The United States prison system, not only a machine for mass incarceration, but a machine for modernized slave labor. The United States has 5% of the worlds population, yet we have 25% of the worlds prison population. Land of the free right?

It would seem the statistics say otherwise, since the official drug war president Nixon announced in the 70′s, our prison population has grown over 700%! Recent estimates put our prison population to well over 2.4 million inmates. 50% of the federal prison inmates are for non violent drug offenses. All the while 20% of state prison inmates are drug related.
Is this making Americans safer, or is there an entire industry making money off of imprisoning human beings? It's estimated that nearly 1 million convicts fill the ranks of Unicor. Unicor being the government owned corporation that handles the labor of inmates! It's no doubt the federal government see's an opportunity in prison labor, as they have used Unicor to have $100 million worth of military uniforms made for as little as $2 an hour. The government has no problem with using prison labor, and Unicor is estimated at raking in over $900 million a year.

Does the Name "Strauss-Kahn" Ring a Bell?

The International Monetary Fund has finally admitted that it was wrong to recommend austerity as early as it did in 2010-2011. The IMF now agrees that it should have waited until the US and EU economies were on a sustainable growth-path before advising them to trim their budget deficits and reduce public spending. According to a report issued by the IMF's research division, the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO): "IMF advocacy of fiscal consolidation proved to be premature for major advanced economies, as growth projections turned out to be optimistic...This policy mix was less than fully effective in promoting recovery and exacerbated adverse spillovers."

Now there's an understatement.

What's so disingenuous about the IMF's apology, is that the bank knew exactly what the effects of its policy would be, but stuck with its recommendations to reward its constituents. That's what really happened. The only reason it's trying to distance itself from those decisions now, is to make the public think it was all just a big mistake.

But it wasn't a mistake. It was deliberate and here's the chart that proves it:

On the heels of the publication of President Putin's lengthy interview with ITAR-TASS (which rivals the 14-year-old First Person interviews in terms of their scope and candidness), the Russian Foreign Ministry has published an important speech given by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the XXII Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, given last week.(Don't miss his TASS interview, either, given back in September.)

For those who have actually read his words or seen him speak, you'll know Lavrov is an intelligent man. He's also an expert diplomat -- always polite, always professional, always keeps his cool. So you can be sure there is a lot going on behind and between the words he says, both for him personally and those around him. Even then, based on what he does say, you can bet he leaves his Western 'colleagues' steaming.

And what does he say? Read on and see for yourself.

While I haven't covered the topic of drones very much as of late, it was a core topic at Liberty Blitzkrieg several years ago. The most recent, relevant piece I published on it was during the summer of 2013 and titled: The Truth About Drones.

Here's an excerpt:

A lot of Americans have an impression that drone strikes are less damaging to civilian populations than conventional airstrikes. This would be false. In fact, earlier this month I highlighted an article from the Guardian that demonstrated how in reality drone strikes are 10x more likely to harm civilians per incident.

Now, thanks to a recently leaked document we find that many more civilians including children have been killed in these strikes than many of us would like to admit. In fact, of the 746 people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan from 2006-2009, an incredible 20% were civilians and 94 (13% of the total) were children.

I strongly believe that the reason so many Americans blindly support the widespread use of drones is due to the mistaken belief that they are precise and result in few civilian casualties. It's important to get some of the facts out to the public in order to have a more informed debate on the matter.

The merchants of death and destruction in the US are still itching for a fight with Russia, and they're willing to sacrifice as many Ukrainians as necessary to do so. Things have not exactly gone their way however. In contrast to US puppet Poroshenko's claim that the so-called 'anti-terrorist operation' would be over in a matter of weeks, the rebels of Dontesk and Luhansk have so far successfully repelled all attempts by Kiev's neo-Nazis to bludgeon them into submission. As is usual in cases where the US is waging a proxy imperial war in someone else's country and the plan isn't going as expected, top US officials have flown in to Ukraine for 'attaboys' to get things moving.
Last Thursday, US vice-president Joe Biden made his third call to Kiev in seven months to meet his underlings friends and to turn the heat up on the warmongering. It should not be forgotten that the son of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, is on the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, the largest private producer of natural gas in Ukraine that holds large licenses to drill for gas in East Ukraine. And as long as there is a war going on, no drilling is possible.

So what did daddy Biden say in Ukraine:

Speaking at the Presidential Administrative Building in Kiev, Biden encouraged the Ukrainian government to press forward with its draconian economic reform agenda to meet the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF has promised $17 billion in loans to prop up the collapsing Ukrainian economy. Biden reassured his audience that the American government is "looking for opportunities to improve Ukraine's business climate and increase trade and investment."

While in Kiev, the vice president also announced a further $23 million in assistance to the Ukrainian government. So far this year the Obama administration has committed $320 million in aid to Ukraine, with $118 million for providing equipment and training to bolster the Ukrainian Armed Forces, State Border Guard Service and the National Guard.

Yes, the US is so generous, don't you think? $23 million in further assistance to the Ukrainian government, which will undoubtedly go to the war effort. That the US stole the best part if not all of Ukraine's 42 tons of gold back in March is of course a minor issue, something that the Ukrainian people will only be to happy to give. And who needs gold in the life hereafter, a place/condition that the US is doing its level best to achieve for every Ukrainian.

In 2011, as the entire world watched the Arab Spring in amazement, the US and its allies, predominantly working under the banner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), militarily overran the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

The peaceful civilian protesters they claimed to be intervening to protect were not really what the US and its cohorts presented to the world. Many of these so-called "protesters" were armed, and when this became apparent they eventually began to portray themselves as "rebel forces." These so-called "rebels" in Libya were not a military force that emerged spontaneously for the most part, but an insurgency movement cultivated and organised before any opposition activities were even reported in Libya.

If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality. We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities - particularly in communities of color. - Thomas Nolan, criminology professor and former police officer

Should police officer Darren Wilson be held accountable for the shooting death of unarmed citizen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014?

That the police officer was white and his victim black should make no difference. In a perfect world, it would not matter. In an imperfect world such as ours, however, racism is an effective propaganda tool used by the government and the media to distract us from the real issues.

As a result, the national dialogue about the dangers of militarized, weaponized police officers being trained to act like soldiers on the battlefield, shooting first and asking questions later, has shifted into a largely unspoken debate over race wars, class perceptions and longstanding, deep-seated notions of who deserves our unquestioning loyalty and who does not.

Putting aside our prejudices, however, let's not overlook the importance of Ferguson and this grand jury verdict. Tasked with determining whether Wilson should stand trial for Brown's shooting, the grand jury ruled that the police officer will not face charges for the fatal shooting.

However, the greater question - whether anything will really change to rein in militarized police, police shootings, lack of accountability and oversight, and a military industrial complex with a vested interest in turning America into a war zone - remains unanswered.

Ferguson matters because it provides us with a foretaste of what is to come. It is the shot across the bow, so to speak, a warning that this is how we will all be treated if we do not tread cautiously in challenging the police state, and it won't matter whether we're black or white, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat. In the eyes of the corporate state, we are all the enemy.

This is the lesson of Ferguson.

Despite earlier claims that US had no intention of supplying Ukraine with weapons, a recent leak of government documents has revealed plans to supply weapons to Kiev. The leak was published online by Ukrainian hackers group CyberBerkut.

The Ukrainian hacker group CyberBerkut published on Tuesday documents showing, in particular, that the Ukrainian military are receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Washington.

According to the hackers, the information was obtained during the visit of US Vice President Joe Biden to Ukraine last week, when they were able to access confidential State Department documents via a mobile device of a US delegation member.

"After examination of just a several files there is the impression that the Ukrainian army is the branch of US Armed Forces. The volume of US financial assistance amazes with its scale. They also show the highest level of degradation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Besides, thousands of dollars go on personal accounts of military personnel and used by certain officers in personal needs. What will the American taxpayers say?" the statement published on the official CyberBerkut web page said.

Other documents published by the hackers indicate that Washington is ready to supply Ukraine with "400 units of sniper rifles, 2,000 units of assault rifles, 720 hand grenade launchers, nearly 200 mortars and more than 70,000 shells for them, 150 stingers and 420 anti-tank missiles."

The United States said earlier that it had no intention of supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons.


Click here to see the full list of US military aid to Ukraine (English transcript included).

The most remarkable development in the management of America's relations with other countries during the quarter-century since the end of World War II has been the assumption of more and more control over military, financial and diplomatic operations at home and abroad by men whose activities are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities as often as not are secret -- in short, by a Secret Team whose actions only those implicated in them are in a position to monitor and to understand...

The Secret Team (ST) being described herein consists of security-cleared individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to those data, when it seems appropriate to them, with paramilitary plans and activities, e.g. training and "advising" -- a not exactly impenetrable euphemism for such things as leading into battle and actual combat -- Laotian tribal troops, Tibetan rebel horsemen, or Jordanian elite Palace Guards...

- L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team

On October 21st, 2001, America invaded Afghanistan under the false pretext of waging a "War on Terror". They toppled the Taliban government, itself a reaction to the mujahadeen America had placed in power to fight the Soviets, placed their puppet Karzai in power, and chaos has ensued ever since.

Due to the chaos, pathological individuals have had a heyday in the production and selling of drugs, constant bombings, and the inability of the central government to enforce the rule of law across the country. The most recent developments in the country continue to reek with the involvement of "Secret Teams" using the chaos to play their pathological games with the people of Afghanistan.

Barack Obama, the obsequious errand boy for the financial and corporate plutocrats who own the U.S. government, made a pathetic appearance on national television to try to persuade the "natives" to remain peaceful in response to the non-indictment of the Ferguson killer-cop. His inane comments extolling the value of non-violence and the rule of law seemed strangely incongruent with the militaristic rhetoric and policies of his administration over the last few years.

Yet, Obama's positions on law and violence are not as contradictory as they might appear when these positions are resituated within the context of imperial logic and the framework of power. Legitimate violence is always determined by history's dominant powers and employed as a weapon to maintain and extend that dominance. Over the last five hundred years Europe emerged from the backwaters of history and cultural backwardness to predominance as a result of genocide and land theft in the Americas, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and colonial/capitalist development. The violent establishment of capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy enabled the West to impose its definitions of legitimacy, including "legitimate" violence.

Thus when Palestinians resist the theft of the their land and the killing of their people by Israeli colonists, their response is defined as illegitimate violence that sparks support for Israel's "right to defend itself." When Africans waged national liberation struggles to free themselves from European colonial domination in places like Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the West condemned their efforts as illegitimate. Furthermore, because those struggles were determined to be illegitimate colonial powers felt justified to viciously attack those efforts with the support of the U.S. government. And when African Americans organized against police violence and for self-determination and our own definitions of liberation in the 60s, our efforts were deemed illegitimate. We were brutally suppressed with the full range of state terror tactics including beatings, deaths, infiltration, surveillance, and the jailing of activists for decades.

Therefore, we should understand the State's response to our discontent in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown in this context. The heavy-handed use of violence to deny the people the human rights to peacefully assemble and freedom of association is consistent with the historical uses of violence to control and suppress opposition. And the state's determination that more militant forms of popular resistance are illegitimate helped to shift the attention of the capitalist media to black resistance and away from the issue of impunity for yet another law enforcement official who literally gets away with murder.