• 146 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • You’re right, it was during the Trump administration. For some reason I thought the first indictment had been made and then sealed during Obama’s tenure. Trump’s attack was a major escalation.

    I don’t see any reference to a Grand Jury in the linked article, and I can’t find anything in Google about “assange grand jury 2010”. Are you thinking about this section?

    Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

    It seems to indicate that they didn’t even bother to assemble a grand jury, which is even better for Obama.



  • There were some very deluded people during the Trump years who thought Assange would get special treatment for his vendetta against Hillary Clinton helping to get Trump elected. But you nailed it right on the head – killing press freedoms and not paying debts are even bigger parts of Donald’s brand than gaudy letters on the sides of buildings.

    But don’t get it twisted. Then Secretary of State Clinton went hard against Assange, and it did look bad for press freedoms in the US. You have to remember the State Department did not take press freedom seriously at all, abusing the espionage act left and right. They put more journalists sources in prison than any other previous president. They went after journalists families, like when they detained Glenn Greenwald’s partner in Heathrow. That should always be remembered as part of Barack Obama’s legacy.

    The Trump “Fake News” era was absolutely devastating to journalism, so it’s easy to see Obama’s administration through rose tinted glasses. But it’s important to remember the damage they did that contributed to where we are today.









  • Enron and the collapse of California’s power grid is directly linked to deregulation by George Bush’s regime and a lack of public control and oversight of electricity markets. Corporate media blamed the energy price crisis on the governor, leading to a recall and his replacement by a Republican. Capitalists would love for that to happen in Chicago too; squeeze poor families with energy prices they can’t afford and then blame it on the government to shift the state’s politics to the right.










  • There’s the real strategic concern that escalating too quickly will have nuclear repercussions. But the deeper reasons are visible if you view most governments as military industrial corporations stacked under a trenchcoat. The true motivator is that the longer the war continues, the more money will flow from their respective tax payers into their pockets. They don’t care about Ukrainian lives, they don’t care about Russian lives. The popular support for the war and lack of domestic casualties means they get to ply their trade of death, and they come out smelling like roses. Opposing Russian colonialism is a noble cause, but the nobility belongs to those who are dying in the foxholes, not the warmongers who are squeezing this crisis to get more capital.

    Western leaders don’t want Ukraine to win. They want Russia to lose. A quick cauterized wound is less damaging than a slow bleed out. Total bankruptcy of the Russian war machine is the objective, the economic elimination of their primary trade competitor.