Neoliberalism | Always Question Authority

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It is a shame that the public seems unwilling to grasp that virtually all our military adventures are lawless, imperial barbarisms, violently robbing others of their freedom and autonomy enabling the US people to continue living in fantastic opulence justified by a sense of exceptionalism while we callously outsource the consequential pain and suffering inflicted on innocent others and the sacred earth. Our veteran “service” does not protect our “freedoms”, though it does preserve freedom to rob, pillage, and rape, destroying and repressing others devoid of genuine diplomacy or “democracy”.

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. . . In effect, I was a complicit cog in a vast murder money-making machine organizing genocide against people I knew virtually nothing about, people simply seeking preservation of their own self-determination from outside imperial, lawless forces. That I was brainwashed and duped is an understatement, but I quickly realized the absurdity and criminality of my participation. Thus, it is painful to hear the persistent “thank yous” which in fact serve only to justify an unthinking continued support of US wars, ad nauseum. This absurd habit of thanking veterans for our service performs a terrible disservice to a genuine search for a truthful national history.

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h/t: Popular Resistance

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On Friday the 28-year-old activist will appear for sentencing in the Southern District Court of New York in Manhattan. After having made a plea agreement, he faces the possibility of a 10-year sentence for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, which does work for the Homeland Security Department, the Marine Corps, the Defense Intelligence Agency and numerous corporations including Dow Chemical and Raytheon.

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Hammond turned the pilfered information over to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications. The 3 million email exchanges, once made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring and surveillance of protesters and dissidents, especially in the Occupy movement, on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And, perhaps most important, the information provided chilling evidence that anti-terrorism laws are being routinely used by the federal government to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none.

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Freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by the corporate state.

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