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Twilight of the Idols: Rise and Fall of the Personalist Left
James Petras
Introduction
Over the past three years Latin American leftist leaders, who presided over heterodox ‘free trade’ and commodity based welfare economies, lost presidential, legislative and municipal elections and referendums or faced impeachment. They fell because they lost competitive elections, not because of US invasions or military coups. These same leftist leaders, who had successfully defeated coups and withstood gross US political intervention via AID, NED, the DEA and other US government agencies, lost at the ballot box.
Why the Arabs don’t want us in SyriaThey don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries — for oil.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
In part because my father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve made an effort to understand the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses from the Islamic world against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should examine the more complex rationales of history and oil — and how they often point the finger of blame back at our own shores.
America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria — little-known to the American people yet well-known to Syrians — sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIL. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely only to compound the crisis. Secretary of State John Kerry this week announced a “provisional” ceasefire in Syria. But since U.S. leverage and prestige within Syria is minimal — and the ceasefire doesn’t include key combatants such as Islamic State and al Nusra — it’s bound to be a shaky truce at best. Similarly President Obama’s stepped-up military intervention in Libya — U.S. airstrikes targeted an Islamic State training camp last week — is likely to strengthen rather than weaken the radicals. As the New York Times reported in a December 8, 2015, front-page story, Islamic State political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention. They know from experience this will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.
Dirty Business As Usual Sweeps Super Tuesday
Stephen Lendman
Results were known before polls opened Tuesday morning. The same holds throughout the farcical political season - a meaningless pre-scripted exercise in theater, substance entirely excluded.
Media hoopla conceals a process too corrupted to fix. Democracy in America is a four-letter word - a rigged Big Money controlled duopoly power system. Voters have no say whatever. Dirty business as usual wins every time.
Green Party presidential aspirant Dr. Jill Stein is the real thing, a true populist supporting governance of, by and for everyone equitably - getting virtually no media coverage. Editorial scoundrels treat her like a nonperson.
She and other independents are shut out, ignored and prevented from competing on a level playing field. The system is rigged to exclude them.
In America, what Wall Street, war-profiteers and other robber barons want, they get. Republicans and Democrats are cookie cutouts of each each other, not a dime’s worth of difference between them.
Campaign promises are made to be broken. All duopoly power candidates march to the same drummer - no exceptions.
None match Jill Stein’s advocacy for peace, ecological sanity, social justice and real grassroots participatory democracy, what America never had from inception, for sure not now.
Former UK Ambassador to Syria: U.S./UK Policy on Syria Is Doomed, Even Corrupt
Eric Zuesse
Peter Ford, who was the UK’s Ambassador in Syria during 2003-2006, was asked by the BBC in their “The Big Questions” interview on February 14th, whether the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have to be a part of the solution in that country after the war is over, and Ambassador Ford said:
“I think sadly, but inevitably, he is. Realistically, Assad is not going to be overthrown. This becomes more clear with every day that passes. Western analysts have been indulging in wishful thinking for 5 years; it’s time to get real, we owe it to the Syrian people to be much more realistic and hard headed about this. The West has to stop propping up the so-called ‘moderate opposition’, which is not moderate at all.”
Libertarians’ False Assumptions about Economics
Eric Zuesse
We’ll start with a typical example of libertarians’ big misconception:
Here was the libertarian white Texan Alex Jones, in a riff for the racist white populist billionaire Republican U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump, the day after Trump had declined to condemn on CNN a KKK endorsement. Jones says in that clip (1:03-): “There’s a lot of good people supportin’ [the progressive U.S. Presidential candidate Bernie] Sanders and I’ve probably been too mean to him, and I know how bad socialism is, but some of them are just helpless and want somethin’ free; that’s not how the world works, but he [Sanders] is obviously better than Hillary [Clinton, the extremely aggressive and corrupt Democratic candidate].”
The libertarian Jones was wrong about Sanders and his supporters (though he was correct about Clinton). What Jones calls “socialism” includes the dictatorial form, communism, and that misrepresents what Sanders specifically stands for. Sanders calls his ideology “democratic socialism,” though it’s actually also democratic capitalism, because the nordic nations that Sanders cites as being examples of “democratic socialism” are “mixed economies,” neither only “socialist” nor only “capitalist.” Libertarians equate that democratic ideology (“democratic socialism”) with communism, and this is one of their crudest misrepresentations: for example: Sweden isn’t at all like the USSR was. They’re fundamentally different systems. Libertarians are deceived to equate them — to imply that a proponent of the Scandinavian system is at all a proponent of the Soviet system.
Clinton-Bush Hardliner Attacks Congress for Blocking Invasion of Syria
Eric Zuesse
In a Huffington Post interview on February 23rd, the Clinton-Bush former head of the NSA and CIA, and defender of their use of waterboarding, and of their violating the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (both of which types of legal violations he says are necessary in order to keep Americans safe), accused Congress of being gutless: “Congress didn’t step up and authorize the use of military force” to invade Syria.
Michael Hayden said this in a video clip at Huffington Post Live, where the context of what he was saying was left ambiguous, but it concerned only the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, so his comment there was gratuitous: he asserted (at 23:00 in the complete interview) that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are prisoners of war and thus can legally be kept imprisoned for the rest of their lives without there being any need at all for them (and there were 775 of them) to be heard in any court — he said they’re prisoners of war and not prisoners of any legal system at all; and, so, even if they were actually captured in error (as many of them were found to have been), they’ve got no legal rights at all. Innocence or guilt is legally irrelevant to their continued imprisonment, says this former chief of America’s CIA and of the NSA.
NYT Reinvented History of War on Libya
Stephen Lendman
The Times operates as a quasi-official ministry of state propaganda, featuring misinformation and Big Lies on major issues mattering most - systematically suppressing what readers need to know.
Its two-part misreporting on US-led NATO’s war on Libya was called “Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall” (Part I) and “A New Libya, With ‘Very Little Time Left’ “ (Part II) - a shameless perversion of truth, an utter disregard for the raping and pillaging of a sovereign independent state, the immiseration of its people.
North Africa’s most developed nation was transformed into a cauldron of endless violence, instability, turmoil, deep poverty, mass unemployment and appalling human misery.
US-Led Foreign Support Lets ISIS Thrive
Stephen Lendman
Washington created ISIS and virtually all other significant terrorist groups, used to advance its imperium, wage endless war on humanity.
America, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and allied rogue states supply ISIS and other terrorist groups with armaments, financing, training and other forms of material support.
A new Conflict Armament Research (CAR) study provides more insight into Washington’s pure evil agenda - titled “Tracing the Supply of Components used in Islamic State IEDs,” it provides evidence from a 20-month investigation in Iraq and Syria.
Dozens of US, European, Turkish and other companies through their home countries provide ISIS with detonators, cables, wires, and other components used to assemble improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
A Coherent Explanation of Obama’s Foreign Policy
Eric Zuesse
Foreign policy is both economic and military. An interpretation of U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy will be presented here that explains both his economic and his military decisions to-date, and that shows he’s been carrying out the policies of his predecessors in office.
On economic matters, he has turned out to be the most ambitious ‘free-trader’ of any U.S. President: he has proposed three gigantic international-trade treaties, two with North Atlantic countries (TTIP for products and TISA for services), and one with Pacific countries (TPP), not only in order to serve America’s aristocracy at the public’s expense (an international “race-to-the-bottom” in terms of workers’ wages, and race to the top in terms of stockholders’ profits and executive pay) (like NAFTA on steroids), but in order to extend the NATO military alliance against Russia, to include now these trade treaties as a companion economic alliance against Russia (to reduce Russian trade with Russia’s biggest market, which is Europe).
Are US-Installed Kiev Fascists Planning War on Russia?
Stephen Lendman
Washington considers most despotic regimes worldwide valued allies - including a few it installed, notably the illegitimate Nazi-infested lunatics running Ukraine.
According to its interior minister Arsen Avakov, a special unit is being trained to return Crimea to Ukrainian control, even though it’s sovereign Russian territory and attempting it would be a declaration of war.
Russia’s military can decisively smash any Ukrainian invasion attempt - in a matter of hours. Avakov’s comments reflect arrogant bluster, saying:
“We have nothing. We need a new army, a new National Guard, a new police force. This is what the government of Ukraine is working on right now.”
“We must restore all of this, and then, with enough will, Crimea will be ours. I have no doubt of that.”
Claiming a “project” was undertaken to seize Crimea amounts to the ranting of a lunatic. They infest Ukraine, including illegitimate US-anointed oligarch president Petro Poroshenko.
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