Tag: President Obama
In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s “shocking” defeat, the corporate media that ardently supported her has tried to reclaim legitimacy by blaming “fake news” as the source of its clearly self-inflicted problems.
As we know, Obama turned his back on many in his own party and, in concert with Republicans, forwarded the multinational corporate agenda’s TPP. Since that time, the administration has sunk to new lows in its zeal to finish the deal on the TPP, even allowing one of its members to get away with forced slavery & other human rights violations.
In a letter to President Obama, Captain Christopher John Antal stated he can no longer serve as a chaplain for an “empire.”
Since President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, an estimated 2,464 people have been killed by drone strikes targeted outside of the United States’ declared war zones; this figure was posted in February 2015 by Jack Serle and the team at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who maintain a database of all known strikes—based on fieldwork, media reports, and leaked documents—which provides a clearer picture of the scale and impact of the US drone program than the episodic reporting provided by corporate media.
Although the corporate and progressive press alike focused public attention on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s December 2014 report on the CIA’s secret program of abductions, “brutal” interrogations, and torture of terrorism suspects, Nafeez Ahmed reported that this coverage has “whitewashed the extent to which torture has always been an integral and systematic intelligence practice since the second World War.” Despite President Barack Obama’s claims that he officially banned torture in 2009, these practices continue today, “under the careful recalibration of Obama and his senior military intelligence officials,” serving to legitimize the existence and expansion of the national security apparatus, Ahmed wrote.
President Obama is requesting Congress to pass an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) resolution against ISIS. The new authorization explicitly does not impose geographic limits on the use of troops anywhere in the world and expands the definition of ISIS to that of all “associated forces.” A grant of this authority will do nothing to limit our dangerous involvement in these constant Middle East wars.
I want to use an analogy to demonstrate what I think is happening with our U.S. Congress and the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. The Fast Track and TPP are like having trash put on a plate and served to you as dinner. You look at it and know instantly that it is nothing that you would ever want to eat, but the president and many Republican legislators tell you that it is going to be good for you and that the U.S. and 11 other countries have been working on perfecting this recipe for nearly a decade. Many of the Democratic legislators agree that there are problems with this recipe. Yet the president believes that he can convince them to vote in favor of this being something that all U.S. Citizens, and those of the other 11 nations, will be forced to swallow.
Congress should not grant President Barack Obama authority to conclude another free trade agreement in Asia, because it would lower American wages and exacerbate income inequality. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would eliminate tariffs and lower other regulatory barriers to trade and investment among the United States, South Korea, Japan and nine other Pacific Rim nations.If successful, China, India and several other nations could seek membership. Hence, the TPP has the potential to redefine the rules for international commerce in the most rapidly growing region of the international economy, but President Obama has given ordinary workers good reason to believe he is not looking out for them.
Don’t feel bad if trade talk – treaties, exports & imports – makes your eyes glaze over. It’s understandable. Most likely, you’ve heard about this Trans Pacific Partnership, or TTP at least once a week. But you’re busy & probably haven’t really looked beneath the headlines. Even if you have, some of the authors don’t always do a great job breaking the nuts & bolts down for you. So, you leave frustrated that they don’t get to the point. This article seeks to tell this story in more plain language. Make no mistake this TPP story is big, full of intrigue, and needs heroes and heroines to stand up to the bad guys. You can be one of the many that are standing up. But time is short because the congress is being asked to shut down debate on this sucker and say yea or nay to it under a limited time crunch to read & understand what’ll probably be over a 1000 pages & then figure out if it is right for America.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) Investment Chapter…reveals how the pact would make it easier for U.S. firms to offshore American jobs to low-wage countries while newly empowering thousands of foreign firms to seek cash compensation from U.S. taxpayers by challenging U.S. government actions, laws and court rulings before unaccountable foreign tribunals. After five years of secretive TPP negotiations, the text – leaked by WikiLeaks –proves that growing concerns about the controversial “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) system that the TPP would extend are well justified, Public Citizen said.
Wireless phones emit radio-frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs) when in use. In May 2011, after the consideration of laboratory studies, studies of long-term use of wireless phones, and data on the incidence of brain tumors, the World Health Organization (WHO) determined RF-EMFs to be a “possible” human carcinogen. Other studies have shown an association between long-term mobile and cordless phone use with glioma and acoustic neuroma. In October 2013, Powerwatch, a United Kingdom–based watchdog focused on the health risks posed by electromagnetic fields, reported that two new research articles provide further evidence of mobile phone use as a cause of increased brain tumors.
[Dennis Kucinich to Congress:] Why would Congress, as a co-equal branch of government, be so ready to give up its constitutional power to this president with an Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which represents a wholesale appropriation of war power? This could be one of the most important votes you will ever cast, so I want to share with you, collegially, information that I hope will be of use in your deliberations. I present some thoughts for your consideration as you enter into a momentous, new debate over the authorization of military force, this time against the Islamic State.
After Bibi Netanyahu’s provocative speech to Congress, The New York Times provided helpful clarifications in an article headlined “What Iran Won’t Say About the Bomb.” Written by two superbly expert reporters, William Broad and David Sanger, the piece walked through the technical complexities for non-experts (myself included) and explained key questions Iranians have failed to answer. But this leads me to ask a different question: What about Israel’s bomb?
Robert Reich gives one of the best descriptions of the nature & dangers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a less than 3 minute video. The effort to have this secretive, nontransparent proposal put on a “fast track”, smacks of Tammany Hall-style politics that benefits no one but fat cats. And, after years of the public hoping for bipartisanship in Congress, isn’t it ironic that this is the issue where Republicans are supporting the president in large & growing numbers?
In what advocates of locally-owned and operated broadband networks are calling “a great moment for the principle of local self-reliance,” President Obama has announced his intention to fight back against efforts by the telecommunications industry to block the building or improvement of municipal internet networks.
