Don DeBar's Blog

What Is To Be Done? Moving From the Imperial Monopole to a Democratic Global Community By Don DeBar September 28, 2014 "It's been a terrible year for principles of the UN Charter..."   So began the opening comments by the UN Secretary General at the UN General Assembly this past Wednesday.   Secretary Ban Ki-Moon then noted some of the most obvious ailments currently plaguing humanity in various parts of our world:   "From barrel bombs to beheadings, from the deliberate starvation of civilians to the assault on hospitals, UN shelters and aid convoys, human rights and the rule of law are under attack."   The Secretary General listed some of the recent and current theaters of mass bloodshed, including Gaza, Ukraine, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Mali, Somalia, Nigeria and, of course, Iraq and Syria. He reported that there are now more refugees than at any time since World War II, a rather remarkable development in and of itself...

PRESS RELEASE Contact: Ralph Schoenman, 707.552.9992; Lil Gregory, 508.746.7427 DICK GREGORY TO FAST UNTIL IMPRISONED ATTORNEY LYNNE STEWART IS FREED   Dick Gregory issued a declaration today, on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., that “I shall refuse all solid food until Lynne Stewart is freed and receives medical treatment in the care of her family and with physicians of her choice without which she will die.”    The 73-year-old Stewart, a renowned criminal defense attorney, is suffering from Stage 4 cancer. Gregory, known for his social activism as much as his for comedic wit and political commentary, has taken this step to reinforce the worldwide petition in support of Stewart’s application for compassionate release. Over 6,000 people, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Pete Seeger, have signed to date with the numbers growing by the minute.   As a criminal defense lawyer for over 30 years, Lynne St...

"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own Government...I cannot be silent." - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By Don DeBar While the insiders in Washington parse the meaning of the paraphrased words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. regarding his own epitaph, his true legacy - the one that many believe led to his murder - has been whitewashed from the King Memorial entirely. Speaking at the Riverside Church in New York City, exactly one year - to the day - before he was shot and killed in Memphis, Dr. King announced that he was expanding his focus on America's national shame of segregation to include its international crime of war on the people of Vietnam: "(I)n the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers, (a)s I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest co...

In the Michael Moore movie "Capitalism: A Love Story" there is a scene where a white couple get evicted after foreclosure from her (the wife's) family's farm. She says something that betrays the nature of OWS in a profound way as including (if not consisting entirely of, at this point) a petit bourgeois/white privilege response. I deliberately avoided using "reaction" because I think that that is only one aspect of its potentiality, as I will explain. "I've lost a piece of my heritage...," she says. "Why do you do this to the hardworking people? Why do you take everything away from them? We're just middle-classed (sic, but this form has its own meaning) hardworking people trying to make a living, just trying to survive." It is important to understand that while she was enjoying her "heritage" (privilege), others were not; rather, they were working and suffering in support of such privilege. She obviously saw that ...

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya The war against Libya is built on fraud. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions against Libya on the basis of unproven claims, specifically that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was killing his own people in Benghazi. The claim in its exact form was that Qaddafi had ordered Libyan forces to kill 6,000 people in Benghazi. These claims were widely disseminated, but always vaguely explained. It was on the basis of this claim that Libya was referred to the U.N. Security Council at U.N Headquarters in New York City and kicked out of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. False claims about African mercenary armies in Libya and about jet attacks on civilians were also used in a broad media campaign against Libya. These two claims have been sidelined and have become more and more murky. The massacre claims, however, were used in a legal, diplomatic, and military framework to justify NATO’s war on the Libyans. Using Human Rights as a Pretext for Wa...

On June 15, 2011, after certain members of Congress had attempted to require President Barack Obama to comply with his statutory and Constitutional obligations to obtain Congressional approval for his undeclared, but raging, war on Libya, and after their attempt to do so was thwarted - by Republicans who sought primarily to gain political advantage over the President's illegal acts while preserving the offending policy because they favored it, and by Democrats who favored it but wanted to avoid an up-or-down vote on this unpopular adventure, ten members of Congress filed a Federal lawsuit seeking to impose compliance. Entitled "Kucinich, et al v. Obama, et al" and brought before the US District Court for the District of Columbia under index # 1:11-cv-01096-RBW, the Plaintiffs sought, among other things, "..an order declaring that the operations in Libya constitute a war for purposes of (US Constitution) Article I and, as such, are unconstitutional absent a declaratio...

Interview with New York journalist Don DeBar, on RT.com, 23 Aug 2011 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5hz2UCR0RQ "Gaddafi opened up the armories to the people of Libya, more than a million rifles and other arms have been handed out to the people of Tripoli. The claim that has been made, wall-to-wall, from the so-called 'progressive' media of the United States to such a Fox is that Gaddafi is a hated dictator and that this is an indigenous rebellion. The dictator does not hand people guns and say: 'Please, defend me!' "This has more the appearance of a large-scale Bay of Pigs, where the invaders are being enticed to come in and engage the people on the ground, than it does some sort of a 'people's rebellion' backed by the United States which, by itself, would be a remarkable event if it were true."