be just

blackagendareport.com - ‘Self-Help’: A Stolen Word Wielded as a Weapon Against Black Activism : "True Self-Help Earlier this year, Black Agenda Report and CBC Monitor circulated a petition with a list of seven demands for presentation to the Congressional Black Caucus. All were rooted in issues that lay at the core of the Historical Black Political Consensus; positions around which many generations of African Americans had coalesced. Most were related to existing legislation before Congress. 1. Dismantle racially selective mass incarceration. 2. Aid and empower those dispersed and dispossessed by Katrina. 3. End the war in Iraq now. 4. Get the U.S. military out of Africa. 5. Transform the cities and create millions of jobs. 6. Establish truly universal, single payer health care. 7. Ensure voting rights."

The End Of Civilization If I can see this, I would guess the United States Government, what with its thousands of full time experts, probably can too. Now, if you are the government (and I don’t mean Tom “I am the federal government” DeLay), and your experts tell you that civilization as we know it is doomed, what do you do? Well, for starters, you do not tell your population of sheeple. That would precipitate panic and result in premature doom, which would consume the government along with everything else. Above all, government seeks to survive, so you would maintain the facade of normalcy for the benefit of your population while you use what time you have left to prepare, as quietly as possible, for the inescapable future. ............... Elections are one such distraction. Elections arouse peoples’ passions and keep them entertained for weeks or months. Elections even give people the illusion of participation, when, in fact, elections mean absolutely nothing in a country like the Un...

AlterNet: War on Iraq: Neocons Embrace Islamic Terror Group : "The U.S. State Department officially considers the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) a Foreign Terrorist Organization. While those honors date back to 1994, they've been renewed during the Bush years. Indeed in 2003 Foggy Bottom went further, including the National Council of Resistance of Iran -- an MEK alias -- under the terrorist designation. (The MEK is also known as the People's Mujahedeen.)"

AlterNet: ForeignPolicy: Bush's Response to 9/11 Was Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves : "They came in as unreformed Cold Warriors, only lacking a cold war -- and looking for an enemy: a Russia to roll back even further; rogue states like Saddam's rickety dictatorship to smash. They were still in the old fight, eager to make sure that the 'Evil Empire,' already long down for the count, would remain prostrate forever; eager to ensure that any new evil empire like, say, China's would never be able to stand tall enough to be a challenge. They saw opportunities to move into areas previously beyond the reach of American imperial power like the former SSRs of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, which just happened to be sitting on potentially fabulous undeveloped energy fields; or farther into the even more fabulously energy-rich Middle East, where Saddam's Iraq, planted atop the planet's third largest reserves of petroleum, seemed so ready for a fall -- wit...

Michael Rubin: Neocon Bunting on Giuliani’s Dog and Pony Show : Another Day in the Empire : "Astute political commentators realize Rudy Giuliani doesn’t stand a chance of becoming the next commander and decider guy, as that position is reserved for a Democrat, most likely Hillary Clinton. Our rulers are fond of the musical chairs process, selecting a Republican one term and a Democrat the next, providing the illusion we are throwing out the bums, when in fact we are voting for the same old globalist one-worlders. Thus Giuliani has nothing to lose by staffing his campaign with irredeemable neocons, most recently Michael Rubin and David Frum. “They join a staunchly neo-conservative team that includes Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American Shi’ism expert who wrote a book several years ago faulting the U.S. Middle East academic community for failing to anticipate the rise of al-Qaeda; Norman Podhoretz, a founder of the neo-conservative movement, who counsels a military strike to stop Iran...

Senate and Neocons Agree to Carve Up Bill of Rights : Another Day in the Empire : "It’s now official, the entire Senate is criminally complicit in undermining the Fourth Amendment. “Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post."

Abu Aardvark: Iraq: tactics vs strategy, revisited Body counts are only one small part of a much larger puzzle. What I want to know is not the day to day casualty trends, or good news stories from some carefully selected hamlet, or the latest assassination of an Awakening shaykh. I want to know: does the devolution to the local level make strategic sense, even if it reaps short-term tactical sense? Towards what endpoint are the tactics leading? Do we want to see a unified Iraq with a sustainable political accord - the official goal of American policy, as Undersecretary of State Nick Burns reminded the DACOR audience yesterday? If so, are American political and military tactics encouraging or discouraging such an outcome? Those are questions that we could be discussing in this moment of relative American political respite, but there's really not much of it (a moment of self-criticism here: I suppose I should give credit to the Biden partition/federalism resolution effort...