September the 28th, there is a show at Logan's to honour Scott Henderson's 30 years of recording bands in Victoria. AK-47 are playing with The Role Models and The Poor Choices. It's going to be fucking wonderful. The Role Models are straight ahead catchy punk rock,and The Poor Choices are more of a surf/garage rock type of thing, with hooks galore. And then we'll come along to ruin your good time and kill your buzz. Please forgive us. Please. There is another show on the 29th for the same reason, again at Logan's. People's War will be playing. No, not the former hardcore band, but the reggae(ish) band from Victoria, featuring Scott Henderson on bass. Come out on both nights, please. Or one. Or none. See you there. And here's Scott, in all his glory.
Our children are bombarded with the idea that the police are here to help, and we should trust them unconditionally. But what about the lowlife piece of shit in this next article? He was an rcmp. Killing him would be too easy. It would have to be a painful, slow, and tortuous death, to even come close to approaching justice, which it still wouldn't. Is this the type that is attracted to a career in law enforcement? Maybe not generally, but here he fucking is, motherfuckers.
Ottawa cop killer guilty of sexually assaulting 10-year-old girl
OTTAWA - A former Mountie serving life in prison for killing an Ottawa police officer has been convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in the week before the cop's murder.
An Ontario Supreme Court justice found 46-year-old Kevin Gregson guilty on Wednesday of four counts of sexual assault causing bodily harm and four counts of sexual interference, and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
The victim told court Gregson raped her four times over the span of a few days.
The assaults occurred before Const. Eric Czapnik was stabbed to death on Dec. 29, 2009, while he sat in his patrol car at the Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus.
Gregson was convicted last March of first-degree murder in the officer's killing and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
He had been dismissed by the RCMP in 2006 for disciplinary and behavioural problems and was appealing that dismissal at the time of the killing.
Gregson's latest conviction will be served in conjunction with his life sentence.
The Crown had been seeking a decade-long sentence, and prosecutor Brian Holowka said he was happy that's what Gregson received.
"Obviously we're gratified, we're pleased with the sentence, we asked for 10 years and we felt that the facts of the case and the sentencing principles called for a 10-year sentence," Holowka said outside court.
In her victim-impact statement, which she was too upset to read aloud in court, the girl said she would forgive the former Mountie for "all the trauma and hurt and scared and changes this has done to me."
She asked Gregson to apologize, but said he could say the words even if he was alone.
When speaking to the court, Gregson did not mention the sexual assaults and instead returned to the topic of Czapnik's death.
"I didn't kill Czapnik, I mean, I didn't murder him," he said. "It's strange, I had a dream when I was 20 about this, about this happening to me."
This is the freedom the western troops are bringing to Afghanistan. This is the true face of their liberating mission. Note the fucking lies before the truth came out. How many times has the u.s. killed "insurgents", but the truth has never come out? Fuck the occupiers of any country anywhere.
Afghan officials say a NATO airstrike killed eight women and girls who were out gathering firewood before dawn Sunday in a remote region on the east of the country.
The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force initially said an airstrike targeted around 45 insurgents, but later expressed its sincerest condolences over “possible ISAF-caused civilian casualties” numbering five to eight.
NATO spokesman Jamie Graybeal stressed later that they took the charge of civilian deaths seriously and were investigating the allegations. He said, however, that initial reports showed only insurgents were killed in the airstrike.
Villagers from Laghman province’s Alingar district brought the bodies to the governor’s office in the provincial capital, said Sarhadi Zewak, a spokesman for the provincial government.
“They were shouting ‘Death to America!’ They were condemning the attack,” Mr. Zewak said.
Seven injured females were brought to area hospitals for treatment, some of them as young as 10 years old, said provincial health director Latif Qayumi.
Airstrikes have been a particularly sensitive issue between the Afghan people — who say civilians often end up killed along with or instead of insurgents — and NATO forces who maintain that they are a key tactic for going after insurgent leaders.
Also Sunday, four soldiers fighting with the NATO-led alliance were killed in another suspected “insider” attack in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, the coalition said, bringing the total number of deaths this weekend caused by Afghans turning on their allies to six.
Four NATO-led troops were found dead and two wounded when a nearby response team arrived at the scene from a nearby checkpoint, a spokesman for the coalition said.
A U.S. official said the four troops were American.
One of the six members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) operating the observation post with six coalition troops was also found dead, while the other five had disappeared.
“The fighting had stopped by the time the responders arrived,” said Major Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the NATO-led coalition.
Sunday’s shooting took place in Zabol, a province where U.S. forces are based, according to a local official, who said the four soldiers killed were American.
The attack came a day after two British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman while returning from a patrol in southern Helmand province, one of the strongholds of the Taliban-led insurgency.
At least 51 foreign military personnel have been killed in “insider” attacks this year, deaths which have put a heavy strain on trust between the coalition and Afghanistan as they move towards handing security responsibility to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
The rise in such attacks has led to the training of new recruits to the Afghan army and police being suspended.
With foreign combat troops withdrawing from the increasingly unpopular and expensive war, the enormous cultural divide still separating Afghans and their allies after 11 years of conflict has become more of a concern than ever.
Adding to the toll of coalition deaths caused by insider attacks over the weekend, two were killed and nine wounded in Friday’s attack on Camp Bastion, one of the worst attacks on a NATO-operated base all year. Prince Harry was at Camp Bastion at the time of Friday’s attack, but was unharmed.
In a separate incident on Sunday, NATO-led forces arrested a Taliban fighter responsible for killing two U.S. troops when they were downed in their Kiowa helicopter in eastern Afghanistan, the coalition said in another statement.
Relations between the NATO-led coalition and its Afghan partners have also been strained by civilian casualties.
Despite efforts to limit such deaths, over 200 civilians have been killed by foreign troops this year so far, according to figures provided by the coalition, around 50 percent fewer than a year ago.
With reports from Reuters and Agence France-Presse
By Associated Press, Updated: Friday, September 14, 1:46 PM
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A police chief convicted of stealing $714 from a stripper’s pocketbook following a chase was sentenced Friday to serve six months in prison.
Former North Providence police Chief Col. John Whiting received a five-year sentence, with six months to serve in prison and 4 ½ years of probation. He was also ordered to under anger management counseling. The sentence will not be imposed while Whiting files an appeal.
Before delivering the sentence, Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Procaccini said Whiting’s actions hurt the victim, a patrolman he asked to take the money and the entire law enforcement profession. Procaccini said Whiting had not shown remorse for his actions.
“The town of North Providence deserves better than what it received from the chief of police,” Procaccini said. “He took an oath. He broke those solemn promises.”
Whiting didn’t address Procaccini before the sentence was announced and didn’t comment after Friday’s hearing. As the sentence was announced, Whiting’s wife and daughter sobbed. Whiting’s attorney, John Harwood, said he would appeal.
Whiting, 58, was convicted in July on charges including larceny over $500. The case began when Whiting came across the woman’s Ford Explorer as the remnants of Hurricane Irene hit the area on Aug. 28, 2011. Whiting testified that while he was trying to pass the SUV, someone inside threw an object at his vehicle. Whiting said he chased the vehicle until it struck a parked car. The occupants of the vehicle then fled, including the vehicle’s owner, Justina Cardoso, who worked at the time as a dancer at the Satin Doll strip club in Providence. She testified that she left behind her money and other belongings.
Whiting said he went through the SUV to determine who had been inside and found money in a zippered pouch and put it in his pocket for safekeeping. But prosecutors said he bypassed normal procedures for searches and did not initially turn the money over, passing up several opportunities to give it to the officer who responded to investigate, Pawtucket police Officer John Brown.
Brown testified that later in the day, Whiting confessed to stealing the money and told Brown to spend it in Las Vegas.
While Whiting did not address the court, his adult daughter Kasia Whiting did, telling Procaccini that her father is “the most honest and trustworthy man and police officer that I’ve ever met.”
Harwood had asked that Whiting serve no jail time for the offenses — which is what state sentencing guidelines would suggest for a person without a previous criminal record. He said the incident was an “aberration” in an otherwise long and successful police career.
“He has been devastated,” Harwood said. “He is remorseful. He has hurt his family. He’s ruined his reputation. He’s lost his job.”
But Procaccini agreed with prosecutors who said Whiting deserved to be punished because of his status as a top law enforcement officer. Procaccini also said Whiting had shown no remorse.
“I have to say, I believe he believes nothing happened,” Procaccini said.
Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, a former Pawtucket police officer, did not attend the hearing. He said in a statement that the sentence is “fair and appropriate” and that “no one is above the law; no one more so than an individual who has the tremendous responsibility of leading a police department.”
Whiting remains on unpaid suspension while the legal proceedings against him continue, though Harwood said his client is no longer working for the department.
Complete Exoneration of CIA Torturers: This Is the Imperialist System... This Is What They Want You to Vote For
On August 30, the U.S. Justice Department announced that no one will be prosecuted in the two cases that had been under investigation for the torture deaths of prisoners at the hands of the CIA under George W. Bush.
In 2008, one reason some people got behind Obama’s candidacy for president was his promise to end, and bring to justice those responsible for, one of the most hideous and dangerous crimes of the Bush regime—the torturing of people in secret prisons, many put there merely on the suspicion of being members of al-Qaeda and other groups opposed to the United States. This was an outrageous violation of international law—but the Bush regime openly justified and legitimized this torture. In fact, there is evidence that more than 100 people died while in U.S. custody—not by “rendition” (sending the prisoners to countries, like Mubarak’s Egypt, to be tortured, murdered, and permanently disappeared), but at the direct hand of CIA torturers.
When Obama ran for president in 2008 he said, if elected, his attorney general would “immediately review” evidence of criminality in these torture programs because “nobody is above the law.” But then, before he was even inaugurated, Obama made clear he was opposed to any such investigations, citing what he called “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He announced complete immunity from prosecution for any officials who had carried out acts of torture that had been officially declared legal by John Yoo and other Department of Justice lawyers.
After this, in August 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said there would be an investigation into whether charges should be brought in over 100 cases of “severe abuse.” In June 2011, he announced that of those 100, only two cases would be pursued.
One was Gul Rahman, who froze to death in the “Salt Pit,” a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, after being stripped, beaten, and shackled to a cement wall in freezing temperatures. The other was Manadel al-Jamadi, whose frozen body, wrapped in plastic, was seen around the world in the photographs of the torture victims at the CIA-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The autopsy couldn’t settle whether he’d been killed by “blunt-force trauma” (the beating itself), or by suffocation; because after having six ribs broken, he was shackled and suspended upside down with a hood over his head, in a position where he was no longer able to breathe.
(And, by the way, Romney says he “does not believe waterboarding is torture,” doesn’t think “it’s wise ... to describe precisely what techniques we’ll use in interrogating people,” defends detaining people indefinitely without trial, and opposes closing the U.S. torture dungeon at Guantánamo.)
NOBODY in the U.S. government will now be held accountable for the torture that was carried out systematically, all over the world, for almost 10 years under the Bush regime. As Glenn Greenwald points out in the GuardianUK (August 31, 2012):
“This is so despite the findings of General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the torture regime and said that ‘there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes’ and ‘the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.’ And it is done even in the face of General Barry McCaffrey’s extraordinary observation that: ‘We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.’”
At the same time, the Justice Department ISbringing criminal charges against John C. Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who spoke publicly about waterboarding, accusing him of giving journalists the identity of other officers who took part in interrogations. And Obama’s Justice Department is carrying out a vicious prosecution against Bradley Manning, a 24-year-old private in the U.S. Army, facing a military court-martial for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents later published by the website WikiLeaks. Manning has been imprisoned for nearly two years, often in conditions constituting torture.
So Obama and his U.S. “Justice” Department has closed the books on cases of CIA torture, insuring NO ONE will be punished for horrendous torture directly carried out by the U.S. government. But in instances where crimes against humanity by the U.S. are brought to light—the Obama administration is vigorously using all its power to punish, imprison, and even torture people.
This Is the Imperialist System...This Is What They Want You to Vote For.
I did not observe a fucking minute of silence (or anything else) to commemorate september 11th. The infamous date that the imperialists have used to kill literally millions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and will forever prattle on and on about, and threaten anyone who doesn't share their bloodlust for the oppressed of the world. Stephen fucking harper can continue licking the amerikkkans' asses, but he doesn't fucking represent me. Fuck 'em all. And now some fucking moron makes some shit assed stupid movie defaming the Prophet Muhammed, (posted on youtube, for fuck's sake), and people in the Middle East are pissed, and justifiably so. It's not enough that the imperialists are over there, calling it a new crusade, it's not enough that the people are being used as cheap labour by both foreign and local capitalist motherfuckers, and as if it's not enough that natural resources are being used to enrich the already richest nations on earth, now some fucking pig goes and makes a movie insulting what little the people have left. Fucking rights they're angry, morons. And they are not jealous of your fucking illusions of freedom. They are fucking angry at your fucking arrogance, racism, theft, and rape. No fucking wonder. And when the next attacks do come, these empty headed western shitfaces who repeat everything they hear on the lying news broadcasts will be left saying, "Duh, see, I told you they wasn't civilised". Stupid mindless motherfuckers. If this doens't apply to you, no need to be offended. If it does, go fuck yourselves.
Key facts after fallout from prophet film
By The Associated Press – 3 hours ago
Anti-American protests have erupted in the Middle East over a crudely made film mocking the prophet Muhammad, resulting in violent embassy protests around the Middle East, fallout in the U.S. presidential campaign and heightened security at U.S. facilities abroad.
THE FILM: Fourteen-minute clips of the amateurish anti-Islam film "Innocence of Muslims" have been posted on YouTube. The clips depict the prophet Muhammad as a fraud, a womanizer and a madman in an overtly mocking way, showing him having sex and calling for massacres. Muslims find it offensive to depict Muhammad in any fashion, much less in an insulting way. Google Inc., owner of YouTube, has pulled down the video in Egypt, but it is still accessible in the U.S. and other countries. The film supposedly runs two hours. Film industry groups and permit agencies haven't been able to find records of a project called "Innocence of Muslims," though a Los Angeles film permit agency did find a record of a movie filmed in Los Angeles last year with the working title "Desert Warriors." The film apparently had a brief run at the Vine Theater, a faded Hollywood movie house. The YouTube clips are called "Muhammad Movie Trailer" and "The Real Life of Muhammad."
THE FILMMAKER: Federal authorities say the shadowy figure behind the film is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, a California man once convicted of financial crimes and prohibited from using computers or the Internet as part of his sentence. Authorities have connected Nakoula to the persona of Sam Bacile, someone who initially claimed to The Associated Press to be the writer and director of the film. The YouTube clips were posted under the username "sam bacile." Nakoula told the AP in an interview Wednesday that he managed logistics for the company that made the film. He denied he was Bacile and said he didn't direct the film, though he said he knew Bacile. Bacile turned out to be a false identity, and the AP traced a cellphone number used by Bacile to a home where a reporter located Nakoula. Court papers in 2010 said Nakoula had many aliases, including Nicola Bacily, Robert Bacily and Erwin Salameh. The man identifying himself as Bacile claimed to be an Israeli Jew, but evidence shows he is a Coptic Christian. He told the AP he is a real estate developer, but his name does not appear in searches of California real estate licenses.
THE PROTESTS: The film has sparked assaults across the Middle East. In Libya on Tuesday, the storming of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi killed the American ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other embassy staff members. Libyan officials say the attack in Benghazi was a planned operation by heavily armed militants that may have been timed to mark the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. and that the militants used civilian protesters as cover for their action. In Egypt, angry youths climbed the walls of the U.S Embassy on Tuesday in Cairo and brought down the flag. In Yemen, hundreds of protesters angered by the film stormed the U.S. Embassy on Thursday in the capital of Sanaa and burned the American flag, chanting "death to America" and "death to Israel." In Iraq, several hundred Shiite hardliners protested Thursday in Baghdad's Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, and the leader of an Iranian-backed Shiite militia, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, threatened anti-U.S. attacks. And in Iran, about 50 protesters shouted, "Death to America" outside the Swiss Embassy, which looks after U.S. interests there. Riot police kept the crowd at bay.
THE VICTIMS: Four Americans were killed in the attack on the Embassy in Libya. Three Americans were wounded, U.S. officials said. Stevens, a 52-year-old career diplomat, died after he became separated from other American officials during the attack. The northern California native had been dispatched to Benghazi amid heavy fighting in April 2011. Also killed was Sean Smith, 34, an Air Force veteran who had worked as an information management officer for 10 years in diplomatic posts in Brussels, Baghdad and Pretoria, South Africa. Smith was well known in the online video game community. The State Department late Thursday identified the other two Americans: Glen A. Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods, both former Navy SEALs who were providing security at the consulate.
THE FALLOUT: Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney seized on the attacks Wednesday as an issue in the campaign, accusing President Barack Obama of apologizing for American values because of a conciliatory statement from the U.S. mission in Cairo. Romney said Obama's first reaction was to sympathize with the attackers rather than to condemn the attacks. The statement read: "The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions." But it was issued to condemn anti-Muslim religious incitement as demonstrations against the film took place near the Cairo embassy and before demonstrators had breached the embassy walls — and even before the attack in Libya. The GOP nominee came under fire for his comments; Obama said in an interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes" that the episode showed Romney's penchant for having "a tendency to shoot first and aim later." Romney toned down his criticism Thursday and tried to shift the campaign focus back to the economy. Obama, meanwhile, ordered increased security at American embassies and consulates around the world Thursday following the attack and urged its citizens abroad to be vigilant. His administration sent two warships to the Libyan coast, ready to respond to any mission ordered by the president, and 50 Marines were sent to the Libyan capital of Tripoli to help with security. Obama told voters campaigning Thursday in Colorado that the Benghazi Consulate killers will be brought to justice and that protecting Americans serving abroad is one of his highest priorities.
I was at a fucking awesome show last night, which I heard of through Bubba (of Write-Off fame), and also from Mr.Robert Nesbitt, ex-AK-47 fella. The bands were tremendous, all of whom played furious songs that seemed to clock in at less than a minute, for the most part. The crowd was respectful (mostly), and there weren't any real trouble makers, not even the fucking police! My main motivation for going was to see the audio-killers who go by the name of Write-Off. Holy fuck, I got my money's worth right there. I could have left and been a happy man. I was still annoyed with myself for having missed them at HardcoreFest, but it's all right now. The intensity of Bubba, the precision of hearing a band who actually sound like they practice, and also seeing old guys rock it better than young guys half their respective ages, made it a fucking amazing set. I love those guys. Get their tape. Get it now, pathetic fools. Other standouts that I got to see were Burning Ghats, SIDETRACKED (!!!), and Hummingbird Of Death. Fuck yes. Once again, the superiority of underground music and culture vs. everything else was proven. (I know it's not a contest, but we win anyway, so fuck you). Old friends were seen and reconnected with, and vinyl and tapes were purchased. That's right, I did not buy one CD. Fuck yes. I don't know who all was involved in putting this on, not being a facebooker, but I'd like to thank Kate, and Scott for keeping things chill outside. See y'all next time.
The fucking yanks are into their election assault on the people in full swing right now, with the republicans calling obama a communist, (showing that they have no fucking idea about anything except making their big business friends richer), and the liberal camp saying that "things are better" under obama's rule. Neither of these things accord with the facts. Obama has in fact continued the course charted under george w., and in some ways has been even worse. Fuck voting, fuck obama, and fuck romney. These lying shitbags need to go, along with the entire class and system they represent.
Obama Has No Future for the People.
THE REVOLUTION DOES.
It is time for anyone who wants a better world to shake off the deadly illusion that supporting Obama is somehow “the best we can do.”
Barack Obama came into office promising “hope.” Millions of people in this country were eager for a change from the nightmare of the Bush years—its brutal wars; its torture and rendition; the spying; the vicious assaults upon the right to abortion; the mass criminalization and incarceration of Black and Latino youth; the worship of obscene wealth while millions lived on the brink of homelessness and joblessness or were plunged into complete destitution. The reality is that Obama has continued, developed, and intensified the policies begun by George W. Bush.
Do you want to continue living in a world where children are destroyed by remote control bombs and called “collateral damage”…where the president and his henchmen have weekly meetings to decide who to kill this week…where tens of thousands of people suffer the torture of solitary confinement, sometimes for years?
If you do, Obama could be your guy. But if you think this isn’t the best of all possible worlds… you need to check out the movement for revolution the Revolutionary Communist Party is building.
Below is a list of some of Obama’s “achievements” in the first 3½ years of his presidency.
Mass Criminalization and Incarceration of Black and Latino Youth
The United States’ first Black president has presided over unprecedented mass incarceration, an epidemic of police brutality and murder, and relentless criminalization of Black and Latino people, especially the youth.
The “New Jim Crow” in the Obama years means more people imprisoned in the United States than any other country in the world (more than 2.4 million), the highest incarceration rate in the world, and in fact the highest incarceration rate in world history.
More than six million people in the U.S. are under “correctional supervision”—in prison, on probation, or on parole.
Black people make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population—but Black men are imprisoned at over six times the rate of white men.
Every day in this country, 50,000 male prisoners live in solitary confinement. Prolonged solitary confinement is recognized internationally as a form of torture.
Stop-and-frisk policies begun in New York and spreading throughout the country have overwhelmingly and overtly targeted Black and Latino youth—Obama has never spoken against these policies. In the first six months of 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by police under stop-and-frisk 337,434 times; 53 percent of those people were Black, 32 percent Latino—89 percent were released, with the cops not able to come up with any reason to hold them.
National statistics on people killed by police are not compiled by the federal government. But indications are that more people have been shot down and otherwise murdered by police in the Obama years than preceding years—again without a word of protest from Obama. In Los Angeles, the number of people shot by police jumped 60 percent in 2011; in Chicago, through the first half of 2011, 43 people were shot and 16 killed by Chicago police.
Massive Unemployment and Evictions
Under Obama, a bitter reality of massive unemployment, large-scale evictions and foreclosures, and homelessness has continued to plague urban, suburban, and rural areas of the country, with inner cities populated largely by Black and Latino people especially hard-hit.
The official unemployment rate for Black youth is 49 percent. As is well known, the U.S. government calculates unemployment in a way that conceals the actual number of people out of work; the true number is higher. A recent study by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies concluded that the actual unemployment rate for Black and Latino youth is over 80 percent. The study stated that “low income Black and Hispanic teens face the equivalent of a Great Depression.”
Washington, D.C. has the highest youth unemployment rate in the country—86 percent. New York City, Detroit, and Chicago all have youth unemployment rates over 80 percent. In Gary, Indiana, whose population is 84 percent Black, jobs have decreased by 54 percent since February 2009. And this huge loss of jobs came after the large steel mills that shaped Gary had largely shut down.
The gap between rich and poor has widened, with wealth more and more concentrated among a select few who are mostly white. The median wealth of white households is now 20 times that of Black households and 18 times that of Latino households, according to the Pew Research Center.
The average total wealth of single Black women is less than $100. Around half of single Black women have zero or negative net wealth.
The number of public housing units in the U.S. has been in serious decline for decades, and the lack of housing became especially acute during the Obama presidency. Millions of people lost their homes through foreclosure or repossession—almost three million homes were foreclosed in 2010 alone. In Chicago alone, 82 public housing high-rises have been torn down since the 1990s; when the city opened its public housing waiting list in 2010, more than 215,000 families applied under the city plan that aims to have 15,000 family units within several years.
Predatory Wars Around the World
In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about “democracy”—without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves—is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no “democracy for all”: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventualabolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.
Bob Avakian BAsics 1:22
Obama has sustained and developed wars and military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has initiated drone bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, is currently threatening war against Iran, and is developing or reestablishing a military presence in many other parts of the world.
In 2009, the first year of Obama’s administration, there were 51 reported drone bombings in Pakistan—there were 45 during the entire George W. Bush administration. Obama’s use of drones has increased since. Obama has unleashed 284 drone attacks on Pakistan alone. Between 2,532 and 3,251 people have been killed by drone bombings in Pakistan since 2004, most of them in the Obama years. At least 175 of them have been children.
The U.S. maintains a massive military occupation in Iraq, despite claims of a “withdrawal.” The U.S. has left about 16,000 “embassy personnel”—mercenary contractors, spies, and military personnel—in Iraq. The U.S. is also carrying out $12 billion worth of arms and training contracts in Iraq, with the first batch of 36 F-16 fighter jets set to be delivered in September 2014.
In May 2012, the Obama administration announced a highly publicized agreement with Afghanistan’s President Karzai to have U.S. military forces “leave” Afghanistan. In his speech announcing this agreement, Obama pledged to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. The agreement states the U.S. can maintain a military presence in Afghanistan until 2024.
In June 2011, Obama ordered the U.S. to extend its drone bomb attacks to include Somalia.
In the name of the “war on drugs,” the U.S. military under Obama has established three bases in Honduras, in regions largely populated by Miskito Indians. On May 11, 2012, helicopters carrying U.S. personnel launched an air assault on a boat that killed two pregnant women and two youths, and severely wounded four other people.
U.S.-led sanctions on Iran have resulted in severe shortages of medicine needed to treat people with life-threatening illnesses such as hemophilia, kidney disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), cancer, and thalassemia—putting in jeopardy the lives of an estimated six million Iranians who suffer from these diseases.
Crimes Against the Environment
Obama promised in 2008 that his administration would mark the “moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” In reality, the devastation of our planet’s ecosystems by the U.S. and this whole imperialist system has continued and even heightened under Obama.
Under Obama the U.S. has continued to sabotage and undermine any international agreements that would enforce actual cuts in carbon and other greenhouse gases that are driving the warming of the earth and climate change. This is nothing short of criminal given that the future of our planet hangs in the balance, as the polar ice caps melt, seas rise, and more devastating droughts, storms, wildfires, and heat waves are becoming the new “normal.”
In the face of anti-scientific denial of the reality of climate change by right-wing lunatics, Obama has refused to make a fight of it, has downplayed the danger of climate change, and has counseled people to be patient while doing nothing of real substance to stop it.
Like previous administrations, including Bush’s, Obama continued the lack of drilling safety and environmental standards that led to the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 that dumped tens of millions of gallons of oil. The devastation to the ecosystem was then increased in ways yet untold with the spraying of unprecedented quantities of toxic chemical dispersants into the water. The government orchestrated the criminal act of covering up the extent of the spill and the damage it was doing to people and the gulf, and then attempted to sweep this under the rug, declaring the crisis over and past.
After a short moratorium on offshore drilling, and with meaningless new “safety measures” put through, Obama opened up vast new areas of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic coastline, and the fragile north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling for the first time.
Obama has bragged that under his watch the number of operating oil rigs has reached a record high and that the U.S. has added enough new oil and gas pipelines to “circle the earth and then some.”
After briefly withholding approval for the Keystone XL pipeline that is aimed to vastly increase the amount of dirty tar-sands oil pumped from the increasingly devastated forests of Alberta, Canada, into the U.S., Obama approved the southern leg of the pipeline. Now his State Department is studying a new pipeline route—with a decision put off until after the U.S. elections.
The Obama administration has opened up huge new areas of the Powder River basin in Wyoming to allow the extraction of 2.35 billion tons of coal. Coal is the most carbon-polluting fuel there is. The coal now available to be mined and burned is the equivalent of the annual carbon emissions from 300 coal-fired power plants. This coal from Powder River alone represents 30 times more “dirty energy” development than Obama’s development of “clean energy.”
On Obama’s watch, there has been an expansion of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas (fracking). Fracking is wrecking groundwater and people’s health and lives in increasingly large areas of the rural “heartland” of the U.S., spreading environmental destruction into previously untouched areas.
Attacks on Fundamental Rights
Obama has taken for himself and future presidents unprecedented and sweeping power to arrest, detain indefinitely, and even assassinate people without judicial review or oversight. He has undermined and repudiated longstanding Constitutional rights such as habeas corpus and the right to a trial. He has presided over a pervasive government spy apparatus that monitors all forms of communication.
If you try to make the Democrats be what they are not and never will be, you will end up being more like what the Democrats actually are.
Bob Avakian BAsics 3:12
Bradley Manning, a 24-year-old U.S. Army private, has been the victim of unjust and outrageous persecution by the military and the Obama administration for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents later published by WikiLeaks. The leaks include the Collateral Damagevideo, which shows a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Iraq that gunned down civilians on a street, including journalists and a man who came onto the scene to help the victims. Manning has been imprisoned for over two years, often in extreme isolation that amounts to torture. He is now facing trial on heavy charges with a possible life sentence.
At the end of 2011, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. This ominous and highly repressive piece of legislation includes, among other things, a measure that allows the U.S. military to detain “terror suspects” indefinitely without charging them—including American citizens arrested in the United States.
Obama has begun a program of “targeted killings,” including of U.S. citizens, supposedly based upon a Department of Justice memo that his administration has refused to release. As journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote, with this law “not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are ‘state secrets’ and thus no court may adjudicate their legality. The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality.” In other words, the president can order people killed without the targeted persons ever having a “day in court,” or even being aware that they are under a death sentence. Every Tuesday morning, Obama and his “national security team” go over material described as being like “baseball cards” of alleged “terrorists” and decide who will be targeted for assassination by the U.S.
Obama has upheld and taken further the program of torture and rendition begun by George W. Bush, and overturned the centuries-old legal principal of habeas corpus. Obama’s administration submitted a two-sentence argument saying that people the U.S. takes into custody in Afghanistan have no legal standing to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team. Greenwald pointed out, “these are not prisoners captured in Afghanistan on a battlefield. Many of them have nothing to do with Afghanistan and were captured far, far away from that country—abducted from their homes and workplaces—and then flown to Bagram [a U.S. base] to be imprisoned.”
Massive electronic spying on U.S. citizens and people from and in other countries began under Bush but has accelerated under Obama. National Security Administration (NSA) whistleblower William Binney estimated in April of this year that since September 11, 2001, the NSA has intercepted “between 15 and 20 trillion” electronic messages. The NSA under the Obama presidency is building a $2 billion center in Utah that will store “near-bottomless databases … [of] all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ It is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”
Assault on the Right to Abortion
The right to abortion has been under relentless assault by Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing fanatics who seek to ban all abortions (and even birth control) and reassert the most horrific patriarchal control of women. During the Obama years, an avalanche of laws restricting abortion has occurred in state after state. Obama speaks of finding “common ground” with these murderous fascists. In a May 2009 speech at Notre Dame University, Obama said people must “open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do [because] that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.” Three weeks later, courageous abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered in a church in Wichita, Kansas by an anti-abortion fanatic. Below are some further examples of where the scramble for “common ground” has led in the Obama years.
It is a striking fact—which is starkly evident in the U.S. now—that, in comparison to what is done to women, there is no other group in society that is so systematically reviled and defiled in a way that has become acceptable (or widely accepted in any case) as a significant part of “mainstream” life and culture, as happens in a concentrated way through pornography and the extremely demeaning and degrading images and messages about women it massively and pervasively purveys (with the Internet a major focus and vehicle for this), including pornography’s extensive portrayal of sadistic and violent sexual domination of women...
I began the “Revolution” talk with “They’re Selling Postcards of the Hanging,” reviewing the ugly history of the lynching of Black people in America and the way in which celebration of this became a cultural phenomenon in the U.S., with the selling of picture postcards of these lynchings a major expression of this—often including smiling and leering crowds of white people surrounding the murdered and mutilated body of a Black man. In a recent exchange, a comrade emphasized this profoundly important and compelling point: Today, the way in which pornography depicts women—the displaying of women in a degraded state for the titillation of viewers—including the grotesque brutality and violence against women which is involved in much of this, is the equivalent of those “Postcards of the Hanging.” It is a means through which all women are demeaned and degraded.
Bob Avakian Unresolved Contradictions, Driving Forces for Revolution
92 state laws restricting abortion were passed in 2011. In 2012, new restrictions on abortion are sweeping through legislatures from Virginia to Arizona, and voters in some states could see proposed constitutional amendments on November ballots that would define life as beginning at conception.
Texas, with a legislature and executive dominated by Christian fascists, passed one of the most horrifically anti-woman, anti-abortion laws this year. Among other things, it requires highly intrusive transvaginal ultrasounds and lectures from doctors and medical personnel, and cuts off funding for agencies such as Planned Parenthood that provide services to hundreds of thousands of women. 146 clinics for women’s health issues have closed in Texas since this law passed, mainly in rural areas and along the border with Mexico. The number of organizations that help poor women plan pregnancy has shrunk by almost half.
On International Women’s Day this year, Congress passed a law called the “Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act,” mandating parental notification and a 24-hour waiting period on any woman under 18 who travels outside her home state to receive an abortion. Anyone, including older siblings, clergy, and grandparents, who helps the young woman without parental notification is subject to criminal charges carrying up to one year in federal prison and a $100,000 fine. Many women have to travel hundreds of miles to receive this most basic medical procedure—and 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion providers; in rural areas, 97 percent don’t.
In December of last year, Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, overruled a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruling that an emergency contraceptive called “Plan B One-Step” be made available over the counter. This was the first time that an FDA recommendation had been overruled by the health secretary. Sebelius claimed that the data about Plan B One-Step is “insufficient,” a view strenuously contradicted by many medical professionals and the head of the FDA itself. Dr Kathleen Hill-Besinque from the University of Southern California said “very few medications are this simple, convenient and safe.”
War on Immigrants
Making the U.S./Mexico border a completely militarized war zone and waging vicious, massive assaults upon immigrants within the U.S. began prior to Obama’s presidency. But both have reached levels of pervasive mass terror beyond everything that preceded him.
There is nothing more unrealistic than the idea of reforming this system into something that would come anywhere near being in the interests of the great majority of people and ultimately of humanity as a whole.
Bob Avakian BAsics 3:2
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported almost 400,000 people in fiscal year 2011—the highest number of deportations in a single year since ICE was formed ten years ago.
More than a million people—mostly immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries seeking work in this country—have been forcibly deported since Obama became president.
Obama’s “Secure Communities” program involves close cooperation between about 1,600 local police departments and the federal Department of Homeland Security. Participating police departments send “biometric information” on every person arrested to the federal government to “check criminal history.” Those suspected of being undocumented are sent to detention centers run by ICE. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s Director of Homeland Security, told Congress in February this year that “We anticipate that nationwide deployment of Secure Communities across all remaining jurisdictions will be finished” by 2013. Secure Communities is supposedly designed to target people who have committed serious felonies. But in reality, it has led to mass deportations of people whose only “crime” is to cross the border without official papers in search of work so they and their families can survive.
ICE maintains a network of 250 detention centers around the country—dungeons where widespread brutality, sexual abuse, and racist treatment abound against vulnerable detainees who have no access to lawyers or other help.
In the summer of 2010, Obama ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol the border in Arizona. In August of that year, he signed the “Southwest Border Security Bill,” which included sending to the already hyper-militarized border an additional 1,000 Border Patrol officers, 250 Immigration ICE agents, 250 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, and two additional drones.
The bodies of 574 dead immigrants were found along the Arizona border alone in the first 2½ years of Obama’s presidency.
