Syria chemical weapons claim: The BBC just doesn’t give up By William Bowles

24 August 2013

Evidently, the BBC was not satisfied with the propaganda pieces I referred to in yesterday’s article, so it’s come out with another, equally audacious piece of fiction that reiterates, again without any proof, the same drivel it peddled to us yesterday (and the day before). But what ‘UN’s Angela Kane in Syria urges chemical weapons probe‘ (24/8/13) does is communicate a sense that it (the BBC’s) wishes might yet come true; that the Empire would once again unleash the dogs of war this time on poor, destroyed Syria.

The BBC’s Syrian Chemical Weapons Coverage: An exercise in Imperial deception By William Bowles

23 August 2013

Over the past three days, since the story first broke, the BBC’s news Website (I use the word news advisedly) has carried twelve stories on the alleged chemical weapons attack that took place in a suburb of Damascus. Today’s offerings include, Hague believes Assad behind attack (23/8/13), without offering a shred of proof that the Assad government is behind the alleged attack or even that it took place, takes foreign secretary Hague’s ‘belief’ as a given. The lead paragraph tells it all:

Pirates of the Mediterranean By William Bowles

20 May 2011

“The media rush to glorify Obama the ‘warrior president’ is symptomatic of a Western society that has come to view war as entirely normal… It is by now almost impossible to imagine that the West would not always be attacking, or targeting for attack, some defenceless nation or other.” — ‘You Cannot Kill An Ideology With A Gun‘ By Media Lens

All things being equal, which undoubtedly they are not, and surely that’s point, the long overdue arrival of a truly socialized, globalized planet would have been able to tackle the mess capitalism has made of things. After all, our disasters are now planetary in scale and thus can now only be handled by the planet as a whole. That means all of us, not just a privileged few.

As things fall apart By William Bowles

4 February, 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation

If it wasn’t such a tragedy the headlines in the corporate media would be truly laughable! Led of course, by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the duel cheerleaders for US corporate capital, where we read the following titled ‘Egypt has Obama cautiously shifting world view on democracy’:

“Shortly after taking office, President Obama traveled to Cairo to declare a new day in U.S. relations with the Muslim world – saying there was “no straight line” to building democratic societies in the Middle East.

“The June 2009 address was in part intended to show a clean break from a George W. Bush-era “freedom agenda” of promoting electoral democracies across the region. Yet Obama now finds himself forced to move much closer to that world view as he escalates pressure on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to make immediate changes.” — Washington Post, 4 February, 2011

‘Yes We Can’. ‘No We Won’t!’ By William Bowles

27 November, 2009

“It was amusing to read that a well-dressed Virginia couple, husband with a tux, blonde wife in a Sari managed to infiltrate the White House State Dinner, presumably an institution known for the highest of security. Red faced secret service officials muttered something about a security post that did not follow procedures. They hoaxed their way in.

“Oh, how could we be human without human errors? To add insult to injury, Joe Biden had his picture taken with the party crashers. All Smiles. Who knew?

“But a more insidious infiltration may have occurred and is still largely unaccounted for. Could there be an imposter in the oval office? In a scene out of the movie “ALIEN,” Barack Obama’s evil “Mini-Me” seems to have infiltrated the body and brain of the 44th President turning a Yes We Can candidate into the No We Won’t President.” — “Infiltrating” the Oval Office, an “Alien” Obama?, The News Dissector, 27 November, 2009

Imposter in the White House? What is it with a lot of liberal/left thinkers and the idea that somehow Obama started off as one kind of person (the ‘Yes We Can’ bit) and has been ‘turned’ into a ‘No We Won’t’ kinda prez? Where does this come from?

It was clear from the getgo what kind of president Obama would be. It’s like the argument that in the days running up to the March 18, 2003 invasion of Iraq by the barbarians, the whole thing could have been called off, if Saddam had done the ‘right thing’, whatever that was.

You don’t get to send 250,000 soldiers and materiel right up to the borders of Iraq and then send ’em all home again, any more than you get to become president of the United States without being already utterly and totally compromised on anything meaningful.

“It is in our strategic interest, in our national security interest, to make sure that al-Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot operate effectively in those areas…We are going to dismantle and degrade their capabilities and ultimately dismantle and destroy their networks.

“After eight years — some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done — it is my intention to finish the job,” Obama said. “And I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we’re doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals, that they will be supportive.” — Barack Obama, ‘Afghan troops announcement likely Dec. 1’, Washington Post, 24 November, 2009

The only people feeling conned are those who conned themselves into thinking that Obama was something other than a true servant of the Empire. The term ‘house negro’ comes to mind but that’s probably very non-PC these days. Whatever, he fulfilled a purpose, he fllled an ideological void with promise, in very much the same way as a TV commercial offers the fantasy of the faraway place, of being somebody else and last but not least, the fantasy of the skin.

It was a brilliant but extremely short-term ‘solution’ to the crisis of legitimacy the state was going through when it was decided at the highest levels that Obama was to be the ‘chosen one’. Short-term because, well look at what he‘s doing: aside from the rhetoric and the cool family photo ops, he’s Bush in drag. Okay, it was a toss-up between playing the female or race card but she’s right in there anyway and right from the getgo, and followed by all the usual suspects, Brzezinski, damn, the entire Cabal!

I could go about Danny Schecter’s piece, “‘Infiltrating” the Oval Office’ as it contains a very good analysis of what I’d expect the titular head of Empire to be doing, like receiving his corporate and political masters, who want to make sure he’s making the ‘right’ kinds of decisions for them. How could it ever be otherwise? It’s been this way for decades.

Without a really coherent, focused and determined force, independent of the current barbarians running the show, a force that can bring real pressure, not just on the prez but on the entire state machine, there is no way change can be effected and especially in the Oval Office (perhaps we’ve all been watching too many movies about fantasy presidents to recognize when the real fantasy prez comes along?).

Even if, and it’s a big if, Obama really does want to ‘heal the planet’, he has even less chance of effecting real change on just about anything than either you or I do. It’s self-delusion to think otherwise.

What depresses me about ‘Infiltrating” the Oval Office’ is the feeling of being betrayed and let down that pervades it, it shouldn’t be so. But if nothing else, the one positive aspect of the Obama ‘dilemma’ for left/liberals, is that perhaps at long last some very sacred bubbles have been burst? The same goes for the Left’s relationship to the Labour government here in the UK where a lot of bubbles have also been burst. I think it’s time for a real shakeup on the Left about what being Left is really all about?

Barack Obama, front man for the ‘man’ By William Bowles

15 August 2009

I contend that ever since the first slave ship left the shores of Africa, the ideology of racism has been central to the success of capitalism. Without it and the wealth that slavery produced, Europe and its bastard offspring, the United States, would never have accumulated the capital that made today’s world possible. And if the corrosive and utterly destructive effects of the ideology of racism were not apparent to you before the election of Barack ‘Hope & Change’ Obama, then surely by now they should be, and especially its effects on the ‘left’.

Obama – Bush Lite or just Dark? By William Bowles

1 August 2009

When it emerged that Barack Obama was to be the candidate for 2008 election I wrote extensively on why such a ‘radical’ solution was chosen, asserting that selecting a black man was a stroke of genius, if the ‘masters of the universe’ could pull it off. Amazing really, considering the people who did it, essentially the Democratic Leadership Council (see, ‘Not corrupted by DLC, says Obama’, Blackcommentator.com and where you can find a wealth of information on the DLC and Obama) and that the selection was made at least five years ago (see my ‘Sucker bait or the politics of smoke and mirrors’). At the same time, I was also aware of the paradox(es) involved and the potential pitfalls that might mean either bumping him off or removing him by some other means, I kid you not.

Barack Obama — a wolf in sheep’s clothing or just the shepherd? By William Bowles

13 November 2008

“There is no doubt that the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is historic. But does framing him as America’s “first black president” show that we have not come nearly as far as we’d like to think?” — How Far Have We Really Come from the “One-Drop Rule”? by Judith Siers-Poisson, The Weekly Spin

A triumph of image over substance

Well, depending on your politics, it seems that either Obama is the best thing since sliced bread (or Mandela, take your pick) or, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I lean toward the latter but with a lot of reservations and not just because of what he, Obama is but simply because of how and why he got to be prez. Thus I view Obama more as the shepherd, who, to paraphrase is instead leading the sheep to slaughter.

Vast forces were set in motion some time ago, a decision was taken at the very highest level, that an entire new reality had to be constructed if the gangsters were going to hang onto their ill-gotten gains. Bush and his half-arsed megalomaniac cronies had really fucked things up, it was time for the construction of a ‘break with the past’. And I said it at the time of Obama’s selection, that it was a stroke of pure genius, but one not without its opponents in the ruling political class who we might well term the ‘old guard’, witness the evil rantings of Hillary Clinton, who really blew her ‘feminist’ cachet, copious tears notwithstanding.

“Obama Wins! … Ad Age’s Marketer of the Year” — Advertising Age, November 5, 2008 and beating out Apple no less.

The Election Results by Age, First Time and Race

5 November 2008

See William Bowles: ‘Obama and the Left’s Dilemma?’

Does a leopard change its spots? By William Bowles

26 July 2008

The US government is talking with Iran, so what’s the catch? The simple answer is the November election. The move is clearly aimed at associating McCain/Republican Party with a new, kinder, softer Bush cabal although the Washington Post sees it somewhat differently. In an unabashed paean to Obama it says: