Opinion

For weeks, Congress has been wrapped up in passing President Trump’s big, brutal budget — the one that pays for tax cuts for the wealthy and a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget by taking food stamps and Medicaid away from people struggling to get by.

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives just barely passed this bill — it squeaked through by a single vote. Now the Senate is considering it.

Alongside trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy, the bill also gives big handouts to the Pentagon and the president’s plans to separate immigrant families. It would result in the country’s first-ever trillion-dollar Pentagon budget — and triple annual spending on the mass detention of immigrants.

General Wesley Clark, a former NATO commander, claimed that after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration had a plan to attack seven majority-Muslim countries over five years, starting with Iraq and followed by Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Iran was the only country not yet attacked, until this week. But it has been in the cross hairs of the American Empire for a long time. Clark said this was shown to him about 10 days after 9/11.

The American Empire has been consistent over the years in demonizing Iran, using the same playbook that was used to demonize Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi . There is a long list of propaganda tools that are effective. One obvious one is that every event in the Middle East is preceded by “Iranian backed”. Iranian backed Hezbollah, Iranian backed Yemeni, Iranian backed Hamas, Iranian backed Ice Cream.

https://worldbeyondwar.org/a-u-s-bank-closed-our-accounts-because-id-visited-cuba-six-months-ago/

Israel’s government, which has undertaken, with prevaricative impunity the illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian water sources, farmland, homes, property, and energy resources through ethnic cleansing and the execrable crimes of mass starvation and genocide in Gaza, has further escalated a world crisis by the preemptive bombing attack on Iran, through a self-proclaimed “Operation Rising Lion.”

This deadly deceit is of monumental proportions that one must struggle with the horrific reality it presents.

Attempting to label such crimes as a defensive strikes does violence to reason. The historical record will show that Israel’s oft-repeated insistence on the Iranian nuclear weapon threat was a contrivance to justify an arms buildup funded almost entirely by the American taxpayer.

We come to you now not merely with news, but with the unfolding of a new chapter in a long and turbulent story—a story of ideals, of struggle, and, at times, of painful self-examination.

The images on TV news are misleading. They can’t be otherwise. TV news seeks out the most dramatic visuals, and those are likely to be small fires and burning vehicles, police cars damaged, and riot-clad police.

These are images associated with violence, with insurrection, with riot. They help create a narrative, but they do little to explain what is actually happening in Los Angeles — and elsewhere. They obscure the truth by eliding complex discussion. And they feed into right-wing talking points that Democratic cities and states like L.A. and California are ungovernable, and that the federal government has to step in to restore order and protect average working Americans from insurrection.

Let’s be clear about what is happening, however. Federal immigration agents — masked and in military-style garb — descended on Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs to conduct workplace raids and the mass round-ups of undocumented workers. The communities responded with protests and active efforts to deny agents access to immigrant workers.