*THE SORRY STATE OF THE UNION
* ** *In a dumbed-down State of the Union address <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/feb/12/state-of-the-union-reading-level> last night, President Obama asked Congress for an increase in the minimum wage. Obama took a cue from President Clinton, who also began his White House years in control of both houses of Congress, but waited until Republicans took control of Congress to ask for a minimum wage increase (the scam is to convince supporters that it's all the Republicans' fault, while ignoring the issue when Dems are in control). * */Common Dreams/ does the SOTU story <http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/12-11> with comments at the end that would never be allowed by the major media, including [raydelcamino] "Not only did he promise to push the trans pacific partnership into law this year, Obama also promised a trans Atlantic partnership. Perhaps this will alert Europeans to mobilize against this empowerment of global corporations to sue sovereign governments for enforcing their own laws, unlike Americans who are ignoring what will be the end of anything resembling the rule of law in the US." * *And [galen066] "Obama takes center stage, mouths a script of meaningless platitudes, the Congress and Senate applaud like the Corporate-paid trained seals they are, and Corporate-owned media pundits on /Fox/ and /MSNBC/ spend the next week waxing rhapsodic and dissecting the meaning of nothing. Meanwhile Obama goes full speed ahead on KXL, stirring up a possible shooting war between China and Japan, ponders whether or not to bomb Iran at Israel's behest, and greenlights even more repression at home."* ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *MIDDLE EASTERN MEDIA HYPOCRISY * ** *"Bahraini police have fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse protesters trying to march to Pearl Roundabout, the now-crushed symbol of the pro-democracy uprising that began nearly two years ago," begins a piece at /al Jazeera/ <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/02/2013213619545829.html>, which points out more than 80 protesters have been killed in the unrest. * *But we see nothing in our government or mass media alarming the American people that "They are killing their own people," resulting in the introduction of al Qaeda terrorists, as was done in Libya and is being done in Syria. Never mind, you can kill your own people if you're a client of the Empire, and be supplied the weapons with which to accomplish the deed. * *But should a member of the press attempt to even consider posing a Middle East question beyond the propaganda allowed in the Land of the Free, /The National Press Club/ cracks down <http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/nationalpressclubresignation02122013/>. * ** ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *WALL STREET MAINTAINS CONTROL OF THE TREASURY * ** *Republican Senators appear to be enjoying a chance to show the hypocrisy of President Obama <http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/1007-other/282679-lews-tenure-at-citigroup-scrutinized> in decrying Wall Street excesses, then appointing a Treasury Secretary (Jack Lew) from /Citigroup/ (which got billions in bailout money). They also point out that Lew had personal offshore investments in the Cayman Islands. Republicans don't really object, after all Jack Lew does exactly what a Republican appointee would do, they just want to embarrass Obama before they agree to the appointment.* ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Totalitarianism begins creeping, eventually culminating in a gallop. Hitler did not begin by taking on a large minority like the Jews, there were millions of them. Pastor Niemoller told us the Nazis began by rounding up the communists, a much smaller minority, then moved to the socialists, then to organized labor leaders, all leftist groups targeted by the US government over the last century. These are the groups most in the way of corporate capitalism, or fascism as it was called in the 1930's (although, in fairness, Mussolini didn't like the word fascism, preferring to call it corporate capitalism). ** **If you target a very large number of people all at once for control, too many will be onto what is happening and opposition will quickly swell and stop you. If you say you are only after those bad Muslims, including American ones, you can get a number of people to support your kill list//-- due process be damned, as the door to totalitarianism opens a crack. It is the tried and true way to do it, and even has Dick Cheney behind the drone kill list, telling us we don't need no stinkin' oversight of the program <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/12/dick-cheney-obama-drone_n_2668511.html> --Jack Balkwill** **America's Expanding Kill List** <http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/12/americas-expanding-kill-list/> **by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS** **** ******Prosecutors always expand laws far beyond their intent. Attorneys in civil cases do the same. For example, the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was passed in order to make it easier for the government to convict members of the Mafia. However, the law, despite its intent, was quickly expanded by prosecutors and attorneys and used in cases against pro-life activists, Catholic bishops, corporations accused of hiring illegal immigrants, and in divorce cases. "Junk bond king" Michael Milken, a person with no ties to organized crime, was threatened with indictment under the RICO Act. Prosecutors have found that the asset freeze provision in the Act is a convenient way to prevent a defendant from being able to pay attorneys and, therefore, makes it easier for prosecutors to coerce innocent defendants into a guilty plea. We are now witnessing the expansion of Obama's Kill List. The list began under the Bush regime as a rationale for murdering suspect citizens of countries with which the US was not at war. The Obama regime expanded the scope of the list to include the execution, without due process of law, of US citizens accused, without evidence presented in court, of association with terrorism. The list quickly expanded to include the American teen-age son of a cleric accused of preaching jihad against the West. The son's "association" with terrorism apparently was his blood relationship to his father. As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote, the power of government to imprison and to murder its citizens without due process of law is the certain mark of dictatorship. Dictatorship is government unconstrained by law. On February 10 the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama dictatorship now intends to expand the Kill List to include those accused of acting against foreign governments. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an "Algerian militant" accused of planning the January attack on an Algerian natural gas facility, has been chosen as the threat that is being used to expand Obama's Kill List to include participants in the internal disputes and civil wars of every country. If the Obama regime is on the side of the government, as in Algeria, it will kill the rebels opposing the government. If the Obama regime is on the side of the rebels, as in Libya, it will kill the government's leaders. Whether Washington sends a drone to murder Putin and the president of China remains to be seen. But don't be surprised if Washington has targeted the president of Iran. The elasticity of the Kill List and its easy expansion makes it certain that Washington will be involved in extra-judicial executions of those "associated with terrorism" over much of the world. Americans themselves should be alarmed, because the term "association with terrorism" is very elastic. Federal prosecutors have interpreted the term to include charitable contributions to Palestinians. The next time former US Representative Cynthia McKinney gets on an aid ship to Palestine, will Washington give the green light to Israel to kill her as a terrorist agent for her association with aid to Gaza, ruled by the "terrorist organization," Hamas? Already a year or two ago, the director of Homeland Security said that the federal police agency's focus had shifted from terrorists to "domestic extremists," another elastic and undefined term. A domestic extremist will be all who disagree with Washington. They also, are headed for the Kill List. Where is the government going with this? The most likely outcome is that everyone disliked or distrusted by those who have the power to add to the Kill List will find themselves on the list. The government can expand the Kill List beyond the original intent as easily as the RICO Act was expanded beyond its original intent. As the Founding Fathers knew and the American people have forgot, no one is safe in a dictatorship. Clearly, the American public lacks sufficient comprehension to remain a free people. All indications are that the large majority of Americans fear alleged terrorists in distant lands more than they fear their government's acquisition of dictatorial powers over them--powers that allow government to place itself above the law and to be unaccountable to law. This is despite the fact that 99.999% of all Americans will never, ever, experience any terrorism except that of their own government. According to a recent poll of registered American voters, 75% approve of Washington's assassination of foreign citizens abroad based on suspicion that they might be terrorists, despite the fact that the vast majority of the Gitmo detainees, declared by the US government to be the most dangerous men on earth, turned out to be totally innocent. Only 13% of registered voters disapprove of the extra-judicial murders carried out by Washington against foreign citizens, whether based on wrong intelligence, hearsay, or actual deeds. Registered voters have a different view of the extra-judicial murder of US citizens. In what the rest of the world will see as further evidence of American double-standards, 48% believe it is illegal for Washington to murder US citizens without due process of law. However, 24% agree with the Obama regime that it is permissible for the government to murder its own citizens on accusation alone without trial and conviction of a capital crime. As The Onion put it, "24% of citizens were unequivocally in favor of being obliterated at any point, for any reason, in a massive airstrike." Are we to be reassured or alarmed that 24% of registered voters believe that the terrorist threat is so great that suspicion alone without evidence, trial, and conviction is sufficient for Washington to terminate US citizens? Should not we be disturbed that a quarter of registered voters, despite overwhelming evidence that Washington's wars are based on conscious lies--"weapons of mass destruction," "Al-Qaeda connections"--are still prepared to believe the government's claim that the person it just murdered was a terrorist? Why are so many Americans willing to believe a proven liar? If we add up all the costs of the "war on terror," it is obvious that the costs are many magnitudes greater than the terror threat that the war is alleged to contain. If terrorists were really a threat to Americans, shopping centers and electric substations would be blowing up constantly. Airport security would be a sham, because terrorists would set off the bombs in the crowded lines waiting to clear security. Traffic would be continually tied up from roofing nails dispensed on all main roads in cities across the country for each rush hour. Water supplies would be poisoned. Police stations would be bombed and police officers routinely terminated on the streets. Instead, nothing has happened despite Washington's killing and displacement of huge numbers of Muslims in seven or eight countries over the past 11 years. The cost of the "war on terror" is not merely the multi-trillion dollar financial bill documented by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. The cost of Washington's wars is the main reason for the large national debt, the threat of which politicians are using to destroy the social safety net. This is a huge cost for a pointless war that pleases Israel and enriches the armament companies but does nothing for Americans. The financial cost is huge, but how important is this cost compared to another cost--the domestic police state supported by a significant percentage of the population and a majority in Congress and the media? Is the war on terror worth the evisceration of the US Constitution? A war that costs us the Constitution means our total defeat. The cost in human life has been enormous. Millions of Muslims have been killed, wounded, orphaned, and displaced, and entire countries have been destroyed as socio-political entities. Washington locked Iraq in sectarian murder. Libya has no government, just warring factions, and now Syria is in the process of being disintegrated. The prospects for people's lives in these countries have been ruined for years to come. The cost in American lives has also been high. More than 400,000 American lives have been adversely affected by 11 years of pointless war. The deaths of 6,656 US troops, the 50,000 wounded, the 1,700 life-changing limb amputations, and the suicides are just the tip of the iceberg. Since the Bush-Obama wars began, 129,731 US troops have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. And now we learn from a new Congressional Research Service report that more than a quarter million of US troops have experienced Traumatic Brain Injury. Based on current diagnostic capability, three-fourths of the cases are classified as mild. These lost, ruined and impaired lives affect also the lives of many others--spouses, children, parents, siblings, and those disheartened by their government's pointless wars who have to care for the damaged. There are many Americans who have been collaterally damaged by Washington's pointless wars. Will Americans wake up in time? I wish I could answer, "yes," but I regret that Americans are an insouciant people. They are unaware. Americans are more concerned with sports events, sales, and which celebrities are sleeping together than they are with their liberty. Washington can create a police state, because there are insufficient citizens with the intelligence, education, and awareness to stop Washington. Congress has accepted the police state and has given up too much of its power to the executive branch and is too beholden to the special interests that benefit from the police state to do anything about it. The federal judiciary has proven to be almost as impotent. Federal judges did not ask federal prosecutors why, in violation of the whistleblower protection laws, they were prosecuting National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake for blowing the whistle on the NSA's illegal spying on US citizens instead of the officials who broke the law and committed felonies. Judges did not ask why CIA agent John Kiriakou was prosecuted for blowing the whistle on the torture program instead of those who committed crimes by authorizing and committing torture. The innocent and the truth-tellers were prosecuted. The criminals and the liars were not. Liberty is disappearing before our eyes. Expect no help from "progressives," who believe in Obama more than they believe in liberty. ** **********http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/12/americas-expanding-kill-list/ ** ******Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In Collapse) has just been published.** ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *If you wish to be removed from this list, please let us know* ** *To join the Liberty Underground news service email libertyuv@hotmail.comwith "join" for a subject* ** *You may also join our talk group athttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyundergroundtalk/ <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyundergroundtalk/>if you would like to participate * *email: libert...@hotmail.com* ** *Tell your friends about /LUV News/ because some people just don't get it* [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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