Category: Aggregated

Monday’s press was filled with an all-out assault on Seymour Hersh by the Obama White House following Hersh’s publication in the London Review of Books of a 10,000- word piece declaring all the known versions of the death of Osama Bin Laden to be a White House fabrication which might have been written by Lewis Carroll.

According to Hersh’s account, Bin Laden had been captured by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI and since 2006 had been living in the Abbottabad ISI safehouse raided by our Navy Seals. The safehouse is next to a major ISI covert operations facility. A Pakistani source revealed this to the CIA in 2010 in return for millions of dollars in reward money offered for Bin Laden’s head. The Pakistanis were soon brought in on the fact that the U.S. knew where Bin Laden was and, based on generous U.S. offers of military and monetary assistance, decided to cooperate with U.S. plans.

According to the Hersh account:

Based on these factors, according to Hersh, it was agreed that Osama Bin Laden would be assassinated by the Navy Seals.  In addition, as opposed to post-raid accounts, Bin Laden had been very ill and, at the point of his murder, was an invalid.

When Obama, for his own political re-election purposes, went public with his account of the raid (it had been originally agreed that it would be subsequently announced that bin Laden had been killed by a drone attack in Afghanistan), he blew apart careful cover stories and preparations by the cooperating intelligence agencies and forced a new level of lies and contradictory stories.

There is much more to the Hersh piece, which we will cover over the coming days.

Brazil was the only member of the BRICS group not represented at the highest level at Moscow’s May 9 commemoration of the defeat of fascism. President Dilma Rousseff had intended to participate, and clearly wanted to go personally, but cancelled at the last minute, sending her Defense Minister, Jaques Wagner, in her stead. Wagner told Sputnik that she “really wanted to come, to be here to honor the 70th anniversary of the Victory Day.” Sputnik reported that Wagner “explained that she had to attend the wedding of a very close person to her, her physician, that had been scheduled a long time ago.”

Look outside Brazil for the actual reason. After Rousseff was reelected last October, on a campaign plank that included her commitment to Brazil’s participation on the BRICS, London’s financial oligarchy moved in to seize the reins of government. Under Finance Minister Joaquin Levy, interest rates have been jacked up to their highest rates since 2008, to a monstrous 13.25% for overnight bank borrowing! Brazilian Congressmen pummeled Levy in recent hearings about why he was implementing the very austerity policies which have destroyed Europe.

Simultaneously, a corruption scandal was launched against the state oil company, Petrobras (with vulture fund killer Paul Singer in the lead), which is being used to threaten President Dilma with impeachment, while paralyzing Brazil’s top engineering and construction companies, as well as Petrobras. Her Transport Minister exploded at a recent congressional hearing, that between the budget cuts and the Petrobras scandal, he didn’t even have the money to repair one highway, never mind build the rail, ports, etc. the country needs.

And then there is the White House. President Dilma has scheduled a visit to Washington to meet Barack Obama for June 30, her first since she cancelled a scheduled state visit in October 2013, after Snowden revealed that Brazil’s top businesses and the President herself were being spied on by the NSA.

For a year and a half, President Dilma had refused to reschedule until Obama gave written guarantees that the spying had stopped and would not resume—which he continues to refuse to do. Obama didn’t change, but President Dilma’s circumstances have. The visit was sealed when Dilma and Barack met on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas in Panama on April 11.

Brazil was the only member of the BRICS group not represented at the highest level at Moscow’s May 9 commemoration of the defeat of fascism. President Dilma Rousseff had intended to participate, and clearly wanted to go personally, but cancelled at the last minute, sending her Defense Minister, Jaques Wagner, in her stead. Wagner told Sputnik that she “really wanted to come, to be here to honor the 70th anniversary of the Victory Day.” Sputnik reported that Wagner “explained that she had to attend the wedding of a very close person to her, her physician, that had been scheduled a long time ago.”

Look outside Brazil for the actual reason. After Rousseff was reelected last October, on a campaign plank that included her commitment to Brazil’s participation on the BRICS, London’s financial oligarchy moved in to seize the reins of government. Under Finance Minister Joaquin Levy, interest rates have been jacked up to their highest rates since 2008, to a monstrous 13.25% for overnight bank borrowing! Brazilian Congressmen pummeled Levy in recent hearings about why he was implementing the very austerity policies which have destroyed Europe.

Simultaneously, a corruption scandal was launched against the state oil company, Petrobras (with vulture fund killer Paul Singer in the lead), which is being used to threaten President Dilma with impeachment, while paralyzing Brazil’s top engineering and construction companies, as well as Petrobras. Her Transport Minister exploded at a recent congressional hearing, that between the budget cuts and the Petrobras scandal, he didn’t even have the money to repair one highway, never mind build the rail, ports, etc. the country needs.

And then there is the White House. President Dilma has scheduled a visit to Washington to meet Barack Obama for June 30, her first since she cancelled a scheduled state visit in October 2013, after Snowden revealed that Brazil’s top businesses and the President herself were being spied on by the NSA.

For a year and a half, President Dilma had refused to reschedule until Obama gave written guarantees that the spying had stopped and would not resume—which he continues to refuse to do. Obama didn’t change, but President Dilma’s circumstances have. The visit was sealed when Dilma and Barack met on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas in Panama on April 11.

The dam has broken. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was left to sputter this Tuesday afternoon that “the Democratic Senate has just shut down the opportunity to debate the top economic priority of the Democratic President…[because]…every Senator but one of the President’s own party voted against the President’s 1 domestic priority.”

That, after President Obama and his Republican allies fell eight votes short of the 60 votes needed to open debate on handing Obama “Fast Track” authority to impose the British Empire’s would-be final stage in globalized looting, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its matching European accord.

Passage in the House of Representatives was known to be dubious; until not long ago, the Senate was considered “on board.” The rising tide of hatred against Wall Street and its Obama stooge has now overturned this consensus, too.

People around the world are chuckling over scenes such as a perturbed Republican McConnell expressing his agreement with Obama’s recent nasty attacks on his Democratic party free trade opponents; or, of members of the White House press corps grinning as an ABC News correspondent dismissed White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s protestations that the vote was only a “procedural SNAFU,” with such questions as: “Can you remind us again of what ‘SNAFU’ stands for?”

The blow to Obama’s already-shredded aura of power should make for a much more contentious TPP ministerial meeting come May 26—if that meeting proceeds as planned, at all. By contrast, no such problems have emerged around the preparations for the July BRICS summit in Ufa, Russia, where a very different program of trade and development cooperation is on the agenda.

Democratic opposition against this Wall Street trap escalated up to the moment of voting. Going into the day, California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer joined fellow Senators and labor leaders livid against Obama’s lies that Congressmen were free to read the treaty, recounting her adventures in trying to do just that.

Probable Presidential candidate Gov. Martin O’Malley sent out a mass e-mail, calling on his supporters to “Tell Congress to stop TPP,” when they voted today. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Rosa DeLauro came out slamming the President, in a joint op-ed in the Boston Globe on Monday, “Who Is Writing the TPP?”

International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) International President Tom Buffenbarger yesterday issued the following statement after the Senate failed to advance Fast Track legislation: “Today, working Americans sent a thunderous message to supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: The days of sitting on the sidelines as disastrous free-trade deals are railroaded through Congress are over.” The IAM is lobbying on Capitol Hill both to reject the TPP and to restore Glass-Steagall—the decisive step now required of Congress.

The dam has broken. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was left to sputter this Tuesday afternoon that “the Democratic Senate has just shut down the opportunity to debate the top economic priority of the Democratic President…[because]…every Senator but one of the President’s own party voted against the President’s 1 domestic priority.”

That, after President Obama and his Republican allies fell eight votes short of the 60 votes needed to open debate on handing Obama “Fast Track” authority to impose the British Empire’s would-be final stage in globalized looting, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its matching European accord.

Passage in the House of Representatives was known to be dubious; until not long ago, the Senate was considered “on board.” The rising tide of hatred against Wall Street and its Obama stooge has now overturned this consensus, too.

People around the world are chuckling over scenes such as a perturbed Republican McConnell expressing his agreement with Obama’s recent nasty attacks on his Democratic party free trade opponents; or, of members of the White House press corps grinning as an ABC News correspondent dismissed White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s protestations that the vote was only a “procedural SNAFU,” with such questions as: “Can you remind us again of what ‘SNAFU’ stands for?”

The blow to Obama’s already-shredded aura of power should make for a much more contentious TPP ministerial meeting come May 26—if that meeting proceeds as planned, at all. By contrast, no such problems have emerged around the preparations for the July BRICS summit in Ufa, Russia, where a very different program of trade and development cooperation is on the agenda.

Democratic opposition against this Wall Street trap escalated up to the moment of voting. Going into the day, California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer joined fellow Senators and labor leaders livid against Obama’s lies that Congressmen were free to read the treaty, recounting her adventures in trying to do just that.

Probable Presidential candidate Gov. Martin O’Malley sent out a mass e-mail, calling on his supporters to “Tell Congress to stop TPP,” when they voted today. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Rosa DeLauro came out slamming the President, in a joint op-ed in the Boston Globe on Monday, “Who Is Writing the TPP?”

International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) International President Tom Buffenbarger yesterday issued the following statement after the Senate failed to advance Fast Track legislation: “Today, working Americans sent a thunderous message to supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: The days of sitting on the sidelines as disastrous free-trade deals are railroaded through Congress are over.” The IAM is lobbying on Capitol Hill both to reject the TPP and to restore Glass-Steagall—the decisive step now required of Congress.