Source: The Guardian

Ten years after the publication of No Logo, Naomi Klein switches her attention from the mall to Barack Obama and discovers that corporate culture has taken over the US government

Brand Obama: wristwatches with the image of President-elect Barack Obama and his family, December 2008. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

by Naomi Klein
January 16, 2010

Extracted from a 10th anniversary edition of No Logo to be published by Fourth Estate on 21 January.

In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called “Absolut No ­Label”. The company’s global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that “For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what’s on the outside, it’s the inside that really matters.” Read the full story

Source: The Progressive

by Matthew Rothschild
December 2, 2009

If you closed your eyes during much of the President’s speech on Afghanistan Tuesday night and just listened to the words, you easily could have concluded that George W. Bush was still in the Oval Office.

Or, at the very least, that Obama had stolen his speechwriters.

Because, like Bush, Obama had barely cleared his throat when out came the first mention of September 11, along with the Bushian line: “We did not ask for this fight.” Read the full story

Source: The Guardian

Demonstrators with hands covered in fake blood and a Tony Blair mask protest outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in London. –Reuters Photo/Luke MacGregor

Until Chilcot hears UN weapons inspectors’ testimony, the fiction of Britain honestly seeking a WMD smoking gun prevails

by Scott Ritter
November 27, 2009

With its troops no longer engaged in military operations inside Iraq, Great Britain has been liberated politically to conduct a postmortem of that conflict, including the sensitive issue of the primary justification used by then Prime Minister Tony Blair for going to war, namely Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. Read the full story

Source: The Telegraph

Video here

Tony Blair and George Bush might have “signed in blood” their agreement to topple Saddam Hussein a year before the Iraq war, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington.

by Gordon Rayner
November 26, 2009

Sir Christopher Meyer told the Iraq Inquiry that the two men spent an afternoon meeting in private at the former president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, which appeared to lead to a shift in the then Prime Minister’s stance on Iraq.

Sir Christopher said: “I took no part in any of the discussions and there was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there. Read the full story

Longue vie au Roi...President !! (Artwork: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE's/flickr)

versión en español abajo

Will You Love Every Future President?

by David Swanson
October 15, 2009

Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Some of the new powers that those two stole from Congress, the courts, the states, and us the people are being abused less severely in this new age of Obama; others, more so; but far more crucially, in a pattern followed by recent presidencies, all are being maintained, if not expanded, and thus more firmly cemented into place for future presidents to use. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you are likely to strongly oppose some major decisions of some future presidents. So it shouldn’t be hard to envision some pretty undesirable consequences that might flow from presidential power that increasingly approaches the absolute. Read the full story

What was once depicted as a grave act of lawlessness — Bush’s NSA program — is now deemed a vital state secret.

(Photo Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t, Adapted From: buhsnarf, mokblog, yaniecks / flickr)

by Glenn Greenwald
November 1, 2009

The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the “state secrets” privilege — which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) — to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government’s domestic surveillance activities.  Obama did so again this past Friday — just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege.  Instead — as predicted — the DOJ continues to embrace the very same “state secrets” theories of the Bush administration — which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned — and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law. Read the full story

G20 police, by cneverman (flickr.com)

by David Michael Green
October 2, 2009

What if the Russians invaded?

It’s not so far-fetched an idea, you know. We spent half a century and trillions of dollars to make sure that it would never happen, so it’s really not such a strange notion.

So what if the Russians invaded?

What if they came and stole all of our money?

What if the Russians invaded and enslaved our children as cheap worker bee drones locked in dismal dead-end jobs?

What if the Russians invaded and excavated all of our natural resources, leaving only mountains of toxic debris in their wake? Read the full story

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; adapted from saschapohflepp / flickr)

by Henry A. Giroux
September 21, 200

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.

Hannah Arendt[1]

In the current American political landscape, truth is not merely misrepresented or falsified; it is overtly mocked. As is well known, the Bush administration repeatedly lied to the American public, furthering a legacy of government mistrust while carrying the practice of distortion to new and almost unimaginable heights. Even now, almost a year after Bush left office, it is difficult to forget the lies and government-sponsored deceits in which it was claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was making deals with al-Qaeda and, perhaps the most infamous of all, the United States did not engage in torture. Unlike many former administrations, the Bush administration was engaged in pure political theater,[2] giving new meaning to Hannah Arendt’s claim that “Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.”[3] For instance, when the government wasn’t lying to promote dangerous policies, it willfully produced and circulated fake news reports in order to provide the illusion that the lies and the policies that flowed from them were supported by selective members of the media and the larger public. The Bush deceits and lies were almost never challenged by right-wing media “patriots,” who were too busy denouncing as un-American anyone who questioned Bush’s official stream of deception and deceit. Ironically, some of these pundits were actually on the government payroll for spreading the intellectual equivalent of junk food. And some of them where actually being paid by the Bush government to make such claims. Read the full story

by Jason Leopold
September 27, 2009

(Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

In recent days, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the “troubled” history of the poor people’s advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

Dropped down the memory hole is the fact that ACORN was at the center of the so-called “prosecutor-gate” scandal, when the Bush administration pressured US attorneys to bring indictments over the grassroots group’s voter-registration drives, then fired some prosecutors who resisted what they viewed as a partisan strategy not supported by solid evidence. Read the full story

Muntadhar al Zaidi, an Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at President Bush, speaks after his release from prison Tuesday. (AP)

September 15, 2009

BAGHDAD — Muntadhar al Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at former President Bush last year in an act of protest that gained international notoriety, was freed from an Iraqi prison Tuesday after nine months behind bars and gave a passionate defense of his actions.

Here are his remarks, translated by McClatchy special correspondent Sahar Issa. Read the full story