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John Kerry's Anti-Palestinian Agenda
by Stephen Lendman
He's no peacemaker. He never was throughout 30 years in state and federal government service. He's one of America's privileged. He's super-rich.
His record shows exclusive support for wealth and power. He spurns popular interests. He's been conducting Middle East shuttle diplomacy for months. He's Israel's man at State.
He's no honest broker. He never was. He's not now. His dirty hands are manipulating dead on arrival Israeli/Palestinian peace talks.
They're more pretense than real. They demand unconditional Palestinian surrender. Israel is all take and no give. So is Washington.
Peace in our time reflects a convenient illusion. Last week, Kerry met with Netanyahu and Abbas. He presented a new plan. It's largely old wine in new bottles. It focused on security issues.
Venezuelan Municipal Elections
by Stephen Lendman
On Sunday, Venezuelans voted. A follow-up article will discuss results. More on what's at stake below.
Last week, Venezuela's National Assembly (AN) passed Chavez's Second Socialist Plan 2013 - 2019.
It followed his National Project Simon Bolivar 2007 - 2013. It focused on ethics and morals. The new plan goes further. It aims to strengthen and expand existing programs.
It calls for greater participatory democracy. It focuses on grassroots control. It discusses serious unresolved problems.
It aims to take Bolivarianism to the next level. It's fair, ambitious and realistic. It states in part:
"This is a program for the transition to socialism and the radicalization of a pre-eminent and participatory democracy."
Western Officials Collaborating Against Ukraine's Government
by Stephen Lendman
US and other Western officials do it openly. They're doing it lawlessly. They're violating international law.
UN Charter Article 2(7) states:
"Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter."
Under no circumstances may one nation, or combination thereof, intervene against another without Security Council authorization.
Article 8 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention of Rights and Duties says: "No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another."
Mandela Eulogies: Reinventing His Disturbing Legacy
by Stephen Lendman
Mainstream praise is unanimous. It ignores reality. It got short shrift. It reinvents Mandela's disturbing legacy. It turned a Thatcherite into a saint. A previous article discussed it.
Editorials, commentaries, and feature articles read like bad fiction. Tributes are overwhelming. They reflect coverup and denial.
The true measure of Mandela is hidden from sight. It's willfully ignored. Illusion replaced it.
Obama issued a disingenuous statement. He called Mandela "a man who took history in his hand, and bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice."
"We will not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela again."
Seymour Hersh, Sarin, and the Obama Deception on Syria WMD
Michael Collins
The people of the United States were subject to a deliberate deception by the Obama administration concerning the use of chemical weapons in Damascus, Syria on August 21 according to leading investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh. No stranger to big stories, Hersh has a successful track record of books and articles based on sources deep in the United States intelligence community.
The article, Whose Sarin, was published in the London Review of Books on Sunday. If we believe Hersh and his sources, the pattern of deliberate lies is so pervasive, there is no reason to believe much of what we hear from the Obama administration without independent verification.
The Core Case for Deception
Hersh begins by stating that we didn't get the whole story from the administration when the president and Secretary of State John Kerry blamed the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria for the chemical weapons attacks. The administration "omitted important intelligence" and "failed to acknowledge" that the Syrian rebels, the Al-Qaeda aligned Al Nusra group in particular, had chemical weapons capabilities.
Of all the points Hersh makes, the most devastating is in the opening of the article. He reports:
NSA Mass Monitoring Cell Phone Calls Globally
by Stephen Lendman
On December 5, the Washington Post broke the story. It headlined "NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show."
Doing so enables tracking individual movements. It maps their relationships. It does it in "previously unimaginable" ways.
NSA maintains a vast database. It's called FASCIA. It "stores information (on) locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices…"
New efforts analyze data collected. Doing so reflects mass global surveillance. NSA claims it doesn't target Americans willfully. It lied saying so.
"Incidental" whereabouts alone are tracked, it claims. WaPo said the term "connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result."
Mandela's Disturbing Legacy
by Stephen Lendman
On December 5, Mandela died peacefully at home in Johannesburg. Cause of death was respiratory failure. He was 95.
Supporters called him a dreamer of big dreams. His legacy fell woefully short. More on that below.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation, Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, and Mandela Rhodes Foundation issued the following statement: "It is with the deepest regret that we have learned of the passing of our founder, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela - Madiba." "The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa will shortly make further official announcements."
"We want to express our sadness at this time. No words can adequately describe this enormous loss to our nation and to the world."
America: Afraid of Shadows in the Dark While Ignoring the Elephants in the Room
via chycho
What baffles the mind about the United States of America is that many of its citizens have been conditioned to fear shadows in the dark while ignoring the elephants in the room.
I. Homelessness and Bankruptcies
For example, in the last few years anti-homelessness laws have been passed across the United States, some going as far as making it illegal to feed the homeless. As if that wasn’t enough, to deal with America’s homelessness problem (2), some government representatives have turned to violence:
“Remarkably, this vigilante isn’t just some random Hawaiian, but five-term State Rep. Tom Brower (D).
“Noting that he’s ‘disgusted’ with homeless people, Brower told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about his own personal brand of ‘justice’: ‘If I see shopping carts that I can’t identify, I will destroy them so they can’t be pushed on the streets.’ Brower has waged this campaign for two weeks, estimating that he’s smashed about 30 shopping carts in the process.
“‘I want to do something practical that will really clean up the streets,’ he explained to Hawaii News Now as he showed off his property destruction skills:”
Bibi and Bandar Badger Obama: Better Six Billion than Six Trillion!
Franklin Lamb
Damascus
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—along with certain Arab League countries, plus Turkey and Israel, have this past week reportedly committed themselves to raising nearly $6 billion to “beef up” the just-hatched Islamic Front (IF) in Syria. These “best friends of America” want the Obama administration to sign onto a scheme to oust the Syrian government by funding, arming, training, facilitating and generally choreographing the movement of fighters of this new front, a front formed out of an alliance of seven putatively “moderate” rebel factions.
Obama's Rogue Agenda
by Stephen Lendman
On Wednesday, Obama addressed income inequality. He called it "the defining challenge of our time." He did so disingenuously.
Throughout his tenure, he's transferred America's wealth to corporate interests and super-rich elites. He stole it from ordinary people doing so.
Even Wall Street Journal editors said "few presidents have done more to increase inequality than he has."
Median household income fell throughout his tenure. It's 4.2% lower than when he took office. It keeps heading south.
Rich investors profited hugely. Most never had it so good. "Mr. Obama is Chief Economist of Nottingham posing as Robin Hood," said Journal editors.
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