Guest Post by Steven Miller

(This is the 1^st of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this post, Miller describes a parallel process in which Big Pharma used their relative monopoly on anti-retrovirals to exclude third world countries who were the most severely impacted by AIDS. )

On April 2, President Obama announced the next step in research of the human brain. This is the BRAIN Initiative – Brain Research through Advanced Neurotechnologies. The US government will finance research into the next generation of technology to map the human brain with $100 million in seed money. The next step is to develop new electrical, optical, computer-assisted technology to investigate how the brain works at the level of neurons to determine how they work and how they link up in neural networks.

The current level of brain research is already pretty amazing. Without invading the skull, scientists can map the areas of the brain, and even neural pathways, that respond to specific stimuli. For example, a given area of the brain will respond to stimulus by increasing the blood flow when it is being used. This area radiates more heat, which is easily detected.

When someone is shown a picture of their pet dog, for example, science can detect exactly which part of the brain activates. Scientists are thus able to detect which brain structures are involved when you dream, when you drive the car, when you fall in love or when you do your taxes. The brain, however, is perhaps the most complex thing in Nature. It has 10 billion cells that make 100 trillion connections. Getting down into the individual neurons and connections themselves offers the possibility of actually determining the structures of the mind, human personality and memory.

 These amazing advances will all be privatized. Corporations intend to claim parts of the brain as private property and sell access for a price. The privatization trend has been rampant in biology and medicine for 30 years.

Can You Own the Sun?

Polio epidemics swept the United States every summer in the early 1950s, terrifying families and entire communities. Sometimes whole birthday parties of kids would be affected, since bodily fluids in swimming pools could spread the virus. At the peak, in 1952, there were 58,000 new cases of children who were crippled or paralyzed.

 Dr Jonas Salk became an international hero in 1955 by proving that a killed virus could easily be made into medicine that could immunize people against the disease. By 1957, 100 million doses had been administered in the US. Treatment on a similar scale spread rapidly across the industrial world. In 2002, over 500 million children were immunized in almost 100 countries. Today the Americas are polio free and the disease is close to extinction around the world.

Salk was asked, in a television interview, who owned the patent. His famous response was, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

This response would be impossible today. Equally impossible would be the massive immunization rapid-response by the public. The single thing that prevents this sort of public health response is that corporations now control the development of science and medicine through patents. And, yes, they do intend to patent the sun!

 Fast-forward 40 years to the 1990s. Consider what happened with the next modern scourge, AIDS. After fighting the disease for 15 years, scientists had developed the cocktail of anti-viral drugs that would prolong life indefinitely by containing the virus. This time however the patents were all controlled by Big Pharma, the cartel of drug-makers like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKlein. By that time, drugs now were the considered private property of corporations; thus they were protected by international treaties over intellectual property enforced by the United States.

 The public no longer had the right to use the anti-virals without paying billion-dollar corporations for them. As AIDS swept across Africa, India and Asia, these corporations, demonstrating once again their great concern for the improvement of humanity, offered them for sale for a mere $15,000 a year. They claimed that the drugs were expensive to manufacture. Besides, they reported, Africans could not use them effectively. Maybe that was because they lived on less than $2 a day.

In India, Dr Yusuf Hamied broke the patents and began manufacturing the anti-virals so easily that they were available for only $350 a year. Big Pharma responded with the true compassion that only corporate-persons can evince. They used their political power to force governments across the world to criminalize anyone who dared to distribute the inexpensive drugs. Some ten million people died as a result.

The response of the public to these police actions was so massive that the governments of Brazil and India were forced to declare that they would break the patents. Corporations could no longer control the distribution of generic AIDS drugs. Thousands of lives were saved. Big Pharma still works actively today to prevent the distribution of life-saving generic drugs today. (1) They innocently strive to maximize profit, even at the expense of human life.

 This is a terrible crime against humanity, one committed by corporate-persons against real persons. Such crime is inevitable when corporations control the resources of health, medicine, science, research and, in fact, any and all forms of technology.

NOTES

1) Democracy Now, “Fire in the Blood”, January 13, 2013

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

photo credit: krischall via photopin cc

Crossposted at  Daily Censored

Is Obama preparing for martial law? All the signs say yes. Many prominent market analysts predict the US economy will collapse some time in 2013. They fully believe Americans will wake up one morning and learn the government has closed all the banks, as they have in Cyprus. When this happens, there will be long queues at cash machines – until they run out of money. With on-line transactions frozen, merchants will decline credit and debit card purchase. Customers with cash-in-hand will strip supermarket shelves of bread, milk, flour, tobacco and other staples.

This is the scenario currently being played out in Cyprus, following the extended bank holiday the government declared last Tuesday. The Cypriot banks are still closed. The moment the government opens them, all account holders with an ounce of sense will withdraw all their money. The European Central Bank has ordered the government of Cyprus to confiscate a percentage of customers’ savings accounts to help bail out Cyprus’s bank debt.

Similar laws are being considered in Italy and New Zealand. Many believe Greece, Spain, Italy (which still doesn’t have a government), and Portugal will go down the same road.

The US Debt Debacle

As Storm Clouds Gathering outlines in the following video, it’s a matter of speculation whether it will be weeks or months before the US economy unravels. The current US debt stands at $16 trillion. This is in addition to $86-123 trillion in “unfunded liabilities” (i.e. the toxic debt Treasury “bought” from the banks that were too big to fail). Added to this, is $1.2 quadrillion in private debt the banking system has incurred through derivatives trading (imagine bailing that out).

There is no possible way this level of debt can ever be repaid. This kind of debt bubble is like a pyramid scheme. When you run out of new suckers to pull in, the whole thing collapses. As in 2008, Obama is going to ask US taxpayers (and maybe people with savings accounts this time) to tighten their belts to save all the banks that are “too big to fail.” Something tells me Americans aren’t going to fall for it again, any more than their Cypriot, Greek, Italian and Spanish cousins have. It would seem Obama doesn’t think so, either. It sure looks like his administration is preparing for major civil unrest.

The video carefully compiles all the evidence suggesting Obama is preparing to enact martial law: the recent purchase by Homeland Security of $1.6 billion of ammunition and thousands of military grade armored vehicles, the leaked memo about the establishment of military internment camps and, most importantly, the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.

The film proposes some intriguing options for addressing the imminent political crisis. Voting the bums out isn’t one of them. It’s far too late for that. However the filmmakers also make some cogent arguments why violent revolution isn’t a viable solution.

photo credit: The U.S. Army via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Below is a fascinating excerpt from Part 8 of Louis Farrakhan’s lecture series The Time and What Must Be Done. Farrahkan is the present leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), best known for its most famous member Malcolm X.

It’s been more than ten years since I heard Farrakhan speak. He has made remarkable progress from his overt antisemitism and talk of white people as blue-eyed devils. I still have a slight problem with the “666” symbolism of the year 2013, which he links with the “beasts” (America, England, Germany and France).

Otherwise his analysis is remarkably similar to that of white economist, journalist and former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts. The NOI leader is highly critical of Obama’s murderous policies in Libya and Syria and his use of drones for targeted assassinations, as well as his apparent willingness to support an Israeli-inspired war with Iran. He also condemns the President’s destruction of American democracy. He describes the US as an oligarchy leading the American people into fascism.

More information about the full 52 week series at Farrakhan promises god has execution planned for america

photo credit: A.Currell via photopin cc

Cross posted at Daily Censored

Screen shot of Dashboard, Obama's data mining ap

Curious how the mainstream media is willing to talk about Team Obama’s cynical use of data mining to win tomorrow’s election – in New Zealand – but not in the US. Radio New Zealand commentator Katherine Ryan interviewed US political analyst Michael Cornfield on her “Nine to Noon”  program this morning. Cornfield founded the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University

According to the New Zealand Listener, which also published an article this week about “quantitative behavioral targeting,” both campaigns “are reluctant to talk about the behind-the-scenes digital manoeuvring that some voters might find sinister (you think?), such as data mining, “micro targeting” and its even more precise cousin, “nano-targeting.”

Sinister? What an understatement. In her interview Ryan refers to Obama’s slick campaign strategy – of exploiting potential voters’ on-line behavior – as a “dog whistle.” For people unacquainted with the term, it’s used to describe subliminal messaging a target responds to unknowingly – much as a dogs respond to high pitched whistles undetectable by the human ear.

Here’s a rather frightening excerpt from the Listener article, which makes the point that Obama’s technical outreach is “light years” ahead of Romney’s:

BIG DATA IS WATCHING YOU

Everything about how campaigns at a presidential level are getting out the vote has changed,” says Michael Cornfield, an expert on politics and the internet at George Washington University. Every time someone uses social media, they leave a digital trace, and all those traces are being collected and cross-checked against voter files. States keep rolls of who is registered and who shows up to vote, and some also include party affiliation, giving campaigns an extra piece of vital information. The scope for picking up information from these digital traces is huge. About 60% of American adults use social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, according to a survey by the Pew Research Centre’s Internet & American Life Project. It also found that two-thirds of these users – or four out of every 10 American adults – have used social media for civic or political activities.

“All this demographic and behavioural information – the websites you’ve been to, the pages you’ve liked – is now fodder for the campaigns as they attempt to get out the vote. That’s a big change,” Cornfield says. For example, a mother in Wisconsin who orders eco-friendly nappies and drives a Toyota Prius might see a banner ad featuring Michelle Obama, and a Latina student in Nevada who visits TMZ, the celebrity gossip site, might see an ad in Spanish. The Obama campaign might not even bother with a middle-aged man in Virginia who has a gas-guzzling SUV and gets his news from Fox, the conservative channel. Tailored messaging does not end with the computer screen. It is all linked so volunteers who head out with clipboards know who lives in a house before they knock on the door and they are told what points to emphasise to appeal to that particular voter.

To hear the Katherine Ryan interview go to http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon and click on “The digital strategies used by the US presidential campaigns.” The easiest way to hear the interview is to download the MP3 file.

If video won’t play go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p_NretS7To

Brilliant news summary by Wide Awake News anchor Charlie McGrath. McGrath reminds us that the garbage the mainstream media feeds us regarding the US political system, the US economy and the war on terror is nothing but a tissue of lies. It’s stuff like this that reminds us why TV news and newspaper are losing their audience to Internet radio and TV.

Political lies: McGrath reminds us that the Red and Blue team both bat for the same side – that Obama continued all George W Bush’s policies and that Romney, if elected, will merely continue Obama’s. He compares the presidential debates to a “made for TV” sporting event in which both the Republican and Democratic Party agree not to address the important issues affecting Americans.

Economic lies: He reminds us that the US economy is controlled by the Federal Reserve and private banks, that there is no recovery, that our savings and pensions are being steadily wiped by inflation, that global debt can’t ever be repaid and that the banksters who collapsed the economy in 2008 haven’t gone anywhere – if anything they have merely consolidated their control over the banking and monetary system.

The ludicrous war on terror: An American is five times more likely to be struck by lightening than to be killed by a terrorist. Yet the US continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to spread democracy by torturing and assassinating people. We pretend we’re getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, just like we pretend we’re getting out of debt. No one ever mentions the 137,000 private contractors who have replaced the US troops in Iraq.

The funny thing is that most Americans already seem to know this stuff, which is why they have the poorest voter turnout of all industrialized countries. During most presidential elections, slightly over half of eligible US voters vote. During non-presidential years, the turnout is 36-38%. Americans already know that nothing they do in the voting booth will make a damn bit of difference to their lives.

From the New York Times – go to paragraph 15 on page 2:

Despite the highly publicized withdrawal of US troops last December, recently a unit of Special Operations soldiers was quietly deployed to Iraq to “advise on counter terrorism and help with intelligence.” Meanwhile Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could result in the redeployment of small units of American Special Operation forces on “training missions.”

In other words Obama, the anti-war president who won the Nobel Peace prize, hasn’t managed to end US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s obvious the Times is trying to kill the story by burying it at the end of an article about Syria. I wonder why?

(This is the first of two posts about the Obama Administration’s hypocritical policy towards Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement.)

Protestors retake Pearl Roundabout

Bahrain, one of the Arab Spring countries, has been in the international news recently, owing to the controversy over Britain’s decision to grant Sheik Nasser bin Hamad al-Khalifa, one of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa’s six sons and the head of Bahrain’s Olympic Committee, a visa for the London Olympics. In June the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) called on Britain to deny Sheik Nasser a visa, on the basis of serious human rights violations constituting crimes against humanity.  Numerous international human rights groups were greatly concerned that Nasser headed a committee that arrested, imprisoned and tortured 150 sportsmen and sports officials for participating in the February 2011 protests at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama. Some athletes stated that Nasser himself beat them.

As part of the revolutionary wave of protests in the Middle East and North Africa following the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia, the Bahraini protests were initially aimed at achieving greater political freedom and equality for the majority Shi’a population. Following the government’s deadly night raid against activists camped out at the Pearl Roundabout, protestors retook the roundabout and their demands expanded to include a call for the ruling family to step down.

Although international journalists are banned in Bahrain, Al Jazeera reporters secretly filmed the crackdown, the subsequent Saudi invasion and attack on medical personnel at Salmaniya hospital and other Bahraini Hospitals and clinics. Their remarkable secret footage appears in the award-winning documentary Shouting in the Dark.

***
Saudi Forces Brutally Suppress Bahraini Protests

In March King Hamad requested military assistance from Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) and declared martial law and a three-month state of emergency. With Saudi military assistance, the Pearl Roundabout was cleared of protesters, as hundreds were beaten, arrested, tortured, murdered and disappeared. After the state of emergency was lifted, pro-democracy protestors resumed their weekly marches and protests – mostly outside Manama’s business district.

George Galloway Threatens Nasser with Citizens’ Arrest

Despite British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s assertion that any government officials who engaged in torture would be denied visas for the Olympic Games, Sheikh Nasser got his visa.  - Labour MP George Galloway subsequently threatened Prince Nasser with citizen’s arrest if he showed his face in Britain.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread871831/pg1

Galloway’s well-publicized warning coincided with a statement by the UN Human Rights Council condemning human rights abuses in Bahrain. The statement was signed by most European countries, including France and Germany, but not the UK or the US

Predictably Hague denied a visa to the president of Syria’s Olympic committee. In Syria Britain is backs the armed insurgency. In Bahrain they, like the US, back the minority Sunni regime and supply them weapons to kill pro-democracy activists.

Obama Authorizes Multimillion Dollar Arms Shipment

In May, Obama also authorized a multimillion dollar arms shipment multimillion dollar arms shipment to the government of Bahrain – because of “security interests.” Translated, this means the Bahraini royal family, like the House of Saud, is a key ally on a US or Israeli attack on Iran. International analysts believe Obama is eager to crush Bahrain’s (majority) Shi’a-led pro-democracy movement in Bahrain – owing to nervousness they will to go berserk if Shiite Iran is attacked.

Manama Bahrain also happens to be home to the headquarters of America’s Fifth Fleet, responsible for naval forces in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and coast off East Africa as far south as Kenya.

Coincidentally the US arms deal was consummated just as Bahraini neurosurgeon Dr Nabeel Rajab was about to go on trial for giving medical assistance to pro-democracy activists during the February 2011 protests.

IHRC Bus Campaign

While Galloway never caught up with Nassar to arrest him, visitors to the 2012 London Olympics enjoyed a highly informative campaign by Britain’s Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), in which 450 of London’s iconic red buses were festooned with banners with graphic images of torture and other human rights abuses in Bahrain and Palestine.

***
Tracking Bahraini Dissidents with FinSpy

The other recent story out of Bahrain that has received virtually no attention in the US – except for a brief mention New York Times – is the malware a British company recently sold the Bahraini royal family to assist them in spying on dissidents. British software company Gamma supposedly developed FinSpy to assist governments agencies in “criminal investigations.” Thus it’s curious how Bahrain and other repressive Middle East regimes got hold of it to monitor pro-democracy activists. FinSpy has the capability to grab images of computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. Moreover its creators specifically engineered it to elude antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, F-Secure and others.

To be continued, with a discussion of CNN’s decision to censor the documentary one of their journalists filmed in Bahrain.

I have recently returned from a week in Australia, where I was pleasantly surprised by the extensive coverage of “current” (government) affairs on mainstream TV and in the major newspapers. Current affairs programming is very much lacking in New Zealand, as in Canada and the US. For younger readers, who may be unfamiliar with the concept of current or public affairs, these were programs and/or newspaper articles offering in-depth investigative reporting and/or diverse views on important aspects of public policy. The PBS program Bill Moyer’s Journal, which aired for the last time in April 2010, was an excellent of current affairs programming.

Prior to the corporate consolidation of the mainstream media, all the major American TV and radio networks, including PBS and NPR, offered at least a half dozen current affairs shows every week. Most featured wide ranging debate between experts and “analysts” representing a wide diversity of perspectives. In the last two decades, this diversity has totally vanished from the mainstream airwaves and major dailies. Instead what we get is universally pro-Wall Street and pro-corporate news and opinion. Given that most federal policy is pro-Wall Street and pro-corporate, it’s also strongly pro-government .

Because most western democracies have experienced the same media consolidation as the US and Canada, I expected to find more of the same in Australia, especially as the main news item for the week concerned the privatization of education (i.e. the diversion of taxpayer money to support private schools). Over the past year, this issue has also received major media attention in the US – both in the form of attacks on teachers and teachers’ unions and unabashed boosterism for (publicly funded) privately run charter schools and (publicly funded) voucher schemes making taxpayer money available to parents who send their kids to private schools. Thanks to major lobbying by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Koch Brothers and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US media has been pretty unified that poorly funded, poorly performing inner city public schools should be punished by having their funding cut still further – if not instantly shut down and transformed into privately run charter schools.

The Gonski Report and Public Funding of Private Schools

In Australia, in contrast, the mainstream media is far more willing to look at factual evidence, i.e. what statistical studies actually reveal. The issue of school privatization was all over the Australian news last week owing to the release of the Gonski Report. The Australian government commissioned prominent businessman and philanthropist David Gonski to undertake an analysis of why student academic achievement is declining in Australia. The report’s conclusions were unequivocal: 1) student achievement in well-funded government and private schools meets or exceeds international standards, 2) by age 15, students from poorly funded schools are more than two years behind their well-off contemporaries, 3) the only way to improve academic achievement in low socioeconomic schools is to increase per-pupil funding to the level of well-funded (government and private) schools, and 4) Australia has no hope of maintaining its global economic dominance with a large uneducated underclass.

Funding Education: An Economic Investment

Given that similar studies in the US, Canada and New Zealand show that students in poorly funded schools perform worse than their counterparts in well-funded schools, these findings and conclusions seem eminently logical. Mind you Gonski isn’t some bleeding heart liberal urging better funding for low socioeconomic schools because of his progressive ideological beliefs. This is a prominent industrialist asserting that improving the academic achievement of all Aussie children is an investment in Australia’s economic future.

Australia’s mainstream press was quick to pick up on number four – the importance of educational reform to the country’s economic future. An editorial in the August 27^th Sydney Morning Herald is an excellent example. Recipe for Education Apartheid starts out “The achievement gaps between rich and poor exposed by Gonski are nothing less than a national scandal.” It’s typical of the commentary I read in a number of papers and watched on Australian TV. Can you imagine reading something like that in the New York Times? It wouldn’t happen.

Could you even imagine the Obama administration ever funding a Gonski-type study? Forget it. That wouldn’t happen, either. The President, along with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, supports an aggressive school privatization agenda and is too busy pressuring states to transfer even more money from public to unproven charter schools. As with most of Obama’s neoliberal agenda, there is big money in privatizing public programs and transferring taxpayer dollars to private corporate coffers. We’ve already seen it with his giant insurance and drug company welfare program known as Obamacare and with his rapid “corporatization” of the US military, resulting in the transfer of trillions of taxpayer dollars to dubious private contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton.

American Readers Abandon the Pro-Corporate Dailies

Even if the US government (or one or more states) did undertake their own Gonski study, we could count on the mainstream media to bury it. American academics have performed numerous studies that definitively link public school funding with achievement, as well as documenting low academic performance in low socioeconomic students who attend charter schools. None of this receive mainstream coverage. The mainstream media is too busy pushing their pro-privatization agenda to care about the evidence.

It pleases me immensely to see the American public wising up to to the pro-Wall Street propaganda peddled by the corporate media. Big city newspapers are dying like flies, as former readers flock to the Internet to find out what’s really happening in the world. I call this poetic justice.

FEAR members arrested

The website Newser has an update on the four soldiers arrested in Georgia yesterday for plotting to overthrow the government and assassinate President Obama. According the initial report on MSN , they formed an “anarchist” militia within the military, though later reports simply refer to them as “terrorists” and emphasize one member’s links to the Republican Party (he attended the 2008 convention as a page). The fact remains the Militia used the Army to recruit new members and wore distinctive tattoos that resemble an anarchy symbol.

According to Georgia prosecutors, the group called itself FEAR, short for Forever Enduring Always Ready. Authorities don’t know how many members it has. They funded the militia using $500,000 in insurance benefits their founder and leader, Pvt. Isaac Aguigui, received following the death of his pregnant wife. In addition to using the insurance money to buy $87,000 worth of semiautomatic assault rifles, other guns, and bomb components, they used some of it to buy land for the militia in Washington State. In addition to FEAR’s plans to take over Fort Stewart (Georgia), where they were stationed, they also plotted to bomb a dam in Washington State and poison the state’s apple crop. According to Georgia prosecutors, their ultimate goal was to overthrow the government and assassinate the president.

While the details are unclear, it appears that Georgia prosecutors learned of the plot after one of them, Pfc. Michael Burnett, pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges relating to the murder of a fellow group member and his girlfriend in December 2011. They were allegedly murdered based on suspicions the pair intended to expose FEAR’s plans to the authorities. Burnett has made a deal to cooperate with prosecutors in testifying against Arguigui and the two other soldiers, Sgt. Anthony Peden and Pvt. Christopher Salmon

Read more here

Ex-Panther Larry Pinkney

In an scorching indictment of Obama’s first four years as president, Black Panther veteran Larry Pinkney (former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa) weighs in on the betrayal of African Americans by Obama and the black “intelligentia.”

At his website Intrepid Report, Pinkney castigates Black America’s so-called intelligentsia for placing “pigmentation and hollow pride” above principles and selflessness.

According to Pinkney, “They have betrayed (and continue to betray) the masses of everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation and throughout Mother Earth. What they have done and who they are must never be forgotten.”

The article continues: “The Black intelligentsia (Pinkney identifies Cornell West and Angela Davis by name) knew, or should have known, better than many, that any person, irrespective of color or gender, who rises to become the head (i.e., chief executive) of the U.S. Empire would not hesitate to:

1) Give trillions of dollars of the people’s money to corporate banksters and other Wall Street robber barons.

2) Federally eliminate the much needed single payer universal health care option.

3) Militarily bomb Africa.

4) Murder women, men and children with incessant predator drone missile strikes upon other sovereign nations.

5) Utilize a self-legitimized ‘kill list’ to commit extrajudicial murders of Americans and non-Americans alike, without the bother of legitimate due process.

6) Sign into law the draconian NDAA—which calls for the indefinite detention in this nation of U.S. citizens—without charge, trial, judge, jury, or legal defense.

7) Continue operating the torture chamber at the U.S. gulag known as Guantanamo.”

Later he writes, “Notwithstanding his double-speak political rhetoric, Barack Obama has indeed ‘redistributed the wealth’ of this nation. He has massively redistributed the wealth from the public sectors, the dwindling middle classes, and the poor to the super-rich corporate/military elite—which is a fact which cannot possibly escape the awareness of the Black intelligentsia and which is precisely why he was overwhelmingly supported by the corporate elite of Lockheed, Goldman Sachs, and the assorted and sordid banking and pharmaceutical multinationals of Wall Street, etc.”

Read more here.