Margaret Rees
WSWS

WikiLeaks’ founder and editor Julian Assange strongly condemned the Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard in a pre-recorded address broadcast to a large public meeting convened in Melbourne last Friday.

The event took place with just four days notice, yet a capacity audience of more than 600 people attended, with hundreds more turned away to watch a live video feed of the event, broadcast on a large screen outside the city’s Federation Square venue. The turnout demonstrated the enormous support for WikiLeaks among ordinary people in Australia, and their opposition to the persecution of Assange on bogus rape allegations by Swedish authorities.

Assange’s address was a powerful and principled defence of himself and WikiLeaks. “We support a cause that is no more radical a proposition than that the citizenry has a right to scrutinise the state,” he declared. “The state has asserted its authority by surveilling, monitoring and regimenting all of us, all the while hiding behind cloaks of security and opaqueness... We at WikiLeaks recognise the difference between secrecy and privacy. Individuals, not governments, have the right to privacy. Strong powers must be held to account while the weak must be protected.” (Click HERE for Assange's speech on YouTube)

Stephen Lendman

Perhaps George Bernard Shaw was thinking of Obama's administration when he said, "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment of the corrupt few."

Obama upholds the tradition and then some, doing more harm globally in two years than most of history's tinpot despots in decades, yet most of it gets little attention. Imagine what's planned ahead. Already, his legacy includes:

● breaking every key promise he made across the board;
● looting the nation's wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;
● enacting greater Wall Street empowerment, disguised as financial reform;
● expanding unbridled militarism through continued foreign wars, occupations, and stepped up aggression on new fronts with the largest defense budget in history - greater than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;
● partnering with Israel's regional reign of terror, occupation, and imperial designs;
● presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;
● continuing the worst of the Bush administration's lawlessness and torture policies;
● targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;
● illegally spying on Americans as aggressively as George Bush;
● sacrificing Net Neutrality for greater corporate control and profits;
● destroying decades of hard won labor rights;
● eroding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other New Deal and Great Society social gains;
● trying to control the media more aggressively than Nixon, according to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas;
● refusing help for budget-stricken states like California, Illinois, Michigan and New York; forcing them to impose austerity by gutting welfare programs, education, health care for the poor, and other vital services at a time they're most needed;
● proliferating commodified education nationally, ending government responsibility for it, and making it another business profit center;
● enacting healthcare reform that taxes more, provides less, places profits above human need, and makes a dysfunctional system worse;
● passing agribusiness empowerment at the expense of small farmers and consumers, disguised as food safety modernization;
● instituting coup d'état regime change in Honduras against its democratically elected president;
● plundering Haiti, ignoring its needs, rigging its elections, and refusing to let Jean-Bertrand Aristide return;
● supporting some of the world's most ruthless, corrupt tyrants; and
● planning American-style regime change in Egypt, its vice president of torture in charge; continuing old policies surrounded by Washington-controlled new faces, denying Egyptian masses freedoms they're willing to die for.

Since taking office, Obama fronted for wealth, power, and imperial poison globally, including hardline homeland control.

Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling...

As mass revolt spreads across Egypt and the Middle East and citizens there demand jobs, civil liberties and an end to police state abuses from repressive, U.S.-backed torture regimes, the Obama administration and their congressional allies aim to expand one right here at home.

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an explosive new report documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade.

That report, "Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001-2008," reveals that the domestic political intelligence apparat spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents.

A rather ironic state of affairs considering the free passes handed out by U.S. securocrats to actual terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11, as both WikiLeaks and FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds disclosed last week.

Although illegal practices and violations were reported by the FBI to the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) after an unexplained two-and-a-half-year delay, a further violation of lawful guidelines, lawbreaking continued unabated; in fact, it accelerated as the Bureau was given a green light to do so by successive U.S. administrations.

The IOB is a largely toothless body created in 1976 by the Ford administration in the wake of disclosures of widespread spying and infiltration of political groups by America's secret state agencies during the sixties and seventies.

Reeling from revelations uncovered by Congress, investigative journalists and citizen activists in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Ford's caretaker government was forced to call a halt to the more egregious practices employed by the FBI to keep the lid on and crafted guidelines governing intelligence and surveillance operations.

Charles E. Carlson
WHTT

A Lecture to Strait Gate Ecclesial 2/1/2011

Good evening fellow followers of Jesus' teaching. Robert Services, a men's poet of the Alaskan gold rush who served as an ambulance driver in World War I but refused to enter combat, wrote these words 93 years ago.

Far and near, high and clear,
Hark to the call of War.
Over the gorse and the golden dells,
Ringing and swinging the clamorous bells,
Praying and saying of wild farewells:
War! War! War!

Today the people of Egypt have revolted against a tyrant who has repressed them and helped Israel repress Gaza Arabs into bondage worse than any Pharaoh ever did. As I speak to you, American National Guard units have been quietly activated to go to Egypt. Will they help free the people? Sadly, our own history tells us they go to support a new Egyptian tyrant, just as they support the puppet governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, and every act of Israel.

Since World War I, war and preparation for more war has never stopped for a single generation. As an American-born follower of Christ, I place the blame for the victims of serial wars at home and abroad on church leaders, and for the destroyed dreams of the suffering people in Gaza and Cairo--not all of the pastors, but many. They alone have the responsibility to know the truth and tell it, regardless of the cost. They must respect life as a gift from God. War respects no life.

Truth is the product of Jesus’ work. But those who preach from mega-church pulpits claiming to follow Jesus have been playing the Monopoly war game with the bankers and politicians. No religious sect has ever been more clearly responsible for so much bloodshed and destruction as “Christian-Zionism.” This 100-year old departure from fundamental Christianity has almost single-handedly legitimized wars upon Arab people since January 1991.