RSN Fundraising Banner
FB Share
Email This Page
add comment
Politics
FOCUS: Why Bernie Sanders Will Win Iowa Print
Saturday, 23 January 2016 11:50

Galindez writes: "When I first got to Iowa last February to cover the caucuses, I was more interested in the 'Run Warren Run' effort than in Bernie Sanders. I, like some others, still thought the Socialist label would be too hard to run on. But then Bernie made a swing through Iowa, and I saw that his message was resonating."

Bernie Sanders shakes hands with supporters during a rally at Hec Ed Pavilion that drew an estimated 15,000 people to the University of Washington. The rally filled the arena and left thousands outside. (photo: Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com)
Bernie Sanders shakes hands with supporters during a rally at Hec Ed Pavilion that drew an estimated 15,000 people to the University of Washington. The rally filled the arena and left thousands outside. (photo: Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com)


Why Bernie Sanders Will Win Iowa

By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News

23 January 16

 

hen I first got to Iowa last February to cover the caucuses, I was more interested in the “Run Warren Run” effort than in Bernie Sanders. I, like some others, still thought the Socialist label would be too hard to run on. But then Bernie made a swing through Iowa, and I saw that his message was resonating.

It was an event at a bookstore in Iowa City that initially caught my attention. There were people standing in places where they couldn’t even see Bernie. There were people in the coffee shop (not the same room), and every now and then you would hear them cheer even though you couldn’t see them. Those lucky enough to get a seat were more enthusiastic than any other crowd I had seen before that day. It was at 4 p.m. on a weekday, so many must have left work early or taken the day off to see Bernie. 

The next day, a community group in Des Moines had an awards dinner. Bernie was the keynote speaker, and he got several standing ovations. Then came a stop in Ames, Iowa, where the Democratic Party had their annual soup supper. They loved him, and I heard the treasurer tell people that they had raised more money than at any other event they had ever held.

I had a chance to sit down with Bernie at that event, and he told me what he needed to see from the people to decide to run:

Well, Bernie must have seen what he needed to see. His next visit to Iowa was as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Right away, you could see that he was a contender. The first event after his announcement in front of thousands of people in Burlington, Vermont, Bernie had a standing-room-only crowd of 750 people in Davenport, Iowa. I arrived early and his only two staffers in Iowa, Pete D’Alessandro and Evan Burger, were discussing the setup of the room while another event was going on. It was a ballroom that had dividing walls that could either be open or closed. I remember that Pete D’Alessandro thought only the middle section would be used. He went on an errand. When he came back and one of the walls was opened, he was worried they couldn’t fill the room. I remember him saying “Let’s go easy on the chairs, we can always add more if needed.” They not only needed more chairs, they had to open the third section of the room and fill it with chairs, and that still wasn’t enough. I had been covering events in Iowa for months and this was by far the largest event in Iowa organized by any candidate. There were dinners and and large multi-candidate events organized by groups that were bigger, but this was just Bernie and his almost non-existent staff that put it together.

A few days later Bernie was in Minneapolis. Close to 5,000 people came to hear him at the American Indian Center. Thousands had to listen from outside the venue. His campaign was less than a week old, and he was already holding huge events.

Another thing that happened very soon after Bernie announced was that MoveOn suspended their efforts to draft Elizabeth Warren. When Bernie opened his first office in Des Moines, it was like going to a “Run Warren Run” event. The staff and volunteers had traded in their Warren gear for Bernie gear. The same day Bernie opened that office he went to Marshalltown, Iowa, and at a UAW hall delivered what I still think was his strongest speech yet:

Bernie Sanders: "Don't Tell Me We Cant"

Bernie Sanders speaking at a UAW Hall in Marshalltown, Iowa. I have attended dozens of Bernie's events but to me this was the best close he has made.

Posted by Reader Supported News on Thursday, October 8, 2015

By this point, mid-June, I was convinced that Bernie would win Iowa. Hillary Clinton was holding small, well-choreographed events, while Bernie was holding overflow events. The Clinton campaign, in holding these ticketed events, was losing the opportunity to increase their volunteer base. Bernie was signing up thousands of volunteers around the country while Hillary was holding small events so she could connect with voters, according to her staff. The problem was that she was only talking to her base, and not expanding it.

Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton made the mistake of underestimating Barack Obama. After Super Tuesday they were broke. They had expected to wrap it up that night. The next day I was on a conference call with her staff, and Mark Penn told reporters that for the next month Obama had built-in advantages because he already had staff on the ground. They were conceding states like Wisconsin and Virginia, states where you would have thought she could compete. Barack Obama swept the primaries during the month of March and half of April.

Now we are hearing that again. The Clinton campaign is telling reporters that Bernie has more organization outside the early states than they have. The reason for that? Bernie has been traveling the country holding large events and recruiting volunteers. Bernie has grassroots groups around the county taking the lead and organizing while they wait for the campaign to arrive. Hillary is running a top-down campaign while Bernie is running a grass-roots campaign. 

While Hillary Clinton is still trying to define her campaign, everyone knows what Sanders stands for, and he is able to close his Iowa campaign with this ad:

That sums it all up. Bernie Sanders is inspiring people. When people see him they say, “that guy is right, and I believe he wants to stand up for me and make America better.” Hillary wants to continue the status quo. Over the next 10 days, the Clinton campaign will show their true colors and throw the kitchen sink at Bernie. It will be a mistake, because when Hillary slings mud at Bernie, she will be slinging it at the rest of us. Bernie’s campaign is a movement. An attack on Bernie is an attack on the revolution. We won’t sling mud back, but we will fire back on caucus night and pack the rooms at 7 p.m. and win.



Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
 
It's Time to Get Serious About Bernie Sanders Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>   
Saturday, 23 January 2016 09:37

Reich writes: "Let's face it: This is going to be remembered as the election where almost no one in either party's Establishment or the political news media saw anything coming. So why should the Bernie Sanders surge be any different?"

Bernie Sanders. (photo: Karen Bleier/Getty Images)
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Karen Bleier/Getty Images)


It's Time to Get Serious About Bernie Sanders

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

23 January 16

 

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. To kick off 2016: Bernie's New Hampshire surge, Palin's Trump endorsement, and the Oscars' diversity problem.

s Bernie Sanders increases his lead over Hillary Clinton to 27 points in one New Hampshire poll (and appears to be closing the gap nationally), some in the media have begun to wonder why they didn't see this pre-caucus surge coming. Is it time for the Democratic elite to more broadly reconsider Sanders's candidacy?

Let’s face it: This is going to be remembered as the election where almost no one in either party’s Establishment or the political news media saw anything coming. So why should the Bernie Sanders surge be any different? Writing at CNN Politics, Dylan Byers points out that the Times, whose supposedly data-driven "Upshot" column is still trying to explain why it declared Donald Trump near death last summer, buried Sanders’s announcement of his candidacy on page 21 — versus the page-one play given Clinton, Trump, and Ted Cruz.

I certainly have been no seer in the case of Sanders. I have never believed — and still don’t — that he can be elected president even though I prefer almost everything about his views and record to Clinton’s. To me he has three problems in a national election: He’s 74; he can be stigmatized as a nominal “socialist” (though that nomenclature may not carry much weight, negative or otherwise, to 21st-century American voters, beyond the claque who think every Democrat is a socialist); and he’s Jewish, a fact that few want to discuss as a possible hindrance to a national general-election candidacy.

I also thought Sanders couldn’t win the Democratic nomination because he has so little support from the party’s crucial African-American constituency. My theory was that while Clinton is a dreadful candidate running a campaign as tone-deaf as the one that imploded in 2008, she’d still triumph thanks to the loyalty of black voters, Sanders’s aforementioned handicaps, her command of the party hierarchy, and her fund-raising clout. I may be proven wrong about all of this. The enthusiasm of Sanders supporters has translated not just into big crowds but into enormous financial support for his campaign by individual donors; he has been pursuing black voters under the media radar; and the Clinton campaign is looking panicked and confounded by a youth-led insurgency in 2016 just as it was eight years ago. The recent effort of a Clinton backer, David Brock, to cast aspersions on Sanders’s (apparently sound) health backfired; so did Chelsea Clinton’s dishonest claim that Sanders wanted to dismantle government health care (he wants to expand upon Obamacare). Meanwhile, Sanders has gotten tougher on Clinton. In the last debate, he tied her speaking fees from Goldman Sachs around her neck like an anvil. He has demolished her grandiose claims about the value of her experience by going after her vote for the Iraq War. Barack Obama did that, too, and Clinton is nearly as flummoxed by this predictable line of attack now as she was then.

If Clinton continues to lose altitude through self-inflicted wounds, through Sanders’s ability to sell himself to a wider electorate, or through further revelations about her and Bill Clinton’s dubious buck-raking from Wall Street, corporate America, and foreign governments, the Democrats are left with only one plan B: Bernie Sanders. The party’s elites better start reconciling themselves to that, because if we’ve learned anything over the past year, anything is possible. Who would have imagined that an election that was destined to be Bush versus Clinton stands at least a small chance of yielding Sanders versus Trump, with possibly a third-party candidate (or so Bloomberg enthusiasts believe) to scramble the odds further?

Sarah Palin's appearance in Iowa, to endorse Donald Trump, was mocked widely on the coasts. How helpful can she be in Trump's campaign against Ted Cruz, even if her support may only add to his potential problems in the general election?

Palin’s pugilistic endorsement of Trump has been fodder from heaven for condescension and ridicule across the political and media spectrum — much in the same way, some may recall, that Trump’s early speeches were. Heaven knows her appearance was bizarre — not so much locked-and-loaded as, just possibly, plain old loaded. But for her audience, the base of the GOP, the “lamestream media’s” criteria of logic, fact-checking, sobriety, and propriety are beside the point. The base loves her, as it loves Trump, precisely because she breaks all the rules and says what she thinks. Granted, thought may not be the appropriate term to describe the whirlwind of non sequiturs, mixed metaphors, jingoistic sloganeering, puerile flag-waving, and self-infatuation that constituted her “speech.” It was an entertainer’s riff in much the way Trump’s performances are. If he is Don Rickles and old Vegas, she is Loretta Lynn and old Nashville. (The 83-year-old Lynn, by the way, has endorsed Trump.)

I have no idea if Palin will help Trump vanquish Ted Cruz. But if Cruz, who wraps himself in the legacy of his father, a hard-right and homophobic preacher, cannot win Iowa, he’s probably done. And Palin’s seal of approval may well help Trump best him there, by making tea-party types and hypocritical Evangelical Christian voters feel better about supporting a guy with “New York values,” a checkered marital history, a largely pro-choice paper trail on abortion, and little or no familiarity with either religious practice or Scripture. Somewhere God is laughing — or maybe Jerry Falwell is. Jerry Falwell Jr. invited Trump to speak at Liberty University on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Perhaps the most amusing aspect of Palin’s return to center stage is the loud chorus of Republican potentates expressing outrage about both her and her Trump endorsement. Most of her current critics were her cheerleaders the first time around, from William Kristol (who once took credit for discovering her in Alaska) to Meghan McCain (who campaigned relentlessly for the ticket her father shared with Palin) to the talking heads at Fox News, which promoted her from the get-go and put her on the payroll after she left public office. The Palin endorsement, like nearly every other aspect of Trump’s rise to the top of the GOP heap, gives the notion of chickens coming home to roost an apocalyptic dimension. 

In an essay he wrote for The Hollywood Reporter a little over a year ago, Chris Rock described entertainment as a "white industry" and talked about the role he's played as a "big brother" to black actors and comedians who couldn't otherwise get a break. Now he's hosting the industry's biggest awards show amid a walkout over another all-white slate of nominees. What would you like to see from him as the ceremony approaches?

The last thing Chris Rock needs to hear from me or anyone else is advice or instruction on what he should do at the Oscars. He is a brilliant interpreter of America and its culture, as I think he has made clear throughout his career, including in the freewheeling conversation I conducted with him for New York in the aftermath of Ferguson, late in 2014. The fact that he is the host of this year’s “all-white” Oscars is the best thing that could have happened to that telecast, which has been mired in declining ratings and irrelevance for some time now. Who would not watch his opening monologue? 

Movie, television, and theater critics — I was once among them — have to take awards seriously, or at least try to. Readers care about them; they’re fun; they prompt debates. But really: They are completely arbitrary or capricious for the most part, and most people in show business know (and privately acknowledge) as much — even if they play to win. As one much-Tony-awarded theater giant has joked to friends, “As long as they’re giving them out, I’ll take one.” So to painstakingly decode this year’s Oscars as some larger indicator about race in America is ridiculous, particularly in what everyone recognizes was a less-than-vintage year for American movies. Look at Chicago, or Baltimore, or Cleveland, or the state-enabled poisoning of the majority-black populace of Flint, Michigan, not at a Hollywood ceremony, to see what’s going on. It’s the Oscars, for heaven’s sake — where many voters eject a screener after ten minutes — not the Council of Trent.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, meanwhile, will have to either reform or die. An old white male electorate is as damaging to it in the entertainment marketplace as that same demographic is to the GOP in the political marketplace. If the Academy intransigently refuses to reflect the audience that votes with its eyeballs — the ever-more-diverse America whose Nielsen ratings and box-office dollars the industry craves — it will soon go the way of the nickelodeon.

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
 
Cleveland's Vile, Embarrassing Scheme to Avoid Paying Victims of Police Abuse Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31267"><span class="small">Radley Balko, The Washington Post</span></a>   
Saturday, 23 January 2016 09:34

Balko writes: "Kyle Swenson draws attention to the case of Kenny Smith, whose family won a rare jury award of $5.5 million. Smith was killed by an off-duty Cleveland police officer outside of a bar. But thanks to some crafty moves from the city's law department, Smith's moment of justice might never come."

Two police officers at their vehicle. (photo: Guardian Liberty Voice)
Two police officers at their vehicle. (photo: Guardian Liberty Voice)


Cleveland's Vile, Embarrassing Scheme to Avoid Paying Victims of Police Abuse

By Radley Balko, The Washington Post

23 January 16

 

ere at The Watch, we’ve frequently noted how difficult it can be for victims of police brutality and misconduct to recover any sort of compensation. Given the opaqueness with which police agencies are allowed to operate, the various “police officer bill of rights” laws, the qualified immunity afforded to police and the sovereign immunity enjoyed by states, cities and counties, it’s rare that police abuse lawsuits ever get in front of a jury. When a case does get that far, juries tend to be reluctant to rule against law enforcement officers. Only the more egregious cases tend to result in compensation, and even then, it’s usually due to political pressure on the city or county to offer a settlement before trial.

All of which makes what’s going on in Cleveland all the more reprehensible. Writing in the Cleveland Scene, Kyle Swenson draws attention to the case of Kenny Smith, whose family won a rare jury award of $5.5 million. Smith was killed by an off-duty police officer outside of a bar.

But thanks to some crafty moves from the city’s law department, Smith’s moment of justice might never come.

Across the country, piggy bank-busting civil judgments have become the best way to keep police and municipalities honest in cases of officer misconduct. From 2004 to 2014, for instance, Cleveland shelled out $10.5 million in settlement money to victims of badly behaving cops. Under state law and the terms of the union contract, chronically cash-strapped Cleveland indemnifies officers in the cases where they’ve been personally found liable, meaning ultimately, taxpayers foot the bill for an officer’s misconduct.

But now, in the two largest civil judgments currently sitting on the books — one being Kenny Smith’s death; the other a sloppy and malicious murder investigation that railroaded an innocent man — the city has pulled a move that one veteran civil rights lawyer calls “wrong, immoral, disingenuous and unethical.”

In both cases, the Cleveland law department used city funds to pay for cops saddled with judgments to move into personal bankruptcy. It’s a calculated effort, according to the attorneys fighting the move, for the city to skip out on their responsibilities to pay the judgments.

… Just as mayor Frank Jackson, clutching the Department of Justice’s 2014 consent decree, promised citywide soul-searching on police reform, Cleveland’s law department is messing with civil matters that have already been decided by a jury.

And the implications aren’t only local.

“This provides a road map for any municipality that wants to evade their obligations,” says Ruth Brown, a Chicago attorney currently locked in legal judo with Cleveland over the issue. “We fully expect that if Cleveland is allowed to get away with this, they will try this again.”

Normally in such cases, the city indemnifies police officers — since the officers are employees of the city, the city covers the award. In rare cases, a city will ask a court to release them from indemnification, but that’s generally limited to misconduct so egregious that the officers are found to have been acting outside the scope of their official duties. (An example might be a cop who, say, blackmails a suspect, or rapes someone while on duty.) Swenson cites a 2014 study that found cops were indemnified in 99.98 percent of cases the researcher surveyed.

Cleveland appears to refusing to indemnify these officers, then paying for their legal and filing fees so that they can declare bankruptcy. The city apparently hopes that this will take the awards off the books. It’s a crafty bit of legal maneuvering. It’s also a betrayal of both the public trust and a second betrayal of the victims in these cases. A man’s life was wrongly taken from him. Another man lost a decade of his life due to a wrongful conviction caused by the illegal actions of a Cleveland police officer. And all of this comes after a jaw-dropping report from the Justice Department finding pervasive and systematic abuse, widespread civil rights violations, routine use of force that violates the Constitution and virtually no accountability. The Justice Department report found the city’s police department to be lacking in almost every area it investigated. And that report, published a little over a year ago, follows a similar report from a decade ago. And of course, this is all happening as the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice has made the city a focal point of the national debate over police reform.

In theory, civil rights lawsuits serve two purposes: They make victims whole, and they deter similar violations from occurring in the future. The hope is that substantial awards in these cases will spur political pressure on public officials to change the policies that allowed the rights violations to happen. The deterrent doesn’t seem to be particularly effective, except in a few cases in which large settlements have prompted a city’s municipal insurer to demand changes under the threat of terminating coverage. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I suspect it’s mostly because elected officials calculate that the pushback from police unions and police agencies against any proposed reforms is a far worse political headache than earmarking a few million dollars in each annual budget to pay off the victims of police abuse.

That’s what happens in most places, and it’s disturbing. But what Cleveland is doing is far more sinister. There’s also an argument to be made that indemnification insulates individual actors from any real accountability. There’s certainly a lot of evidence for that argument. Over the past few years, we’ve seen lots of reports about cities that pay out millions of dollars each year to compensate victims of police abuse, while almost never holding cops accountable for misconduct, even in cases of egregious abuse or repeat offenders. One idea I’ve seen suggested is to end both indemnification and qualified immunity but make police officers purchase personal liability insurance. In theory, this would eliminate a lot of the political barriers to police reform and impose real consequences for misconduct. In practice, it isn’t difficult to envision the problems that might accompany a system that would essentially hand policing policy over to the insurance industry.

For now, we have the system we have. It’s certainly flawed, but what’s happening in Cleveland isn’t just unfair; if it’s allowed to happen, it means that the system no longer even aspires to fairness or justice. The city is not only shirking responsibility for the policies and lack of oversight that allowed these abuses to happen, but it’s also actively seeking to deny the victims the compensation that the justice system has determined they deserve. It’s just outrageous.

At least with the current system, a victim with a case strong enough to merit a settlement or judgment is made whole. The city pays. That provides at least a little bit of an incentive to fix the problem. Eventually, a city will either have to deal with rogue cops and implement better policies or continue to pay out millions. Cops who are found guilty of abuse or misconduct are less effective witnesses. The incentives aren’t strong enough, but they at least exist.

As Swenson points out, the same lawyers representing the city of Cleveland are representing the individual officers in their bankruptcy cases. The decision of whether to indemnify an officer can spur — and has spurred — litigation between officers and the governments that employ them. It seems like some awfully shady ethics for the same attorneys to be representing the city and the officers after the decision not to indemnify. It certainly gives the appearance of some sort of arrangement. And it isn’t difficult to see how other city officials adopting this policy could, say, promise to not press criminal charges, to let an officer keep his or her job, or to not stand in the way of an officer working elsewhere in exchange for an agreement to declare bankruptcy and release the city from indemnification. The result: Even the relatively weak incentive for change that these payouts provide is removed. The individual cops responsible even for misconduct severe enough to merit a judgment escape serious punishment. And the victims are never made whole. It’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

I’m not a lawyer, but this also feels like bankruptcy fraud. Or if it isn’t, it ought to be. At best, it’s a second violation of people whose lives have already been ruined by government abuse and an utter abandonment of the idea that public officials serve the public.

If I lived, voted and paid taxes in Cleveland, I don’t know if I’d be more angry or embarrassed.

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
 
How the West Creates Terrorism Print
Saturday, 23 January 2016 09:33

Vltchek writes: "The West linked terrorism with Islam, which is one of the greatest cultures on earth, with 1.6 billion followers. Islam is big and mighty enough, to scare the shit out of the middle class housewives in some Western suburb! And on top of that, it had to be contained anyway, as it was essentially too socialist and too peaceful."

Al-Shabaab fighters. (photo: Mohamed Sheikh Nor/AP)
Al-Shabaab fighters. (photo: Mohamed Sheikh Nor/AP)


How the West Creates Terrorism

By Andre Vltchek, CounterPunch

23 January 16

 

errorism has many forms and many faces, but the most terrible of them is cold cruelty.

We are asked to believe that terrorists consist of dirty lunatics, running around with bombs, machine guns and explosive belts. That’s how we are told to imagine them.

Many of them are bearded; almost all are “foreign looking”, non-white, non-Western. In summary they are wife beaters, child rapists and Greek and Roman statue destroyers.

Actually, during the Cold War, there were some white looking “terrorists” – the left-wingers belonging to several revolutionary cells, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. But only now we are learning that the terrorist acts attributed to them were actually committed by the Empire, by several European right-wing governments and intelligence services. You remember, the NATO countries were blowing up those trains inside the tunnels, or bombing entire train stations…

It “had to be done”, in order to discredit the Left, just to make sure that people would not become so irresponsible as to vote for the Communists or true Socialists.

There were also several Latin American ‘terror’ groups – the revolutionary movements fighting for freedom and against oppression, mainly against Western colonialism. They had to be contained, liquidated, and if they held power, overthrown.

But terrorists became really popular in the West only after the Soviet Union and the Communist Block were destroyed through thousands of economic, military and propaganda means, and the West suddenly felt too exposed, so alone without anyone to fight. Somehow it felt that it needed to justify its monstrous oppressive acts in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

It needed a new “mighty”, really mighty, enemy to rationalize its astronomical military and intelligence budgets. It was not good enough to face a few hundred ‘freaks’ somewhere inside the Colombian jungle or in Northern Ireland or Corsica. There had to be something really huge, something matching that ‘evil’ Soviet “threat”.

Oh how missed that threat was, suddenly! Just a threat of course; not the danger of egalitarian and internationalist ideals…

And so the West linked terrorism with Islam, which is one of the greatest cultures on earth, with 1.6 billion followers. Islam is big and mighty enough, to scare the shit out of the middle class housewives in some Western suburb! And on top of that, it had to be contained anyway, as it was essentially too socialist and too peaceful.

At that time in history, all great secular and socialist leaders of Muslim countries, (like in Iran, Indonesia and Egypt), were overthrown by the West, their legacy spat on, or they were simply banned.

But that was not enough for the West!

In order to make Islam a worthy enemy, the Empire had to first radicalize and pervert countless Muslim movements and organizations, then create the new ones, consequently training, arming and financing them, so they could really look frightening enough.

There is of course one more important reason why “terrorism”, particularly Muslim “terrorism”, is so essential for the survival of Western doctrines, exceptionalism and global dictatorship: it justifies the West’s notion of absolute cultural and moral superiority.

This is how it works:

For centuries, the West has been behaving like a mad bloodthirsty monster. Despite the self-glorifying propaganda being spread by Western media outlets all over the world, it was becoming common knowledge that the Empire was raping, murdering and plundering in virtually all corners of the Globe. A few more decades and the world would see the West exclusively as a sinister and toxic disease. Such a scenario had to be prevented by all means!

And so the ideologues and propagandists of the Empire came up with a new and brilliant formula: Let’s create something that looks and behaves even worse than we do, and then we could trumpet that we are still actually the most reasonable and tolerant culture on earth!

And let’s make a real pirouette: let’s fight our own creation – let’s fight it in the name of freedom and democracy!”

This is how the new generation; the new breed of “terrorist” was born. And it lives! It is alive and well! It is multiplying like Capek’s Salamanders.

Western terrorism is not really discussed, although its most extreme and violent forms are battering the world relentlessly and have for a long time, with hundreds of millions of victims piling up everywhere.

Even the legionnaires and gladiators of the Empire, like the Mujaheddin, Al-Qaida, or ISIS, can never come close to the savagery that has been demonstrated time and again by their British, French, Belgian, German or US masters. Of course they are trying very hard to match their gurus and bread-givers, but they are just not capable of their violence and brutality.

It takes “Western culture” to butcher some 10 million people in just one single geographic area, in almost one go!

So what is real terrorism, and how could ISIS and others follow its lead? They say that ISIS is decapitating their victims. Bad enough. But who is their teacher?

For centuries, the empires of Europe were murdering, torturing, raping and mutilating people on all continents of the world. Those who were not doing so directly, were “investing” into colonialist expeditions, or sending its people to join genocidal battalions.

King Leopold II and his cohorts managed to exterminate around 10 million people of Western and Central Africa, in what is now known as the Congo. He was hunting people down like animals, forcing them to work on his rubber plantations. If he thought that they were not filling up his coffers fast enough, he did not hesitate to chop off their hands, or burn entire village populations inside their huts, alive.

10 million victims vanished. 10 million! And it did not take place in some distant past, in the “dark ages”, but in the 20th century, under the rule of so-called constitutional monarchy, and self-proclaimed democracy. How does it compare with the terrorism that is ruling over the territories occupied by ISIS? Let’s compare numbers and brutality level!

And the Democratic Republic of Congo has, since 1995, lost again close to 10 million people in a horrid orgy of terror, unleashed by the West’s proxies, Rwanda and Uganda (see the trailer to my film “Rwanda Gambit”).

Germans performed holocausts in South-Western Africa, in what is now Namibia. The Herero tribe was exterminated, or at least close to 90% of it was. People were first kicked out from their land and from their homes, and driven into the desert. If they survived, the German pre-Nazi expeditions followed, using bullets and other forms of mass killing. Medical experiments on humans were performed, to prove the superiority of the Germanic nation and the white race.

These were just innocent civilians; people whose only crime was that they were not white, and were sitting on land occupied and violated by the Europeans.

The Taliban never came close to this, or even ISIS!

To this day, the Namibian government is demanding the return of countless heads severed from its people: heads that were cut off and then sent to the University of Freiburg and several hospitals in Berlin, for medical experiments.

Just imagine, ISIS chopping thousands of European heads, in order to perform medical experiments aiming to demonstrate the superiority of the Arab race. It would be absolutely unthinkable!

Local people were terrorized in virtually all colonies grabbed by Europe, something that I have described in detail in my latest 840-page book “Exposing Lies of the Empire”.

What about the Brits and their famines, which they were using as population control and intimidation tactics in India! In Bengal at least 5 million died in 1943 alone, 5.5 million in 1876-78, 5 million in 1896-97, to name just a few terrorist acts committed by the British Empire against a defenseless population forced to live under its horrid and oppressive terrorist regime!

What I have mentioned above are just 3 short chapters from the long history of Western terrorism. An entire encyclopedia could be compiled on the topic.

But all this sits far from Western consciousness. European and North American masses prefer not to know anything about the past and the present. As far as they are concerned, they rule the world because they are free, bright and hard working. Not because for centuries their countries have plundered and murdered, and above all terrorized the world forcing it into submission.

The elites know everything, of course. And the more they know, the more they put that knowledge to work.

Terrorist trade and experience are passed on from Western masters to their new Muslim recruits.

The Mujahideen, Al-Qaida, ISIS – on closer examination, their tactics of intimidation and terrorization are not original at all. They are built on imperialist and colonialist practices of the West.

News about this, or even about the terror that has been inflicted on the Planet by the West, is meticulously censored. You would never see them on the programs broadcast by the BBC, or read about them in mainstream newspapers and magazines.

On the other hand, the violence and ruthlessness of the client terrorist organizations are constantly highlighted. They are covered in their tiniest detail, repeated, and “analyzed”.

Everybody is furious, horrified! The UN is “deeply concerned”, Western governments are “outraged”, and the Western public “has had enough – it does not want immigrants from those terrible countries that are breeding terrorism and violence”.

The West “simply has to get involved”. And here comes the War on Terror.

It is a war against the West’s own Frankenstein. It is a war that is never meant to be won. Because if it is won, god forbid, there would have to be peace, and peace means cutting defense budgets and also dealing with the real problems of our Planet.

Peace would mean the West looking at its own past. It would mean thinking about justice and rearranging the entire power structures of the Planet. And that can never be allowed.

And so the West is “playing” war games; it is “fighting” its own recruits (or pretending to fight them), while innocent people are dying.

No part of the world, except the West, would be able to invent and unleash something so vile and barbaric as ISIS or Al-Nusra!

Look closer at the strategy of these group-implants: it has no roots in Muslim culture whatsoever. But it is fully inspired by the Western philosophy of colonialist terrorism: “If you don’t fully embrace our dogmas and religion, then we will cut off your head, slash your throat, rape your entire family or burn your village or city to the ground. We will destroy your grand cultural heritage as we did in South America 500 years ago, and in so many other places.”

And so on and so on! It would really require great discipline not to see the connections!

In 2006 I was visiting my friend, a former President of Indonesia, and a great progressive Muslim leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, (known in Indonesia as “Gus Dur”). Our meeting was held at the headquarters of his massive Muslim body Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). At that time the NU was the biggest Muslim organization in the world.

We were discussing capitalism and how it was destroying and corrupting Indonesia. Gus Dur was a “closet socialist”, and that was one of the main reasons why the servile pro-Western Indonesian “elites” and the military deposed him out of the Presidency in 2001.

When we touched on the topic of “terrorism”, he suddenly declared in his typically soft, hardly audible voice: “I know who blew up the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. It was done by our own intelligence services, in order to justify the increase in their budget, as well as aid that they have been receiving from abroad.”

Of course, the Indonesian army, intelligence services and police consist of a special breed of humans. For several decades, since 1965, they have been brutally terrorizing their own population, when the pro-Western coup toppled the progressive President Sukarno and brought to power a fascist military clique, backed by the predominantly Christian business gang. This terror took between 2-3 million lives in Indonesia itself, as well as in East Timor and (until now) in occupied and thoroughly plundered Papua.

3 genocides in only 5 decades!

The Indonesian coup was one of the greatest terrorist acts in the history of mankind. The rivers were clogged with corpses and changed their color to red.

Why? So that capitalism would survive and Western mining companies could have their booty, at the expense of a completely ruined Indonesian nation. So the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) would not be able to win elections, democratically.

But in the West, those 1965 intensive massacres planned by the Empire were never described as “terrorism”. Blowing up a hotel or a pub always is however, especially if they are frequented by Western clientele.

Now Indonesia has its own groups of “terrorists”. They returned from Afghanistan where they fought on behalf of the West against the Soviet Union. They are returning from the Middle East now. The recent attacks in Jakarta could be just a foreplay, a well-planned beginning of something much bigger, maybe an opening of the new “front” of toy soldiers of the Empire in Southeast Asia.

For the West and its planners – the more chaos the better.

Had Abdurrahman Wahid been allowed to stay as the President of Indonesia, there would, most likely, have been no terrorism. His country would have undergone socialist reforms, instituted social justice, rehabilitated Communists and embraced secularism.

In socially balanced societies, terrorism does not thrive.

That would be unacceptable to the Empire. That would mean – back to Sukarno’s day! The most populous Muslim nation on earth cannot be allowed to go its own way, to aim for socialism, and to annihilate terrorist cells.

It has to be at the edge. It has to be ready to be used as a pawn. It has to be scared and scary! And so it is.

The games the West is playing are complex and elaborate. They are murky and nihilist. They are so destructive and brutal that even the sharpest analysts are often questioning their own eyes and judgments: “Could all this be really happening?”

The brief answer is: “Yes it can. Yes it is, for many long decades and centuries.”

Historically, terrorism is a native Western weapon. It was utilized freely by people like Lloyd George, a British PM, who refused to sign the agreement banning aerial bombardment of civilians, using unshakeable British logic: “We reserve the right to bomb those niggers.” Or Winston Churchill who was in favor of gassing the ‘lower grade’ of races, like Kurds and Arabs.

That is why, when some outsider, a country like Russia, gets involved, launching its genuine war against terrorist groups, the entire West is consumed by panic. Russia is spoiling their entire game! It is ruining a beautifully crafted neo-colonialist equilibrium.

Just look how lovely everything is: after killing hundreds of millions all over the Globe, the West is now standing as the self-proclaimed champion of human rights and freedom. It is still terrorizing the world, plundering it, fully controlling it – but it is being accepted as the supreme leader, a benevolent advisor, and the only trustworthy part of the world.

And almost nobody is laughing.

Because everyone is scared!

Its brutal legions in the Middle East and Africa are destabilizing entire countries, their origins are easily traceable, but almost no one is daring to do such tracing. Some of those who have tried – died.

The more frightening these invented, manufactured and implanted terrorist monsters, the more beautiful the West looks. It is all gimmicks. It has roots in advertisement, and in hundreds of years of propaganda apparatus.

The West then pretends to fight those deep forces of darkness. It uses powerful, “righteous” language, which has clear bases in Christian fundamentalist dogma.

An entire mythology is unleashed; it feels like Wagner’s “Ring”.

he terrorists represent evil, not the enormous expenditure from the coffers of the US State Department, the European Union and NATO. They are more evil than the Devil himself!

And the West, riding on the white horse, slightly pissed on wine but always in good humor, is portrayed as both a victim and the main adversary of those satanic terrorist groups.

It is one incredible show. It is one terrible farce. Look underneath the horseman’s mask: look at those exposed teeth; that deadly grin! Look at his red eyes, full of greed, lust and cruelty.

And let us never forget: colonialism and imperialism are two most deadly forms of terrorism. And these are still the two main weapons of that horseman who is choking the world!

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
 
5 Reasons Ted Cruz Is Even More Dangerous Than Donald Trump Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>   
Friday, 22 January 2016 15:28

Reich writes: "Cruz is a true believer. Trump has no firm principles except making money, getting attention, and gaining power. But Cruz really does detest the federal government, and has spent much of his life embracing radical right economic and political views."

Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)


5 Reasons Ted Cruz Is Even More Dangerous Than Donald Trump

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page

22 January 16

 

ive reasons Ted Cruz is even more dangerous than Donald Trump.

  1. He’s more fanatical. Trump is a bully and bigot but doesn’t hew to any sharp ideological line. Cruz is a fierce ideologue: He denies the existence of man-made climate change, rejects same-sex marriage, wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, believes the 2nd amendment guarantees everyone a right to guns, doesn’t believe in a constitutional divide between church and state, favors the death penalty, opposes international agreements, embraces a confrontational foreign policy, rejects immigration reform, demands the repeal of “every blessed word of Obamacare,” and takes a strict “originalist” view of the meaning of the Constitution.

  2. Cruz is a true believer. Trump has no firm principles except making money, getting attention, and gaining power. But Cruz really does detest the federal government, and has spent much of his life embracing radical right economic and political views. When Cruz said “we are facing what I consider to be the epic battle of our generation,” he wasn’t referring to jihadist terrorism but to Obamacare.

  3. He’s Smarter. Trump is no slouch but he hasn’t given any indication of a sharp mind. Cruz is razer-sharp: It’s not just his degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law, along with an impressive record at Harvard, or even his winning arguments before the Supreme Court. For his entire adult life he's been a fierce debater with a intensely-logical debater’s mind.

  4. He’s more disciplined and strategic. Trump is all over the place, often winging it, saying whatever pops into his mind. Cruz hews to a clear script and a carefully crafted strategy. He plays the long game (as he’s shown in Iowa). Cruz’s legal career entailed a sustained use of the courts to achieve conservative ends, and he plots his moves carefully.

  5. Cruz is a loner who’s willing to destroy institutions. Trump has spent his career using the federal government and making friends with big shots. Not Cruz. Most of his Republican colleagues in the Senate detest him. And Cruz is eager to destroy: He has repeatedly crossed to the other side of the Capitol and led House Republicans toward fiscal cliffs. In the Fall of 2013, Cruz’s strident opposition to Obamacare – including a 21-hour talking marathon -- led in a significant way to the shutdown of the federal government.

Both men would be disasters for America, but Cruz would be the larger disaster.

What do you think?

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
 
<< Start < Prev 2171 2172 2173 2174 2175 2176 2177 2178 2179 2180 Next > End >>

Page 2174 of 3432

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

RSNRSN