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There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet.
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By Margaret Kimberley
August 10, 2015 - blackagendareport.com
“...hypocritical Americans have made gay rights the new measurement of societal well being all over the world ...”
On January 20, 2017 Barack Obama will leave the presidency and those black people capable of critical thought will have many reasons to breathe sighs of relief. They will no longer have to submit to condescending lectures directed exclusively at them. From the moment he ran for president Obama has harangued black people on a wide variety of issues. It doesn’t matter if his audience is made up of church congregants, graduating students, or Kenyan dignitaries. Every black person unlucky enough to be in his vicinity risks being treated like a dead beat dad, career criminal or cousin Pookie, Obama’s own imaginary Willie Horton.
During his trip to east Africa the president chastened Kenyans about gay rights, domestic violence, genital cutting, forced marriage and equal rights for women. He went on and on with no mention of how well his country lives us to any accepted standards of human rights.
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U.S.A.: State of the Union 2015: Lethal, Predatory, Delusional
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By Glen Ford
January 22, 2015 - blackagendareport.com
Tuesday night, in his next-to-last State of the Union address, President Obama flashed the suckers a bag of tricks that has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress, but will allow his apologists to claim that the genuine, more progressive Obama is revealing himself in his final two years in office. Of course, the final-years Obama could have accomplished his modest 2015 agenda, and much more, back in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats dominated both the House and the Senate and the Republicans were in despair and disarray. Which is precisely why Obama chose, instead, to put his party’s perishable congressional majorities at the service of bankers, Wall Street, private insurers and Big Pharma. Now that Democrats are the endangered species on Capitol Hill, Obama hangs a piñata of subsidized community college education, additional tax deductions for child care, seven days paid sick leave, higher capital gains taxes on the wealthy, and billions in fees on casino bankers.
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U.S.A.: American State of the Union: A Festival of Lies
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By Glen Ford
January 30, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
"When you say ‘jobs,' he says tax cuts – just like the Republicans, only Obama first cites the pain of the unemployed, so that you know he cares."
"Believe it," said the current Prevaricator-in-Chief, in the conclusion to his annual litany lies. President Obama's specialty, honed to theatrical near-perfection over five disastrous years, is in crafting the sympathetic lie, designed to suspend disbelief among those targeted for oblivion, through displays of empathy for the victims. In contrast to the aggressive insults and bluster employed by Republican political actors, whose goal is to incite racist passions against the Other, the sympathetic Democratic liar disarms those who are about to be sacrificed by pretending to feel their pain.
Barack Obama, who has presided over the sharpest increases in economic inequality in U.S. history, adopts the persona of public advocate, reciting wrongs inflicted by unseen and unknown forces that have "deepened" the gap between the rich and the rest of us and "stalled" upward mobility. Having spent half a decade stuffing tens of trillions of dollars into the accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of financial capitalists, Obama declares this to be "a year of action" in the opposite direction. "Believe it." And if you do believe it, then crown him the Most Effective Liar of the young century.
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World Focus: If Charles Taylor is a War Criminal, Then So are Obama, Bush and Clinton
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“Clinton, Bush and Obama have instigated, encouraged and collaborated in the worst genocide since World War Two.”
By Glen Ford
October 06, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“Whereas Liberian president Charles Taylor was accused of encouraging the slaughter of possibly 50,000 people in Sierra Leone, Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have armed, financed and protected the killers of six million people – 120 times as many fatalities – in the eastern Congo.”
Last year, former Liberian president Charles Taylor became the first former head of state ever to be convicted by an international tribunal. Taylor, whose 60-year prison sentence was upheld, last week, was found guilty of war crimes – not in his own country, but in neighboring Sierra Leone, where a civil war had raged from 1991 to 2002. The Liberian president wasn’t accused of personally committing mass murder in Sierra Leone, or even of having ordered that these crimes be committed. Instead, the prosecution argued that he had “instigated” others to commit the crimes in order to profit from the sale of what became known as “blood diamonds.” The court reasoned that Taylor must have known about the horrendous crimes that were being perpetrated by his friends among the rebels in the neighboring country, and was, therefore, as guilty as they were.
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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
September 06, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“U.S. imperialism has no option but to bang its military fist on the table to reset the global game board.”
With obscene imperial arrogance, President Obama proclaimed that the “world” – not he – has drawn a bloody “red line” in Syria. “I didn’t set a red line,” said Obama, at a stop in Sweden on his way to a Group of 20 nations meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. “The world set a red line.”
That’s news to the rest of the planet, including most of the Group of 20 and the meeting’s host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who described Obama’s claims that Syria used sarin gas against civilians in rebel-held areas as “completely ridiculous.” “It does not fit any logic,” said Putin, since Syrian President Assad’s forces “have the so-called rebels surrounded and are finishing them off.”
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Is This Child Dead Enough for You?
By Chris Floyd
December 06, 2012 - chris-floyd.com
To all those now hailing the re-election of Barack Obama as a triumph of decent, humane, liberal values over the oozing-postule perfidy of the Republicans, a simple question:
Is this child dead enough for you?
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U.S.A.: Obama Humiliates the Black Caucus – and They Pretend Not to Notice
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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
October 03, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
“Obama has very publicly commanded them to shut up and perform what he believes is their only legitimate function: to get him re-elected.”
This magazine spent much of the 2008 presidential campaign warning that reflexive, unquestioning, uncomplaining support for Barack Obama would render African Americans politically irrelevant for the next four years. “About 90 percent of Black America has allied itself with a candidate that never promised them a damn thing,” we wrote, back on April Fools Day, 2008. One year before, in Selma, Alabama, Obama had first deployed his pseudo-Baptist preacher delivery to announce that Blacks had already come “90 percent of the way” towards equality, strongly inferring that his election would take us the other ten percent of the way, while simultaneously sending “a signal to whites that the days of Black racial agitation were nearly over.”
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U.S.A.: Barack Obama and the Debt Crisis: a Successful Con Game Explained
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By Bruce A. Dixon
August 08, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
The phony debt ceiling crisis was, from beginning to end, a con. It was an elaborate and successful hoax in which the nation's first black president, the Democratic and Republican parties, Wall Street and corporate media all played indispensable parts. The object of the supposed “crisis” was to short circuit public opinion, existing law, democratic process and traditions of public oversight, in order to deal fatal blows to Medicaid, Medicare, social security, job growth and public expenditures for the common good. It worked. We've been conned.
President Barack Obama as First Actor in the Con
The key actor in the con was and is Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic party and president of the United States. When the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the banksters in 2008, 2009 and 2010 they didn't print new warehouses of greenbacks and send them over in a fleet of trucks. The Federal Reserve simply opened its spreadsheets, and wrote numbers with lots of zeroes crediting the banksters' accounts. It literally created the new money by giving it away, and next proceeded to borrow those funds back from the banksters at interest. The debt ceiling crisis was nothing but those same banksters twirling their mustaches and oinking “Well, we don't think you (the government that created the money by giving it to them) can really afford to repay all these loans you've been taking out... We might have to downgrade your credit rating...”
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By Murray Polner
February 08, 2010 - hnn.us
Suddenly and surprisingly, we have a Bush-like Obama Doctrine. To the applause of liberal hawks and formerly critical neocons, the president declared in his Nobel Peace Prize speech that the U.S. will continue to wage war—though naturally, only “just” war—anywhere and against anyone it chooses in a never-ending struggle against the forces of evil. His antiwar supporters can take seats on the sidelines. It’s all reminiscent of John F. Kennedy and the prescient George Ball, and afterward Ball and Lyndon Johnson. In the early ’60s, JFK—reluctantly, we are told by his admirers—decided to send 16,000 “trainers” to Vietnam to teach the South Vietnamese how to play soldier and to stop the Communists from sweeping over Southeast Asia. Vast quantities of money and assorted advisers were shipped without accountability to the corrupt gang of thugs running and ruining that country.
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By William Blum
December 10, 2009
All the crying from the left about how Obama "the peace candidate" has now become "a war president" ... Whatever are they talking about? Here's what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:
We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don't do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.
Why should anyone be surprised at Obama's foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: "Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban." This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.
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World Focus: Barack Obama, The Nobel Peace Prize and the Wrong discussion
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By Iniko Ujaama
October 10, 2009
I realise the discussion is out of focus and they have us debating about the wrong things. Perhaps the more peripheral issue is whether Obama deserves their prize (assuming it is worth anything). Had we not had so much respect and admiration for such awards we would not be having the same discussion.
Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I think many factors would influence our response to this occurrence. Many people are debating whether he 'deserves' the award and I for some time today engaged in this debate also. But upon reflection, much is overlooked which forms the bases for even having such a discussion. First, I think this discussion presumes a certain meaning and significance to the award which must be clarified (or at least a common ground established) before the discussion could be engaged productively.
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By Lloyd Whitefield Butler, Jr.
July 17, 2009 - talkzimbabwe.com
In 1863, the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, 'Now you are free,' but you don't give him any bus fare to get to town. You don't give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.
THE Honourable Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America made the following statements to the African world during an AllAfrica interview and his recent lecture to the Ghanaian Parliament:
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U.S.A.: Some Thoughts about Torture. And Mr. Obama
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By William Blum
May 05, 2009
www.killinghope.org
Okay, at least some things are settled. When George W. Bush said "The United States does not torture", everyone now knows it was crapaganda. And when Barack Obama, a month into his presidency, said "The United States does not torture",(1) it likewise had all the credibility of a 19th century treaty between the US government and the American Indians.
When Obama and his followers say, as they do repeatedly, that he has "banned torture", this is a statement they have no right to make. The executive orders concerning torture leave loopholes, such as being applicable only "in any armed conflict".(2) What about in a "counter-terrorism" environment? And the new administration has not categorically banned the outsourcing of torture, such as renditions, the sole purpose of which is to kidnap people and send them to a country to be tortured. Moreover, what do we know of all the CIA secret prisons, the gulag extending from Poland to the island of Diego Garcia?
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By Chris Floyd
February 25, 2009
chris-floyd.com
It would be superfluous in us to point out that a plan to "end" a war which includes the continued garrisoning of up to 50,000 troops in a hostile land is, in reality, a continuation of that war, not its cessation. To produce such a plan and claim that it "ends" a war is the precise equivalent of, say, relieving one's bladder on the back of one's neighbor and telling him that the liquid is actually life-giving rain.
But this is exactly what we are going to get from the Obama Administration in Iraq. Word has now come from on high – that is, from "senior administration officials" using "respectable newspapers" as a wholly uncritical conduit for government spin – that President Obama has reached a grand compromise with his generals (or rather, the generals and Pentagon poobahs he has inherited -- and eagerly retained -- from George W. Bush) on a plan to withdraw some American troops from the country that the United States destroyed in an unprovoked war of aggression. Obama had wanted a 16-month timetable for the partial withdrawal; his potential campaign rival in 2012, General David Petraeus, wanted 23 months; so, with Solomonic wisdom, they have now split the difference, and will withdraw a portion of the American troops in 19 months instead.
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By Ron Jacobs
January 23, 2009
counterpunch.org
The American people did not elect the Pentagon. They elected Barack Obama based a good deal on his promise to get US troops out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Since he was elected, Mr. Obama has hedged on this promise. Since he was inaugurated, the Pentagon and its civilian boss Robert Gates have hedged even more. Now, they insist, US troops should remain until the Iraqis hold a national election that is as of today not even scheduled. Then, even after that election is held, the departure of some US troops should depend on the outcome of the election. In other words, the Pentagon and Defense Department are telling Mr. Obama that no US troops should leave Iraq unless the election results meet the expectations of Washington.
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