A temblor measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale has struck Gansu province in northeast China, but no casualties have so far been reported by authorities in the Asian country.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

I learned firsthand about the realities of executive branch power 40 years ago, when I discovered that a handful of U.S. executive leaders from both political parties, liberals and conservatives, had secretly destroyed the 700-year-old Plain of Jars civilization in northern Laos without congressional or public knowledge, let alone consent.

The Executive and Congress: Craven Fear

I learned then that one key to executive power is its secrecy and deception. As described in an earlier piece, executive officials did not inform Congress it was bombing Laos, as Senator J. William Fulbright stated in the fall of 1969. Even after the refugees from U.S. bombing had been brought to the capital city of Vientiane in September 1969 (each said their villages had been partially or completely destroyed, and I had photographed dozens who had been blinded, burned by napalm, and lost arms and legs ), U.S. Executive Branch officials still lied to legislators by denying they had bombed civilian targets.

Back in D.C. on April 22, 1971, I saw an executive branch representative, former U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan, look directly into the eyes of a legislator, Senator Edward Kennedy, and lie to his face, saying, “It was the policy not to bomb civilian targets in Laos.”

I knew Kennedy knew he was being lied to. He had issued a report six months earlier saying that, “the United States has undertaken a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure in Pathet Lao-held areas. The bombing has taken and is taking a heavy toll among civilians.”

In the fictional democracy many pundits think we still live in, Kennedy would have sworn Sullivan in and indicted him for perjury for lying to Congress.

But even 40 years ago, one of the Senate’s most powerful legislators did not dare seriously challenge what he knew was unaccountable executive mass murder. The killing of civilians in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam continued for two more years until it was finally halted.

This craven congressional fear of the Executive is another key to its power. I first observed this in 1967, when I accompanied my congressman, Lester Woolf, along with Congressman Rex McCarthy, on a visit to Sam Thong. It was portrayed in the press as a center for refugees fleeing communism, but actually was a camp for dependents of Hmong soldiers fighting in the CIA’s secret army.

We flew up in a large C130 plane carrying rice. But as we approached Sam Thong we were told the runway was too muddy for the heavy plane, and that we would be landing at an “auxiliary landing strip” to Sam Thong. After we arrived, I followed an embassy official who had flown up with us over to a dour Pop Buell, the USAID official in charge of Sam Thong, who stood stockstill with his arms crossed. When we reached him he said to the embassy man out of the corner of his mouth, “Do they know anything?” The official replied, “Don’t worry, Pop. [Deputy Chief of Mission] Hurwich gave them a beautiful snow job, complete with maps. They were very impressed.”

I wondered about this exchange, but soon found myself in a meeting where the Hmong General Vang Pao delivered an impassioned speech about how his people were fighting for freedom against the communists and requested more military aid from Congress. My liberal Democratic congressman earnestly pledged he would do his best to see he got it.

That night I found myself sharing a trailer with Congressman Wolff in the nearby town of Vang Vieng. I was new to Laos at that point, but had already heard the stories about how Vang Pao was a savage warlord who carelessly shot prisoners in public or threw them into pits where they slowly starved to death; a dictator entirely opposed to the democracy he claimed to be fighting for. As I began to tell Wolff what I had heard, he nervously interrupted me and burst out, with genuine fear in his voice, that I needed to understand that he had been elected on Lyndon Johnson’s coattails in 1964 and that nobody crossed Lyndon Johnson! He was not interested in learning anything more about Laos.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

Many Palestinian refugees have joined the Syrian Army in its fight against the foreign-sponsored militants at the Yarmouk refugee camp near the capital Damascus, Press TV reports.

Yarmouk camp is home to the largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria. The camp turned into a flashpoint area in Damascus when unrest broke out in the Arab country in 2011.

But now, in a bid to secure their home community, Palestinian volunteer fighters along with the Syrian Army fight the militants and have made significant gains.

“We are trying to regain control of the camp and regain their houses and pushed them (militants) outside the camp,” a Palestinian refugee told a Press TV correspondent at the camp.

“I cannot show my face because there are terrorists inside the camp and I have family members,” he added.

“You can see the destruction caused by the terrorists,” he said pointing towards the bullet holes in the walls. Å“No one would such cause destruction to their own house; so, these people are not from the camp.”

According to the Press TV correspondent at Yarmouk Camp, the battle in the camp is a very complicated task and there are many reasons for that. It is the closest point the militants have to Damascus, and they will not relinquish it easily.

In addition, refugees are still going back to check on their houses in the once-densely populated area, and not to forget narrow streets of the camp with high buildings next to each other.

Fighting in Yarmouk camp is taking place from one building to the other and from one room to the other, making it a very difficult.

Palestinian volunteer fighters have been advancing into the camp slowly, facing the militants who have turned every building and every street into a bunker.

The frontlines are so close that either side can only whisper not to be heard while traveling in a maze of apartments that allow them to travel for hundreds of meters and maybe kilometers without setting a foot on a street.

Syria has been gripped by deadly unrest since 2011. According to the UN, more than 90,000 people have been killed and millions of others displaced in the violence.

Damascus says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

The Syrian government says the West and its regional allies — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — are supporting the militants.

GJH/AS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

July 21, 2013
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The following is a transcript, originally published by The Real News Network. Video appears at the bottom.

OSCAR LEÓN, TRNN PRODUCER: Today, Saturday July 20, a journey of protest was held nationwide. In Los Angeles, California, a few hundred people from community organizations and activist coalitions gathered outside the Federal courts building to protest for the liberation of George Zimmerman.

This are the voices of those who where there.

UNIDENTIFIED: Sometimes when you win you actually lose, and sometimes when you lose you actually win. Zimmerman now has to wear, ironically, a hoodie to hide his face every day. The killing of a–think about it. The killing of a teenager by a man is morally wrong.

UNIDENTIFIED: It’s racial. It was racial. Yes, I truly believe in my heart it was racial.

UNIDENTIFIED: Unfortunately, America has a tragic racist history. And the mindset of so many people is governed by those racist perspectives.

UNIDENTIFIED: I just want to say that Trayvon Martin had the same right to be where he was as any [incompr.] to go to a public store to buy some bubblegum. Trayvon Martin had a right to be where he was the same as Rosa Park had to sit on that bus and not get up and move to the back. Trayvon Martin had the same right that Medgar Evers had to pull up in his driveway to go home and greet his kids. Trayvon has a right to justice.

And what I want America to know: it took us 30 years, a generation, to get Byron Beckwith convicted. It took 30 years. But we did not stop.

CROWD: No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!

LEÓN: The outrage crossed racial borders.

UNIDENTIFIED: I think if the tables were turned, if Zimmerman was black and Trayvon was white, I think Zimmerman would most definitely be in prison. I don’t think–if Trayvon was white, I don’t think he would have been followed or been a person of suspicion in the first place.

UNIDENTIFIED: This type of thinking is the base for a society that’s based on discrimination and racism. And sometimes we don’t even know. And we’re doing–we’re supporting the system.

LEÓN: President Obama spoke to the nation the day before the rallies, pledging to the “I am Trayvon Martins” campaign. But then he also asked for acceptance of the verdict acquitting Zimmerman.

BARACK OBAMA, U.S. PRESIDENT: I can only imagine what they’re going through, and it’s remarkable how they’ve handled it.

The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there are going to be a lot of arguments about the legal issues in the case. I’ll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues. The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works.

LEÓN: Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, spoke to a crowd in New York.

SYBRINA FULTON, TRAYVON MARTIN’S MOTHER: –the verdict won’t stop here. This is another chapter on a different movement. We have moved on from the verdict. Of course we’re hurting. Of course we’re shocked and disappointed. But that just means that we have to roll up our sleeves and continue to fight.

LEÓN: Reuters reported there where dozens of marches all around the country, and thousands gathered in cities like Chicago and New York and D.C.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Female Egyptian supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood hold up portraits of Egypt’s ousted president Mohamed Morsi during a rally in Cairo on July 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

The Syrian Army has killed dozens of foreign-backed militants in a strategic suburb near the capital Damascus.

A monitoring group with close links to the militants told Reuters news agency that the Syrian Army had killed 49 insurgents near Adra on Sunday.

Adra lies on a route that the militants had been using to smuggle weapons into Damascus, but a few months ago government forces reestablished control over the town.

According to Syrian state media, the army Å“eliminated a large number of terrorists from Jabhat al-Nusra, some of them were foreigners,” in Adra on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Syrian forces also launched attacks against the militants in the governorates of Idlib, Daraya, Lattakia, Homs, Daraa, and Aleppo on Sunday and killed a large number of them.

Syria has been gripped by deadly unrest since 2011. According to the UN, more than 90,000 people have been killed and millions of others displaced in the violence.

Damascus says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

The Syrian government says the West and its regional allies — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — are supporting the militants.

The militants from a number of countries have been crossing into Syria to fight against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, contributing to an international effort to destabilize the Arab country.

Several international human rights organizations say the foreign-sponsored militants have committed war crimes in Syria.

The Syrian troops have recently conducted successful clean-up operations across the country, inflicting heavy losses on Takfiri extremists.

The Syrian Armyâ„¢s push against the militants rattled their foreign sponsors.

Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi said on June 26 that Saudi Arabia is trembling with fear because of the Syrian Armyâ„¢s recent successes against the militants.

In a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Jeddah, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal insisted on June 25 that the militants in Syria must be armed with anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons.

Zoubi said that the Saudi weapons and money is the main reason behind bloodshed in Syria, adding that Faisal Å“is lost in the Syrian blood.”

GJH/AS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

What in the world is happening to America? All around us there are disturbing signs that the slow-motion collapse of society is accelerating. With each passing year, criminals seem to be getting more desperate and more twisted. Some of the sick things that some people are willing to do to their fellow human beings are simply beyond description. What kind of psychotic individual would hold elderly men captive for a decade in order to get their Social Security and veteran benefit checks? How depraved do you have to be before you are able to convince yourself to rape a 16-year-old girl and then throw her body off of a roof? What kind of heartless teens would pour gasoline on an innocent boy walking home from school and then set him on fire? The social decay that is eating away at our nation like cancer is starting to get a lot worse, and yet there are still lots of people out there that will flat out deny that society is collapsing. They have totally bought into the propaganda being pushed by the mainstream media, and they are fully convinced that things in America are actually getting better even though our communities are literally coming apart at the seams all around us. How much worse do things have to get before everyone finally is willing to admit that we have a major problem on our hands? The following are 12 signs that the decay of society is accelerating…

#1 Elderly Men Held In A “Dungeon” In Houston

Four elderly men in Houston were recently rescued from the “dungeon” that they were being held in. The goal of their captors was apparently to confiscate their Social Security and veteran benefits checks…

Four men found living in “deplorable conditions” in a Houston garage told police that they were being held captive after being lured by promises of alcohol and cigarettes so that their captor could cash their public-assistance checks, authorities said.

When police arrived at the place they were being held, they found that the doors had literally been nailed shut…

Around 8am Friday, a neighbor called 911, fearing there some was something suspicious going on in the home. Police say when they arrived they discovered four men living in some sort of converted garage without beds or even a restroom.

One by one, the alleged captives were taken away on stretchers. They’re sick, malnourished and confused. Police say they were being held in the home against their will – possibly for years.

“The doors were nailed shut, barred shut with small nails,” said HPD Sgt. JW McCoy. “One of them said they had been held there for up to 10 years. One of them said he’d been there a few years, and the other one didn’t know how long he’d been there.”

#2 The “Bash Mobs” Of Southern California

Over the past few years, “flash mob crimes” have become increasingly popular. According to the Los Angeles Times, police in Southern California are now calling these group crime waves “Bash Mobs” and they are deeply concerned about the surge in these types of events in recent days…

Organized “bash mob” crime rampages of roving groups attacking innocent people and businesses have been striking cities around the United States. Law enforcement agencies in Southern California have reported few similar problems – until now.

In the last several days, there have been several reports of such group crime waves in South L.A., Hollywood, San Bernardino and Victorville. Long Beach police are bracing for another one Friday.

These so-called bash mobs of “flash mob” crime waves are organized through social media and have been a problem in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington.

#3 16-Year-Old Girl Raped, Thrown Off Roof

How sick do you have to be to rape a 16-year-old girl and then throw her off a roof?…

Police have arrested one man and are searching for a second suspect after they allegedly lured a 16-year-old girl to a Brooklyn roof, where they raped her before throwing her off,  leaving her with serious injuries to her leg, arm and back, authorities said.

Authorities say the two men, ages 24 and 26, lured the teenage girl to the roof of a three-story building on Miller Avenue in East New York early Sunday.

They allegedly raped her and flung her off the roof after at least one of them tried to strangle her, police said.

#4 New York Man Robbed, Maced, Falls Off Roof To His Death

According to the New York Daily News, a 50-year-old Brooklyn man got much more than he was bargaining for when he was lured up to the roof of a four-story building with promises of sex…

A 50-year-old Brooklyn man who fell to his death from atop a four-story building was lured onto the roof by two women who had promised him sex, police sources said Thursday.

Instead of showing Robert Reichl a good time, the women led him into a trap shortly after midnight on Wednesday – and stole $2,000 in cash he had been carrying.

Three toughs were waiting on the roof of the building on Fourth Ave. near 47th St. in Sunset Park, the sources said, and at some point the men attacked Reichl.

One of them, Ruben Santiago, sprayed Reichl in the face with a chemical spray believed to be mace that caused the victim to reel back, lose his balance and fall off the rooftop, the source said.

#5 “Malicious Fecal Distribution”

Would you defecate next to someone else’s house? Would you do it multiple times?…

An Albuquerque, New Mexico, man was in for a vile surprise when he realized that a random woman has been defecating next to his house during her morning jogs. The bizarre and grotesque act – which has purportedly occurred at least four times – has been caught repeatedly on a security camera.

The homeowner, who wishes to remain anonymous and goes by the alias “Bobby,” went to local ABC affiliate KOAT-TV with the footage in an effort to try and track the woman down – or to, at the least, shame her into stopping the unsanitary antics.

#6 “Professional Liars” For Hire

According to CNN, there is a company called “Paladin Deception Services” that you can actually hire to tell lies for you…

Timothy Green, a 59-year-old former private detective, claims to run a company in Forest Lake, Minn., that will lie to anyone about anything.

Its name is Paladin Deception Services, and it advertises its services for $54 per month.

Green says customers run the gamut – from cheating spouses in need of alibis to people playing hooky from work. But the real demand comes from job seekers, making up more than 60% of what he says are its 250 to 300 monthly clients.

“We can replace a supervisor with a fictitious one, alter your work history, provide you with a positive employment reputation, and give you the glowing reference that you need,” Paladin’s website states.

#7 The Violence In Chicago Just Continues To Get Worse

The violent crime wave in Chicago is showing no signs of letting up. In fact, just check out what happened this weekend between Friday night and early Sunday…

Six men have been killed and at least another 17 people – including a 6-year-old girl – have been wounded in shootings across the city since Friday night.

#8 Store Clerk Beaten With A Baseball Bat Because The Store Was Out Of Extra Large Tank Top Shirts

It just doesn’t pay to be a store clerk in some neighborhoods these days. Many of them only make minimum wage, and the abuse that they take from some customers is terrible…

The 51-year-old clerk was behind the counter of the store when a man went into the store and asked the clerk if he had triple extra large sized tank top t-shirts, O’Brien said.

After the clerk told the man the store did not carry the item, the man pulled out a baseball bat and began beating the clerk, O’Brien said. After beating the clerk, the man fled with the bat.

Another merchant on the block said she saw the clerk run out after the man fled.

“He went out on the street to cry for help,’’ his body covered in blood, she said. “It was very unfortunate, very vicious.’’

#9 Serial Killer Murdering Women In Cleveland?

According to Fox News, law enforcement authorities in the Cleveland area are concerned that they may have uncovered the work of yet another serial killer…

The police chief of a Cleveland suburb told searchers Sunday that he believes there could be one or two more victims in addition to the three bodies found in the neighborhood earlier.

Police Chief Ralph Spotts told volunteers checking vacant houses to be alert for smells of rotting. He declined to elaborate on other possible victims. East Cleveland Mayor Gary Norton said authorities have a lot of reasons to suspect there are more, but he refused to say why.

Why does Cleveland seem to produce so many of these sickos?

#10 Tee-Ball Coach Stabbed In The Neck In Front Of Kids

Who in the world would try to kill a tee-ball coach in front of a bunch of children?…

A T-ball coach was stabbed in the neck just after a youth baseball game in Hoyne Park on Sunday, allegedly by a young ballplayer’s jealous father looking for his ex’s new boyfriend.

The coach suffered a severed artery and was listed in critical condition after surgery. Although the T-ball game had just ended, there were still players present during the attack, according to a person familiar with the incident.

Other children were arriving for the next game.

#11 New York Food Stamp Recipients Buying Food And Sending It Overseas?

According to a shocking article in the New York Post, many food stamp recipients in New York are buying food with their EBT cards and shipping it off to relatives in foreign countries…

Food stamps are paying for trans-Atlantic takeout – with New Yorkers using taxpayer-funded benefits to ship food to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.

The practice is so common that hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels line the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.

#12 Teens Pour Gasoline On Boy Walking Home From School And Set Him On Fire

As I have written about previously, something really seems to be wrong with American kids these days. For example, no normal kids would pour gasoline on a 13-year-old boy and light him on fire…

A 13-year-old boy who police say was doused with gasoline and lit on fire last week while walking home from school is recovering from first-degree burns to his face and head.

The boy was just two blocks from his home in Kansas City Tuesday when two teenagers began to follow him and then attacked him

And remember, right now the economy is still at least somewhat stable.

How much worse is the decay of society going to get once the economy really starts falling to pieces?

Desperate people do desperate things, and once all hope of an economic recovery is gone I believe that we are going to see a huge wave of crime and civil unrest in this nation.

And all of this comes at a time when police forces are being cut back all over the country. For example, as I wrote about the other day, the size of the police force in Detroit has been reduced by approximately 40 percent over the past ten years.

You can see some photos of the ruins of Detroit right here. Will hundreds of our cities eventually look like this?

America is changing, and not for the better. On a very basic level, people seem to be losing a sense of love and respect for their fellow human beings. If this continues, we will soon get to a point where many people will literally become afraid to interact with one another.

The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear. Once it is gone, it will be incredibly difficult to get back.

Republished with permission from: The American Dream

File photo shows Indian people in New Delhi protesting against the gang rape.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Nearly nine out of ten Spaniards believe that Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy should explain himself in the parliament, a poll shows.

According to the survey published in Spain’s daily El Mundo on Sunday, 89.1 percent of those questioned think that Rajoy should respond to allegations regarding the secret payments he received from his party.

Only 2.4 percent of the people believed that the Spanish prime minister does not have to explain about the issue.

Also on Sunday, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who is the secretary general of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and the leader of the opposition in the Spanish Parliament, threatened to introduce a motion of censure against Rajoy if he does not face the lawmakersâ„¢ questions.

Rubalcaba said the Spanish prime minister “cannot continue to govern if he does not explain” the scandal in parliament.

Luis Barcenas, a former treasurer of the premierâ„¢s Popular Party, says he channeled payments to Rajoy and other party leaders.

In mid-July, Barcenas told the court that he had handed Rajoy 25,000 euros ($33,000) in cash in 2010.

Rajoy has denied any wrongdoing and rejected calls to step down over the issue. He dismissed calls by opposition lawmakers to answer questions on the scandal in parliament.

Under Spanish law, members of the government have the right to submit testimony in writing instead of appearing in court if summoned as witnesses.

NT/HN

Republished with permission from: Press TV

In an op-ed published in Roll Call on July 20, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.; shown) called for the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty to be sent to the Senate for ratification.

“Representatives from countries all over the world, including the United States, voted at the United Nations in April to do just that – create an international treaty to establish basic rules and procedures governing the cross-border flow of weapons and to close the loopholes that allow irresponsible arms brokers to operate outside the international regulatory system,” Murphy wrote. “Now the treaty has to be signed by President Barack Obama and ratified by the U.S. Senate,” he added.

Parroting the party line of the global disarmament claque, Murphy claims: “The goal of the Arms Trade Treaty is to prevent weapons from reaching the hands of warlords and human rights abusers; it does not interfere one bit with domestic arms sales or legitimate international trade.”

Later in his letter, Murphy insists that the ATT “does nothing to affect Americans’ right to bear arms” and that is sole aim is to only control “the export and import of weapons from one nation to another.”

Murphy is wrong. There is much in the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty directly interferes with domestic gun sales, as well as with the entire philosophy behind the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms.

As we have reported, several provisions of this treaty significantly diminish the scope of the right to keep and bear arms.

First, the Arms Trade Treaty grants a monopoly over all weaponry in the hands of the very entity (approved regimes) responsible for over 300 million murders in the 20th century.

Furthermore, the treaty leaves private citizens powerless to oppose future slaughters.

An irrefutable fact of armed violence unaddressed by the UN in its gun grab is that all the murders committed by all the serial killers in history don’t amount to a fraction of the brutal killings committed by “authorized state parties” using the very weapons over which they will exercise absolute control under the terms of the Arms Trade Treaty.

Article 2 of the treaty defines the scope of the treaty’s prohibitions. The right to own, buy, sell, trade, or transfer all means of armed resistance, including handguns, is denied to civilians by this section of the Arms Trade Treaty.

Article 3 places the “ammunition/munitions fired, launched or delivered by the conventional arms covered under Article 2” within the scope of the treaty’s prohibitions, as well.

Article 4 rounds out the regulations, also placing all “parts and components” of weapons within the scheme.

Perhaps the most immediate threat to the rights of gun owners in the Arms Trade Treaty is found in Article 5. Under the title of “General Implementation,” Article 5 mandates that all countries participating in the treaty “shall establish and maintain a national control system, including a national control list.”

This list should “apply the provisions of this Treaty to the broadest range of conventional arms.”

Mark it down: Within months, the federal government (likely under the management of the Department of Homeland Security) will begin compiling a list of who owns, buys, sells, trades, or transfers any firearm, as well as the ammunition, parts, and components of those weapons.

After creating this database, the federal government will be required under the provisions of Article 5(4) of the Arms Trade Treaty to “provide its national control list to the Secretariat, which shall make it available to other States Parties.”

That’s right. The UN demands that the list of gun and ammunition owners not only be in the hands of our own government, but be sent to foreign regimes, as well. This provision will guarantee that should an American owner of a legally purchased firearm decide to emigrate, he will be on the radar of the ruling regime in his new home.

Americans are right to recognize this registry as the first step toward confiscation. Without such a registry, it would be impossible to monitor weapons transfers effectively because governments can’t track weapons exchanges and transfers unless they know who has them to begin with.

Article 12 adds to the record-keeping requirement, mandating that the list include “the quantity, value, model/type, authorized international transfers of conventional arms,” as well as the identity of the “end users” of these items.

In very clear terms, the Arms Trade Treaty requires that the federal government of the United States force gun owners to add their names to the national registry. Citizens will be required to report the amount and type of all firearms and ammunition they possess.

Section 4 of Article 12 requires that the list be kept for at least 10 years.

Although the White House has not announced when the president will sign the document, Secretary Kerry said that in the United States “we look forward to signing it [the Arms Trade Treaty] as soon as the process of conforming the official translations is completed satisfactorily.”

The fight for the right to keep and bear arms is just beginning. As explained by the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA), “Once a treaty has been signed, it normally remains available for the Senate to ratify in perpetuity, unless a later president withdraws from it. This means that American gun owners must remain vigilant in ensuring this treaty is never ratified.”

Despite Murphy’s misunderstanding of the goal of the ATT, thankfully there yet remain U.S. federal lawmakers determined to prevent the UN from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms protected by the Second Amendment.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) issued a statement on May 30 regarding a bipartisan letter he authored and submitted to President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry petitioning the administration not to sign the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

The letter is signed by a total of 130 members of Congress, including Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas). It declares all of the signatories’ opposition to “both the ratification of the Arms Trade Treaty and any effort to treat it as internationally or domestically binding upon the United States.”

Rep. Kelly further states in the letter,

As the signing period for the ATT gets underway next week, President Obama has an opportunity to take a monumental stand for our national sovereignty and our Constitutional rights. The ATT threatens both of these things and should be fully rejected. Any treaty that would put the United States – the world’s defender of peace and freedom – on equal footing with the world’s worst dictatorships and terror-sponsors ought to be condemned, dismissed, and ultimately denied our country’s signature. I sincerely hope the administration will listen to the very real objections my colleagues from both parties in Congress share and rightly decide that joining the ATT is not at all in America’s interest.

Ratification of the treaty faces an uphill battle in the Senate, as well. As The New American reported in March, by a vote of 53-46, the Senate passed an amendment to the budget bill sponsored by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). The measure aims “to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.”

A resolution of similar intent sponsored by Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) is currently pending before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Moran’s measure declares that it is the sense of Congress that:

the President should not sign the Arms Trade Treaty, and that, if he transmits the treaty with his signature to the Senate, the Senate should not ratify the Arms Trade Treaty; and

until the Arms Trade Treaty has been signed by the President, received the advice and consent of the Senate, and has been the subject of implementing legislation by Congress, no Federal funds should be appropriated or authorized to implement the Arms Trade Treaty, or any similar agreement, or to conduct activities relevant to the Arms Trade Treaty, or any similar agreement.

In June, Secretary of State John Kerry sought to squelch the opposition in the Senate and reassure citizens that the U.S. delegation to the UN would not surrender the sovereignty and constitutional rights of Americans. “The ATT will not undermine the legitimate international trade in conventional weapons, interfere with national sovereignty, or infringe on the rights of American citizens, including our Second Amendment rights,” Kerry claimed.

In an earlier statement, Kerry expressed similar sentiments. The United Nations approved “a strong, effective and implementable Arms Trade Treaty that can strengthen global security while protecting the sovereign right of states to conduct legitimate arms trade,” said Secretary Kerry in a statement.

“Nothing in this treaty could ever infringe on the rights of American citizens under our domestic law or the Constitution, including the Second Amendment,” he added.

Citizens determined to prevent unelected, unaccountable globalist bureaucrats from doing a “victory lap” around the Second Amendment must pressure elected officials on the federal level to oppose ratification and encourage state lawmakers to pass laws nullifying any attempt by the federal government to unconstitutionally infringe upon the God-given rights protected by the Second Amendment.

^{Photo of Sen. Chris Murphy: AP Images}

Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.

Republished with permission from: The New American

Infowars.com
July 21, 2013

Would you like to see what it might be like to order a pizza in the Federal Data Services Hub future?

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This article was posted: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 5:04 pm

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Civilians inspect the aftermath of a car bomb attack in the neighborhood of Tobjee in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, July 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

In announcing her bid to be the next U.S. senator from Wyoming, Liz Cheney (shown) sounded at times as if she was running for president against Barack Obama, who is, of course, constitutionally ineligible to run for a third term.

“President Obama has launched a war on our Second Amendment rights. He has launched a war on our religious freedom. He has used the IRS to launch a war on our freedom of speech. He has used the EPA to launch a war on Wyoming’s ranchers, farmers and energy industry,” Cheney said in the YouTube video she posted July 16 announcing the candidacy that will pit her next year against incumbent Mike Enzi in a GOP primary in what is generally regarded as the most Republican state in the nation.

It may be that Cheney, a lawyer, former State Department official and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, wants to show she will be more aggressive in opposing the Obama administration than Enzi, a conservative, but more low-key Republican. And Cheney, 46, is not bashful in highlighting the age difference between herself and Enzi, who, at 69, is closer to her father’s age. As she described a need for change, it is, at least in part, a generational thing.

“I am running because I believe it is necessary for a new generation of leaders to step up to the plate,” she announced.

But the U.S. Senate has not often been disrupted by a youth movement, and Enzi says he is “the median age” for a member of that august body. And some voters – particularly elderly ones – might consider it a low blow that Cheney suggested Enzi was “just confused” when he said she had promised him she would not run if he decided to seek a fourth term.  

“She’s been traveling around Wyoming for a long time, so I’m not surprised,” Enzi told CNN’s Dana Bash on July 17. “I’m only surprised in that she said if I ran, she wouldn’t. She announced 30 minutes after I more specifically stated my intention.” He is “absolutely not too old to be a senator,” Enzi said. “I’m in really good health. I’m on the committees that I want to be on. I have seniority.”

In offering herself as a “strong voice for Wyoming,” Cheney, without mentioning Enzi, seemed to suggest the senator is meek and not enough of a fighter for conservative principles. “I am running because I know as a mother and as a patriot, we can no longer afford simply to go along to get along,” Cheney said.

Enzi claims his ability to cooperate with both Democratic and Republican colleagues is a point in his favor. “I’ve developed trust on both sides of the aisle,” he told Bash. “People trust me that what I say I’m going to do, I do.”

Cheney, who has been a Fox News commentator and chairman of an organization called Keep America Safe, is known for her hawkish stance on foreign policy and national security issues. She remains an unapologetic defender of the Iraq War, of which her father was a leading architect.

Enzi who also supported the war and, has a 93 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. Cheney faces a considerable challenge if she plans to portray the incumbent as something less than a solid Republican in a solidly red state.

She will also have to contend with the “carpetbagger” issue. Though her father was the state’s U.S. House member form 1979-1989, she is a native of Wisconsin and former Virginia resident who moved to Wyoming just last fall.  

“She is running against an incumbent from her own party who has a solidly conservative voting record and is well-liked by voters,” Jennifer Duffy, senior editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, told CNN “Her theme seems to be Enzi’s age, but I don’t know that it will play that well.”

Unlike most first-time candidates running against a multi-term incumbent, Cheney will suffer no disadvantage in name recognition or fund-raising ability. 

“She will out-raise him by factors of 10 or more, and he will still win because Wyoming is grassroots, retail, campaigning,” Republican Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming’s U.S. House member, told Politico. “A novice candidate with little direct experience in retail politics isn’t likely to adapt to Wyoming’s political environment.” Nor is Cheney, with her obvious Washington connections and the years she has spent in an around the nation’s capital, well positioned to portray herself as the outsider running against an “establishment” favorite. 

“One of the most remarkable things about Cheney’s Wyoming adventure is there appear to be no significant ideological or policy differences between the two candidates,” observed American Conservative editor Daniel Larison. “It is an insurgency in the name of self-promotion and nothing more,” he opined, “and presumably primary voters will reject it for that reason.”

^{Photo of Liz Cheney: AP Images}

Republished with permission from: The New American

FARC rebels stand during a presentation to the press in the town of Tame in the Arauca Department on July 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

In a statement issued by her office July 11, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane (shown) announced that the Office of Attorney General will not defend Pennsylvania’s Defense of Marriage Act in a recently filed lawsuit (Whitewood v. Corbett). The lawsuit challenges Pennsylvania’s Defense of Marriage Act, based on the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

“I cannot ethically defend the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s version of DOMA where I believe it to be wholly unconstitutional,” Kane said. “It is my duty under the Commonwealth Attorneys Act whenever I determine it is in the best interest of the Commonwealth to authorize the Office of General Counsel to defend the state in litigation.”

“Additionally, it is a lawyer’s ethical obligation under Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct to withdraw from a case in which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement with the client,” added Kane.

Regardless of the language used by Kane to justify her disregard of state law, the fact is, she has chosen to personally nullify a law she believes violates the Constitution.

Such a posture is curious in light of the staunch opposition to nullification by most people of Kane’s political bent.

In the past, political scientists, self-proclaimed constitutional historians, and elected officials fond of federal power have disparaged nullification as “nuts” and a “bizarre fad.”

One of these nullification naysayers wrote a blog post on MSNBC declaring, “Not to put too fine a point on this, but there’s nothing to discuss – state lawmakers can’t pick and choose which federal laws they’ll honor.”

Seems state legislators can’t pick and choose which federal laws they’ll honor unless that federal law violates their personal philosophy.

“I know that in this state there are people who don’t believe in what we are doing, and I’m not asking them to believe in it. I’m asking them to believe in the constitution,” Attorney General Kane said in the press release.

Although Kane’s definition of marriage is wrong, her sense of when state officials should resist federal attempts to legislate where there is not constitutional authority is spot on.

When Washington decides to go walkabout, however, and start legislating (or issuing edicts, in the case of President Obama) in areas not within its constitutional boundaries (healthcare, education, gun ownership), the states reserve the right to check that usurpation by refusing to afford such acts the power of law. Conversely, it would be a usurpation on the part of the states should they attempt to disregard federal laws that are constitutionally sound.

In the case at hand, there is not a single word in the Constitution that grants the federal government the power to define marriage.

The 10th Amendment makes clear that if any power is “not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states,” that power is “reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The right of states to refuse to enforce unconstitutional federal acts is known as nullification.

Nullification is a concept of constitutional law recognizing the right of each state to nullify, or invalidate, any federal measure that exceeds the few and defined powers allowed the federal government as enumerated in the Constitution.

Nullification exists as a right of the states because the sovereign states formed the union, and as creators of the compact, they hold ultimate authority as to the limits of the power of the central government to enact laws that are applicable to the states and the citizens thereof.

Constitutionally speaking, then, whenever the federal government passes any measure not provided for in the limited roster of its enumerated powers, those acts are not awarded any sort of supremacy. Instead, they are “merely acts of usurpation” and do not qualify as the supreme law of the land. In fact, acts of Congress are the supreme law of the land only if they are made in pursuance of its constitutional powers, not in defiance thereof.

Hamilton put an even finer point on the issue when he wrote in The Federalist, No. 78, “There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the constitution, can be valid.”

Constitutionally speaking, then, states are right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional federal acts, including DOMA. Kane’s refusal brings up a separate issue: Whether the practice of by state officials – rather than state legislators – is a constitutionally sound expression of nullification.

First, the analysis should consider the obligations of the state attorney general as set forth in the Pennsylvania state constitution.

Article IV, Section 4 of the Pennsylvania constitution establishes that the attorney general “shall be the chief law officer of the Commonwealth and shall exercise such powers and perform such duties as may be imposed by law.”

Shall perform such duties as imposed by law, not “may do so unless she disagrees with it.”

In a statement, the Pennsylvania Office of General Counsel seems to agree, “We are surprised that the attorney general, contrary to her constitutional duty under the Commonwealth Attorneys Act, has decided not to defend a Pennsylvania statute lawfully enacted by the General Assembly, merely because of her personal beliefs,” Pennsylvania General Counsel James D. Schultz said in a statement.

Additionally, the Commonwealth Attorneys Act of 1980 defines the duties of an elected attorney general. Included among those duties is the obligation:

To represent the commonwealth and all commonwealth agencies and upon request the auditor general, state treasurer and Public Utility Commission in any action brought by or against the commonwealth or its agencies; to furnish upon request legal advice to the governor or the head of any commonwealth agency.

Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s announcement that she “cannot in good conscience” defend duly enacted state law violates this provision of the Commonwealth Attorneys Act.

Of course, should Kane decide ultimately that her duty to her conscience trumps her duty to the state constitution (and there is an argument to made that it certainly should), she is not left without recourse: She may resign.

Finally, the divergence between Kane’s refusal to enforce state law and a state’s refusal to enforce an unconstitutional federal law is evident. The United States of America is a union of sovereignties. If one or more of the parties to the compact that created the union esteem some federal act to be beyond the authority of the federal government, then it or they are strengthening the Constitution by insisting that its restrictions on power be recognized.

In the case of Kane and DOMA, Kane’s instinct is correct insofar as the proper respect that should be afforded unconstitutional federal acts. Where she runs afoul of principle, however, is in her decision to assume the power to pick and choose among lawfully enacted state statutes.

Pennsylvania has chosen to enact a state version of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Constitutionally speaking, states may act in innumerable areas where the federal government is forbidden to enter. As James Madison explained in The Federalist, 45, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite.”

In the case of marriage, the state legislature of Pennsylvania is within its rights to define that term to be the union of a man and woman, as well as to restrict its benefits to those who comply with that legal definition and to deny those same benefits to those who do not.

The federal government does not have such a prerogative.

But, that has no impact on Attorney General Kane’s decision to violate her constitutional responsibility to enforce state law. The Constitution of the state of Pennsylvania is very clear: The attorney general must perform her legal duties, duties defined by the constitution, the Commonwealth Attorneys Act, and the state legislature. Her open and hostile refusal to do so is grounds for her removal from office, assuming she doesn’t manifest the strength of the restraints of her conscience by resigning.

^{Photo of Kathleen Kane: AP Images}

Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at
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.

Republished with permission from: The New American

Why have Edward Snowden’s actions resonated so powerfully for so many people?

The huge political impacts of the leaked NSA documents account for just part of the explanation. Snowden’s choice was ultimately personal. He decided to take big risks on behalf of big truths; he showed how easy and hazardous such a step can be. He blew the whistle not only on the NSA’s Big Brother surveillance but also on the fear, constantly in our midst, that routinely induces conformity.

Like Bradley Manning and other whistleblowers before him, Snowden has massively undermined the standard rationales for obedience to illegitimate authority. Few of us may be in a position to have such enormous impacts by opting for courage over fear and truth over secrecy–but we know that we could be doing more, taking more risks for good reasons–if only we were willing, if only fear of reprisals and other consequences didn’t clear the way for the bandwagon of the military-industrial-surveillance state.

Painted by Robert Shetterly for his Americans Who Tell The Truth Project.

Near the end of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the man in a parable spends many years sitting outside an open door till, near death, after becoming too weak to possibly enter, he’s told by the doorkeeper: “Nobody else could have got in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I’ll go and close it.”

That’s what Martin Luther King Jr. was driving at when he said, in his first high-risk speech denouncing the Vietnam War: “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.”

Edward Snowden was not too late. He refused to allow opportunity to be lost. He walked through the entrance meant only for him.

When people say “I am Bradley Manning,” or “I am Edward Snowden,” it can be more than an expression of solidarity. It can also be a statement of aspiration–to take ideals for democracy more seriously and to act on them with more courage.

The artist Robert Shetterly has combined his compelling new portrait of Edward Snowden with words from Snowden that are at the heart of what’s at stake: “The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the ‘consent of the governed’ is meaningless. . . The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.” Like the painting of Snowden, the quote conveys a deep mix of idealism, vulnerability and determination.

Edward Snowden has taken idealism seriously enough to risk the rest of his life, a choice that is to his eternal credit and to the world’s vast benefit. His decision to resist any and all cynicism is gripping and unsettling. It tells us, personally and politically, to raise our standards, lift our eyes and go higher into our better possibilities.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

US forces are seen building a base in Parwan Province, Afghanistan, in 2010.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with a group of Iranian officials in Tehran on July 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Infowars.com
July 21, 2013

On a recent trip to the Texas Coast, President Obama recently caught a big fish affected by dental cavities.

This disgusting discovery really hit the President hard.

Once again he experienced first-hand the lack of global cooperation in releasing more hydrofluoric acid into the oceans to further protect wildlife and the environment.

Even though the fish protested the president’s statements in its designated Free Speech Zone, Obama still strives to find solutions for us all, friend or foe.

After solving such global problems, President Obama will turn to building the success of every hard-working American.

We must believe in Obama. Only the president can allow the individual American to thrive.

But the Obama Administration needs to take the necessary precautions to protect our homeland from home-grown terrorism.

To ensure that no harm comes from this salt-water political dissident who also happens to be a bloodthirsty domestic terrorist (according to FBI bulletins and fusion center flyers), federal agencies have planted their top agents onto the fish’s fins.

Ironically the agents share the same last names as our current and last president, highlighting the far-reaching influence that our presidents had with their domestic policies which keep us safe.

Even though the fishing trip confirmed yet another global tragedy, President Obama offers us hope:

The president creates rainbows at will to remind all Americans that paying U.N. carbon taxes will save the environment.

President Obama could truly build a great global institution for us all if individuals would quit stonewalling his progress.

As the absurdity of the state increases (which can be seen in the video below), satire becomes much more effective at exposing government lies.

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This article was posted: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 3:32 pm

Tags: big brother, climate, domestic news, environment, terrorism

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Palestinians in the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip are in need of basic supplies as neighboring Egyptâ„¢s military destroys most cross-border tunnels, Press TV reports.

Since the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian military has reportedly destroyed about 90 percent of the tunnels connecting Egypt and Gaza, hindering the Gazans from bringing in most of their basic goods like construction materials, food, and fuel.

In this regard, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Press TV that the Palestinian resistance movement has tried to negotiate an alternative for the tunnels with the Egyptian officials, but to no avail.

Å“Egyptians authorities decided to shut down all the tunnels, now there are few working. We have been negotiating an alternative with the Egyptian side. We asked them to allow the goods to enter through the Rafah crossing.” Abu Zuhri said, adding, Å“The tunnels are a main source of life to Gazans.

Mohsen Abu Ramadan, a political analyst, also stated that Egyptâ„¢s decision signals Å“an upcoming catastrophe” if the two sides fail to find an alternative.

Over the past months, Egypt has stepped up its crackdown on the supply tunnels leading into Gaza which bring basic supplies to the Gazans in the besieged enclave. Egyptian army forces flooded several of tunnels in February.

Palestinians say the tunnels are the only resort to provide food and other basic needs for the starving population in the impoverished territory.

Egypt plunged into a fresh wave of unrest after the military deposed Morsi on July 3 and declared the following day the chief justice of Egyptâ„¢s Supreme Constitutional Court, Adly Mansour, as caretaker president.

MKA/AS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Fifteen Colombian soldiers have been killed in an ambush by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos says.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

BACKGROUND: In our previous study, higher serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentrations and the vitamin D receptor (VDR) FokI CC genotype were associated with milder Parkinson disease (PD).

OBJECTIVE: We evaluated whether vitamin D3 supplementation inhibits the progression of PD on the basis of patient VDR subgroups.

DESIGN: Patients with PD (n = 114) were randomly assigned to receive vitamin D3 supplements (n = 56; 1200 IU/d) or a placebo (n = 58) for 12 mo in a double-blind setting. Outcomes were clinical changes from baseline and the percentage of patients who showed no worsening of the modified Hoehn and Yahr (HY) stage and Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS).

RESULTS: Compared with the placebo, vitamin D3 significantly prevented the deterioration of the HY stage in patients [difference between groups: P = 0.005; mean± SD change within vitamin D3 group: +0.02 ± 0.62 (P = 0.79); change within placebo group: +0.33 ± 0.70 (P = 0.0006)]. Interaction analyses showed that VDR FokI genotypes modified the effect of vitamin D3 on changes in the HY stage (P-interaction = 0.045), UPDRS total (P-interaction = 0.039), andUPDRS part II (P-interaction = 0.021). Compared with the placebo, vitamin D3 significantly prevented deterioration of the HY stage in patients with FokI TT [difference between groups: P = 0.009; change within vitamin D3 group: -0.38 ± 0.48 (P = 0.91); change within placebo group, +0.63 ± 0.77 (P= 0.009)] and FokI CT [difference between groups: P = 0.020; change within vitamin D3 group: ±0.00 ± 0.60 (P = 0.78); change within placebo group: +0.37 ± 0.74 (P = 0.014)] but not FokI CC. Similar trends were observed in UPDRS total and part II.

CONCLUSION: Vitamin D3 supplementation may stabilize PD for a short period in patients with FokI TT or CT genotypes without triggering hypercalcemia, although this effect may be nonspecific for PD. This trial was registered at UMIN Clinical Trials Registry as UMIN000001841.

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

Two U.S. AV-8B Harrier fighter jets have dropped four bombs in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park when a training exercise went wrong. (Photo/U.S. Marine Corps)

Two US fighter jets dropped four training bombs on Australia’s World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef Marine Park after a training exercise went wrong, the US Navy said in a statement released late Saturday. The US 7th Fleet “has ruled out any risk to the public or environment.”

The AV-8B Harrier jets took off from the aircraft carrier USS Bonhomme Richard and each released an inert bomb and an unarmed explosive bomb off the coast of Queensland.

Each Harrier jet dropped two 227-kilo bombs: one BDU 45 and one High Explosive GBU 12. None of the bombs exploded as the BDU 45s are inert and the GBU 12s were unarmed when released.

Queensland Greens Senator Larissa Waters told the Australian Broadcasting Company that she was outraged and that this not the way to treat the World Heritage area.

“I think it’s outrageous that we’re letting the US military drop bombs on the World Heritage Great Barrier Reef,” she said. “I mean have we gone completely mad? Is this how we look after our World Heritage area now? Letting a foreign power drop bombs on it?”

The two AV-8B Harrier planes had intended to drop the bombs on a range on a nearby island but were unsuccessful despite several attempts.

Aerial of Heron Island, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, Queensland, AustraliaExploring the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park inQueensland, Australia.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Republished with permission from: Common Dreams

Poland has been identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison. Cuba is host to the notorious Guantanamo Bay. Pictured here are protestors during the 10-year anniversary of Guantanamo Bay detention center, in January 2012. (Amnesty Intl/Christoph Koettl/CC By 2.0)

WARSAW – The only sign of life at Szymany’s “international airport” are mosquitoes eager to suck blood out of a rare visitor. The gate is locked with a rusted chain and a padlock.

Evidence suggest that some of the last passengers at this site were CIA officers and their prisoners. That was in 2003. Soon after, the airport about 180 km north of Warsaw inside the picturesque Mazury forests went out of service.

Bounded by the Freedom of Information Act, Polish Airspace authorities have revealed that at least 11 CIA aircrafts landed at Szymany, and some of their passengers stayed on in Poland. The European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) was not informed about those flights.

From Szymany the prisoners were driven to a nearby intelligence academy in Stare Kiejkuty, where the CIA had a separated facility. In 2006, a few months after Poland was first identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison, Polish ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski visited the CIA villa — only to see that its chambers have been freshly renovated.

According to a U.S. intelligence source quoted by The New York Times, the prison in Poland was the most important of the CIA’s black sites, where terror suspects were subjected to interrogation techniques that would not be legal in the United States. The source claimed that Poland was picked mostly because “Polish intelligence officials were eager to cooperate.”

Two other European countries with known but unconfirmed black sites are Romania and Lithuania; the rest were in Asia and North Africa.

Human rights groups believe about eight terror suspects were held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two other men currently detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have been granted “injured person” status in the ongoing investigation.

The first is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national alleged to have organized the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. He has claimed that he was often stripped naked, hooded, or shackled during seven months at Stare Kiejkuty, and subjected to mock execution with a gun and threats of sexual assault against his family members.

The second, a stateless Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, said he was subjected to extreme physical pain, psychological pressure and waterboarding — mock drowning.

Any Polish leaders who would have agreed to the U.S. program would have been violating the constitution by giving a foreign power control over part of Polish territory, and allowing crimes to take place there.

Former prime minister Leszek Miller, now chairman of the opposition Democratic Left Alliance has been the prime target of criticism. There are demands he should face a special tribunal charged with trying state figures.

In March 2008, the Polish authorities opened a criminal investigation. “This indicates that Poland is a country with a rule of law,” Senator Jozef Pinior told IPS. “But the protraction is a reason for concern. The investigation has been moved to the third consecutive prosecutor’s office, in what looks like playing for time.”

Pinior, one of the leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement during the 1980s, and more recently a member of the European Parliament, has for long been lobbying for a full investigation into what the CIA was doing in Poland. Twice he was called in as witness in the investigation. He claims to have seen a document on a CIA prison with PM Miller’s signature.

“The Polish government, especially Leszek Miller, must have had knowledge that such sites existed on Polish territory without any legal basis,” Pinior said. “They must have known about the torture too. Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.”

It is still not clear how much knowledge the Polish leaders had about the black site in Stare Kiejkuty. Some have vehemently denied the prison’s existence, but some admit it between the lines, though denying responsibility.

“Of course, everything took place with my knowledge,” said former president Aleksander Kwasniewski in an interview with leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

“The President and the Prime Minister agreed to secret service co-operation with the Americans, because that is what was required by national interest…the decision to co-operate with the CIA carried a risk that Americans would use unacceptable methods. But if a CIA agent brutally treated a prisoner in a Marriott hotel in Warsaw, would you charge the directors of that hotel for the actions of that agent?”

For now Poland is the only country with investigation into the secret jails still open (Lithuania closed its case inconclusively). The officials blame delays on lack of cooperation on the U.S. government.

According to a public opinion poll by SW Research released in June, 82 percent Polish respondents said that the issue of CIA secret prisons should be clarified, and 78 percent that those responsible for human rights abuses and breach of constitution should be held liable.

“In the U.S. there is a stamp of approval that even though torture did happen, they are unwilling to go after the criminals. So Poland has tremendous responsibility to pursue the investigation and hold people accountable. It could be an inspiring example for the rest of the world,” Ramzi Kassem, attorney for some Guantanamo prisoners told IPS.

Otherwise, Kassem said, Poland will prove to be “a puppet regime willing to do the dirty work for the U.S. in much the same way that Jordan, Egypt and other dictatorships were doing at the time, imprisoning people and torturing them because the U.S. asked them to.”

Although no major political party in Poland wants the truth about Polish cooperation with the CIA to come out, Senator Pinior is “cautiously optimistic”.

“Any attempt to cover up would result in colossal shame,” he said. “I believe Polish democracy and institutions are too strong to be manipulated.”

Poland’s Szymany Airfield used for secret CIA torture operations.

© 2013 Inter Press Service

Republished with permission from: Common Dreams

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

Ex-MI6 chief threatens to expose secrets of Iraq war if he faces censure from the Chilcot inquiry.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew urged Greece to persevere with tough economic reforms during a one-day trip to Athens designed to demonstrate Washington’s support for the crisis-plagued country.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew urged Greece on Sunday to continue its crushing austerity policies “to ensure prosperity and growth for generations to come.”

Lew is on a one-day visit to Greece after attending the Group of 20 summit in Russia.

Lew emailed his comments to the media Sunday: “We know that Greece has passed through a very difficult period of adjustment and reform. We recognize the difficult decisions and shared sacrifices of the last few years, as well as the challenges that remain. The road ahead is still challenging. Continued reform will be essential to laying the foundation for sustained growth.”

Last week, Greek lawmakers passed a new law that puts 25,000 additional state workers on notice for possible dismissal as part of the wage and pension cuts and tax increases demanded by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.

According to The Greek Reporter: “The U.S. is keen on making sure Greece stays in the Eurozone at all costs so that there are no ripple effects that would upset Wall Street and American banks.”

Lew’s visit to Athens comes ahead of a meeting between Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on Aug. 8th.

Lew’s trip came just three days after German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a leading proponent of the harsh austerity policies, also visited Athens.

Massive Crowd Gathers at Parliament For Greek Anti-Austerity Protest, September 26, 2012.

A protester gestures at riot police during clashes outside the Greek parliament in Athens, on February 12, 2012. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the square outside Parliament as a parliamentary debate began, with more arriving constantly. As the crowds grew, a few hundred anarchists started to throw bottles and firebombs at police, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Republished with permission from: Common Dreams

An Iranian lawmaker says Washingtonâ„¢s proposal of direct talks with Tehran is merely a gesture and the US has made disingenuous overtures in the past.

Member of Iran Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee Mohammad-Saleh Jokar said on Sunday that the Americans have not changed.

Å“Whenever the US has voiced readiness for talks with Iran we have seen nothing but hostilities,” he added.

Former US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said in an article published by The Times Record on July 19 that Tehran and Washington may hold their first direct negotiations in 34 years in the second half of 2013.

Pointing to Burnsâ„¢ recent remarks, the Iranian lawmaker said, Å“If the Americans are making such a claim, they must stop meddling in the internal affairs of countries before anything else.”

Å“The hostilities shown by the United States toward our people and country over the past 30 years show its arrogant and hegemonic nature.”

Washington can only be trusted when it stops seeking dominance over other countries and respects their right to progress without accusing them of terrorism and human rights violations, the Iranian lawmaker stated.

On July 19, The Washington Post reported that the US Congress has postponed sending its annual sanctions legislation on Iran to the White House.

Citing Congressional Quarterly, the report claimed that the legislation will not be considered until October at the earliest.

While no specific reason has been officially announced as to why the sending of the legislation has been delayed, The Washington Post report said it might have been due to certain considerations by the Congress following the victory of Hassan Rohani in Iranâ„¢s June 14 presidential election.

MKA/HGH/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Iranian capacities helped defeat US-led sanctions: Iran oil min.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Iran Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi (R) and Iraqi Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Liwaa Sumaisem meet in Tehran on July 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says he does not reject talks with the United States on certain issues, but is not optimistic about talks with US.

The Leader emphasized that experience shows US is neither honest nor reliable.

MKA/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir ordered the stoppage of oil transfer through Sudanese territory from South Sudan on June 8.(file photo)

Republished with permission from: Press TV

The head of Italyâ„¢s central bank Ignazio Visco says political instability in the debt-ridden country will affect Milanâ„¢s recovery from recession.

“This is a critical phase…There is a stability issue, also from a political point of view, which affects the (country’s) ability to pursue opportunities for recovery,” Visco said on Saturday.

Italy started to experience recession after its economy contracted by 0.2 percent in the third quarter of 2011 and by 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of the same year.

Over the past decade, Italy has been the slowest growing economy in the eurozone as tough austerity measures, spending cuts, and pension changes have stirred serious concerns for many people already grappling with the European countryâ„¢s ailing economy.

In June, Italyâ„¢s Prime Minister Enrico Letta apologized to unemployed Italian young people who must leave the debt-stricken country to find jobs, saying Å“The biggest debt that we are accumulating, by repeating the mistakes of the previous generations, is towards the young people, which is an unforgivable mistake.”

On July 12, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) ratings agency downgraded its credit ratings on the two biggest Italian banks, UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo.

On July 9, S&P downgraded Italyâ„¢s sovereign credit rating to BBB from BBB+, with a negative outlook.

Meanwhile, Italyâ„¢s national statistics office said in a report that the number of Italians living in absolute and relative poverty has soared in 2012 with families in southern Italy being hit the hardest.

The report, citing a study conducted by ISTAT, revealed on July 17 that about 4.8 million people, or 8 percent of the population, are grappling with absolute poverty, meaning they are unable to afford the minimum acceptable living standard.

In 2011, 3.4 million people were reported to be living in poverty.

MAM/PR

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Bob Unruh
WND
July 21, 2013

In a survey by a top research firm, six in 10 physicians said it is likely many doctors will retire earlier than planned in the next one to three years.

The same percentage say the practice of medicine is in jeopardy as medical experts lose control of their clinics and compensation with the implementation of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, or Obamacare.

A spokeswoman for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Jane Orient, was not surprised.

Read more

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This article was posted: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 12:06 pm

Tags: domestic news, healthcare

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

Iran Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has slammed the Å“inhumane” abduction of an Iranian diplomat in the Yemeni capital, urging the Sanaâ„¢a government to take serious measures to secure his release.

In a telephone conversation with Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi on Sunday, Salehi said according to international treaties and conventions, the host country is responsible for ensuring the safety of diplomats.

He called on the Yemeni government to fulfill its duties and responsibilities in this regard.

Al-Qirbi, for his part, said the Yemeni government would make every effort to release the Iranian diplomat. He added that initial measures have been taken to identify the abductors.

Iranâ„¢s Foreign Ministry on Sunday summoned the Yemeni charge dâ„¢affaires to Tehran to convey the Islamic Republic’s serious concern over the fate of the kidnapped diplomat and to remind the Yemeni government’s responsibility about the issue.

Police sources said on Sunday that unknown gunmen kidnapped a staff member of Iranâ„¢s Embassy in Sanaâ„¢a. The diplomat was travelling through the diplomatic quarter in southern Sanaâ„¢a when armed men blocked the road, forced him to get out of his vehicle and took him to an unknown location.

Iran Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Araqchi confirmed that Nour Ahmad Nikbakht, an administrative staff member of Iranâ„¢s Embassy in Sanaâ„¢a, has been kidnapped by an unknown group.

SF/HGH/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says more than 625,000 Syrian refugees are receiving aid in neighboring Lebanon.

According to a UNHCR report released on Sunday, the recent figure comes after the registrations with its office in the Arab country increased by 13,000.

The report also says that the number of registered refugees is over 530,000, adding that more than 95,000 people are currently waiting for the completion of their registration process.

This week, more than 429,899 Syrian refugees reportedly received food coupons from the World Food Program through the Refugees Danish Board, the International Handicapped Organization, and a number of Italian NGOs.

Meanwhile, Beirut has called on the UN Security Council, as well as international donors, to help with it hosting the growing number of Syrian refugees.

Earlier in July, the UNHCR announced that the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has passed half a million.

Lebanese government officials, aid workers and experts believe the refugee figure is higher by an additional several hundred thousand people, and it does not include the tens of thousands of displaced Syrians in Lebanon who are well-off or not relying on humanitarian assistance.

Syria has been gripped by a deadly unrest since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of government forces, have been killed in the violence.

Damascus says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

SZH/PR

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Egyptâ„¢s security forces have released Ahmad al-Sioufi, head of Iranâ„¢s al-Alam Arabic-language news channel bureau in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, on bail.

Al-Sioufi was released on Sunday on a bail of 10,000 Egyptian pounds (about 1,428 dollars).

He was detained on Sunday after Egyptian security forces stormed the office of al-Alam in Cairo under the unfounded allegation that the office has no official permission, confiscating the officeâ„¢s equipment.

Al-Sioufiâ„¢s arrest was condemned by Egyptian journalists who staged a sit-in to protest against his arrest.

Earlier on Sunday, Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Hosseini dismissed as Å“unacceptable” the attack on the al-Alam office in Cairo and the confiscation of its equipment.

Å“We expect to see an end to such behaviors as quickly as possible. Egypt is a Muslim state and we are ready to broaden cooperation with this country in all sectors,” the minister stated.

Egypt’s military-led authorities have shut down several stations, including one operated by the Muslim Brotherhood, after former president, Mohamed Morsi, was toppled by the army.

On July 3, Egyptian security forces raided the offices of al-Jazeera Mubasher Misr news channel, and detained at least five of its staff.

Muslim Brotherhood-owned Egypt25 was also forced off the air and its managers were arrested shortly after General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s army chief, announced that Morsi and his government were no longer in office.

The authorities also shut down two other stations, al-Hafiz and al-Nas, after Morsi was overthrown.

SF/HGH/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Mexicoâ„¢s top drug cartel leader Victor Hugo Delgado Renteria(file photo).

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Infowars.com
July 21, 2013

State Of Mind: The Psychology Of Control, from the creators of A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995, is now going viral.

Released in full on YouTube only a few days ago, this high-definition film already has nearly 150,000 views.

Those who have already seen the film now know that much of what we believe to be true is actually deliberate deception.

State of Mind, available in DVD and Blu-Ray at the Infowars Shop, makes for an excellent addition to your library of liberty.

Consider picking up copies of State of Mind for great gifts to your friends and family.

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This article was posted: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 11:23 am

Tags: activism

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Syrian Ambassador to Tehran Adnan Mahmoud says Iranâ„¢s participation in the Geneva 2 conference is necessary and will help resolve the crisis in Syria.

On Sunday, Mahmoud said Syria is ready to take part in the peace conference which should be focused on ending terrorist plots and enabling talks between all Syrian sides without any preconditions.

On May 7, Russia and the United States agreed in the Russian capital, Moscow, to convene an international conference on Syria, which will serve as a follow-up to an earlier Geneva meeting held in June 2012. No specific date has been set for the event so far.

Mahmoud said Takfiri militants operating inside the Arab state have targeted civilians and destroyed the countryâ„¢s infrastructure, but the Syrian nation is resisting against them.

The envoy added that the Syrian army has the upper hand in its fight against foreign-backed extremists in the country and with the support of the people the army will continue to make strategic achievements.

He also praised Iranâ„¢s support for the Syrian nation since the beginning of the unrest in the country and its efforts to resolve the crisis.

The unrest in Syria erupted in March 2011. Since then, many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed.

Iran has repeatedly expressed its opposition to any foreign intervention in Syria’s internal affairs, stressing that inclusive dialogue and national reconciliation as well as free elections are keys to resolving the unrest in the Arab country.

MKA/HGH/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Indian paramilitary troops stop a private vehicle during the second day of curfew in Srinagar on July 20, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Syrian forces stand in the main square of al-Qusayr, after regaining control of the town, on June 5, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Two Egyptian soldiers and one policeman have been killed in three separate attacks in the disputed Sinai Peninsula which borders Israel, officials say.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Archbishop of York calls low pay in Britain a ‘national scandal’.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

File photo shows installations in South Pars gas field in southern Iran.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

David Lightman, Kate Irby and Ben Kamisar
McClatchy
July 21, 2013

Congress is growing increasingly wary of controversial National Security Agency domestic surveillance programs, a concern likely to erupt during legislative debate _ and perhaps prod legislative action _ as early as next week.

Skepticism has been slowly building since last month’s disclosures that the super-secret NSA conducted programs that collected Americans’ telephone data. Dozens of lawmakers are introducing measures to make those programs less secret, and there’s talk of denying funding and refusing to continue authority for the snooping.

The anxiety is a sharp contrast to June’s wait-and-see attitude after Edward Snowden, a government contract worker, leaked highly classified data to the media. The Guardian newspaper of Britain reported one program involved cellphone records. The Guardian, along with The Washington Post, also said another program allowed the government access to the online activity of users at nine Internet companies.

Obama administration officials quickly provided briefings about the programs, and they continue to have strong defenders at the Capitol. “People at the NSA in particular have heard a constant public drumbeat about a laundry list of nefarious things they are alleged to be doing to spy on Americans _ all of them wrong,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said last month. “The misperceptions have been great, yet they keep their heads down and keep working every day to keep us safe.”

Most in Congress remain reluctant to tinker with any program that could compromise security, but lawmakers are growing frustrated. “I think the administration and the NSA has had six weeks to answer questions and haven’t done a good job at it. They’ve been given their chances, but they have not taken those chances,” said Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash.

The House of Representatives could debate one of the first major bids for change soon. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., is trying to add a provision to the defense spending bill, due for House consideration next week, that would end the NSA’s mass collection of Americans’ telephone records. It’s unclear whether House leaders will allow the measure to be considered.

Other legislation could also start moving. Larsen is pushing a measure to require tech companies to publicly disclose the type and volume of data they have to turn over to the federal government. Several tech firms and civil liberties groups are seeking permission to do so.

Other bipartisan efforts are in the works. Thirty-two House members, led by Amash and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., are backing a plan to restrict Washington’s ability to collect data under the Patriot Act on people not connected to an ongoing investigation. Also active is a push to require the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which rules on government surveillance requests, to be more transparent.

Late Friday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reauthorized collection of telephone and online data by the federal government, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper revealed. He said the administration was “undertaking a careful and thorough review of whether and to what extent additional information or documents pertaining to this program may be declassified, consistent with the protection of national security.”

“It is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to have a full and frank discussion about this balance when the public is unable to review and analyze what the executive branch and the courts believe the law means,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who has asked the administration to make the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court public.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is leading an effort along with Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to have the court’s judges nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Currently, the Supreme Court’s chief justice selects judges from those holding other federal district court judgeships.

Schiff also is pushing a measure, along with Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., to require the attorney general to declassify significant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act opinions, and got a boost Friday from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

If there is a prevailing mood, it’s the nuanced approach offered by Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., an Intelligence Committee member.

“I think as more and more people come to understand the breadth of the authorizations that the NSA and other intelligence agencies have, they start to get a little worried about the encroachment on their privacy, and that’s absolutely fair,” he said.

The NSA is not acting rogue, Himes added. “They are acting pursuant to very clear authority under Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” Himes said. But, he said, “that law is too broadly worded and being interpreted a little broadly.” Section 215 provides authority for the surveillance programs.

The Obama administration maintains Congress shouldn’t be surprised by the programs.

“These programs are not illegal,” said James Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “They are authorized by Congress and are carefully overseen by the congressional intelligence and judiciary committees. . . . “In short, all three branches of government knew about these programs, approved them, and helped to ensure that they complied with the law.”

In 2011, he said, Congress reauthorized the programs after the House and Senate intelligence and judiciary committees had been briefed and information was made available to all members.

But Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., recalled that when he chaired the House Judiciary Committee in 2006, “I was not aware of any dragnet collection of phone records when the Patriot Act was reauthorized.” If he had, he said, “I would have publicly opposed such abuse.”

He cautioned the White House that the mood could turn against it. “If the administration continues to turn a deaf ear to the American public’s outcry, Section 215 will not have the necessary support to be reauthorized in 2015,” Sensenbrenner said. “. . . The proper balance between privacy and security has been lost.”

While the final shape of any legislation, if any, remains uncertain, questions about the programs are getting tougher.

“I’m not saying that they’ve been breaking the law or anything like that, but I think it’s been surprising to most members that it extends as far as it has, and I think members would like to review what is appropriate for the NSA to do,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, a senior House Appropriations Committee member.

The concerns fall into two general categories: What exactly is the NSA doing, and how can its work be more open?

“They need to provide as much clarity as they possibly can so people know and have a familiarity with what’s happening, why that happens,” said James Lankford, R-Okla., chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. He wanted “another round of information again and to be able to process that.”

The desire to know more sparked a sometimes fiery House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week with top administration officials.

Conyers, the committee’s top Democrat, noted that the Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable search and seizure. “You’ve already violated the law as far as I am concerned,” Conyers said.

The ire came from both parties. “The Star Chamber . . . in England started out . . . as very popular with the people. It allowed people to get justice that otherwise would not,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., referring to a court that was abolished by Parliament in 1641 over its abuses of power. “But it evolved over time into a powerful weapon for political retribution by the king.”

Litt had a ready explanation, saying the law was designed “to make sure that all three branches of government are involved, that this isn’t just the king, or the administration or an executive branch doing it.”

That court also came under tough scrutiny, as lawmakers are pressing to make it more open.

“There’s no legitimate reason to keep this legal analysis from public interest any longer,” said Conyers. Judiciary Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., was sympathetic, saying, “I share his concern about some classified information that does not need to be classified.”

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

Pro-Taliban militants have made various homemade explosives in order to target religious gatherings of Shia Muslims in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, a media report says.

The revelation comes after an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded accidentally in the house of a pro-Taliban commander in the volatile city on Saturday evening. At least two of the bomb makers were killed and several others injured as a result of the accidental explosion.

Some suspects now in police custody have told investigators that the bombs were made to target a huge Shia Muslim procession schedules to be held during the holy month of Ramadan, Dawn newspaper reported.

The developments come as a top Pakistani court has recently ordered the government in Sindh Province, of which Karachi is the capital, to take the issue of the presence of the pro-Taliban militants in the city seriously.

Karachi has experienced a wave of sectarian violence and targeted killings over the past few months.

Sectarian, political, and ethnic violence has killed hundreds of people in Pakistanâ„¢s main commercial hub so far this year.

Meanwhile, human Rights Watch says hundreds of Shias were killed in Pakistan in 2012, which was the deadliest year on record for the Shia Muslim community.

Reports say the anti-Shia terrorist group of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) was behind most of the attacks on Shia Muslims in Pakistan.

Shia Muslims in Pakistan say the government must take decisive action against the forces involved in the targeted killings. They also accuse Islamabad of failing to provide security for the Muslim community.

The countryâ„¢s Shia leaders have called on the government to form a judicial commission to investigate the bloodshed.

The killing of Shias has caused an international outrage, with rights groups and regional countries expressing concern over the ongoing deadly violence.

Shias make up about one third of Pakistanâ„¢s population of over 180 million.

JR/PR

Republished with permission from: Press TV

US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) and Acting Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas meet in the West Bank city of Ramallah on July 19, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Woolwich suspect assaulted by prison officers.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A picture taken on May 28, 2013 shows the Blue Nile in Guba, Ethiopia, during its diversion ceremony.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A military court in Jordan has rejected a bail application by Cleric Abu Qatada who faces multiple terror charges, his lawyer says.

“The state security court today refused to release Abu Qatada on bail,” his lawyer Taysir Diab said on Sunday.

On July 7, Abu Qatada, 53, was charged with “conspiracy to carry out terrorist acts” in Jordan.

The charges were brought against him just hours after he was deported from Britain, after a decade-long battle over his extradition.

The Palestinian-born cleric however has pleaded not guilty.

“The court gave no reason for its decision. I will meet with Abu Qatada on Wednesday to look into the issue and decide future steps,” Diab added.

The cleric is currently staying at the Muwaqqar prison.

In May, Qatada accepted to return to Jordan voluntarily after the countryâ„¢s government ratified the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Britain, ensuring a fair trial for him.

He was sentenced to death in absentia back in 1999 for attempting to carry out terror attacks, including at a US school in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

However, the sentence was commuted to life in prison with hard labor. In 2000, again he was sentenced to 15-year jail term.

SZH/PR

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A European economist, Ben May, says the recession-hit Greece may be forced to leave the eurozone if the countryâ„¢s international creditors cannot reduce Athensâ„¢ debts.

“If Eurozone creditors behave unwilling in decreasing Greece’s debt burden, it might lead to the country’s collapse and quit from Euro zone,” said the economist at the London-based finance institution Capital Economics on Saturday.

Greece has been at the epicenter of the eurozone debt crisis and is experiencing its sixth year of recession, while harsh austerity measures have left about half a million people without jobs.

On July 8, Eurozone finance ministers decided to agree on the recommendations by the so-called troika of international lenders — the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — to release nearly 7 billion euros (USD 9.2 billion) in financial aid for Greece.

This is while, in order to receive the approved rescue funds, Greece must stick to the agenda of either transferring or laying off thousands of civil servants, including Athens municipal police, teachers and school security personnel, by the end of this year.

Athens was granted a 110-billion-euro (USD 145-billion) bailout by the so-called troika in May 2010.

Another 130-billion euro (USD 170-billion) rescue package was approved in February 2012.

The record high unemployment level in Greece stands at 27 percent and 62.5 percent of the youths are without work.

One out of every five Greek workers is currently unemployed; banks are in a shaky position, and pensions and salaries have been slashed by up to 40 percent.

MAM/PR

Republished with permission from: Press TV

At least three people, including two British citizens, have died after a 5-seat Eurocopter EC120 Colibri helicopter struck them in Russia.

The crash took place Sunday morning at about 11:00 local time (07:00 GMT) in a popular tourist area, the Lovozersky district, some 150 kilometers east of the northern city of Murmansk.

According to a source in Russia’s aviation agency Rosaviatsia, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Å“After take-off, the helicopter tilted and fell onto its side. Three people who were on the ground at the time died of their injuries.”

Following the crash, Russiaâ„¢s Emergencies Ministry said in a statement that a helicopter with rescuers was sent to the site of the deadly crash near the Rynda River.

The cause of the crash has not been determined yet, and an investigation into the incident is underway.

Local police officials said that the pilot of the private helicopter has survived the crash.

Earlier this month, 24 people, including children, were killed after a transport helicopter, flying from Deputatsky village in Sakha, about 8500 kilometers east of the capital Moscow, to Kazachye village, crashed into a hilltop in a polar region of Siberia.

Following the accident, a regional police officer said that Å“The helicopter was literally pressed into the slope of the hill by strong, descending air currents.”

In May, several people, on board a Soviet-built transport helicopter, were killed after the aircraft went down in the countryâ„¢s Siberian region of Irkutsk.

MAM/PR

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Voters select candidates before casting their ballots in Japan’s upper house parliamentary elections at a polling station in Tokyo, Sunday, July 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Hosseini says the Egyptian governmentâ„¢s ban on Iranâ„¢s al-Alam Arabic-language news channel harms Tehran-Cairo ties.

Hosseini also dismissed as Å“unacceptable” the July 20 attack on the office of al-Alam in Cairo by Egyptian security forces and the confiscation of its equipment.

Å“We expect to see an end to such behaviors as quickly as possible. Egypt is a Muslim state and we are ready to broaden cooperation with this country in all sectors,” the minister stated.

Egyptian forces arrested Ahmad al-Sioufi, who serves as the Cairo bureau chief for the station, on Saturday and refused to provide any explanation for their acts.

Egypt’s military-led authorities have shut down several stations, including one operated by the Muslim Brotherhood, after former president, Mohamed Morsi, was toppled by the army.

On July 3, Egyptian security forces raided the offices of al-Jazeera Mubasher Misr news channel, and detained at least five of its staff.

Muslim Brotherhood-owned Egypt25 was also forced off the air and its managers were arrested shortly after General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s army chief, announced that Morsi and his government were no longer in office.

The authorities also shut down two other stations, al-Hafiz and al-Nas, after Morsi was overthrown.

KA/HGH/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Road accident kills 15 Egyptian soldiers, injures 40, on July 21, 2013. (file photo)

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has strengthened his position in recent months, British Prime Minister David Cameron admits.

Speaking on the state-run BBCâ„¢s Andrew Marr show, Cameron said the Syrian government is stronger now than few months ago.

“I think he [Assad] may be stronger than he was a few months ago but I’d still describe the situation as a stalemate,” Cameron said.

He also said London is still committed to help the insurgents in Syria despite dorpping plans to arm them in the Arab country.

Britain pushed to lift an European Union (EU) arms embargo on Syria militants to open up the possibility for the West to arm the insurgents fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Cameron, however, held off after military chiefs warned over the risks of arming the militants in the Arab country.

Syrian government forces recaptured the strategically important town of al-Qusayr in Western Syria in June. Most of the much bigger city of Homs also has been retaken by the government troops.

MOS/HE

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says resuming stalled peace talks with the Palestinians will not be easy.

During a weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu told Israeli ministers that any draft treaty would be put to a referendum.

Netanyahu remarks came after US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel have agreed to meet and prepare for the resumption of talks.

Netanyahu said he hoped the talks would be held “in a responsible, practical and serious manner.”

Kerry has visited the Middle East six times in an effort to resume talks, which have been stalled since September 2010 due to the illegal expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Although the PA has called for a halt to the construction of illegal settlements, Israeli ministers have voiced opposition to a freeze on settlement expansion.

“It’s inappropriate for the Jewish people, for the land of Israel and for a sovereign state,” Housing Minister Uri Ariel said. “We are in favor of building as much as possible.”

On July 19, spokesman for the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, rejected the proposal made by Kerry for the resumption of talks between the two sides.

The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israelâ„¢s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds more than four decades ago.

The Palestinians are seeking to create an independent state on the territories of the West Bank, East al-Quds (Jerusalem), and the Gaza Strip and are demanding that Israel withdraw from the Palestinian territories occupied in the Six-Day War of 1967.

Tel Aviv, however, has refused to return to the 1967 borders and is unwilling to discuss the issue of al-Quds.

The United Nations and most countries regard the Israeli settlements as illegal because the territories were captured by Israel in a war and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbids construction on occupied lands.

SZH/PR

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Afghan security forces inspect the site of a car bomb attack in Kabul. (File photo)

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Craig Whitlock
Washington Post
July 21, 2013

The steel-gray U.S. Air Force Predator drone plunged from the sky, shattering on mountainous terrain near the Iraq-Turkey border. For Kurdish guerrillas hiding nearby, it was an unexpected gift from the propaganda gods.

Fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, filmed the charred wreckage on Sept. 18 and posted a video on YouTube. A narrator bragged unconvincingly that the group had shot down the drone. But for anyone who might doubt that the flying robot was really American, the video zoomed in on mangled parts stamped in English and bearing the label of the manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics.

For a brief moment, the crash drew back the curtain on Operation Nomad Shadow, a secretive U.S. military surveillance program. Since November 2011, the U.S. Air Force has been flying unarmed drones from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in an attempt to suppress a long-simmering regional conflict. The camera-equipped Predators hover above the rugged border with Iraq and beam high-resolution imagery to the Turkish armed forces, helping them pursue PKK rebels as they slip back and forth across the mountains.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 6:22 am

Tags: drones

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

James S. Robbins
Rare
July 21, 2013

Would you trust thousands of low-level Federal bureaucrats and contractors with one-touch access to your private financial and medical information? Under Obamacare you won’t have any choice.

As the Obamacare train-wreck begins to gather steam, there is increasing concern in Congress over something called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Data Hub is a comprehensive database of personal information being established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to implement the federally facilitated health insurance exchanges. The purpose of the Data Hub, according to a June 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is to provide “electronic, near real-time access to federal data” and “access to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer-eligibility information.” In these days of secret domestic surveillance by the intelligence community, rogue IRS officials and state tax agencies using private information for political purposes, and police electronically logging every license plate that passes by, the idea of the centralized Data Hub is making lawmakers and citizens nervous.

They certainly should be; the potential for abuse is enormous. The massive, centralized database will include comprehensive personal information such as income and financial data, family size, citizenship and immigration status, incarceration status, social security numbers, and private health information. It will compile dossiers based on information obtained from the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social Security Administration, state Medicaid databases, and for some reason the Peace Corps. The Data Hub will provide web-based, one-stop shopping for prying into people’s personal affairs.

Full article here

Patrick Howley
Daily Caller
July 21, 2013

Former neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman is viewed favorably by 32 percent of the American public, according to a new Rasmussen poll.

32 percent of American adults view Zimmerman favorably, while 48 percent view him unfavorably, according to the poll.

Zimmerman was acquitted this month in the shooting death of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, but his case remains a lightning rod in the public discourse. Though just 34 percent of the public actually disagreed with Zimmerman’s not-guilty verdict, according to a previous Rasmussen poll, the 29-year old watchman remains a polarizing national figure.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” President Obama said in a press conference on Friday after the verdict. Protests related to Zimmerman’s acquittal resulted in 17 arrests in Southern California after a demonstration in Victorville Wednesday. Florida governor Rick Scott was forced to hold an emergency meeting with protesters that camped out in the lobby outside his office, demanding repeal of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law.

NBA legend Charles Barkley has been one of the few public figures anywhere near Zimmerman’s side during the frenzy, saying, “I agree with the verdict.”

Full article here

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This article was posted: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 6:15 am

Tags: domestic news

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Melanie Hall
London Telegraph
July 21, 2013

A former head of MI6 has threatened to expose the secrets of the ‘dodgy dossier’ if he disagrees with the long-awaited findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s role in the Iraq War.

Sir Richard Dearlove, 68, has spent the last year writing a detailed account of events leading up to the war, and had intended to only make his work available to historians after his death.

But now Sir Richard, who provided intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that was apparently ‘sexed up’ by Tony Blair’s government, has revealed that he could go public after the Chilcot Inquiry publishes its findings.

Sir Richard is expected to be criticised by the inquiry’s chairman, Sir John Chilcot, over the accuracy of intelligence provided by MI6 agents inside Iraq, which was used in the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’.

Now the ex-MI6 boss, who is Master at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, has said: “What I have written (am writing) is a record of events surrounding the invasion of Iraq from my then professional perspective.

“My intention is that this should be a resource available to scholars, but after my decease (may be sooner depending on what Chilcot publishes).

“I have no intention, however, of violating my vows of official secrecy by publishing any memoir.”

Sources close to Sir Richard said that he insists Chilcot should recognise the role played by Tony Blair and the Prime Minister’s chief spokesman Alastair Campbell in informing media reports which suggested Saddam could use chemical weapons to target British troops based in Cyprus, a claim which led to Britain entering the war in Iraq.

Sir Richard is said to remain extremely unhappy that this piece of intelligence, which his agents stressed only referred to battlefield munitions which had a much shorter range, led to media reports that UK bases were under threat.

However, he accepts that some of MI6’s information on the WMDs was inaccurate, the Mail on Sunday reported.

Mr Blair and Mr Campbell have repeatedly denied making misleading statements about WMD.

Last week it was revealed that Sir John had written to Prime Minister David Cameron informing him of his intention to write personally to those individuals he intends to criticise, with Tony Blair reported to be among those on Sir John’s list.

Sir Richard has taken a sabbatical from his duties at Cambridge University to research and write his record of events, and is expected to resume his Master’s role at the start of the new academic year.

A security source told The Mail on Sunday: “This is Sir Richard’s time-bomb. He wants to set the record straight and defend the integrity of MI6. And Sir Richard has taken a lot of personal criticism over MI6’s performance and his supposedly too-cosy relationship with Mr Blair.

“No Chief of MI6 has done anything like this before, but the events in question were unprecedented.

“If Chilcot doesn’t put the record straight, Sir Richard will strike back.”

Last night the committee’s chairman, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was appointed in 2010, offered Sir Richard his support, saying: “I have never heard of a former MI6 chief putting something out there in these terms but I would be interested in what Sir Richard has to say in response to the Chilcot Inquiry which is clearly going to have some meat in it.

“I know Sir Richard and worked with him in the Foreign Office many years ago. He is a very able man of the highest character and a man of his own opinions. We shall have to wait to see what he says.”

Last night, Alastair Campbell and the office for Tony Blair declined to comment on Sir Richard’s account.

When intelligence historian Matthew Aid read the USA Today story last Thursday about how the National Security Agency was collecting millions of phone call records from AT&T, Bell South and Verizon for a widespread domestic surveillance program designed to root out possible terrorist activity in the United States, he had to wonder whether the date on the newspaper wasn’t 1976 instead of 2006.

Aid, a visiting fellow at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, who has just completed the first book of a three-volume history of the NSA, knew the nation’s bicentennial marked the year when secrets surrounding another NSA domestic surveillance program, code-named Project Shamrock, were exposed. As fireworks showered New York Harbor that year, the country was debating a three-decades-long agreement between Western Union and other telecommunications companies to surreptitiously supply the NSA, on a daily basis, with all telegrams sent to and from the United States. The similarity between that earlier program and the most recent one is remarkable, with one exception – the NSA now owns vastly improved technology to sift through and mine massive amounts of data it has collected in what is being described as the world’s single largest database of personal information. And, according to Aid, the mining goes far beyond our phone lines.

The controversy over Project Shamrock in 1976 ultimately led Congress to pass the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other privacy and communication laws designed to prevent commercial companies from working in cahoots with the government to conduct wholesale secret surveillance on their customers. But as stories revealed last week, those safeguards had little effect in preventing at least three telecommunications companies from repeating history.

Aid, who co-edited a book in 2001 on signals intelligence during the Cold War, spent a decade conducting more than 300 interviews with former and current NSA employees for his new history of the agency, the first volume of which will be published next year. Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, calls Aid the top authority on the NSA, alongside author James Bamford.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Infowars.com
July 21, 2013

Alex stopped by the birth place of the Texas revolution in Gonzales TX.

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This article was posted: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 6:21 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Often forgotten amidst journalists’ public personas and front page scoops is the crux of their profession: the practice of gathering news. Reporting, at its best, consists of bringing to light information powerful factions want kept in the dark, and the sources for these stories are often people whose careers, or even lives, are at risk if they are exposed. To provide this public service, all good reporters must sometimes promise their sources confidentiality for which they would, in turn, risk their own careers to protect.

Recognizing that robust and uninhibited newsgathering is essential to a free press, many courts have established a common law “reporter’s privilege” which protects journalists from having to testify about the identity of their sources in all but the most extreme cases. Yesterday, in the most significant reporter’s privilege decision in decades, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals eviscerated that privilege, in the jurisdiction where it is needed most.

The underlying case involves a former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who is alleged to be a source for an illuminating chapter in New York Times reporter James Risen’s 2006 book State of War, and Risen was subpoenaed to give up the identity of his source. The court ruled that Risen has no right to a reporter’s privilege in the First Amendment, nor is there a common law privilege in the Fourth Circuit, nor does the Court have the right to create one, nor will they allow Risen to escape testimony even if there was.

The district court, which this decision overturns, had it exactly right when it wrote, “A criminal trial subpoena is not a free pass for the government to rifle through a reporter’s notebook.” Now there is nothing stopping reporters from being used as prosecutors, called to testify as to their sources at the whims of the Executive, which is often times the very branch of government they are reporting on.

Many of the largest government agencies dealing with national security–including the CIA, NSA, and Joint Special Operations Command (JOSC)–are located in the Fourth Circuit; this will undoubtedly make it harder for reporters covering them to do their job. As Marcy Wheeler put it, “This pretty much guts national security journalism in the states in which it matters.”

The stinging dissent, written by Bush-appointed Judge Roger Gregory, suggested the decision betrayed the spirit of the free press clause of the First Amendment, “one of our Constitution’s most important and salutary contributions to human history.”

“Our country’s Founders established the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press as a recognition that a government unaccountable to public discourse renders that essential element of democracy—the vote—meaningless,” he wrote. “The majority reads narrowly the law governing the protection of a reporter from revealing his sources, a decision that is, in my view, contrary to the will and wisdom of our Founders.”

The district court decision granted James Risen the privilege not to testify after he submitted an extraordinary legal affidavit to the court in which he laid out how his reporting on national security abuses during the Bush administration had led to him being harassed–with his emails, phone calls, and even credit reports being monitored. The Bush administration and members of Congress had publicly threatened him with prosecution under the Espionage Act for his reporting on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. (Sound familiar?)

The Bush administration eventually dropped the subpoena after Risen resisted it for so long, but when President Obama took office, his Justice Department re-issued it and has taken the fight from Sterling’s grand jury, to his trial, and now the appeals court. As Marcy Wheeler wrote, “there is a strong case to be made that the entire point of this trial is to put James Risen, not Jeffrey Sterling, in jail.”

As the New York Times reported Friday, “Mr. Risen has vowed to appeal any loss at the appeals court to the Supreme Court, and to go to prison rather than testify about his sources.” He should be commended for continuing to fight for his rights and others’.

This should strengthen the calls for a federal shield law that will once and for all codify protections most courts already provided (at least up until today). But be warned: the current bills circulating in the House and Senate are quite dangerous and should be resisted by all media organizations until substantial fixes are made. The Senate bill contains a significant national security exception, which as we’ve explained before, would make the bill meaningless for the only journalists who need the law in the first place. The bills also contain restrictive definitions of journalism that will leave many bloggers and independent journalists without protection.

Whatever happens, make no mistake: this is a dark day for press freedom in the United States. This decision not only deals a blow to all national security journalists, but to the public at large, whose right-to-know will certainly suffer because of it.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Conflict drags on interminably. Dozens or more die daily. Syrian forces outmatch Western-backed death squad terrorists. They’re not rebels. They’re lawless invaders.

They’re US proxy fighters. They’re imported from dozens of countries. They’re waging war against sovereign Syrian independence. Don’t expect duplicitous Western politicians or media scoundrels to explain.

Assad’s military outguns and outflanks Washington’s shock troops. Reinforcements keep coming. Libya 2.0 looks possible. Perhaps likely.

Russia hopes for a September international peace conference. Originally a June one was planned. Why bother when Washington prioritizes war. It spurns peace. Last year’s conference failed.

Expect nothing different this time. Peace remains elusive. Advocates have no partners.

According to European Council president Herman Van Rompuy:

“A military solution to the crisis is impossible. (T)he solution is only diplomatic.” Conflict can end soon. It can happen if Washington calls off its dogs. It shouldn’t have unleashed them in the first place.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey said he provided Obama with “options for the use of force.” He declined to explain more.

“(I)t would be inappropriate for me to try to influence the decision with me rendering an opinion in public about what kind of force we should use.”

John McCain’s super-hawkish. He’s not alone. He asked the wrong question. He asked Dempsey what carries greater risk: continued limited Washington intervention or more robust tactics.

He favors more heavily arming terrorist fighters. They’re getting plenty of weapons already. He wants no-fly zone protection implemented.

Doing so’s an act of war. It’s illegal without Security Council authorization. So is meddling in Syria’s internal affairs politically, economically, and/or militarily (directly or indirectly).

McCain’s dismissive of international law. So are other congressional hawks. Dempsey said he favors “building a moderate opposition and supporting it.”

“The question whether to support it with direct kinetic strikes…is a decision for our elected officials, not for the senior military leader of the nation.”

Kinetic strikes refer to missiles, bombs, drone attacks, and other military initiatives.  According to Dempsey, they’re “under deliberation inside of our agencies of government.”

Asked about Dempsey’s comments, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama always asks military commanders for options. It’s “true in an arena like Syria” and elsewhere.

Obama’s reviewing them, he added. According to Vice Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral James Winnefeld:

“There are a whole range of options that are out there. We are ready to act if we’re called on to act.”

These type comments aren’t new. Whether direct US intervention follows remains to be seen.

Senator Carl Levin wants it. He wants Syria bombed. He urged Obama to attack “airfields, airplanes and massed artillery.” He supports terrorist insurgent invaders. He does so shamelessly. More on him below.

Armed Services Committee members are considering whether to renominate Dempsey and Winnefield for second terms. McCain’s opposed.

Democrats have majority say. Expect both top commanders to be approved.

At the same time, anti-Assad forces are fighting each other. Extremist Al Nusra insurgents are clashing with Free Syria Army elements. Unity remains elusive.

Things escalated dramatically. Whether full-scale internecine conflict follows remains to be seen. If so, maybe each side will annihilate the other. That’s one way to wind things down.

Al Qaeda wants its own. Syrian unity is threatened. So far insurgent extremists lack enough strength to prevail.

Assad forces consistently rout them. Without US intervention, they don’t have a chance. They can prolong conflict.

They can cause many more deaths, injuries and displacements. They can’t prevail without Libya 2.0 help.

General David Richards is UK outgoing armed forces chief. Britain must be prepared to “go to war” with Syria, he said. “(I)f you want to have the material impact on the Syrian regime’s calculations that some people seek…ground targets” must be “hit.”

“There is a lack of international consensus on how to take this forward,” he said.

“We are trying to cohere the opposition groups, but they are difficult to cohere because there are many different dimensions to them.”

“So it is work in progress. So I am very clear in my military advice to the government that we need to understand what the political objective is before we can sensibly recommend what military effort and forces should be applied to it.”

“That is something we debate a lot, from the Prime Minister downwards. We also need to do this with our allies.”

“Allies have different views on the way ahead. Understandably there is a great reluctance to see Western boots on the ground in a place like Syria.”

“If you wanted to have the material impact on the Syrian regime’s calculations that some people seek, a no fly zone per se is insufficient.”

“You have to be able, as we did successfully in Libya, to hit ground targets.”

“You have to establish a ground control zone. You have to take out their air defences.”

“You also have to make sure they can’t manoeuvre — which means you have to take out their tanks, and their armoured personnel carriers and all the other things that are actually doing the damage.”

“If you want to have the material effect that people seek you have to be able to hit ground targets and so you would be going to war if that is what you want to do.’

“That is rightly a huge and important decision. There are many arguments for doing it, but there are many arguments for not doing so too.”

Syria’s situation is “highly complex,” he stressed. Escalated war risks cross-border conflict. It’s happening in Lebanon.

It could affect all Syria’s neighbors. Perhaps other regional states. The entire region could become embroiled. Global conflict could follow.

Richards knows the risks. So do other high-level military commanders. They’re warriors, not peacemakers.

Richards called himself a “moral soldier.” His remark is offensive. It’s oxymoronic on its face. He said Afghanistan’s a “good war.”

Others know better. Benjamin Franklin said “(t)here is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.”

Russia said it won’t let Assad be toppled militarily. It has strategic interests at stake. Perhaps it wants Syria to be Obama’s regional Waterloo.

Halting his imperial rampaging’s important. If Russia and China aren’t committed, who will be? United they stand the best chance. It’s time they stepped up to the plate and acted.

America wages wars on small nations. It prefers weaker ones it can roll over. It abstains from challenging more equal rivals militarily. Bullies operate that way.

Jimmy Carter believes “America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy.” It never had one. Carter didn’t explain.

He’s pessimistic. He’s got good reason to be. He called Snowden’s leaks “beneficial.”

He thinks NSA spying undermines US credibility worldwide. It constitutes “the invasion of human rights and American privacy.” It’s “gone too far.”

“I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive,” he said.

“So I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.”

He criticized Obama’s policies earlier. He condemned his drone attacks. He called targeted assassinations lawless.

Imperial policies undermine America’s “role as the global champion of human rights,” he said.

“America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.”

America lacks moral authority. It lost it multiple ways. Carter’s no saint. Compared to Obama, he looks that way.

A Final Comment

Levin chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. King serves on it with him. Both express hawkish views. They visited the region. They did so for propaganda purposes.

They deplore peace. They support escalated war. They may get what they wish for. They’ll be accountable for lots more blood on their hands.

“We believe the United States should join with its partners and allies in the region and elsewhere to pursue an end to the bloodshed,” they said.

“An international coalition that strengthens the military and political capabilities of thoroughly vetted anti-Assad forces should supply equipment and training.”

“That coalition should also plan for steps that would place even greater military pressure on the Assad regime, including possible strikes against the missiles, aircraft and other heavy weapons that are the instruments of Assad’s campaign of terror.”

Both senators know Washington directly aids Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. They’re supplied weapons, funding, training and direction. It’s been ongoing since conflict began. CIA and US special forces are involved. It’s an open secret.

Levin and King believe the best way to end war is wage more of it. They believe war is peace. They stop short of recommending US boots on the ground. Perhaps they will later. Who knows?

No matter the risks involved, they said, “the costs of inaction are equally high. Assad’s survival, with support from Iran and Hezbollah, would surely strengthen them, to our great detriment.”

They barely stopped short of urging regional war against nonexistent threats.

They blame Assad for Washington’s crimes. It’s standard imperial duplicity. Obama bears full responsibility. Don’t expect them to explain.

“….US national interests are at stake,” they claim. So are neighboring countries “Israel, Turkey and Jordan.”

They propose international action against Assad. They want “a comprehensive strategy” agreed on as soon as possible.

They want all-out war. They want it against an independent, nonbelligerent sovereign state. They ignore inviolable international law principles.

They turned truth on its head, saying:

A “widespread insurgency has strong popular support.”

False! The vast majority of Syrians support Assad. Independent polls show it. The longer conflict persists, the more his support grows.

Syrians depend on him for whatever protection he can provide. When Syrian forces liberate insurgent held areas, residents express gratitute openly.

Levin and King want America to “help the Syrian people end the senseless slaughter they are suffering” by inflicting more of it.

They, likeminded congressional members, Obama, and complicit administration officials reflect diabolical forces of evil. They’re unmatched in human history.

They’re waging war on humanity. Perhaps they believe the best way to save it is destroy it.

They support permanent war. They want unchallenged US global dominance. They’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.

Imagine the worst ahead. They endorse what’s likely coming. Survival’s up for grabs.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour 

http://www.dailycensored.com/whats-next-for-syria/

Republished with permission from: Global Research

NSA Spying: A Matter of Degree

We have long noted that the government is spying on just about everything we do.

The NSA has pretended that it only spies on a small number of potential terrorists. But NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis inadvertently admitted that the NSA could spy on just about all Americans.

Inglis told Congress last week that the agency conducts “three-hop” analysis.

Three-hop (also known as “three degree”) analysis means:

The government can look at the phone data of a suspected terrorist, plus the data of all of the contacts, then all of those people’s contacts, and all of those people’s contacts.

This means that a lot of people could be caught up in the dragnet:

If the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Given that there are now approximately 875,000 people in the government’s database of suspected terrorists — including many thousands of Americans — every single American living on U.S. soil could easily be caught up in the dragnet.

For example, 350 million Americans divided by 2.5 million Americans caught up in dragnet for each suspected terrorist, means that a mere 140 potential terrorists could lead to spying on all Americans. There are tens of thousands of Americans listed as suspected terrorists … including just about anyone who protests anything that the government or big banks do.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes:

According to an unusually blunt Senate investigation of so-called “fusion centers” released last month, the TIDE [i.e. suspected terrorist] database is also full of information of innocent people that have nothing to do with terrorism. The report gave examples of: a TIDE profile of a person whom the FBI had already cleared of any connection to terrorism, a TIDE profile of a two-year old-boy, and even a TIDE profile of Ford Motor Company.

ARS Technica reports:

When the first revelations about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) widespread collection of phone call metadata and Internet traffic began to surface, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham noted that for those not talking to terrorists on the phone, “We don’t have anything to worry about. I’m glad that activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to.”

Turns out the data collection is not so limited. In testimony yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee, National Security Agency Deputy Director Chris Inglis said that the NSA’s probing of data in search of terrorist activity extended “two to three hops” away from suspected terrorists. Previously, NSA leaders had said surveillance was limited to only two “hops” from a suspect.

If you’ve ever played “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” or used LinkedIn to try to reach someone professionally, you know how small the world of interconnected contacts can be. When you use big data tools to mine for relationships, the world gets even smaller. That third hop in connections greatly expands the probability of innocent people worldwide being scooped up into the NSA’s surveillance machine to include a good-sized share of American citizens–citizens who Senator Graham said “don’t have anything to worry about.”

***

By reading this article, you’re one hop from me–and three hops from [Afghan President] Hamid Karzai.

***

The NSA’s systems sort through the data using algorithms to find connections. These can be detected in near real time from Internet data or discovered in the periodic dumps of phone metadata from carriers, building upon the system’s knowledge of previous connections. The system narrows the field of potential surveillance targets through a process that’s similar to playing the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”–only, in this case, it’s more like “Three Degrees of Osama Bin Laden.”***

To determine how many hops you are from Osama, for example, the NSA’s data analysis engine software constantly plows through information and builds a model of all the relationships between every phone number on record and every IP address. Other software robots query the graph to discover which “nodes”–phone numbers, IP addresses and email accounts–fall within three degrees of separation from an established suspect.

If you have a direct relationship with a suspected terrorist or target (you’ve called them, you’ve emailed them, you’ve visited their website) that’s a “one hop” relationship; there’s a solid line connecting you to that person in the NSA’s relationship graph. If you talk with, e-mail, or visit the Facebook page or website of someone who’s got a one-hop relationship, you’re two hops away. Add one more person in between in the graph, and you’re three hops away.

If you’re within three hops, you may get flagged for analysis, and then you could get extra special attention, such as a secret FISA warrant request to use PRISM for access to your data on cloud providers’ servers.

Under the NSA’s FISA requests, Google, Microsoft, and other Internet services companies can be compelled to hand over relevant data from their servers on any account that falls within the three-hop range and is flagged as belonging to a person of interest. If you’ve won this lottery, the NSA will get access to your e-mails on Gmail or Outlook.com as well as your chats and Web-stored contacts, your documents, your synced data from computers and mobile devices, your backups, and anything else that can be handed over–at least, so the documents Snowden leaked imply.

Your raw Internet traffic will get more attention as well. Your IP address will be watched more carefully by deep packet inspection hardware at the NSA’s ‘Net taps, and what you do online will get extra scrutiny.

If your behavior is anomalous enough, and if you’re a US resident, the NSA will pass the surveillance over to the FBI. Otherwise, your data will be collected and analyzed until it’s determined that you have nothing to do with the alleged terrorist; how long that process takes (and how long the data is retained after analysis) is unknown.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much to hit the three-hop jackpot; without knowing it, a large percentage of the world’s population (and the US population) could easily be classified as being in a third degree of separation from a suspected terrorist.

A great deal of research has been done into the interconnectedness of people in the Internet age. Social scientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists have explored the “small world” phenomenon with studies and experiments for over 50 years, and their findings show that the “small world” keeps getting smaller as technology advances. In 1979, chair and founder of MIT’s political science department Ithiel de Sola Pool and the University of Michigan’s Manfred Kochen published a paper titled “Contacts and Influence,” which draws on a decade of research into social networks. De Sola Pool and Kochen posited that “in a country the size of the United States, if acquaintanceship were random and the mean acquaintance volume were 1,000, the mean length of minimum chain between pairs of persons would be well under two intermediaries.”

In other words, if the average person in the US has contact with and is acquainted with 1,000 others (through brief interactions, such as an e-mail or a phone call, or through stronger associations), then we’re at most two hops from anyone else in the US. Ergo, if any one person in the US is one hop from a terrorist, chances are good that you are three hops away.

***

Live in a major metropolitan center in the US and you’re bound to be two degrees of separation away from someone in a country that’s of interest to the NSA. For example: I have been a regular customer of restaurants owned by Baltimore’s Karzai family, which is headed by a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai–two hops. I’m also, according to LinkedIn, two degrees of separation away from President Obama. Am I a good guy or a bad guy?

The Internet has blown the level of interconnectedness though the proverbial roof–we now have e-mail, social media, and instant message interactions with people we’ll never meet in real life and in places we’ll never go. A 2007 study by Carnegie Mellon University machine learning researcher Jure Leskovec and Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz found that the average number of hops between any two arbitrary Microsoft Messenger users, based on interaction, was 6.6. And a study of Twitter feeds published in 2011 found the average degree of separation between random Twitter users to be only 3.43.

So even if the NSA limited its surveillance activities–and by “surveillance” I mean active probing of the content of communications of an individual–to people within two hops of suspected terrorists, that’s a sizable population. Three ratchets it up to hundreds of millions or potentially billions of people, especially when the definition of a hop is based on relationships so casual we could create them by accidentally clicking on a link in a spam e-mail. So far, we know that there have been about 20,000 requests for FISA warrants to surveil domestic targets since 2001, but if those warrants covered three hops from the suspects at the center of the requests–depending on how tightly or loosely the NSA defines a relationship–three hops could encompass as much as 50 percent of the Internet-using population of the world.

What’s the likelihood that you’ve managed to fall into that 50 percent? Well, if you live outside the US or ever talk to anyone outside the US, your odds go up. If you have contacts in parts of the world that the US government has interest in as sources of terrorism, it goes up much more. That places people like me (journalists), social activists, academics, and a large chunk of the business world in a zone of high risk for NSA surveillance.

***

You’d be a fool not to at least consider the possibility that the NSA is already reading your e-mail.

The New York Times writes:

Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.

If the distance between any two people in the world is 4.74, the distance between any two Americans is probably less than 3 .

Legendary NSA cryptographer and mathematician William Binney — who worked at the agency for 32 years, and who was the head of the NSA’s global digital data efforts — created a much better “two hop” system before 9/11.

Called “ThinThread“, the system created by Binney (with the help of Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis) automatically encrypted all Americans’ communications to protect our Constitutional rights. Information was gathered on people within two hops of suspected terrorists, and information could only be decrypted by a court order. In other words, Binney’s system created a structure in which innocent Americans couldn’t be spied on unless there was a court order showing probable cause.

Binney’s system was actually cheaper and more efficient than the NSA’s current Constitution-violating system.

Binney told us:

The zone of suspects was for us limited to two degrees (hops). Beyond that increases the problem exponentially. So, three hops is going much too far.

By “going much too far”, Binney means that the NSA is unnecessarily trashing Americans’ Constitutional rights.

But he also means that the more data the NSA gathers on more innocent Americans, the harder it will be to catch bad guys. Because — contrary to the NSA’s claims — looking in bigger and bigger haystacks doesn’t help find the needle.

Technical Postscript: We asked Binney about the formula for determining how many Americans would be caught up in a “three hop” dragnet. He explained that simple formulas can’t give an accurate answer, as it depends on such factors as whether government and business organizations are eliminated from the hop analysis:

If you don’t eliminate commercial companies and government agencies from the calculations, then by inclusion they reduce the number of degrees of separation.

Binney also explained that failure to eliminate duplicate contacts, the number of people caught up in the dragnet could be over-estimated.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Belgiumâ„¢s King Albert II (L) and Crown Prince Philippe (R) during the abdication ceremony in Brussels, July 21, 2013

Republished with permission from: Press TV

British Prime Minister David Cameron is considering Å“legislative options” on child sexual abuse searches on the internet if companies like Google refuse to blacklist Å“sick” terms.

Cameron is to put an October deadline for internet companies in a key speech on Monday asking them whether they would block any search results for a list of abusive terms prepared by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

“There are some searches which are so abhorrent and where there can be no doubt whatsoever about the sick and malevolent intent of the searcher that there should be no search results returned at all,” Cameron will say.

“I have called for a progress report in [the PMâ„¢s office in] Downing Street in October … If in October we don’t like the answer we’re given to this question, if the progress is slow or non-existent, then I can tell you we are already looking at the legislative options we have to force action.”

Internet companies have already agreed to set up Å“splash pages” that warn viewers the internet sites they are trying to access contain illegal images.

However, Cameron wants the splash pages to also contain warnings that viewers will get punishments for accessing the material Å“such as losing their job, their family, even access to their children”.

The British PM also seeks to persuade companies to include links in the splash pages that redirect them to the charity Stop It Now in a bid to correct their behavior.

The issue came to the spotlight after investigators found that murderers of April Jones, the five-year-old girl who was abducted in October last year and killed, and of Tia Sharp, the 12-year-old girl who suffered a similar fate in August 2012, had accessed child and violent pornography on the internet.

AMR/HE

Republished with permission from: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least two people have been killed in an airstrike carried out by US-led forces in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Tow US fighter jets have dropped four unarmed bombs in an emergency jettison on a World Heritage-listed marine park in Australia because of technical difficulties.

The pilots of two AV-8B Harrier jets, launched from aircraft carrier USS Bonhomme Richard, jettisoned four unarmed bombs in Australiaâ„¢s Great Barrier Reef marine park off the coast of Queensland, the US 7th Fleet said in a statement on Saturday.

The pilots jettisoned the bombs, which were supposed to be dropped on the Townshend Island bombing range, because they were low on fuel and could not land with their load.

The training exercise was part of a biennial joint US and Australian military and humanitarian drill codenamed Talisman Saber, which kicked off earlier this week.

More than 28,000 US and Australian military forces have taken part in the three-week exercise.

The exercise features comprehensive amphibious, airborne and special operations training. The US has sent 15 ships this year, including the George Washington Carrier Strike Group, which will be joined by 11 Australian vessels.

The exercise is being observed by representatives from Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, Canada and the UK.

The alliance between the US and Australia has strengthened in recent years from the battlefield in Afghanistan to the deployment of US Marines to Darwin. The Australian government announced in June that the number of Marines rotating in on six-month deployments would increase to 1,150 in 2014.

MYA/HJL

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A file photo of a version of Zolfaqar tank, on a transporter, displayed during a military parade in Tehran

Republished with permission from: Press TV

British PM David Cameron meets Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe on the sidelines of G8 summit in Northern Ireland.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/detroit_and_the_bankruptcy_of_americas_social_contract_20130721/

Posted on Jul 21, 2013

Republished with permission from: TruthDig

Syrian troopers are seen on a tank in the town of Qusayr, June 5, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/plants_wilt_as_heat_increases_ozone_20130721/

Posted on Jul 21, 2013

Republished with permission from: TruthDig

Officers were hit with blast bombs during five-day loyalist riots in Belfast.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Araqchi says the heads and the officials of all world states have been invited to attend the swearing-in ceremony of Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani.

In a Sunday interview with ISNA, the Iranian official said that regional countries, however, were a priority with regards to the sending of the invitations.

Rohaniâ„¢s swearing-in ceremony is scheduled to be held on August 4, one day after his endorsement by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

The Iranian president-elect won Iran’s June 14 presidential election with 50.7 percent of a total of 36, 704, 156 ballots. Voter turnout in the election was 72.7 percent.

The Iranian president-elect currently represents Ayatollah Khamenei in the Supreme National Security Council and is also a member of the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts. He is the president of the Expediency Council’s Center for Strategic Research as well.

MYA/HJL/HMV

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Clashes between Colombian military forces and the so-called Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have left four soldiers and six rebels dead.

The countryâ„¢s military said the fighting took place on Saturday in the town of El Doncello, located in the department of Caqueta, a stronghold of the southern bloc of FARC.

In addition, three soldiers were injured and two FARC members were detained.

The latest clashes came a day after FARC announced it was ready to release a former US soldier the rebel group had captured earlier as a good-will gesture to the Colombian government.

On July 15, at the start of a new round of peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC, chief negotiator for rebel group Ivan Marquez had said that the insurgency, now almost half a century old, is approaching an end.

According to the government, the two sides have already agreed on land reforms and the negotiations are now focusing on FARCâ„¢s participation in politics.

The other items on the agenda include an end to alleged drug trafficking, turning over arms, and compensating the victims of the insurgency.

The ongoing peace talks, which are being held in Cuba, opened last November, in a fourth attempt since the 1980s, to end the conflict, which has left 600,000 dead, more than 3.7 million displaced as well as 15,000 missing.

The rebel group is thought to have around 8,000 fighters operating across a large swathe of the eastern forests of Colombia.

CAH/HJL

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A strong earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale has jolted New Zealand, but there have been no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), the tremor occurred at 5:09 p.m. local time (0509 GMT) on Sunday, 57 kilometers (36 miles) south-southwest of the capital Wellington at a depth of 14 kilometers.

The USGS initially reported the magnitude at 6.9.

It was followed minutes later by another quake of 5.5 and came about 10 hours after a 5.8 tremor in the same region, which has been rocked by multiple quakes in recent days.

Dozens of earthquakes were recorded on Sunday.

New Zealand government geological agency GNS Science described both quakes as severe, adding that more aftershocks can be expected.

All train services around Wellington were suspended after the quakes, and TranzMetro said delays can be expected.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said earthquakes of such magnitude can generate local tsunamis but there was no threat of a Å“destructive widespread tsunami.”

Recent quakes have been centered about 200 kilometers north of New Zealandâ„¢s second largest city Christchurch, where a 6.3-magnitude quake on February 22, 2011 struck the cathedral city on South Island.

The natural disaster killed 181 people, destroyed thousands of houses, and left much of Christchurchâ„¢s central business district in rubble.

The country sits on the so-called Ring of Fire, the boundary of the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, and experiences up to 15,000 tremors a year.

MSH/HSN

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Republished with permission from: Stephen Lendman

Republished with permission from: Stephen Lendman

The supporters of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi gather during a demonstration at Rabia al-Adawiya Mosque in Nasr City, Cairo, July 7, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

It is so sad to watch one of America’s greatest cities die a horrible death. Once upon a time, the city of Detroit was a teeming metropolis of 1.8 million people and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. Now it is a rotting, decaying hellhole of about 700,000 people that the rest of the world makes jokes about. On Thursday, we learned that the decision had been made for the city of Detroit to formally file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. It was going to be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States by far, but on Friday it was stopped at least temporarily by an Ingham County judge. She ruled that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing violates the Michigan Constitution because it would result in reduced pension payments for retired workers. She also stated that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing was “also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy“, and she ordered that a copy of her judgment be sent to Barack Obama. How “honoring the president” has anything to do with the bankruptcy of Detroit is a bit of a mystery, but what that judge has done is ensured that there will be months of legal wrangling ahead over Detroit’s money woes. It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out. But one thing is for sure – the city of Detroit is flat broke. One of the greatest cities in the history of the world is just a shell of its former self. The following are 25 facts about the fall of Detroit that will leave you shaking your head…

1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.

2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities. That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000.

5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroit right now for $500 or less.

7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

8) About one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

10) Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

11) If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

12) Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but over the past 60 years the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

13) The city of Detroit is now very heavily dependent on the tax revenue it pulls in from the casinos in the city. Right now, Detroit is bringing in about 11 million dollars a month in tax revenue from the casinos.

14) There are 70 “Superfund” hazardous waste sites in Detroit.

15) 40 percent of the street lights do not work.

16) Only about a third of the ambulances are running.

17) Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

18) Two-thirds of the parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down since 2008.

19) The size of the police force in Detroit has been cut by about 40 percent over the past decade.

20) When you call the police in Detroit, it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond.

21) Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

22) The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

23) The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

24) Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.

It is easy to point fingers and mock Detroit, but the truth is that the rest of America is going down the exact same path that Detroit has gone down.

Detroit just got there first.

All over this country, there are hundreds of state and local governments that are also on the verge of financial ruin…

“Everyone will say, ‘Oh well, it’s Detroit. I thought it was already in bankruptcy,’ ” said Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone. “But Detroit is not unique. It’s the same in Chicago and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It’s a lot of major cities in this country. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems.”

A while back, Meredith Whitney was highly criticized for predicting that there would be a huge wave of municipal defaults in this country. When it didn’t happen, the critics let her have it mercilessly.

But Meredith Whitney was not wrong.

She was just early.

Detroit is only just the beginning. When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.

And of course the biggest debt problem of all in this country is the U.S. government. We are going to pay a great price for piling up nearly 17 trillion dollars of debt and over 200 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.

All over the nation, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, debt levels are exploding and poverty is spreading. We are consuming far more wealth than we are producing, and our share of global GDP has been declining dramatically.

We have been living way above our means for so long that we think it is “normal”, but an extremely painful “adjustment” is coming and most Americans are not going to know how to handle it.

So don’t laugh at Detroit. The economic pain that Detroit is experiencing will be coming to your area of the country soon enough.

Republished with permission from: The Economic Collapse

July 16, 2013
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Darlene Arden is a certified animal behavior consultant who recently began to advocate for medical marijuana–on behalf of pets. She says her purpose in life is to speak for the voiceless, so who better to defend than our furriest companions?

“Pets cannot speak up and say ‘Hey, this hurts,’” she says, noting that just decades ago it was common veterinary practice not to provide any pain medication for pets. “There was a time when veterinarians would do surgery and not give the poor animals any kind of pain control in the belief that if the animals felt pain, they wouldn’t move that body part.”

Of course, cats and dogs do feel pain just as humans do, and they function far better with pain medication. Arden says pet owners should do everything possible to relieve their animal’s pain.

“I think we should be living in a kinder, gentler society,” says Arden. “Animals need love and they give us unconditional love, so the least we can do is help them.”

Arden is an authority on the care of toy breeds and has written several books on pet care. In lectures around the world and in regular animal care columns she speaks on behalf of our pets. After recognizing the benefits medical cannabis can have for human patients in pain, she says it’s time to think about using the herb to treat pets, too.

“You think about how much good this has done for cancer patients, and yet in most of the country not only is it withheld from pets, it’s withheld from people who desperately need a drug that has been proven to work, because [the government is] afraid of the drug people, the ‘potheads,’” she says. “That means they’re punishing sick people because they don’t want well people to get it. That, to me, is crazy.”

Arden is neither liberal nor conservative. She says she simply votes for whichever policies make the most sense. While she has never smoked weed, after researching the topic extensively she became an advocate. Between the relief cannabis can provide to medical patients, and the negative historical impacts of prohibition on society, she says legalization seemed an obvious choice.

When a ballot initiative was up for the vote to legalize medical marijuana in Arden’s home state of Massachusetts in 2012, she voted for it. While the initiative passed, Massachusetts has yet to open a dispensary due to ongoing rhubarb over regulation and location.

Jump over to California, where medical marijuana dispensaries have operated since 1996 when Proposition 215 legalized the drug for medical purposes, and you’ll find a few animals already being treated with cannabis via an ingestible “magic cheese.”

Los Angeles veterinarian Doug Kramer, who runs the Vet Guru animal center, became the first vet in the nation to offer medical cannabis to animals, he told New York Daily News, when he treated his elderly husky, Nikita, with marijuana. He said after he gave the dog cannabis, she “stopped whimpering and started eating, gaining weight and meeting him at the door again.” While the dog passed away weeks later, he was able to improve the quality of the end of her life.

Kramer also told New York Daily News he believes that the active ingredient in pot, THC, could be the key to mitigating pain for dogs in particular. In an interview with the Missoulian, Kramer said he’d grown “tired of euthanizing pets” when he thought there was more he could do to help them feel better.

“I felt like I was letting them down,” he said in the article.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 17, 2013
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Optimists will compare the Xi Jinping-Barack Obama summit in Sunnylands, California, in June with Richard Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972 or Jimmy Carter’s rendezvous with Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Indeed, the nuances and impact of the latter two meetings were only fully comprehended years if not decades later.

However, the pessimists did not have to wait long. The undesirable outcomes of the Xi-Obama meeting have already begun to manifest themselves. Immediately after the summit, the Snowden saga shook the US-Chinese relationship to its core and threatened to undermine the foundation for a new approach built upon the 90-plus channels of communication.

It also cast a shadow on the positive signs of the recent Xi-Obama meeting, despite President Obama’s pledge to prevent the crumbling of US-China relations because of a “29-year-old hacker”. The significant impact of the spying incident has become obvious, as former secretary of state Hillary Clinton commented, “China damaged its relations with the US by allowing National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to flee Hong Kong, despite US request to arrest him for extradition.”

Clearly, one should avoid the tendency to speak of “new type of great power relationship” between the US and China in terms that tend toward hyperbole. Although the two sides have agreed to establish a new framework for the bilateral relationship, Chinese insistence on the phrase of “new type of great power relationship” as opposed to the US’s “new model of cooperation” suggests that the two giants are still lying in “same bed”, but experiencing very “different dreams.” In short, the US and China still have a long way to go before there is agreement regarding the shape, form, and substance of the “new relationship”.

In comparison with what appears to be China’s enthusiasm about forging a “new type of great power relationship”, the US seems relatively aloof about the idea that was first propounded by Xi Jinping during his visit to the US in February 2012, and developed further as a framework in an essay by Cui Tiankai, former deputy minister of foreign affairs and current Chinese ambassador to the US.

It is important to understand what the Chinese had in mind when the idea was first advanced, and equally important to look closely at what they have said about the construct in the first formal attempts to develop the idea.

First, China only offered to establish this “new type of great power relationship” with the US, not with any other powers – the “new type of relationship” was not intended to alter Beijing’s ties with India, Russia, or Japan. This suggests that the Middle Kingdom views itself as an equal with the US, and sees the “new type of great power relationship” as a step in the direction of building a “mini order” that could be conveniently employed to resolve bilateral, regional, and global issues.

Second, China seems determined to draw attention to the element of “mutual consensus” that emerged from the summit, a goal that was given emphasis in a speech by State Councilor for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi to the diplomatic corps in Beijing immediately after the Xi-Obama meeting.

This means that there are two versions of the new partnership being presented. China’s depiction of the consensus that has emerged on the concept of “new type of great power relationship” is offset by the US emphasis on disagreements that emerged from the summit while playing down or even neglecting any “agreement” that might have emerged from the Xi-Obama meeting.

Importantly, following the meeting, Obama personally called South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to assure them that throughout the course of the dialogue with Beijing the US did not compromise the security interests of Washington’s two most important allies in any way.

The US may have been concerned at the prospect of a repeat of the 1979 mistake when the visiting Deng Xiaoping told US host Jimmy Carter that China would “teach Vietnam a lesson”, an unfortunate episode that resulted in the US being seen as colluding with China in the latter’s military campaign against Vietnam a month later.

Is the “new type of great power relationship” feasible and if so, is it a cause for concern among friends and allies of the US and China? The short answer is “no,” and the Snowden incident has shown that the seemingly extensive and firm US-China relationship is no less than a palace made out of glass – thin and delicate.

The rifts are deep. Bilaterally, the 2008-2009 financial crisis amplified the frictions between these two countries and offered some clear signs of an impending “divorce of Chimerica” in the words of Niall Ferguson, a British financial historian.

As the leverage China derived from being the principal buyer of US treasury bills and government bonds decreases, the knot that once tightly bound China and the US together financially and economically will slowly loosen. This could make the US more aggressive and decisive as Washington will have diminishing reasons to concern itself with the possible economic repercussions of its China policy.

In the international arena, competition between China and the US over influence, markets, and natural resources is heating up in the Middle East, Europe, South America, and most recently, Central America – the US’s traditional backyard.

It is telling that when Xi held the China-Africa Summit on the sidelines of the BRICS gathering in Durburn, South Africa this March, President Obama also convened four heads of African states in Washington DC to discuss economic cooperation and development. In Central America, Xi’s visits to Mexico, Costa Rica, and Trinidad and Tobago shows China’s departure from the static policy. China is taking active measures to react to the US “rebalancing” strategy in the Asia-Pacific, which Beijing views as aimed at containing China and putting it on the defensive.

Today, China is targeting a region where the US has proclaimed and preserved dominance since the 19th century with a second “Charm Offensive” intended to position the People’s Republic as the region’s economic hub and the primary force in advancing regional commerce and investment. These developments are eerily reminiscent of the Cold War at its heights during the late 1970’s – minus the proxy wars that were the means by which the US and Soviet Union projected power and flexed their muscles – in the contest for influence in the Third World.

From a long-term perspective, the relative power gap between a rising China and the US as an established power is narrowing. The result will be an intensification of the competition between these two giants. In that context, the new framework for US-Sino relations seems unlikely to solve the problems brewing between Beijing and Washington in a comprehensive manner.

In the short term, a new detente would give both countries more breathing room to solve their pressing domestic issues. For China, this would mean finding ways to suppress, manage, and resolve issues that threaten to sweep away the success of its 30-year-old-plus reform effort. The challenges are profound: economic and financial maladies that mirror those that plagued the US prior to the Great Depression from 1929-1933; corruption, income inequality, and the sluggish speed of institutional reform that fails to keep up with the rapid economic growth – a familiar urgency that has swept through the Arab world and shaken India, Chile, Turkey, and Brazil. For the US, the principal concerns are sustaining the shaky economic recovery, reducing unemployment rates, and downsizing both the public debt and federal budget deficits.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 18, 2013
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Appearing on Fox & Friends in the wake of a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, Geraldo Rivera’s claim that Martin brought about his own death by dressing in a hooded sweatshirt the night of the killing was shocking, but not surprising. Echoing earlier comments he made on the program, Rivera proclaimed: “You dress like a thug, people are going to treat you like a thug.”

It was shocking because the idea of a well-paid commentator going on television and blaming an unarmed teen for being shot while walking home inside a gated community because he wore a hoodie — because he tried to look like “a thug” as Rivera put it — is repellent.

So yes, Rivera’s comments were shockingly awful and irresponsible. As was his claim that the all-female jury “would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did.” But his comments weren’t surprising, because Fox News and too much of the right-wing media have spent the last 16 months zeroing in on the memory of a dead teenager and doing their best to denigrate it.

Apart from the far right’s gleeful and disrespectful response to the not guilty verdict, there remains a separate thread of loud tastelessness that dates back to 2012 and focuses on the victim for all the wrong reasons, suggesting he somehow got what he deserved. (Or what he “sought.”)

Remember the fake, menacing photo of Martin that right-wing sites passed around last year? And when The Daily Caller published tweets from the slain boy’s closed Twitter account? Tweets that conservatives then used to portray the teen as a thug?

This week, Fox favorite Ten Nugent practically danced on Martin’s grave, accusing the dead teenager of being a “dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe” who was “responsible” for being shot by a volunteer neighborhood watchman on the night of February 26, 2012.

Comments by Rivera, Nugent and others were proof that a smear campaign was in full swing this week and a reminder the attacks are a continuation of the foul smears first unleashed in the wake of the killing. At the time, the attacks were an ugly attempt to justify Martin’s death, to shift the blame away from the gunman, Zimmerman, and to cloud the debate about Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law. ( Rivera in 2012: “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”)

Trayvon Martin deserves better. Indeed, every victim, and particularly every victim of gun violence in America, deserves better than to have a well-funded media machine like the one led by Fox News targeting shooting victims for endless attacks on their character and on the choices, large and small, they made while alive.

There’s something spectacularly misguided about wanting to turn an unarmed shooting victim, an unarmed minor, into the bad guy and blame him for walking home with Skittles and an iced tea. But that’s what conservatives in the press have been doing, on and off, for nearly a year and a half now.

Recall the Slate headline from March, 2012, highlighting the trend: “When in Doubt, Smear the Dead Kid.”

Yet one of the puzzling questions surrounding the public saga of Martin’s death has always been why the partisan, conservative political movement in America, led by its powerful media outlets, felt the need to become so deeply invested in the case, and felt so strongly about defending the shooter, as well as demeaning the victim.

I understand why civil rights leaders who traditionally lean to the left politically embraced the case, why they saw it as part of a long history of injustice for blacks, and why they urged that Zimmerman be charged with a crime. But why did GOP bloggers, pundits and talk show hosts eventually go all in with their signature brand of hate for a local crime story?

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 18, 2013
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Around the country, local farmers are selling meat, dairy products, and other dinner table staples directly to neighbors, who are increasingly flocking to the farms in search of wholesome food.

This would seem to embody the USDA’s advisory, “Know your farmer, know your food,” right? Not exactly.

For the USDA and its sister food regulator, the FDA, there’s a problem: many of the farmers are distributing the food via private contracts like herd shares and leasing arrangements, which fall outside the regulatory system of state and local retail licenses and inspections that govern public food sales.

In response, federal and state regulators are seeking legal sanctions against farmers in Maine, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, among others. These sanctions include injunctions, fines, and even prison sentences. Food sold by unlicensed and uninspected farmers is potentially dangerous say the regulators, since it can carry pathogens like salmonella, campylobacter, and E.coli O157:H7, leading to mild or even serious illness.

Most recently, Wisconsin’s attorney general appointed a special prosecutor to file criminal misdemeanor charges against an Amish farmer for alleged failure to have retail and dairy licenses, and the proceedings turned into a high-profile jury trial in late May that highlighted the depth of conflict: following five days of intense proceedings, the 12-person jury acquitted the farmer, Vernon Hershberger, on all the licensing charges, while convicting him of violating a 2010 holding order on his food, which he had publicly admitted.

Why are hard-working normally law-abiding farmers aligning with urban and suburban consumers to flaunt well-established food safety regulations and statutes? Why are parents, who want only the best for their children, seeking out food that regulators say could be dangerous? And, why are regulators and prosecutors feeling so threatened by this trend?

Members of these private food groups often buy from local farmers because they want food from animals that are treated humanely, allowed to roam on pasture, and not treated with antibiotics. “I really want food that is full of nutrients and the animals to be happy and content,” says Jenny DeLoney, a Madison, WI, mother of three young children who buys from Hershberger.

To these individuals, many of whom are parents, safety means not only food free of pathogens, but food free of pesticides, antibiotic residues, and excessive processing. It means food created the old-fashioned way–from animals allowed to eat grass instead of feed made from genetically modified (GMO) grains–and sold the old-fashioned way, privately by the farmer to the consumer, who is free to visit the farm and see the animals. Many of these consumers have viewed the secretly-made videos of downer cows being prodded into slaughterhouses and chickens so crammed into coops they can barely breathe.

These consumers are clearly interpreting “safety” differently than the regulators. Some of these consumers are going further than claiming contract rights–they are pushing their towns and cities to legitimize private farmer-consumer arrangements. In Maine, residents of ten coastal towns have approved so-called “food sovereignty” ordinances that legalize unregulated food sales; towns in other states, including Massachusetts and Vermont, and as far away as Santa Cruz, CA, have passed similar ordinances.

The new legal offensive isn’t going over well with regulators anywhere. Aside from the Hershberger action in Wisconsin, and a similar one in Minnesota, Maine’s Department of Agriculture filed suit against a two-cow farmer, Dan Brown, in one of the food-sovereignty towns, Blue Hill, seeking fines and, in effect, to invalidate all the Maine ordinances. In April, a state court ruled against the farmer, and in effect against the towns; sentencing is due within several weeks, and the case could well be appealed.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 18, 2013
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I learned firsthand about the realities of executive branch power 40 years ago, when I discovered that a handful of U.S. executive leaders from both political parties, liberals and conservatives, had secretly destroyed the 700-year-old Plain of Jars civilization in northern Laos without congressional or public knowledge, let alone consent.

The Executive and Congress: Craven Fear

I learned then that one key to executive power is its secrecy and deception. As described in an earlier piece, executive officials did not inform Congress it was bombing Laos, as Senator J. William Fulbright stated in the fall of 1969. Even after the refugees from U.S. bombing had been brought to the capital city of Vientiane in September 1969 (each said their villages had been partially or completely destroyed, and I had photographed dozens who had been blinded, burned by napalm, and lost arms and legs ), U.S. Executive Branch officials still lied to legislators by denying they had bombed civilian targets.

Back in D.C. on April 22, 1971, I saw an executive branch representative, former U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan, look directly into the eyes of a legislator, Senator Edward Kennedy, and lie to his face, saying, “It was the policy not to bomb civilian targets in Laos.”

I knew Kennedy knew he was being lied to. He had issued a report six months earlier saying that, “the United States has undertaken a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure in Pathet Lao-held areas. The bombing has taken and is taking a heavy toll among civilians.”

In the fictional democracy many pundits think we still live in, Kennedy would have sworn Sullivan in and indicted him for perjury for lying to Congress.

But even 40 years ago, one of the Senate’s most powerful legislators did not dare seriously challenge what he knew was unaccountable executive mass murder. The killing of civilians in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam continued for two more years until it was finally halted.

This craven congressional fear of the Executive is another key to its power. I first observed this in 1967, when I accompanied my congressman, Lester Woolf, along with Congressman Rex McCarthy, on a visit to Sam Thong. It was portrayed in the press as a center for refugees fleeing communism, but actually was a camp for dependents of Hmong soldiers fighting in the CIA’s secret army.

We flew up in a large C130 plane carrying rice. But as we approached Sam Thong we were told the runway was too muddy for the heavy plane, and that we would be landing at an “auxiliary landing strip” to Sam Thong. After we arrived, I followed an embassy official who had flown up with us over to a dour Pop Buell, the USAID official in charge of Sam Thong, who stood stockstill with his arms crossed. When we reached him he said to the embassy man out of the corner of his mouth, “Do they know anything?” The official replied, “Don’t worry, Pop. [Deputy Chief of Mission] Hurwich gave them a beautiful snow job, complete with maps. They were very impressed.”

I wondered about this exchange, but soon found myself in a meeting where the Hmong General Vang Pao delivered an impassioned speech about how his people were fighting for freedom against the communists and requested more military aid from Congress. My liberal Democratic congressman earnestly pledged he would do his best to see he got it.

That night I found myself sharing a trailer with Congressman Wolff in the nearby town of Vang Vieng. I was new to Laos at that point, but had already heard the stories about how Vang Pao was a savage warlord who carelessly shot prisoners in public or threw them into pits where they slowly starved to death; a dictator entirely opposed to the democracy he claimed to be fighting for. As I began to tell Wolff what I had heard, he nervously interrupted me and burst out, with genuine fear in his voice, that I needed to understand that he had been elected on Lyndon Johnson’s coattails in 1964 and that nobody crossed Lyndon Johnson! He was not interested in learning anything more about Laos.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 18, 2013
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For the global economy, notes the just-released 17th annual World Wealth Report from the Capgemini wealth consultancy and the Royal Bank of Canada, 2012 turned out to be one real downer.

“The myriad crises of 2011 cast a shadow into 2012,” the study relates, “and widespread fiscal austerity exerted a palpable drag, resulting in sluggish GDP growth for the global economy throughout the year.”

But the world’s wealthy –the “high net worth individuals” among us – didn’t let this “palpable drag” get them down in the least. Their fortunes soared in 2012.

The analysts at the Capgemini and RBC count anyone with $1 million in investable assets as “high net worth.” They don’t include in this $1 million tally the value of primary personal residences, automobiles and other consumable durables, or jewelry, art, and other collectibles.

By this definition, the new World Wealth Report calculates, global millionaires ended 2012 holding $46.2 trillion in net worth, 10 percent more than the year before – and 14 percent more than the total wealth of the world’s millionaires in 2007, right before the global economic meltdown.

Two key points about this mammoth mountain of assets. The first: The wealthiest of the wealthy – those individuals with over $30 million – make up less than 1 percent of the global high-net-worth population. But they hold over a third, 35.2 percent, of the high-net-worth population’s wealth.

The second: America’s rich continue to outpace the rich anywhere else in the rest of the world. The United States has, for starters, many more high-net-worth individuals than any other country, over three times more than Germany, over five times more than China, over a dozen times more than Switzerland.

The U.S. millionaire population is also growing at a faster pace than millionaire populations elsewhere, with a growth rate nearly triple Japan’s.

And, oh, yes, one more thing: All these numbers on wealth holdings, Capgemini and RBC researchers acknowledge, understate the fortunes of the world’s most financially fortunate. The reason: The wealth the wealthy have stashed in offshore tax havens does not all show up in the new World Wealth Report.

The data in the report, the authors note, do “theoretically” account for offshore investments, “but only insofar” as countries can accurately estimate “relative flows of property and investment in and out of their jurisdictions.”

And the world’s offshore tax havens would rather not do that estimating.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 19, 2013
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There’s no shortage of bad prosecutors in America. At the top of the law enforcement pyramid, there are federal prosecutors seeking to lock up pot growers for life (Montana) and those deporting of hundreds of immigrants every month (Texas), destroying lives as if they were disposing of traffic fines. But lower down the pyramid, where the country’s 17,000-plus state and local police departments dump cases on their desks, is where many criminal defense lawyers say the worst prosecutors are.

“I think the biggest injustices are at the state level,” said Miles Gerety, a public defender in Connecticut who recently retired after three decades. “The U.S. attorneys don’t try cases unless they are complete winners… If the feds don’t think they have a good case, they dump it on the states.”

A perfect example would be Florida State Attorney Angela Corey, who not only oversaw the failed prosecution of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, but also oversaw the prosecution of Marissa Alexander, an African-American woman who fired a warning shot at her abusive husband and was sentenced to 20 years under Florida’s sentencing guidelines. In both cases, Corey approved the charges to be filed–making it harder to convict a predatory Zimmerman and easier to convict a domestic abuse victim.

There’s no shortage of examples like this through the country. The deeper you look, the more you can turn up local and state examples of overzealous prosecutors bringing a battlefield mentality to their job, or botching prosecutions, or covering up for police brutality, or using their job as a stepping-stone for political office. What follows are a four examples that stand out, but they just scratch the surface.

1. Florida State Attorney Angela Corey

The Marissa Alexander conviction prompted celebrity lawyer and legal commentator Mark Geragos to tell CNN that Angela Corey was “a menace” who needed to be disbarred and removed from office. Rev. Jesse Jackson visited the 32-year-old mother after the sentence and told the local papers, correctly, “It’s not beyond her influence,” to have sought a different charge and jail term.” And that was before the Trayvon Martin verdict, where even the New York Times explained that Corey could have filed different charges against Zimmerman with lower legal hurdles to clear to obtain a conviction.

2. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott

Top Texas lawman Greg Abbott just announced he was running for governor. What stands out the most is not his recent conversion in the media to a centrist before seeking the higher office, or his long record picking legal fights to overturn federal voting rights laws, but one initative before the cameras were rolling. A decade ago, Abbott sent state troopers after elderly women of color who were registering voters. In the most outrageous example, the state troopers walked past known crack houses to spy in and then arrest one elderly woman–waiting until she was taking a bath. It was all part of an “voter fraud” effort, which in Texas, means stopping non-whites from voting.

3. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes

Brooklyn, New York’s top prosecutor, has been in office for 23 years, the Village Voice recently noted in a long profile that detailed why a prosecutor who was once seen as “innovative” had to go. In recent years, Hynes has presided over an office filled with bad prosecutions, including scores of cases from one detective who fabricated evidence, sending innocent people to prison. In other instances, his deputies let innocent people languish in jail after witnesses recanted or others were charged with the same crime.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

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Workers at a Manhattan McDonald’s and a Chicago Dunkin’ Donuts mounted strikes today to protest alleged unsafe heat. The single-store strikes are the latest in a wave of fast food walkouts, and could represent an additional front in low-wage workers’ struggle against the mammoth industry.

“I felt dizzy and sick” working in the heat without air conditioning, McDonald’s employee Luisa Dilla told Salon in Spanish. “My co-workers were afraid, but I wasn’t,” because “I just wasn’t going to work that way.”

Dilla and three other workers walked out of their store around 10 AM, after they say a co-worker fainted from the heat and had to be wheeled to an ambulance by paramedics. Dilla alleged that that when the worker — who had repeatedly said she didn’t feel well — went downstairs to vomit in the bathroom, a manager followed her there to order her back to work. Dilla said that when she went to check on her co-worker, “She was laying down on some chairs and vomiting and then she fell and fainted. Her eyes were rolling back…That’s when we said, enough is enough.”

In an “Excessive Heat Warning” for Manhattan today, the National Weather Service stated that without “protective action,” there was a risk of “sunstroke… muscle cramps… and/or heat exhaustion or heat stroke” due to heat and humidity “expected to make it feel like it is 105 degrees or greater.” Reached while rallying with the striking workers, New York City Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez noted that working in or around a fast food kitchen would be even hotter.

“This is a crime,” Rodriguez told Salon. “This is a crime to have workers doing their job, providing their services, with the temperature going more than 110 degrees without air conditioning.” The councilmember said the workers “have been working in that situation for four or five days,” and when “they brought that condition to the manager, they did not respond.”

Asked about the industry’s franchisee structure, in which most workers are legally employed by franchisees, and not directly by global corporations like McDonald’s, Rodriguez responded that the corporation remains responsible for the working conditions in McDonald’s stores, and “they should also read just the conditions under which an individual can buy a franchise.”

By late Friday afternoon, organizers said that the New York store’s owner had shown up with a portable air conditioning unit and met with Councilmember Rodriguez about the issue.

Workers have also been on strike today at a Dunkin’ Donuts store in Chicago, alleging that their management also failed to address their repeated requests to fix the air conditioning amid unsafe heat. Organizers say three workers there walked off the job around 5 PM CST last night, forcing the normally 24-hour store to shut down until managers arrived to re-open it this morning. “We couldn’t focus on the customers, and we felt light-headed,” striker Erick Guerrero told Salon. “And we just decided to walk out.”

McDonald’s did not immediately respond to a Friday request for comment. Asked about the Chicago strike, Dunkin’ Donuts sent a statement saying its outlets “are operated by individual franchisees who are responsible for making their own business decisions” and “are required to comply with all state, federal and local laws.”

These work stoppages come amid an unprecedented wave of fast food strikes. As Salon first reported, two hundred New York City fast food workers mounted a one-day walkout last November, followed by another citywide action about twice as large in April. Since then, workers have staged one-day strikes in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Seattle. In each case, workers have demanded a raise to $15 an hour and the right to unionize without intimidation; each of these local campaigns is backed by a coalition including the Service Employees International Union. (McDonald’s has also faced strikes this year by international student guest workers in Pennsylvania and by sub-contracted workers on federal property in D.C.)

Those strikes have anchored a union-backed comprehensive campaign against the country’s fast food corporations. In New York City, that’s included the release of a report alleging rampant “wage theft” in the industry, which coincided with the news that state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had issued subpoenas to at least one fast food corporation. The New York City Council held a June meeting on fast food wage theft and working conditions. New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, one of several mayoral candidates who’ve rallied with fast food strikers, told Salon yesterday that amid the “dumbing-down of wage and benefit levels,” unionization “is in the public’s interest more broadly.”

At the federal level, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has launched a “Raise Up America” tour to promote an increase in the minimum wage and support for low-wage organizing efforts. Interviewed at last month’s Netroots Nation conference in San Jose, where he’d joined fast food workers and a few congressional colleagues for a campaign kick-off, CPC Co-Chair Keith Ellison, D-Minn., said, “The significance of this wave of low-wage workers striking is that they have had all they can stand, and they have to fight back…All the Progressive Caucus can do if we are worth the salt contained in our bodies is to stand with them.”

The fast food effort faces long odds. But, while today’s two strikes involve only a handful of employees, high-profile actions amplifying safety allegations could mean additional public pressure on fast food giants. Stories of workers striking over threats to their health could fuel the campaign’s outreach to customers and politicians. Achieving incremental victories like getting air conditioning fixed in individual stores could build momentum and engage more employees. And the smaller strikes could help develop leadership and broaden the base of workers prepared to participate in future actions that stretch across the city — or beyond.

Related Stories

• “Dizzy and Sick”: McDonald’s and Dunkin' Donuts Workers Strike After Enduring 110-Degree Heat
• School Districts, Charter Schools Save Money By Impoverishing Support Staff
• Haagen Dazs Berry Pickers in Washington State Go Out On Strike

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 20, 2013
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In case you’ve been in a cave or on Mars, here’s the update: In response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, The Daily Show host John Oliver dubbed Florida “the worst state,” citing the state’s broken laws. As a Floridian for eight years, I say Oliver couldn’t be more right. Much attention has been paid to the state’s asinine Stand Your Ground law, which Oliver described as cut and pasted from 1880s Tombstone. That is just the start of it, however. Below is a small snippet of some of the backwards laws or policies that have been passed, largely under uber-Conservative Governor Rick Scott.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Governor Scott passed a law requiring recipients of welfare benefits to pass a drug test. A federal court overturned the law, noting that the state had not proven that those receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) were any more likely to use drugs than the general population. In fact, before the courts shut down this large-scale gathering of Floridian’s urine, only 108 people had negative tests. This was only 2.6% of the persons who were tested. The state had to pay more than $100,000 to persons who passed the pee tests. Clearly the program was not cost-effective.

Equally problematic is the fact that the law targeted the poor, not the many corporations like Wal-Mart or Kel Tec CNC, which manufactures the gun used to kill Trayvon Martin. Kel Tec CNC receives millions in tax incentives to locate in the state. This corporate welfare is widespread in Florida, a state that in 2012 had to cut $1.8 million for school safety initiatives and $5.7 million for mental health programs, a state that has the highest long-term unemployment and foreclosure rates in the nation.

Another Rick Scott loser is the law that has come to be known as “Docs v. Glocks.” This gem prohibits doctors from asking their patients about guns in their homes. While clearly it is essential that gun owners store their weapons safely, the NRA-backed legislation would make asking this standard risk-assessment question a misdemeanor, subject to a $10,000 fine and even potentially the loss of medical licensure. A U.S. District Court ruled that the law was an unconstitutional restriction on doctor’s right to free speech.

In both cases, Governor Scott vowed to fight the court decisions, at taxpayer expense, of course. By August 2012, the governor reportedly had spent more than $880,000 to fight for Docs v. Glocks. He reportedly spent more than $190,000 to fight for the drug testing program. In December 2012, the Miami New Times reported that Scott had spent more than $1 million on lawsuits related to his controversial laws.

And, while Governor Scott was a Tea Party darling for his repeated pronouncements about “limited government,” it is clear that these two laws are anything but that. Instead, Scott seems to feel that it is all fine and dandy if the government gets into our bodily fluids or our medical consultations.

The list of Governor Scott-isms could go on and on. Suffice it to say that John Oliver has it right: “Just because you’re shaped like some combination of a gun and a dick doesn’t mean you have to act that way.” Indeed.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

July 20, 2013
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It was a banner week for right-wing racists and sexists. The acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, issued a cascade of attempts to portray Martin as the real criminal in an incident where the unarmed teenager was stalked and killed essentially for being black. The deeply objectionable things said in the wake of the trial are too numerous to mention, although Geraldo Rivera managed to maintain his supremacy atop the mountain of absurdity in his comments on the case, which began months ago when he identified hoodies as the uniform of criminals.

Meanwhile, the Texas legislature passed a bill severely restricting abortions that Wendy Davis and other brave Texas women fought against valiantly–immediately resulting in Planned Parenthood’s announcement that it would close three clinics in the state. That’s three out of a whopping 37 that will close in the nation’s second largest state. Those anti-choice legislators must be exceedingly happy, celebrating their victory, and kicking back to relax after a job well done. But wait, what’s this? They want more? Well yes, they do.

Republican Representatives Phil King, Dan Flynn and Geanie Morrison have introduced a “fetal heartbeat” bill, which would ban abortions after six weeks (a point when many women don’t even know they are pregnant) to keep up with the great, though considerably smaller and less populous state of North Dakota. The bill would criminalize abortions and mandate invasive vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking to commit the crime of deciding for themselves when to become mothers, since transvaginal probes are the only way to detect fetal heartbeats that early. One silver lining: the law would only go into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned. Fingers crossed.

With so many ugly and appalling things to say, it’s a wonder that Republican lawmakers, pundits and bloggers found time to be offensive and absurd about other topics, but they are a resourceful bunch. Here are some other gems from the week that was.

1. Erick Erickson: Self-administered abortions are a real yuck fest.

Shortly after the vote to approve the draconian abortion ban, right-wing blogger Erick Erickson tweeted a link to a wire coathanger supplier, telling “liberals,” and really, the women of Texas, to “Go bookmark this site.” Rather like Geraldo’s jackass comments, this can be an instance of the right wing making the case against itself: Yes, your laws will drive women to desperate life-endangering measures, that is what we have been saying. Perhaps Erickson realized his mistake because he later deleted the tweet. But wait, then he defended his tweet against detractors by saying that before Roe v. Wade “only” 39 women died from self-administered abortions. Oh, only 39. (Not that we accept his accounting.) He also stands by his view that working women are “against nature.” Yeah, that one is still good.

2. Lou Dobbs: Eric Holder is a radical racist. DOJ organized and paid for protests.

Since we revisited Texas, let’s revisit Florida and Trayvon Martin as well, just for the sheer perversity of the reactions to the case. On Monday, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs promoted the conspiracy theory that the Department of Justice organized the protests over the killing of Trayvon Martin. Why is that? Well, because Attorney General Eric Holder is a radical racist. Just like his boss.

Yes, this cabal of black men at the pinnacle of American power used “thousands” of taxpayer dollars to train people to go out and pretend to be mad back when Martin was shot. And they are doing it again, because black people have to be paid to be mad about having their innocent young men gunned down. They are paying people like Al Sharpton to “raise racial tensions” nationwide. You see the DOJ, as “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy says, is letting the New Black Panthers call the shots.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

It is so sad to watch one of America’s greatest cities die a horrible death. Once upon a time, the city of Detroit was a teeming metropolis of 1.8 million people and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. Now it is a rotting, decaying hellhole of about 700,000 people that the rest of the world makes jokes about. On Thursday, we learned that the decision had been made for the city of Detroit to formally file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. It was going to be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States by far, but on Friday it was stopped at least temporarily by an Ingham County judge. She ruled that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing violates the Michigan Constitution because it would result in reduced pension payments for retired workers. She also stated that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing was “also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy“, and she ordered that a copy of her judgment be sent to Barack Obama. How “honoring the president” has anything to do with the bankruptcy of Detroit is a bit of a mystery, but what that judge has done is ensured that there will be months of legal wrangling ahead over Detroit’s money woes. It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out. But one thing is for sure – the city of Detroit is flat broke. One of the greatest cities in the history of the world is just a shell of its former self. The following are 25 facts about the fall of Detroit that will leave you shaking your head…

1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.

2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities. That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000.

5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroit right now for $500 or less.

7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

8) About one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

10) Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

11) If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

12) Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but over the past 60 years the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

13) The city of Detroit is now very heavily dependent on the tax revenue it pulls in from the casinos in the city. Right now, Detroit is bringing in about 11 million dollars a month in tax revenue from the casinos.

14) There are 70 “Superfund” hazardous waste sites in Detroit.

15) 40 percent of the street lights do not work.

16) Only about a third of the ambulances are running.

17) Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

18) Two-thirds of the parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down since 2008.

19) The size of the police force in Detroit has been cut by about 40 percent over the past decade.

20) When you call the police in Detroit, it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond.

21) Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

22) The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

23) The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

24) Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.

It is easy to point fingers and mock Detroit, but the truth is that the rest of America is going down the exact same path that Detroit has gone down.

Detroit just got there first.

All over this country, there are hundreds of state and local governments that are also on the verge of financial ruin…

“Everyone will say, ‘Oh well, it’s Detroit. I thought it was already in bankruptcy,’ ” said Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone. “But Detroit is not unique. It’s the same in Chicago and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It’s a lot of major cities in this country. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems.”

A while back, Meredith Whitney was highly criticized for predicting that there would be a huge wave of municipal defaults in this country. When it didn’t happen, the critics let her have it mercilessly.

But Meredith Whitney was not wrong.

She was just early.

Detroit is only just the beginning. When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.

And of course the biggest debt problem of all in this country is the U.S. government. We are going to pay a great price for piling up nearly 17 trillion dollars of debt and over 200 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.

All over the nation, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, debt levels are exploding and poverty is spreading. We are consuming far more wealth than we are producing, and our share of global GDP has been declining dramatically.

We have been living way above our means for so long that we think it is “normal”, but an extremely painful “adjustment” is coming and most Americans are not going to know how to handle it.

So don’t laugh at Detroit. The economic pain that Detroit is experiencing will be coming to your area of the country soon enough.

Republished with permission from: The Economic Collapse

It is so sad to watch one of America’s greatest cities die a horrible death. Once upon a time, the city of Detroit was a teeming metropolis of 1.8 million people and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. Now it is a rotting, decaying hellhole of about 700,000 people that the rest of the world makes jokes about. On Thursday, we learned that the decision had been made for the city of Detroit to formally file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. It was going to be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States by far, but on Friday it was stopped at least temporarily by an Ingham County judge. She ruled that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing violates the Michigan Constitution because it would result in reduced pension payments for retired workers. She also stated that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing was “also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy“, and she ordered that a copy of her judgment be sent to Barack Obama. How “honoring the president” has anything to do with the bankruptcy of Detroit is a bit of a mystery, but what that judge has done is ensured that there will be months of legal wrangling ahead over Detroit’s money woes. It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out. But one thing is for sure – the city of Detroit is flat broke. One of the greatest cities in the history of the world is just a shell of its former self. The following are 25 facts about the fall of Detroit that will leave you shaking your head…

1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.

2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities. That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000.

5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroit right now for $500 or less.

7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

8) About one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

10) Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

11) If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

12) Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but over the past 60 years the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

13) The city of Detroit is now very heavily dependent on the tax revenue it pulls in from the casinos in the city. Right now, Detroit is bringing in about 11 million dollars a month in tax revenue from the casinos.

14) There are 70 “Superfund” hazardous waste sites in Detroit.

15) 40 percent of the street lights do not work.

16) Only about a third of the ambulances are running.

17) Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

18) Two-thirds of the parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down since 2008.

19) The size of the police force in Detroit has been cut by about 40 percent over the past decade.

20) When you call the police in Detroit, it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond.

21) Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

22) The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

23) The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

24) Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.

It is easy to point fingers and mock Detroit, but the truth is that the rest of America is going down the exact same path that Detroit has gone down.

Detroit just got there first.

All over this country, there are hundreds of state and local governments that are also on the verge of financial ruin…

“Everyone will say, ‘Oh well, it’s Detroit. I thought it was already in bankruptcy,’ ” said Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone. “But Detroit is not unique. It’s the same in Chicago and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It’s a lot of major cities in this country. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems.”

A while back, Meredith Whitney was highly criticized for predicting that there would be a huge wave of municipal defaults in this country. When it didn’t happen, the critics let her have it mercilessly.

But Meredith Whitney was not wrong.

She was just early.

Detroit is only just the beginning. When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.

And of course the biggest debt problem of all in this country is the U.S. government. We are going to pay a great price for piling up nearly 17 trillion dollars of debt and over 200 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.

All over the nation, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, debt levels are exploding and poverty is spreading. We are consuming far more wealth than we are producing, and our share of global GDP has been declining dramatically.

We have been living way above our means for so long that we think it is “normal”, but an extremely painful “adjustment” is coming and most Americans are not going to know how to handle it.

So don’t laugh at Detroit. The economic pain that Detroit is experiencing will be coming to your area of the country soon enough.

Republished with permission from: The Economic Collapse

Clashes between the police and hundreds of the far-right English Defense League (EDL) in Birmingham, Britain, have left several of both sides injured.

Minutes after EDL leader Tommy Robinson began his speech in Centenary Square of the city, a number of the EDL thugs attacked the police with a range of missiles including bottles, sending on officer to the hospital for concussion.

The violent scenes also saw the EDL members pull down fences around the new Library of Birmingham construction site

Meanwhile, the clashes led to several EDL thugs suffering head injuries.

More than 1,000 police officers in full riot gear were deployed on the streets before the EDL march.

Four EDL thugs were arrested during the clashes.

AMR/HE

Republished with permission from: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_helen_thomas_20130720/

Posted on Jul 20, 2013

Republished with permission from: TruthDig

People vote in Japanâ„¢s election for the upper house of parliament in Tokyo on July 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

In the years 2006 and 2007, the underlying stability of the global economy and the U.S. credit base in particular was experiencing intense scrutiny by alternative economic analysts. The mortgage-driven Xanadu that was the late 1990s and early 2000s seemed just too good to be true. Many of us pointed out that such a system, based on dubious debt instruments animated by the central banking voodoo of arbitrary fractional reserve lending and fiat cash creation, could not possibly survive for very long. A crash was coming, it was coming soon, and most of our society was either too stupid to recognize the problem or too frightened to accept the reality they knew was just over the horizon.

The Federal Reserve had cheated America out of an economic reset that was desperately needed. The 1980s had brought us utter destruction disguised as “globalization.” Our industrial center, the very heart of the American middle class that generated enormous wealth and decades of opportunity, had been dismantled and shipped overseas to the lowest bidder. It was then that the U.S. economy actually died; we just couldn’t see it. From that point forward, Americans were fully dependent on the charity of central bank money creation and international bank lending standards. The collapse that should have occurred in the 80s was delayed and thus made more volatile as the Fed artificially lowered interest rates and allowed trillions upon trillions of dollars in dubious loans to be generated. Free money abounded, and average citizens were suckered royally. Their greed was used against them, as they collateralized homes they could not afford to buy more crap they didn’t need. Of course, you know the rest of the story…

Today, credit markets remain frozen. Lending is nowhere near the levels reached in 2006. The housing market is showing signs of life; but that’s only because most home purchases are being made by banks, not regular people, for pennies on the dollar, as bankrupt properties are then reissued on the market for rent rather than for sale. If you are lucky, maybe one day you’ll get to borrow the keys to the house you used to own. And, millions of higher-paying full-time jobs have been lost and then replaced with lower-paying part-time-wage slavery positions. The image of American prosperity carries on, but it is nothing but a cruel farce; and anyone with any sense should question how long this false image can be given life before the truth dawns.

The novice will question why it is necessary to re-examine all of this information. Is it not widely known? Am I not simply preaching to the choir a message heard over and over again since the crash of 2008? Maybe — or maybe it is time for us to finally apply some foresight given our knowledge of the recent past.

Why did 2008 creep up on so many people? Weren’t there plenty of economists out there “preaching to the choir” at that time? Weren’t there plenty of signals? Weren’t there plenty of practical conclusions being made about the future? And yet, the world was left stunned.

The truth is, human beings have a nasty habit of ignoring the cold hard facts of the present in the hopes of using apathy as a magical elixir for future prosperity. They want to believe that disaster is a mindset, that it is a boogeyman under their bed that can be defeated through blind optimism. They refuse to accept that disaster is a tangible inevitability of life that pays no heed to our naïve, happy-go-lucky attitudes. The American people allowed themselves to be caught off guard in 2008, just as they are setting themselves up to be caught off guard again today.

Again, the reality is clear; the Federal Reserve has propped up equities and bonds using money created out of thin air – so much so that both markets have become totally reliant and disturbingly addicted to fiat injections. The distribution of this fiat threatens the continued dominance of the dollar as the world reserve currency and will invariably lead to currency collapse and hyperstagflation. This process is much more likely to climax in the near term given the accelerated rate of quantitiative easing within our system to date and the accelerated rate at which our primary lenders (namely China) are dumping the dollar in bilateral trade with each other. The endgame is obvious, but I still fear millions of people within this country and around the world will be shell-shocked once again by a renewed crash.

The argument is always the same: “Yeah, things might get dicey, but it won’t be as bad as all the doom-mongers claim, and probably not for many years.”

Similar statements were made by naysayers before the Great Depression and before the 2008 crash. So why are the skeptics wrong again this time around?

The Stimulus Fantasy

Let’s put this in the simplest terms possible: Stimulus is now the lifeblood of our economy. There is nothing else sustaining our nation. Period. Stimulus in the form of bailouts and QE are keeping the stock market and bonds afloat. This means that the continued existence of equities, and the continued existence of healthy treasuries, and thus the foundation of our currency, our general economy, and a functioning (or barely functioning) government, is completely dependent on the Fed continuing to print.

In recent weeks, the Fed hinted at possible intentions reduce or remove stimulus measures, which would effectively shut down the life-support machine and let the patient drown in his own fluids.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/19/news/economy/federal-reserve-stimulus/index.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/14/usa-imf-lagarde-idUSL2N0EQ0QI20130614?feedType=RSS&feedName=marketsNews&rpc=43 

Day traders and common investors are not very bright, but they do understand well that no stimulus means no stock market and no bond market. In response, indexes have become erratic, shifting on the slightest rumor that the central bank might continue QE for a little longer. Pathetically, the Dow Jones now rallies upward whenever bad financial news hits the wire, as insane investment groups pour in money in the hopes that dismal economic developments might cause the Fed to extend the bailout bonanza.

In our modern nightmare era of hyper-centralized economy, one word or rumor from Ben Bernanke now determines whether stocks dramatically rise or fall. This is NOT the behavior of a healthy and vibrant fiscal system.

The anatomy of American finance and trade has been horribly mutilated; and clearly, such a monstrous creation cannot last. Stocks are supposed to perform based on the true profitability of individual businesses as well as the political and social health of the overall culture. The wild printing of paper money by private banking magnates is not a catalyst for a successful economy. Whether the Fed actually ends QE is ultimately irrelevant. No fiscal structure can survive when it abandons fundamentals for fantasy. Either QE continues, becoming less and less effective in staving off negative results in equities, inspiring a flight from the dollar leading to a crash, or QE ends, exposing the inevitability of negative results in equities, leading to a crash. If the Fed ends stimulus, the process of collapse will merely take place slightly faster than if stimulus remains.

But every historic economic crisis has a defining moment, a moment in which the tide turned overwhelmingly sour for a majority of the public. The question now becomes what, exactly, will trigger the avalanche?

Precious Metals Signal Secret Shift To Asia

As I have discussed in numerous articles over the years, China’s shift away from the U.S. consumer and the U.S. dollar is well under way. Over half of the world’s major economies now have bilateral trade agreements in place which remove the dollar as the world reserve currency in trade with China and the ASEAN economic bloc. China is issuing trillions in Yuan and Yuan denominated bonds around the globe, setting the stage for a higher Yuan valuation and allowing Chinese consumer markets to replace American consumer markets as the number one driver of manufacturing in export countries. At the same time, China has increased its purchases of precious metals exponentially to the point that the nation is now set to become the largest holder of gold and silver in the world in the next two years. This is clearly in preparation for a currency crisis event…

The buying spree in Asia seems to directly contradict the “paper market” value of metals in recent weeks. Demand for gold and silver has only increased throughout most of the world, even in light of Federal Reserve suggestions that QE might end. Manipulations within metals markets by the CME and JP Morgan explain half the story, but there may be another issue at work.

It is very possible that the COMEX is now essentially broken, and that gold and silver ETF’s (paper gold and silver) are decoupling from the street value of physical metals during the last gasp of a failing system. In the near term, I believe that premiums on physical coins and bars will skyrocket, even as the official market prices of those metals is held down. At the same time, China, Russia, and other countries heavily invested in gold may break from Western COMEX valuations completely using their own metals markets to establish their own prices.

As the dollar loses its world reserve status, the countries holding the most physical gold in their coffers stand to weather the storm most effectively, and because U.S. gold stores have never been officially audited, we have no idea if America has any reserve whatsoever.

Crushing Energy Prices Coming Soon?

While China continues a careful strategy of decoupling from the dollar and the U.S. consumer through bilateral agreements and trading blocks, another issue is arising: the issue of energy. I would like to note that despite globally diminishing oil demand caused by the 2008 credit collapse, gas prices have experienced little to no deflation. I would also like to note that after the Federal Reserve hinted at shutting down QE, oil was one of the few commodities that continued to rise.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-18/u-s-oil-demand-falls-to-16-year-low-api-reports.html

This has not been caused by a lack of supply, as many American-based companies ramp up production. (I am aware of all the arguments behind peak oil. As soon as a peak oil proponent can show me an example of oil demand not being met because of a legitimate lack of supply, then I’ll be happy to consider that peak oil is the main cause of price increases.)

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/blog/morning-edition/2013/06/us-oil-production-up-as-global.html

The fact is current regressive global demand and ample supply should have led to lower gas prices, not higher. If speculation was the cause, then price shifts within the oil market should have been far more volatile, with increases lasting weeks or perhaps months, but certainly not years. The only plausible explanation for this kind of commodity activity is a weakening of the currency it is directly tied to. The petrodollar is slowly but surely coming to an end.
I believe the next market exodus may be triggered by the weakening effects of stimulus (or the removal of stimulus altogether) along with extreme energy prices cause by steady inflation and a global political crisis in the near future.

China, being strangely and consistently prophetic when it comes to economic calamity, has recently established an astonishing oil trade deal with Russia, which plans to supply China with an alternative petroleum source for the next 25 years. (This news went almost completely unnoticed by the mainstream media.)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/22/russia-inks-big-china-oil-deal/?partner=yahootix

Now, keep in mind that in 2010, China and Russia signed an agreement completely removing the U.S. dollar in bilateral trade. The dollar has been the world reserve and the only currency used to purchase petroleum for decades. The Russia/China oil deal changes everything. It sets a trend toward the removal of the petrodollar function of the Greenback which ultimately destroys any credibility the currency has left. This news flies in the face of dollar proponents who consistently claim that the dollar’s ties to oil make it invincible. Apparently, there are some weaknesses in the armor.
Ongoing social unrest in Egypt has also made oil markets jumpy, being that the Suez Canal oversees the transfer of a significant portion of the world’s oil shipping. Clearly, there are two opposing factions within the country vying for power, and regardless of who is best suited to U.S. interests, the Egyptian people overall have no love for the West. There is a distinct chance of a shooting war, similar to Syria, in the coming months in Egypt.

Meanwhile, the engineered conflict in Syria continues to go exactly as I predicted in my article ‘The Terrible Future Of The Syrian War’.

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/1535-the-terrible-future-of-the-syrian-war

Syria remains an explosive trigger point for regional war which will, in the end, draw in Iran and result in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which annually handles the shipping of about 20 percent of the world’s oil. All trends point toward higher gas prices over the horizon, and the U.S. economy is barely able to survive on the cost of energy we have today.

So Close They Can’t See It

Reduced stimulus combined with adversely high oils prices may very well be the tumbling boulders that bring down the mountain. We are close now. Beyond the undeniable economic factors, the very fabric of American government is crumbling. Corruption is openly rampant. Scandals are exposed daily. The establishment leadership is unapologetic and grows even more despotic with each truth that escapes into the open air. They are becoming MORE bold, not less bold, and those of us who seek transparency in all things, from politics, to economics, to surveillance, are being attacked as the source of the problem rather than the solution.

Collapse, from a historical perspective, seems to occur when the searchlights of the individual mind are dimmest, when the threat is the greatest, and when we are most comfortable in our ignorance. In 2008, the U.S. public was mostly oblivious to the danger, and they were painfully stung. Today, I hope that the liberty movement, the alternative media, and alternative economic analysts have created a window of opportunity by which millions of people can this time see the writing on the wall and prepare accordingly. At this point, there is no question that Americans have been warned. Whether or not they pay heed, is out of our hands.

You can contact Brandon Smith at:  brandon@alt-market.com

Alt-Market is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

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Republished with permission from: SHTF Plan

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Republished with permission from: SHTF Plan

The price of gold and silver has seen a massive decline as of late, prompting one analyst to suggest that there is no compelling fundamental reason to own precious metals and the only thing investors can do now is “hope and panic, in that order.”

But while current prices and technical charts may leave some with the feeling that gold’s bull run is over and the bubble has popped, others are scooping up as much yellow and silver metal as they can find, and in some cases they’re doing it by the tens of thousands of ounces.

According to recent data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, private investors are rapidly exchanging their paper holdings and turning them into deliverable physical assets, an indication that the purported ‘free market’ price for gold on global exchanges is grossly undervalued.

Brinks is now being depleted. 

They have gone from 447,199 on July 3rd to 134,525 on July 9th which is a drop of 312,674 oz.

If this is correct, then this is a decline of 70 percent in the gold held in private accounts at Brinks in just one week.

If this is data is correct, it would not be too much of a stretch to say that this has the appearance of ‘a run on the bank.’

Jesse’s Cafe Americain via Steve Quayle

Commodities guru Doug Casey recently noted that it costs mining companies about $1200 an ounce to get gold out of the ground. Given that the price of gold is hovering right at that amount as of this writing it should be obvious that the going price for gold at this time is not sustainable. Either demand has waned and gold producers are going to be closing up shop soon because their business models will not be able to function under these prices, or we’re set to see prices bounce back significantly in coming months and years.

If we are to believe that investors are losing interest in precious metals, then how is it possible that major gold retailers like JM Bullion were reporting weeks-long delivery delays citing “astounding volume” from the retail sector?

Even the US Mint has seen such high demand (118% increase year-over-year) that they have actually suspended the sale of some of their gold American Eagles because they are unable to source the gold blanks required to strike the coins.

Obviously what mainstream analysts are reporting and what is happening in the real world are two different things, as evidenced by the large scale physical deliveries being reported around the globe.

The price of gold may have dropped 25% in the last 12 months, but a similar scenario unfolded from 1975 to 1976 when gold dropped nearly 50%, only to recover and go to new highs, quadrupling in value over the subsequent five years.

We’ve noted previously that the volatility in financial markets will be so extreme that even gold investors will be shaken.

If there’s one thing that should be clear, it’s that the global economic crisis is nowhere close to be resolved, and recovery could be a decade or more away. In fact, chances are we have yet to see the worst of it.

It is during environments exactly like these — when the people fear their government and lose confidence in its ability to mitigate crises — that precious metals become the investment asset of last resort.

It has happened throughout history. And it’s happening right now.

Republished with permission from: SHTF Plan

This analysis has been contributed by The Common Sense Show.

In Part one of this series, I detailed how this administration has set themselves up to roll out martial law like no other martial law in history. Part one further revealed that the mechanisms needed for hard-core martial law are either active or merely waiting in the wings. All that is needed for unmistakable martial law to be rolled out in its entirety, is for the right trigger event to take place.

Will It Be a False Flag Attack Or a Currency Collapse?

My initial response to that question is, does it really matter? The pattern of societal collapse and subsequent governmental enslavement of the American people will be largely the same whether the precipitating incident is a false flag attack or a currency collapse. For the purpose of simplicity, let us call the precursor event to all-out martial law, a currency collapse.

The Federal Reserve Is the Enemy of Humanity

The Federal Reserve has been bleeding this country to death for exactly one century. What the dollar bought 100 years ago, can only buy three cents of product today. This means that 97% of the value of our currency has gone into the pockets of the Federal Reserve.

I am amazed at the abject ignorance of the American people and that they think the Federal Reserve is actually part of the federal government. As we like to stay in the alternative media, the Federal Reserve is no more federal than Federal Express.

The Dollar Is Diving

The world is running from the dollar. Until recently, our dollar was used as the currency of international trading. Further, the dollar was also the reserve currency for oil. All foreign countries wishing to purchase oil from the Middle East, first had to purchase dollars from the Federal Reserve. After FDR took us off the gold standard during the Great Depression and Richard Nixon finished the task of providing America with a totally Fiat currency, the only backing that our dollar enjoys is that of being the reserve currency for both trading and for oil (i.e. the Petrodollar scam).

The major cause of the present calamity is fractional reserve banking. When the government goes to the private Federal Reserve and asks for one trillion dollars, the federal reserve gets to print one trillion for the government, at interest, and 10 trillion dollars for themselves and to lend out at high interest rates. This inflationary practice erodes the value of your dollar while enriching our Federal Reserve masters. Ultimately, the currency upon which we depend on will be destroyed and life as we know it will be changed forever.

A Changing of the Financial Guard

Today, many important nations are running from the dollar. Countries such as India, China, Iran, Japan, and Australia have signed their own trade agreements and their currency of choice is no longer the dollar!

When the collapse of the dollar occurs, it will literally and figuratively come like a thief in the night, and I do mean overnight!

We are all familiar with the concept of inflation, which is the intentional byproduct of the Federal Reserve.  But I am not just talking inflation, I’m speaking about hyperinflation which is caused by the collapse of the value of the currency resulting in runaway prices. Here are three examples of how quickly a currency collapse can occur when a nation’s money when its money no longer holds it value:

1. In Weimar Germany, from 1922 — 1923, prices  doubled  every three days.

2. In the modern era, in Yugoslavia from 1992-94, witnessed prices doubling every 34 hours.

3. In Zimbabwe, in the two year period from 2007 — 2008, prices doubled  every 25 hours.

History is replete with examples of currency collapses and they typically follow very predictable patterns in which a nation unravels and social chaos, and many times, widespread violence and even genocide becomes part of the national landscape.

What Does a Currency Collapse Look Like?

Generally, when the currency collapses, a stock market crash is right on its heels. Because of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a banking collapse will immediately occur following the collapse of the stock market. Your life savings will be wiped out. From this point on, the effect cascades like a roaring tsunami racing across the open ocean.

Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy demonstrated that gas stations will be bone dry within two days following a complete collapse. Subsequently, commerce will not move. If you are on vacation like I presently am, you may not make it home. On the second day following a currency collapse, being on the road will be a risky endeavor because of other desperate motorists.

With no available fuel, the grocery and drug stores will be empty within one to three days. There will be no food to be had except for that which is decaying in your refrigerator and that in which you can beg, borrow and steal from your neighbors who will also be begging, borrowing and stealing. If you have an adequate food and water supply, you better have an adequate gun and ammo supply in order to defend your assets. And when will you sleep? The protection of your critical assets is a 24/7 proposition. Therefore, having a cooperative survival plan is critical.

Without gas, people will stop going to work. Corporations will disappear overnight. Hurricane Katrina showed America that the police cannot be expected to stay on the job more than 48-72 hours as they will be home protecting their families and foraging for food and water like everyone else. The emergence of former police gangs will become common in an effort to secure the products which will ensure survival. Therefore, when your home is under attack, there will nobody to call. Everyone will be on their own.

The elderly and the chronically ill will be the first to die. Too old to defend their assets, the elderly will find themselves overpowered as they will make easy preys of opportunity for the roving gangs. The chronically ill will have no way to procure their medication and even if they survive the looting rampage which will follow a currency collapse, these poor souls will perish without access to their life-sustaining prescriptions.

The money in your wallet will be useless. Cell phones will not work. Heating and air conditioning will not work either and depending on the time of year, the environment could prove deadly to untold numbers of people.

Water treatment plants will stop operating for the same reasons that you will not be able to find a cop during this crisis nobody will be manning the water treatment plants. Toilets will back up and diseases will spread like wildfire. Something as simple as toilet paper will become a prized commodity. There will be no trash pickup and more disease will result due to the increased rodent population.

Clean drinking water and hunger will become the dominant motivator in society. Roving bands of looters, turned murderers, will sweep through neighborhoods seeking to obtain these critical elements of survival. Young women will sell themselves for a can of food for their children. Society will see the widespread loss of human dignity and self-respect.

Infanticide and euthanasia of the weak will become common events because there will be decided efforts to reduce the amount of mouths to feed. There will be the stark realization that the lights are not coming back on and the ensuing sense of hopelessness will lead to murder-suicides within families and simple incidences of suicide will be used as a means to escape the horrendous circumstances.

Humanity’s Darkest Hour

There will come a time when all the available animals will be devoured and then there will be only one place to turn to for food. History shows that cannibalism will set in by the beginning of the third week. Extreme hunger will lead to humans hunting humans as an available food supply. This will begin to occur within 15-20 days following the currency collapse.

The Government’s Version of the Final Solution

If the establishment military has properly planned, they will move into take control but they will not move quickly. The more death there is, the fewer people there will be to control. Government will typically move in with their solutions towards the end of the second week.

The reasons behind the creation of Executive Order 13603 will soon become readily apparent. You will retain ownership over nothing including food, water, guns, ammunition, your house, your car and even yourself. If you survive, you will be conscripted to work in some capacity in a specialty and location not of your choosing. On a positive note following this catastrophe, the debate over the existence of FEMA camps will be quickly determined and your NSA threat matrix score, resulting from their illegal surveillance, will have a lot to do with whether you survive or are executed as an enemy of the state. There is one ironclad thing that you can count on, food and water will be used to control the people following a currency collapse.

Who Will Help Us?

When past currency collapses occur, organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, the UN and the US have appeared to render their predatory version of help in exchange for control of critical infrastructure and other capital considerations. Because of this aid, more people survived in the impacted areas. However, what happens when the top dog collapses? Who would be able to come and render aid in America? Even in a world disgusted by our imperialistic ways would  offer help, could they? Not under the coming circumstances could anyone offer help because they will be in a worse situation.

In short, there will be nobody riding in to rescue the United States. Despite some rebelling against the dollar, the world is still dependent upon our currency. When the currency collapses it will pull the rest of world down with us. The subsequent collapse of global currencies will indeed constitute a major depopulation event and all the elite have to do is wait it out in places like the tunnels under Denver International Airport.

During this time, Americans will truly discover if there really are FEMA camps and what they will be used for. If people want to eat, they will be enticed to go where food is promised. Although you can count on the above mentioned events transpiring in the event of a currency collapse, what lies ahead is unknown to a large extent because the top dog will not have been economically obliterated in modern history.

Conclusion

Obama is willing to talk about the 17 trillion dollar deficit. However, you never hear the government nor the media discuss the real debt? Our real financial obligations total 240 trillion dollars through programs like social security, Medicare, public pensions and welfare. Subsequently, I want to make one thing abundantly clear; It is not a matter if we are going to have a currency collapse, it is when.  And the when is much sooner than later.  It could happen tomorrow, next month and even next year. We do not have two years left in the American economic engine. A currency collapse is nothing that I look forward to, and people who intend on surviving the event should be in the midst of their preparations.

Dave Hodges is an award winning psychology, statistics and research professor, a college basketball coach, a mental health counselor, a political activist and writer who has published dozens of editorials and articles in several publications such as Freedom Phoenix, News With Views, and The Arizona Republic. 

The Common Sense Show features a wide variety of important topics that range from the loss of constitutional liberties, to the subsequent implementation of a police state under world governance, to exploring the limits of human potential. The primary purpose of The Common Sense Show is to provide Americans with the tools necessary to reclaim both our individual and national sovereignty. You can follow Dave’s work at his web site, on Facebook and Twitter.

Republished with permission from: SHTF Plan

Before anybody in America ever cared about AIG, credit markets or bailouts, Karl Denninger had warned that the fuse was burning and had “gone inside the box.” This was in September of 2008, about a month before the bottom fell out of global markets and the giant kaboom was heard ’round the world. He had repeatedly sounded the alarm. A “credit event” was coming, and it couldn’t be stopped. No one listened.

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Republished with permission from: SHTF Plan

Zimmerman Verdict Spurs an Outbreak of…Temper Tantrums?

While Hollywood and the media puppets play their harps, write their poetry, and weep gracefully over the Zimmerman verdict, riots erupt across the United States.

Except, as any mom or dad who has ever raised a child through the toddler years will recognize, they aren’t really “riots” but temper tantrums.  It is like a bunch of hungry, overtired children, melting down and having a big, screaming hissy fit.

Basically, these people who are angry about the Zimmerman verdict are stomping their feet, running around, shouting, crying, and breaking things…just because they’re mad.

They are doing absolutely nothing that will effect a change, nothing that will increase their own credibility, and nothing that will prove to the world that they are right and the Zimmerman jury was wrong.

Wouldn’t peaceful protests with large numbers of citizens standing in unity get across the point that they are trying to prove with more clarity?  Aren’t these people trying to show that an injustice was done, that Zimmerman should not have been fearful of Trayvon Martin?  By rioting through city streets, threatening and hurting innocent bystanders, aren’t these “protesters” proving the complete opposite of their alleged point?

With this complete lack of dignity, you can’t even call these actions “protests” — you have to call them what they are — temper tantrums.  Here are a few examples.

From Los Angeles

Several protesters ran into a Wal-Mart store and knocked down displays before store security chased them out. Police began guarding the door.

Tonya Williams was shopping with her daughter when the protesters burst in and security briefly locked down the store.

“We thought we were going to be stuck in there,” Williams said. “We saw the merchandise all thrown around. They had pulled the rack down, and there was merchandise all over the floor.”  (source)

From Pennsylvania:

In Chester County, Pennsylvania, police are investigating graffiti on a building before it was set on fire: “KILL ZIMMERMAN.” Firefighters were called to the scene of the fire at ProSigns, a company manufacturing commercial signs for business, and found that phrase spray-painted in red on the front of the building. The firefighters put out the fire without significant damage. The fire has been ruled arson. (source)

From Oakland:

Dozens of demonstrators briefly blocked all lanes of Interstate 880 at the tail end of rush hour, stopping traffic in both directions for several minutes before lanes were cleared by authorities. Several protesters laid their bicycles on the ground in front of stopped cars.

“You’ve got to go. You will go to jail,” one police officer shouted at demonstrators who were blocking traffic, the Oakland Tribune reported. However, police decided not to make arrests as the marchers, chanting “Justice for Trayvon Martin,” were directed back to surface streets.

Later, another group tried to march up the onramp to Interstate 580 before being turned away by Oakland police and California Highway Patrol officers. (source)

Also from Oakland:

There were scattered reports of vandalism – including Dumpsters pulled into the street – but not at the level of destruction that happened Saturday night when numerous downtown businesses had windows smashed or were covered in spray paint.. (source)

Across the San Francisco Bay area:

 A BART police car parked outside the 12th Street BART Station had its windows smashed, and protesters spray-painted “F- the police” and “Kill Pigs” on the side of the vehicle… The crowd later moved away from the intersection and headed east on 14th Street, stopping at a McDonald’s restaurant shortly after midnight to burn several flags and to spray-paint “Kill Zimmerman” and “FTP,” an anti-police epithet, on the side of Alameda County’s Rene C. Davidson Courthouse. (source)

Reporters were also a target in Oakland…but why?  Those are the people who were there to do what the protests were allegedly supposed to do — get the story out about the outrage at the verdict:

…a small number of Oakland demonstrators – some hiding their faces with bandanas, as demonstrators did during the Occupy Oakland melees – turned violent late Sunday, setting upon an Oakland Tribune photographer and KTVU cameraman with kicks and punches.

“I’m OK, but protesters had our photog on the ground,” Bay Area News Group reporter Natalie Neysa Alund tweeted a little before 11:30 p.m. Sunday. “I tried to get them off him. An #SFgate photog came to the rescue – 1 camera is destroyed.”

Shortly afterward, another reporter with the news group – which publishes the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News – followed up: “Just patched up my assailed colleague. He’s shaken but not stirred. Should be ok. Senseless.”

A KTVU tweet said that news agency’s cameraman was also “attacked by masked protesters.” (source)

Some of the riots resulted in serious harm…but what is the point of injuring a person because of the color of his skin? Isn’t that what the “protesters” are protesting against?

From Baltimore:

Real estate agent Christina Dudley said she was walking to her car just before 9 p.m. when she saw several young black males and two black females chasing a 37-year-old Hispanic man west on North Linwood Avenue past East Fairmont Avenue.

“One of the boys had a handgun out and it was pointed at the back of him,” Dudley said in an interview.

They caught up to the man at the corner of Fairmount and N. Streeper Street, and the male with the gun beat the victim with what appeared to be his gun while others kicked and stomped him, Dudley said.

“They were just yelling and calling him names as they ran after him, but once they were hitting him and after that they started yelling, “This is for Trayvon, [expletive],” said Dudley, who heard the chant repeated multiple times. (source)

From Mississippi:

A man who says he was jogging alongside of a road when three black men abducted and beat him claims the alleged attack was in retaliation for George Zimmerman’s acquittal, police in Senatobia, Miss. told Fox News.

Police Chief Steve Holts told Fox News the alleged victim, who is white, was jogging Sunday night along Highway 51 when, he said, the suspects pulled over and ordered him to get inside their car.

“One of them asked, ‘Do you know who Trayvon Martin was?’” Holts quoted the man as saying. At that point, the men in the vehicle allegedly attacked him.

The man, who the chief described as a young resident of the area, was treated  at a local hospital.

Memphis television station WREG reported the assailants allegedly told the victim, “This is for Trayvon.” The television station and The Democrat newspaper reported the jogger was badly beaten and later dropped off on a road between Senatobia and Coldwater, Miss. (source)

So, clearly, it should be judged a hate crime when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, but it should be considered an act of protest when they beat up a bystander “for Trayvon” , selecting their victim just because he happens to be white or Hispanic.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who are peacefully protesting the verdict, as is their Constitutionally protected right to do.  Unfortunately, the positivity and unity that they are trying to convey is being overridden by a bunch of kids having a tantrum. As Ted Nugent wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. is rolling over in his grave that he sacrificed his life for the cause of judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, as so many of his own race carry in in self-destructive behavior while professional race mongers blame everything on racism.” (Check out his essay on the subject of the Zimmerman verdict HERE.)

The people participating in this big national melt-down are actually doing more to vindicate George Zimmerman’s actions last February than the jury did when they acquitted him.  They are, without direct provocation, destroying property, committing arson, beating the daylights out of people because of their skin color, and purposely attempting to incite fear.  They are perpetuating the racial stereotypes they claim to be railing against.

So, judging by these childish and vicious tantrums, why wouldn’t people be feeling rather suspicious?

Someone needs to take away their spray paint and their matches, and then send them to their rooms so the adults can have a conversation.

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Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor.  Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

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As your personal data from hospitals, insurance companies, banks, retailers, phone carriers, traffic records and every other manner of electronic interaction is merged into massive databases, it will soon be possible for not just the government, but companies you patronize on a daily basis to know your most intimate secrets.

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This file photo shows PKK militants training at a base in northern Iraq.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under renewed political pressure after not offering any new details on the extent of US surveillance activities.

Opposition parties have reacted to Merkelâ„¢s recent press conference where she defended her stance on the US spying program, saying her government is applying Å“appropriate pressure” on Washington.

Merkelâ„¢s center-left challenger, Peer Steinbrueck, termed her comments a sign of Å“alarming cluelessness and helplessness.”

Å“I get the impression that she is simply sitting waiting in the chancellery for our American partners to inform her,” said Steinbrueck.

The Green Party reacted by saying Merkel was not at all convincing in her speech.

Å“Merkelâ„¢s performance at the press conference was not only an insult to all listeners who expected explanations, but also an intellectual insult to all those who work in the chancellery, pretending not to have known about anything,” said Green deputy leader Volker Beck.

During her press conference on July 19, Merkel was reluctant to directly criticize the US, saying Washington needs more time to give all the answers and that she could not force the US to change its laws.

Merkel said a list of questions had been submitted to the US and that Berlin is waiting for answers however Å“the work is not complete. It is ongoing.”

In addition, the Chancellor repeated her message from Obamaâ„¢s visit to Berlin in June that surveillance measures in Germany could not be allowed to grow out of proportion with what is actually needed.

Merkel and her ministers claim they were first informed about the US spying programs from press reports however a report published on July 17 by German daily Bild revealed that the German military has been aware of the surveillance for years.

A recent poll ran by public broadcaster ARD shows that over two thirds of those questioned are not happy with how the German government is handling the US spying affair.

In June, Edward Snowden, an American former technical contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA) and a former employee of the CIA, leaked documents showing the US spied on the European Union and monitored up to a half-billion German telephone calls and internet activities each month.

CAH/HSN

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A senior Syrian Kurdish leader had rejected earlier reports that Kurds are planning to establish an independent Kurdish government in northern Syria.

Chinaâ„¢s Xinhua news agency on Sunday quoted Salih Muslim, the leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), as saying, Å“There is no intention among the Kurds to form their own government, nor to secede from Syria.”

On Saturday, Qatar-based al-Jazeera news network quoted Muslim as saying that Syriaâ„¢s Kurds were planning to create a Å“temporary autonomous government to administer their regions in the north.”

The Syrian government has granted the Kurds a certain level of autonomy since 2012 and they are now controlling security of the region.

In recent months, Kurdish fighters, who are opposed to foreign interference in Syria, have been battling foreign-backed militants in the north.

This comes as clashes continued between PYD-linked Kurdish militants and foreign-backed Takfiri militants around several villages in northeastern Syria near the border with Turkey on Saturday.

The Kurdish militants took control of a checkpoint and also seized light weapons, ammunition, a vehicle mounted with a heavy machinegun, and a mortar launcher.

On July 17, the Kurdish fighters took control of the town of Ras al-Ain in the border province of Hasakah, forcing out the al-Qaeda-linked militants.

Foreign-sponsored militancy has taken its toll on the lives of many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, since March 2011.

Western powers and their regional allies including the Israeli regime, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are supporting anti-Syria militant groups, including al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.

DB/HSN/HMV

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A former US Marine says any foreign military intervention in Syria would instigate a third World War by inevitaby getting Russia involved in the conflict, Press TV reports.

Ken Oâ„¢Keefe, a former US Marine, told Press TV on Saturday that Russia would not remain indifferent to a potential military attack against Syria.

Å“Russia has made [it] very, very clear that they would not sit by and allow yet another country to be bombarded and effectively raped and pillaged in terms with the empiresâ„¢ designs. It will not allow this to happen,” Oâ„¢Keefe said.

He said a third world war was possible with Å“even thinking [about] … military intervention, whatever it is, whether it is using some high-tech weapons, secretly weapons and whatnot; the bottom line is that we are attempting the third world war,” he added.

On June 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against any attempt at foreign military intervention in Syria, stressing that such a move is doomed to fail.

In April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned the West against attempting to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Å“There are governments and outside players that believe that all means are appropriate [to be used] to overthrow the Syrian regime,” Lavrov said.

Oâ„¢Keefe added, Å“At the end of the day, these people who are in power, the banksters in particular are the ones pulling the strings for the Third World War,” the former Marine said.

The turmoil in Syria erupted in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed so far.

In May, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said militants from as many as 29 different countries were operating in different parts of the country.

MYA/HJL

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The United States has agreed to extradite Aafia Siddiqui – a Pakistani woman it had abducted and jailed – to her country under a prisoner exchange deal.

The US has offered Islamabad an agreement in which both sides will release each otherâ„¢s inmates. The US government agreed to send back Siddiqui after finalizing the deal.

The terms of the deal demand that Pakistan accept the ruling of a US court, in which Siddiqui was convicted on terror-related charges.

The Pakistani woman also has to complete the remaining of her prison term in Pakistan. The swap deal is likely to be signed soon.

Pakistanâ„¢s Interior Ministry has formed a task force to follow up on the US offer.

Siddiqui was sentenced to 86 years in prison after she was convicted of grabbing a US soldierâ„¢s assault rifle and trying to shoot a group of FBI agents and soldiers at an Afghan police compound in July 2008.

She denied the charge against her during the trial.

US officials also claim she is an al-Qaeda agent, but her family and many Pakistanis believe this is just a cover-up.

Siddiqui is being held at the notorious Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, Texas, where she is kept in the Special Housing Unit (SHU), which is the most severe confinement category.

Her release has become one of the top national issues in Pakistan. There have been numerous protests not only in Pakistan but many other countries for her release.

MSH/HSN/HMV

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Sheikh Ali Salman, the head of Bahrainâ„¢s main opposition bloc, Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society

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Three British drugs offenders, who claim to have been tortured in Dubai, have returned to Britain, legal charity Reprieve says.

The three were given four years in prison last April for possessing synthetic cannabis but were pardoned by Dubai officials following lobbying by London, including during British Premier David Cameronâ„¢s visit to the UAE in May.

The three Londoners claim they were beaten and suffered electric shocks in the hands of Emirati police.

Reprieve said the Dubai police have Å“serious questions to answer” regarding their treatment of the drug offenders.

However, police in Dubai have rejected the allegations saying they have carried out an internal investigation into the claims and found them baseless.

AMR/HE

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Iran-North Korea Parliamentary Friendship Group is scheduled to travel to Pyongyang on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the countryâ„¢s Fatherland Liberation War Day.

The delegation from Iranâ„¢s Majlis will visit the North Korean capital by the end of this week.

North Korea commemorates Fatherland Liberation War Day on July 27 to mark the end of the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953.

In September 2012, Iran and North Korea signed a scientific and technological cooperation agreement at the presence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korean Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) Kim Yong-Nam in Tehran.

The agreement includes the formation of joint scientific and technological laboratories, the exchange of scientific teams and the transfer of technology in the fields of information technology, energy, environment, agriculture and food.

In April 2013, a North Korean delegation visited Iran to participate at the 18th International Oil, Gas, Refining, and Petrochemical Exhibition in Iranâ„¢s capital, Tehran.

Iran’s Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi said on the sidelines of the exhibit that North Korea was negotiating with Tehran over the possibility of importing oil from the Islamic Republic.

ASH/HJL/HMV

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A former CIA agent has been released from custody in Panama and flown to the United States instead of Italy, where he has been sentenced to nine years in prison for kidnapping an Egyptian Muslim cleric.

Robert Seldon Lady, a former CIA agent in Milan, was arrested as he entered Panama on July 17 at the request of Italian authorities and Interpol for his role in the 2003 CIA capture of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar.

It was not immediately clear what measures the US had taken to secure Ladyâ„¢s release.

Panama, a close US ally, had reportedly refused to extradite Lady to Italy.

Earlier this year, Lady and 22 other US officials, most of them CIA agents, were convicted in absentia in the kidnapping case, in which agents abducted Abu Omar by bundling him into a van as he walked to a mosque.

Abu Omar was then taken to US military bases in Italy and Germany before being delivered to Egypt, where he was tortured.

The court also ordered the 23 convicts to pay one million euros (about USD 1.3 million) to Abu Omar as well as 500,000 euros to his wife.

The trial brought the first convictions against agents involved in the so-called US rendition program.

Under the rendition program, CIA agents in various countries abducted and jailed alleged suspects without legal charges.

Rendition was first authorized by former US President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. However, the practice was intensified in 2001 after ex-US President George W. Bush declared the so-called war on terror.

CAH/HSN

Republished with permission from: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least 100 people have been injured in anti-regime protests over the past three days in Bahrain, a human rights group says.

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People gather at the site of a car bomb attack in Kut, southeast of Iraqâ„¢s capital Baghdad, July 20, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

A boy stands inside a classroom near books and steel plates of children in the Indian state of Bihar on July 18, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

The wreckage of a car used in a bomb attack is seen in a Shia area of Baghdad. (file photo)

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A new research has found that almost 1.5 million more British families are under financial pressure than a year ago, despite signs of an economic boom.

The research commissioned by Which? concluded that one-third of households (34 percent) in the UK, equal to 9 million families, are now feeling financially squeezed, up from an estimated 7.5 million households last July.

The research also found that families are continuing to come under pressure from inflation, which surged to a 14-month high in June.

Which? said that rises to costs such as food prices and energy bills mean that people are relying more on credit to get by, with an estimated 6.1 million households dipping into their savings each month on average over the last year to get by.

“Consumers are looking on the bright side but millions more households are facing a prolonged squeeze on their finances. This implies they are getting used to the tougher financial climate or relying more heavily on savings or credit to get by”, said Richard Lloyd, Which? executive director.

“Consumers may be aiding our fragile economic recovery but using savings and getting into debt is not sustainable and more people are now feeling the squeeze.

“The Government must do more to keep spiralling housing, food and energy prices in check”, added Lloyd.

More than 2,000 people took part in the research in June across the UK.

MOL/

Republished with permission from: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_calm_reflection_on_trayvon_martin_oscar_grant_and_too_many_other_20130720/

Posted on Jul 20, 2013

Republished with permission from: TruthDig

Police used water cannon and tear gas on Saturday to disperse protesters after barring them from entering the park where they had hoped to celebrate the wedding of a couple.

There were no immediate reports on the number of casualties.

The newlywed and hundreds of protesters were later allowed into Gezi Park to take photographs. But they were soon forced out of the park again after they began to chant anti-government slogans.

Turkey has been rocked by nationwide protests and strikes against the policies of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The unrest was triggered by a crackdown on a sit-in by environmentalists protesting the uprooting of trees at Gezi to make way for the construction of a replica Ottoman-era barracks

Critics blame the police for using heavy-handed tactics against protesters, such as firing teargas canisters directly at protesters as well as inside closed spaces.

The government has arrested many activists, among them high school students, on allegations of inciting unrest.

Erdogan has branded the protesters as vandals, looters or terrorists, and claims the demonstrations are part of a plot to topple his government.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Egyptian interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi has called for national reconciliation to end divisions in the country.

On Friday, several Egyptians were killed in clashes between the opponents and supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi, a former leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

On the same day, tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood activists and their supporters took to the streets of Cairo and other cities to demand Morsi’s reinstatement, while thousands of people held demonstrations in favor of the military coup against Morsi, the countryâ„¢s first democratically elected president.

In an interview on the state TV on Saturday evening, Beblawi said, “It’s time for agreement and consensus as the country is divided.”

Beblawi said that Egypt is undergoing a stage of infighting and confrontation following the ouster of Morsi, adding that reconciliation is the only way to get out of this situation.

“There should be no room for revenge or alienation,” he said.

Beblawi added that Egypt is fighting a war to restore security and revive ailing economy.

“As a prime minister, I urge all ministers to avoid isolating certain groups,” he stated.

In a televised speech late on the night of July 3, Egyptian army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced that Morsi was no longer in office and declared that the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court, Adly Mansour, had been appointed as the new interim president of Egypt. The army also suspended the constitution.

Army officials said Morsi, who took office in June 2012, was being held Å“preventively” by the military. On July 4, Mansour was sworn in as interim president.

The Muslim Brotherhood has declined to negotiate with the new administration, saying they can only hold talks after Morsi is reinstated as president.

On July 5, Muslim Brotherhood supreme leader Mohammed Badie said the coup against Morsi was illegal and millions would remain on the street until he is reinstated.

Badie vowed to “complete the revolution” that toppled the Western-backed regime of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

The Egyptians launched a revolution against the pro-Israeli regime on January 25, 2011, which eventually brought an end to the 30-year dictatorship of Mubarak on February 11, 2011.

GJH/AS

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View of the Costa Concordia taken on January 14, 2012, after the cruise ship ran aground and keeled over off the Italian Giglio Island.

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File photo shows the wreckage of the car used in a mosque bombing in the Bahraini city of Riffa on July 17, 2013.

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Helen Thomas, the grand dame of the White House press corps, has passed away at the age of 92.

Thomas, who worked the White House beat for 49 years for United Press International and Hearst newspapers, died on Saturday at her home in Washington after a long illness, the Gridiron Club and Foundation announced in a statement.

Thomas, who covered 10 US presidents, had been a fixture at presidential press conferences for decades and was often allowed to ask the first question.

She would rise from her front-row seat at White House press conferences to end the meetings with the familiar phrase “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Thomas was famous for her difficult questions and was regarded as a pioneer for women in journalism.

Å“Helen was a true pioneer, opening doors and breaking down barriers for generations of women in journalism,” US President Barack Obama said in a statement. Å“She covered every White House since President Kennedyâ„¢s, and during that time she never failed to keep presidents — myself included — on their toes.”

During his last decade in power, Fidel Castro was asked to define the difference between democracy in Cuba and the United States. “I don’t have to answer questions from Helen Thomas,” the revolutionary leader wryly retorted.

Thomas, who was the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, was born in Winchester, Kentucky in 1920 but raised in Detroit, Michigan.

She joined United Press International in 1943.

Thomas was assigned to cover then President-elect John F. Kennedy in late 1960. Kennedy once said of her: “Helen would be a nice girl if she’d ever get rid of that pad and pencil.”

In June 2010, Thomas was forced to resign from Hearst Newspapers after saying the Israelis should leave the occupied territories of Palestine.

She handed in her resignation on June 7, one week after saying, “Tell them (Israelis) to get the hell out of Palestine.”

She made the remarks in a conversation with a rabbi with a video camera at a White House event held to commemorate Jewish Heritage Month.

“Remember these people are occupied and it’s their land, not German and not Poland,” she said. “They can go home, Poland, Germany, and America and everywhere else.”

However, the veteran reporter later expressed regret over the comments, saying that “they do not reflect my heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.”

Thomas worked as a correspondent for UPI for 57 years from 1943 to 2000. She then joined Hearst Newspapers as a columnist, covering national affairs and the White House.

United Press International was purchased in May 2000 by News World Communications, the media corporation of Sun Myung Moonâ„¢s Unification Church. The day after the sale, Helen Thomas resigned as the news agencyâ„¢s White House correspondent after having worked for UPI for 57 years.

Thomas was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and first female president of the White House Correspondents Association, and, in 1975, became the first female member of the Gridiron Club.

Her husband, Douglas Cornell, died in 1982.

GJH/HGL

Republished with permission from: Press TV

“America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time,” former President Jimmy Carter said this week, according to a report in the German newspaper, Der Spiegel. Carter was quoted as having made that remark at a closed-door meeting of Atlantic Bridge, a research and education organization supporting cooperation between the United States and Great Britain on political, economic and defense issues. The former President reportedly said the National Security Agency’s invasion of privacy has gone too far, as he defended that actions of Edward Snowden, the American now seeking asylum in Russia after leaking classified documents revealing the massive NSA interception of communications between citizens and among government officials worldwide.

The English translation of Carter’s remarks was published in the online news source, Inquisitr.com. No American media outlets reported on the closed meeting and it was not clear where Der Spiegel got its source, Inquisitr noted. But both Inquisitr and Huffington Post, which also carried the story, noted that the quotes were consistent with previous published remarks by the former president.

In June, Huffington Post noted, Carter addressed the Snowden controversy in an interview with CNN after the 29-year-old intelligence analyst had flown from Hong Kong to Moscow in his quest for asylum from the U.S. government that is seeking to prosecute him for espionage and theft of government property.

“He’s obviously violated the laws of America, for which he’s responsible,” Carter said at that time, “but I think the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far.” The Georgia Democrat also said nations that were offering asylum to Snowden were acting within their rights. “I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial,” Carter said.

Snowden has been described by the NSA as a systems administrator employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor that worked on the secret agency’s PRISM program for intercepting and storing billions of telephone, Internet and other electronic messages daily. His revelation and documentation of the program through classified documents he gave last month to the British publication The Guardian and to the Washington Post made headlines around the world and caused diplomatic strains between the United States and other nations when it was revealed that the massive surveillance program included spying on other governments.

Snowden fled his Hawaiian home and turned up at a secret location in Hong Kong, where he acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian he was the source of the news leak that had blown the secrecy of the NSA program and had U.S. officials claiming disclosure of the classified information could help terrorists escape detection.

Since his arrival in Russia on June 23, Snowden has reportedly been holed up in Moscow airport while trying to arrange an escape to one of the Latin American countries offering asylum from prosecution by the United States. His ability to travel, however, is hindered by the fact that the U. S. State Department has revoked his passport. He has applied for temporary asylum in Russia, but the United States has warned of serious consequences to U.S.-Russian relations if asylum is granted.

Carter’s assessment of the Snowden affair is in sharp contrast with the Obama administration’s position and with members of Congress, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have accused Snowden of treason. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has said Snowden should be hunted “to the ends of the earth” and former Vice President Dick Cheney has called the systems analyst a “traitor.”

Earlier this week, former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey, a New Hampshire Republican, sent an email message of support to Snowden, calling the NSA surveillance program a “massive violation of the United States Constitution.”

^{Photo of Jimmy Carter: AP Images}

Republished with permission from: The New American

Egyptâ„¢s interim President Adly Mahmoud Mansour (L) and army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi

Republished with permission from: Press TV

The photo shows a 108-year-old man in northern Iran who has become a father for the 11th time.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

This was posted to my facebook page

My Proposal for us to discuss this weekend:

Creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to move this country forward, to a higher level, where we all—on this page, anyway—want it to be. (Bill Clinton suggested a National Dialogue on Race.)

Not too long ago, we also discussed the Laissez-Faire Leadership that us visionaries are saddled with in the White House and the Congress. I would also like to make this a call for us to support only Transformational Leadership—what the times in our country call for.

Transformational Leadership is charismatic, visionary, highly ethical, and morally based. Transformational Leadership does not dictate what is needed, but allows a process of discovery of solutions that are consistent with stated and shared values.

On this page, I saw the beginnings of the kind of transformations that are possible when people open up on their feelings, hear others, and then reflect on what they’ve experienced. This is the process by which we can move forward on a new SHARED vision.

While many are preparing to rally in their hometowns against the Trayvon Martin murder verdict, I thought I’d encourage us on this page to develop a possible solution that could last more than the mere hours of a protest rally. Rallies serve their purpose, but only the development of a process whereby we all can functionally come together and work collectively on a new shared vision that includes everyone will put an end to the scourge that we continue to face.

I posted my sincere feelings here and many others did, too. I believe that we engaged in open and honest discussion here with everyone not agreeing. Except for the Zionist trolls who populate this site, I do believe that we began a process that our country as a whole really needs if we ever are to move forward together, building character, with integrity, for liberty and justice in our local and global communities.

So, I propose a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I must admit that the idea I’m putting forward came to me in the form of a paper submitted by Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s father figure, incarcerated as a political prisoner since the days of the Black Panther Party before it was cracked down upon by the FBI and others in COINTELPRO.

Tell me what you think about the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the U.S. whose goal would be to allow us to develop goals and shared values first. Perhaps, if this had been done generations ago, many communities could have been spared so much pain. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission would begin with that pain and encourage civic action with common purpose and enlightenment.

Let me know what you think. Do you have an alternative or complementary solution? Please think about your solution and share it here on this page with the rest of us.

And, as always . . . Thank you for sharing.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Under “threat” of drone strike, drivers are encouraged to watch their speeds.

Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
July 20, 2013

Several highway signs “warning” drivers of drone-enforced speed zones were mounted around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The professionally-made metal signs read “Speed Enforced by Drones” and show a Predator drone drawn in a possible homage to a recent Anthony Freda painting.

“It is a black and white reflective sign, just like the signs that we use on the side of the road for speed limits and everything else,” California Highway Patrol Officer Andrew Barclay told CBS San Francisco.

California Highway Patrol said that the signs are fake.

“At CHP we definitely do not have drones,” Officer Barclay said. “We use radar, lidar, pace, we have planes and we have helicopters, but we do not have drones.”

“Along with not having drones we definitely do not have any drones that would fire any type of weaponry.”

According to Officer Barclay, the signs violate Section 21465 of the California Vehicle Code, which states that no one may place a sign on a highway that imitates an official traffic control device.

The quality and mounting of the signs rival real traffic signs.

“One of the signs that we found on Highway 37 was actually mounted using tamper-resistant bolts,” Officer Barclay said. “The other two signs were strapped using metal strapping on poles on the side of the freeway.”

The signs utilize headlight reflective materials so night-time drivers can easily be reminded to watch their speeds in these non-existent, drone-enforced speed zones.

But will the use of drones to catch speeders always remain a fantasy?

We recently reported on Customs and Border Patrol Predator drones being used by other agencies such as the Texas Department of Transportation.

Interdepartmental drone sharing will become more common as the Department of Homeland Security promotes a “layered security strategy.”

As domestic drone use increases, it is not totally inconceivable that police will eventually use drones to enforce speed zones.

One person commenting on the drone signs at Jalopnik.com shares a similar sentiment.

“This may just be a prank, but I honestly believe that we will see drone-based highway enforcement in the not-too-distant future,” the commenter said. “Small drones are becoming less and less expensive, and will soon likely be less expensive to patrol highways with than with a police cruiser (especially taking fuel costs into consideration.)”

“This might not be our reality today, but I would be surprised if this were not a reality within a decade.”

So the next time Kowalski speeds down the highway in his ’70 Dodge Challenger towards San Francisco, he might fear drones more than the desert.

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This article was posted: Saturday, July 20, 2013 at 4:49 pm

Tags: domestic news, drones

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

UK Uncut campaigners have forced shut several branches of HSBC bank across Britain, protesting against large corporationsâ„¢ tax-dodging, media reports said.

Campaigners targeted the bank in 13 locations on Saturday, including Glasgow, Sheffield, Brixton and Regent’s Street in London, British media reported.

Demonstrators complained that large corporations such as HSBC had made matters worse by Å“dodging tax”.

They also protested against the governmentâ„¢s spending cuts or delays in benefits payments which have transformed people into relying on food banks.

The campaigners highlighted research showing that 500,000 people regularly rely on food banks, with almost half saying it was because of cuts or delays in benefits payments.

The protesters set up a food bank on the street in front of the branch and put tape across the front door which had the message “Closed by UK Uncut” written across it.

A HSBC spokesman said the branch “shut temporarily at 11.30am as a precaution”, adding: “It may open later.”

Earlier, the spokesman said: “Our branches will be open as usual this Saturday; however our clear priority is the safety of our customers and staff. We are aware that our branches are a focus of UK Uncut for the day and we will take any precautions necessary.”

Murray Worthy, a spokesman for UK Uncut taking part in the protest on Regent Street, said: “We came here to shut it down and it’s shut down. We can’t go on with business as usual with the big banks dodging tax, while hundreds of thousands of people go hungry. That’s what we came here to do and that’s what we’ve done.”

He added: “We’re here today because we think it’s an outrage that half a million people now rely on food banks in the UK.”

Worthy accused HSBC of using tax havens more than any other bank.

MOL/HE

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

On July 17, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave a “mostly cordial reception” to Samantha Power, President Obama’s nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Reporting on the hearing, the New York Times writes that Power “appeared to face no serious obstacles to confirmation.” Although not unexpected, it is unnerving given Power’s record on human rights, the locus of sovereignty, and the purpose of UN-sponsored war.

Parroting the party line and demonstrating her fondness for undeclared wars featuring U.S. troops fighting under that infamous blue flag, Power told senators, “We see the failure of the U.N. Security Council to respond to the slaughter in Syria a disgrace that history will judge harshly.”

Unfortunately, Power herself is not being judged at all, it appears.

Even ranking Republicans were ready at Wednesday’s hearing with a compliment or a vote of confidence. Again, as reported by the New York Times:

Several key Republican senators, including Bob Corker of Tennessee, the ranking member of the committee, and John McCain of Arizona, offered their support.

“I know you’re going to be received very well,” Mr. Corker said at the outset of the hearing.

For his part, in an earlier statement, McCain praised Power, saying, “I support President Obama’s nomination of Samantha Power to become the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. I believe she is well-qualified for this important position and hope the Senate will move forward on her nomination as soon as possible.”

The only wet blanket seemed to be Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Rubio fired a couple of good questions at Power, but failed to follow up when the would-be ambassador offered oblique answers. Committee member Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) did refer to Power’s answers as “non-responsive response[s].”

Rubio asked Power about “Force Full,” an article she wrote for The New Republic in 2003 criticizing President George W. Bush’s use of “illiberal power.” In the article, Power wrote:

U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. This would entail restoring FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] to its pre-Bush stature, opening the files, and acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia: A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.

When asked by Rubio to enumerate the sins for which America should ask the world’s forgiveness, Power dodged.

“I, as an immigrant to this country, think this country is the greatest country on earth,” Power said. “I would never apologize for America – America is the light to the world.” According to Wikipedia, Power’s Irish parents emigrated from Dublin to Pittsburgh in 1979, when Power was nine years old.

In trying not to answer, Power said more than she knew. America was once “the light of the world.” There was a time when the fundamental liberties upon which this country was founded drew immigrants to her shores, seeking freedom from oppression.

Now, however, rather than welcome the down-trodden and the refugees from despotism, our government sends billions of American dollars to prop up those same dictators and then sends thousands of American soldiers to topple them when our interests realign.

Rather than creating a haven for those desperate to breath free, one presidential administration after another exports death and destruction to the far-flung reaches of the world, creating enemies who know nothing of America’s greatness other than her military might and indiscriminate killing.

What of Power, though? What will she do to bring the candle of American greatness out from under the bushel of drones, death, and imperialism? A brief rehearsal of some of her principles might help illuminate the answer to that critical question – the one fawning federal representatives refuse to ask.

Samantha Power rose to prominence in government circles as part of her campaign to promote a doctrine known as the Responsibility to Protect. Notably, this philosophy was also espoused by Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian lawmaker who has publicly questioned the reality of the Holocaust and who was a dedicated lictor of the late leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization – Yasser Arafat.

Responsibility to Protect (also known as Responsibility to Act) is a doctrine advanced by the United Nations and is predicated on the proposition that sovereignty is a privilege, not a right, and that if any regime in any nation violates the prevailing precepts of acceptable governance, then the international community is morally obligated to revoke that nation’s sovereignty and assume command and control of the offending country.

The three pillars of the United Nations’-backed Responsibility to Protect are:

A state has a responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities.

The international community has a responsibility to assist the state if it is unable to protect its population on its own.

If the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene through coercive measures such as economic sanctions.

Military intervention is considered the last resort.

Records indicate that the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, of which Samantha Power is a co-founder, participated in the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that was established by the Canadian government in September 2000 to address the growing problem of “mass atrocities.”

It was this “independent” commission that coined the term “responsibility to protect.”

Also of significance to the current examination of Samantha Power is the fact that she is the founding executive director and the head of the Carr Center at the precise time it was helping to hammer out the details of the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect.

There are other more ominous threads in the tapestry depicting the relationship that exists among President Obama, Samantha Power, the Atrocities Prevention Board that she currently heads, the United Nations, and America’s official sponsorship of the Responsibility to Protect.

The worldwide leader in the promotion of this sovereignty-stealing doctrine that Samantha Power worked to develop is the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P).

As published on its website, the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect’s mission is:

to help transform the principle of the responsibility to protect into a practical guide for action in the face of mass atrocities. The GCR2P was founded by leading figures in government and academia, as well as by International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Refugees International, and WFM-Institute for Global Policy. 

The GCR2P engages in advocacy around specific crises; conducts research designed to further understanding of R2P; recommends and supports strategies to consolidate the norm and help states build capacity; and works closely with NGOs, governments and regional bodies which are seeking to operationalize the responsibility to protect.

One of the biggest financial supporters of the GCR2P is the Open Society Institute, which itself is a branch of the Open Society Foundation, an organization created by leftist financier and Rothschild benefactor George Soros.

A quick perusal of the GCR2P website reveals that Soros’ group is one of a very small cadre of sponsors not affiliated with any government. The other two sponsors are the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (a substantial funder of National Public Radio) and Scott and Elena Lawlor.

Apart from providing financial backing to the Responsibility to Protect, Soros personally believes in and promotes the philosophy. In an article published by Foreign Policy in 2004 entitled “The People’s Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World’s Most Vulnerable Populations,” Soros presented his take on the principles that undergird the Responsibility to Protect.

“True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments,” Soros wrote.

And:

If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified. By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.

In particular, the principle of the people’s sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict. 

So deep are Soros’ roots in the Responsibility to Protect family tree that Ramesh Thakur, one of the men credited with first uttering the term “responsibility to protect,” sits with Soros on several boards and is a former distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which participates in international efforts with another institute founded by Soros.

The picture is darker still. Thakur, the co-author of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine that is so dear to Atrocities Board leader Samantha Power, was quoted in a Canadian newspaper article published in March 2011 pushing for a “global rebalancing” and “international redistribution” of power that would usher in a “new world order.”

Samantha Power, 42, is repeating that same old mantra: new world order. The drive to achieve the generations-old goal of replacing the Constitution with the UN Charter and replacing the Declaration of Independence with the UN Declaration of Human Rights is still very much in effect. President Obama’s nominee to represent the United States at the UN would oversee the sacrifice of American sovereignty on the altar of the globalists’ “new world order.”

Should the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approve Power’s nomination, the matter will go to the full body for consideration. Members of the Foreign Relations Committee are listed on its webpage.

Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Republished with permission from: The New American

The CIA is funding a scientific study to determine the feasibility of altering the planet’s climate in order to stave off climate change, according to documents released by The National Academy of Sciences.

The papers reveal that the project will run for 21 months at a cost of $630,000, with a final report due in 2014. The CIA backed scientists will study how weather patterns could be influenced and altered, and assess the potential impacts of geo-engineering attempts.

The NAS website notes that the funding for the study is coming from “the US intelligence community”. William Kearney, a spokesman for NAS, told Mother Jones that the agency in question is the CIA.

The revelations mark the first time that an intelligence agency has publicly funded such a study.

A CIA spokesman would not confirm that the agency was involved, yet stated that “It’s natural that on a subject like climate change the Agency would work with scientists to better understand the phenomenon and its implications on national security.”

It seems that the CIA has outsourced its geo-engineering studies following the apparent closure of its own research center on climate change and national security in 2012. The move came following criticism from Republican members of Congress who said that the intelligence community should not be spending time researching weather modification.

The NAS website states that the study will encompass a “technical evaluation of a limited number of proposed geoengineering techniques.” A prominent technique that will be evaluated, according to the papers, is “solar radiation management”, which involves spraying aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from the planet — in other words chemtrailing.

The study will also look into “carbon dioxide removal (CDR)”, which involves sucking carbon out of the air via chemical reactions or porous nanosponges. Of course, Carbon Dioxide is fundamental to all life on Earth, so “sucking it out of the air” could come with dire consequences.

The study is also being backed by two other government agencies — NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Reporting on the project, The New Scientist stresses that CIA involvement in weather modification should not be seen as sinister.

“In fact, the CIA’s main interest in geoengineering does not lie in any offensive use. Rather, the US intelligence community sees climate change as a potential threat to global geopolitical stability, and so wants a thorough analysis of the mitigation options.” the report states.

Critics will balk at such a naive statement, given the history the CIA has for covertly subverting and overthrowing foreign governments that it does not approve of, and doing anything but securing geopolitical stability.

Weather weapons have existed for decades, with research on such offensive techniques dating back to the 1950s. In 1997, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen admitted that weather modification techniques had been actively used by governments for over 15 years. The US military has been using weather modifcation techniques since the Vietnam war.

One need only look up at the sky to confirm that our governments, at the behest of think tanks, ‘research’ groups, and radical environmental organisations, are already engaging in these type of programs. Our skies are riddled with artificial clouds, that are patently not merely the contrails of standard air planes.

Indeed, as we reported last year, a Harvard University project experiment funded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates saw thousands of tonnes of sulphur particles sprayed over New Mexico as part of a geoengineering study, despite the fact that even staunch environmentalists have warned the process could have catastrophic effects on the earth’s eco-system.

This is just one example of a practice that has now been in operation for years, if not decades.

Groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meet routinely to discuss ongoing geoengineering programs, specifically the spraying of aerosols into the atmosphere.

Levels of aluminium, barium and strontium in our air, water and soil have exponentially increased, leading many to conclude that these are the after effects of radical geoengineering programs that are already in operation.

A further study last year revealed that the cost of a massive program to spray sun-dimming particles into the upper atmosphere would be around $5 billion dollars a year. However, the study conducted by U.S. scientists writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters completely failed to analyze whether such a massive geoengineering program would be a good idea and what environmental consequences it would have.

A similar Carnegie Institution for Science proposal also recently advocated spraying the upper atmosphere with aerosols, a process that would “reduce by 20 per cent the amount of sunlight that takes a direct route to the ground” and make blue skies “fade to hazy white,” the New Scientist reported.

Given the fact that most advancements in science and technology are already taking place years before they are disclosed to the public, it stands to reason that geoengineering programs based around spraying the upper atmosphere with particles are already underway.

Scientists now admit that vapor trails from airplanes are creating “artificial clouds” that block out the sun. This is no longer a matter of debate. The chemtrail “conspiracy theorists,” who were ridiculed for pointing out that from the mid-90′s onwards contrails from jet planes were lingering for hours and forming artificial clouds, have been proven correct.

 Reading University’s Professor Keith Shine told the Daily Mail that the clouds “formed by aircraft fumes could linger ‘for hours’, depriving those areas under busy flight paths, such as London and the Home Counties, of summer sunshine.”

The report also makes reference to a 2009 Met Office study which found that high-level winds did not disperse contrails that later formed into clouds which covered an astonishing 20,000 miles.

 As we have documented, geoengineering programs based around the premise of artificial aerosols were already in operation years ago, including at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, which in 2009 began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere.

Another program under the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program is directed towards, “developing comprehensive understanding of the atmospheric processes that control the transport, transformation, and fate of energy related trace chemicals and particulate matter.”

The DOE website states that, “The current focus of the program is aerosol radiative forcing of climate: aerosol formation and evolution and aerosol properties that affect direct and indirect influences on climate and climate change.”

These programs are already having the effect of blocking out sunlight. The emergence of the chemtrails phenomenon coincided with an average 22% drop in sunlight reaching the earth’s surface.

 In 2008, a KSLA news investigation found that a substance that fell to earth from a high altitude chemtrail contained high levels of Barium (6.8 ppm) and Lead (8.2 ppm) as well as trace amounts of other chemicals including arsenic, chromium, cadmium, selenium and silver. Of these, all but one are metals, some are toxic while several are rarely or never found in nature.

The newscast focuses on Barium, which its research shows is a “hallmark of chemtrails.” KSLA found Barium levels in its samples at 6.8 ppm or “more than six times the toxic level set by the EPA.” The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality confirmed that the high levels of Barium were “very unusual,” but commented that “proving the source was a whole other matter” in its discussion with KSLA.

KSLA also asked Mark Ryan, Director of the Poison Control Center, about the effects of Barium on the human body. Ryan commented that “short term exposure can lead to anything from stomach to chest pains and that long term exposure causes blood pressure problems.” The Poison Control Center further reported that long-term exposure, as with any harmful substance, would contribute to weakening the immune system.

Spraying sulphur into the upper atmosphere is linked with both environmental catastrophes and human health problems.

 The following health effects are linked with exposure to sulphur.

– Neurological effects and behavioral changes
– Disturbance of blood circulation
– Heart damage
– Effects on eyes and eyesight
– Reproductive failure
– Damage to immune systems
– Stomach and gastrointestinal disorder
– Damage to liver and kidney functions
– Hearing defects
– Disturbance of the hormonal metabolism
– Dermatological effects
– Suffocation and lung embolism

 Even pro-geoengineering scientist Mark Watson, admits that injecting sulphur into the atmosphere could lead to “acid rain, ozone depletion or weather pattern disruption.”

 Rutgers University meteorologist Alan Robock also, “created computer simulations indicating that sulfate clouds could potentially weaken the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing rain that irrigates the food crops of billions of people.”

“Imagine if we triggered a drought and famine while trying to cool the planet,” Robock told a geoengineering conference in 2010.

The Canada-based Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC) has called for such experiments to be shut down. “This experiment is only phase one of a much bigger plan that could have devastating consequences, including large changes in weather patterns such as deadly droughts,” the group said in a written statement.

 Fred Singer, president of the Science Environmental Policy Project and a skeptic of man-made global warming theories, warns that the consequences of tinkering with the planet’s delicate eco-system could have far-reaching dangers.

“If you do this on a continuous basis, you would depress the ozone layer and cause all kinds of other problems that people would rather avoid,” said Singer.

 Even Greenpeace’s chief UK scientist — a staunch advocate of the man-made global warming explanation — Doug Parr — has slammed attempts to geoengineer the planet as “outlandish” and “dangerous”.

Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Today is Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday, but forget the crocodile tears from the U.S. government about Mandela’s poor health. Imperialist diplomacy with all of its sugar-coated phrases is nothing more than a form of historical perjury.

Nelson Mandela’s arrest in 1962, which led to 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment on Robbins Island, was based on the work of the CIA. The CIA and National Security Agency worked as partners with the racist, apartheid regime’s vicious military and intelligence services.

Mandela was a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) that organized civil resistance and an armed struggle against South Africa’s white racist apartheid regime. The United States and the other western capitalist governments supported the racist, fascist apartheid regime.

Mandela was labeled a terrorist by the United States. So was the entire ANC. Even as late as 2008 the U.S. State Department had to pass special waivers so that Mandela or any ANC leader could visit the United States because he and the ANC were still on the “terrorist watch list.”

The ANC’s struggle for Black majority rule and the liquidation of apartheid received critical support from Cuba, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The ANC had an active alliance with South African Communist Party in the struggle for Black majority rule.

Even after the fall of the apartheid government ANC members applying for visas to the USA were flagged for questioning and forced to ask for waivers to enter the country. Former ANC chairman Tokyo Sexwale was denied a visa in 2002

In 2007, Barbara Masekela, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States until the year prior was denied a visa to visit a dying cousin living in the United States.

U.S. Imperialism was the enemy of African Liberation

The CIA and NSA spy services–with the full collaboration of such transnational corporations at IBM, Kodak and many others–worked at all levels and for decades for apartheid and against the African National Congress activists who were routinely murdered, tortured and sentenced to life terms in the hell holes of South Africa.

The ANC was labeled and treated as a terrorist organization and pro-communist by the CIA and successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. Congress, too, was an enthusiastic cheerleader for this vile partnership with the planet’s most disgustingly racist regime.

The House of Representatives only voted to call for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1986 when it was clear that the fascist apartheid regime’s days were numbered, leading the United States and Britain to abruptly shift course and broker a negotiated end to the white supremacist system. A mass worldwide anti-apartheid movement had completely isolated South Africa. Dick Cheney voted against the House resolution in 1986, pointing out that the U.S. government was still retaining the ANC on the official U.S. “terrorist list.”

The U.S. and Britain knew the end had finally come for the usefulness of the apartheid government when its seemingly invincible military was decisively defeated by the Angolan army and thousands of Cuban volunteers in the historic battle of Cuito Canavale.

As Mandela said, “When Africa called, Cuba answered.”

Shameless duplicity

In an act of shameless duplicity, once Mandela was released from prison, each successive U.S. administration  has pretended that the United States was always opposed to Mandela’s imprisonment and stood with him against apartheid.

After getting out of prison, Mandela came to the United States to meet President George H.W. Bush on June 25, 1990. He was being touted as a hero and a champion in the fight against racism. The U.S. government, working through propagandists in the corporate-owned media, tried to instill a society-wide case of amnesia about the fact that they were the defenders of apartheid and directly responsible for Mandela’s imprisonment.

But one reporter had the gall to ask an unscripted question.

Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, was asked in the days before the June 25 meeting with Bush whether the president would apologize to Mandela for the U.S. role in his arrest.

Fitzwater was angry and caught off guard. He said, “I just don’t like it when people question our motives on blacks or on Mandela because of an incident that happened 20 years ago in another administration.”

Today, on Mandela’s 95th birthday and when the U.S. government celebrates Mandela, will any of the corporate media expose the bloody role of the CIA, NSA and other U.S. intelligence services in their war against the African liberation movements?

Nelson Mandela is a beacon for the oppressed. He is a hero and he will be remembered as such. Not true for the CIA and NSA which worked as the spy service for the racist, apartheid regime as it hunted down and captured Mandela and captured or killed his comrades.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Christian retailer Hobby Lobby has won its second legal decision in a month in its ongoing battle against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contraception mandate, which requires employers to provide their employees with health insurance that includes free contraception – including drugs that can cause abortion.

On July 19 a federal judge in Oklahoma City granted the retailer and its sister business, the Mardel Christian book chain, a preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from enforcing the mandate against the businesses. The ruling follows on the heels of a landmark decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled June 27 that Hobby Lobby’s owners are free to follow their religious convictions under the First Amendment, and are likely to win their case against the mandate.

Hobby Lobby’s owners, led by company founder and CEO David Green, filed suit to stop the mandate in September 2011, arguing that forcing them to provide their thousands of employees with contraceptives like the RU-486 “abortion pill” would cause them to violate their convictions that life begins at conception. The company faced as much as $1.3 million in fines per day for their refusal to knuckle under to the mandate.

“By being required to make a choice between sacrificing our faith or paying millions of dollars in fines, we essentially must choose which poison pill to swallow,” Green said as the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the company in the case, announced the suit last year. “We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate.”

“The tide has turned against the HHS mandate,” declared Kyle Duncan, general counsel with the Becket Fund, following the July 19 ruling by federal judge Joe Heaton, who wrote in his decision that there is “a substantial public interest in ensuring that no individual or corporation has their legs cut out from under them while these difficult issues are resolved.”

Heaton had originally refused to grant the company an injunction, but the decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals prompted him to reconsider. The appeals court ruled that Hobby Lobby and Mardel had demonstrated the probability that their religious-freedom argument would prevail in the lawsuit.

Lori Windham, senior counsel for the Becket Fund, said in an interview that Heaton’s ruling demonstrates that “companies can be protected from the mandate and can continue to exercise their religious beliefs in the way they run their businesses.”

On its website Hobby Lobby explains that one of the main purposes of the business is to honor God “by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.” The company’s over 500 retail outlets are closed on Sundays, and its owners contribute generously to ministries and outreaches that seek “to share the Good News of Jesus Christ to all the world,” the Hobby Lobby website reads.

While churches and select faith-based religious non-profits have been exempted from the mandate, countless religious based non-profits and private companies owned by Christians would be required to follow the mandate, requiring a violation of deeply held beliefs in the sanctity of life.

Thus far, according to the Becket Fund, more than 60 federal lawsuits have been filed against the HHS mandate, and courts have granted injunctions to nearly two dozen for-profit corporations while refusing to issue injunctions or restraining orders for seven companies.

^{Photo: AP Images}

Republished with permission from: The New American

If you’ve been worn down by too much bad news into thinking that nothing good can ever happen in Washington, here’s proof that it ain’t so: “the biggest ever pro-Iran diplomacy letter from the Hill.”

JTA, the international news agency, reports:

Days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the incoming Iranian president’s plea for engagement with the United States and called for ratcheting up military pressure, a bipartisan letter circulating in the US House of Representatives is urging President Obama to test Hassan Rohani’s offer.

The letter, spearheaded by Reps. Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania) and David Price (D-North Carolina), had garnered 118 signatures by Thursday afternoon, more than a quarter of the House. The bulk of the signatories are Democrats, but 15 Republicans have signed on as well.

With 200 Democrats in the House, that means that the majority of House Democrats signed the letter.

And while 15 Republicans is a small group compared to the House Republican caucus, the signature of these 15 Republicans is a big deal. There’s a widespread perception in Washington that “always more war” is the official line of the Republican Party leadership, even though the record shows that on issue after issue – from Afghanistan to Syria – this doesn’t represent the views of rank-and-file Republicans at all. That perception raises the bar for Republicans to publicly speak out for diplomacy. So these 15  Republicans deserve special praise. They’re surely speaking for other Republicans who aren’t yet willing or able to publicly challenge the perceived “always-more-war” party line.  

President Obama expressed cautious optimism following Rouhani’s election, telling PBS that he wants “a more serious, substantive” engagement with Iran.

But to seriously test Rouhani’s offer of engagement, Obama needs a little room from Congress. He can’t seriously engage Iran if it’s widely perceived that the whole Congress is working to undermine him. We can be sure that some members of Congress will do everything in their power to try to disrupt and sabotage any possibility of diplomatic progress with Iran, as part of their long game to ensnare the United States in another Middle East war. To counteract that, we need other members of Congress – especially Republicans – to speak up and say:  “The ‘always-more-war’ people don’t speak for me. I want the president to test whether there is a chance for a diplomatic solution.” 

Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of former US officials wrote to President Obama, calling the election of Rouhani “a major potential opportunity to reinvigorate diplomatic efforts to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program” and strongly encouraging him to “seize the moment to pursue new multilateral and bilateral negotiations with Iran once Rouhani takes office and to avoid any provocative action that could narrow the window of opportunity for a more moderate policy” out of Iran.

Writing in The New York Review of Books, William Luers, Thomas Pickering and Jim Walsh call for “active diplomacy” with Iran, noting our repeated and recent national experience that attempts to change other governments through pure coercion have ended in miserable disaster.

There is an opening now for meaningful US diplomacy with Iran that hasn’t existed in many years. President Obama is in his second term. After August 3, Iran will have a new president with an electoral mandate for a more constructive relationship with the United States. Bipartisan fatigue with the endless war in Afghanistan and bipartisan suspicion of military involvement in Syria’s sectarian civil war suggest that magical thinking in Washington about the boundless capacity of military force is at low ebb. There is no guarantee that a sustained US diplomatic effort now will succeed. But we owe it to our troops and to our fellow citizens not to let the “always-more-war” faction sabotage a major diplomatic opportunity before it is tested.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

Pelican Bay State Prison. (Photo: California Department of Corrections / Wikimedia)Revolution Interview:
A special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports, and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own; and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper.

Carol Strickman is a staff attorney at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, a San Francisco-based organization which advocates for the human rights and empowerment of incarcerated parents, children, family members, and people at risk of incarceration. She is a member of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, a member of the team mediating between the prison hunger strikers and prison authorities (the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation–CDCR), and part of the litigation team in Ashker v. Brown, a case filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights challenging solitary confinement in California prisons, now being argued in federal court.

This interview was conducted June 27, 2013.

Larry Everest: The June 20 communiqué from the principal prisoner representatives from the Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) SHU Short Corridor Collective Human Rights Movement stated they’d just held a mediation session with prison officials, that their demands hadn’t been met, and so they felt compelled to resume their “hunger strike/work stoppage of indefinite duration until CDCR signs a legally binding agreement meeting our demands, the heart of which mandates an end to long-term solitary confinement (as well as additional major reforms).”

I want to begin with some background on the basic issue–long-term solitary confinement. Your organization has been providing services for prisoners and their families for many years, and you’ve personally visited Pelican Bay State Prison and the SHU (Security Housing Unit) Unit eight times in the last two years. I just saw a film clip of an inmate in the Pelican Bay SHU who talked about not having seen the moon or stars since 1998. Can you help readers understand what the conditions in the SHU are like, and what prompted the two prisoner hunger strikes in 2011 and now another one scheduled to start July 8?

Carol Strickman: There’s a horrible, near total, lack of human contact. The Pelican Bay is divided into “pods” of eight cells with a total of eight prisoners each–four up and four down. There are a total of 1,056 SHU cells divided into 132 pods. Prisoners are confined to these 8′ x 10′ cells for 22 and a half to 24 hours a day–without natural light, without being able to look outside the prison walls. They are allowed showers and solitary exercise in what prisoners call the “dog run.” Someone in a control booth, which controls six pods, just pushes a button and their cell door opens. Then they are monitored on closed-circuit TV, and are told when time’s up and they have to return to their cell.

There’s no meaningful human interaction. Prisoners may have brief conversations–shouting to each other as they walk down the tier to get to the shower or exercise area, sometimes to people in other pods. They also communicate by shouting to each other through the slots in their cell doors, perhaps they catch a glimpse of other prisoners from time to time. So there’s a very limited ability to have conversation.

The guards bring food twice a day; there’s a food slot in the door and a tray gets shoved through (the same slot prisoners put their hands through to get handcuffed if they’re leaving the pod). You could have a word with the guard who comes to the cell then, or when mail gets delivered through the slot at night. And then once every couple of weeks some psychologists come through asking if everyone is OK. So there is some very minimal contact with staff in that way, mostly verbal contact–but again, there’s a terrible lack of any normal human contact.

Another thing I’ve learned is that none of the SHU prisoners get a good night’s sleep. These are big cavernous areas, without carpets on the concrete floors and with very big, heavy doors. Guards come in and out, open and close doors, clomp up metal stairs, rattle keys, and shout to each other. So it’s very noisy during the night. In our lawsuit we cite chronic sleep deprivation as being part of the cruel and unusual punishment that prisoners are subjected to, due to the whole structure of the SHU pods.

And, as you say, there is virtually no ability to experience anything in nature; there are virtually no educational, vocational or self-help programs; and family visits (which are rare because of the distance that families must travel) are conducted behind glass. Family visits are recorded; social mail is read.

All this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment amounting to torture.

Everest: How many prisoners in the state of California are locked up in these Security Housing Units or other forms of solitary confinement?

Strickman: Legal Services for Prisoners with Children recently did an assessment based on CDCR statistics. As of the end of March 2013, there were 3,941 prisoners in SHUs (3,820 men and 121 women), and another 6,251 in Administrative Segregation, or Ad Seg. (Ad Seg–often called “the Hole”–can be long- or short-term isolation in which prisoners are deprived of regular human contact, phone calls, and contact visits, and subject to other restrictions.) So that makes a total 10,192 prisoners in solitary confinement in California alone. I understand that there are another 70,000 or so in solitary confinement in prisons across the U.S.

Everest: The 2011 California prisoners’ hunger strikes–one from July 1 until July 22, the other from September 26 until October 13–were very powerful. You were telling me that during the first hunger strike 6,600 prisoners took part, and in the second 11,900. I think we both feel this was an unprecedented and extremely significant struggle. At the time, the prisoners put forward five core demands–eliminate group punishments; abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria; comply with the recommendation of the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement; provide adequate and nutritious food; and expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates.

They ended their second hunger strike when the CDCR promised meaningful reform. However, the prisoners’ June 20 statement sums up, “For the past [2] years we’ve patiently kept an open dialogue with state officials, attempting to hold them to their promise to implement meaningful reforms, responsive to our demands. For the past seven months we have repeatedly pointed out CDCR’s failure to honor their word–and we have explained in detail the ways in which they’ve acted in bad faith and what they need to do to avoid the resumption of our protest action.”

Could you explain what the CDCR has done–and not done–to address the prisoners’ demands?

Strickman: What people need to know, first off, is that long-term solitary confinement at Pelican Bay is horrible because the conditions are so extreme. So the prisoners’ demands are significant–they are not just asking for little things, or just small changes.

The prison authorities agreed to some of the prisoners’ smaller demands, and they’ve implemented some. They’ve provided prisoners hats for warmth, balls to bounce in the exercise area, and photos taken of themselves–things which were banned before the hunger strike, and allowed proctored exams for those who can pay for college courses. And when you’re in the SHU, even a little thing is big.

But in terms of the major issues–like changing rules for how someone gets into the SHU and the evidence used to put people there, or long-term solitary–there’s been little done. They promised to revise their gang validation regulations–that’s the main way people get sent to the SHU, being “validated” as a gang member–and they’ve done some things on that.

The prison system did say they were going to go around and evaluate those in the SHUs to see if they should remain, given that there’s new criteria: under the new regulations, being a member of a designated group is cause for being sent to the SHU, but being an “associate” is not. And the CDCR needs a little more evidence to send someone to the SHU than they do now. They used to need three pieces of “evidence.” But now they have a somewhat different formula under which various pieces of weighted evidence have to add up to 10 points. So they’ve set the bar a little higher, and they’re going through and looking at associates and evaluating whether they should be in the SHUs. At Pelican Bay, for example, around 75 percent of those in the SHU are “associates” not “members.” And the CDCR has reportedly determined that more than half of all SHU prisoners should be released to general population–and some have been.

The prison authorities are touting these statistics as showing their new program is really different. But what it shows is how bad the old system was. None of these changes would have happened without the 2011 hunger strike, and the prisoners’ demands and support they got. So some people who have been in for decades are now getting out–but they never should have been in the SHU to begin with!

I’m not confident the new system will end up much different than the old one. The CDCR claims it’s now behavior-based, not based on associations, but when “behavior” is simply having artwork in your cell that supposedly proves you’re in a gang and then being locked up in isolation for it–well, we shouldn’t have that kind of system. And they’re still doing that–locking people up due to artwork. They may have moved a little bit because of the last hunger strike, but there’s still a long way to go.

And in some ways, the new gang validation policy is worse, or potentially worse, than the old one. The previous validation policy targeted members or associates of seven prison gangs. Now the authorities say they won’t limit themselves to those seven, but may also identify other “security threat groups”–which could have as few as three people. So a few prisoners–perhaps friends from the same neighborhood–could be identified as a “security threat group,” labeled a street gang, and then sent into solitary confinement. As far as I know, the CDCR hasn’t gone through the process yet to establish one or more new “STGs,” but creating a means for doing so expands the net of those who could go into those horrible isolation units.

Everest: Are all the prisoners in the SHU through gang validation?

Strickman: Most are, but not all. Selling dope can send you to SHU–not on gang validation, but serving a “straight SHU sentence,” for a fixed, not indefinite, period. The longest straight SHU sentence is five years for killing a guard, or three years for killing another prisoner.

Everest: Wait–You’re telling me that if a prisoner kills a guard, they get five years in the SHU, but if they’re “validated” as being a gang member–without committing any violent action against a guard or another prisoner–they can be sent to the SHU for decades?

Strickman: Exactly! Prisoners are in the Pelican Bay SHU for 20 to 30 years for nothing more than having drawn art which supposedly shows they’re gang members or associates.

Everest: This hits me as such a striking example–that these SHUs are not about “crime prevention”; they’re really a counter-insurgency program, aimed at different social groups or organizations–a counter-insurgency before the insurgency, so to speak. This is something Revolution has written about, as have groups like the Stop Mass Incarceration Network and Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow.

Strickman: It’s like the criminal justice system: They don’t care if you’re innocent or guilty. There’s something about having this system–it’s just a voracious system, and having the control as you say that is abusive and has nothing to do with truth or honesty. The whole thing is very distressing, the whole thing. It’s so cruel, the living situation is so mean-spirited. Some prisoners say, I know you’re going to keep me here, but you have to give me some way to live a meaningful life.

The CDCR wants people to think they’ve made significant changes, but the prisoners feel they haven’t. It’s not all that different than before. The authorities did not make the big improvements the prisoners were led to believe they would get. And the terrible conditions of confinement have hardly changed at all. Many are still facing decades of long-term solitary confinement. So that’s the reason for the renewed hunger strike.

Everest: I recall after the last hunger strike the CDCR did punish, really retaliated against, the hunger strikers. And recently I’ve seen some of your emails concerning very troubling ways the authorities may be preparing to retaliate against the hunger strikers this time around. Could you talk about that?

Strickman: Well, first, everyone involved in the second hunger strike in 2011 had write-ups and penalties assessed–for example, losing good time conduct or conduct credit accrued before they went into the SHU. Many had their TVs taken away for 90 days.

But what’s troubling now is news that the prisons may start doing checks of the cells every 30 minutes (rather than every four hours as is the current practice). It is not yet clear whether this will actually be implemented, or what exactly it means, but there is talk that they’ll implement this in connection with rolling lockdowns, which would be another escalation in the deprivation inflicted on prisoners. A lot of different reasons have been offered for this–it’s very hard to figure out exactly what the CDCR is actually doing or planning, but it could mean that on some days staff would be shifted so prisoners wouldn’t get showers or exercise that day at all. They’d get it the next day, but there would be less time for everyone.

It’s troubling. We have a hunger strike looming for July 8, and CDCR issues a memo out of the blue for these 30 minute security checks. There’s real potential for abuse–bothering people every 30 minutes, doing a head count in middle of night and waking people up. Are they just flexing their muscles and trying to show the prisoners how much they can make their lives miserable right before the hunger strike?

Everest: What about CDCR OP 228, the so-called “Hunger Strike Policy”? This seems to say the CDCR is going to isolate hunger strikers and cut them off from communication, including family visits or visits from attorneys unless active cases are going on.

Strickman: During the July 2011 hunger strike, they allowed family visits, but in September 2011, they did not. In both cases they allowed legal visits, but this time they say they won’t unless the prisoner has a pending case.That’s worse. I don’t see how they can do that, how it’s legally justifiable. It’s aimed against the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition lawyers. It’s disturbing because we need to know on the outside what’s going on inside. That’s difficult if we don’t have a way to get inside and talk to prisoners. They held up my mail in the second strike; I got nothing for a while and then 20 pieces came. I believe they intentionally held up my mail so I didn’t know what was going on. We do have a pending class action case, so even under their new rules we should be able to see most Pelican Bay prisoners.

Everest: The June 20 statement from the prisoner representatives from the PBSP SHU Short Corridor Collective said they’d just come out of a mediation session at which the State of California refused to meet their demands. Could you fill us in–are there further negotiations planned? And could you talk about the lawsuit that prompted this mediation session?

Strickman: I was actually up at Pelican Bay doing interviews with prisoners for the lawsuit on the day the mediation took place, although I was not directly involved. It was a full-day session and I think there was a serious effort to settle things, with written offers from both sides submitted to the magistrate in the case. The magistrate has since scheduled another mediation session for July 26, two and a half weeks after the hunger strike resumes on July 8.

Ashker v. Brown is a lawsuit filed in federal court challenging solitary confinement in California prisons. It was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and joined by Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, California Prison Focus, Siegel & Yee, and the Law Offices of Charles Carbone. Earlier this year the Ninth Circuit trial judge ruled against the State’s motion to dismiss the case, allowing it to go forward. This was an important ruling. We’ve filed a motion for class certification so that the case would cover not only the 10 named plaintiffs in the original filing, but everyone in the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU) either through gang validation or those in the SHU for 10 years or more. Now we’re in the process of fighting for class certification, which would broaden the case and have important potential implications in the struggle against solitary confinement.

(For background, see “Lawsuit Challenges Solitary Confinement at California Prison.”)

Everest: Given everything you’ve told me, what’s amazing and inspiring is that all this abuse and inhumane treatment has not succeeded in breaking the will, humanity, or spirit of the prisoners, or their determination to fight for justice. And the “Agreement to End Hostilities,” issued by the Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective and the Representatives Body on August 12, 2012 also demonstrated how they’re working to break out of the situation the system has put them in and putting their lives on the line to improve the situation for all prisoners. So could you tell us your sense of how this coming hunger strike may be shaping up?

Strickman: Pelican Bay prisoners issued a statement in December 2012 or January of this year making 40 additional demands and inviting prisoners in other prisons to write their own demands. So far, six other prisons have issued written demands to the governor or the wardens. These are High Desert, Wasco, Salinas Valley, San Quentin Death Row, New Folsom, and Corcoran. I think these demands all build on the five core demands from the 2011 strike, but these are other issues, in some cases very practical, small-scale issues, which are part and parcel of making prisons more livable and more useful to people.

This shows more organizing in advance than we were aware of last time. It suggests the hunger strike could be bigger this time. And this time people have known about the July 8 date for months. But it’s hard to know how big it may end up being, relative to the previous hunger strike.

Everest: Thanks much for your time. I really learned a lot from this and I’m sure our readers will as well.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

(Photo: Walmart / Flickr)Washington, DC – Proponents of a proposed higher “living wage” requirement for workers at large retailers here in Washington are stepping up their campaign, urging the city’s mayor to sign pending legislation into law.

Dozens of other U.S. cities have enacted similar laws, which increase minimum wages at those businesses covered by the legislation by around 50 percent. Yet the legal battle here has garnered national attention because it appears to be aimed at one company in particular — Walmart.

“We want him [Mayor Gray] to remember that he was elected by the citizens and not by Walmart.” — Reverend Graylan Hagler of Faith Strategies

“We will give the mayor our support if he has the backbone to sign the bill,” Reverend Graylan Hagler, president of Faith Strategies, a religious group here that has led demonstrations in support of the living wage bill this week, told IPS.

“To cave in to the threat of this corporation is to send a mixed message to the public that somehow corporations can come in and damage our sense of self-respect.”

Walmart, which has been criticised for years for paying its employees and suppliers notably low rates, had previously announced plans to build six stores in the Washington area, its first stores in the city. But it also warned that it would halt those plans on at least three stores (three others are under construction) if the living wage legislation were passed.

“This is a difficult decision for us — and unfortunate now for most D.C. residents — but the council has forced our hand,” Walmart spokesperson Steve Restivo said in a statement.

Last week, the Washington city council passed the so-called Large Retailer Accountability Act, and sent it on to Mayor Vincent Gray. The bill requires all indoor stores of 75,000 square feet or larger, and with a parent company that has a gross revenue of at least one billion dollars, to pay their employees a minimum of 12.50 dollars an hour, minus benefits.

After the vote, Walmart made its threat to pull out of the area. 

“With the passage of the Large Retailer Accountability Act, any future plans for retail expansion in the city must be revisited,” stated a letter from the company.

“Arbitrary conditions that subject our stores to rules that other employers, including countless competitors, are not equally subjected to unfairly distort the marketplace and are cause of grave concern.”

Since the vote, several other large retail stores that may be affected by the law — including Autozone, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Macy’s, Target and Walgreens — joined Walmart in opposition to the act.

In 2012, Walmart was sued by three female workers in Tennessee on behalf of female employees in four other southern states, claiming that the company pays women less than men and blocks promotions for female workers. The case was eventually thrown out by the Supreme Court.

Citizen values

The wage fight in Washington is part of a longstanding, and still building, push-and-pull in the United States.

The city of Chicago approved a similar bill seven years ago, and the city alderman who sponsored the bill, Joe Moore, said Walmart made the same kinds of threats — refusing to open stores while the legislation was even being considered. Then-mayor Richard Daley ultimately vetoed the legislation and Walmart subsequently opened several stores in the city.

New York State, too, raised its minimum wage in March, but only after the state allowed tax subsidies to stores that hire seasonal employees, including Walmart.

Here in Washington, the fight now is to try to ascertain what the residents — and voters — of the city may want.

“We want him (Mayor Gray) to remember that he was elected by the citizens and not by Walmart,” Hagler told IPS. “I think the mayor is smart enough and analytical enough to come around and do the right thing.”

Yet according to a poll carried out by Walmart, some 73 percent of DC residents in areas supposedly getting a store said they were in favour of Walmart.

For his part, Mayor Gray has previously promised his home ward hundreds of new jobs, with a new Walmart store in that area offering an obvious anchor for this pledge. According to many analysts, including Hagler, the mayor is now hesitant to take those jobs away.

“I’ve got to look at the full impact of the (living wage) bill,” Gray told reporters recently. “Everybody has looked at it from the perspective of Walmart, but it’s bigger than Walmart.”

Corporate bullying

According to some analysts, the impacts of a living wage are less dramatic for either side of this equation than is currently being admitted.

A study done by the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkley, for instance, found that if Walmart raised its minimum wage to 12 dollars an hour, and wanted to retain its profit margin, retail prices would only rise by around 1.1 percent.

“The notion that this (living wage law) is going to undermine Walmart’s business is so dramatically absurd,” David Cooper, an economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, told IPS.

Walmart has a history of driving out small regional competitors and undercutting their prices, while paying their workers so little that they can barely survive without public assistance, according to Cooper.

“DC has been a thriving and growing location for business, and Walmart would do great business even if they have to pay their workers more,” he says. “It would be a shame for the mayor to cave to what amounts to corporate bullying.”

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

(Photo: Debra Sweet / Flickr)Washington, DC – Courts cannot second-guess drone strikes that kill U.S. citizens overseas, an Obama administration lawyer argued Friday.

A Republican-appointed judge sounded dubious about the expansive claim, saying she was “really troubled” by assertions that courts are completely shut out of the drone strike debate. But for other legal reasons, the judge also sounded hesitant about a lawsuit targeted at top military and intelligence officials for violating the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens blown up in foreign lands.

“There are instances where wrongs are done, but for one reason or another they cannot be remedied in a civil suit,” U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a family member, have sued former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other former officials over the two separate drone strikes that killed three U.S. citizens in Yemen. The Obama administration wants the lawsuit dismissed.

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the administration’s secretive war-fighting practices that have mobilized skeptics on both the right and the left.

On Sept. 30, 2011, missiles fired from a remotely piloted aircraft killed U.S. citizens Anwar al Awlaki and Samir Khan, along with at least two other people traveling with them in Yemen. Two weeks later, another drone strike at an open-air restaurant in Yemen killed seven people including Abdul Rahman Anwar Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of al Awlaki.

The same drone strikes against U.S. citizens that incited the ACLU lawsuit heard Friday also sparked a 13-hour filibuster in March from Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. A Gallup Poll in March found that while 62 percent of U.S. residents surveyed supported drone strikes against terrorists, 52 percent opposed strikes against U.S. citizens.

During the 80-minute oral argument Friday before a standing-room-only crowd, Collyer sounded highly dubious about the administration’s most far-reaching claim _ that judges should steer entirely clear of military and national security decision-making.

“The executive is not an effective check on the executive when it comes to constitutional rights,” Collyer told Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Hauck. “The argument you are making is tied to an assertion of authority (in which) the court has no role. I find that a little disconcerting.”

Neither Hauck’s declaration that the decision to strike at a target overseas is “outside the court’s competence” and “unfit for adjudication,” nor his insistence that an “extensive executive review” and “robust congressional oversight” ensure rights are protected, seemed to reassure Collyer.

But while Hauck struggled in his efforts to establish a judicial no-fly zone over the administration’s drone policy, ACLU attorneys faced their own challenges.

In part, Collyer questioned whether one or two of the slain U.S. citizens were simply “unintended” collateral damage from strikes aimed at someone else. In that case, she said, while the deaths “may be tragic,” they do not necessarily raise the same constitutional questions as those raised by the death of an intended target.

More broadly, Collyer suggested Friday it might be “a stretch” and “highly unusual” to let a lawsuit proceed that aims to find top U.S. military and national security officials personally liable for constitutional violations.

The lawsuit claims the lethal drone strikes violated the dead men’s Fifth Amendment due process rights, as well as Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. Although government officials typically enjoy sovereign immunity, lawsuits may proceed against individuals for violation of a “clearly established” constitutional right.

“There is no ‘Leon Panetta exception’ to the Constitution,” ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi said.

Hauck countered that “we don’t want these counterterrorism and national security officials distracted by the threat of litigation.”

Anwar al Awlaki was born in 1971 in New Mexico. He moved to Yemen with his parents in 1978, later returning to the United States to earn degrees from Colorado State University and San Diego State University.

Though never publicly indicted, he was said by U.S. officials to have played a key role in “setting the strategic direction” for al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Samir Khan was born overseas but became a U.S. citizen in 1998. He attended community college in North Carolina before returning to Yemen in 2009. He was never publicly indicted, though U.S. officials described him as a “propagandist” for al Qaida.

Abdul Rahman Anwar Awlaki was born in Denver and moved to Yemen in 2002. Subsequent media reports stated that the missile strike that killed him was aimed at another individual, who reportedly survived the attack.

The 67-year-old Collyer has generally not been sympathetic to other national security challenges. Appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush and currently a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Collyer earlier this week upheld the forced feeding of Guantanamo Bay detainees. Two years ago, she rejected an ACLU effort to obtain the CIA’s drone strike documents through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“I do not consider this a particularly easy set of questions,” Collyer said Friday.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

Jaisal Noor, TRNN Producer: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Jaisal Noor in Baltimore.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline Exposed, a new study that’s thus far received very little attention, has revealed that in states that use high-stakes exit exams, students who fail these tests were more than 12 percent more likely to face incarceration and had lower graduation rates than states without exit exams. Meanwhile, the study found no consistent effects of exit exams on employment or the distribution of wages.
Now joining us to discuss this study are two guests.
We’re joined by Kevin Lang. He’s professor of economics at Boston University. He has served on multiple National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences panels on education issues, including his most recent study, the effect of high school exit exams on graduation, employment, wages, and incarceration.

And we’re also joined by Jesse Hagopian. He teaches history and is the Black Student Union adviser at Garfield High School, the site of the historic boycott of the MAP test earlier this year. Jesse is an associate editor of the acclaimed Rethinking Schools magazine and founding member of Social Equality Educators, and blogs at I’mAnEducator.com.
Thank you so much for joining us.

Prof. Kevin Lang, Boston University: Pleasure to be here.
Jesse hagopian, teacher, garfield high school: Thanks a lot for having us.

Noor: So let’s start with you, Kevin. Talk about why you did this study and the most important findings of this study.

Lang: Well, I did this study because for two reasons. One is for 13 years I was an elected member of my local school board, and there were a lot of debates about whether our high-stakes tests were good or bad and who they were good for, and there wasn’t a lot of good work that has been done on that. And I also get very interested because I served on some of the National Academy of Sciences panels which were trying to assess the effect.
Now, the big results were: for most areas there really wasn’t much of an effect. It was neither wonderful nor terrible. We didn’t find big improvements in wages or people losing their earnings. We didn’t find a large increase in the dropout rate. We found a small increase in the dropout rate partially offset by people getting the GED. But the one really disturbing result was the one that you’ve emphasized, which is that we saw a noticeable increase in the incarceration rate.

Noor: So, Kevin, particularly since No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002, we’ve seen a dramatic increase of high-stakes tests. And this has greatly expanded under the Obama administration. Talk more about why this finding should concern citizens of this country, especially people involved in public education.

Lang: Well, a lot of people have thought that high-stakes testing was really going to be the way that the United States could catch up and surpass Finland and Singapore. I think the overwhelming evidence from all of the studies we’ve looked at is that the effects are not dramatic. And what we’re finding is we’re not finding any positive effects in our study, and we’re finding one noticeably adverse effect. And I certainly think all of us should be concerned if indeed these sorts of tests increase the incarceration rate. That’s certainly not good for the society and it’s not good for the individuals who are affected.

Noor: I want to bring Jesse Hagopian into this discussion.
Jesse, earlier this year you helped lead this historic boycott of your state’s standardized highs-stakes tests. What’s your reaction to this study?

Hagopian: Well, I want to thank Kevin for doing the hard work and looking in the right places and doing this study, because I think it’s of immense help to educators across the nation. And it really shows what we’ve known for a long time. You know, I got started teaching in the 2001, 2002 school year just as No Child Left Behind was coming online, and I began teaching in Washington, D.C., in the shadow of the White House, only when you cross the Anacostia River, you’re in a hole ‘nother world. And I taught at an elementary school where we saw the lack of resources and the high-stakes testing just creating a social catastrophe.
The first assignment I ever assigned student to those students in sixth grade was a show-and-tell assignment. And they went home and brought something back from their home that really showed who they were. And every single one of those students reached into their brown paper bag and pulled out a picture of a father or an uncle who was in prison.
And this school-to-prison pipeline is a catastrophe in communities across the nation, and it’s being fueled by this high-stakes testing regime. It’s what educators have known for some time. And now we have concrete, irrefutable proof of that. And we, I think, will use that to build the best school system we can for our students.

Noor: And, Jesse, within the last few years, there’s been a growing movement to oppose high-stakes testing. And you’ve become a leader and in some ways a spokesperson of this movement. You helped lead this one-of-a-kind boycott at Garfield High. What impact could this study have on the anti high-stakes testing movement around the country?

Hagopian: Yeah, I believe very strongly in parents, students, and teachers taking action to refuse these tests wherever possible. You know, the MAP tests that we were asked to give in the Seattle public schools was not a graduation requirement for our students, but it was part of this testing regime culture, and it was a high-stakes test for teachers that drove our evaluations. And it was a test that isn’t aligned to our curriculum and continues to drive this culture of test prep in the classroom.

And the culture of trust rep in the classroom kills the love of learning. And when that happens, the whole thing falls apart because students check out. They’re more likely to be disruptive in the classroom. And then when you have zero-tolerance policies that have been copied and pasted from drug enforcement manuals into school manuals, what we’re seeing is students get pushed out of school with higher suspension rates, especially of students of color, especially African-American students. And then we see them more likely to drop out. And what that’s doing is basically just building a school-to-prison pipeline. And so part of my rationale for refusing to administer the MAP tests, for helping to organize the teachers at Garfield High School to refuse the map test, was to say, enough with the school to prison pipeline.

Noor: Kevin, what kind of feedback and what kind of reactions have you gotten to this study? Because this does put this whole testing agenda, this whole testing regime, instituted in many states across the country, it kind of challenges the whole premise that these high-stakes tests will improve outcomes. And, in fact, as we discussed, it actually increases the worst outcome. It’s actually putting more students in prison. And just doing a simple Google search, I’ve noticed that this study has not been picked up by any major news outlets. It’s been blogged on a few websites. But can you talk more about the reaction it’s received?

Lang: Well, I mean, there are two places where it gets reaction. It gets reaction in the academic area, and of course people tend to be nice, so I don’t want to exaggerate, but people have been pleased that we were careful. We try not to exaggerate the results. There is–this is one study. There are other studies that can be done and other people can see if they find the same thing that we do.
That said, I have received various emails from people who are very interested in this result, because obviously it’s important if we find no positive effects and an adverse effect in a very important area where people obviously are being severely hurt if they are part of the group of people who end up in prison as a result of the high-stakes testing. Obviously that has elicited some interest at least in those quarters where people are already inclined to have their doubts about high-stakes testing.

Noor: Now, since the economic downturn a few years ago, around the country in almost every state we’ve seen school budgets being cut. The one place that’s not being cut is high-stakes tests.
Hagopian: We have five state-mandated tests that the kids have to pass at Garfield High School on top of the MAP test, which, thankfully, because all the teachers, parents, and students at Garfield, we voted unanimously to refuse the test at Garfield High School. And, thankfully, the superintendent, after threatening us with ten-day suspension without pay and other unknown consequences, he finally backed down and made the MAP test optional for next year. And so we scored a huge victory against that test prep culture. But we still have those five state-mandated standardized tests that are going to disproportionately affect low-income and students of color, drive down their graduation rates. And then we know the facilities and the jail cells that are being built right now to house them.
And in Seattle public schools, we were just audited by the Department of Justice, and they found that the suspension rates for black kids are twice that of white kids for the same infractions.

And so we see the machinery of the school-to-prison pipeline. It’s not a loose metaphor. It is a very consciously constructed project that needs to be deconstructed by people refusing these tests and by getting the study out that Kevin has done and making sure people understand the real consequences of a high-stakes testing regime. We can’t have cruelty as part of education policy.

Noor: And, Kevin, let’s end with you. I wanted to give you a chance to respond to my statement about how you’ve seen school budgets being cut around the country. The one thing that’s not being cut is high-stakes testing, and as well as could you also talk about what you hope comes out of this study and how you hope people use it around the country.

Lang: Well, I think–I hope that it creates additional skepticism about high school exit exams as a effective way of reforming schools. I don’t want to come across as somebody who is absolutely opposed to testing. I have a more moderate opinion on that. But what we are not finding–this is consistent with what everyone else has found–we’re not finding large positive effects. We are finding some noticeably negative effects.
You can’t put as much of the education reform eggs into the basket, into the high-stakes testing basket as seems to be the case in the federal initiative. That’s what worries me. If we’re going to reform education, we’re going to have to think much more broadly and not think that just by doing a bunch of testing, things are going to change, ’cause they’re not going to change significantly for the better, and possibly for the worse.
Noor: That’s right. And, as you noted, we’re using these tests to catch up with these other countries, for example, in Europe and elsewhere. But those countries, they don’t use these tests. We’re the only country that’s so obsessed with these high-stakes standardized tests.
But I want to thank you both, Kevin Lang and Jesse Hagopian, for joining us. Thank you so much.

Lang: Thank you.

Hagopian: Thank you so much.

Noor: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

Thom Hartmann here — on the news…

You need to know this. Detroit is broke. On Thursday, the Motor City became the largest in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy. After decades of factory closings, and a massive decline in population, even Governor Rick Snyder’s little dictator — Kevyn Orr — couldn’t save the city from financial ruin. Now that Mr. Orr has moved Detroit into bankruptcy court, creditors will be forced to accept pennies on the dollar for the city’s debt. Of course, Governor Snyder and Mr. Orr are calling for huge cuts to Detroit’s union and pension contracts, which they’ve been after for some time. Even before the bankruptcy, Mr. Orr tried to convince these groups to accept 10 cents on the dollar, and blamed public unions for the city’s financial strain. Because the pension groups refused the so-called offer, Mr. Orr and Governor Snyder are blaming the bankruptcy on public workers. In a press release yesterday, Governor Snyder wrote, “Despite Mr. Orr’s best efforts, he has been unable to reach a restructuring plan with the city’s creditors. I therefore agree that the only feasible path to a stable and solid Detroit is to file for bankruptcy protection.” In a press conference today, Mr. Orr indicated that secured creditors will be favored over unsecured — translation — Detroit workers are screwed. Governor Snyder has offered no alternatives other to throwing workers under the bus, like investing in the city by creating jobs and repairing infrastructure, which could be done using state funds. Instead, Snyder and Orr will use three decades of Reaganomics, outsourcing, and wage decline to destroy public unions and sell the city off in parts. And, it won’t be long before Republican lawmakers in other states catch on, and use forced austerity measures to do the same in their states.

In screwed news… Only weeks ago, thousands gathered at the Texas State Capitol to protest a radical anti-abortion bill. Well, Republican lawmakers in the Lone Star State must like all the attention, because they’re considering an even more extreme version of that law. The previous bill banned abortion after 20 weeks, and will shut down the majority of abortion clinics in that state. Although the measure was just signed into law Thursday morning, a few hard-right state legislators think it doesn’t go far enough. So, State Representatives Phil King, Dan Flynn, and Geanie Morrison filed their own version of the law, which would ban abortion after just six weeks. The so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill would criminalize abortions after the first half of the first trimester, before many women even know that they are pregnant. It’s not clear if state lawmakers will attempt to pass this extreme anti-choice legislation, but it’s likely that the protests in Texas aren’t coming to an end any time soon.

In the best of the rest of the news…

After spending 2.3 million taxpayer dollars in legal fees, Republicans in the House of Representatives are finally giving up on the Defense of Marriage Act. In 2011, when the Justice Department announced they would no longer defend the discriminatory law in court, Republican lawmakers jumped into the fight to keep same-sex couples from getting married. But, since the Supreme Court recently ruled that Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional, House Republicans won’t continue spending our tax dollars to defend it. The attorney representing the group of lawmakers withdrew from a case in which US service members were suing for military benefits for same-sex partners. As the Defense Department has already announced that those benefits will be provided, there wasn’t much of a fight left for the Republican lawmakers. The fight for equality is still ongoing in the states, but at least our federal tax dollars are no longer being used to defend discrimination.

It’s not just low-wage fast food workers that are standing up for their right to a living wage. On Thursday, under-paid federal workers walked off the job at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. They went on strike for the third time in eight weeks to protest poverty wages. Workers are taking part in a campaign called “Good Jobs Nation,” to put pressure on the federal government for allowing private-sector partners to pay employees less than they need to survive. According to the National Employment Law Project — known as “NELP”, about 75 percent of these workers make less than $10 dollars an hour, and nearly half rely on public assistance programs to get by. The NELP reports that the federal government has more low-wage workers than Wal-Mart and McDonalds combined. Democratic Representatives Keith Ellison and Eleanor Holmes Norton joined striking workers, and they are urging President Obama to put an end to these poverty wages. One of the striking workers, said, “We’re all just trying to reach the American Dream.” As more workers around our nation stand together and speak out, hopefully that dream will soon be possible.

And finally… Uber is the latest thing for on-demand car services. And in response to the current heat wave, they’re now also the latest thing for on-demand ice cream. Today only, Uber users in 35 cities, can not only place an order for a car, but they can use Uber apps to request that an ice cream truck come to their location. The only requirement is that users purchase a minimum number of ice cream treats, and make their requests between 11AM and 5PM. The company tried out the special event last year, and they were overwhelmed by the response. So this year, they expanded the offer to more cities, to help more of their users beat the heat. Despite the amazing response, the promotion will only run one day, as a company spokeman said, “We are not going to be an ice cream delivery company.” On-demand ice cream may sound like child’s fantasy, but for today, it’s a real life possibility for people suffering in extreme heat. Parents, keep a close eye on all your smartphones.

And that’s the way it is today — Friday, July 19, 2013. I’m Thom Hartmann — on the news.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

After serving time, finding food, a job and a place to live with a criminal record can become an almost impossible task. On this edition, Women building their own support network after being released from prison. We’ll hear “A New Way of Life and the New Underground Railroad” a documentary by Chris Moore-Backman.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

In 2010, in the small and temperate town of Tiquipaya, Bolivian President Evo Morales hosted a World People’s Summit on Climate Change, a conference organized in response to what many perceived to be the inadequate outcome of the Copenhagen Summit in 2009. There, Velcrow Ripper, a Canadian documentary filmmaker, asked the President, “How can the climate crisis be turned into the greatest love story on Earth?”

That innocuous and seemingly immaterial question became the basis for Occupy Love, the third film in a documentary series that began in 2006 with the Genie Award-winning Scared Sacred.

In the first film, Ripper (born Steve) journeyed to the “ground zeroes” of the world, from Afghanistan and Hiroshima to New York City in the aftermath of 9/11, looking for stories of hope and survival. Now, with Occupy Love, Ripper has attempted to situate Occupy Wall Street and other global protests within the framework of a love story.

“Great love stories involve yearning to be together, separation, forces that keep the lovers apart,” biologist Rupert Sheldrake says in the film. “The big separation that’s happened here is the separation of humanity and nature, which has been brought about by a framework of thought.”

When he began filming in 2010, Occupy Wall Street was still a nonentity. Ripper cast a wide net, visiting the G20 summit in Canada and later the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo and the European Summer in Madrid in 2011, as well as a Zen center in New Mexico. Although Occupy became the focus of the film, it is framed by these concurrent expressions of discontent and compassion. At the Alberta Tar Sands, a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network pulls back the collar of his T-shirt to reveal a tattoo: “Love is the Movement.”

In the film, love is defined not by the romantic attachments with which much of modern cinema is preoccupied, but by an attitude of empathy, caring and understanding toward humanity and the environment. It is an uncommon narrative, one that is absent from most protest coverage, and it makes a compelling case for the forgotten tenderness of the Zuccotti Park occupation.

“There was a beautiful sign at May Day that said, ‘All our grievances are connected,'” Ripper said. “I think that’s an important part of Occupy Love. The core is about people coming together, trying to make their community and their world a better place. We don’t want to simplify and lump them together, but we still are united. Occupy Sandy is now a great model of that; what I saw was people coming together and supporting each other in this beautiful way.”

Occupy Love spends a little time with the familiar narratives of Occupy Wall Street: the attempted evictions, the clashes with police and injuries sustained. But it lingers on the moments that have received far less attention. Children distribute free newspapers while volunteers serve hot meals. Generators are powered by bicycles and rainwater passes through a makeshift filtration system. There are drum circles, naturally, and impassioned conversations between people who might otherwise never have met. As the temperature drops, volunteers hand out thermal blankets and bananas and medics perform spot checks.

“The love story is people getting to know each other, based on their human experience,” a member of Occupy the Hood says in the film. “I’ve never felt so human in my life.”

In one particularly touching moment, Ripper visits with a young environmentalist. “It’s like a little temple of seeds, you see?” the child says, carefully splitting open an orange flower. “Nature doesn’t yell at you, it doesn’t tell you what to do. It makes you feel peaceful. It doesn’t make you think of bad things. Nature doesn’t want to control things.”

Occupy Love is aesthetically as well as emotionally striking, compounding charged scenes of political protest and civil injustice with art-film tropes: a flower that blooms and quickly dies, billowing black smokestacks silhouetted against a golden sunset, an underwater city, its inhabitants frozen and still like the ruins of Pompeii.

There are moments when the future seems utterly bleak, and the world appears to be rapidly, unstoppably disintegrating. Evidence of humanity’s cruelty towards the Earth and toward ourselves abounds: spiraling debt, ecological crisis, demonstrations that erupt in mass slaughter. In Tahrir Square, Ripper records protesters as they are doused with gas by police. He pans over the desolate wasteland of the Alberta Tar Stands, where there once stood a boreal forest.

“Are we predatory, competitive by nature?” Ripper muses in the film. “Are we self-interested, materialistic, utilitarian, seek only to perpetuate our survival and driven by libido? If that’s who we are, we’re likely doomed.”

The solution put forward in Occupy Love is that love, combined with action, is the key to opposing a society that seems predatory and a planet that appears doomed. The ideology is indebted to Martin Luther King Jr., whose words feature prominently in the film: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

“Love and power together is enough to save the world, but not love alone,” Ripper said. “We need to accelerate change, a paradigm shift, and it’s got to be rooted in love. That’s the only way we’ll be able to keep ourselves anchored. But we need to be fierce and uncompromising in that love, and we’re going to have to revolt.”

There is an acknowledged bias in Occupy Love. Ripper makes no secret of the fact that he has an involvement with and an admiration for Occupy. As shots of protesters’ placards — “I Care About You,” “Occupy Your Heart,” “We Truly Love the 1% But the System Needs to Reinvent,” “The Beginning is Near” — come up against footage of police attacking protesters, the message can seem heavy-handed. Zuccotti Park was plagued by theft, violence and sexual assault. (Lauren DiGioia, who is featured in the film, was groped while she was sleeping, but later railed against the officers who handled her case, carrying a sign that read, “I was more victimized by the NYPD who handled my sexual assault case than I was by the assaulter.”)

Nonetheless, the evidence Ripper supplies for the tenderness of Occupy argues convincingly that media coverage of Occupy was shamefully one-sided.

“In any large group, you’re always going to find people doing stupid things,” Ripper said. “Unfortunately, it’s very easy to amplify those things, and I think that’s been done quite a bit to Occupy in order to undermine them. The film is focusing on the movement at its best, and the movements in general at their best. It’s for those of us who came at it with the very best of intentions, and that, I think, is the majority.”

Occupy Wall Street lost steam following its eviction from Zuccotti Park, and its newer branches have attracted far less attention. The film is likewise framed by the demise of the Zuccotti moment. “There was something very unique and special at that time, the ability to gather like that, that is being lost when people are just meeting in working groups,” Ripper said.

However, he feels that the movement’s spirit remains intact, not only in Occupy’s offshoots but in the rising tide of global unrest that may, indeed, suggest that the beginning is near.

“I started out looking for the perfect love story,” he concludes. “But what I found instead was something much more beautiful: a messy love, an imperfect love — a human love.”

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) announced Friday that he will hold hearings this fall on the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the NRA in spreading “Stand Your Ground” laws across the country, which the Center for Media and Democracy uncovered last year, after launching ALECexposed.org.

Sen. Durbin’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee will hear testimony on the NRA-backed legislation, which has become law in over two dozen states since being adopted as a “model” by ALEC in 2005.

The announcement comes six days after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Florida’s Stand Your Ground law was initially cited to protect Zimmerman from arrest, and the jury was instructed to consider Stand Your Ground when deciding his fate, even though the defense did not request a ruling under the law’s criminal immunity provisions. The one juror who has spoken publicly said that the state’s Stand Your Ground law influenced their decision to acquit. As CMD’s Executive Director Lisa Graveshas documented, the NRA played a key role in approving those jury instructions, in addition to helping initially draft the Stand Your Ground law and taking it to ALEC to become a “model” for the nation.

Durbin’s office also plans to examine the legal definition of self defense, how such laws have affected shooting confrontations and how such laws affect the problem of racial profiling.

Rep. Raul Gutierrez (D-IL) asked House Judiciary Committee Chair Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.) to hold similar hearings in the House, but he has declined to comment. The Congressional Black Caucus has also announced plans to examine Stand Your Ground laws.

Also on Friday, President Obama discussed some of his concerns about the law and the Trayvon Martin tragedy:

“[I]f we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

Yesterday, CMD joined an array of organizations and citizens concerned about these laws at a rally in front of ALEC’s new headquarters outside of Washington, DC. ALEC has tried to distance itself from the proliferation of Stand Your Ground laws by telling the press that it has stopped endorsing gun bills. However, as noted in a letter signed yesterday by CMD, the NAACP, Color of Change and 37 other civil rights, labor, and watchdog organizations, ALEC has not called for the repeal of Stand Your Ground in Florida or any other state, despite spending more than six years promoting the legislation.

At the event yesterday, ALEC — whose central feature is helping get the wish lists of corporations and special interest groups into the hands of state legislators — refused to accept a copy of the letter from these national organizations that represent millions of Americans. Diallo Brooks of People for the American Way offered the letter to an ALEC representative, who refused to accept it. The police officer standing nearby accepted the letter and offered it to ALEC’s rep, who refused to even look at it.

ALEC may be disinterested in the views of concerned citizens about its legacy of endorsing Stand Your Ground and pushing it into law in dozens of states, but both the United States Senate and President Obama have now signaled they are interested in the impact of these laws.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out

Marie Antoinette, meet Ronald McDonald.

A lot of people are angry about McDonald’s new financial advice website for employees, an ill-conceived project which drips with “let them eat cake” insouciance. “Every dollar makes a difference,” McDonald’s lectures its struggling and often impoverished workers.

But it’s time to ditch the resentment and offer McDonald’s a word of thanks. It has just performed an invaluable service for campaigns like Raise the Minimum Wage, petitions like this one, and July 24′s National Day of Action by serving up a timely and exhaustively researched brief on their behalf. This new website provides invaluable data for a living-wage “McManifesto.”

You want fries with that?

Golden archness.

Get this: The new employee website, co-created with Visa, helpfully suggests that people who work for this Fortune 500 corporation begin the financial planning process bytaking a second job.

As a number of ticked-off writers have observed, McDonald’s also pretty much advises its employees not to clothe themselves, heat their homes, seek educational advancement, or pay more than $600 in rent and $20 in health insurance premiums per month. (AsDaniel Gross notes, that would pay for about two days of coverage.)

And, as if that’s not enough, there isn’t even any money for food in the McDonald’s sample budget. Apparently for McDonald’s employees the phrase “Happy Meal” means you’re happy whenever you’re lucky enough to scrounge a meal.

People were seething at the website’s arch touches, which include interactive games like “Financial Football” and “Road Trip to Savings,” and were thunderstruck by the lordly obliviousness behind pronouncements like “Knowing where your money goes and how to budget it is the key to your financial freedom.”

(Not when there’s not enough of it, Sir Ronald.)

Peter S. Goodman notes that McDonald’s receives a fortune in “corporate welfare.” In fact, government policies help most of the country’s underpaying mega-corporations keep expanding through a series of tax breaks and other concessions.

Economically, we’re super-sizing them.

Heart of the matter.

Many McDonald’s workers need public assistance to survive, which often includes Medicaid. That’s right: The public is even subsidizing McDonald’s low wages and lousy benefits when it comes to health care.

Subsidize McDonald’s? For health care? With that food it should be hit with a surcharge.

Fun fact: McDonald’s says it serves nine million pounds of French fries globally every day. Since slightly more than half its franchises are in the US, that means Americans presumably consume between four and five million pounds of this lard-laden, massively space-time curving starchy mass every 24 hours.

Each McDonald’s French fry is a tiny, fat-drenched drone missile aimed directly at the American cardiovascular system.   One can only imagine how much of our nation’s runaway health care costs are traceable to this one corporation alone.

And we’re subsidizing its health care, rather than the other way around.

Gross profits.

In 2012 McDonald’s had gross profit of more than $10 billion on annual revenues of $27 billion. That’s up more than 12 percent from 2010. The lard business is good.

Visa, which for some reason has been spared most of this week’s online fury, deserves its own share of negative attention. As the financial half of this website team, Visa presumably provided the handiwork which reminds struggling fast-food employees that “every day and every dollar make a difference.”

Visa, like McDonald’s, is a coddled corporation. A government less corrupted by Big Money would have broken up this monopolistic enterprise long ago, especially given its tendency to abuse its marketplace dominance.

Visa was originally created by one fraud-ridden and bailed out megabank, Bank of America, and continues to enrich another. And, as CNN Money reported, its 2008 IPO “created a nice windfall for its owners, including its largest shareholder JPMorgan … about $1.3 billion on its 29 million shares.”

JPM made the headlines with yet another major fraud just this morning, adding piquancy to the knowledge that it bleeds us a little every time we swipe a credit card or debit card. And yet these two corporate anti-heroes have performed a great service by making the case so beautifully:

Americans can’t live on today’s minimum wage.

With a side of cynicism.

As this video from LowPayIsNotOK.org makes clear, it takes a minimum of $15 per hour to even begin earning a living wage in this country. (And that’s without some basic necessities.)

If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity it would now be $16.54 per hour, according to the Center for Economic Policy Research. It would be $10.74 if it had merely kept pace with inflation — although McDonald’s and VISA have now demonstrated that this isn’t enough to live on either. (The minimum wage is currently $7.25.)

That adds an extra dose of cynicism to the website’s observation that “You can have almost anything you want as long as you plan ahead and save for it.”

That lie carries a special sting for the millions who have been locked out of the American Dream. Thanks to the deliberate policy decisions of the last four decades — breaks and giveaways for corporations, coupled with lost income for the majority — social mobility and income fairness have plunged in this country.

No matter how much you try to save on a minimum wage, a better life will remain beyond your means — until something changes.

Are there no roommates? Are there no malt shops?

A McDonald’s-like tone-deafness let Washington Post blogger Timothy B. Lee in for a heavy dose of online criticism too, when he defended the McDonald’s/Visa budget. Here’s an excerpt:

“Gawker’s Neil Casey calls $600 per month for rent a ‘laughably small’ figure, but Casey should spend more time outside the Northeast Corridor. When I lived in St. Louis, my roommate and I each paid $425 per month …”

Roommate? That clichéd thinking reflects one of the key misconceptions about minimum-wage workers: that they’re teenagers or twenty-one year olds just starting out in life. It’s closely related to the myth that most fast-food workers are fresh-faced kids serving root beer floats at the local malt shop.

In fact, less than 16 percent of minimum-wage workers are teenagers. Many are parents, which makes the “roommate” suggestion especially silly. More than seven million children live in a minimum-wage home.  And many minimum-wage workers live in poverty. (See Real Faces of the Minimum Wage for more.)

You deserve a break today.

America is crying out to McDonald’s as if with one voice: “Stuff that financial planning website in your Egg McMuffin.”

The pain and anger is palpable. But it’s not enough. What do we do?

For one thing, we can sign a petition supporting a bill which would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 — and then demand it be raised even further. We can back the minimum-wage campaigns being waged around the country, which build on an exciting grassroots movement of fast-food workers in cities like Detroit. (There’s more information here.)

McDonald’s should join the wage movement it so ably served this week, because economic misery is hurting its bottom line in the US and worldwide. And while its new and successful “dollar menu” shows that it’s willing to profit from hard times, that’s only a short-term fix in a declining economy.

Pay your workers what they deserve, McDonald’s. But the rest of us won’t wait for you. We’re taking action, because we agree with you about one thing:

Every dollar makes a difference.

Republished with permission from: Truth Out