We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, July 8, 2012

US war crimes from Vietnam to Obama

Click here to access article by John Pilger from Green Left (Australia). 

The presiding formal head of the Empire follows in what is becoming a tradition in the US--war crimes against humanity. Obama, of course, it just a flunky, a hired slick super-salesman working a gullible public to sell them the worst vehicles in history. The real criminals are the ones who hired him and control his actions. They are the political operatives of the One Percent who currently direct an Empire based on the most exploitative, the most hazardous of systems to organize human life ever before in human history. That system is capitalism.
On May 28, US President Barack Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free-fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society.

It was, said Mr Hopey Changey, "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history".

The next day, the New York Times published a long article documenting how Obama personally selects the victims of his drone attacks across the world. He does this on "terror Tuesdays" when he browses through mug shots on a "kill list", some of them teenagers, including "a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years". Many are unknown or simply of military age.