Having established saintly status for himself Obama can now get off with this mendacious, racist caricature of Africa and rebrand Western plunder as “patronage”. The nerve of this charlatan, fresh from putting the finishing touches to the US kleptocracy, in attacking African leaders for self-enrichment is astounding and puts him firmly in the Blair, Goebbels school of deception and hypocrisy.
Here is a particularly brazen lie:
“But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade”
For in depth exposure of this lie we recommend Stephen Gowan’s blog, What’s Left. Alternatively look at our Zimbabwe section in “categories” ( left-hand column)
Africans need to take cognisance of the fact that behind the “partnership” verbiage lies the menace of Africom. ITNT strongly recommends that African states reject any “health” initiatives coming from the USA.
“This isn’t some abstract notion that we’re trying to impose upon Africa,” he told allAfrica.com. “There is a very practical pragmatic consequence to political instability and corruption when it comes to whether people can feed their families, educate their children. And we think that the African continent is a place of extraordinary promise as well as challenges. We’re not going to be able to fulfil those promises unless we see better governance.”
Behind the vacuous blether of the Great Charlatan lies a real threat to the African nations. With the empire in retreat everywhere else Africa should realize that it is now being sized up for soft pickings.
The US is planning a dramatically more assertive policy in Africa, sometimes backed by a threat of force, to end conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria that are seen as among the principal obstacles to the continent’s revival.
Arguably, a new element of tension appeared by a conscious strategy by the Obama administration to insert a wedge between Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and create a rift within the Kremlin. To quote noted Russia-watcher Peter Lavelle, “Either Obama believes he has already mastered Russian politics … or he is being given some very bad advice … In Russia today, it is simply impossible to play Medvedev off against Putin. Both represent the same policy approaches, including foreign policies, but in different ways.”
“Biden’s remarks didn’t actually warrant a Russian rebuttal. But Moscow probably decided to put Obama’s hawkish deputy on the mat while the boss was in town to balance to some extent the mischievous briefings given by White House officials, touting a growing US-Russia convergence over Iran, which of course was exaggerated hype.”
So Obama tried to put a wedge between Putin and Medvedev and between Russia and Iran: both failed miserably as anyone with any grasp of Russia diplomacy at all could have predicted. As with the interventions in Iran and Honduras, the old box of tricks is still being used, but they just don’t work anymore.
11th July, 2009
The Cold War may or may not be lurking in the shade, but the mystique of Russian-American summitry lingers. In an event packed with animated passions in the run-up to it, and loaded with history, as the summit in Moscow on July 6-7 indeed was, what ultimately matters is the morning after. Read the rest of this entry »
Petras is one of the very few on the left to view Obama’s strategy objectively. He is right to stress that global conditions are no longer favourable for US intervention: we are witnessing, before our very eyes, the end of empire.
The recent events in Honduras and Iran, which pit democratically elected regimes against pro-US military and civilian actors intent on overthrowing them can best be understood as part of a larger White House strategy designed to rollback the gains achieved by opposition government and movements during the Bush years.
A number of days ago we heard that the AU has declared that they will not cooperate with the ICC indictment of Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir. This is a very positive development, and I would like to submit my own testimony on behalf of Sudan and its president Omar al Bashir, in a spirit of defiant resistance, and for the cause of truth. Read the rest of this entry »
The meaning of Biden’s sabre-rattling now becomes clear: it’s part of a fiendishly clever scheme to put a wedge between Russia and Iran. It’s becoming an amusing spectator sport watching the cretinous US leadership trying to cope with the reality of their ebbing power.
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman has said the recent remarks by US Vice President Joe Biden, who said Israel has the right to attack Iran, have surprised Moscow. Read the rest of this entry »
Celente is a bit hard on Mussolini who would , of course, have been appalled at government backing for purely parasitic financial wheeling and dealing. The problem is not state intervention per se but the fact that it is not orientated to rebuilding infrastructure, productive capacity and the general welfare.
As Americans celebrate July 4th, they can contemplate that the union of “free and independent states,” like the former British colonial power, has evolved into its final manifestation–a complete whore house. While Members of Parliament in London charge their expense accounts with every personal expenditure, including the rental of adult xxx-rated films, an American newspaper put the reporting of public policy out to bids until politico.com blew the whistle.
GABRIEL Ciro Noriega, a journalist from San Juan Pueblo, was killed on Friday night after leaving a television program, according to Andrés Pavón Murillo, president of the Human Rights Defense Committee in Honduras.
The Obama administration has ordered the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (2 MEB) into a potentially bloody offensive in the southern province of Helmand. The objective is the suppression of the ethnic Pashtun population, which is overwhelmingly hostile to the seven-and-a-half year US and NATO occupation of the country and rejects the legitimacy of the Afghan puppet government headed by President Hamid Karzai.
Robert Hormats, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs, is to be installed as Under Secretary of Economics, Business, and Agricultural Affairs. This comes as one more, probably unnecessary reminder of the total control exercised by Wall Street over the Obama administration’s economic and financial policy. True, Hormats is “a talker rather than a decider” according to one former White House official, but he will find plenty of old friends used to making decisions, almost all of them uniformly disastrous for the U.S. and global economy
In These New Times 