul Craig Roberts, Contributor
The election that was supposed to be too close to call turned out not to be so close after all. In my opinion, Obama won for two reasons: (1) Obama is non-threatening and inclusive, whereas Romney exuded a “us vs. them” impression that many found threatening, and (2) the election was not close enough for the electronic voting machines to steal.
As readers know, I don’t think that either candidate is a good choice or that either offers a choice. Washington is controlled by powerful interest groups, not by elections. What the two parties fight over is not alternative political visions and different legislative agendas, but which party gets to be the whore for Wall Street, the military-security complex, Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and energy, mining, and timber interests.
Being the whore is important, because whores are rewarded for the services that they render. To win the White House or a presidential appointment is a career-making event as it makes a person sought after by rich and powerful interest groups. In Congress the majority party can provide more services and is thus more valuable than the minority party. One of our recent presidents who was not rich ended up with $36 million shortly after leaving office, as did former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who served Washington far better than he served his own country.
Wars are profitable for the military/security complex. Israel rewards its servants and punishes its enemies. Staffing environmental regulatory agencies with energy, mining, and timber executives is regarded by those interests as very friendly behavior.
Many Americans understand this and do not bother to vote as they know that whichever candidate or party wins, the interest groups prevail. Ronald Reagan was the last president who stood up to interest groups, or, rather, to some of them. Wall Street did not want his tax rate reductions, as Wall Street thought the result would be higher inflation and interest rates and the ruination of their stock and bond portfolios. The military/security complex did not want Reagan negotiating with Gorbachev to end the cold war.
What is curious is that voters don’t understand how politics really works. They get carried away with the political rhetoric and do not see the hypocrisy that is staring them in the face.
Proud patriotic macho American men voted for Romney who went to Israel and, swearing allegiance to his liege lord, groveled at the feet of Netanyahu.
Obama plays on the heart strings of his supporters by relating a story of a child with leukemia now protected by Obamacare, while he continues to murder thousands of children and their parents with drones and other military actions in seven countries.
Obama was able to elicit cheers from supporters as he described the onward and upward path of America toward greater moral accomplishments, while his actual record is that of a tyrant who codified into law the destruction of the US Constitution and the civil liberties of the American people.
The election was about nothing except who gets to serve the interest groups. The wars were not an issue in the election. Washington’s provoking of Iran, Russia, and China by surrounding them with military bases was not an issue. The unconstitutional powers asserted by the executive branch to detain citizens indefinitely without due process and to assassinate them on suspicion alone were not an issue in the election.
The sacrifice of the natural environment to timber, mining, and energy interests was not an issue, except to promise more sacrifice of the environment to short-term profits. Out of one side of the mouth came the nonsense promise of restoring the middle class while from the other side of the mouth issued defenses of the offshoring of their jobs and careers as free trade.
The inability to acknowledge and to debate real issues is a threat not only to the United States but also to the entire world. Washington’s reckless pursuit of hegemony driven by an insane neoconservative ideology is leading to military confrontation with Russia and China.
Eleven years of gratuitous wars with more on the way and an economic policy that protects financial institutions from their mistakes have burdened the US with massive budget deficits that are being monetized.
The US dollar’s loss of the reserve currency role and hyperinflation are plausible consequences of disastrous economic policy.
How is it possible that “the world’s only superpower” can hold a presidential election without any discussion of these very real and serious problems being part of it?
How can anyone be excited or made hopeful about such an outcome?
This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new website Institute For Political Economy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.
To Obama Supporters
It is a very sad day. the handwriting on the wall is obscured by ludicrousity, insanity and blatant denial. The masses travail in the muck and mire of an ill-fated illusion. Their deluded hope and belief in a denigrated system, sold out to the power elite. Nothing has changed save a momentary dream awakening to nightmarish proportions. I don’t care who thinks I am a vile voice in the wilderness.
I am a truth warrior, and the truth is the truth. The first time around, no one would listen, so with silent knowing, it came to pass, what could not be spoken aloud. The second time around, courage must speak its truth and open itself to frontal attack from those who cry “naysayer, kill joy, party buster, etc.”
Wake up, people, before it is too late! We live on a prison planet and have just witnessed, the changing of the guards. Same system, different guards. Same system, different keys to the cells. Same system and it will not be changed by the guards or their handlers. NB
President Obama’s second term in the White House was largely secured by record numbers of votes from ethnic minorities, while his popularity among whites plummeted, exit polls have revealed.
Hispanics, the fa
Of these, 7
1 per cent voted for Obama, up from 67 per cent in 2008. In a sign Republicans are failing to win over this increasingly influential group, Romney won just 27 per cent.
A record number of Asian voters – three per cent of the electorate – also turned out, with nearly three-quarters backing Obama. He also won a staggering 93 per cent of African-American votes.
Yet while his popularity among ethnic minorities swelled, he received just 39 per cent of the white votes, down by four per cent on the last election, a drop his campaign had anticipated.
Considering the 1.5 million deportations, and the incarceration of so many others, it begs to question, why the Hispanics came out so strongly for him. Not to mention the fact that his address to African Americans was stop complaining, take your slippers off and get to work on change. And the closest he came to digging in with the Black masses was hanging out with Jay-Z (a one per center) and Beyonce’,(I won’t get into what I think about her as a role model for young girls). And writing in on the Census report that he was African American. Not to mention the removal of a towering figure for Black unity and African unity, Muamar Qaddaffi. Hmm, me thinks I sense a hint of cognitive dissonance. NB
“we cling to voting like its our greatest & only chance for change; our one and only lifeboat. we misrepresent ancestors & claim we must participate in the process becuz of their past suffering, while ignoring the fact that their analysis was rooted in their times. since then, we’ve been brutally uprooted & though we can identify the hour, we never seem to kno what time it is. we swear voting is the answer, and when it doesn’t work, we still think it’s the answer, and when it’s proven to us that it doesn’t work, we still think it’s the answer, with a birth defect.”
Laini Mataka
excerpt from “there’s paralysis in our analysis”, from THE PRINCE OF KOKOMO by laini (don’t tread on me) mataka
Victory! – for the Non-Resistance
BARACK OBAMA: THE MORE EFFECTIVE EVIL
In his second term, Obama will continue attacking the working class. |
BARACK OBAMA: THE MORE EFFECTIVE EVIL
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inPlease see the links below the article on Barack Obama, election fraud, non-voting as revolutionary resistance and faux democracy in America. Listen to this warning to America from Spain which accurately describes the police state America has become under the Bush-Obama administrations. (See The Coup Of 2012) Regardless of which candidate is “elected”, The Deep State and The Doomsday Project/Operation Endgame as described by Peter Dale Scott, will advance its agenda of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship dedicated to global destruction and perpetual war unless the American people rise up and stop it.
(See State Crimes Against Democracy & The NDAA)
Alexandra Valiente
Editor of Ephemeris 360°
I’ve called on readers of this blog to abstain from voting in order to delegitimize the current political system. In this regard, I align myself with Muammar Gaddafi, who wrote:
“It is an indisputable fact that direct democracy is the only ideal form that is practical.”
I do not believe that anything in this article contradicts that perspective.
– Nina Westbury, Editor of Crimson Satellite
Jim Creegan Via Crimson Satellite
Barack Obama hardly represents a rampart against Republican extremism, as some on the left still maintain.
When in March a reporter asked an advisor of Mitt Romney if the Republican presidential candidate was not tacking too far to the right in the primaries to win the presidential election, Eric Fehrnstrom replied that the post-primary campaign would be “like Etch a Sketch – you can shake it up and we start all over again”.
Fehrnstrom spoke on behalf of a candidate whose political career has depended heavily on the use of the above-named drawing toy with an erasable screen. To capture the Republican nomination, he had already morphed from the ‘moderate’ Republican governor of liberal Massachusetts into the self-described “severe conservative” playing for the allegiance of the party’s far-right base.
Now, for the three televised presidential debates held in October, the nominee shape-shifted yet again. Gone was the Tea Party firebrand, for whom refusing to rescind Bush’s tax cuts for the rich was a matter of rock-bottom principle; in his place on the platform stood a Romney anxious to assure a viewing audience of nearly 70 million (in language vague enough to avoid reneging on his earlier pledge) that the top 5% will continue as now to pay 60% of federal income taxes under his plan.
In place of the man who had praised as a model for the nation Arizona’s ‘stop and frisk’ law, permitting police to detain anyone suspected of being an illegal alien and demand proof of citizenship, stood a candidate who emphasised that he had no wish to round up aliens, and even thought that the more worthy among them should have a way to become citizens. The candidate who had earlier spoken of a possible unilateral nuclear strike against Iran now affirmed his commitment to “peaceful and diplomatic means”, at least to begin with. And, instead of repeating his original criticism of Obama for setting a withdrawal date from Afghanistan, Romney now affirmed his intention, if elected, to abide firmly by the scheduled 2014 departure deadline.
The newly unveiled moderate Mitt put himself forward as the saviour of a middle class, “crushed during the last four years” of the Obama administration, which, he said, offers nothing but more of the same in a second term. He reiterated his commitment to reducing the federal deficit and promised to create 12 million new jobs. Apart from getting tough on Chinese “currency manipulation” and drilling for more oil on federal lands, he was vague on specific means to these ends. But he asked the American people to trust that his decades as a successful CEO have given him the know-how to get the job done.
Taken aback by the new Romney, and perhaps a little groggy from the mountain altitude of the first debate venue of Denver, Colorado, Obama turned in a semi-comatose performance, which cost him dearly in the opinion polls. By the second debate, however, he seemed to have regained his composure (though not his wide polling-number lead). There, he sounded the note that he has struck repeatedly on the campaign trail ever since, and hopes will carry him through to the election: pointing out the yawning discrepancies between Romney’s currently proclaimed softer positions and his ‘radical’ utterances of just a few months, or even weeks, before. Obama has given a name to his opponent’s condition. He calls it “Romnesia”.
To shore up the crucial women’s vote, Obama never ceases to remind audiences of Romney’s earlier statement that he would be happy to sign any bill outlawing abortion, or that he favours (or until recently favoured) leaving the decision about whether to cover contraceptive care in the hands of the private employers who pay health-benefit premiums for their employees. Nor does he cease to remind Latino voters of Romney’s support for the Arizona ‘Show me your papers’ anti-immigrant law.
And, given Romney’s role as finance capitalist and political spokesmen for his class, Obama can hardly avoid a few jabs at his view that the main answer to the country’s economic woes is to help the wealthy and the corporations even more. But the mild class content that has forced its way into Obama’s stump speech – “The rich should pay their fair share of taxes” – is usually accompanied by declarations of fealty to free enterprise.
Matter of degree
Moreover, there is a bleakness at the heart of Obama’s election effort. The slogans of “hope” and “change” that electrified his followers in 2008 after four years under Bush would be absurdly out of place in 2012. During his first four years in office, the president has shown himself to be not the crusading reformer most of his supporters imagined (contrary to the evidence) that they were voting for, but a right-centrist bourgeois politician.
His multi-billion-dollar bailout of the banks at public expense can hardly be forgotten easily. His signature reform initiative, the health insurance scheme now known as Obamacare, actually consolidated the grip of private-insurance profiteers on the medical industry. The exceptions, loopholes and ambiguities of his party’s attempt to rein in financial speculation, the Dodd-Frank Bill, greatly weaken the restrictions it places on Wall Street swindlers. This record makes it amply clear that any reform efforts to come out of a second Obama term will, like those of the first, strain to stay within the limits of acceptability laid down by corporate power, even though Wall Street will denounce such reforms as steps toward socialism anyway. Obama’s attempts to undo some of the grosser inequities of the tax code have been abandoned time and again to achieve a legislative compromise with Congressional Republicans.
Thus Obama stands before the electorate with little in the way of inspiration. The ‘progressive’ achievements he touts – the Lily Ledbetter ‘fair pay’ act, making it easier for women to sue over pay inequities in the workplace; his decision to allow gays to serve openly in the military; and his personal acceptance of gay marriage – seem inadequate in relation to the mass joblessness, underemployment and low wages that are foremost in the mind of the electorate. To these deep worries, Obama offers answers that ring hollow. He promises no new government stimulus of any kind, and his emphasis on expanded training for “the skilled jobs of tomorrow” ignores what everyone knows: that there are not, nor will there be, enough of these jobs to absorb even the university-educated young now entering the job market under mountains of debt.
So, as Romney argues that a second Obama term will mean that the next four years will be as bad as the last four, the incumbent, bereft of any big ideas or arresting slogans for the future, and unable to argue that he will implement any major changes after having failed to do so when he had the chance, can only reply that things were not so bad as all that during his first term – and will get even worse under Romney.
But, for the mass of people, things will get worse under Obama too. It is only a matter of degree. The first major crisis of a second Obama term would take place at the end of November, when Congress must once again consider voting to raise the government debt ceiling. The stand-off between the two parties that occurred when Congress last took up this matter in the summer of 2011 resulted in a compromise by which a bipartisan committee of lawmakers must either come up with a plan for deficit reduction or face automatic cuts (‘sequestration’) in January, including reductions in military spending, which neither party really wants. To avoid going over the ‘fiscal cliff’, as the automatic cuts are called, Obama is already talking once again about a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, which would include “entitlement reform” – most likely decreases in social security and/or Medicare.
A foretaste of what labour can look forward to in a second Obama term was provided in Chicago. The city’s recently elected mayor, Rahm Emanuel, previously served in the White House as the president’s chief of staff. In Chicago, he intensified the war against teachers’ unions being carried out by the ruling class throughout the country with the support of Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan. In contract negotiations, Emanuel sought to lengthen the school day, replace teachers’ automatic pay increases by ‘merit pay’, based largely on student performance on standardised tests, and make teachers redundant without regard to seniority from the many schools he plans to close. The teachers, however, had earlier replaced the Democrat-loyal, concession-prone leadership of their union with a more militant reform group (the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, or Core). In contrast to the bureaucratic methods of most union officials, Core mobilised the rank and file of the union and reached out to parents and community organisations in preparation for the seven-day strike that closed the schools and made national headlines in September. Public opinion in Chicago favoured the strikers.
The result was a concessionary contract (the school day was lengthened, school closures were not stopped, and seniority in redundancies remained unprotected) that in a period of greater labour strength would have been considered a defeat. But perhaps the most significant aspect of the strike was that – unlike the outcome of many recent union struggles – defeat was less than total. The union forced the withdrawal of certain give-back demands (for a merit pay system) and the dilution of others (only 30% of teacher evaluations, as opposed to the 45% originally demanded, will be based on standardised student tests), thus demonstrating to its members, and workers throughout the country, that striking is not futile. But, however one judges the outcome, there could be no doubt in the minds of the strikers concerning the commitment of the Obama administration to the bipartisan ruling class policies of deepening austerity and assaults on workers.
‘National security state’
If austerity is one pillar of the ruling class programme being pursued by both parties, the other is the retrenchment of the American empire around the world. Both these objectives require the strengthening of the ‘national security state’. And, in this area, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has made the considerable efforts of George W Bush seem modest by comparison.
Figuring prominently in the final presidential debate on foreign policy was the prospect of military intervention against Iran following the elections – either by the US directly or by Israel with US approval. Both candidates sought to outdo each other in proclaiming their support for the Zionist state. Regarding Iran, Obama pointedly pledged to “keep all options on the table”. Despite Romney’s effort to appear more decisive and belligerent than Obama, it soon became apparent to most commentators that little divided the two candidates where foreign policy is concerned. As Obama quipped to his opponent, “Governor, you’re saying the same things as us, but you’d say them louder.”
As a result of the failure of US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama seeks to place greater emphasis on remote, high-tech warfare. His sixfold expansion of US drone strikes in the Pakistan tribal areas since taking over from Bush, with a corresponding fivefold increase in (mostly civilian) deaths, are well known, along with the private ‘kill list’ from which the president personally orders the lethal strikes. So too is his government’s vindictiveness toward Bradley Manning and Julian Assange for piercing the veil behind which the empire conducts its military and diplomatic operations.
But subtending these more visible actions is a vast expansion in secrecy, surveillance and repression, abroad and at home. In 2011, 70 million government documents were ordered classified, 40% more than in the previous year. The government now hires 30,000 people to listen in on the private telephone conversations of Americans, and has built a $2 billion facility in Bluffdale, Utah for storing the data thus gathered. The Obama administration pushed through Congress the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the government to imprison anyone, including US citizens, for an indeterminate length of time on suspicion of terrorism, in blatant violation of the right of habeas corpus guaranteed in the fifth amendment to the constitution.
The administration has also authorised the assassination of anyone living abroad said to be participating in terrorist activities, again including US citizens, even though they are not directly involved in armed combat. The most famous target of this policy was Anwar al-Awlaki, a self-exiled American citizen who made propaganda videos for al Qa’eda, and was accused, without public proof, of participating in plotting the 9/11 attack. Al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen by a US drone strike. His 16-year-old son was also killed in another drone strike two weeks later. No one alleged that the Denver-born high-school student was involved in terrorist activity.
Although Obama failed to keep his election promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, and is proceeding with military trials of those held there, he seems inclined to replace the whole cumbersome process of detention, ‘secret rendition’ and military tribunals with the simpler expedient of assassination. Quoting theWashington Post, left-liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald reports that a government agency called the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has developed what it calls a “disposition matrix”. According to Greenwald, “One of its purposes is ‘to augment’ the ‘separate but overlapping kill lists’ maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as the centralised clearing house for determining who will be executed without due process, based upon how one fits into the executive branch’s ‘matrix’.” He adds: “… the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored and analysed. This includes ‘records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records …’ In other words, the NCTC – now vested with the power to determine the proper ‘disposition’ of terrorist suspects – is the same agency that is at the centre of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens” (Common Dreams October 24).
No Republican or Tea Party supporter, for all their talk about the encroachments of “big government”, has to our knowledge uttered a peep of protest about these developments. And no-one who has been on the receiving end of nationally coordinated efforts to remove Occupy encampments from public squares, or stepped-up police harassment of leftwing protestors, will believe that the government will limit itself, in a period of imperial decline and mass austerity, to deploying this repressive apparatus against Islamic terrorists.
Zyklon C
Hopes that disappointment in Obama would lead to a leftward break with the Democratic Party have thus far been unrealised. The Occupy movement had little sympathy for Obama. But its stalwarts consider themselves above not only Democratic politics, but politics in general. This abstentionism left Occupy unprotected against the inevitable efforts to channel the energies it had released into electoral support for the party of the ‘lesser evil’. Few among Occupy’s quasi-anarchist core will vote for the Democrats, but almost none were able to conduct the active anti-Democratic propaganda effort that any shift to the left would require.
Hence, on a left spectrum bounded on one end by liberalism and on the other by populist radicalism and socialism, with many indistinct hues in between, little has changed since 2008. The two principal candidates running to the left of the Democrats, Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, are local politicians virtually unknown outside their states (Massachusetts and Utah respectively).The anti-Obama minority clustered around the webzine, Counterpunch, has stuck to its guns. The other two left media mainstays – Amy Goodman’s syndicated television and radio programme, ‘Democracy Now!’ and the Pacifica radio network – remain, as before, non-committal.
On the rest of what calls itself the left, lesser-evilism is rampant. In the 2000 presidential elections, the pages of the country’s leading left-liberal magazine, The Nation, hosted a lively debate between the supporters of the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, and partisans of the Green Party’s Ralph Nader. But all the then-Naderites have since been purged, and, with the death in July of the last columnist to advocate an independent politics of the left, Alexander Cockburn, the magazine is drably homogeneous.
A special election issue, titled ‘Why Obama?’ (October 22), contains contributions from 10 writers, all of whom advocate critical support for the president, arguing only about just how critical one should be. The authors can hardly make their case on the basis of the naive hopes of 2008, so completely disappointed in the four years since. They can only argue on the basis of fear of Romney and the Republicans, heightened by the party’s right-extremist dérivé. They provide a pristine example of what Cockburn dubbed the “Zyklon C” approach to politics: resisting the use of Zyklon B (the gas used by the Nazis in the death chamber of Auschwitz) will only result in the deployment of an even more lethal gas called Zyklon C.
Perhaps the most comprehensive Zyklon C manifesto was issued over the summer by a long-time social democrat, Bill Fletcher, and a former Students for a Democratic Society leader and Maoist, Carl Davidson, who is now with the National Committees of Correspondence, a rightward split from the Communist Party. The article is entitled, ‘The 2012 elections have little to do with Obama’s record … which is why we are voting for him’. The best thing about the article is its acknowledgement that the position of the left represents a “Groundhog Day” scenario – alluding to the movie in which the protagonist, played by Bill Murray, finds himself trapped in a perpetual February 2. What they forget to add is that lesser-evilists like themselves are a predictable part of the scenario.
Fletcher and Davidson state that the 2012 elections are “unlike anything that any of us can remember”, and will be “one of the most … critical elections in recent history”. The authors were, however, saying similar things during the elections of 2004 and 2008, in which both also urged support for the Democrats.
The arguments of Fletcher and Davidson boil down to alarmism over the Republican Party, which they claim has been captured by the forces of “revenge-seeking white supremacy”, bent upon resisting the political influence of the country’s soon-to-be non-white majority, even to the point of severely curtailing electoral democracy. They argue further that Barack Obama, regardless of his political record, has become a hate symbol for these forces. His re-election would therefore represent a defeat for white revanchism, which would give “progressive forces” a “breathing space” in which to build their strength.
The problem with this line of argument is its tendency to view the racial question in isolation from the class dynamics with which it is interwoven and to which, in the end, it is subordinate. The ugly racist undercurrent in the Tea Party is certainly real enough. But so also is the fact that the racial (and misogynist) insults that regularly arise from the movement’s depths are a source of embarrassment to its leaders, who routinely apologise and have made a conscious attempt to appropriate the symbols and rhetoric of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Open, vulgar racism may still be alive and well in the south and beyond, but, despite the temptation to pander to these sentiments at election time, there is a recognition amongst national Republican political operatives that the programme of white revanchism, given an eventual non-white majority, could only mean the construction of a neo-apartheid state, which cannot be sold to the electorate, and therefore ultimately not to the ruling class, as the preferred way of pursuing their principal agenda of austerity.
No rampart
And this agenda is one in which the Democratic leadership shares. It is true that the Republicans, because their base includes far fewer of the victims of austerity, are less constrained than the Democrats about pushing it. But the Democrats are hardly a rampart against Republican reaction. A victory for Obama and Democratic Congressional candidates will not be the electoral equivalent of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, affording the working class and unemployed “breathing space”, as Fletcher and Davidson think. It is rather more akin to the Munich Pact, opening the way for a new round of retreats before the Republicans, and Democratic-sponsored measures to weaken social programmes and worker rights, encouraging even bolder rightwing thrusts.
It may be true, as Fletcher and Davidson aver, that merely not voting for the Democrats, or voting for a protest candidate, is hardly a political strategy. Voting for them, however is not a strategy either, but a resigned acceptance of the status quo. Refusing to vote for the lesser evil is at least the beginning of the wisdom required to exit Groundhog Day.
Obama’s lacklustre performance in the first presidential debate was not only the result of the mountain altitudes in which it took place. What the country perhaps glimpsed was the real Obama, lacking the will to do battle with the Republicans, and profoundly bored with the whole adversarial charade (he even went so far as to say that he and Romney had the same essential views on social security). That performance cost the president what was till then a commanding lead in the opinion polls, and the contest has become much closer. Some opinion samplings even show Romney with a slight advantage.
The president is not elected by direct popular suffrage, but the Electoral College, whose delegates are apportioned according to the population of the state, and in which the candidate with the majority in each state gets all of its delegate votes. The popular vote in solidly Republican or Democratic states is therefore irrelevant, having been figured into electoral calculations from the start. The outcome therefore hinges on a few ‘swing states’, the most important in this election being Ohio, where both contenders are campaigning heavily. Despite the evening out of opinion polls, the arithmetic of the Electoral College still favours Obama only a few days before November 6.
An Obama victory will surely cause great consternation in Republican ranks, and a ripple or two in the ruling class. Certain factions will be driven even further to the right. But perhaps others will become convinced that racial innuendo and open contempt for the majority are no way to run a country or an empire. It would be wrong to be too confident in the rationality of the bourgeoisie, but we shall see. And perhaps the inevitable rightward trajectory of a second Obama presidency may yet convince the enemies of the ruling class that Obama is, in the words of Black Agenda Report editor, Glen Ford, not so much the lesser evil as the more effective one.
BOYCOTT THE 2012 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION! ABSTINENCE IS THE ONLY VOTE THAT COUNTS.
HACKING DEMOCRACY
COINTELPRO 101 AND COINTELPRO DOCUMENTARY
NON-VOTING – PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY LINKS:
ENDING OLIGARCHY: DON’T VOTE FOR EVIL
IN CUBA, VOTERS SELECT CANDIDATES
NEW YORK TIMES CAN’T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND HOW THEIR SIDE LOST IN VENEZUELA
VOTING FOR DEATH
YOU HAVE GOT TO STOP VOTING!
NON-VOTING AND BRINGING DOWN THE IMPERIAL OLD WORLD ORDER
THE LAST WORD ON VOTING
ELECTION FRAUD AMERICAN STYLE: CINDY SHEEHAN INTERVIEWS CYNTHIA MCKINNEY
AMERICAN BLACKOUT
WHAT IF THEY STAGED AN ELECTION AND NOBODY CAME?
DIRECT PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY LINKS
BEYOND ELECTIONS – PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY
GLOBAL BASIC INCOME
THE GREEN BOOK BY MUAMMAR GADDAFI
FURTHER READING ON BARACK OBAMA:
THE MEN BEHIND OBAMA
PART I
PART II
OBAMA AND THE POSTMODERN COUP – THE MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
BARAK H. OBAMA: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY
OBAMA AND THE CIA: ALL IN THE COMPANY
THE OBAMA FILES
ALLAN NAIRN – OBAMA IS A WAR CRIMINAL (PART I)
ALLAN NAIRN – OBAMA IS A WAR CRIMINAL (PART II)
ALLAN NAIRN – OBAMA IS A WAR CRIMINAL (PART III)
ALLAN NAIRN – OBAMA IS A WAR CRIMINAL (PART IV)
OBAMA LEADS NO WAR ON TERROR
OBAMA’S MILITARY TRIBUNALS AND TARGETED ASSASSINATIONS
Why the West Wanted Qaddafi
Nana’s Comments:
But I think the bigger reason is that great man-made river and the technology he used to change a desert into farmland. They don’t really need oil, that is a sham, they know all about free energy. They wanted and seized Qaddafi’s 3-4 billion dollars in gold dinars. He was threatening to change his economy to the gold dinar and he was encouraging other African leaders to do the same. And there is historical, spiritual and cosmic reasons for them to seize certain territories. If you notice, these territories are mentioned in the Bible stories. These lands are so ancient, that Europeans cannot be found there. The history is unbelievable. If they can conquer these regions they can really re-write history while gaining access to the ancient secrets.These folks know what’s up, they keep the masses in the dark
Drone Wars – Junious Ricardo Stanton
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OurWorldView/message/11937?var=1 |
In this Jan. 31, 2010 file photo, an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, on a moon-lit night. (Photo: AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File) |
Oakland police officers in riot gear line Frank H. Ogawa plaza, the site of an Occupy Wall Street encampment, Tuesday, Oct. 25. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) |
Oakland police officers in riot gear line Frank H. Ogawa plaza, the site of an Occupy Wall Street encampment, Tuesday, Oct. 25. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) |
Should We Vote For Obama?
Truth be told, my heart goes out to him, that he got caught in that cycle of psychopathic madness and became the pawn in their chess game, instead of saying “NO”, I will not spread American Imperialism around the world, I will not drop drones, I will not indefinitely detain, I will not kill (Disposition) people without a trial or even a reason why, I will not bail out the banks, and I will help my people. You all want to put me in between Malcom & Martin, well Ima show you I ain’t no pacified scared Negro, I am a truth Warrior and I am here to bring real change!! Alas, such is not the case, and he continues the policies of his predecessors and he is unabashed by it. He is just a brown side of the same coin. Too bad folks want to vote for him just cause he’s Black. When in fact he acts like the Overseer, who gets a few points from his Master, and with those points he continues the Oppression of his Masters. Sad to say, but it is the truth, it can be ignored, but he really has brough no change, just more of the same, just laced with swagger, charisma, intelligence and skullduggery.
Voting For Obama Because he is Black????
The President of the United States is not only representing African people, but supposedly he is a world representative and in some perceptions, the representative of the greatest country in the world, a world leader, et al, and we vote for him simply because he is black, or we feel we are taboo to express our concerns over the policies of this man in black skin.
How is it that on his watch the US has engaged in 3 war campaigns, drone attacks on other sovereign countries and what we saw without regard in Libya, sending troops deep into Africa, and now this Kony thing? These are military operations and we all know what military operations look like. Why is there no challenge to this, or, if folks are so happy about the Health Care legislation, much of those dollars that are spent on war could certainly be spent here in the US, and build infrastructure and develop genuine green energy.
Why is it okay, to look the other way, and say, well, he is black and he is all we have and we have been fighting for our seat at the table for 4 hundred years, instead of looking at the table, see what is being served, check out the room the table is in, then look outside at the neighborhood? Have we become so desperate for leadership, that we will take anything that is thrown at us? Why are people ignoring the aides, backers and financial supporter of Pres. Barack Obama? Why are they stepping over this elephant in the room so they can claim they lived during the time when a Black man was President of the United States.
There have been many African Presidents, Rulers, kings and monarchs, does that mean that they too were above reproach, and therefore their misdeeds could be overlooked, and no one is ever called to task? Is that what happened to the many African nations that have dropped the ball on their developments because the people did not, would not see beyond the corruption?
Again, it is quite troubling to me, that the reason folks are voting for Obama again is because he is black, or, on the other side of the aisle he is being mis-treated by them white folks who don’t want to see no black folks get anywhere. Folks we need to wake up. The fact that he is still in office proves that the “Important White Folks who run this country” want him there. The media talking heads are all on board the good ship lollipop because they are being told and paid to do so. As soon as the tied changes, they too will change and pull out all the dirt and grime they can.
Bottom-line, it is flimsy to support any person in such a high position because of their ethnicity. Since these people will be on the front lines for all folks in this country, they need to have top notch skills to maintain that position on the front lines. They need to know what is going on domestically and globally as it relates to economic, politics, world affairs cultures, religions, societal norms, manners, and etiquette, along with a strong sense of the seriousness of their position as it relates to world peace and maintaining a peaceful environment at the home base. They need to be scholars in all the fields that are needed to govern a whole nation properly. This may sound like a tall task but if they are at least familiar with the nuts and bolts of this kind of leadership, they will call around them folks to advise them that are highly eligible to advise a President. In this way, when they receive advise that is non-supportive of the original agenda, then they can make a determination and have the person step down from the position of adviser.
The President should be keenly aware that the decisions he makes will reflect back on him and not on the advisers behind him. So they should be chosen appropriately. This will probably sound rather idealistic and probably unrealistic, but my point is that we need to get there in our own discernment, before we take this ship down to hell!! Waving an American flag with Obama’s face on it!!!!! What does that mean???
Comment: Welcome to ‘Merica! A land where you can proudly express your violent tendencies with blatant stupidity!