PREDICTABLE MIND TORTURE The rhetoric of the imperial governing class is so predictable once you know the doctrinal codes. Here’s my forecast – issued on Facebook at around 6:00 pm central time – on Obama’s “end of combat operations” speech from the oval office, delivered with folded presidential hands in a cardboard cutout delivery at [...]

August 29, 2010 ZNet: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-empires-new-clothes-by-paul-street-1 By Paul Street * A shortened version of this talk (below) was given at Bluestockings Bookstore (NYC), the Wooden Shoe Bookstore (Philly), Busboys and Poets (Washington DC), Barnes and Noble (Springfield, New Jersey), and Encuentro 5 (Boston) during a recent northeastern tour in promotion of my new book The Empire’s [...]

War Crime Whistleblower in Obama’s Sights, War Criminals Not Private First Class Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, is being prosecuted by the Obama administration for disclosing a classified video showing American troops murdering civilians in Baghdad from an Apache Attack Helicopter in 2007.  Eleven adults were killed in the attack [...]

From Chapter 1, titled “Business Rule as Usual”: Two and a half weeks after Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, commented on the President elect’s corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet appointments with a musical metaphor. Obama, Rothkopf told The New York Times, was following [...]

We Americans must seem to much of the world a callous and superficial people.  Look at the recent media-politics soap opera that briefly distracted us from (among other things) the ongoing state-capitalist eco-tastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico (which surged dramatically yesterday morning [I am writing in the afternoon of Thursday, June 24th] as British [...]