Chilean protesters run with Molotov cocktail bottles to throw at police during a student demonstration in Santiago on Wednesday, June 26, 2013.

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Iranâ„¢s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R) and Tajikistan’s Foreign Minister Hamrokhon Zarifi meet in Tehran, June 26, 2013.

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A protester waves a Portuguese flag in front of the police in Lisbon during a general strike. (File photo)

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Kimberly McCarthy was the 500th person to be executed in Texas, the first state to earn the dubious distinction since capital punishment was reinstituted there in 1982. Texas leads the nation in wrongful convictions, exonerations and state killings.

Despite pleas from thousands of protesters, prison officials
administered a single dose of pentobarbital and pronounced
McCarthy dead at 6:37 pm local time Wednesday. McCarthy, a
52-year-old African-American, had been convicted for the 1997
robbery, beating and fatal stabbing of Dorothy Booth, her
71-year-old white neighbor.

McCarthy, a former nursing home therapist who became addicted to
crack cocaine, reportedly cut off Booth’s finger in an attempt to
steal the retired college professor’s wedding ring. She blamed
the crime on drug dealers but was also linked by DNA to the
murders of two other senior citizens. 

She was first woman to be put to death in the US since 2010 and
only the fifth in Texas since 1854. 

Texas has carried out nearly 40 per cent of America’s executions,
with more than 1,300 since the Supreme Court resurrected the
dormant law in 1976. Governor Rick Perry alone has overseen more
than 250 executions during his time in office, according to human
rights-focused journalist Rhania Khalek, the most of any governor
in history. 

“I just wanted to say thanks to all who have supported me over
the years,” McCarthy wrote in her last statement. “Thank
you everybody, this is not a loss, this is a win. You know where
I am going.” 

Her final meal was pepper steak, mashed potatoes with gravy along
with mixed vegetables and cake. 

She became the eighth person to be put to death in Texas in 2013
alone, although after Wednesday 282 more inmates will remain on
Texas’ death row. Seven Texan men are scheduled to die in the
coming months, according to the Associated Press. McCarthy, the
Death Penalty Information Center noted, is the 17th person in
America to be put to death in the first six months of 2013. 

McCarthy was granted a retrial in 2002 after proving that the
original prosecution intentionally excluded African-American
jurors. She was again convicted and returned to death row. She
was granted a stay of execution in January and then April of this
year.

Other states have altogether stopped administering lethal
injections. Oregon has not executed a single person since 1997,
and California, despite having the nation’s largest death row
population at 727, has not carried out an execution since
2006. 

Sixty-one per cent of all Americans responded in the affirmative
when asked in a 2013 Gallup poll if they support capital
punishment. A 2012 Texas Tribune poll indicated that a mere 21
per cent of Texans were opposed to the death penalty, evidence of
which came during Governor Perry’s 2011 run for the presidency,
when he was roundly applauded for overseeing so many
executions. 

“I’ve never struggled [to sleep at night] at all,” he
said. “In the state of Texas when you kill one of our
children, you kill a police officer, you are involved in another
crime that killed one of our citizens — you will face the
ultimate justice in the state of Texas.” 

The nationwide decline in executions is, at least in part,
attributable to unearthed evidence that has exonerated wrongfully
convicted Americans across the country. Earlier this year the
National Registry of Exonerations revealed that Texas — and
Dallas County, in particular, where McCarthy was convicted — is
the national leader in exonerations. 

A probe, ordered after that study and published April 2013,
revealed that at least 117 people in Texas were imprisoned over
the last 25 years for crimes they did not commit. 

“Texas has been showcased as the number on state in the nation
for wrongful convictions,” state Rep. Ruth McClendon told the
Houston Chronicle. “Each conviction of an innocent person
reveals a tragic failure of the justice system.”

This article originally appeared on: RT

Recently
by Greg Hunter: Bail-ins
— The Ultimate Win for Precious Metals — Eric Sprott

Top trends
forecaster Gerald Celente says NSA leaker Edward Snowden is a non-event.
Celente charges, “What did Snowden say that we didn’t write about
over a year ago.” Celente says the real stories are the imploding
economy and coming war. Another crash is coming, and Celente predicts,
“It will be worse than the panic of ’08. It will be deeper. It will
be more painful because they will not be able to pull off the stimulus
game again.” Celente goes on to say, “We are going into the Greatest
Depression, but they will try to boost it in some way, and that’s
when gold and silver prices will skyrocket.” Celente also predicts
war in the Middle East is a lock. Celente says, “When all else fails,
they will take us to war. We are seeing war drums beating louder
and louder throughout the Middle East as the Middle East is collapsing.”
As far as a real recovery is concerned, Celente boldly states, “The
business of America has become war, and as long as business is war,
there is not going to be any recovery.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes
One-on-One with Gerald Celente, Publisher
of The Trends Journal.

June
27, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 USAWatchdog.com

The
Best of Greg Hunter

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

by
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report

Recently
by William Blum: The
Insanity of War Flags Over Graves

In the course
of his professional life in the world of national security Edward
Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie
detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks,
as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch
any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington Post
(June 10) reported that “several officials said the CIA will
now undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may
have been hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed
signs that he might one day betray national secrets.”

Yes, there
was a sign they missed — Edward Snowden had something inside
him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.

It was the
same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to
become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best — the most
patriotic — of intentions, going to do my best to slay the
beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror,
on a daily basis, of what the United States was doing to the people
of Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of media; it was
making me sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and
nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview
would have alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed
because I didn’t know of the danger myself. No questioning
of my friends and relatives could have turned up the slightest hint
of the radical anti-war activist I was to become. My friends and
relatives were to be as surprised as I was to be. There was simply
no way for the State Department security office to know that I should
not be hired and given a Secret Clearance. 1

So what is
a poor National Security State to do? Well, they might consider
behaving themselves. Stop doing all the terrible things that grieve
people like me and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and so many
others. Stop the bombings, the invasions, the endless wars, the
torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the support of dictatorships,
the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things that make
the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American terrorists,
that compel the National Security State — in pure self defense
— to spy on the entire world.

Eavesdropping
on the planet

The above is
the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter
in my book Rogue
State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Here
are some excerpts that may help to put the current revelations surrounding
Edward Snowden into perspective …

Can people
in the 21st century imagine a greater invasion of privacy on all
of earth, in all of history? If so, they merely have to wait for
technology to catch up with their imagination.

Like a mammoth
vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks
it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax,
telex … satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications
traffic, microwave links … voice, text, images … captured
by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed by
high-powered computers … if it runs on electromagnetic energy,
NSA is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps
billions of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents,
prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of
England, embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe,
your Aunt Lena … if God has a phone, it’s being monitored
… maybe your dog isn’t being tapped. The oceans will
not protect you. American submarines have been attaching tapping
pods to deep underwater cables for decades.

Under a system
codenamed ECHELON, launched in the 1970s, the NSA and its junior
partners in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada operate
a network of massive, highly automated interception stations, covering
the globe amongst them. Any of the partners can ask any of the others
to intercept its own domestic communications. It can then truthfully
say it does not spy on its own citizens.

Apart from
specifically-targeted individuals and institutions, the ECHELON
system works by indiscriminately intercepting huge quantities of
communications and using computers to identify and extract messages
of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Every intercepted message
— all the embassy cables, the business deals, the sex talk,
the birthday greetings — is searched for keywords, which could
be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes
to flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple
or so of the key words in the ECHELON “dictionary” —
“He lives in a lovely old white house on
Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot
over there in two minutes.” Within limitations, computers
can “listen” to telephone calls and recognize when keywords
are spoken. Those calls are extracted and recorded separately, to
be listened to in full by humans. The list of specific targets at
any given time is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one point including
the likes of Amnesty International and Christian Aid.

ECHELON is
carried out without official acknowledgment of its existence, let
alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as
to whether it serves a decent purpose. The extensiveness of the
ECHELON global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War
activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget — far
from being greatly reduced — was increased, and the network
has grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence
that the Cold War was not a battle against something called “the
international communist conspiracy”.

The European
Parliament in the late 1990s began to wake up to this intrusion
into the continent’s affairs. The parliament’s Civil
Liberties Committee commissioned a report, which appeared in 1998
and recommended a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing
power of the technologies of surveillance. It bluntly advised: “The
European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States
for making private messages via the global communications network
[Internet] accessible to US intelligence agencies.” The report
denounced Britain’s role as a double-agent, spying on its
own European partners.

Despite these
concerns the US has continued to expand ECHELON surveillance in
Europe, partly because of heightened interest in commercial espionage
— to uncover industrial information that would provide American
corporations with an advantage over foreign rivals.

German security
experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in
heavy commercial spying in Europe. Victims included such German
firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1998, Enercon
developed what it thought was a secret invention, enabling it to
generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than
before. However, when the company tried to market its invention
in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech,
which announced that it had already patented a near-identical development.
Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the sale
of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, an NSA
employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette
on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s
secrets by tapping the telephone and computer link lines that ran
between Enercon’s research laboratory and its production unit
some 12 miles away. Detailed plans of the company’s invention
were then passed on to Kenetech.

In 1994, Thomson
S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based in Blagnac Cedex,
France, also lost lucrative contracts, snatched away by American
rivals aided by information covertly collected by NSA and CIA. The
same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during
negotiations with the United States in 1995 over auto parts trade.

German industry
has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position
because the government forbids its security services from conducting
similar industrial espionage. “German politicians still support
the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each
other’s businesses. The Americans and the British do not have
such illusions,” said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist
in European industrial espionage, in 1999.

That same year,
Germany demanded that the United States recall three CIA operatives
for their activities in Germany involving economic espionage. The
news report stated that the Germans “have long been suspicious
of the eavesdropping capabilities of the enormous U.S. radar and
communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich”, which
is in fact an NSA intercept station. “The Americans tell us
it is used solely to monitor communications by potential enemies,
but how can we be entirely sure that they are not picking up pieces
of information that we think should remain completely secret?”
asked a senior German official. Japanese officials most likely have
been told a similar story by Washington about the more than a dozen
signals intelligence bases which Japan has allowed to be located
on its territory.

In their quest
to gain access to more and more private information, the NSA, the
FBI, and other components of the US national security establishment
have been engaged for years in a campaign to require American telecommunications
manufacturers and carriers to design their equipment and networks
to optimize the authorities’ wiretapping ability. Some industry
insiders say they believe that some US machines approved for export
contain NSA “back doors” (also called “trap doors”).

The United
States has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well
to allow it “back-door” access to encryption programs,
claiming that this was to serve the needs of law-enforcement agencies.
However, a report released by the European Parliament in May 1999
asserted that Washington’s plans for controlling encryption
software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything
to do with US industrial espionage. The NSA has also dispatched
FBI agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign
facilities in the United States, and CIA officers to recruit foreign
communications clerks abroad and buy their code secrets, according
to veteran intelligence officials.

For decades,
beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the world’s
most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked
its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality
in the Cold War or any other war. The purchasing nations, some 120
of them — including prime US intelligence targets such as
Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia — confident that their communications
were protected, sent messages from their capitals to their embassies,
military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the
world, via telex, radio, and fax. And all the while, because of
a secret agreement between the company and NSA, these governments
might as well have been hand delivering the messages to Washington,
uncoded. For their Crypto AG machines had been rigged before being
sold to them, so that when they used them the random encryption
key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted along with
the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the messages as
easily as they could the morning newspaper.

In 1986, because
of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing in
West Berlin, the Libyans began to suspect that something was rotten
with Crypto AG’s machines and switched to another Swiss firm,
Gretag Data Systems AG. But it appears that NSA had that base covered
as well. In 1992, after a series of suspicious circumstances over
the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion similar to Libya’s,
and arrested a Crypto AG employee who was in Iran on a business
trip. He was eventually ransomed, but the incident became well known
and the scam began to unravel in earnest.

In September
1999 it was revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert
special “keys” into Windows software, in all versions
from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez
of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows
instruction code and found the smoking gun — Microsoft’s
developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test
this software before they released it. Inside the code were the
labels for two keys. One was called “KEY”. The other
was called “NSAKEY”. Fernandez presented his finding
at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance.
The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their
software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why
it had been put there without users’ knowledge. Fernandez
says that NSA’s “back door” in the world’s
most commonly used operating system makes it “orders of magnitude
easier for the US government to access your computer.”

In February
2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS),
the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared
a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install
secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report,
“it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely
supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made
to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.”
The report stated that there had been a “strong suspicion
of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence
of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel
in Bill Gates’ development teams.” The Pentagon, said
the report, was Microsoft’s biggest client in the world.

Recent years
have seen disclosures that in the countdown to their invasion of
Iraq in 2003, the United States had listened in on UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and all the members of
the UN Security Council during a period when they were deliberating
about what action to take in Iraq.

It’s
as if the American national security establishment feels that it
has an inalienable right to listen in; as if there had
been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire world,
stating that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom
of the government to intercept the personal communications of anyone.”
And the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: “Persons
shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, except in cases of national
security, real or alleged.” 2

The leading
whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee

Before there
was Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake … before
there was Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds and Jesselyn Radack …
there was Philip Agee. What Agee revealed is still the most startling
and important information about US foreign policy that any American
government whistleblower has ever revealed.

Philip Agee
spent 12 years (1957-69) as a CIA case officer, most of it in Latin
America. His first book, Inside
the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1974 — a pioneering
work on the Agency’s methods and their devastating consequences
— appeared in about 30 languages around the world and was
a best seller in many countries; it included a 23-page appendix
with the names of hundreds of undercover Agency operatives and organizations.

Under CIA manipulation,
direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present presidents
of Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, “our minister
of labor”, “our vice-president”, “my police”,
journalists, labor leaders, student leaders, diplomats, and many
others. If the Agency wished to disseminate anti-communist propaganda,
cause dissension in leftist ranks, or have Communist embassy personnel
expelled, it need only prepare some phoney documents, present them
to the appropriate government ministers and journalists, and —
presto! — instant scandal.

Agee’s
goal in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make
it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty
work.

A common Agency
tactic was writing editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly
published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA
authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of
such a “news” item might be multiplied by being picked
up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate
it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station.
Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to
be read or heard by unknowing North Americans.

Wooing the
working class came in for special treatment. Labor organizations
by the dozen, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were
created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again,
in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete
with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership
away from them.

In 1975 these
revelations were new and shocking; for many readers it was the first
hint that American foreign policy was not quite what their high-school
textbooks had told them nor what the New York Times had
reported.

“As complete
an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere, an
authentic account of how an ordinary American or British ‘case
officer’ operates … All of it … presented with
deadly accuracy,” wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA station
chief, and ardent foe of Agee. (There’s no former CIA officer
more hated by members of the intelligence establishment than Agee;
no one’s even close; due in part to his traveling to Cuba
and having long-term contact with Cuban intelligence.)

In contrast
to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of hundreds of informants
from the nearly 400,000 Iraq war documents it released.

In 1969, Agee
resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who “long ago ceased
to believe in what they are doing”).

While on the
run from the CIA as he was writing Inside the Company —
at times literally running for his life — Agee was expelled
from, or refused admittance to, Italy, Britain, France, West Germany,
the Netherlands, and Norway. (West Germany eventually gave him asylum
because his wife was a leading ballerina in the country.) Agee’s
account of his period on the run can be found detailed in his book
On
the Run (1987). It’s an exciting read.

Notes

1. To read
   about my State Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc
   Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (2002)
2. See Rogue
   State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter
   21, for the notes for the above.

June
27, 2013

William
Blum [send him mail] is the
author of Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II,
Rogue
State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power, West-Bloc
Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir, and Freeing
the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire.

Copyright
© 2013 William Blum

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

by
Gary North
GaryNorth.com

Recently
by Gary North: Investors
Say: ‘Mises Was Right!’

The National
Institute on Retirement Security has issued a report: The
Retirement Savings Crisis: Is It Worse Than We Think? There
is no question about it; it is worse than we think – way, way
worse than we think. It is posted here.

The report
is divided into two parts. The first part is clear. It is a careful
description of the discrepancy between the retirement plans of Americans
and the financial resources available to these Americans to fulfill
their retirement plans. The discrepancy is greater than I had imagined.
In contrast, the second part is an exercise in utter fantasy. It
calls for massive federal programs to increase the amount of capital
that private firms invest in employees’ retirement programs. In
other words, there is a massive discrepancy between the first part
of the report and the second part.

Here are some
of the highlights from the first part.

Approximately
38,000,000 working households in the United States do not own any
retirement assets. This is about 45% of all the working households
in the United States. They do not have an IRA. They do not have
a 401(k). They do not have anything. In other words, they have made
no plans whatsoever to fund their retirements.

If we take
into consideration all households in America, meaning the ones that
have no retirement savings and the ones that have some retirement
savings, the median retirement account balance is $3,000. Got that?
$3,000. Americans believe that $3,000 will carry them through retirement,
as long as they continue to let those 3,000 precious dollars grow
by wise investing. If we talk about people who are 55 years or older
and still in the labor force, the total accumulated retirement savings
for all of these people is $12,000 (p. 1). This means they have
about 12 years, max, to accumuulate 8 to 11 times their annual income
in the final year of their careers.

The utter impossibility
of this situation should be obvious. This is not a slight shortfall.
This is a guaranteed head-on collision inside the American social
order. That is because the Social Security system is going bankrupt,
which the second part of this report categorically denies. There
is no possibility that the dreams and schemes of Americans will
be fulfilled by the Social Security system.

Even they could
could be fulfilled, the Medicare system’s shortfall will completely
bankrupt the federal government anyway. Medicare is a huge expense,
and this expense is going to be shifted onto the backs of the families
of Americans. In other words, not only is Social Security going
to go belly-up, the Medicare system is going to go belly-up. This
means that the total burden of the Social Security tax system is
going to be imposed on workers, but there is going to be a steady
increase in the retirement age for these workers. They will pay
into the system, and they are not going to get much out.

Meanwhile,
the Medicare system, which has to start at age 65, because the private
insurance companies kick everybody out of their programs at age
65, will bankrupt the federal government. There is no question about
this. The system is over $220 trillion in the hole: Kotlikoff’s
2012 estimate.

With this as
background, consider further statistical indicators from the first
part of this report. Factor these into your plans, and especially
your plans for what happens in American political life, when the
Medicare system will overwhelm the entire federal government, and
the Social Security trust fund is empty today, not in 20 or 30 years.

THE COLLECTIVE
SAVINGS GAP

The report
speaks of a collective retirement savings gap: what is needed vs.
what has been saved. Among working households, ages 25 to 64, this
range is now somewhere between $7 trillion and $14 trillion, depending
on the financial measure. We are talking about the private sector.
If we look at existing retirement assets, at least 90% of working
households in the United States do not meet the targets (p. 14).
Obviously, households that do not have any retirement savings are
not meeting the targets. Remember, this is about 45% of all households.
But when these households are factored into the total population,
then we find that 90% of the population has fallen short, age bracket
by age bracket.

What kind of
income should be provided to an individual in retirement? The experts
debate over this. The minimum figure cited is 70%. A more common
estimate is 85% (p. 2). This means that a person who enters retirement
should continue to have 85% of the income that he had in the year
before he entered retirement. In other words, his annual retirement
income should equal 85% of his maximum year of income as an employed
person.

Under this
assumption, the Social Security system will provide approximately
35% of a typical household’s retirement income. This leaves a retirement
income gap of about 50% of the individual’s pre-retirement earnings.
This is the portion of the families’ income that has to be made
up by means of retirement savings program. But we have already seen
that that is a hopeless goal for 45% of the American population,
and a near hopeless goal for about 80% of the population.

What about
people who are nearing retirement? These are the people who are
55 years old to 64 years old. You cannot get conventionsl Social
Security benefits and to you are 67. But, let us ignore that. How
much money does the average person in this age bracket have in his
401(k) or IRA account? Approximately $100,000 (p. 2). These are
the people who actually have 401(k) accounts and IRA accounts. They
constitute less than half of the American working class. These are
the really future-oriented people who bothered to set up a retirement
program. At the end of the entire process of their careers, they
have $100,000 in reserve.

In
the United States, about 48% of the population works for a company
that does not have any retirement program at all. This is the lowest
rate since 1979. So, it is clear why most employees do not have
any retirement program. If the companies do not provide one, they
are unlikely to provide one for themselves, and they do not.

There used
to be defined benefit programs. These guaranteed a particular income
to retirees. They have declined in number for 30 years. Fewer than
a third of Americans who are under 55 years old participate in such
a program (p. 3). Employers have decided that they cannot afford
to guarantee retirees anything. So, if they have to compete by offering
retirement programs to new employees, they simply offer some kind
of matching grant program to the retirees, usually capped somewhere
around 6%. The report does not mention this figure. It does mention
that when the 401(k) programs were first introduced in 1978, they
were assumed to be supplemental to retirement programs of a defined-benefit
nature. Instead, the companies have abandoned the defined-benefit
programs. Out of all households that have a workplace retirement
program, 60% have only a 401(k) program.

Read
the rest of the article

June
27, 2013

Gary
North [send him mail]
is the author of Mises
on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com.
He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An
Economic Commentary on the Bible.

Copyright ©
2013 Gary North

The
Best of Gary North

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

Copyright
© 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or
in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

Recently
by Peter Schiff: Tapering
the Taper Talk

The Japanese
stereotype of excessive courtesy is being confirmed by the actions
of prime minster Shinzo Abe who is giving the world a free and timely
lesson on the dangers of overly accommodative monetary policy. Whether
or not we benefit from the tutorial (Japan will surely not) depends
on our ability to understand what is currently happening there.

For now most
economists still believe that Abe has stumbled upon the magic elixir
of economic revitalization. His commitment to pull his country out
of the mud by doubling the amount of yen in circulation, and raising
the nation’s official inflation rate to 2%, had conferred rock star
status on the formerly bland career politician. But just one year
after his first critical raves arrived, the audience is heading
for the exits. As it turns out, the Japanese miracle may be a simple
tale of confidence easily gained, and just as rapidly lost.

In many ways
the 75% nine month rally in the Nikkei 225 (that began when Abe
was elected prime minister in September 2012), and the subsequent
crash that began on May 22, is not all that different from the turbocharged
rally, and spectacular crash, that occurred in technology heavy
Nasdaq more than a dozen years ago here in the United States.

At the time
that Pets.com (the company behind
the iconic Sock Puppet) made its IPO, other high flying tech stocks
had racked up 1000% gains. While investors scratched their heads,
pundits offered reasons why common sense no longer applied to the
new economy. We were told that valuations, revenue and profits no
longer mattered. And to an extent that now seems absurd, the investing
establishment bought into the insanity. But then a funny thing happened,
investors woke up and realized that they had nothing but a handful
of magic beans that couldn’t grow a beanstalk. When the fog lifted,
stocks plummeted…Wile E. Coyote style.

This time around
investors in the Japanese market were similarly deluded by fairy
tales. Leading economists told them that Japan could cheapen its
currency to improve trade, use inflation to create real growth,
increase prices to encourage spending, and drastically increase
inflation without raising interest rates. In short, monetary policy
was seen as substitute for an actual economy.

Initially at
least the economic data seemed to confirm the success of Abe’s program.
The leading indicator was the yen itself, which dropped like a stone.
Given the widely held view that a weak currency is the key to economic
success, the 25% decline in the yen was welcomed as good news. Soon
thereafter, the inflation that Abe so eagerly sought began to materialize
in various sectors of the economy. When the Nikkei reacted positively
to these developments, momentum traders from around began to take
notice, thereby creating self-fulfilling prophecy.

But it’s no
great trick to weaken a currency. Any two bit economy could accomplish
that objective. For a nation like Japan that imports nearly all
of its raw materials it was inevitable that a drastically cheaper
yen would to push up prices. However the rest of the plan, the part
about surging exports and growing economic activity, has been much
harder to achieve. In fact the data has been downright disheartening.
The plunging yen has failed to reverse Japan’s weakening trade balance
which has declined for 28 straight months. The trend finally sent
Japan into an overall trade deficit 10 months ago for the first
time in 30 years. The latest data confirms that while the yen value
of exports has increased, actual trade volume has fallen.

While the broad
economic data failed to impress, economists and investors were nevertheless
hopeful that Abenonmics would eventually work its magic. But recently
the bottom has fallen out in a way that should have surprised no
one, but somehow managed to do just that. Beginning in April Japanese
Government bonds began to sell off sharply. Previously, the Japanese
government could borrow funds for 10 years at just 36 basis points.

The truth is
that the sub 40 basis point yield on Japanese Government bonds was
the most important data point for their economy. At those levels,
Japan needed to spend 25% of its tax revenue to service its outstanding
debt. While that figure is high, most it is manageable given Japan’s
high savings rate. However, with a national debt that exceeds 200%
of GDP, the Japanese government could quickly become insolvent in
the face of higher debt service costs. If rates on 10 year debt
were to ever match the 2% of their inflation target, more half of
total tax revenue would be needed to service debt payments.

But the central
premise of Abenomics seems to be that the Bank of Japan could push
up inflation to 2% without raises the rates on long-term debt. To
do this one would have to assume that bond investors would accept
negative interest rates, even while a falling yen was eating away
at principle and returns on alternative investments would be expected
to be more attractive. Such an outcome is not consistent with human
behavior.

As a result,
in late May a strong sell off in Japanese government bonds caused
yields to nearly triple to almost 100 basis points on 10 year debt.
And while one percent doesn’t sound like much, it was the rapidity
of the ascent that got everyone’s attention. This grim, but very
simple, reality seems to have hit Japanese stock investors with
a panic unseen since Mechagodzilla took aim at Tokyo. Knowing that
even moderately higher rates could counteract any economic gains
made by stock market or export growth, the faith in Abenomics has
seemed to evaporate almost overnight. Sounds a little like the dot-com
bubble, doesn’t it?

Any more rapid
escalation in Japanese bond yields should tell us that quantitative
easing and growth through devaluation is a cul-de-sac that should
be avoided. Japan should be our canary in the coal mine. In the
meantime, the drama in Japan is diverting attention away from more
important shifts in Asia, more of that in our latest newsletter.

June
27, 2013

Peter
Schiff is president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of The
Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets and Crash
Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse. His
latest book is The
Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy, How to Save Yourself and
Your Country.

Copyright
© 2012 Euro Pacific Capital

The
Best of Peter Schiff

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

by Cris Sheridan
FinancialSense.com

Recently
by Cris Sheridan: Cashless:
The Coming War on Tax-Evasion and Decentralized Money

What characterizes
the beginning stages of an empire in decline? Is it war, famine,
disease, moral decay, or all of the above? There is perhaps no clear
formula or single event that can be used to pinpoint when a civilization
begins to fall and yet, it must seem obvious to many living at the
time.

So, let’s ask
the question: How about the U.S.? Is it on the verge of falling
apart?

Given what
I’m about to say, I think we all need to take this question seriously.

To understand
the fate of our nation, we can easily compare the following two
things: The amount of taxpayer money used to invest in things
that, without question, we’ll all need and use for years to come,
i.e. roads, bridges, dams, clean drinking water, etc – that
is, our infrastructure – versus the amount of taxpayer money
used by the government for creating a massive worldwide surveillance
machine.

Just think
about that for a moment.

Needless to
say, I don’t need to tell you much about recent leaks regarding
the NSA. If you’ve been watching the news, you may know that billions
are being spent each year on developing a hi-tech surveillance network
to collect, record, and potentially track or predict you and others
across the globe.

How much is
being spent exactly? Here are some estimates:

The
NSA is one of at least 15 intelligence agencies, and combined the
total U.S. intelligence budget in 2012 was $75 billion, said Steve
Aftergood, director of the government secrecy program at the Federation
of American Scientists, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes national
and international security issues.
…
Aftergood estimates about 14% of the country’s total intelligence
budget — or about $10 billion — goes to the NSA.
…
Gordon Adams, a former White House budget official for national
security, said he wouldn’t be surprised if NSA’s resources are “well
north” of $20 billion a year.

Meanwhile,
America’s infrastructure – as graded by the American Society
of Civil Engineers – lies in a serious state of disrepair.
Here’s their most recent report
card:

Essentially,
the money being taken out of your wallet each and every month is
not being used towards the things you and I actually need to live,
but, instead, it seems that it’s being used to help the government
spy on you. Forget that our sewers, roads, and drinking water systems
are one grade away from failing. You could be a terrorist! You just
don’t know it yet.

So, I ask you:
Is the U.S. on the verge of falling apart? Our priorities determine
our future. Right now, it appears that our government’s greatest
priority is not whether we’ll have electricity, drinking water,
and good roads in the years ahead, but, as Edward Snowden says,
“to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people
around the world with this massive [and extremely expensive] surveillance
machine” secretly being built. 

Well, the secret
is out. The U.S. government is investing heavily in a bridge that
no one wants. Let’s hope it collapses before our actual bridges
do.

Bottom line:
While much of our infrastructure is near failing and severely underfunded,
the U.S. government is wasting taxpayer money on building a modern
Police State instead.

June
27, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 FinancialSense.com

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

The Truth Shall Keep Us Free

by
Andrew P. Napolitano

Recently
by Andrew P. Napolitano: Fidelity
to the Constitution When We Need It

Which is more
dangerous to personal liberty in a free society: a renegade who
tells an inconvenient truth about government law-breaking, or government
officials who lie about what the renegade revealed? That’s the core
issue in the great public debate this summer, as Americans come
to the realization that their government has concocted a system
of laws violative of the natural law, profoundly repugnant to the
Constitution and shrouded in secrecy.

The liberty
of which I write is the right to privacy: the right to be left alone.
The Framers jealously and zealously guarded this right by imposing
upon government agents intentionally onerous burdens before letting
them invade it. They did so in the Fourth Amendment, using language
that permits the government to invade that right only in the narrowest
of circumstances.

The linchpin
of those circumstances is “probable cause” of evidence
of crime in “the place to be searched, and the persons or things
to be seized.” If the government cannot tell a judge specifically
what evidence of crime it is looking for and precisely from whom,
a judge may not issue a search warrant, and privacy — the natural
human yearning that comes from within all of us — will remain where
it naturally resides, outside the government’s reach.

Congress is
the chief culprit here, because it has enacted laws that have lowered
the constitutional bar that the feds must meet in order for judges
to issue search warrants. And it has commanded that this be done
in secret.

And I mean
secret.

The judges
of the FISA court — the court empowered by Congress to issue search
warrants on far less than probable cause, and without describing
the places to be searched or the persons or things to be seized
— are not permitted to retain any records of their work. They cannot
use their own writing materials or carry BlackBerries or iPhones
in their own courtrooms, chambers or conference rooms. They cannot
retain copies of any documents they’ve signed. Only National Security
Agency staffers can keep these records.

Indeed, when
Edward Snowden revealed a copy of an order signed by FISA court
Judge Roger Vinson — directing Verizon to turn over phone records
of all of its 113,000,000 U.S. customers in direct and profound
violation of the individualized probable cause commanded by the
Constitution — Vinson himself did not have a copy of that order.
Truly, this is the only court in the country in which the judges
keep no records of their rulings.

At the same
time that Vinson signed that order, NSA staffers, in compliance
with their statutory obligations, told select members of Congress
about it, and they, too, were sworn to secrecy. Oregon Democratic
Sen. Ron Wyden was so troubled when he learned this — a terrible
truth that he agreed not to reveal — that he mused aloud that the
Obama administration had a radical and terrifying interpretation
of certain national security statutes.

But he did
more than muse about it. He asked Gen. James Clapper, the director
of national intelligence, who was under oath and at a public congressional
hearing, whether his spies were gathering data on millions of Americans.
Clapper said no. The general later acknowledged that his answer
was untruthful, but he claimed it was the “least untruthful”
reply he could have given. This “least untruthful” nonsense
is not a recognized defense to the crime of perjury.

After we learned
that the feds are spying on nearly all Americans, that they possess
our texts and emails and have access to our phone conversations,
Gen. Keith Alexander, who runs the NSA, was asked under oath whether
his spies have the ability to read emails and listen
to telephone calls. He answered, “No, we don’t have that authority.”
Since the questioner — FBI agent turned Congressman Mike Rogers
— was in cahoots with the general in keeping Americans in the dark
about unconstitutional search warrants, there was no follow-up question.
In a serious public interrogation, a committee chair interested
in the truth would have directed the general to answer the question
that was asked.

Since that
deft and misleading act, former NSA staffers have told Fox News
that the feds can read any email and listen to any phone call, and
Alexander and Rogers know that. So Alexander’s “no,” just
like his boss’s “no,” was a lie at worst and seriously
misleading at best.

This is not
an academic argument. The oath to tell the truth — “the whole
truth and nothing but the truth” — also makes those who intentionally
mislead Congress subject to prosecution for perjury.

President Obama
is smarter than his generals. He smoothly told a friendly interviewer
and while not under oath that the feds are not listening to our
phone calls or reading our emails. He, of course, could not claim
that they lack the ability to do so, because we all now know that
he knows they can.

These Snowden
revelations continue to cast light on the feds when they prefer
darkness. Whatever one thinks of Snowden’s world-traveling odyssey
to avoid the inhumane treatment the feds visited upon Bradley Manning,
another whistleblower who exposed government treachery, he has awakened
a giant. The giant is a public that has had enough of violations
of the Constitution and lies to cover them up. The giant is fed
up with menial politicians and their media allies demonizing the
messenger because his message embarrasses the government by revealing
that it is unworthy of caring for the Constitution.

Think about
that: The very people in whose hands we have reposed the Constitution
for preservation, protection, defense and enforcement have subverted
it.

Snowden spoke
the truth. Knowing what would likely befall him for his truthful
revelations and making them nevertheless was an act of heroism and
patriotism. Thomas Paine once reminded the Framers that the highest
duty of a patriot is to protect his countrymen from their government.
We need patriots to do that now more than ever.

Reprinted
with the author’s permission.

June 27, 2013

Andrew P.
Napolitano [send
him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey,
is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano
has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent
is Theodore
and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional
Freedom. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read
features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit
creators.com.

Copyright
© 2013 Andrew P. Napolitano

The
Best of Andrew Napolitano

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

by
Margot Peppers
Daily Mail

Submerging an AK 47 gun and firing it underwater appears to make
it work better, according to high speed footage.

In an experiment posted online, a team put one of the automatic
machine guns into an water-filled aquarium and filmed it using a
high-speed camera.

When the footage was slowed down, they discovered that not only
does the weapon still fire while under water, it actually reloads
itself faster.

New high speed footage has revealed that submerging an AK 47 gun
and firing it underwater appears to make it work better

The AK47 assault rifle is based on a gas recoil system.

It uses the hot expanding gases of a bullet being fired to automatically
rechamber the next round, Gizmodo
reports.

The gas flows up through the chamber and back to the gun’s
bolt, which forces it back.

The video was uploaded on the Smarter Every Day channel on YouTube.

In an online experiment, a team sunk one of the automatic machine
guns into an aquarium and filmed it using a high-speed camera

Read
the rest of the article

June
27, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 Daily
Mail

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

On this past
Saturday morning, I did a live remote from Kansas City for CNN’s
“New Day” program on the subject of TWA Flight 800, hosted
by Alison Kosik. What follows is the transcript as
it appears on CNN.com. What does not appear I will explain later.

Inherent in
this transcript is the Achilles heel of what is arguably the most
successful bit of government propaganda in American peacetime history.
Unwittingly, what the CNN editors left in is more damning than what
they took out.

Before I comment
on what’s missing, let me add a little clarity to what is here.
In 1997, at the request of the FBI, the CIA prepared its zoom-climb
animation in an attempt to convince the media and the American people
that the eyewitnesses did not see a missile or missiles but rather
a noseless 747 rocketing into space. This became the official government
position.

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

A 20-30% S&P Drop Coming?
Marc Faber on the state of the markets

Dr.
Marc Faber, the Swiss fund manager and publisher of the ‘Gloom,
Boom and Doom Report’ always enjoys illuminating the Wall St. talking
heads and displaying his awesome command of numbers, dates and predictions.

The
Fed’s ‘tapering’ comments have ramped up market volatilaty and Faber
gives some advice for short and long-term strategies. For example:
“”The best course of action is to actually not buy anything, but
rather to reduce positions on a rebound,” Faber said: Also, “New
highs in emerging markets and in high yield bonds are out of the
question, and if it happened in the S&P, which I don’t believe,
it would be driven by very few stocks. Longer term, the market is
far from oversold. It still has considerable downside risk everywhere,”
he said.

Finally,
buy more gold……he is. (6:31)

June
27, 2013

Dr.
Marc Faber [send him
mail] lives in Chiangmai, Thailand and is the author of Tomorrow’s
Gold.

Copyright
© 2013 Daily Reckoning

The
Best of Marc Faber

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell

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.

This article originally appeared on: Green Med Info

This article originally appeared on: Green Med Info

Bahraini human rights activists say the torturing of the countryâ„¢s prisoners has been intensifying amid an international spotlight on the Persian Gulf nation, Press TV reports.

At a seminar at House of Lords in London on Wednesday, several Bahraini victims of torture gave testimony of their ordeals and their loved ones in Bahrainâ„¢s prisons.

Å“There is the use of electricity… They are using the microwaves on cells especially on the brain cells. (They) bring the wife or the teenage daughter in front of you, and threaten (you that) they are going to rape her,” former Bahraini MP Jalal Firooz said.

The participants also condemned the western powersâ„¢ silence against the Bahraini prisoners.

Å“They keep a blind eye to atrocities and human rights violation in Bahrain, which encourages the regime to continue these tactics,” said Mohammad al-Tajir, a Bahraini lawyer.

The Bahraini uprising began in mid-February 2011, when the people, inspired by the popular revolutions that toppled the dictators of Tunisia and Egypt, started holding massive demonstrations.

The Bahraini government promptly launched a brutal crackdown on the peaceful protests and called in Saudi-led Arab forces from neighboring states.

Dozens of people have been killed in the crackdown, and the security forces have arrested hundreds, including doctors and nurses accused of treating injured revolutionaries.

A report published by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry in November 2011 found that the Al Khalifa regime had used excessive force in the crackdown and accused Manama of torturing political activists, politicians, and protesters.

Bahrainis say they will continue holding demonstrations until their demand for the establishment of a democratically elected government is met.

NT/AS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_third_political_branch_20130626/

Posted on Jun 26, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

Death toll from a CAR mine collapse rises to 52.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/edward_who_said_the_doctor_20130626/

Posted on Jun 26, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

People have staged a demonstration in front of the US Embassy in Yemen calling for the release of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

On Wednesday, the Yemeni protesters marched outside the embassy in Sanaâ„¢a, demanding US President Barack Obama release a number of Yemeni prisoners.

Å“Those who imprison others are enemies of God,” the demonstrators shouted as they carried pictures of a number of the inmates.

The United States holds about 166 men at the prison. A mass hunger strike involved many of the prisoners in the summer of 2005 but the protest dwindled after the military began tying people down and force-feeding them liquid nutrients through tubes to prevent them from starving to death.

The Guantanamo prison was initially established on January 11, 2002 by former US President George W. Bush to hold suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Obama famously promised in early 2009 to close the prison within 12 months, but four years on, the controversial prison remains open. He has put the blame on Congress for his failure to make good on his promise.

NT/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Food Network star Paula Deen has been dumped by her network following a racism scandal which began with a lawsuit filed by Lisa Jackson, a Caucasian woman in her 40s, against Deen and Deen’s brother, Bubba Hiers. Jackson’s lawsuit alleged that Deen had been guilty of using the “n-word,” sexual harassment, and infliction of emotional distress on Jackson while Jackson was working at Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House in Savannah, Georgia, from 2005 to 2010 as the general manager.

]]>

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Moody’s downgrades Jordanâ„¢s credit rating two notches from Ba2 to B1.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has begun transferring weapons to Jordan in order to arm groups of foreign-backed militants fighting against the Syrian government, a report says.

According to the report by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the CIA is moving the weapons Å“from a network of secret warehouses.”

The report added that Washington plans to provide the militants with Å“training, small arms, ammunition, and possibly certain types of antitank missiles.”

Saudi Arabia also plans to provide them with Å“antiaircraft weapons.”

The Syria crisis began in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

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

Damascus says the West and its regional allies, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are supporting the militants.

In an interview broadcast on Turkish television in April, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that if the militants take power in Syria, they could destabilize the entire Middle East region for decades.

Å“If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control… the situation will inevitably spill over into neighboring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” he stated.

NT/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_russia_fears_the_gay_20130626/

Posted on Jun 26, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_supreme_court_makes_history_two_steps_forward_one_step_back_20130626/

Posted on Jun 26, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

One of Britainâ„¢s biggest insurers Direct Line has announced some 2,000 job cuts as it seeks to double its cost-saving plans in the near future.

Direct Line said it will find the cuts from head office and support functions with three sites in Liverpool, Croydon and central London facing closure.

The leading motor insurer sacked 1,200 workers in the first phase of its savings plans in 2012 and is now looking to savings worth £200 million annually by 2014.

The group has 14,400 staff currently and the new cuts represent 14 percent of the workforce.

Out of the 2,000 positions, earmarked to be axed, some 1,140 come from the three sites that will be shut down.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi delivers a televised address on June 26, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Supreme Court used a pair of anticipated rulings June 26 to strike a blow to traditional marriage in the United States. The ruling against the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), along with a decision to let stand a lower court ruling striking down California’s Proposition 8 marriage protection amendment, had homosexual activists looking hopefully toward a full-blown legalization of same-sex marriage across the nation, and conservative, pro-family leaders vowing to continue their efforts to protect traditional marriage.

In the DOMA case, which has the most far-reaching consequences for marriage across America, the High Court stuck down a key provision of the law barring “married” same-sex couples from receiving the same federal tax, health, and retirement benefits that traditional married couples enjoy. The American Center for Law and Justice explained that in effect, the 5-4 ruling means that “the federal government must provide the same benefits to same-sex spouses as opposite-sex spouses, if the same-sex marriage has been lawfully performed. In other words, if a gay couple is married in a state that recognizes gay marriage, then the federal government will recognize that marriage on the same basis as a traditional marriage.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that the “avowed purpose and practical effect of [DOMA] are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”

Kennedy – an erstwhile “conservative” justice whose siding with Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan made the majority – opined that the “principal effect” of DOMA was to “identify and make unequal a subset of state-sanctioned marriages. It contrives to deprive some couples married under the laws of their State, but not others, of both rights and responsibilities, creating two contradictory marriage regimes within the same State. It also forces same-sex couples to live as married for the purpose of state law but unmarried for the purpose of federal law, thus diminishing the stability and predictability of basic personal relations the State has found it proper to acknowledge and protect.”

Writing a dissent for the minority justices, which also included Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice Roberts, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia insisted that “to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.”

Signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 with overwhelming clearance by both the House and Senate, DOMA provided a traditional definition of marriage for the benefit of federal laws and business, barring homosexual relationships from recognition for IRS or Social Security purposes and prohibiting the same-sex partners of homosexual federal employees from sharing in insurance and other employment benefits.

Mr. Clinton insisted that circumstances of the time compelled him to sign DOMA into law, and that he now views the law as unconstitutional. “Among other things, [homosexual] couples cannot file their taxes jointly, take unpaid leave to care for a sick or injured spouse, or receive equal family health and pension benefits as federal civilian employees,” Clinton said. “Yet they pay taxes, contribute to their communities, and, like all couples, aspire to live in committed, loving relationships, recognized and respected by our laws.”

Among those praising the High Court’s ruling on DOMA were President Obama, who said in a statement that the law “treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people. The Supreme Court has righted that wrong, and our country is better off for it.”

By contrast, Austin R. Nimocks, Senior Counsel for the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, said that the High Court “got it wrong in saying that a state that has redefined marriage can force that definition on the federal government. The federal government should be able to define what marriage is for federal law just as states need to be able to define what marriage is for state law. Americans should be able to continue advancing the truth about marriage between a man and a woman and why it matters for children, civil society, and limited government.”

He added that “marriage – the union of a husband and wife – is timeless, universal, and special, particularly because children need a mother and a father. That’s why 38 states and 94 percent of countries worldwide affirm marriage as the union of a man and a woman, just as diverse cultures and faiths have throughout history.”

Other pro-family and conservative groups offered similar reaction to the High Court decision. Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission called the ruling “far-reaching, with massive implications for family life and religious liberty. The grounding of this decision in equal protection and human dignity means this is not simply a procedural matter of federalism. This is a new legal reality.”

In the case of California’s Proposition 8, the voter-passed constitutional amendment defining marriage in that state as only between a man and a woman, the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment’s supporters lacked legal standing to appeal the lower court’s ruling that struck it down in 2010. “The public is currently engaged in an active political debate over whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the 5-4 majority in the case. “We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here.”

Baptist Press News noted that the ruling on Prop 8 “made for an unusual mixture of conservative and liberal justices on each side. Joining Roberts in the majority were Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan. Dissenting were Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Sotomayor.”

Predictably, following the ruling California Gov. Jerry Brown lost no time in announcing that he had directed the California’s Department of Public Health to “advise the state’s counties that they must begin issuing marriage licenses” to homosexual couples throughout the state once the Ninth Circuit of Appeals makes its final ruling in response to the Supreme Court’s decision. The Ninth Circuit had earlier affirmed the ruling of a federal judge striking down Prop 8.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council expressed relief that the the justices limited their decision only to California, noting that they “could have gone much further and struck down the marriage amendments which are in 30 states. They did not do that. This only applies to California, and how it’s going to be implemented we don’t yet know as we are still combing through the opinion.”

Responding to the Court’s ruling, the ADF’s Austin Nimocks, a member of Prop 8’s legal team, said that “despite the Supreme Court’s decision, the debate over marriage has only just begun. The court’s decision does not silence the voices of Americans. Marriage – the union of husband and wife – will remain timeless, universal, and special, particularly because children need mothers and fathers. This has been the experience of diverse cultures and faiths throughout history, including the American experience, and that will not change.” He added that “Americans will continue advancing the truth about marriage between a man and a woman and why it matters for children, civil society, and limited government.”

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Russia says it expects the United States to clarify its position against an international conference on Syria crisis.

“We expect more clarity from the meeting with (US Secretary of State) John Kerry about the US position regarding the joint Russia-US initiative to convene an international conference on Syria,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

“The Syrian leadership has confirmed its readiness to send a delegation to the conference in Geneva without any preconditions, whereas the opposition is divided. The National Coalition of Syria supported by our western partners refuses to attend the conference until (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad steps down,” Lavrov said, calling the situation “regrettable.”

On Tuesday, senior Russian and US diplomats along with UN-Arab League Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi held a meeting in Geneva to prepare a new international conference for Syria.

Lavrov said on Wednesday that the closed-door meeting failed to specify a date for the conference due to the unwillingness on the part of Syria’s opposition to participate without preconditions.

However, on Tuesday, the United Nations said in a statement after the preparatory meeting that Kerry and Larvrov would meet next week to discuss the Syrian crisis.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said that Kerry and Lavrov would meet at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conference in Brunei.

Geneva talks were initially supposed to be held in June, but were later postponed to July.

On Tuesday, Brahimi said that the situation in Syria was not getting better, adding that he did not expect the talks to take place until later in the summer.

The Syria crisis began in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

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

Damascus says the West and its regional allies, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are supporting the militants.

In an interview broadcast on Turkish television in April, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that if the militants take power in Syria, they could destabilize the entire Middle East region for decades.

Å“If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control… the situation will inevitably spill over into neighboring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” he stated.

NT/AS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A senior Iranian lawmaker has slammed Britain for letting drugs production rise four-fold in Afghanistan compared to the figures under Taliban in Iranâ„¢s eastern neighbor.

Head of the Iranian Parliamentâ„¢s National Security Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said production of narcotics has surpassed 8,000 tons since Britain took over the responsibility of fighting poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.

Boroujerdi added the figure was between 200 to 2,000 tons under Taliban and called on the international community to cooperate with Iran in its fight against narcotics.

Iran has some 900 kilometers of land border with Afghanistan and has borne the brunt of drugs smuggling from the worldâ„¢s biggest opium producer.

Boroujerdi said Iran has lost more than 3,700 police lives to the fight against drugs trafficking over the past three decades.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a report back in April that Afghan poppy cultivation is set to register a new record this year.

The Asian country produced 75 percent of the global poppy crop in 2012 with the figure expected to take a 15 percent leap this year.

Å“We can’t deny the fact that the level of cultivation now is much higher than it has ever been under the Taliban,” Martin Raithelhuber of UNODC said at the time.

British forces are in charge of security in the Afghan province of Helmand, which is considered the heart of Afghanistanâ„¢s poppy cultivation.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Adan Salazar
Infowars.com
June 26, 2013

Embracing the true spirit of censorship, YouTube earlier this http://static.infowars.com/slideshow/undie.jpgyear seemingly began omitting search results that would have allowed curious users to stumble upon Alex Jones’ prescient review of the popular film World War Z, a review we put out several months in advance of the film’s debut.

Since at least March, the Infowars crew began noticing our video, hosted on our main channel’s sister channel “PrisonPlanetLive,” would not display as a result when searched using practical queries, such as the title of the video, “secrets of world war z leaked,” or “secrets of world war z.”

As Infowars.com freely allows others to copy and host our videos ad infinitum, other users’ mirrored videos do populate as search results; however, our initial video exposing the United Nations propaganda-laden film is nowhere to be found.

We encourage our readers not to take our word, but to try the search for themselves.

In order for our video to populate as a search result, a more refined search, one including the channel name “PrisonPlanetLive” or “PrisonPlanet” is needed. Additionally, “world war z secrets leaked” also lists our video as a search result.

Infowars.com reached out to YouTube earlier today for comment regarding the apparent censorship, but have not heard back from them. Should they issue a response, we will update this article to reflect their statement.

As we were particularly careful to abide by YouTube’s Terms of Service, we are at a loss as to why our hosted video is being censored. One plausible explanation could be that our video has proven immensely popular and has been viewed over a quarter of a million times.

In January, after reading Max Brooks’ novel, Alex and his staff put together a video breaking down the classic modes of propaganda used in the story to acclimate large audiences on the proper way to move themselves into the system in case of a bio attack.

Watch the video YouTube is omitting from search results:

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 5:33 pm

Tags: entertainment

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Mounted policemen patrol outside the Mineiro Stadium in Belo Horizonte ahead of the Brazil vs. Uruguay game on June 26, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Members of the Syrian army have taken a city near the Lebanese border, marking another gain for the Syrian government in its fight against foreign-sponsored militants.

The Syrian troops liberated the city of Tel Kalakh in the northwest of the country three kilometers (two miles) from the Syrian border with Lebanon on Wednesday.

Tel Kalakhâ„¢s liberation puts an end to the smuggling of weapons and militants through the city.

In a video published by a Syrian website, a Syrian army officer said, “Terrorist groups infiltrated and terrorized the local people… In response to the request of the local people, the army entered Tel Kalakh to cleanse the area and restore security.”

Wednesdayâ„¢s capture marks another victory for the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after Syrian soldiers recaptured the strategic town of Qusayr on June 5, which consolidated the armyâ„¢s control around the city of Homs in the center of the country.

Qusayr was an important center and supply route for the foreign-backed militants fighting against the Damascus government.

The Syria crisis began in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

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

Damascus says the West and its regional allies, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are supporting the militants.

In an interview broadcast on Turkish television in April, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that if the militants take power in Syria, they could destabilize the entire Middle East region for decades.

Å“If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control… the situation will inevitably spill over into neighboring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” he stated.

NT/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

In a 7-1 decision made on June 24, the Supreme Court declined to rule on the constitutionality of the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas and returned the case to the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. In handing down the decision, however, the High Court vacated the circuit court’s previous decision and directed it to revisit the case and to apply a stricter level of scrutiny in deciding whether the university’s affirmative policy is justified.

The case being considered, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, began in 2008 when the University of Texas rejected the admissions application of a Sugar Land high school senior, Abigail Noel Fisher. Fisher, who is white, sued the university, asserting that her application was evaluated differently from those of some less-qualified minority students who were accepted. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled in favor of the university, and the Fifth Circuit Court affirmed that decision, after which that decision was appealed to the Supreme Court.

CNN quoted UT’s president, Bill Powers, who said the university was encouraged by the decision: “We remain committed to assembling a student body at The University of Texas at Austin that provides the educational benefits of diversity on campus while respecting the rights of all students and acting within the constitutional framework established by the court,” said Powers.

The decision was written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas are usually regarded as philosophically conservative members of the court, while Breyer and Sotomayor are considered to be quite liberal. Kennedy, a middle-of-the-roader, is often the “swing” vote on the court.

Surprisingly, the sole dissenter was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is regarded as one of the more liberal members of the court. Another liberal justice, Elena Kagan, did not participate in the decision because she served as solicitor general in the Obama administration when the case was first appealed.

In writing the majority opinion, Kennedy, in parts, appeared to defend affirmative action: “The attainment of a diverse student body serves values beyond race alone, including enhanced classroom dialogue and the lessening of racial isolation and stereotypes.”

However, Kennedy also placed limits on how far affirmative action should be used, writing that the university “must prove that the means chosen” to attain diversity “are narrowly tailored to that goal,” and that the highest level of legal standard must be met before institutions use diversity programs.

“Strict scrutiny [of the affirmative action policy] imposes on the university the ultimate burden of demonstrating, before turning to racial classification, that available, workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice,” he noted.

Individuals on both sides of the affirmative action debate expressed satisfaction with the decision. Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, stated: “The educational benefits of diversity are clear. The court’s decision reaffirms that it is in our national interest to expand opportunities for everyone.”

On the other side of the argument, Edward Blum, the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute fellow who led the legal challenge to UT’s policy, said the court had “established exceptionally high hurdles” for universities that wish to continue race-based admissions policies. “This decision begins the restoration of the original color-blind principles to our nation’s civil rights laws,” Blum said, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times.

In writing the majority opinion, Kennedy noted that the ruling by the appeals court in favor of the university “did not hold the University to the demanding burden of strict scrutiny articulated in Grutter [v. Bollinger] and Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 305 (1978) (opinion of Powell, J.) Because the Court of Appeals did not apply the correct standard of strict scrutiny, its decision affirming the District Court’s grant of summary judgment to the University was incorrect. That decision is vacated, and the case is remanded for further proceedings.”

Again referring to Grutter v. Bollinger and Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, Kennedy wrote: “Grutter made clear that racial ‘classifications are constitutional only if they are narrowly tailored to further compelling governmental interests.’… And Grutter endorsed Justice Powell’s conclusion in Bakke that ‘the attainment of a diverse student body … is a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education.’… Thus, under Grutter, a university’s ‘educational judgment that such diversity is essential to its educational mission is one to which we defer.’”

After conceding that a university – Kennedy makes no distinction between a university that is funded privately or one that is funded with taxpayer dollars – may determine if the attainment of a diverse student body is a legitimate goal to be obtained by extraordinary measures, Kennedy goes on to express some limitations of such policies: 

A university is not permitted to define diversity as “some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race or ethnic origin.” Bakke, supra, at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.) “That would amount to outright racial balancing, which is patently unconstitutional.” Grutter, supra, at 330. “Racial balancing is not transformed from ‘patently unconstitutional’ to a compelling state interest simply by relabeling it ‘racial diversity.’”…

Once the University has established that its goal of diversity is consistent with strict scrutiny, however, there must still be a further judicial determination that the admissions process meets strict scrutiny in its implementation. The University must prove that the means chosen by the University to attain diversity are narrowly tailored to that goal.

An article in the Wall Street Journal quoted Kennedy as stating his view that because racial classifications inherently are “odious to a free people,” universities “must prove that the means” they use “to attain diversity are narrowly tailored to that goal.” Kennedy continued by writing that UT must demonstrate “that available, workable, race-neutral alternatives do not suffice.”

While both opponents and defenders of affirmative action may optimistically take comfort in the “half a loaf” that this latest ruling offers them, like many cases dealing with social issues (e.g., abortion, same-sex marriage, the war on drugs), the battle lines are usually drawn between the socially “liberal” and socially “conservative” sides, rather than between those who are loose constructionists and those who are strict constructionists (“constitutionalists”) when it comes to interpreting the Constitution.

While the majority opinion in this decision, which instructs the lower court to apply “strict scrutiny” in ruling on UT’s policies, might be viewed as a step toward the common-sense policy of admitting students based on merit rather than race, from the constitutionalist standpoint, it can hardly be regarded as “conservative.” 

From a strict constructionist standpoint, any involvement by the federal government in affairs that rightfully should come under the jurisdiction of the states is a violation of the Tenth Amendment.

Thomas Jefferson, writing in “Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank” on February 15, 1791, affirmed this point: “I consider the foundation of the [Federal] Constitution as laid on this ground: That ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”

The constitutionalist would say that any federal involvement in education, affirmative action included, goes several steps beyond what is authorized by the Constitution.

Related article: 

Justice Thomas Likens Affirmative Action to Segregation Laws

This article originally appeared on: The New American

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced his administration’s “Climate Action Plan” for cutting carbon pollution in his second term in the Oval Office at Georgetown University and unfortunately, it’s a full-throttle endorsement of every aspect of fracking and the global shale gas market.

You can fight climate change or you can promote expansion of fossil fuels, but you can’t do both say critics of Obama’s touting of gas fracking which scientists say is just as dangerous as coal when it comes to overall emissions. (Image: EcoWatch.org) Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is the toxic horizontal drilling process via which gas is obtained from shale rock basins around the world, and touting its expanded use flies in the face of any legitimate plan to tackle climate change or create a healthy future for children. 

Here is what President Obama said at Georgetown about natural gas and fracking:

Now even as we’re producing more domestic oil, we’re also burning more clean-burning natural gas than any country on earth. And again, sometimes there are disputes about natural gas, but we should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because in the medium-term at least, it can provide not only safe cheap power, but it can only help reduce our carbon emissions.

Federally-supported technology has helped our businesses drill more effectively and extract more gas. And now we’ll keep working with the industry to keep making drilling cleaner and safer, make sure that we’re not seeing methane emissions, and to put people to work, modernizing our modern infrastructure so that we can power more homes and businesses with cleaner energy. The bottom line is natural gas is creating jobs, it’s lowering many familes’ heat and power bills and it’s the transition fuel that can power our economy with less carbon pollution, even as our businesses work to develop and then deploy more of the even cleaner technology for the energy economy of the future.

The “Fact Sheet” announcing the Plan further explains:

“We have a moral obligation to leave our children a planet that’s not polluted or damaged, and by taking an all-of-the-above approach to develop homegrown energy and steady, responsible steps to cut carbon pollution, we can protect our kids’ health and begin to slow the effects of climate change so we leave a cleaner, more stable environment for future generations.”

This portion of the plan alone – not to mention anything else problematic found within it, such as endorsement of nuclear energy and illusory “clean coal”/carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology – would prevent the actions outlined in his Fact Sheet from taking place.   

In fact, children’s health and air quality nationwide are directly threatened by the promotion of further fracking and natural gas drilling activity. There is a clear disconnect between the president’s stated commitment to a healthy future for children, and the vast expansion of natural gas drilling and fracking, which are scientifically proven to be polluting the air and drinking water of Americans.

“Burning natural gas is about one-half as carbon-intensive as coal, which can make it a critical ‘bridge fuel’ for many countries as the world transitions to even cleaner sources of energy,” reads the plan.

That premise is false. When measured in its entire life cycle – as Cornell University researchers found – fracked gas is actually dirtier than coal and therefore is a bridge to nowhere other than extreme climate disruption. That’s due to fugitive methane emissions, conveniently left out of the climate plan: methane is a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. 

Endorsement of Shale Gas Exports, Global Fracking Development, Pickens Plan

Obama’s plan also boasts about bringing the U.S. model for fracking abroad through the U.S. State Department’s Global Shale Gas Initiative, now called the Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program. 

“We have launched the Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program to share best practices on issues such as water management, methane emissions, air quality, permitting, contracting, and pricing to help increase global gas supplies and facilitate development of the associated infrastructure that brings them to market,” the plan further explains. 

Further locking in demand for fracking, the Obama climate plan also fully endorses T. Boone Pickens’ “Pickens Plan,” helping create a domestic market for natural gas vehicles, particularly for 18-wheelers. The plan also endorses shale gas exports.

“Going forward, we will promote fuel-switching from coal to gas for electricity production and encourage the development of a global market for gas. Since heavy-duty vehicles are expected to account for 40 percent of increased oil use through 2030, we will encourage the adoption of heavy duty natural gas vehicles as well,” the fracked gas portion of the plan concludes.  

“Gasland 2” Director Josh Fox and Mark Ruffalo Weigh In on the Plan

Sarah Palin, Republican Party Vice Presidential candidate for President in 2008 – who famously chanted “drill baby, drill” at a campaign rally – once was described this way by then-candidate Obama before the 2008 election: “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”

These two statements are pearls of wisdom as it applies to the Obama climate change plan’s endorsement of fracking. “Gasland 2” Producer and Director Josh Fox agrees with the sentiment. 

“Without reducing total production, which would require him to really take on the fossil fuel industries and have a real fight with them, this plan is not going to do anything to solve the problem,” Fox told DeSmogBlog. “Cutting the overall emissions from power plants, but not cutting overall production of coal and gas, makes the problem worse. It’s like switching from Marlboro to Camel cigarettes, instead of just quitting.

Actor/director Mark Ruffalo, a spokesperson for Americans Against Fracking, also weighed in:

“President Obama deserves praise for prioritizing climate change, but if he’s serious he needs to start by rejecting fracking for oil and gas. Fracking is a dangerous and toxic drilling process that greatly exacerbates climate change and threatens to put us over the edge. 400 ppm is a game changer that requires President Obama stand up to the oil and gas industry. We have clean and abundant wind, water, and solar alternatives that can power the entire U.S. and individual states, according to studies, with existing technologies at equivalent or lower costs than conventional fuels. President Obama can’t claim to seriously address climate change and expand fracking for oil and gas – that’s a stark contradiction.”

© 2013 DeSmog Blog

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

In a victory for marriage equality, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 on Wednesday that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)–a federal law that deprived legally married same-sex couples of benefits given to other married couples–is unconstitutional and “a deprivation of equal liberty.”

Photo: chris dilts/cc/flickr “DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, and added that “The avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.”

He continued:

DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability on the class by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Kennedy was joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan.

Cheering the ruling, Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, said that the “the justices have affirmed that all married couples are equal, ending the ‘gay exception’ that relegated same-sex couples to second-class status for too long. Married couples — gay or non-gay — should be treated as what they are: married.”

“The Supreme Court’s mortal blow to DOMA puts the moral weight of the federal government on the side of all Americans who seek to share in the freedom to marry and all its protections and responsibilities,” stated Wolfson.

In an additional victory for equality on Wednesday, the Court ruled that it will not address the merits of a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, saying those who brought the proposed the ban of same-sex marriage had no legal standing to do so.

“Today, history was made not only by the Supreme Court, but by the hundreds of thousands of people across the country who have worked for marriage equality in the states and federally,” stated Rea Carey, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “Now we have to work harder than ever to ensure that all same-sex couples have marriage equality across our nation–and all LGBT people have full equality in every other respect.”

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To see more about the lead plaintiff in the case, Edith Windsor, her now deceased wife, Thea Spyer, and the remarkable love story they shared, see the clip below by posted by Democracy Now! earlier this year:

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

In the second decision favorable to marriage equality advocates and deemed a victory by the LGBT community on Wednesday, the US Supreme Court ruled that it will not address the merits of a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, saying those who brought the proposed ban of same-sex marriage had no legal standing to do so.

Gay rights supporter Vin Testa waves a rainbow flag outside the U.S. Supreme Court building. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) Just minutes earlier, the court also struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that deprived legally married same-sex couples of benefits given to other married couples, was unconstitutional and “a deprivation of equal liberty.”

The 5-4 ruling by the court means that same-sex couples in California will soon be free to marry once more, restoring rulings by lower federal and state courts that determined the ban was unconstitutional.

Celebrations broke out on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC and inside the rotunda at City Hall in San Francisco among other places where marriage equality advocates had gathered.

Legal experts say that California can now rely on those earlier rulings and allow the resumption of same-sex unions in a matter of weeks when the decision goes into effect.

In response, Equality California and other gay rights groups cheered the decision and tweeted:

And Twitter otherwise was alight:

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

NSA Head General Keith Alexander (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP Photo)The NSA moved quickly to cover its tracks Tuesday after being publicly exposed for posting a false “fact sheet” on the Prism internet spying program that deceptively portrayed U.S. privacy protections as stronger than they actually are.

The public statement was initially published last week to quell widespread outrage at the NSA snooping program, exposed by The Guardian in early June. Facing heated questioning from Congress, chastisement from international governments, and deep anger from those caught in the vast spying dragnet, the NSA hoped to clear the air by illustrating the oversight and limits placed on internet snooping.

Yet, the fact sheet turned out to contain serious falsehoods, making what was already a highly secretive spying operation even more mysterious.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall released a public letter Monday declaring the “fact sheet” to be significantly inaccurate because it, “portrays protections for Americans’ privacy being significantly stronger than they actually are.”

The senators, however, did not publicly reveal exactly where the inaccuracies lie, because they do not wish to expose classified documents. Rather, they shared the inaccuracies in a classified letter to the NSA.

After the public exposure, NSA officials admitted that the document contained falsehoods. NSA head General Keith Alexander wrote a letter to the senators admitting the fact sheet ‘could have more precisely described’ NSA targeting.

As the Washington Post reports, NSA Spokeswoman Judith Emmel skirted the question of inaccuracies yet acknowledged the “fact sheet” had been removed:

Emmel would not explicitly acknowledge that the fact sheet had been removed from the agency’s Web site. Instead, she referred to the text of a 2008 law that governs NSA surveillance programs.

“Given the intense interest from the media, the public, and Congress, we believe the precision of the source document (the statute) is the best possible representation of applicable authorities,” Emmel said in a prepared statement sent by e-mail to The Washington Post.

This is not the first time the NSA has been caught stretching the truth since the spying scandal broke.

Earlier this month, National Intelligence Director James Clapper was blasted for lying in a March testimony in which he declared that the NSA is not tracking and storing information on ‘hundreds of millions of Americans.’ Clapper defended his actions on the grounds that he responded in what he thought was ‘the most truthful, or least untruthful manner.’

Senators Wyden and Udall are calling for the NSA to publicly admit to the falsehood, declaring, “When the NSA makes inaccurate statements about government surveillance and fails to correct the public record, it can decrease public confidence in the NSA’s openness.”

At this point, the public does not know which inaccuracies the NSA is admitting to.

An article in The Atlantic attempted to uncover the NSA statement’s inaccuracies by comparing the disproved “fact sheet” with leaked documents.            While they questioned many of the NSA statement’s claims, they cast considerable doubt on the following “fact sheet” assertions:

• Any inadvertently acquired communication of or concerning a U.S. person must be promptly destroyed if it is neither relevant to the authorized purpose nor evidence of a crime.
• Any information collected after a foreign target enters the U.S. – or prior to a discovery that any target erroneously believed to be foreign was in fact a U.S. person – must be promptly destroyed unless that information meets specific, limited criteria approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Yet, the specific falsehoods pinpointed by the senators remain mysteries.

Trevor Trimm from the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed to broad NSA deceptiveness but also could not pinpoint the specific inaccuracies exposed by the senators.

I can’t really tell which statement Wyden and Udall think is inaccurate. Many of the statements are written to downplay the true scope of what the NSA does and how it affects Americans’ privacy. For example, they say nothing about how they can hold onto communications forever if the communication is encrypted. Essentially they’re saying, if you value privacy, you are suspicious. But I doubt this is what Wyden and Udall are talking about. This is exactly problem with keeping such sweeping surveillance powers behind the veil of secrecy – the public has no way of knowing if what the government says is true or not.

But I have no doubt Wyden and Udall are correct. They originally said Americans would be “stunned” to learn how the government was interpreting the Patriot Act, and they were proven right when the Verizon court order was published. Wyden also alleged the NSA could conduct “backdoor searches” of US persons data after targeting foreigners under the FISA Amendments Act, and it’s becoming increasingly clear, judging by the latest report from the Guardian, that he was right about that too.  

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

A February demonstration in support of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Tuesday’s ruling by the Supreme Court gutted an essential protective of the law. (Photo: SEIU International/ Flickr)The flood gates have opened. Following the Tuesday Supreme Court ruling that gutted an essential protective from the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a slew of states with a history of racial discrimination are already lining up to pass new voter identification laws all but guaranteeing increased minority voter suppression.

Hours after the Supreme Court ruling, Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, declared he was instantly implementing a controversial voter ID law that had been blocked by the Obama administration last August.

“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas,” he said.

The law was initially blocked on the basis that the requirement to show photo identification before casting a ballot would have imposed “strict, unforgiving burdens” on poor minority voters, the Guardian reports.

The NAACP estimates that a quarter of African-Americans and 16% of Latinos of voting age lack a current government-issued photo ID and are thus at risk of disenfranchisement.

“The court’s majority put politics over decades of precedent and the rights of voters,” said NAACP President, Benjamin Todd Jealous. “We are more vulnerable to the flood of attacks we have seen in recent years.”

“The Supreme Court’s ruling sets the stage for a fight to ensure that people of color are not turned away from the ballot box using modern pretextual devices like photo identification,” added NAACP General Counsel Kim Keenan. “Until we demand a fix for this problem, equal rights under the law and a fair vote will be no more than a promise to millions of voters.”

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determines which states and localities–based on those locations having a history of racial discrimination–are subject to federal “preclearance” before changing any voting laws, from new congressional district maps to the precinct locations and voting hours. Prior to the ruling, nine states, including Texas, and parts of seven others were required to obtain the approval.

Tuesday’s ruling also cleared the way for Alabama to pass a new voter identification law. Following the news, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange and Secretary of State Beth Chapman said they believed the voting requirement, which is scheduled to take effect with the June 2014 primaries, can now move forward without any oversight or preclearance. 

“Photo voter ID will the first process that we have gone through under this new ruling,” Chapman stated. 

In addition to Texas and Alabama, a slew of other formerly Confederate states that had previously been subject to oversight are also announcing new legislation. The Associated Press reports:

[…] Mississippi pledged to immediately implement laws requiring voters to show photo identification before getting a ballot. North Carolina Republicans promised they would quickly try to adopt a similar law. Florida now appears free to set its early voting hours however Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP Legislature please. And Georgia’s most populous county likely will use county commission districts that Republican state legislators drew over the objections of local Democrats.

According to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice, any weakening of preclearance requirements within the Voting Rights Act “would seriously threaten the rights of minority voters across the country to cast a ballot and generate additional confusion and litigation over voting rules.”

They estimate that over the past 15 years the Justice Department has blocked discriminatory election changes from the listed jurisdictions 86 times. 

Myrna Pérez, author of the report, noted that the most “dangerous” changes would be those kept below the radar. “The biggest threats could come from small town officials making changes without any public notice or scrutiny — canceling an election, say, or moving the location of a polling station a week before election day” she said, adding, “We will be asking people to keep vigilant.”

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

A new study shows that the majority of American voters believe the NSA may have monitored the private communications of Congress, military leaders, and judges.

(Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images) According to Rasmussen Reports, who published the poll, 72% of voters think it is “somewhat likely” that the NSA spied on these officials, violating “one of the country’s most cherished constitutional standards — the checks and balances between the three branches of government.” 

This larger figure is divided in two–with 27% of those polled finding the action “somewhat likely” while 45% agree it is “very likely.” Only 14% of the participants disagreed, saying the possibility of the NSA acting in this way is “not likely.”

Rasmusen adds that this data is especially significant considering that 57% of voters believe in the likelihood that the NSA data will be used by U.S. government agencies to harass political opponents.

President of the company Scott Rasmusen commented on the recent leaks, noting that “none of the public players comes off looking great in the NSA story.”

1,000 people participated in the survey which was facilitated by Pulse Opinion Research.

(Chart via Instantpiechart)Lucia Brown is a summer editorial intern at Common Dreams.

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On Wednesday, Texas is set to reach the “shameful milestone” of executing its 500th inmate since it reinstated in the death penalty in 1982.

Texas is set to confirm its “dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings” with its milestone execution of Kimberly McCarthy. (Photo: Kurt and Sybilla/cc/flickr) 52-year-old Kimberly McCarthy is scheduled to die by lethal injection shortly after 6 PM in Huntsville, Texas after her lawyer exhausted all efforts to appeal the execution.

The Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington writes that it “will confirm Texas’s dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings.”

As Nick Chiles reports at the Atlanta Black Star:

Texas kills an average of one inmate every three weeks, a pace that makes it by far the most active state in the killing business. Of the 34 states that have the death penalty on the books, Texas has killed almost five times more people than the runner-up, Virginia, which has had 110 executions since the death penalty was federally reinstated in 1976.

Among the previous 499 inmates killed by Texas before this “shameful milestone,” Amnesty International points out, “there have been prisoners suffering from severe mental illness or intellectual disability, and teenage defendants who had been provided with woefully inadequate legal representation.”

In addition to being the 500th person to be executed in the state since the death penalty’s reinstatement, Sadhbh Walshe writes,

McCarthy will also be the 185th black person. This is significant because it means that in a state where African Americans make up just 12.2% of the population, they account for around 37% of those who are executed. This is disturbing of itself, but all the more so because McCarthy’s application for a stay was based on claims that her conviction and death sentence were the result of a process that was infected by racial discrimination.

Amnesty International explains:

McCarthy’s death sentence was for the murder of a 71-year-old white neighbor Dorothy Booth, who was stabbed to death in 1997. At the 2002 trial – which was a retrial – the jury consisted of 11 white members and one person of color. At the jury selection, only four out of 64 prospective members of the jury were black, and three of these were dismissed by the prosecution – a decision which was never challenged by McCarthy’s lawyer.

“The shameful errors that plague Ms. McCarthy’s case–race bias, ineffective counsel and courts unwilling to exercise meaningful oversight of the system–reflect problems that are central to the administration of the death penalty as a whole,” Maurie Levin, McCarthy’s lawyer, said. “For this to be the emblem of Texas’ 500th execution is something all Texans should be ashamed of.”

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After Obama’s climate speech on Tuesday and the reaction that followed, a couple of questions stand out.

Number one. Is it possible that the anti-Keystone XL movement counting victory on the controversial tar sands project prematurely?

And second. Have environmental groups more broadly been too friendly to President Obama in the aftermath of a mere speech, however welcome its rhetorical flourishes?

With a showering of praise from ‘big green’ groups like NRDC, Sierra Club, and Environment America–the last of which decided to launch an expensive ‘thank you’ TV ad for the president–is it possible that the environmental movement is easing off the pressure at exactly the moment they should be holding Obama’s feet more firmly to the fire?

As Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in his remarks about the speech, climate change “poses a near-existential threat to humanity,” and presidential rhetoric–especially vague rhetoric–is simply too little and too late.

“We need a national mobilization — and indeed a worldwide mobilization — to transform rapidly from our fossil fuel-reliant past and present to a clean energy future,” Weissman said. “We need a sense of urgency — indeed, emergency — massive investments, tough and specific standards and binding rules.”

Though the president offered none of that, many groups were blasting praise to their memberships and heralding a new era of executive action.

But where’s the action?

If you want to know what President Obama signaled about his pending decisions about the Keystone XL pipeline, just read the headlines:

Analysts see okay for Keystone as Obama muddies the debate (the Globe and Mail);
Keystone XL pipeline: Did Obama just drop a big hint about his decision? (Christian Science Monitor);
After speech, Canada confident Keystone XL will be approved (Mining Gazette);
Obama hints that Keystone XL may be rejected (Raw Story);
or Obama hints at Keystone approval (Politico)

Or don’t. Because the truth of the matter seems that everyone is entitled to interpret Obama’s surprise comments about the controversial tar sands project however they feel most comfortable.

First, here’s what the president said during his address at Georgetown University on Tuesday:

I know there’s been … a lot of controversy surrounding the proposal to build a pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands down to refineries in the Gulf. And the State Department is going through the final stages of evaluating the proposal. That’s how it’s always been done.

But I do want to be clear: Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. The net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward. It’s relevant.

In response, some of the groups most vocal and active in their opposition praised Obama’s language, saying they were both surprised and heartened because to them it meant that the president could not make such bold public statements and then–given all the available science and public outcry– turn around and approve the project.

“This is an appropriate standard that the president appears to be setting on Keystone XL,” said 350.org’s Bill McKibben, probably the group best known for organizing and standing against Keystone XL. “The president is saying what the science has always demanded. It’s encouraging news for certain.”

The answer to Obama’s question about the “pipeline’s impact on our climate” is clear, said Oil Change International. “Keystone XL will greatly impact our climate, and thus our communities and our children,” the group opposed to the project said. “On this basis, the pipeline must be denied.”

But though groups like Oil Change International and 350.org–long associated with promoting the scientific consensus on climate change–may understand the certainty of the warnings associated with the further development of the Alberta tar sands, it is not at all clear that the State Department shares this understanding.

Indeed, here’s what the State Department’s draft Supplement Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) itself said:

[F]rom a global perspective, the decision whether or not to build the Project will not affect the extraction and combustion of WCSB [Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin] oil sands crude on the global market. However, on a life-cycle basis and compared with reference crudes refined in the United States, oil sands crudes could result in an increase in incremental GHG emissions.

As others have pointed out, this creates a very possible loophole because what this phrasing really says is that while tars sands development itself will definitely increase carbon emissions, the mere building of the Keystone XL pipeline will not.

If interpreted this way by the State Department, and if Obama follows their guidance as he suggested he will, then the fate of Alberta’s “carbon bomb” has now been entrusted to nuanced legal interpretations of a highly controversial impact study.

And as Politico reports, proponents of the pipeline were in a mostly celebratory mood.

The company building the pipeline and many of its top supporters in Congress saw Obama’s remarks as highly encouraging.

Keystone builder TransCanada said in a statement that it’s “pleased with the President’s guidance to the State Department, as the almost five-year review of the project has already repeatedly found that these criteria are satisfied.” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) said Obama’s remarks were “a positive step forward toward getting this project built, creating jobs and decreasing our dependence on foreign sources of oil.” And a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said “the standard the president set today should lead to speedy approval of the Keystone pipeline.”

And despite the hopes and desires of environmentalists, even as they once again enjoyed his rhetorical gifts, Obama just might.

When and if he does it will be TransCanada–as tar sands oil snakes its way from Alberta to the Gulf coast for export–who will be producing the next batch of ‘thank you’ ads for the president.

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(Photo: Courage to Resist Website)San Francisco Pride is welcoming military recruiters to this massive June 30th LGBTQ celebration, the media exposed Tuesday. The revelation comes just weeks after the Pride board officially dumped Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning as the Grand Marshal.

The national guard will join the celebration’s vast corporate and bank sponsors–including AT&T and Bank of America–by setting up recruiting booths. This marks the first time the military will formally recruit at Pride since ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was overturned in 2011.

When the revelations of military recruiters were made public, LGBTQ and anti-militarist groups were already mobilizing against the SF Pride board’s controversial dethroning of Bradley Manning as the parade’s Grand Marshal.

The news that military recruiters will be in full-force is a further blow to many LGBTQ organizers and Manning supporters calling for Pride to take a stand against U.S.-led wars.

“It’s shocking, but not surprising,” declared Clare Bayard, San Francisco queer organizer on issues of racism, militarism, and war with Catalyst Project. “Since the community response was so loud and clear when Pride threw Bradley Manning under the bus, they’ve found another way to reassert their role in trying to defang a queer liberation movement with a long history of challenging militarism.”

“I don’t want the military at Pride,” said Stephen Funk, queer former service member who refused deployment to Iraq on ethical grounds and is an active supporter of Bradley Manning and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “This shows who is really controlling Pride. Now the gay rights movement you see on the media is not anti-war, they are all about assimilation.”

In early June, the SF Pride board announced their final decision to exclude Manning from this honor after he was initially named Grand Marshal April 26th. This followed public trashing of Manning from the board, including charges that he is a traitor.

This provoked uproar from many LGBTQ organizers who hail the former Army private as a ‘queer hero’ for leaking and exposing U.S. war crimes and human rights abuses. Manning’s supporters organized protests, open letters, and a massive community meeting attended by over one hundred calling for the board to reinstate this honor.

While the Pride board ultimately decided to strip manning’s title, LGBTQ and veterans groups announced Tuesday that they will honor the whistle blower as ‘Community’ Grand Marshal in their own Pride contingent, expected to draw hundreds. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, will be numbered among them.

Manning supporters have garnered widespread support for this action, including pledges from the SF dyke and trans marches–during the same weekend as Pride–that they will honor Manning.

“There’s been an outpouring of support for Bradley Manning in the LGBTQ community, not only in San Francisco but nationally and internationally, since Pride’s leadership made its divisive decision to overturn his election as Grand Marshal,” declared former SF Pride Grand Marshal Joey Cain.

“It makes me feel very upset that the military would be welcome but Bradley Manning isn’t,” bemoaned Michael Thurman– organizer with Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist–as he made picket signs for upcoming actions to hold Pride accountable. “That shows how militarized the decision-making process is.”

Many in LGBTQ communities charge that Pride only represents the interests of the most elite U.S. gays.

“Look at this week with the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act and Indian Child Welfare Act, and the Texas legislature’s attempt to slash abortion rights,” declared Bayard. “Pride has long positioned itself as an arm of funneling white gays with money away from uniting with our multiracial, cross-class, many-gendered queer family with interests way past marriage, towards joining up with conservative white electoral agendas.”

Organizers vow that they will not let the Pride’s embrace of military recruiters stop them from sending a loud anti-war and anti-militarist message this weekend. Bayard insists:

The Pride committee would love nothing more than for us to spend the weekend celebrating the defeat of DOMA and Prop 8. We don’t want to trade ‘tolerance’ and the opportunity to enlist in occupation forces for our deeply held values of justice and building healthy communities that meet everyone’s needs and celebrate everyone’s gift.

Queers need other routes besides joining the military to be accepted and loved. Trashing Bradley Manning and inviting in the military is a clear message about where they want to position us, but we refuse to be used as a wedge.

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Egypt’s embattled President Morsi appeared to be clinging to power in his televised address Wednesday evening, in which he refused widespread calls for his resignation while vowing to make ‘quick’ reforms.

A boy holds a defaced poster of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi that reads, “Tamarod, Rebel June 30, It’s the End of (the) Brotherhood’s role” outside his family’s tent in front of the Ministry of Defense in Cairo June 25, 2013. (Photo: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ Reuters) A broad coalition of anti-Morsi demonstrators swarmed Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demanding the quick ouster of a president charged with hoarding power and steamrolling human rights and democracy.

Egyptian state media also depicted protesters gathered outside of Cairo’s defense ministry flying signs that demand: ‘Out!”

Soldiers and military vehicles were deployed throughout Cairo after Egypt’s massive Army vowed Sunday it would intervene if Egypt’s ‘unrest’ continues.

State media is reporting clashes between the liberal factions and Morsi supporters. An estimated 160 people were reported injured in the city of Mansoura and Reuters reports, “rival factions were on the streets of other nearby towns in the Nile Delta as night fell. Crowds were also gathering in Cairo, in separate locations.”

Other media outlets are reporting two deaths and as many as 230 injuries as the tension continues to mount between those calling for President Mohamed Morsi’s resignation and others who back the controversial regime.

Reuters continues: 

Fears of a violent stand-off in the streets between Morsi’s Islamist supporters and a broad coalition of the disaffected have led people to stock up on food. Long lines of cars outside fuel stations have snarled roads in Cairo and other cities. 

Wednesday’s speech and skirmish come ahead of widespread anti-government protests scheduled for June 30, for which Egypt’s military is preparing for by bringing in “reinforcements of troops and armor to bases near Egyptian cities,” Al Jazeera reports.

The protests have been organized by the Tamarod (‘Rebel’) petition campaign who, in a run up to the demonstrations, is holding rallies inside Cairo’s metro station. The group is calling for Morsi’s resignation followed by ‘snap elections’ and is hoping to collect 15 million signatures for a petition in support of a vote of no confidence in the leader, who marks his first year in office on Sunday.

“The campaign accuses Morsi, who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, of ‘failing to implement policies to improve the life of ordinary people,’ citing Egypt’s increasingly dire economic situation,” Ahram Online reports.

Critics charge that the Morsi regime’s quick embrace of the neoliberal economic policies of the Mubarak administration is responsible for the current energy and food crisis gripping the country.

Morsi’s regime has been broadly condemned for frequent and often fatal attacks on the country’s continuing mobilizations. Protesters have expressed fear of a massive Army and police crackdown on the planned June 30th protests.

The Morsi Administration and Egyptian Army are backed by the Obama Administration, with $1.3 billion per year given directly in military aid to the powerful and famously secretive Egyptian Army, estimated to control 40% of the economy.

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People in Vancouver, Canada, hol a demonstration in support of First Nations. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has blamed the United States for tensions in his country by allowing the opening of a political office for Taliban militants in the Qatari capital Doha.

Karzai made the remark on Wednesday in a meeting with Afghan tribal elders at his presidential palace.

He said the opening of the Taliban office in Doha will cause ethnic tensions in Afghanistan.

His comments drew opposition from US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan James Dobbins, who claimed the Taliban office serves to restore peace in Afghanistan.

Dobbins visited Kabul on Monday to ease recent tensions over the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar.

The tension between Washington and Kabul broke out on June 18, when the Taliban militant group opened its new political office in Doha under the name of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The Afghan government has reacted angrily to the opening of the office, which is backed by the United States.

Kabul has also suspended negotiations with Washington on the nature of US presence in Afghanistan after foreign troops leave the country in 2014.

Afghanistan says

The Afghan government, which says it wants to lead any talks with militants, has demanded a full explanation as to how the US and Qatar allowed the Taliban to raise its flag over its office in Doha.

Å“The manner in which the office was established was in clear breach of the principles and terms of references agreed with us by the US government,” Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai said on Sunday.

Senior Afghan officials in Kabul say the Taliban militants will be able to use the office to raise funds for their campaign in Afghanistan.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 as part of Washingtonâ„¢s so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but after almost 12 years, insecurity remains across the country.

The increasing number of military casualties in Afghanistan has caused widespread anger in the US and other NATO member states, undermining public support for the Afghan war.

MN/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

There’s a move on to prohibit Washington’s football team from calling itself “Redskins,” even though a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision said that it has that right. Now the name change advocates are turning to the political arena and intimidation. The NCAA has already banned the University of North Dakota from calling its football team the “Fighting Sioux.”

This is the classic method of busybodies and tyrants; they start out with something trivial or small and then magnify and extend it. If these people are successful in banning the use of Indian names for football teams, you can bet the rent money that won’t end their agenda. Our military has a number of fighting aircraft named with what busybodies and tyrants might consider racial slights, such as the Apache, Iroquois, Kiowa, Lakota and Mescalero. We also have military aircraft named after animals, such as the Eagle, Falcon, Raptor, Cobra and Dolphin. The people fighting against the Redskins name might form a coalition with the PETA animal rights kooks to ban the use of animal names.

Another example of the strategy of starting out small is that of the tobacco zealots. In 1965, in the name of health, tobacco zealots successfully got Congress to enact the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. A few years later, they were successful in getting a complete smoking ban on planes, and that success emboldened them to seek many other bans. The issue here is not smoking but tyrant strategy. Suppose that in 1965, the tobacco tyrants demanded that Congress enact a law banning smoking in bars, in workplaces, in restaurants, in apartments, within 25 feet of entrances, in ballparks, on beaches, on sidewalks and in other places. Had they revealed and demanded their full agenda back in 1965, there would have been so much resistance that they wouldn’t have gotten anything. By the way, much of their later success was a result of a bogus Environmental Protection Agency study on secondhand smoke. I’d like to hear whether EPA scientists are willing to declare that people can die from secondhand smoke at a beach, on a sidewalk, in a park or within 25 feet of a building.

During the legislative and subsequent state ratification debates over the 16th Amendment – which established the income tax – the political task of overturning the Constitution’s prohibition of such tax was considerably eased by political promises that any income tax levied would fall upon only the wealthiest 3 to 5 percent of the population. Most Americans paid no federal income tax, and those earning $500,000 or more paid only 7 percent. In 1913, only 358,000 Americans filed 1040 forms, compared with today’s 140 million. That’s the rope-a-dope strategy. To get the votes of the masses, politicians start out small and exploit the politics of envy by promising that only the rich will be taxed.

In 1898, Congress imposed a temporary federal excise tax on telephones as a revenue measure during the Spanish-American War. At that time, only the rich owned phones. Soon nearly all Americans owned phones. Both the rich and the poor paid the telephone excise tax. Congress repealed this “temporary” Spanish-American War tax in 2006. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

The Tax Reform Act of 1969, called the alternative minimum tax, was created to raise revenue from 155 “rich” Americans who legally avoided federal income taxes by buying tax-free municipal bonds. Today more than 4 million Americans are hit by the AMT, and most of them hardly qualify as rich.

Here’s another rope-a-dope just beginning. The National Transportation Safety Board recently recommended that states reduce the allowable blood alcohol content by more than a third – to 0.05 percent, as opposed to today’s 0.08 percent. The NTSB is calling it a recommendation just to test the waters. If the board doesn’t see resistance, its next move will be to threaten noncomplying states with a cutoff of highway construction funds. Setting the legal limit at 0.05 percent is not these people’s end objective. Their end objective is to outlaw any amount of alcohol in the blood while one is driving.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

This article originally appeared on: The New American

With the Senate apparently within days or hours of passing the so-called Gang of Eight’s immigration reform bill, one opponent of that bill has offered an amendment to that legislation that would prevent it from becoming another tool of totalitarianism.

On June 20, Senator Rand Paul (shown, R-Ky.) announced on his website that he would introduce the Protect Our Privacy Act as an amendment to S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.

According to Paul, his measure would prohibit the issuance of a national ID card. The constitutionally consistent freshman senator believes that his proposed amendment would push back against the assault on liberty being perpetrated by the Obama administration.

“A National ID card violates our right to privacy by helping to consolidate data and facilitate the government in the tracking of individuals. President Ronald Reagan opposed this idea, as did President Bill Clinton. They believed, as I do, that American citizens should not be forced to carry around a National Identification Card as a condition of citizenship, because the card offends any reasonable basic concept of freedom. While identifying and documenting immigrants is necessary for proper reform, implementing a mandatory identification registry for all citizens is not,” Paul said.

Senator Paul’s statement provides the following points relating to the protections proposed by his amendment.

The Protect Our Privacy Act does the following:

– Prohibits the Department of Homeland Security from interpreting the immigration reform bill to permit a national identification card or system;

– Prohibits the Federal or State government from requiring photographs or biometric information without probable cause;

– Prevents the provision in the bill titled “Photo Tool” from allowing the government to force all citizens to provide a photo;

– Prohibits a “biometric social security card” for citizens; and,

– Forbids a “de facto national registry of citizens.”

In an op-ed published by Politico, Senator Paul explained his impending “no” vote on the immigration overhaul:

I will be voting no on the Senate’s Gang of Eight immigration bill, because the legislation does not secure the border first.

I think we desperately need immigration reform. Unfortunately, this legislation does not give us serious reform.

Of paramount concern is what to do with the 12 million people currently residing in the U.S. who are in legal limbo: No one is seriously contemplating they leave, but conservatives believe normalizing their status should be dependent on border security first.

Any immigration reform must expand legal immigration and the work visa program, so we don’t find another 12 million undocumented workers here a decade from now. The Gang of Eight bill actually decreases the number of agricultural workers visas. If work visas are less than what the market demands, the workers will come illegally and we’re right back where we started.

On May 24, Senator Paul published a similar opinion piece in the Washington Times. Paul wrote:

The controversial immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee this week is expected to be considered by the Senate in June. Many see measures contained in this bill, such as a strong E-Verify and a “photo tool,” as a means to control unlawful immigrants’ access to unlawful employment. I worry that they go too far.

I think there are better ideas that err on the side of individual privacy while still strengthening our borders. We should scrap a national identification database and pass immigration reform that secures the border, expands existing work-visa programs and prevents noncitizens from access to welfare. These simple ideas will eliminate the perceived need for an invasive worker-verification system and a government citizenship database.

I am against the idea that American citizens should be forced to carry around a National Identification Card as a condition of citizenship. I worry that the Senate is working to consider a series of little-noticed provisions in comprehensive immigration reform that may provide a pathway to a national ID card for all individuals present in the United States – citizens and noncitizens. These draconian ideas would simply give government too much power.

Forcing Americans to carry around an identification card to affirmatively prove citizenship offends our basic concept of freedom. Wanting to avoid a “papers please” culture in our country is also why conservatives oppose federal universal gun background checks. We oppose such measures not because we don’t believe in common-sense rules or regulation – but because we are wary of giving the federal government this kind of centralized power over our daily lives.

I am against government lists of those who own or have transferred a firearm for the same reason I oppose any pathway to a national ID. I don’t think that government should have the awesome power of monitoring the legal activities of American citizens. That is not a proper role of the federal government – or any level of government, for that matter.

As with his other amendments to the immigration bill, Paul is blocking every effort by his colleagues in Congress to deprive Americans of their most basic civil rights as protected by the Constitution.

In the Politico letter, Senator Paul places the onus for real immigration reform on the shoulders of the House of Representatives.

The authors of the current bill gloss over these core immigration issues by saying they will simply put more people on the border. This is like using a Band-Aid to cure a cold, and further shows Washington’s ignorance of the deep systematic flaws that have contributed to our immigration dilemma.

It is now up to the House to champion real immigration reform. If we’re going to fix our broken borders and have an overhaul of the system verifiable by Congress, the House will have to lead the way.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday, June 25, that House Republicans “feel no pressure to act quickly” on the immigration issue.

“We have a minority of the minority in the Senate voting for this bill,” the Times quotes Representative Tom Cole (R-Okla.), referring to the 15 members of the GOP likely to vote in favor of the measure when the Senate votes this week.

“That’s not going to put a lot of pressure on the majority of the majority in the House,” Cole said, as reported by the Times.

Finally, as The New American has repeatedly pointed out throughout the debate on the immigration issue over the past few years, Congress is not empowered by the Constitution to legislate in the arena of immigration.

Nearly the entire universe of authority delegated to the Congress of the United States is contained with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Not one of the roughly 20 powers listed authorizes Congress at all, not to mention exclusively, to establish immigration policy.

The closest the Constitution comes to placing anything even incidentally related to immigration within the bailiwick of Congress is found in the clause of Article I, Section 8 that empowers Congress to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.”

That’s it. There is no other mention of immigration in the text of the Constitution. Somehow, though, the enemies of state sovereignty and enumerated powers have extrapolated from that scant reference to “naturalization” the exclusive and unimpeachable right to legislate in the arena of immigration.

The difference between immigration and naturalization is one of definition. Immigration is the act of coming to a country of which one is not a native.

Naturalization, however, is defined as the conference upon an alien of the rights and privileges of a citizen. It is difficult to understand how so many lawyers, judges, and legislators (most of whom are/were lawyers) can innocently confuse these two terms.

Before the states sent delegates to a convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to amend the Articles of Confederation (the result of which was the Constitution), they had years of experience policing their sovereign borders, setting rules governing the means by which one could lawfully enter the state. That is to say, they were policing the immigration of aliens, an act undeniably within their right as a sovereign government.

On not one single occasion during that summer of 1787 did any one of the 55 (on and off) representatives of the 13 states suggest the endowment of the new federal government with the authority to set immigration policy for the entire nation. That is significant. Not even the most strident advocate of a powerful national government ever proposed granting the power in question to the central authority.

The Senate will likely vote on the immigration bill this week.

Photo of Sen. Rand Paul: 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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The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2014 was recently passed by the House of Representatives, and one member of Congress wants to make sure that civilian disarmament is not among the programs included in the defense bill.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) offered an amendment to the NDAA (HR 1960) that would prohibit federal funding for the implementation of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) for one year.

Remarkably, the House unanimously passed Kelly’s amendment, and it was included in the final passage of the NDAA. Subsequently, Kelly voted in favor of the NDAA.

In support of his bill, Kelly made the following remarks from the floor of the House of Representatives:

Over the last year, I have been joined by over 140 bipartisan members of this body to express deep concerns with the ATT and to urge its rejection.

First, the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty undermines our Second Amendment rights by omitting the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms and imposing a national “responsibility” to prevent firearms “diversion,” thus opening the door to new gun control measures.

Secondly, the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty undermines our sovereignty by imposing vague, readily politicized requirements on the United States and inviting United Nations-led investigations into what U.S. policy makers knew or should have known regarding arms transfers that allegedly violate the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

Ultimately, the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty will stop the good from doing good without stopping the bad from doing bad. As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, the U.S. maintains the “gold standard” of arms export controls. My amendment upholds our current policies as well as our enduring values.

Since March, when the Obama administration ordered the U.S. delegation to the UN to support passage of the Arms Trade Treaty, Representative Kelly has been at the vanguard of congressional opposition to the global gun grab.

On March 15, 2013, Kelly offered a concurrent resolution proclaiming the House’s opposition to the treaty. The non-binding measure has 146 cosponsors in the House and 35 on the Senate side.

Although not unanimously, the Senate has voted to prevent enforcement of the Arms Trade Treaty, as well.

About a week after Kelly introduced his resolution in the House, the Senate approved a measure “to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.”

By a vote of 53-46, the Senate passed the amendment to the budget bill sponsored by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).

“We’re negotiating a treaty that cedes our authority to have trade agreements with our allies in terms of trading arms,” Inhofe said before the vote on his amendment. “This is probably the last time this year that you’ll be able to vote for your Second Amendment rights.”

A resolution of similar intent sponsored by Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) has languished since March waiting for action by 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.

Moran’s legislation is nearly identical to the amendment sponsored last week by Representative Kelly.

Both the Moran and Kelly resolutions declare that the Arms Trade Treaty “poses significant risks to the national security, foreign policy, and economic interests of the United States as well as to the constitutional rights of United States citizens and United States sovereignty.”

The measures also points out that the UN gun grab “fails to expressly recognize the fundamental, individual right to keep and to bear arms and the individual right of personal self-defense, as well as the legitimacy of hunting, sports shooting, and other lawful activities pertaining to the private ownership of firearms and related materials, and thus risks infringing on freedoms protected by the Second Amendment.”

On May 30, Kelly issued a statement 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) – and 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.

To say that the Arms Trade Treaty is not at all in America’s interest is an understatement.

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 ATT opened for national signatures on June 3, 2013, and will become law for signatory nations 90 days after the 50th country has ratified the treaty.

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.

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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This article originally appeared on: The New American

Lawmakers have now introduced bills in both houses of Congress aimed at restraining President Obama and his lawless intervention in Syria on behalf of jihadist rebels, many of whom are openly fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda while massacring Christians and other minorities. If the legislation becomes law, it would make any military action – including the ongoing provision of weapons and training to opposition forces by the administration – contingent on congressional approval.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution already grants war powers to Congress, stating that wars must be declared by lawmakers – not the president. Obama, however, like previous administrations, has a long track record of ignoring his oath of office in virtually every field. In Libya, for example, he even launched an unconstitutional war to overthrow dictator Moammar Gadhafi without so much as a semblance of permission from Congress.

While the U.S. government has been funding opposition forces in Syria since long before open warfare began, the president has stepped up that assistance, offering everything from training and money to military weapons. Obama’s “regime change” operation, backed by the highest echelons of the global establishment, recently culminated with a deeply unpopular announcement this month that the administration would be openly supplying arms and other military aid to rebel forces. Having U.S. troops set up a “no-fly zone” is also being considered.      

For some members of Congress, enough is enough. Murmurs about impeaching Obama over his unlawful war scheming have even been popping up since last year on both sides of the aisle. Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) even introduced a resolution stating that the president’s use of military force without congressional permission constitutes an impeachable offense. After the decision to openly arm rebel forces was announced earlier this month, though, lawmakers in both parties and in both houses of Congress are taking action.

In the Senate, a bipartisan coalition of four senators introduced a bill last week to make any administration involvement in the Syrian conflict contingent on congressional approval. Sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the legislation would prohibit any military support for warring factions in Syria unless Congress specifically approves.

“The president’s unilateral decision to arm Syrian rebels is incredibly disturbing, considering what little we know about whom we are arming,” said Sen. Paul. The liberty-minded Republican with potential presidential aspirations, who recently blasted some of his Senate colleagues for voting to support weapons transfers to al-Qaeda allies, has been a leading critic of lawless foreign interventionism since his election.

“Engaging in yet another conflict in the Middle East with no vote or congressional oversight compounds the severity of this situation,” Paul continued. “The American people deserve real deliberation by their elected officials before we send arms to a region rife with extremists who seek to threaten the U.S. and her allies.” Sen. Lee, another leading proponent of liberty in Congress, expressed similar concerns.

More recently, Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) announced Tuesday the introduction of the “Congressional Accountability and Oversight in Syria Act,” a similar piece of legislation containing much of the same language. The goal, according to the two congressmen, is also to prohibit the administration from taking military action in Syria without explicit permission from Congress.

“What is the goal of providing weapons to the rebels?” asked Rep. Rooney in a statement about the legislation. “We know that the rebels have been infiltrated by al Qaeda and some of the same people we’ve been fighting for the last 10 years. Senior administration officials have told me they can’t give any assurance that our weapons won’t wind up in the hands of al Qaeda. So what’s our endgame?”

Indeed, as The New American has documented for well over a year, rebel ranks are infested with al-Qaeda-linked terrorists and violent jihadists from across the Middle East. The most effective fighting force in Syria, the al Nusra front, officially merged with the terror group earlier this year. Separately, opposition forces have come under fire for using chemical weapons, eating body organs out of Syrian troops, massacring civilians, firing on protesters, ethnic cleansing of minorities, and more.

“If the President wants to take us into Syria, he needs to come to Congress and convince us,” continued Rep. Rooney, who serves on the House Intelligence and Appropriations committees. “The President needs to make a convincing case that this is in our national security interest, and he needs to lay out a clear and comprehensive mission, including an exit strategy. He hasn’t done that yet.”

According to an e-mail survey of around 4,500 people conducted by Rep. Rooney’s office, his constituents – like most Americans – overwhelmingly agree that the United States should steer clear of the conflict in Syria. Almost 84 percent of respondents, for example, oppose sending arms to rebel forces. A stunning 97.4 percent said they did not support putting American troops on the ground. 

It is not the first time that Rooney, who tried but failed to cut off funds for Obama’s war on Libya, has spoken out about the administration’s lawless behavior in Syria. Last year, after then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the administration would seek “international permission” from the UN and NATO, instead of congressional approval to wage war on the Syrian regime, the Florida congressman issued a strongly worded statement demanding that Obama come to Congress.

“Once again, we’re seeing the Obama administration ignore the Constitution, the War Powers Act, and the role of Congress in determining when this country goes to war,” said Rooney, an Army captain. “It’s an insult to the American people for the Secretary of Defense to come before a Senate committee and say that the administration will seek ‘international permission’ to spend American resources and potentially put American lives on the line in Syria, but won’t consult with Congress.… The founders were clear not to leave this decision in the hands of one man, and rightfully so.”

The new five-page legislation, which cites older U.S. laws and United Nations efforts in Syria, expresses the sense of Congress that all sides and factions in the war should stop the violence. If enacted, it would prohibit any federal agency from providing aid to any group, movement, or individual unless and until the administration receives specific congressional authorization. The only exception, assuming the administration complies, would be humanitarian aid. 

According to cosponsor Rep. McCaul, who serves as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, the bill is also aimed at ensuring U.S. national security. Like other lawmakers from both parties and virtually every serious analyst in the world, the congressman from Texas has serious concerns about opposition forces in Syria and their well-documented links to terrorist groups.

“Arming the rebels in Syria potentially places those weapons into the hands of the Islamist extremists who have infiltrated their ranks and who continue to plot against the United States and our interests abroad,” Rep. McCaul said in a statement. “If the president believes American involvement in Syria is necessary, he will have to present a convincing plan to the Congress and make the case that providing assistance to Syrian opposition forces would not pose a national security threat to the United States.”

On the other side of the debate are establishment forces in both parties – especially RINO Republicans, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the latter of whom is currently embroiled in scandal after posing for pictures with rebel kidnappers in Syria. Among the warmongering wing of both parties, lawmakers are insisting that Obama get the U.S. government even deeper into the bloody Syrian conflict, which some analysts have suggested could become a regional or even global war.

Already, an estimated 100,000 people have been killed in the fighting, with over a million having fled the country so far. Fueled largely by foreign powers – the Obama administration, Sunni Arab dictators, al-Qaeda, and some European governments on one side; the Iranian regime, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Hezbollah on the other – the brutal war is expected to continue raging. Meanwhile, innocent civilians, especially Christians and Shia Muslims, are paying the steepest price.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at
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This article originally appeared on: The New American

On June 20, as the nation waited for a ruling from the Supreme Court on a pair of cases that could change how Americans view marriage, a group of over 200 Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox clergy and Christian leaders released a signed pledge vowing to “stand in solidarity to defend marriage and the family and society founded upon them. The “Marriage Solidarity Statement,” drafted by Keith Fournier, editor of Catholic Online, and Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel Action, acknowledges that while there are differences between the signers on some significant matters of religious doctrine and practice, “on the matter of marriage, we stand in solidarity.” The pledge was vetted among hundreds of pastors and Christian leaders across the nation, and was ultimately signed by a group of clergy and leaders who arguably represent tens of millions of Christians across America.

“As a nation, we have lost our moral compass,” the Christian leaders declare in their solemn pledge. “As a result, we are losing true freedom. We affirm together that there is a moral basis to a free society. Though we live in a secular society, together we reject relativism and secularism.”

They go on to affirm that “marriage and family have been inscribed by the Divine Architect into the order of creation. Marriage is ontologically between one man and one woman, ordered toward the union of the spouses, open to children and formative of family. Family is the first vital cell of society; the first church, first school, first hospital, first economy, first government and first mediating institution of our social order. The future of a free and healthy society passes through marriage and the family.”

While noting that the Supreme Court is poised to render verdicts on the future of two major marriage cases – Proposition 8 in California and the federal Defense of Marriage Act – the leaders affirm that marriage predates government and stands above the judgments and mandates of civil institutions, including the U.S. Supreme Court. “Redefining the very institution of marriage is improper and outside the authority of the State,” the pledge reads. “The Supreme Court has no authority to redefine marriage.”

Should the High Court become “the tool by which marriage is redefined in the positive law of this nation,” the statement continues, “the precedent established will leave no room for any limitation on what can constitute such a redefined notion of marriage. Conferring a moral and legal equivalency to same-sex couples by legislative or judicial fiat also sends the message that children do not need a mother and a father. It undermines their fundamental rights and threatens their security, stability, and future.”

The statement recalls that in its 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey abortion ruling, the High Court acknowledged that its power is ultimately based upon the legitimacy of its decisions in the eyes of the nation’s citizens. “If the Supreme Court were to issue a decision that redefined marriage or provided a precedent on which to build an argument to redefine marriage,” the statement read, “the Supreme Court will thereby undermine its legitimacy. The Court will significantly decrease its credibility and impair the role it has assumed for itself as a moral authority. It will be acting beyond its proper constitutional role and contrary to the Natural Moral Law which transcends religions, culture, and time.”

“As Christians united together in defense of marriage,” conclude the clergy, “we pray that this will not happen. But, make no mistake about our resolve. While there are many things we can endure, redefining marriage is so fundamental to the natural order and the true common good that this is the line we must draw and one we cannot and will not cross.”

Keith Fournier, one of the statement’s principal architects, noted that the institution of marriage between a man and a woman predates the Christian Church. “Though affirmed, fulfilled, and elevated by Christian teaching, the truth that marriage can exist only between one man and one woman is not based on religion or revelation alone, but on the Natural Moral Law, written on the human heart and discernible through the exercise of reason,” he said. “Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they manufacture a right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage. Experience and history have shown us that if the government redefines marriage to grant a legal equivalency to same-sex couples, that same government will then enforce such an action with the police power of the State. This will bring about an inevitable collision with religious freedom and conscience rights and does not serve the common good of society.”

Among the high-profile clergy and Christian leaders signing on to the marriage statement were: Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association; Gary Bauer, president of American Values; Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America; Al Kresta, president of Ave Maria Radio; Father Frank Pavone, president of Priests for Life; and world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson.

Click Here to read the statement in full and for a list of all the signers.

This article originally appeared on: The New American

When the fight started against Agenda 21, those of us working to expose it were largely ignored by the main stream media and even the established Conservative movement and its media. Too far out there, they said, to be taken seriously.
 
Then, as more and more Americans began to experience the dire effects of Sustainable Development in their daily lives, suddenly our message began to take hold. Today, thousands of Americans have taken up the fight. And anti-Agenda 21 activists are storming planning meetings, demanding answers. State legislatures and even some county and city governments are passing legislation against it. It seems the Agenda 21 fight is everywhere.
 
So, now, proponents of the Sustainable Development policy are alarmed and working feverishly to counter our claims that such controls over local development and energy policy have their roots in international policy; in particular, our claims that these planning policies come from the UN’s Agenda 21 that was introduced to the world at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
 
Their most often-used description of Agenda 21 is an “innocuous, 20-year-old document that has no enforcement power.” Continuously we hear that local planning programs, especially from such groups like the American Planning Association (APA), have no connection to Agenda 21 or the UN. It’s all local – or as the APA says in its document, “Glossary for the Public,” “There is no hidden agenda.” In its “Agenda 21: Myths and Facts” document found on the APA website, the group goes to extreme measures to distance itself and its policies from Agenda 21, specifically saying “The American Planning Association has no affiliation regarding any policy goals and recommendations of the UN.”
 
Well, then it would be interesting to hear the APA explain information found in one of its own documents from 1994. The document was an APA newsletter to its members in Northern California (San Francisco Area). The article was a commentary entitled “How Sustainable Is Our Planning?” by Robert Odland. It was written just two years after the UN Earth Summit at which Agenda 21 was first introduced to the world. The document can be viewed here.
 
The fifth paragraph of the article says, “Vice President Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, addressed many of the general issues of sustainability. Within the past year, the President’s Council on Sustainable Development has been organized to develop recommendations for incorporating sustainability into the federal government. Also, various groups have been formed to implement Agenda 21, a comprehensive blueprint for sustainable development that was adopted at the recent UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro (the “Earth Summit.”)   
 
In one paragraph, this document brings together the APA, Agenda 21, the UN’s Earth Summit, Al Gore, Sustainable Development, the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, and NGO groups with the mission of implementing Agenda 21 and the description of Agenda 21 as a “comprehensive Blueprint” for Sustainable Planning. It sounds like it came verbatim from one of my speeches!
 
A couple of paragraphs higher in the article, it says, “A common misconception is that sustainability is synonymous with self-sufficiency; on the contrary, sustainability must recognize the interconnections between different levels of societal structure.” That “societal structure” is “social justice,” as described in Agenda 21. A visit to the PlannersNetwork.org, of which the APA is a member, will find in its Statement of Principles this quote: “We believe planning should be a tool for allocating resources … and eliminating the great inequalities of wealth and power in our society … because the free market has proven incapable of doing this.”
 
The United Nations blatantly advocates that Capitalism and private property rights are not sustainable and pose the single greatest threat to the world’s ecosystem and social equity. And, while sometimes using different words, the APA is helping communities across the nation enforce these ideas, while swearing it is all a local idea, designed from local input.  
 
As George Orwell masterfully put it in his epic novel Animal Farm, it’s become difficult to see the difference between the pigs and the farmers – or the APA and the UN.
 
Sustainable Development is not implemented in the open, as the APA claims, but in back rooms filled with the proper NGO organizations, which surround your elected officials and pressures their actions. In that way it is changing our American society and form of government, making government more powerful and more invasive in our daily lives. Sustainability is anti-free enterprise, anti-private property, and anti-individual – and that’s why we oppose it.

View this article on our web site: http://americanpolicy.org/2013/06/05/here-it-is-the-smoking-gun/
Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence. Go to americanpolicy.org for more information

Tom DeWeese’s new book is now on Amazon! Click here for more information

This article originally appeared on: The New American

A broad coalition of anti-Morsi demonstrators have swarmed Cairo’s Tahrir Square calling for the President’s resignation ahead of a televised address Wednesday evening.

A boy holds a defaced poster of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi that reads, “Tamarod, Rebel June 30, It’s the End of (the) Brotherhood’s role” outside his family’s tent in front of the Ministry of Defense in Cairo June 25, 2013. (Photo: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ Reuters) Ahead of the speech, state media is reporting clashes between the liberal factions and Morsi supporters. An estimated 160 people were reported injured in the city of Mansoura and Reuters reports, “rival factions were on the streets of other nearby towns in the Nile Delta as night fell. Crowds were also gathering in Cairo, in separate locations.”

Other media outlets are reporting two deaths and as many as 230 injuries as the tension continues to mount between those calling for President Mohamed Morsi’s resignation and others who back the controversial regime.

Reuters continues: 

Fears of a violent stand-off in the streets between Morsi’s Islamist supporters and a broad coalition of the disaffected have led people to stock up on food. Long lines of cars outside fuel stations have snarled roads in Cairo and other cities. 

Wednesday’s speech and skirmish come ahead of widespread anti-government protests scheduled for June 30, for which Egypt’s military is preparing for by bringing in “reinforcements of troops and armor to bases near Egyptian cities,” Al Jazeera reports.

The protests have been organized by the Tamarod (‘Rebel’) petition campaign who, in a run up to the demonstrations, is holding rallies inside Cairo’s metro station. The group is calling for Morsi’s resignation followed by ‘snap elections’ and is hoping to collect 15 million signatures for a petition in support of a vote of no confidence in the leader, who marks his first year in office on Sunday.

“The campaign accuses Morsi, who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, of ‘failing to implement policies to improve the life of ordinary people,’ citing Egypt’s increasingly dire economic situation,” Ahram Online reports.

It is yet unknown what the President plans to address in the speech, which is scheduled for 9:30 PM local time, however, he has deemed it “an important speech,” and reports say that he “shows no sign” of resignation.

The Morsi administration, which has received consistent support from the Obama administration, has been widely condemned for their severe crackdown on dissenters.

You can view a live stream of the speech below:

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

In announcing the death of 78-year-old international oil trader Marc Rich (shown), commentators around the world nearly ran out of descriptors, calling him “friend,” “pioneer,” “colorful,” “great,” “controversial,” a “buccaneer,” the “King of Oil,” and the “King of Commodities.” Others weren’t so kind, calling him a “traitor,” a “tax evader,” and a “racketeer.”

His impact as a trader in the world commodity market was profound. He learned to trade oil and other commodities at the age of 20 at Phillip Brothers (now called Phibro) where he met his future partner, Pincus “Pinky” Green. After a disagreement over the amount of bonuses they were owed, Rich and Green left Phibro and started their own company, Marc Rich and Company AG, in 1974, just in time to recognize and profit from the 1973 oil embargo. By being quick on their feet and taking advantage of contacts at the highest levels of governments worldwide, Rich was able to match needs with demands and take a commission in the process.

Following the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, for instance, Rich was able to deliver oil from Iran and the Soviet Union to the apartheid regime in South Africa in exchange for uranium from Namibia, which was sold back to the USSR. As the Wall Street Journal noted: “Over two decades … Mr. Rich’s involvement in the firm … grew [it] into a global trading and mining giant.” That modest assessment missed the impact of Rich and Green. His company was sold to its management in 1994 and then merged with another commodity trading firm, Xstrata, and last year the combined companies did $214 billion in business, and employed 140,000 people worldwide.

Rich gained national attention when his trading activities caught the eye of the new U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Rudolph Giuliani, who, after investigating Rich’s activities, secured more than 50 indictments against him for fraud, racketeering, and tax evasion in September 1983. The next year, after failing to persuade Giuliani that he was innocent, Rich fled to Switzerland, where he lived out the rest of his life. On his own website, Rich defended himself:

These transactions, which also involved major U.S. oil companies … were not unlike many other transactions widely engaged in during this period. In accordance with the law and following the advice of competent counsel, payments attributable to the offshore aspects of the linked transactions were properly treated as exempt from U.S. taxes….

The U.S. Attorney investigating the matter ambitiously turned the proper reporting treatment of these complex corporate transactions – essentially a routine tax allocation dispute – into a highly politicized criminal tax and energy fraud case alleging that domestic oil revenues were improperly diverted offshore….

Shortly after the conclusion of the case against the companies in 1984, the U.S. Department of Energy itself reached conclusions supporting the manner in which the challenged transactions were originally reported.

Despite his claims of innocence, Rich’s U.S.-based affiliates paid nearly $200 million in fines, and the FBI put Rich onto its “most-wanted” list for nearly a decade. After several attempts to arrest Rich failed, the case disappeared from public view.

Until January 20, 2001, that is, when President Bill Clinton, on his last day in office, granted Rich a presidential pardon. This erupted into a scandal known as “Pardongate,” but by that time, nothing could be done, and Rich could relax at his villa (“La villa rose”) overlooking Lake Lucerne.

In a rare and revealing interview lasting more than 30 hours in November 2009, with the business editor of a Swiss newspaper, Rich spelled out just how he had managed not only to make himself extremely wealthy, but avoid being prosecuted by Giuliani. It was very simple: He bribed top government officials who helped him do “workarounds” on existing embargoes while providing espionage tips to his contacts in those governments. In essence, Rich had an enormously influential network of powerful people dependent upon him for their existence and their financial well-being.

Said interviewer Daniel Ammann, “The biggest advantage of Marc Rich and his company is that they were on the spot. They weren’t dealing from the U.S. or Switzerland. They were on the spot.” He added:

Let’s say Iran after the 1979 revolution. They were there. In Angola, Cuba, Jamaica, South Africa. There were always his people working with the local authorities. The commodity trade is often done by governments so they really had the best contacts imaginable.

When Rich was paying big bribes to buy and sell the stores of commodities from entire nations, he made sure he was paying off all the right people and depositing the money into all the right offshore bank accounts for those people, all the time.

This sheds light on Clinton’s defense of his pardon of Rich when he said he was influenced by pleas for clemency from Ehud Barak, Israel’s former prime minister and Shimon Peres, then (and now) the president of Israel. During the oil embargo following the hostage crisis, it was Rich who was able to sell embargoed Iranian oil to its enemy, Israel. In such a crisis, enemies become friends, and Rich’s successful providing of oil to Israel was remembered by his friends. Explained Amman:

Rich was the very needed and useful intermediary. He was the one who brought their oil to the customer and converted it into foreign currencies. I really think they needed him as much as he needed them. This is sort of the principle of trading.

Of course, the fact that Denise Rich, Rich’s wealthy socialist wife, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Clinton library fund and to Hillary Clinton’s run for the senate didn’t hurt, either.

Rich was indeed all of the descriptors offered by commentators around the world at the news of his death from a stroke in Lucerne at age 78. Rich was a major player. All he did was what George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall politician, did: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” Rich just did it on a far grander scale. 

A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at
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This article originally appeared on: The New American

File photo shows soldiers guarding an oil production facility in South Sudan on January 29, 2012.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The EPIX cable television channel will air the documentary TWA Flight 800 on July 17, a video that claims the official investigation over the 1996 airline disaster needs to be reopened because of new evidence. The New York-to-Paris flight exploded less than two minutes after take-off, killing all 230 passengers and crew aboard the plane.

The official National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation concluded that the explosion of TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996 was likely a result of an electrical short that ignited a fuel tank on the wing of the Boeing 747 aircraft. Fueling speculation about the TWA Flight 800 tragedy was the remarkably safe flight history of the Boeing 747 fleet; no 747 had seen a mid-wing fuel tank explode in the more than 25 years of flights before that time, or since.

The video’s producers concluded, according to Time magazine, that they have “reviewed the FAA radar evidence along with new evidence not available to the NTSB during the official investigation and [they] contend that the NTSB’s probable cause determination is erroneous and should be reconsidered.”

Aviation journalist William J. McGee at Time.com wrote that “There may be enough smoking guns to warrant reopening the investigation.” McGee concluded after watching the documentary, “Although I’m not ready to support all the film’s premises, after watching the documentary, I believe there are enough smoking guns to warrant an unbiased reexamination. What surprises me, although I suppose it shouldn’t, is the rush to slam the movie sight unseen…. It’s time that journalists and government officials alike recognize the best way to quell public doubts is to encourage further investigation. And let the results speak for themselves.”

McGee’s view is not unanimous among the documentary’s viewers. Popular Mechanics magazine published a persuasive article dismissing the documentary as “conspiracy theory.” Of course, conspiracy theories are commonplace and real, from the Mafia to Mexican drug gangs to 19 hijackers conspiring to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings on September 11, 2001. Newspaper reporters generally dismiss as “conspiracy theories” only the conspiracy theories they don’t believe in. And if anything has become apparent in recent months – as it was revealed the IRS has been targeting conservative political groups and the NSA is monitoring the telephone and Internet habits of the entire American public – is that even conspiracy theorists such as radio talk show host Alex Jones may have been insufficiently paranoid about their government’s mendacity.

One person who doesn’t believe there was a conspiracy in the Flight 800 investigation is John Goglia, one of the NTSB Board members wrote the 1999 NTSB report on Flight 800. Goglia published a defense of the NTSB findings in a Forbes magazine op-ed, stressing that “If an explosion had occurred outside the aircraft while it was in flight, aircraft damage inside the aircraft would have shown a pattern of blast fragments coming from outside the aircraft.  Aircraft debris from inside the fuselage did not contain evidence of such an explosion. Nor did the aircraft skin around the fuselage. This skin is relatively thin and easy to damage and would have shown evidence of an explosion…. While the film claims to have the radar data from five different locations surrounding the accident site, it has no radar evidence to support any missile launch, let alone two or three. In my opinion, the eyewitness accounts are less reliable than the radar data. Period.” 

Goglia stressed in his Forbes op-ed that the NTSB study had only concluded that the electrical short/fuel tank explosion was a “probable cause” explanation of the disaster: “New and substantial evidence could warrant re-opening of the investigation. I do not believe the film or petition to the NTSB raises any new evidence and its three-missiles-brought-down-the-aircraft theory is just plain ridiculous.”

The documentary’s authors – independent producer Kristina Borjesson and Tom Stalcup of the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Group – interviewed various officials who were part of the official investigation and eyewitnesses to the explosion.

In one segment, Borjesson asks former NTSB senior accident investigator Hank Hughes what his analysis of why Flight 800 exploded. Hughes’ response: 

The primary – primary conclusion was the explosive forces came from outside the airplane, not the center fuel tank.

Borjesson noted that the NTSB report ignored eyewitness accounts in its reports during an interview with the leftist Democracy Now! internet-based video channel: “The significance of it is that it is the hard evidence that has been reviewed and is being presented by the government’s own former, you know, members of the official investigation. And the other thing is, is that for the first time the eyewitnesses are brought in as a credible piece of the investigation. And as you know, in any investigation, it doesn’t matter whether it’s cops or reporters or whatever, the key to those investigations are firsthand sources, evidence and eyewitnesses.”

Co-producer Tom Stalcup stressed in the same interview that “The eyewitnesses reported something going up, heading out down towards that airplane, a long distance, colliding with it in a perpendicular fashion, detonating near or at the aircraft.”

But the skin of the aircraft left no evidence it had received a blow from a missile, according to the original 2000 NTSB report: “Only two holes had any characteristics of high-velocity penetration, and these holes also exhibited some low-velocity penetration characteristics. Both holes were about 3/16 inch in diameter… [and] on the basis of the direction of the penetrations and their locations relative to each other, it was determined that the penetrating objects for the two holes did not originate from a common point, nor did they originate from a point outside the airplane.”

The movie reportedly hypothesizes that three missiles – two from sea and one from land – may have been fired at the aircraft that had just lifted off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. Commander William Donaldson, USN (Ret.), explained the three-missile theory in an interview with The New American magazine back on December 4, 2000.

There are three major problems with the three-missile theory, however: One, it revolves around eyewitness accounts, which are traditionally unreliable in tragedies. Two, the radar evidence is inconsistent at best for missile attacks.

Finally, there’s the problem of motive. If the alleged missile attack had been an accident as a result of a Navy exercise – say with some top secret, new weapon with a minimal radar signature – three missiles from different platforms would not make any sense. And if the Navy fired three missiles at one civilian jet liner, it could not be an accident. And if it were done deliberately, why this plane? What was so special about this particular aircraft? And why never use the same assassination tactic again? Alternatively, if it had been a terrorist attack (and it would have been the most deadly terror attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11), why waste three missiles fired at the same plane? And if three missiles were fired by terrorists – and only one or two hit the plane – where is the radar track for the errant missiles? No one has claimed that there is a radar record for these alleged missiles that failed to hit the target. Nor has any terrorist group ever claimed responsibility for TWA Flight 800.

Photo of Boeing 747-100 N93119, the TWA Flight 800 aircraft, in 1982

This article originally appeared on: The New American

I went to the Drive-In in Atlanta Friday night, to celebrate a friend’s birthday, a beautiful night under an almost full moon. We watched This is The End and Fast and Furious 6, and two of us stayed for the 2:00 am screening of World War Z.

I’m not a zombie fanatic, so other than watching the Walking Dead, I had few expectations beyond the trailers that have been on TV since the Super Bowl. So I was surprised, jarred out of the movie really, when right in the middle of the narrative, Brad Pitt’s character, Gerry Lane, travels to Israel and spends more than 10 minutes in a full-on pro-Israel propaganda piece that was as corny as it was crazy.

The Times of Israel may be only slightly exaggerating when it calls this “the greatest piece of cinematic propaganda for Israel since Otto Preminger’s “Exodus.”Not only is Israel’s fanatical Wall Building proven to be justified, against the hordes of undead invaders, and not only are Jewish victimizations paraded to justify the aggrandizement of Israeli military prowess, but it’s Israel’s supposed humanism, and multicultural inclusiveness, which in the end weakens the fragile post-apocalyptic state and allows the zombies to overrun everything. Its pretty heady stuff.

The film

Spoiler Alert: In order to deconstruct this bizarre interlude into politics at the movies, I will need to reveal most of the plot points, so read on at your own risk. Apparently, WWZ is based on the book of the same name, by Max Brooks, Mel’s son. It took many years to produce, cost about 200 million to make, and has a respectable 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which ensures a wide audience and broad cultural impact for this summer blockbuster. The story centers on an unexplained global zombie pandemic that starts suddenly and engulfs the world rapidly with an onslaught of sprint-inclined zombies that rush toward their prey in huge mindless swarms. What people seem to like about the book is that it engages the global geo-politics of the zombie fall out, but it quickly reverts to neo-conservative assumptions that are played out with far less scope in the film. While the film sticks with the super fast zombies, and the compelling immersion narrative technique, its international scope is greatly curtailed, with Israel the only country besides the US that is featured in any substantive way, beyond very brief forays into Korea, Wales, and at the very end, Canada.

Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a semi-retired UN worker who reluctantly is drawn back into the field to save his family and all of humanity. His zombie-readiness credentials are listed by his agency head as field experience in the conflict zones of Kosovo, Chechnya, and especially Liberia; and with this, the racialized naturalizing of interpersonal human violence begins. After zombies suddenly swarm through New Jersey, Gerry gets his family to the safety of offshore naval vessels and then embarks on a search for patient zero, in hopes of finding a cure. In the book, this would be the outbreak of disease in China, but in the film this is South Korea, which we never really see, beyond a mostly white military unit on a US base besieged by walkers. Gerry immediately loses his South Asian medical investigator to a panic-induced, self inflicted gunshot to the head, runs several harrowing zombie gauntlets, and picks up vital intel from a deranged CIA officer who suggest that answers lie in Israel, which has somehow managed to wall itself off from the plague, and also mysteriously seems to have known in advance that it was coming. Gerry says something about “they’ve been building wall for two millennia,” and then he’s off.

Before the viewer can process whether the film is about to go down some post-9/11 Jewish conspiracy path, Gerry is landing in the Holy Land fortress-state to the site of slowly fluttering Israeli flag close-ups, triumphant marshal music, and confident IDF soldiers speaking in Hebrew, rushing around, smiling in soft filtered light close-ups. It’s the first glimpse of order, military control, and calm since the disaster has started, and its so overtly pro-military that its reminiscent of the armed forces segments in Transformers, looking almost like a commercial shot by the media wing of the armed services. [1] Filmed in Malta, the aerial and long distance wide shots do a passable job of conveying Jerusalem to an unfamiliar audience, and Gerry is soon talking to the Mossad chief, Jurgen Warmbrunn, played by a somewhat Tevya [2]-like caricature that really is redolent of Exodus.

Gerry’s already informed the audience that wall building is natural to Israel, so the reinforcement of ancient and Separation Walls is plausible, and comes as not at all veiled justification of Israel’s current and widely condemned Apartheid Wall. He questions the Mossad chief on how he knew the threat was coming, and gets a lesson in revisionist Zionist history, starting with the legitimate failure to take the threat in 30s Germany seriously, and then the same failure from similar or greater threat in 1973, when “we were almost washed into the sea,” and at the 1978 Olypmics, both of which “we did not see coming.” It’s the classic, and academically disproven myth that Israel was always on the defense in its wars, and also the conflation of Palestinians and Arabs with Nazis, as ever-present existential threats to peace-loving Jews. Then we are treated to a quasi-mystical “10th Man” theorem, in which any time there is too much consensus, a 10th man in the hierarchy must consider the impossible, as a form of protection from this repeated failure to see the inevitable next assault on the Jewish people. This throw-away theory is never returned to in the film, but briefly justifies Israel’s aggressive military posture, and suggests that others in the world must follow suit to survive the coming Armageddon.

In the book, unlike the film, Cuba is portrayed as ascendant during the disaster, due to its supposedly fascist state military control of the society. Worse, South Africa rehabilitates apartheid era tactics and leaders, at the request of Nelson Mandela himself, in an effort to stave off the zombies. It creates survivalist Bantustans for the privileged, and fake safe zones where lesser humans are fed to biters/zombies to buy time for the others to regroup. So the defense-of-apartheid trope is neither accidental nor limited to Israel. While the fate of North Korea is a mystery in the book, in the film we are told it survived by the largest feat of social engineering ever: it knocked the teeth of all 13 million inhabitants out in one day, thereby preventing zombies from biting and spreading their virus after they’ve shifted. Viva totalitarianism.

In Israel, Gerry’s Mossad tour continues, showing a society safely protected by its paranoia and militarism from the outside threat, the only known safe haven as the world crumbles. At a clearing in front of the large barrier wall, near a refugee processing military checkpoint, is a spectacle of pure multicultural fantasy, in which Hassidic and secular Jews, and Palestinians sing and dance in praise of the savior state. I think I caught a Palestinian woman singing a patriotic song in Hebrew, after she grabs the mike in the celebratory frenzy. It’s a very brazen rewrite of the violence and exclusion of Israel’s hundreds of check-points, which are turned completely on their head in the film. Talking over the din of this utopian spectacle, Jurgen explains that they are letting in every human being, in a kind of equalized Right of Return for all, because every living human is one less undead to deal with later. This is the high point of the Zionist propaganda, after which things quickly fall apart. But by now Israel’s aggression and militarism have been fully justified, and it is the only safe harbor in the apocalypse. Its apartheid walls are what save it, and others wishing to survive must copy their example (as the US is doing on its southern border in real life). And we have received heavy-handed doses of Israel’s democratic, multicultural, inclusive nature, all in defiance of any basic facts, human rights reports, or even middle of the road media coverage.

Then it comes unglued. Israel’s supposed openness and multiculturalism are what does it in! Jews and Palestinians singing together in a circle get too loud, and the zombies create zombie pyramids to overrun the walls and invade the sanctuary-state. Chaos ensues and Gerry, with his IDF escort, makes his way to the airport to try to escape alive. It’s such a straight shot at the weakness of inclusion and a (fantasy) post-racial Jewish state, that the Times of Israel, again, says: “Basically, if it weren’t for those damn peaceniks, Israel would have survived. Hey, who the hell wrote this movie, Meir Kahane?”5 And below an accompanying photo of the zombie pile breaching the Security Wall, their caption: “World War Z’s zombie pyramid. Damn peace camp.” Message received.

Zombies rush the wall in World War Z

But as the Times also states, “Okay, so Israel falls to the zombie plague, too. But… at least it lasted longer than everybody else. That has to stand for something, right?” And from here on out, Gerry has acquired an Israeli sidekick, young badass IDF soldier Segen, played by Daniella Kertesz, one of at least three credited Israeli actors in the film. As Jerusalem/Israel falls, Jewish soldiers fight valiantly with guns, grenades and hand-to-hand combat to stem the tide, and Gerry rushes to the airport. On the way, Segen is bitten and Gerry performs a quick amputation of her hand, saving her from becoming undead. They escape together, and travel to the film’s 3rd act, in the WHO offices in Wales. Segen’s now disabled body does not prevent her from continuing to fight on the way, but it is also used to symbolize her and the Israeli/Jewish state’s lesser status in the ranks of humanity, coming in second to the fully humanized and whole body of Brad Pitt’s Gerry Lane, whose full, passive, hetero-normative family awaits him in Nova Scotia, and gives him a reason to keep on fighting to save us all.

The final sequences, in the WHO offices in Wales, are much less broad in scope, as Gerry uses his cunning and superior intelligence to figure out that zombies only feed on healthy humans, and avoid those who they sense are sick, weak, or terminal, apparently following a precedent found amongst predators in nature. “Mother” nature is literally called a ruthless bitch by the Harvard doctor earlier in the film, but luckily (super) man [3] will overcome her with reason, so not to worry. And while I suspect my biologist colleagues will tell me this is not a very accurate depiction of predators and nature, it is a zombie film after all, and the pretense to realism and intellectual accuracy is just that, a pretense. But this analytic allows for a bizarre anti-environmentalism to cohabitate with the neo-conservative, macho geopolitics of the global narrative. [4]

So Gerry risks all to acquire the zombie-surrounded pathogen samples to test his hypothesis, purposely infects himself, and then powerfully is able to walk undetected through the undead, thus finding the cure to the global crisis. But remember, his fully able body is not actually sick, its just temporarily infected, before receiving the antidote to whatever typhus or dengue fever he selected for himself, and he will live on in full health after this mission.

World War Z’s racial hierarchy

Gerry’s method of survival is important because it confirms the total racial hierarchy of value established in the film’s narrative structure. While Segen fights valiantly on the plane and in the Welsh research facility, she and the Israeli social body are clearly secondary, tools to achieve a final solution and goal, but little more. Mystical, paranoid Jews developed a survival instinct and a vicious apartheid separation system, which allowed Gerry a space to visit and make observations about the undead menace that only his superior intelligence could bestow on the world. It is the US military, working with the UN, in the body of the selfless white, Aryan, Christian male, Gerry Lane, which occupies the apex of human subjectivity. This narrative is a perfect metaphor for the reality of the Jewish/Christian Zionist political relationship that it is based on.

The Times of Israel misses this entirely, of course, as their celebration of the film’s Zionism culminates in a critique of the sub-titling in Turkey, where apparently references to Israel and Jews are replaced with the generic phrase Middle East, much to their displeasure. But in the real world, Christian Zionists mainly in the US and also scattered throughout the settler-colonies of the West, contribute more than 10 times the funding to Israel than the much vaunted Jewish communal support machine does. And it does so in the service of Israel’s Jewish defeat of unnamed Arab armies, to prepare the way for Christian rapture, during which Jews and other infidels will be converted or eliminated to create the (alarmingly mono-cultural or mono-theocratic) Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth, or in the sky somewhere.

In concluding, let’s look at the racial hierarchy of World War Z’s narrative. Gerry is the superman, for sure, who saves us all. Segen, minus her hand, is a worthy sidekick, useful like the Jews in general, in getting to the End of Times, or at least the end of the story. Almost all the others in the film are explicitly lesser in one way or another. Before being rescued by the UN helicopter after New Jersey is overrun, Gerry and his family are taken in by a kind Latino family, whose assimilated son translates their unexpected hospitality. But when Gerry tells them that he has experienced things like this before and learned that “movement is survival,” their lesser racial/rational status prevents them from leaving their home and being saved with Gerry and his family. Only the son, who has converted to the “American” way, and learned English, survives, and gets unofficially adopted by the Lanes. This liberal act of compassion is compelling, but reinforces the necessity of assimilation to the dominant culture to ensure acceptance and survival. The unassimilated parents are left in the dust.

Thierry Umutoni, Gerry’s presumptively African boss at the UN is competent, but unable to do more than recognize and deploy Gerry’s greater intelligence and skills. He also can’t adequately protect Gerry’s family, who are immediately shipped off to the Nova Scotia refugee camp when they think Gerry is dead. Gerry’s wife and kids are important, and worth saving (given their apex whiteness), but still lesser due to gender and age – passive, needing protection, unable to fend for themselves, and in the case of the children, annoyingly and dangerously irrational in the face of the threat of death. It’s a racial hierarchy that is explicitly gendered, with the patriarchal leader unequivocally at the head throughout the film, especially in the predictable Hollywood moment conclusion when the family is reunited.

Thierry assigns Gerry to guide Harvard educated Dr. Andrew Fassbach through the Korean hotzone, in search of patient zero. Fassbach, played by actor Elyes Gabel, is not white, has a British accent, and is presumptively of South Asian or Arab heritage. Gerry instructs him in what to do and expect, but on first sight of zombies as they deplane in the darkness and fog of Korea, he breaks ranks, panics, runs, maladroitly falls, and accidentally shoots himself dead. Potentially useful intelligence wasted on a lesser person, to be sure, who lacked the hetero-manly fortitude to face down the threat, thus confirming his lesser racial status, almost straight out of 19th century colonial tropes of the lesser manhood of colonized men. Korea itself is never seen, beyond the literal shadows at the edge of the US military base there. As to North Korea, all we hear is a deranged whisper of its ultra-fascist response.

In the end we are left with a prototypical kind of liberal multiculturalism that reinforces rather than challenges the hierarchies of modern white supremacy. The rational, Aryan, Christian male is at the very top, with his appended family next in line. Jews are provisionally white, therefore useful in Empire’s need to fend off the hordes of undead walkers and others at the periphery. But ultimately even the mystical Jews are expendable, en route to the final salvation. All the other Others in the narrative are even further behind in the ranks of worthy survivors. While the film definitely provides a bizarrely crude Zionist redemption narrative, and even a Kahane-esque rebuke of liberal Zionist tendencies toward peace and coexistence, the ultimate Subject of value is the Christian Zionist of US Empire, so powerful that it goes unnamed, largely unseen, even though He is always, irrevocably at the center of the story.

Its fun to speculate about what motivates the heightened zombie vogue, what psychological and social angst it reveals. On the one hand, there is the fear of declining Empire, the fear of anarchy and chaos should the bottom fall any further out of our privileged economy. This makes perfect sense, and seems to have a lot of merit. On the other hand, the zombie meme may be less about looming Armageddon, and more about a nagging subconscious awareness that the extreme inequalities of our current world order are in fact already a kind of zombie-scape, in which almost 3 billion people live in such extreme poverty, largely removed from the view of Westerners, malnourished and off the grid, that they are real life living dead in a way, and they have lots of reason to come for us, looking to eat us, or at least consume our ill-gotten wealth. Maybe it’s a little of both.

When WWZ (both the book and the film) strides into Israel, the slippage between zombie and racial-Other comes clearly into view. During an interview about his book, Max Brooks is asked by a caller in Alexandria, VA if he “compare(s) the zombies to today’s fundamentalist Islamists? i.e., unthinking, uncaring, irrational villains who kill for the sake of killing?” He replies:

“The lack of rational thought has always scared me when it came to zombies, the idea that there is no middle ground, no room for negotiation. That has always terrified me. Of course that applies to terrorists, but it can also apply to a hurricane, or flu pandemic, or the potential earthquake that I grew up with living in L.A. Any kind of mindless extremism scares me, and we’re living in some pretty extreme times.”

Brooks seems moored in the state of our current world, and its (political or force of nature) “zombies,” more than fear of any impending melt-down. While his work is noted for its breadth of global politics, it’s also clear that it lacks structural analysis about the causes of violence and injustice, because the privileged prefer to construct those coming for them as mindless and irrational. Maybe what we need is a narrative from the perspective of the zombie, a subaltern zombie tale in which the myth of irrationality is finally rebuked.

Jesse Benjamin, an associate professor of sociology at Kennesaw State University, is a US and an Israeli citizen.

Notes

[1] In this case, it’s the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and not the US army, marines, navy and airforce shilled for in Transformers. But at least one of the people behind WWZ was also on board for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and that’s Ben Seresin Director of Photography, and this may explain some of the similarity of sympathetic flag close-ups and reverential pro-military stylings.

[2] The main character in Fiddler on the Roof.

[3] I mean this more in the Nietzsche superman sense than in the comic book superman sense. Nietzsche’s superman is Man with a capital M, the rational conqueror of nature, physics, and lesser humans that also features centrally, although inverted, in the critical theories of Sylvia Wynter.

[4] Apparently the book is more ambivalent on the environmental front, with this same meta-explanation more or less in place, but balanced to some extent by the despoliation of the Canadian arctic by uninfected humans amassing there due to zombies discomfort with the cold. Somehow readers seem to take this as an admonition that humans are too hard on their environment and need to rethink this.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Spy agencies are the biggest winners of the British governmentâ„¢s new multi-billion-pound austerity plans, getting a higher-than-inflation annual increase to their combined £1.9 billion budget.

Based on the new budget proposals unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne on Wednesday, spy agencies MI5 and MI6 as well as eavesdropping agency the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) will get budget rises equal to annual inflation plus three percent from 2015.

The three will effectively receive the biggest rises of any government department including the health service and the education sectors.

The ring fencing of the spy agencies spending comes as Osborne also announced an equal-to-inflation annual rise in the counter-terrorism police budget.

This is while the spy agencies have recently faced severe criticism over abuse of their power.

Recent revelations showed that GCHQ has been illegally tapping fiber optic cables carrying global internet communications and the police have been spying on 9,000 campaigners, described as Å“domestic extremists”, while many of them have no criminal record.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Russia has called for another round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers once Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani has assumed office.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the call during a press conference on Wednesday. Å“There have been certain breakthroughs made before the elections, and we would like to reaffirm them,” he explained.

Lavrov said prior to the June 14 presidential election, Tehran had announced its readiness to discuss the conditions for halting its 20-percent uranium enrichment.

On June 21, Lavrov said the P5+1 group was to make an offer for talks shortly after Iranâ„¢s president-elect is sworn in early August.

Iran and the P5+1 — Russia, China, France, Britain, and the United States plus Germany — have held several rounds of talks, mainly over the Iranian nuclear energy program.

The US, Israel, and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program and used the same allegation as a pretext to impose illegal sanctions against the Iranian nation.

Tehran has categorically rejected the accusation, arguing that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) it is entitled to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

Meanwhile, numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the IAEA have never found any evidence showing that the Iranian nuclear energy program has been diverted toward non-civilian purposes.

China and Russia, as two veto-wielding powers at the United Nations Security Council, have repeatedly voiced support for Iran’s nuclear energy program, and opposed the US-engineered sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

On June 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed the peaceful nature of Iranâ„¢s nuclear energy program, saying he had Å“no doubt that Iran is adhering to the rules” regarding its nuclear energy program and its international commitments.

MRS/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Anthony Weiner is looking more likely than ever to win the New York City mayoral race scheduled for later this year. According to the latest polls, the former congressman is the top contender among Democratic Party hopefuls.

Weiner, 48, announced last month that’d he be seeking the
position of mayor of New York, a role which will be vacated by
Michael Bloomberg when his third and final term expires at the
start of 2014. Now only four weeks after officially throwing his
hat in the race, Weiner is winning the support of 25 percent of
registered Democrats, according to a just released poll conducted
by Wall Street Journal-NBC New York-Marist.

The news puts Weiner at the top of his party’s race for the first
time since he confirmed in May the long-standing rumors he’d be
running for mayor, but the ex-lawmaker will likely face a battle
through Election Day that’s largely uphill. Even if Weiner is
winning the support of a quarter of his party, the high-profile
scandal that prompted his resignation from the United States
House of Representatives in 2011 is still fresh on the minds of
voters.

Rep. Weiner was already eyeing the New York City two years ago
when he was caught sending graphic photographs to women over
Twitter. At first Weiner relentlessly denied allegations that he
acted inappropriately, but after several weeks took
responsibility and resigned from Congress.

When Mr. Weiner announced he’d be running for mayor last month,
he said, “I made some big mistakes, and I know I let a lot of
people down, but I also learned some tough lessons.”

“I’m running for mayor because I’ve been fighting for the
middle class and those struggling to make it my entire life. And
I hope I get a second chance,” he said.

Before Weiner confirmed he’d be running for mayor, a March 2013
poll found that less than half of the city’s Democrats would even
considering voting for the disgraced congressman. According to
the latest numbers, though, Weiner is now the frontrunner,
grabbing 25 percent of support among Democrats to the runner up’s
20 percent. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the party’s
frontrunner up until recently, now has only one-fifth of her
party’s support.

“Things are changing — the race has been scrambled by Weiner’s
candidacy,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College
Institute for Public Opinion, told the Wall Street Journal.
“Weiner’s candidacy has gotten more acceptable to voters since
he announced, (and) Quinn’s having a difficult time reversing
what has been a slow but steady decline in her numbers.”

Speaking to the New York Times earlier this year about his
Democratic contenders, Weiner said, “I like them all.” In
the same interview, though, Weiner took a jab at one stance in
particular adopted by Quinn that doesn’t sit well with him. In
2008, Quinn supported removing a term limits law, which as a
result allowed Mayor Bloomberg to successfully campaign for a
third term in office.

“The term-limits thing, as an issue, was a deal breaker for
me,” Weiner told the Times in April. “But, I think the
polls are right: Chris Quinn is leading, and then someone will
get into a runoff with her. I don’t like runoffs, and I don’t
think we should have them so you don’t have these divisive
primaries anymore.”

According to the latest poll, Weiner and Quinn are being trailed
by Comptroller Bill Thompson with 13 percent of the party’s
support, followed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and city
Comptroller John Liu. Fewer than one in five Democrats are
undecided, the poll found.

“This won’t change our focus one bit,” a spokesperson for
Mr. Weiner told the Journal. “Anthony is going to keep talking
about the issues and how to stand up for New Yorkers who want a
middle class fighter in City Hall.”

Mike Morey, a spokesman for Ms. Quinn, told the New York Times,
“We fully expect the polls to fluctuate throughout the
campaign, but we are confident that on Election Day, when voters
have to decide who they want to lead this city, they will choose
someone who has demonstrated the ability to lead and
deliver.”

This article originally appeared on: RT

Thousands of teachers across north-west England will walk out on Thursday to voice their outrage at attacks on their working conditions and pay.

The strike organized by the two biggest teachersâ„¢ unions the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) will affect 3,000 schools.

NUT said part of the striking teachers will also march in protest to the governmentâ„¢s education cuts in the cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and Chester.

The two unions said they want the Education Secretary Michael Gove to halt changes to teachersâ„¢ pay and conditions as long as the negotiations between the unions and the government over the thorny matters continue.

The NUT and NASUWT General Secretaries held talks with Gove on June 17 but the two left the meeting describing Goveâ„¢s response as Å“extremely disappointing”.

They said over the last year Gove “has made no effort to hold serious discussions with both unions or cease his escalating attacks on teachers.”

The unions have already warned that the Thursday strike will be a prelude to a series of walkouts in the autumn.

The Thursday action also follows a march by hundreds of teachers in London to call on the government to protect education.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The city of West, Texas, has filed a lawsuit against the owner of the fertilizer plant that exploded in April, as well as the chemical company that supplied two 100-ton shipments of ammonium nitrate in the weeks before the deadly blast.

The city has filed a suit against Adair Grain Inc. and ammonium
nitrate supplier CF Industries, claiming that the chemical
shipments were improperly stored and caused the explosion that
killed 15 people and destroyed more than 150 homes. A high
school, middle school, apartment complex and a nursing home were
also destroyed in the April 17 blast.

The lawsuit claims that 30 tons from the first 100-ton shipment
of ammonium nitrate had not yet been sold and were being
dangerously stored in the plant at the time of the explosion. The
city has accused the supplier of failing to properly inspect the
fertilizer mixing facility to determine whether hazard mitigation
was necessary or to provide recommendations for safe
storage. Even though the Illinois-based CF industries knew
that the plant was located within a community of homes, parks,
and schools, it chose to blindly sell hundreds of tons of the
hazardous material to the facility, the suit states.

“The explosion happened when a substantial portion of the
thirty tons of ammonium nitrate stockpiled in the fertilizer
mixing building was heated to the point of detonation,” the
complaint states. “This explosion occurred at approximately
7:50 p.m., some twenty minutes after a fire had been
detected in the same building at the fertilizer facility.”

The lawsuit also accused CF Industries of providing outdated
safety information to West Fertilizer, and failing to provide a
material safety data sheet for either of the two shipments.

After investigating the blast for a month, Texas fire marshals
said they could not determine a cause. Investigators have
launched a criminal probe, but no one has yet been charged.

The city of West is seeking $17 million in damages for negligence
and product liability. The city says it needs the money to fix
its streets, water and sewer lines that were destroyed by the
explosion. The deadly blast resulted in an estimated $57 million
in damages, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has
refused to
provide funds to help rebuild the devastated town.

But Scott Deatherage, a Dallas attorney specializing in
environmental law, told CBS News that this would most likely be a
difficult case for the city to win, since the chemical in
question is used extensively throughout the US. Ammonium
nitrate can be found in products ranging from fertilizer to
instant cold packs used as first aid on injuries.

“Consider ammonium nitrate is a very common material sold all
over the country, all over Texas, and it’s used everyday,” he
said. “So to argue that particular product is somewhat
defective is extremely difficult. It’d be like saying gasoline is
defective because it exploded somewhere.”

CF Industries provided a statement to WPTV, claiming that there
is “no basis for this suit”, but that it was
“sympathetic to those whose lives were affected by this
unfortunate incident.”

“The CF Industries’ companies will seek dismissal of this
lawsuit and otherwise defend the company vigorously in
court,” it said in a statement to CBS. 

This article originally appeared on: RT

Thousands of President Morsi’s supporters gather in central Cairo on June 21, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Heavily-armed gunmen have kidnapped two Egyptian police officers in the volatile Sinai Peninsula, security sources say.

Local officials said on Wednesday that the officers were abducted near the city of Saint Catherine in the South Sinai Governorate.

The head of South Sinai Ambulance service, Khaled Abu Hashem, said the policemen “were abducted on their way to Sharm al-Sheikh International Hospital in an ambulance.”

The abduction was reportedly an act of revenge against one of the policemen, who had had a quarrel with a member of the Bedouin community at a gas station.

Talks are underway between the South Sinai tribal leaders and security officials for the release of the kidnapped officer.

Militant groups and criminals have exploited a security vacuum that developed in the Sinai since the 2011 uprising against the countryâ„¢s former dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Occasionally, tribal Bedouins in the increasingly lawless peninsula would briefly kidnap foreigners to use them as bargaining chips with authorities, urging them to release imprisoned relatives.

In August 2012, at least 15 Egyptian policemen were killed in an assault on a police station at the border between Egypt and Israel. It was the deadliest incident in Egypt’s Sinai in decades.

In response, Cairo launched an offensive against terrorists in Sinai, sending thousands of troops backed by tanks and heavy equipment into the region.

MT/JR/AS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

June 1 Rally for Bradley Manning (Photo: Jenna Pope)SF Pride is welcoming military recruiters to this massive June 30 LGBTQ celebration, the media exposed Tuesday, just weeks after the Pride board officially dumped Wikileaks Whistle-blower Bradley Manning as the Grand Marshall.

The national guard will join the celebration’s vast corporate and bank sponsors–including AT&T and Bank of America–by setting up recruiting booths, marking the first time the military will formally recruit at this massive celebration since ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was overturned in 2011.

When the revelations of military recruiters were made public, queer and anti-militarist groups were already mobilizing against the SF Pride Boards controversial dethroning of Bradley Manning as the parade’s Grand Marshall.

The news that military recruiters will be in full force is a blow to many LGBTQ organizers and Manning supporters demanding that the SF Pride Board stand up against U.S.-led wars by reinstating Manning, who is widely hailed as a ‘queer hero’ for leaking and exposing U.S. war crimes.

“It’s shocking, but not surprising,” declared Clare Bayard, San Francisco queer organizer on issues of racism, militarism and war with Catalyst Project. “Since the community response was so loud and clear when Pride threw Bradley Manning under the bus, they’ve found another way to reassert their role in trying to defang a queer liberation movement with a long history of challenging militarism.”

“I don’t want the military at Pride,” declares Stephen Funk, a queer former service member who refused deployment to Iraq on ethical grounds and is an active supporter of Bradley Manning and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “This shows who is really controlling Pride. Now the gay rights movement you see on the media is not anti-war, they are all about assimilation.”

In early June, the SF Pride Board announced their final decision to exclude Manning from this honor after he was initially rewarded this title April 26.

This provoked uproar from within the LGBTQ community, leading to protests and a massive community meeting attended by over one hundred calling for the board to reinstate this honor.

LGBTQ and veterans groups announced Tuesday that they will defy the Pride Board by honoring the queer whistle blower as ‘community’ grand marshall on June 30. Manning supporters have garnered widespread support for this action, including pledges from the SF dyke and trans marches–also during Pride weekend–that they will honor Manning.

“There’s been an outpouring of support for Bradley Manning in the LGBTQ community, not only in San Francisco but nationally and internationally, since Pride’s leadership made its divisive decision to overturn his election as Grand Marshal,” declared former SF Pride Grand Marshall Joey Cain.

Manning’s supporters blasted the embrace of military recruiters as the latest blow by an SF Board that they say has been too eager to embrace militarism. “It makes me feel very upset that the military would be welcome but Bradley Manning isn’t,” declared Michael Thurman– organizer with Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist–as he made picket signs for upcoming actions to hold Pride accountable. “That shows how militarized the decision-making process is.”

Many in the LGBTQ community have blasted Pride for only looking out for the interests of the most elite U.S. gays.

“Look at this week with the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act and Indian Child Welfare Act, and the Texas legislature’s attempt to slash abortion rights,” declared Bayard. “Pride has long positioned itself as an arm of funneling white gays with money away from uniting with our multiracial, cross-class, many-gendered queer family with interests way past marriage, towards joining up with conservative white electoral agendas.”

Organizers vow that they will not let the Pride’s embrace of military recruiters stop them from sending a loud anti-war message this weekend. Bayard insists:

The Pride committee would love nothing more than for us to spend the weekend celebrating the defeat of DOMA and Prop 8. We don’t want to trade ‘tolerance’ and the opportunity to enlist in occupation forces for our deeply held values of justice and building healthy communities that meet everyone’s needs and celebrate everyone’s gift. Queers need other routes besides joining the military to be accepted and loved. Trashing Bradley Manning and inviting in the military is a clear message about where they want to position us, but we refuse to be used as a wedge.

_____________________

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

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This article originally appeared on: SHTF Plan

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/william_van_poycks_final_farewell_20130626/

Posted on Jun 26, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

In announcing the death of 78-year-old international oil trader Marc Rich (shown), commentators around the world nearly ran out of descriptors, calling him “friend,” “pioneer,” “colorful,” “great,” “controversial,” a “buccaneer,” the “King of Oil,” and the “King of Commodities.” Others weren’t so kind, calling him a “traitor,” a “tax evader,” and a “racketeer.”

His impact as a trader in the world commodity market was profound. He learned to trade oil and other commodities at the age of 20 at Phillip Brothers (now called Phibro) where he met his future partner, Pincus “Pinky” Green. After a disagreement over the amount of bonuses they were owed, Rich and Green left Phibro and started their own company, Marc Rich and Company AG, in 1974, just in time to recognize and profit from the 1973 oil embargo. By being quick on their feet and taking advantage of contacts at the highest levels of governments worldwide, Rich was able to match needs with demands and take a commission in the process.

Following the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, for instance, Rich was able to deliver oil from Iran and the Soviet Union to the apartheid regime in South Africa in exchange for uranium from Namibia, which was sold back to the USSR. As the Wall Street Journal noted: “Over two decades … Mr. Rich’s involvement in the firm … grew [it] into a global trading and mining giant.” That modest assessment missed the impact of Rich and Green. His company was sold to its management in 1994 and then merged with another commodity trading firm, Xstrata, and last year the combined companies did $214 billion in business, and employed 140,000 people worldwide.

Rich gained national attention when his trading activities caught the eye of the new U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Rudolph Giuliani, who, after investigating Rich’s activities, secured more than 50 indictments against him for fraud, racketeering, and tax evasion in September 1983. The next year, after failing to persuade Giuliani that he was innocent, Rich fled to Switzerland, where he lived out the rest of his life. On his own website, Rich defended himself:

These transactions, which also involved major U.S. oil companies … were not unlike many other transactions widely engaged in during this period. In accordance with the law and following the advice of competent counsel, payments attributable to the offshore aspects of the linked transactions were properly treated as exempt from U.S. taxes….

The U.S. Attorney investigating the matter ambitiously turned the proper reporting treatment of these complex corporate transactions – essentially a routine tax allocation dispute – into a highly politicized criminal tax and energy fraud case alleging that domestic oil revenues were improperly diverted offshore….

Shortly after the conclusion of the case against the companies in 1984, the U.S. Department of Energy itself reached conclusions supporting the manner in which the challenged transactions were originally reported.

Despite his claims of innocence, Rich’s U.S.-based affiliates paid nearly $200 million in fines, and the FBI put Rich onto its “most-wanted” list for nearly a decade. After several attempts to arrest Rich failed, the case disappeared from public view.

Until January 20, 2001, that is, when President Bill Clinton, on his last day in office, granted Rich a presidential pardon. This erupted into a scandal known as “Pardongate,” but by that time, nothing could be done, and Rich could relax at his villa (“La villa rose”) overlooking Lake Lucerne.

In a rare and revealing interview lasting more than 30 hours in November 2009, with the business editor of a Swiss newspaper, Rich spelled out just how he had managed not only to make himself extremely wealthy, but avoid being prosecuted by Giuliani. It was very simple: He bribed top government officials who helped him do “workarounds” on existing embargoes while providing espionage tips to his contacts in those governments. In essence, Rich had an enormously influential network of powerful people dependent upon him for their existence and their financial well-being.

Said interviewer Daniel Ammann, “The biggest advantage of Marc Rich and his company is that they were on the spot. They weren’t dealing from the U.S. or Switzerland. They were on the spot.” He added:

Let’s say Iran after the 1979 revolution. They were there. In Angola, Cuba, Jamaica, South Africa. There were always his people working with the local authorities. The commodity trade is often done by governments so they really had the best contacts imaginable.

When Rich was paying big bribes to buy and sell the stores of commodities from entire nations, he made sure he was paying off all the right people and depositing the money into all the right offshore bank accounts for those people, all the time.

This sheds light on Clinton’s defense of his pardon of Rich when he said he was influenced by pleas for clemency from Ehud Barak, Israel’s former prime minister and Shimon Peres, then (and now) the president of Israel. During the oil embargo following the hostage crisis, it was Rich who was able to sell embargoed Iranian oil to its enemy, Israel. In such a crisis, enemies become friends, and Rich’s successful providing of oil to Israel was remembered by his friends. Explained Amman:

Rich was the very needed and useful intermediary. He was the one who brought their oil to the customer and converted it into foreign currencies. I really think they needed him as much as he needed them. This is sort of the principle of trading.

Of course, the fact that Denise Rich, Rich’s wealthy socialist wife, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Clinton library fund and to Hillary Clinton’s run for the senate didn’t hurt, either.

Rich was indeed all of the descriptors offered by commentators around the world at the news of his death from a stroke in Lucerne at age 78. Rich was a major player. All he did was what George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall politician, did: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” Rich just did it on a far grander scale. 

A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at
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This article originally appeared on: The New American

After Obama’s climate speech on Tuesday and the reaction that followed, a couple of questions stand out.

Number one. Is it possible that the anti-Keystone XL movement counting their victory on the controversial tar sands project prematurely?

And second. Have environmental groups more broadly been too friendly to President Obama in the aftermath of a mere speech, however welcome its rhetorical flourishes?

With a showering of praise from ‘big green’ groups like NRDC, Sierra Club, and Environment America–the last of which decided to launch an expensive ‘thank you’ TV ad out for the president–is it possible that the environmental movement is easing off the pressure at exactly the moment they should be holding Obama’s feet more firmly to the fire?

As Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in his remarks about the speech, climate change “poses a near-existential threat to humanity,” and presidential rhetoric–especially vague rhetoric–is simply too little and too late.

“We need a national mobilization — and indeed a worldwide mobilization — to transform rapidly from our fossil fuel-reliant past and present to a clean energy future,” Weissman said. “We need a sense of urgency — indeed, emergency — massive investments, tough and specific standards and binding rules.”

Though the president offered none of that, many groups were blasting praise to their memberships and heralding a new era of executive action.

But where’s the action?

If you want to know what President Obama signaled about his pending decisions about the Keystone XL pipeline, just read the headlines:

Analysts see okay for Keystone as Obama muddies the debate (the Globe and Mail);
Keystone XL pipeline: Did Obama just drop a big hint about his decision? (Christian Science Monitor);
After speech, Canada confident Keystone XL will be approved (Mining Gazette);
Obama hints that Keystone XL may be rejected (Raw Story);
or Obama hints at Keystone approval (Politico)

Or don’t. Because the truth of the matter seems that everyone is entitled to interpret Obama’s surprise comments about the controversial tar sands project however they feel most comfortable.

First, here’s what the president said during his address at Georgetown University on Tuesday:

I know there’s been … a lot of controversy surrounding the proposal to build a pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands down to refineries in the Gulf. And the State Department is going through the final stages of evaluating the proposal. That’s how it’s always been done.

But I do want to be clear: Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. The net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward. It’s relevant.

In response, some of the groups most vocal and active in their opposition praised Obama’s language, saying they were both surprised and heartened because to them it meant that the president could not make such bold public statements and then–given all the available science and public outcry– turn around and approve the project.

“This is an appropriate standard that the president appears to be setting on Keystone XL,” said 350.org’s Bill McKibben, probably the single group best known for organizing and standing against Keystone XL. “The president is saying what the science has always demanded. It’s encouraging news for certain.”

The answer to Obama’s question about the “pipeline’s impact on our climate” is clear, said Oil Change International. “Keystone XL will greatly impact our climate, and thus our communities and our children,” the group opposed to the project said. “On this basis, the pipeline must be denied.”

But though groups like Oil Change International and 350.org–long associated with promoting the scientific consensus on climate change–may understand the certainty of the warnings associated with the further development of the Alberta tar sands, it is not at all clear that the State Department shares this understanding.

Indeed, here’s what the State Department’s draft Supplement Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) itself said:

[F]rom a global perspective, the decision whether or not to build the Project will not affect the extraction and combustion of WCSB [Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin] oil sands crude on the global market. However, on a life-cycle basis and compared with reference crudes refined in the United States, oil sands crudes could result in an increase in incremental GHG emissions.

As others have pointed out, this creates a very possible loophole because what this phrasing really says is that while tars sands development itself will definitely increase carbon emissions, the mere building of the Keystone XL pipeline will not.

If interpreted this way by the State Department, and if Obama follows their guidance as he suggested he will, then the fate of Alberta’s “carbon bomb” has now been entrusted to nuanced legal interpretations of a highly controversial impact study.

And as Politico reports, proponents of the pipeline were in a mostly celebratory mood.

The company building the pipeline and many of its top supporters in Congress saw Obama’s remarks as highly encouraging.

Keystone builder TransCanada said in a statement that it’s “pleased with the President’s guidance to the State Department, as the almost five-year review of the project has already repeatedly found that these criteria are satisfied.” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) said Obama’s remarks were “a positive step forward toward getting this project built, creating jobs and decreasing our dependence on foreign sources of oil.” And a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said “the standard the president set today should lead to speedy approval of the Keystone pipeline.”

And despite the hopes and desires of environmentalists, even as they once again enjoyed his rhetorical gifts, Obama just might.

When and if he does it will be TransCanada–as tar sands oil snakes its way from Alberta to the Gulf coast for export–who will be producing the next batch of ‘thank you’ ads for the president.

___________________________________________

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

It is hard to understand the fuss that Washington and its media whores are making over Edward Snowden. We have known for a long time that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying for years without warrants on the communications of Americans and people throughout the world. Photographs of the massive NSA building in Utah built for the purpose of storing the intercepted communications of the world have been published many times. 

It is not clear to an ordinary person what Snowden has revealed that William Binney and other whistleblowers have not already revealed. Perhaps the difference is that Snowden has provided documents that prove it, thereby negating Washington’s ability to deny the facts with its usual lies.

Whatever the reason for Washington’s blather, it certainly is not doing the US government any good. Far more interesting than Snowden’s revelations is the decision by governments of other countries to protect a truth-teller from the Stasi in Washington.

Hong Kong kept Snowden’s whereabouts secret so that an amerikan black-op strike or a drone could not be sent to murder him. Hong Kong told Washington that its extradition papers for Snowden were not in order and permitted Snowden to leave for Moscow.

The Chinese government did not interfere with Snowden’s departure.

The Russian government says it has no objection to Snowden having a connecting flight in Moscow.

Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino responded to Washington’s threats with a statement that the Ecuadorian government puts human rights above Washington’s interests. Foreign Minister Patino said that Snowden served humanity by revealing that the Washington Stasi was violating the rights of “every citizen in the world.” Snowden merely betrayed “some elites that are in power in a certain country,” whereas Washington betrayed the entire world.

With Hong Kong, China, Russia, Ecuador, and Cuba refusing to obey the Stasi’s orders, Washington is flailing around making a total fool of itself and its media prostitutes.  

Secretary of State John Kerry has been issuing warnings hand over fist. He has threatened Russia, China, Ecuador, and every country that aids and abets Snowden’s escape from the Washington Stasi. Those who don’t do Washington’s bidding, Kerry declared, will suffer adverse impacts on their relationship with the US.  

What a stupid thing for Kerry to say. Here is a guy who once was for peace but who has been turned by NSA spying on his personal affairs into an asset for the NSA. Try to realize the extraordinary arrogance and hubris in Kerry’s threat that China, Russia, and other countries will suffer bad relations with the US. Kerry is saying that amerika doesn’t have to care whether “the indispensable people” have bad relations with other countries, but those countries have to be concerned if they have bad relations with the “indispensable country.” What an arrogant posture for the US government to present to the world.

Here we have a US Secretary of State lost in delusion along with the rest of Washington. A country that is bankrupt, a country that has allowed its corporations to destroy its economy by moving the best jobs offshore, a country whose future is in the hands of the printing press, a country that after eleven years of combat has been unable to defeat a few thousan d lightly armed Taliban is now threatening Russia and China.  

God save us from the utter fools who comprise our government.

The world is enjoying Washington’s humiliation at the hands of Hong Kong. A mere city state gave Washington the bird. In its official statement, Hong Kong shifted the focus from Snowden to his message and asked the US government to explain its illegal hacking of Hong Kong’s information systems.

China’s state newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote: “The United States has gone from a model of human rights to an eavesdropper on personal privacy, the manipulator of the centralized power over the international internet, and the mad invader of other countries’ networks. . . The world will remember Edward Snowden. It was his fearlessness that tore off Washington’s sanctimonious mask.”

China’s Global Times, a subsidiary of The People’s Daily, accused Washington of attacking “a young idealist who has exposed the sinister scandals of the US government.” Instead of apologizing “Washington is showing off its muscle by attempting to control the whole situation.”

China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that Snowden’s revelations had placed “Washington in a really awkward situation. They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear that Russia’s sympathy is with Snowden, not with the amerikan Stasi state. Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said that it was unrealistic to expect the Russian government to violate law to seize a transit passenger who had not entered Russia and was not on Russian soil. RT’s Gayane Chichakyan reported that Washington is doing everything it can to shift attention away from Snowden’s revelations that “show that the US has lied and has been doing the same as they accuse China of doing.”

Ecuador says the traitor is Washington, not Snowden.

The stuck pig squeals from the NSA director—”Edward Snowden has caused irreversible damage to US”—are matched by the obliging squeals from members of the House and Senate, themselves victims of the NSA spying, as was the Director of the CIA who was forced to resign because of a love affair. The NSA is in position to blackmail everyone in the House and Senate, in the White House itself, in all the corporations, the universities, the media, every organization at home and abroad, who has anything to hide. You can tell who is being blackmailed by the intensity of the squeals, such as those of Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Mike Rogers (R, MI). With any luck, a patriot will leak what the NSA has on Feinstein and Rogers, neither of whom could possibly scrape any lower before the NSA.

The gangster government in Washington that has everything to hide is now in NSA’s hands and will follow orders. The pretense that amerika is a democracy responsible to the people has been exposed. The US is run by and for the NSA. Congress and the White House are NSA puppets.

Let’s quit calling the NSA the National Security Agency. Clearly, NSA is a threat to the security of every person in the entire world. Let’s call the NSA what it really is—the National Stasi Agency, the largest collection of Gestapo in human history. You can take for granted that every media whore, every government prostitute, every ignorant flag-waver who declares Snowden to be a traitor is either brainwashed or blackmailed. They are the protectors of NSA tyranny. They are our enemies.

The world has been growing increasingly sick of Washington for a long time. The bullying, the constant stream of lies, the gratuitous wars and destruction have destroyed the image hyped by Washington of the US as a “light unto the world.” The world sees the US as a plague upon the world.

Following Snowden’s revelations, Germany’s most important magazine, Der Spiegel, had the headline: “Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself From America.” The first sentence of the article asks: “Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.”

Der Spiegel continues: “We are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching. On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend then we really don’t need to be terribly worried about our enemies.”

There is little doubt that German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich has lost his secrets to NSA spies. Friedrich rushed to NSA’s defense, declaring: ”that’s not how you treat friends.” As Der Spiegel made clear, the minister was not referring “to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying. Friedrich’s reaction is only paradoxical on the surface and can be explained by looking at geopolitical realities. The US is, for the time being, the only global power—and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent—either as enemies or allies. And because most prefer to be allies, politicians—Germany’s included—prefer to grin and bear it.”

It is extraordinary that the most important publication in Germany has acknowledged that the German government is Washington’s puppet state.

For those moronic amerikans who say, “I’m not doing anything wrong, I don’t care if they spy,” Der Spiegal writes that a “monitored human being is not a free one.” We have reached the point where we “free americans” have to learn from our German puppets that we are not free.

Present day Germany is a new country, flushed of its past by war and defeat. Russia is also a

new country that has emerged from the ashes of an unrealistic ideology. Hope always resides with those countries that have most experienced evil in government. If Germany were to throw off its amerikan overlord and depart NATO, amerikan power in Europe would collapse. If Germany and Russia were to unite in defense of truth and human rights, Europe and the world would have a new beginning. 

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Gun company cannot keep up with national demand.

Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
June 26, 2013

Smith & Wesson finished its fiscal year with colossal profits as the demand for new firearms surges nationwide.

The storied firearms company released a yearly financial report Tuesday showing astronomical sales figures and a favorable future outlook.

Net sales for the recent fourth quarter were almost $180 million, an increase of over 37% from the same quarter last year.

For the full fiscal year, net sales reached over $587 million, an increase of over 42% compared to the previous year.

Even after increasing production capacity, Smith & Wesson cannot meet ongoing demand for most of its firearms, according to the report. The company’s back orders are exploding as a result.

Other firearms manufacturers are also experiencing high demand and massive back orders. In May, Guns.com reported that Sturm, Ruger & Co. could not manufacture the additional two million firearms necessary to keep up with its most recent orders. Ruger stopped taking new orders for two months last year in order to catch up to sales.

The surge in demand has left empty gun store shelves nationwide. Michael Cargill, the owner of Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, Texas and a guest on the Alex Jones Show, believes the Obama Administration has greatly influenced gun sales.

“Because of the current administration and their continued attack on lawful gun ownership in this country, your major gun manufacturers have seen their profit earnings soar to unprecedented numbers,”
said Cargill. “I contribute that to the President being the nation’s number one gun seller.”

Wait times for new firearms are now meeting or even surpassing the wait times for concealed handgun licenses nationwide. Licensees may get their new permit in the mail before their new handgun.

“Consumers who are looking your most popular firearms such as the Smith & Wesson M&P Shield and the Springfield XDS for concealed carry purposes will have to wait three months for the industry to catch up with the demand,” Cargill said. “Because citizens are concerned that their civil liberties and Second Amendment rights will be taken away, the wait time for a [Texas] CHL license is also three months.”

Be sure to check out Michael Cargill’s interview on the Infowars Nightly News:

To see more interviews like this one, consider becoming a Prisonplanet.tv subscriber for only $5.95 per month!

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1:52 pm

Tags: constitution, domestic news, gun rights

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

In the course of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington Post (June 10) reported that “several officials said the CIA will now undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed signs that he might one day betray national secrets.”

Yes, there was a sign they missed — Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.

It was the same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best — the most patriotic — of intentions, going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what the United States was doing to the people of Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of media; it was making me sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn’t know of the danger myself. No questioning of my friends and relatives could have turned up the slightest hint of the radical anti-war activist I was to become. My friends and relatives were to be as surprised as I was to be. There was simply no way for the State Department security office to know that I should not be hired and given a Secret Clearance. 1

So what is a poor National Security State to do? Well, they might consider behaving themselves. Stop doing all the terrible things that grieve people like me and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and so many others. Stop the bombings, the invasions, the endless wars, the torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the support of dictatorships, the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things that make the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American terrorists, that compel the National Security State — in pure self defense — to spy on the entire world.

Eavesdropping on the planet

The above is the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter in my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Here are some excerpts that may help to put the current revelations surrounding Edward Snowden into perspective …

Can people in the 21st century imagine a greater invasion of privacy on all of earth, in all of history? If so, they merely have to wait for technology to catch up with their imagination.

Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex … satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links … voice, text, images … captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed by high-powered computers … if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena … if God has a phone, it’s being monitored … maybe your dog isn’t being tapped. The oceans will not protect you. American submarines have been attaching tapping pods to deep underwater cables for decades.

Under a system codenamed ECHELON, launched in the 1970s, the NSA and its junior partners in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada operate a network of massive, highly automated interception stations, covering the globe amongst them. Any of the partners can ask any of the others to intercept its own domestic communications. It can then truthfully say it does not spy on its own citizens.

Apart from specifically-targeted individuals and institutions, the ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting huge quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Every intercepted message — all the embassy cables, the business deals, the sex talk, the birthday greetings — is searched for keywords, which could be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes to flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of the key words in the ECHELON “dictionary” — “He lives in a lovely old white house on Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two minutes.” Within limitations, computers can “listen” to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Those calls are extracted and recorded separately, to be listened to in full by humans. The list of specific targets at any given time is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one point including the likes of Amnesty International and Christian Aid.

ECHELON is carried out without official acknowledgment of its existence, let alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose. The extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget — far from being greatly reduced — was increased, and the network has grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence that the Cold War was not a battle against something called “the international communist conspiracy”.

The European Parliament in the late 1990s began to wake up to this intrusion into the continent’s affairs. The parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report, which appeared in 1998 and recommended a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance. It bluntly advised: “The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network [Internet] accessible to US intelligence agencies.” The report denounced Britain’s role as a double-agent, spying on its own European partners.

Despite these concerns the US has continued to expand ECHELON surveillance in Europe, partly because of heightened interest in commercial espionage — to uncover industrial information that would provide American corporations with an advantage over foreign rivals.

German security experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in heavy commercial spying in Europe. Victims included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1998, Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention, enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than before. However, when the company tried to market its invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech, which announced that it had already patented a near-identical development. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the sale of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, an NSA employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets by tapping the telephone and computer link lines that ran between Enercon’s research laboratory and its production unit some 12 miles away. Detailed plans of the company’s invention were then passed on to Kenetech.

In 1994, Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based in Blagnac Cedex, France, also lost lucrative contracts, snatched away by American rivals aided by information covertly collected by NSA and CIA. The same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the United States in 1995 over auto parts trade.

German industry has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position because the government forbids its security services from conducting similar industrial espionage. “German politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each other’s businesses. The Americans and the British do not have such illusions,” said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist in European industrial espionage, in 1999.

That same year, Germany demanded that the United States recall three CIA operatives for their activities in Germany involving economic espionage. The news report stated that the Germans “have long been suspicious of the eavesdropping capabilities of the enormous U.S. radar and communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich”, which is in fact an NSA intercept station. “The Americans tell us it is used solely to monitor communications by potential enemies, but how can we be entirely sure that they are not picking up pieces of information that we think should remain completely secret?” asked a senior German official. Japanese officials most likely have been told a similar story by Washington about the more than a dozen signals intelligence bases which Japan has allowed to be located on its territory.

In their quest to gain access to more and more private information, the NSA, the FBI, and other components of the US national security establishment have been engaged for years in a campaign to require American telecommunications manufacturers and carriers to design their equipment and networks to optimize the authorities’ wiretapping ability. Some industry insiders say they believe that some US machines approved for export contain NSA “back doors” (also called “trap doors”).

The United States has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well to allow it “back-door” access to encryption programs, claiming that this was to serve the needs of law-enforcement agencies. However, a report released by the European Parliament in May 1999 asserted that Washington’s plans for controlling encryption software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with US industrial espionage. The NSA has also dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities in the United States, and CIA officers to recruit foreign communications clerks abroad and buy their code secrets, according to veteran intelligence officials.

For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the world’s most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or any other war. The purchasing nations, some 120 of them — including prime US intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia — confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to their embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, and fax. And all the while, because of a secret agreement between the company and NSA, these governments might as well have been hand delivering the messages to Washington, uncoded. For their Crypto AG machines had been rigged before being sold to them, so that when they used them the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted along with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the messages as easily as they could the morning newspaper.

In 1986, because of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, the Libyans began to suspect that something was rotten with Crypto AG’s machines and switched to another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG. But it appears that NSA had that base covered as well. In 1992, after a series of suspicious circumstances over the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion similar to Libya’s, and arrested a Crypto AG employee who was in Iran on a business trip. He was eventually ransomed, but the incident became well known and the scam began to unravel in earnest.

In September 1999 it was revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special “keys” into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun — Microsoft’s developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called “KEY”. The other was called “NSAKEY”. Fernandez presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users’ knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA’s “back door” in the world’s most commonly used operating system makes it “orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer.”

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, “it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.” The report stated that there had been a “strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates’ development teams.” The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft’s biggest client in the world.

Recent years have seen disclosures that in the countdown to their invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States had listened in on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and all the members of the UN Security Council during a period when they were deliberating about what action to take in Iraq.

It’s as if the American national security establishment feels that it has an inalienable right to listen in; as if there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire world, stating that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the government to intercept the personal communications of anyone.” And the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: “Persons shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, except in cases of national security, real or alleged.” 2

The leading whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee

Before there was Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake … before there was Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds and Jesselyn Radack … there was Philip Agee. What Agee revealed is still the most startling and important information about US foreign policy that any American government whistleblower has ever revealed.

Philip Agee spent 12 years (1957-69) as a CIA case officer, most of it in Latin America. His first book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1974 — a pioneering work on the Agency’s methods and their devastating consequences — appeared in about 30 languages around the world and was a best seller in many countries; it included a 23-page appendix with the names of hundreds of undercover Agency operatives and organizations.

Under CIA manipulation, direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, “our minister of labor”, “our vice-president”, “my police”, journalists, labor leaders, student leaders, diplomats, and many others. If the Agency wished to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, cause dissension in leftist ranks, or have Communist embassy personnel expelled, it need only prepare some phoney documents, present them to the appropriate government ministers and journalists, and — presto! — instant scandal.

Agee’s goal in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.

A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a “news” item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station. Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or heard by unknowing North Americans.

Wooing the working class came in for special treatment. Labor organizations by the dozen, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership away from them.

In 1975 these revelations were new and shocking; for many readers it was the first hint that American foreign policy was not quite what their high-school textbooks had told them nor what the New York Times had reported.

“As complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere, an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British ‘case officer’ operates … All of it … presented with deadly accuracy,” wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA station chief, and ardent foe of Agee. (There’s no former CIA officer more hated by members of the intelligence establishment than Agee; no one’s even close; due in part to his traveling to Cuba and having long-term contact with Cuban intelligence.)

In contrast to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of hundreds of informants from the nearly 400,000 Iraq war documents it released.

In 1969, Agee resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who “long ago ceased to believe in what they are doing”).

While on the run from the CIA as he was writing Inside the Company — at times literally running for his life — Agee was expelled from, or refused admittance to, Italy, Britain, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. (West Germany eventually gave him asylum because his wife was a leading ballerina in the country.) Agee’s account of his period on the run can be found detailed in his book On the Run (1987). It’s an exciting read.

Notes

1. To read about my State Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold war Memoir (2002) ↩
2. See Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter 21, for the notes for the above. ↩

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Tuesday’s decision by the US Supreme Court gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act is an outrage that must be answered by working people. This act of judicial oppression is a milestone in the mounting attacks on democratic rights by the US financial aristocracy and its political servants.

By a 5-4 margin, the court effectively abrogated one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. The Voting Rights Act remains on the books, but its enforcement mechanism has been declared unconstitutional and struck down.

The opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts is insolent in its dismissal of any concern over five unelected judges overturning an act of Congress and defying the popular will. This ruling will shock and anger millions of working people–and it should.

Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy will go down in history alongside those high court justices who issued the pro-slavery Dred Scott decision in 1857. On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, these minions of American capitalism have demonstrated that the US ruling class is opposed to the democratic principles for which millions of working people have given their lives.

The narrow majority dropped any pretense to judicial restraint or respect for the separation of powers, overturning a law that was reauthorized only seven years ago by overwhelming votes–98-0 in the Senate, 390-33 in the House of Representatives–and signed into law by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

In striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, the court majority defied the plain language of the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in the wake of the Civil War, reads:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

For nearly a century, Congress took no action to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, while African Americans were systematically disenfranchised throughout the southern states. Only in response to mass civil rights struggles that spanned more than a decade was the Voting Rights Act finally enacted in 1965. The law is explicitly grounded on the language of Section 2, which provides the most sweeping grant of legislative power that can be afforded by the Constitution.

Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act identified those states, mainly in the South, which were to face federal oversight of voting and election law changes because of their long history of excluding African Americans from the polls. In the course of several renewals, most recently in 2006, Congress broadened the law to include discrimination against minority language groups, such as Hispanics, and added more states or counties found to have engaged in discriminatory practices.

Section 4 currently covers all of nine states–Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia–and parts of seven others–California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota.

The court majority declared that the coverage formula laid down in Section 4 had become outdated because of increases in registration and turnout at the polls on the part of African American voters. But the majority opinion scarcely attempted to justify this claim. Roberts wrote, “When the law was last renewed, in 2006, Congress relied on data from decades before.” But nowhere did he address the thousands of pages of evidence of ongoing acts of racial discrimination accumulated as part of the 2006 renewal.

In fact, the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder offers nothing of any substance, legally or factually. It is a pile of words concocted for the purpose of justifying a decision reached long in advance–and foreshadowed in the language of an earlier decision, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder in 2009, which turned aside a previous challenge to the Voting Rights Act on technical grounds.

If the ultra-right majority on the court now feels emboldened to go further, it is because it is not acting in a vacuum. These justices are encouraged by the general atmosphere of reaction that permeates government and media circles.

The president of the United States asserts the right to target any individual, including US citizens, for assassination. Those such as Edward Snowden who expose government criminality are witch-hunted and vilified as traitors. An entire American city, Boston, is placed on lockdown in complete disregard of fundamental constitutional rights–all without any significant opposition from within the political establishment.

The five arch-reactionaries would not dare to hand down such a ruling if they were not encouraged as well by the cowardice and complicity of American liberalism and the Democratic Party, which have gone along with sweeping attacks on democratic rights. None of these spent forces will lift a finger to defend the democratic rights of the people.

The claim by Roberts that there is no longer any significant racial discrimination in the states targeted by the Voting Rights Act is patently false. These states, particularly in the Deep South, remain among the most politically reactionary and backward in the US, with the highest rates of executions, the worst conditions of life for the masses, and incessant efforts to curtail the right of workers and minorities to vote.

The dissenting opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and signed by three other justices, had no difficulty citing a mass of empirical evidence of ongoing racially-motivated discrimination, including efforts to purge the rolls of black voters, the redrawing of electoral boundaries to eliminate black office-holders, and the moving of polling places to make it harder for blacks to vote.

Ginsburg noted the character of the plaintiff, Shelby County, Alabama, in the suburbs of the city of Birmingham, one of the key battlegrounds of the civil rights era. The majority opinion made no attempt to explain why federal oversight of Shelby County should be ended, nor could it since both the county and towns within it have repeatedly been sanctioned under the Voting Rights Act for discriminatory practices, as recently as 2008.

As for the claim by the majority that the Voting Rights Act had become outmoded by social progress in the South, Ginsburg pointed out that the law was designed to be flexible and included a bailout mechanism allowing states to leave federal oversight if they went ten years without being successfully sued for discrimination. Not one of the states covered by the law has attempted to qualify, although hundreds of cities, counties and smaller jurisdictions have done so.

Ginsburg also made short work of the claim that the Voting Rights Act formula amounts to “unequal treatment” of the states, pointing out that this is commonplace in federal laws, from appropriations bills that award funding disproportionately to small and rural states to laws that apply to only a single state (as in provisions covering disposal of nuclear waste).

The dissent underscored the fact that the court majority is engaged, not in rational argument and analysis, but in pushing toward a predetermined goal, using whatever pseudo-legal verbiage might fill the bill.

Scalia voiced the sentiments of this majority when he sneered during the oral arguments in the case that Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 only because of “a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The attack on the right to vote is not fundamentally a racial issue. It is part of an assault on the democratic rights of the entire working class. Dozens of states in recent years have enacted voter ID laws and other anti-democratic provisions in a deliberate effort to make it harder for the poor, the elderly, and students to vote.

There is a definite class logic behind this campaign: the American ruling elite is well aware that its policies of militarism and social austerity are opposed by the vast majority of the population. Opinion polls show only 15 percent support the Obama administration’s drive to war in Syria, and even fewer back cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other social benefits. To carry through the reactionary program of the financial aristocracy requires dispensing with democratic forms of rule.

The 5-4 ruling to wipe out a crucial legal guarantee of the people’s right to vote comes barely a decade after a similar political milestone: the 5-4 ruling that ratified the theft of the 2000 presidential election and installed the loser of the popular vote, George W. Bush, in the White House.

From Bush v. Gore to Shelby County, the Supreme Court has lost all credibility in the eyes of the people. It deserves neither deference nor respect. The defense of democratic rights requires the development of a mass popular movement of working people and youth in opposition to the entire political establishment, its two-party system, and the capitalist state institutions they defend.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Police sergeant trades sex for police tips.

Julie Wilson
Infowars.com
June 26, 2013

The owner of a bikini-barista stand and a 30-year veteran sheriff’s sergeant were arrested last week for conspiring to promote prostitution in Snohomish County, Washington. According to authorities, a total of seven barista stands were under investigation on suspicions of operating a prostitution ring.

The coffee stands got the attention of the local police department after customers complained of barista employees showing their private parts in exchange for tips. Along with coffee, some employees were selling sex.

Darrell L. O’Neill, a Snohomish County sheriff sergeant who was part of the investigating team, was allegedly receiving sex from the baristas, and in exchange offered them tips on how to avoid arrest for prostitution.

Deputy police chief Dan Templeton says “Sgt. O’Neill was giving the baristas information indicating when undercover operations were taking place at the stands, as well as how to avoid detection, and possibly even provided a description of undercover vehicles that were being used in the investigation.”

The owner of the barista stand, Carmela A. Panico, had been under investigation for several months. According to court records, she was arrested in July of 2011 and plead guilty to charges of misdemeanor lewd conduct. Previously, Panico was employed with Talents West, a strip club company that was shut down in 2010 for racketeering.

“In March, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office was notified by a local law enforcement agency of possible criminal activities being conducted by a Sheriff’s Office commissioned officer,” Sheriff’s spokeswoman Shari Ireton said in a statement. “Upon learning of the allegations, Sheriff’s Office administration immediately contacted Everett Police Department and requested a criminal investigation.”

Everett police called the investigation a “multijurisdictional effort to stop prostitution and lewd conduct.” Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation was involved.

After numerous customer complaints regarding barista’s exposing themselves, an investigation was launched on seven different barista stands in Everett, Edmonds and Kent, Washington, including Java Juggs and Twin Peaks espresso.

Panico’s manager, a 22-year old Shoreline woman was also arrested. Officials say it’s possible more arrests will be made in the future.

According to the police chief, detectives “observed both in-person and through on-camera surveillance not only lewd conduct but sexual activity at these stands.”

So far attempts to contact Panico and O’Neill for comment have been unsuccessful.

Following the officer’s arrest, O’Neill has been placed on paid administrative leave, however officials are planning an internal investigation on O’Neill’s involvement.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1:48 pm

Tags: government corruption, police state

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

A US hospital deported an unconscious stroke victim after noticing that the patient was an undocumented immigrant from Poland. Polish health officials are furious that the man was “dumped on their doorstep” before the transfer was approved.

“Imagine being carted around like a sack of potatoes,”
Polish Consul General Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka told the New York
Daily News, describing the incident in which 69-year old
Wladyslaw Haniszewski was unconsciously deported to his homeland.

Haniszewski, who suffers from a blood disease, lived in Perth
Amboy, N.J., for 30 years. He recently lost his job, apartment
and health insurance, and was forced to move into a homeless
shelter, the Daily News reports.

After the man suffered a dangerous stroke, a friend named Jerzy
Jedra took him to the New Jersey hospital for treatment. When
officials at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital noticed
that the patient had no health insurance and lived in the US
without documentation, they sent the comatose man to Poland. US
hospitals are legally required to provide emergency care to
anyone who needs it, but are allowed to deport stabilized
undocumented immigrants.

But in order to deport someone, a US hospital must first get
consent from either the patient, a family member, or a court
guardian. Officials at the Polish consulate claim that no one was
contacted, and that Haniszewski’s family was never informed that
the man was deported.

Meanwhile, Haniszewski was left at the doorstep of a hospital in
Boleslawiec, Poland. The facility is now being forced to take
care of the man’s medical payments, which have cost “a few
hundred dollars” a day, the hospital’s deputy director told
TVN.

Junczyk-Ziomecka, who works at the Polish consulate in New York
City, said she was trying to help the comatose man, only to
realize last week that he was gone. Polish officials are furious
about the deportation, especially since the 69-year-old patient
was not in a healthy state to sign off on the transfer.

“Behind our backs they transported the unconscious man to
Poland,” she told TVN, noting that she was most furious about
the hospital’s decision to dump the man at a facility in Poland.
“I cannot imagine such a situation that the decision about
transporting an unconscious person could be made without
agreement. Between the two institutions must be a contract, there
must be documents. You cannot simply leave a patient at the door
and drive away.”

At least 800 people have been deported from US hospitals without
consent over the past six years in 15 states, the Associated
Press reported in April. Medical repatriation has become
increasingly common, but AP suggests that the actual number of
such hospital deportations is much higher. Some health advocates
are afraid that repatriations will occur more frequently after
major components of Obamacare are implemented in 2014, since the
US government will reduce its payments to hospitals that care for
large numbers of uninsured patients.

Shena Erlington, director of the Health Justice Program, told the
Daily News that although hospitals may face the burden of paying
for uninsured patients, medical care providers should not have
the ability to deport patients. 

“It’s an incredibly disturbing case,” Lori Nessel,
director of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall
University School of Law, said about the Haniszewski
repatriation. “This kind of actions seems clearly illegal and
also not ethical, but it’s hard to bring a legal action.”

The New Jersey hospital denies any wrongdoing and claims that the
patient was informed of his discharge and care plan. The patient
is awake, but is unable to speak or communicate with doctors.

This article originally appeared on: RT

A February demonstration in support of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Tuesday’s ruling by the Supreme Court gutted an essential protective of the law. (Photo: SEIU International/ Flickr)The flood gates have opened. Following the Tuesday Supreme Court ruling that gutted an essential protective from the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a slew of states with a history of racial discrimination are already lining up to pass new voter identification laws all but guaranteeing increased minority voter suppression.

Hours after the Supreme Court ruling, Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, declared he was instantly implementing a controversial voter ID law that had been blocked by the Obama administration last August.

“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas,” he said.

The law was initially blocked on the basis that the requirement to show photo identification before casting a ballot would have imposed “strict, unforgiving burdens” on poor minority voters, the Guardian reports.

The NAACP estimates that a quarter of African-Americans and 16% of Latinos of voting age lack a current government-issued photo ID and are thus at risk of disenfranchisement.

“The court’s majority put politics over decades of precedent and the rights of voters,” said NAACP President, Benjamin Todd Jealous. “We are more vulnerable to the flood of attacks we have seen in recent years.”

“The Supreme Court’s ruling sets the stage for a fight to ensure that people of color are not turned away from the ballot box using modern pretextual devices like photo identification,” added NAACP General Counsel Kim Keenan. “Until we demand a fix for this problem, equal rights under the law and a fair vote will be no more than a promise to millions of voters.”

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determines which states and localities–based on those locations having a history of racial discrimination–are subject to federal “preclearance” before changing any voting laws, from new congressional district maps to the precinct locations and voting hours. Prior to the ruling, nine states, including Texas, and parts of seven others were required to obtain the approval.

Tuesday’s ruling also cleared the way for Alabama to pass a new voter identification law. Following the news, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange and Secretary of State Beth Chapman said they believed the voting requirement, which is scheduled to take effect with the June 2014 primaries, can now move forward without any oversight or preclearance. 

“Photo voter ID will the first process that we have gone through under this new ruling,” Chapman stated. 

In addition to Texas and Alabama, a slew of other formerly Confederate states that had previously been subject to oversight are also announcing new legislation. The Associated Press reports:

[…] Mississippi pledged to immediately implement laws requiring voters to show photo identification before getting a ballot. North Carolina Republicans promised they would quickly try to adopt a similar law. Florida now appears free to set its early voting hours however Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP Legislature please. And Georgia’s most populous county likely will use county commission districts that Republican state legislators drew over the objections of local Democrats.

According to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice, any weakening of preclearance requirements within the Voting Rights Act “would seriously threaten the rights of minority voters across the country to cast a ballot and generate additional confusion and litigation over voting rules.”

They estimate that over the past 15 years the Justice Department has blocked discriminatory election changes from the listed jurisdictions 86 times. 

Myrna Pérez, author of the report, noted that the most “dangerous” changes would be those kept below the radar. “The biggest threats could come from small town officials making changes without any public notice or scrutiny — canceling an election, say, or moving the location of a polling station a week before election day” she said, adding, “We will be asking people to keep vigilant.”

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

A new study shows that the majority of American voters believe the NSA may have monitored the private communications of Congress, military leaders, and judges.

(Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images) According to Rasmussen Reports, who published the poll, 72% of voters think it is “somewhat likely” that the NSA spied on these officials, violating “one of the country’s most cherished constitutional standards — the checks and balances between the three branches of government.” 

This larger figure is divided in two–with 27% of those polled finding the action “somewhat likely” while 45% agree it is “very likely.” Only 14% of the participants disagreed, saying the possibility of the NSA acting in this way is “not likely.”

Rasmusen adds that this data is especially significant considering that 57% of voters believe in the likelihood that the NSA data will be used by U.S. government agencies to harass political opponents.

President of the company Scott Rasmusen commented on the recent leaks, noting that “none of the public players comes off looking great in the NSA story.”

1,000 people participated in the survey which was facilitated by Pulse Opinion Research.

(Chart via Instantpiechart)Lucia Brown is a summer editorial intern at Common Dreams.

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Household drinking water that comes from wells near known fracking sites contains levels of methane six times greater than what’s common elsewhere, a new study has found.

Researchers at Duke University sampled drinking water from 141
wells across northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York and
determined that the concentration of methane, the main component
of natural gas, is much higher when those wells are within one
kilometer of a hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” sites.

Fracking is a method of drilling deep into the Earth in order to
extract natural gas and has seen an emergence in recent years as
an increasingly popular process used by energy companies. That
spread in popularity is not without opposition from
environmentalists and activists, however, who fear fracking has
detrimental effects on the Earth.

According to the latest study, researchers have linked fracking
sites with methane contamination several times over what is seen
elsewhere. The scientists say that those high levels aren’t a
direct result of the drilling, though, but caused in part by poor
well construction that has allowed the water to become
contaminated.

“It is looking like we are seeing a problem with well
construction in some places and not others,” wrote the
study’s main author, Robert Jackson.

“Poor casing and cementing problems are the simplest
explanation of what we found,” he said, but declined to
single out well construction as the exclusive cause of the
contamination.

“We need to understand why, in some cases, shale gas
extraction contaminates groundwater and how to keep it from
happening elsewhere,” the researchers wrote.

Jackson and his crew determined that 82 percent of the 141 water
wells tested had elevated levels of methane, with other additives
appearing in unusually high numbers as well. In addition to
finding methane concentrations at around six times the usual
level, Jackson also found ethane concentrations 23 times higher
in drinking water at homes near fracking sites. In ten of the
sites located within one kilometer of a drilling, propane was
detected in 10 separate water samples.

“The methane, ethane and propane data, and new evidence from
hydrocarbon and helium isotopes, all suggest that drilling has
affected some homeowners’ water,” Jackson wrote.

Steve Everley, a spokesman for Energy in Depth, told the Wall
Street Journal that Jackon’s study “is not a smoking gun to
say that gas drilling is a problem.”

“There is methane concentration near gas wells, but there is
also methane concentrations in areas where there is no gas
drilling,” he said. Energy in Depth, wrote the Journal, is
funded by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Jackson’s peer-reviewed study appeared in this week’s edition of
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This article originally appeared on: RT

June 26, 2013
 |

After Texas Republicans used their majority to cut off debate and force a vote on the gravely abortion-restricting bill SB5 Monday, female Texas democrats refused to take it from these right-wing bullies. Enter Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (D), who led an epic, eleven-hour filibuster that killed the insanely damaging (not to mention insulting to women) legislation. SB5 would have closed nearly every abortion clinic in the state, leaving only a handful of locations where women in Texas can safely and legally procure the procedure. It also would have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks, directly contradicitng Roe v. Wade.

Women in Texas — and across the country — won a huge victory yesterday, but the War on Women is far from over.

Here are 3 things to know about the rowdy, inspiring battle that went down yesterday in one of America’s reddest states.

1. Wendy Davis and her Comrades, Ultimate Badasses, refused to back down

Davis literally stood with Texas woman for eleven hours, unable to even lean against a podium for support, let alone take a bathroom break or eat. Determined to strike down the bill to which she brought national attention, Davis flat-out refused to yield.

After hours of Davis delivering facts about the necessity of access to abortion and heartwrenching testimony from women across the country, Texas republicans decided they just couldn’t take any more of her talking and moved to shut her right up. They claimed she violated the filibuster’s “three-strike” rules, twice by allegedly veering off topic by bringing up topics like Planned Parenthood’s budget, mandatory sonograms, and Roe v. Wade (not “germaine,” the GOP claimed), and also by receiving assistance to strap on a backbrace. Shortly after 10 p.m., her Senate foes said she had broken the rules and the filibuster was over.

Attempts to silence Davis resulted in an in eruption of shouting, as supporters yelled “LET HER SPEAK!” At 11 p.m., Democratic senators challenged the end of the filibuster and debated the rules, postponing the vote about 11:45 p.m.. Backing Davis were Sen. Kirk Watson, Sen. Rodney Ellis and Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, who came from her father’s funeral in San Antonio to stand with Davis and Texas women.

The crowd loudly refused to accept the filibuster’s end. Chanting ensued for a straight 15 minutes, drowning out the vote.

Sen. Robert Lloyd Duncan asked for “order” to no avail, and the unruly crowd was ordered out of the building so that the Republicans could have their way and throw away women’s rights in some peace and quiet. But, oh no, it didn’t stop there.

2. The Senate Republican pulled some really shady shit.

The Senate passed the bill minutes after the midnight deadline, but the GOP went ahead and changed the document to pretend they met the deadline anyway:

The initial time stamp on the Capitol website and on Senate documents placed the vote at 12:02 or 12:03 on June 26. But then someone mysteriously changed the time stamp to make it appear SB5 passed before the deadline. The time stamp evidence, circulated on Twitter, eventually forced GOP leaders to admit defeat, at least for tonight.

By 12:45 AM, protesters were cleared from the room, and a couple of hours later, the bill was officially dead. But it isn’t over.

3. This has nationwide importance. As Sarah Seltzer writes on Medium:

What Davis was fighting, a kind of anti-choice ram-rodding in the statehouse, isn’t unusual. In fact, restricting reproductive rights is one of the most common tactics the state-level GOP has used across the country since the wave of Tea Party candidates took office in 2010, punching holes in the rights afforded by Roe every year. It was called the “War on Women” by national media in 2011. But it never stopped.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 26, 2013
 |

Though the strong majorities of Americans who support marriage equality and equal federal benefits for gay couples celebrated today’s historic Supreme Court rulings, several prominent conservatives reacted with fear and fury. Though the conservative establishment (by in large) had little to sayabout the marriage equality cases, the vitriol that came from these particular conservatives stood out:

1. Rand Paul and Glenn Beck worry about Muslims and animals: In a video captured by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, the purportedly libertarian Senator and popular talk show host worry about a host of bizarre “logical” consequences of the moves toward marriage equality, with Beck asking “who are you to say that, if I’m a devout Muslim, I come over here and I have three wives, who are you to say if I’m an American citizen that I can’t have multiple wives?” Paul nodded, saying “people take it to one extension further – does it have to be humans?…I’m kinda with you…we should not just say ‘oh, we’re punting on it, marriage can be anything.”

2. Mike Huckabee channels Jesus’ tearducts: On Twitter, the former Governor and leading GOP Presidential candidate had two words: “ Jesus wept.” He later elaborated, saying that the Supreme Court declared itself “ bigger than God.”

3. Congressmen declare the apocalypse is imminent: At a press conference ThinkProgress watched after the ruling, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) declared that “society itself is at risk and cannot continue.” At the same presser, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said that same-sex marriage was “usually tried at the end of a great civilization.” Walberg and Gohmert’s comments echoed House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), who had said earlier that “preserving the institution of traditional marriage is crucial to the stability of our society.”

4. Ralph Reed sees “Orwellian” threat to federalism, rule of law, and Western civilization: In a press release emailed to ThinkProgress, the influential evangelical activist falsely claimed that there “has never been any attempt by either party to repeal or modify” DOMA, and that the overturning the act was “an Orwellian act of judicial fiat.” He added that the Prop 8 ruling “endangers federalism as well as the most time-honored tradition in the history of Western civilization,” and that “these twin decisions will undermine the already low respect for the federal courts and the rule of law.

5. The National Organization for Marriage suggests the Supreme Court is corrupt and smells bad: The leading anti-marriage equality organization’s press release blamed a conspiracy of “homosexual” and “liberal” lower circuit judges for the Court’s rulings. “There is a stench coming from this case that has now stained the Supreme Court,” said Brian Brown, the organization’s President, in a confusingly mixed metaphor. “They’ve allowed corrupt politicians and judges to betray the voters, rewarding them for their betrayal.” The organization vowed to challenge any efforts by marriage advocates to overturn bans in the states, and looks to have an ally in Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), who announced he would introduce a federal constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage in response to the court rulings.

Another fiery reaction – outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann’s declaration that “no man, not even a Supreme Court, can undo what a holy God has instituted” – didn’t have quite the intended impact. “Who cares?” responded House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), when asked for comment on Bachmann’s outburst.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

Donna Anderson
Infowars,.com
June 24, 2013

In a move lawmakers say takes a “sensible approach to fighting crime,” New Jersey senators approved a bill that would require DNA testing for people convicted of a disorderly persons offense. The legislation is only expected to affect a small percentage of offenders but we all know it’s only a matter of time before the DNA every citizen in America is entered in the federal database.

The New Jersey bill is co-sponsored by state Sen. Nicholas Sacco, D-North Bergen, and Paul Sarlo, D-Wood-Ridge and was approved by a vote of 35-3. DNA would be required from anyone convicted of a “more serious disorderly persons offense,” such as domestic violence, shoplifting, prostitution and some drug-related crimes.

“DNA is one of the most powerful tools we have to identify perpetrators and exonerate those falsely accused of crimes,” Sacco said. “A more expansive DNA database will enable us to solve investigations with greater speed and accuracy. By adding certain serious disorderly persons offenses … this legislation only affects a small percentage of offenders and takes a sensible approach to fighting crime.”

Currently, the federal government and 28 states authorize the practice of collecting DNA samples from people arrested in connection with serious crimes. In a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month arguing the legality of a Maryland state law authorizing warrantless DNA collection from people who had been arrested but not yet convicted, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, “taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

However, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a stern dissenting opinion, arguing that the Fourth Amendment forbids searches without reasonable suspicion to gather evidence about an unrelated crime.

“Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason..Solving crimes is a noble objective,” he concluded, “but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law enforcement searches. The Fourth Amendment must prevail.”

According to Justice Scalia, “DNA testing as it is actually practiced is to solve cold cases, not to identify the suspect in custody.”

Apparently, though, as long as you’re voluntarily giving up your DNA it’s fine. Earlier this month law enforcement officials in Alabama set up roadblocks in St. Clair and Bibb counties, asking motorists to voluntarily submit blood and DNA samples.

In 2009, while protesting that Texas’ thumbprint requirement for renewing a driver’s license was unconstitutional, Alex Jones was already anticipating that Americans would soon be required to turn over their DNA, and it’s no secret that the federal government has been quietly and surreptitiously building the DNA database for years.

In 2010, the Department of Motor Vehicles in Penn Branch in Southeast Washington began offering free HIV tests to anyone applying for a driver’s license. Participants were offered up to $15 to help toward their DMV costs and the program was strictly voluntary but you know everyone who’s participated is now listed on the federal Combined DNA Index System.

In 2009, police officers in Idaho were actually forcibly taking roadside blood samples from people they only suspected of drunk driving, a practice which has been in place in some areas since 1995. In an article for PrisonPlanet.com, Paul Joseph Watson wrote,

“…officers in Texas and Idaho are training to withdraw blood from “suspects” as a replacement for the standard breathalyzer test, primarily because police can’t make anyone breathe into a tube but apparently, in the “land of the free,” they can forcibly hold someone down and jab a needle into their arm and take their blood, “a practice that’s been upheld by Idaho’s Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.”

It’s highly unlikely that anyone caught shoplifting a pack of gum would someday go on to become a murderous thug who’s able to evade capture but, according to New Jersey and the United States Supreme Court it’s always a possibility, so better to get that shoplifter’s DNA on file now — just in case.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1:08 pm

Tags: constitution, domestic news, police state, science, technology

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Jack Kaskey
Bloomberg
June 26, 2013

Monsanto Co. (MON), the world’s largest seed company, reported third-quarter earnings fell 3 percent as increased seed-production costs overshadowed rising prices for Roundup herbicide.

Net income dropped to $909 million, or $1.68 a share, in the three months through May, from $937 million, or $1.74, a year earlier, St. Louis-based Monsanto said today in a statement. Per-share profit excluding a legacy tax matter was $1.66, exceeding the $1.59 average of 15 analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant said profit fell because last year’s U.S. drought required more seed to be shipped from South America in the quarter, and the company didn’t pass on the higher costs to customers. Gross profit in the unit that makes Roundup herbicide gained 31 percent because of higher prices while profit in the larger seed unit declined 10 percent.

Read full article

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 26, 2013

Don’t mess with the banks. That’s the message coming out of a courtroom in San Diego, California, after a man was arrested for writing anti-bank messages outside the Bank of America. Jeff Olsen is charged with 13 counts of vandalism and faces time in prison for expressing his opinion on a public sidewalk.

“I wrote ‘No thanks big banks,’ I wrote ‘Shame on Bank of America,’” Olsen told CBS8 in San Diego. “Always on city sidewalks, washable chalk, never crude messages, never vulgar, clearly topical,” he added.

The San Diego city attorney decided to prosecute Olsen after numerous complaints about the anti-bank messages were sent in an email from a high ranking bank security manager.

Olsen’s attorney argued that his client’s First Amendment right to free speech will be violated if he is convicted on the vandalism charge. Judge Howard Shore said the messages directed at the banking industry have nothing to do with the First Amendment. “In light of the fact that it’s clear in the case law, vandalism is not a legitimate exercise of free speech rights. It really is irrelevant what the message is, or content is,” the judge said.

The absurd case reveals just how far the state will go to prevent criticism of a corporate partner in crime. Children are not arrested for drawing on sidewalks with washable chalk and citizens putting up signs for garage sales or private business in the public commons are rarely arrested and prosecuted. Clearly, the Olsen case is political in nature. It is a ham-fisted response by government in reaction to criticism of the bankster elite and their predatory behavior.

In another case with political overtone, prosecutors in West Virginia have requested a court-imposed gag order to prevent a father and his 14-year old son from talking to the media. The 14-year old, Jared Marcum, was arrested for wearing a National Rifle Association t-shirt to school two weeks ago. The eight grader was charged with obstructing an officer and faces a $500 fine and up to a year in jail.

The arresting cop did not accuse the teen of making any threats or acting violently. He did say, however, that Marcum hindered his ability to carry out his duties by talking.

Note: Alex briefly entertained the prospect of a July 4th sidewalk chalk revolt on today’s broadcast. He suggested people should, at their own peril, exercise their First Amendment rights by using water-soluble sidewalk chalk to spread the message of liberty and warn others of encroaching tyranny.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1:26 pm

Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

With the Senate apparently within days or hours of passing the so-called Gang of Eight’s immigration reform bill, one opponent of that bill has offered an amendment to that legislation that would prevent it from becoming another tool of totalitarianism.

On June 20, Senator Rand Paul (shown, R-Ky.) announced on his website that he would introduce the Protect Our Privacy Act as an amendment to S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.

According to Paul, his measure would prohibit the issuance of a national ID card. The constitutionally consistent freshman senator believes that his proposed amendment would push back against the assault on liberty being perpetrated by the Obama administration.

“A National ID card violates our right to privacy by helping to consolidate data and facilitate the government in the tracking of individuals. President Ronald Reagan opposed this idea, as did President Bill Clinton. They believed, as I do, that American citizens should not be forced to carry around a National Identification Card as a condition of citizenship, because the card offends any reasonable basic concept of freedom. While identifying and documenting immigrants is necessary for proper reform, implementing a mandatory identification registry for all citizens is not,” Paul said.

Senator Paul’s statement provides the following points relating to the protections proposed by his amendment.

The Protect Our Privacy Act does the following:

– Prohibits the Department of Homeland Security from interpreting the immigration reform bill to permit a national identification card or system;

– Prohibits the Federal or State government from requiring photographs or biometric information without probable cause;

– Prevents the provision in the bill titled “Photo Tool” from allowing the government to force all citizens to provide a photo;

– Prohibits a “biometric social security card” for citizens; and,

– Forbids a “de facto national registry of citizens.”

In an op-ed published by Politico, Senator Paul explained his impending “no” vote on the immigration overhaul:

I will be voting no on the Senate’s Gang of Eight immigration bill, because the legislation does not secure the border first.

I think we desperately need immigration reform. Unfortunately, this legislation does not give us serious reform.

Of paramount concern is what to do with the 12 million people currently residing in the U.S. who are in legal limbo: No one is seriously contemplating they leave, but conservatives believe normalizing their status should be dependent on border security first.

Any immigration reform must expand legal immigration and the work visa program, so we don’t find another 12 million undocumented workers here a decade from now. The Gang of Eight bill actually decreases the number of agricultural workers visas. If work visas are less than what the market demands, the workers will come illegally and we’re right back where we started.

On May 24, Senator Paul published a similar opinion piece in the Washington Times. Paul wrote:

The controversial immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee this week is expected to be considered by the Senate in June. Many see measures contained in this bill, such as a strong E-Verify and a “photo tool,” as a means to control unlawful immigrants’ access to unlawful employment. I worry that they go too far.

I think there are better ideas that err on the side of individual privacy while still strengthening our borders. We should scrap a national identification database and pass immigration reform that secures the border, expands existing work-visa programs and prevents noncitizens from access to welfare. These simple ideas will eliminate the perceived need for an invasive worker-verification system and a government citizenship database.

I am against the idea that American citizens should be forced to carry around a National Identification Card as a condition of citizenship. I worry that the Senate is working to consider a series of little-noticed provisions in comprehensive immigration reform that may provide a pathway to a national ID card for all individuals present in the United States – citizens and noncitizens. These draconian ideas would simply give government too much power.

Forcing Americans to carry around an identification card to affirmatively prove citizenship offends our basic concept of freedom. Wanting to avoid a “papers please” culture in our country is also why conservatives oppose federal universal gun background checks. We oppose such measures not because we don’t believe in common-sense rules or regulation – but because we are wary of giving the federal government this kind of centralized power over our daily lives.

I am against government lists of those who own or have transferred a firearm for the same reason I oppose any pathway to a national ID. I don’t think that government should have the awesome power of monitoring the legal activities of American citizens. That is not a proper role of the federal government – or any level of government, for that matter.

As with his other amendments to the immigration bill, Paul is blocking every effort by his colleagues in Congress to deprive Americans of their most basic civil rights as protected by the Constitution.

In the Politico letter, Senator Paul places the onus for real immigration reform on the shoulders of the House of Representatives.

The authors of the current bill gloss over these core immigration issues by saying they will simply put more people on the border. This is like using a Band-Aid to cure a cold, and further shows Washington’s ignorance of the deep systematic flaws that have contributed to our immigration dilemma.

It is now up to the House to champion real immigration reform. If we’re going to fix our broken borders and have an overhaul of the system verifiable by Congress, the House will have to lead the way.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday, June 25, that House Republicans “feel no pressure to act quickly” on the immigration issue.

“We have a minority of the minority in the Senate voting for this bill,” the Times quotes Representative Tom Cole (R-Okla.), referring to the 15 members of the GOP likely to vote in favor of the measure when the Senate votes this week.

“That’s not going to put a lot of pressure on the majority of the majority in the House,” Cole said, as reported by the Times.

Finally, as The New American has repeatedly pointed out throughout the debate on the immigration issue over the past few years, Congress is not empowered by the Constitution to legislate in the arena of immigration.

Nearly the entire universe of authority delegated to the Congress of the United States is contained with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Not one of the roughly 20 powers listed authorizes Congress at all, not to mention exclusively, to establish immigration policy.

The closest the Constitution comes to placing anything even incidentally related to immigration within the bailiwick of Congress is found in the clause of Article I, Section 8 that empowers Congress to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.”

That’s it. There is no other mention of immigration in the text of the Constitution. Somehow, though, the enemies of state sovereignty and enumerated powers have extrapolated from that scant reference to “naturalization” the exclusive and unimpeachable right to legislate in the arena of immigration.

The difference between immigration and naturalization is one of definition. Immigration is the act of coming to a country of which one is not a native.

Naturalization, however, is defined as the conference upon an alien of the rights and privileges of a citizen. It is difficult to understand how so many lawyers, judges, and legislators (most of whom are/were lawyers) can innocently confuse these two terms.

Before the states sent delegates to a convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to amend the Articles of Confederation (the result of which was the Constitution), they had years of experience policing their sovereign borders, setting rules governing the means by which one could lawfully enter the state. That is to say, they were policing the immigration of aliens, an act undeniably within their right as a sovereign government.

On not one single occasion during that summer of 1787 did any one of the 55 (on and off) representatives of the 13 states suggest the endowment of the new federal government with the authority to set immigration policy for the entire nation. That is significant. Not even the most strident advocate of a powerful national government ever proposed granting the power in question to the central authority.

The Senate will likely vote on the immigration bill this week.

Photo of Sen. Rand Paul: 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.

This article originally appeared on: The New American

When the fight started against Agenda 21, those of us working to expose it were largely ignored by the main stream media and even the established Conservative movement and its media. Too far out there, they said, to be taken seriously.
 
Then, as more and more Americans began to experience the dire effects of Sustainable Development in their daily lives, suddenly our message began to take hold. Today, thousands of Americans have taken up the fight. And anti-Agenda 21 activists are storming planning meetings, demanding answers. State legislatures and even some county and city governments are passing legislation against it. It seems the Agenda 21 fight is everywhere.
 
So, now, proponents of the Sustainable Development policy are alarmed and working feverishly to counter our claims that such controls over local development and energy policy have their roots in international policy; in particular, our claims that these planning policies come from the UN’s Agenda 21 that was introduced to the world at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
 
Their most often-used description of Agenda 21 is an “innocuous, 20-year-old document that has no enforcement power.” Continuously we hear that local planning programs, especially from such groups like the American Planning Association (APA), have no connection to Agenda 21 or the UN. It’s all local – or as the APA says in its document, “Glossary for the Public,” “There is no hidden agenda.” In its “Agenda 21: Myths and Facts” document found on the APA website, the group goes to extreme measures to distance itself and its policies from Agenda 21, specifically saying “The American Planning Association has no affiliation regarding any policy goals and recommendations of the UN.”
 
Well, then it would be interesting to hear the APA explain information found in one of its own documents from 1994. The document was an APA newsletter to its members in Northern California (San Francisco Area). The article was a commentary entitled “How Sustainable Is Our Planning?” by Robert Odland. It was written just two years after the UN Earth Summit at which Agenda 21 was first introduced to the world. The document can be viewed here.
 
The fifth paragraph of the article says, “Vice President Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, addressed many of the general issues of sustainability. Within the past year, the President’s Council on Sustainable Development has been organized to develop recommendations for incorporating sustainability into the federal government. Also, various groups have been formed to implement Agenda 21, a comprehensive blueprint for sustainable development that was adopted at the recent UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro (the “Earth Summit.”)   
 
In one paragraph, this document brings together the APA, Agenda 21, the UN’s Earth Summit, Al Gore, Sustainable Development, the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, and NGO groups with the mission of implementing Agenda 21 and the description of Agenda 21 as a “comprehensive Blueprint” for Sustainable Planning. It sounds like it came verbatim from one of my speeches!
 
A couple of paragraphs higher in the article, it says, “A common misconception is that sustainability is synonymous with self-sufficiency; on the contrary, sustainability must recognize the interconnections between different levels of societal structure.” That “societal structure” is “social justice,” as described in Agenda 21. A visit to the PlannersNetwork.org, of which the APA is a member, will find in its Statement of Principles this quote: “We believe planning should be a tool for allocating resources … and eliminating the great inequalities of wealth and power in our society … because the free market has proven incapable of doing this.”
 
The United Nations blatantly advocates that Capitalism and private property rights are not sustainable and pose the single greatest threat to the world’s ecosystem and social equity. And, while sometimes using different words, the APA is helping communities across the nation enforce these ideas, while swearing it is all a local idea, designed from local input.  
 
As George Orwell masterfully put it in his epic novel Animal Farm, it’s become difficult to see the difference between the pigs and the farmers – or the APA and the UN.
 
Sustainable Development is not implemented in the open, as the APA claims, but in back rooms filled with the proper NGO organizations, which surround your elected officials and pressures their actions. In that way it is changing our American society and form of government, making government more powerful and more invasive in our daily lives. Sustainability is anti-free enterprise, anti-private property, and anti-individual – and that’s why we oppose it.

View this article on our web site: http://americanpolicy.org/2013/06/05/here-it-is-the-smoking-gun/
Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence. Go to americanpolicy.org for more information

Tom DeWeese’s new book is now on Amazon! Click here for more information

This article originally appeared on: The New American

The Islamic Republic of Iran has launched a domestically designed and manufactured landing craft capable of carrying 400 tons of commodities in the southern province of Hormozgan.

The vessel, named Moshtari 2 (Jupiter 2) was launched in the waters of the Persian Gulf off the coast of Qeshm Island on Wednesday with a number of local officials in attendance.

Moshtari 2 is 49 meters long and 11.5 meters wide with a depth of 2.5 meters. It can carry 50 automobiles equal to 400 tons, runs on two 700-horsepower engines and has twenty crew members on board working in two shifts.

The vessel will initially travel between Laaft pier in Qeshm Island and Pehel port on the suburbs of the city of Khamir in Hormozgan Province.

Moshtari 2 was constructed over 27 months at a cost of 25 billion rials (over USD 2 million).

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A fresh wave of ethnic riots has hit Chinaâ„¢s troubled restive far western region of Xinjiang, killing more than dozen people, state media say.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iran has burned more than 100 tons of narcotics across the country to mark the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, Press TV reports.

Iranian anti-narcotics police chief, Brigadier General Ali Moayyedi, announced on Wednesday that 115 tons of illicit drugs which were destroyed today had been seized across the country over the first three months of the current Persian calendar year, which began on March 21, 2013.

Å“As compared to first three months of last year, we have seized six percent more opium, 13 percent more hashish, 200 percent more morphine, 82 percent more heroin and 60 percent more of other illicit drugs excluding crack,” Moayyedi said.

He further criticized the international community for its lack of cooperation with Iran in its fight against narcotics, saying that some of the drugs seized had been destined for Europe as they have no usage in Iran.

Å“Morphine is not used in Iran at all. It is transited to Europe and used there. We have seized tons of morphine this year. You can say that we are fighting for them and we are saving their lives and their society. But the international community is not helping, they are not cooperating with us as they should be,” the Iranian official said.

On Monday, Iranian Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency Ali Asghar Soltanieh also stated that Iran has played an exceptional role in fighting drug trafficking.

Soltanieh made the remarks as the 55th summit of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) kicked off in Vienna.

Over the past three decades, more than 3,700 members of Iranian police force have lost their lives and many more have been injured in the fight against drug trafficking.

MKA/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

An activist who has been protesting the continuous operation of the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility was arrested Wednesday after climbing over the fence on the north lawn of the White House.

Diane Wilson, a member of the activism group Code Pink, was
arrested Wednesday afternoon in Washington, according to the
organization’s official Twitter account.

Wilson, a Texas shrimp boat captain in her sixties, has been
regularly demonstrating outside of the White House in an effort
to raise awareness of the 166 Gitmo detainees who remain held at
the detention facility in Cuba more than four years after
President Barack Obama said he’d shut the center down. Eighty-six
of those inmates have been cleared for release, and more than 100
have been participating in a hunger strike that started this past
February.

As an act of solidarity with the detainees who have engaged in a
months-long hunger strike, Wilson has been fasting for 57 days as
of Wednesday’s arrest.

Wilson and other members of Code Pink began demonstrating outside
of the White House just after 12 noon on Wednesday, and word of
her arrest circulated quickly over the Internet around one hour
later.

Jodi Evans, a fellow co-founder of the group, tweeted that Wilson
was arrested shortly after climbing over the White House fence in
order to demand the detainees’ release. Photos have since spread
of Wilson standing on the lawn of the property, as well as other
images of her laying on the grass as armed police and guard dogs
race to the scene. 

Code Pink tweeted that co-founder Medea Benjamin was also
apprehended by police after reportedly assisting Wilson. Benjamin
made headlines on her own account earlier this year after she
interrupted the president during a speech about the detention
center.

“Eighty-six were cleared already. Release them today!”
Benjamin yelled during last month’s presidential address in
Washington.

“I’m willing to cut the young lady who interrupted me some
slack because it’s worth being passionate about,” the
president responded. “Is this who we are? Is that something
our fathers foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave our
children?

Wilson has previously been arrested for chaining herself to the
White House fence, and was sentenced to three months in jail in
2006 after interrupting a speech by then-Vice President Dick
Cheney.

This article originally appeared on: RT

NSA Head General Keith Alexander (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP Photo)The NSA moved quickly to cover its tracks Tuesday after being publicly exposed for posting a false “fact sheet” on the Prism internet spying program that deceptively portrayed U.S. privacy protections as stronger than they actually are.

The public statement was initially published last week to quell widespread outrage at the NSA snooping program, exposed by The Guardian in early June. Facing heated questioning from Congress, chastisement from international governments, and deep anger from those caught in the vast spying dragnet, the NSA hoped to clear the air by illustrating the oversight and limits placed on internet snooping.

Yet, the fact sheet turned out to contain serious falsehoods, making what was already a highly secretive spying operation even more mysterious.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall released a public letter Monday declaring the “fact sheet” to be significantly inaccurate because it, “portrays protections for Americans’ privacy being significantly stronger than they actually are.”

The senators, however, did not publicly reveal exactly where the inaccuracies lie, because they did not wish to expose classified documents. Rather, they shared the inaccuracies in a classified letter to the NSA.

After the public exposure, NSA officials admitted to the falsehoods. NSA head General Keith Alexander wrote a letter to the senators admitting the fact sheet ‘could have more precisely described’ NSA targeting.

As the Washington Post reports, NSA Spokeswoman Judith Emmel refused to admit to the lies yet acknowledged the “fact sheet” had been removed:

NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel would not explicitly acknowledge that the fact sheet had been removed from the agency’s Web site. Instead, she referred to the text of a 2008 law that governs NSA surveillance programs.

“Given the intense interest from the media, the public, and Congress, we believe the precision of the source document (the statute) is the best possible representation of applicable authorities,” Emmel said in a prepared statement sent by e-mail to The Washington Post.

This is not the first embarrassing lie that the NSA has been caught in since the spying scandal broke.

Earlier this month, national intelligence director James Clapper was blasted for lying in a March testimony in which he declared that the NSA is not tracking and storing information on ‘hundreds of millions of Americans.’ Clapper defended his actions on the grounds that he responded in what he thought was ‘the most truthful, or least untruthful manner.’

Senators Wyden and Udall are calling for the NSA to publicly admit to the falsehood, declaring, “When the NSA makes inaccurate statements about government surveillance and fails to correct the public record, it can decrease public confidence in the NSA’s openness.”

Yet, an article in The Atlantic, compared the disproved “fact sheet” with leaked documents to uncover the secret lie.            While they questioned many of the NSA statement’s claims, they cast considerable doubt on the following “fact sheet” assertions:

• Any inadvertently acquired communication of or concerning a U.S. person must be promptly destroyed if it is neither relevant to the authorized purpose nor evidence of a crime.
• Any information collected after a foreign target enters the U.S. – or prior to a discovery that any target erroneously believed to be foreign was in fact a U.S. person – must be promptly destroyed unless that information meets specific, limited criteria approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Trevor Trimm from the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed to broad NSA deceptiveness but could not pinpoint the secret lie exposed by the senators.

I can’t really tell which statement Wyden and Udall think is inaccurate. Many of the statements are written to downplay the true scope of what the NSA does and how it affects Americans’ privacy. For example, they say nothing about how they can hold onto communications forever if the communication is encrypted. Essentially they’re saying, if you value privacy, you are suspicious. But I doubt this is what Wyden and Udall are talking about. This is exactly problem with keeping such sweeping surveillance powers behind the veil of secrecy – the public has no way of knowing if what the government says is true or not.

But I have no doubt Wyden and Udall are correct. They originally said Americans would be “stunned” to learn how the government was interpreting the Patriot Act, and they were proven right when the Verizon court order was published. Wyden also alleged the NSA could conduct “backdoor searches” of US persons data after targeting foreigners under the FISA Amendments Act, and it’s becoming increasingly clear, judging by the latest report from the Guardian, that he was right about that too.  

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

On Wednesday, Texas is set to reach the “shameful milestone” of executing its 500th inmate since it reinstated in the death penalty in 1982.

Texas is set to confirm its “dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings” with its milestone execution of Kimberly McCarthy. (Photo: Kurt and Sybilla/cc/flickr) 52-year-old Kimberly McCarthy is scheduled to die by lethal injection shortly after 6 PM in Huntsville, Texas after her lawyer exhausted all efforts to appeal the execution.

The Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington writes that it “will confirm Texas’s dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings.”

As Nick Chiles reports at the Atlanta Black Star:

Texas kills an average of one inmate every three weeks, a pace that makes it by far the most active state in the killing business. Of the 34 states that have the death penalty on the books, Texas has killed almost five times more people than the runner-up, Virginia, which has had 110 executions since the death penalty was federally reinstated in 1976.

Among the previous 499 inmates killed by Texas before this “shameful milestone,” Amnesty International points out, “there have been prisoners suffering from severe mental illness or intellectual disability, and teenage defendants who had been provided with woefully inadequate legal representation.”

In addition to being the 500th person to be executed in the state since the death penalty’s reinstatement, Sadhbh Walshe writes,

McCarthy will also be the 185th black person. This is significant because it means that in a state where African Americans make up just 12.2% of the population, they account for around 37% of those who are executed. This is disturbing of itself, but all the more so because McCarthy’s application for a stay was based on claims that her conviction and death sentence were the result of a process that was infected by racial discrimination.

Amnesty International explains:

McCarthy’s death sentence was for the murder of a 71-year-old white neighbor Dorothy Booth, who was stabbed to death in 1997. At the 2002 trial – which was a retrial – the jury consisted of 11 white members and one person of color. At the jury selection, only four out of 64 prospective members of the jury were black, and three of these were dismissed by the prosecution – a decision which was never challenged by McCarthy’s lawyer.

“The shameful errors that plague Ms. McCarthy’s case–race bias, ineffective counsel and courts unwilling to exercise meaningful oversight of the system–reflect problems that are central to the administration of the death penalty as a whole,” Maurie Levin, McCarthy’s lawyer, said. “For this to be the emblem of Texas’ 500th execution is something all Texans should be ashamed of.”

_______________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

This article has been generously contributed by Michael Snyder. You can follow his regular writings, research and analysis at The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream. Read his recent book The Beginning of the End to get an idea of what America may look like in the very near future.

The vast majority of Americans are going to be absolutely blindsided by what is coming. They don’t understand how our financial system works, they don’t understand how vulnerable it is, and most of them blindly trust that our leaders know exactly what they are doing and that they will be able to fix our problems. As a result, most Americans are simply not prepared for the massive storm that is heading our way. Most American families are living paycheck to paycheck, most of them are not storing up emergency food and supplies, and only a very small percentage of them are buying gold and silver for investment purposes.  They seem to have forgotten what happened back in 2008. When the financial markets crashed, millions of Americans lost their jobs. Because most of them were living on the financial edge, millions of them also lost their homes. Unfortunately, most Americans seem convinced that it will not happen again. Right now we seem to be living in a “hope bubble” and people have become very complacent. For a while there, being a “prepper” was very trendy, but now concern about a coming economic crisis seems to have subsided. What a tragic mistake. As I pointed out yesterday, our entire financial system is a giant Ponzi scheme, and there are already signs that our financial markets are about to implode once again. Those that have not made any preparations for what is coming are going to regret it bitterly.  The following are 17 signs that most Americans will be wiped out by the coming economic collapse…

#1 According to a survey that was just released, 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. But most Americans are acting as if their jobs will always be there. But the truth is that mass layoffs can occur at any time. In fact, it just happened at one of the largest law firms in New York City.

#2 27 percent of all Americans do not have even a single pennysaved up.

#3 46 percent of all Americans have $800 or less saved up.

#4 Less than one out of every four Americans has enough money stored away to cover six months of expenses.

#5 Wages continue to fall even as the cost of living continues to go up. Today, the average income for the bottom 90 percent of all income earners in America is just $31,244. An increasing percentage of American families are just trying to find a way to survive from month to month.

#6 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

#7 Small business is becoming an endangered species in America. In fact, only about 7 percent of all non-farm workers in the United States are self-employed at this point. That means that the vast majority of Americans are depending on someone else to provide them with an income. But what is going to happen as those jobs disappear?

#8 In 1989, the debt to income ratio of the average American family was about 58 percent. Today it is up to  154 percent.

#9 Today, a higher percentage of Americans are dependent on the government than ever before. In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that gets direct monetary benefits from the federal government. So what is going to happen when the government handout gravy train comes to an end?

#10 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.

#11 It is estimated that less than 10 percent of the U.S. population owns any gold or silver for investment purposes.

#12 It has been estimated that there are approximately 3 million“preppers” in the United States. But that means that almost everyone else is not prepping.

#13 44 percent of all Americans do not have first-aid kits in their homes.

#14 48 percent of all Americans do not have any emergency supplies stored up.

#15 53 percent of all Americans do not have a 3 day supply of nonperishable food and water in their homes.

#16 One survey asked Americans how long they thought they would survive if the electrical grid went down for an extended period of time. Incredibly, 21 percent said that they would survive for less than a week, an additional 28 percent said that they would survive for less than two weeks, and nearly 75 percent said that they would be dead before the two month mark.

#17 According to a survey conducted by the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation, 55 percent of Americans believe that the government will come to their rescue when disaster strikes.

Just because you are living a comfortable middle class lifestyle today does not mean that it will always be that way.

If you doubt this, take a look at what is going on in Greece. Many formerly middle class parents in Greece have become so impoverished that they are actually dumping their children at orphanages so that they won’t starve…

Scores of children have been put in orphanages and care homes for economic reasons; one charity said 80 of the 100 children in its residential centres were there because their families can no longer provide for them.

Ten percent of Greek children are said to be at risk of hunger. Teachers talk of cancelling PE lessons because children are underfed and of seeing pupils pick through bins for food.

If the U.S. economy crashes and you lose your job, how will you and your family survive?

Will you and your family end up homeless and totally dependent on the government for your survival?

Get prepared while there is still time. If you do not know how to get prepared, my article entitled “25 Things That You Should Do To Get Prepared For The Coming Economic Collapse” has some basic tips, and there are dozens of excellent websites out there that teach people advanced prepping techniques for free.

So there is no excuse. You can trust that Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama have everything under control, but as for me and my family we are going to prepare for the giant economic storm that is coming.

I hope that you will be getting prepared too.

Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years. Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream. If you want to know what things in America are going to look like in a few years read his new book The Beginning of the End.

This article originally appeared on: SHTF Plan

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This article originally appeared on: SHTF Plan

June 26, 2013
 |

The U.S. Supreme Court opened the legal door to same-sex marriage Wednesday, issuing two narrow rulings that did not confer broad new civil rights but still clearly established that same-sex marriage must be treated equally under federal law.

“The crowds are overwhelmingly ecstatic about this experience,” said Tom Goldstein, publisher of SCOTUSblog.com, describing the scene at the Courthouse. “The bottom line from the court seems to be straightforward. It was not going to announce fundamental rights for same sex marriage, but it will uphold the rights of people who have been married… sometimes you have to listen to the music not the individual notes.”

The Court’s majority sent the message that same-sex marriages and individuals deserve equal treatment. In the first case, it threw out the key sections of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), saying it was unconstitutional on equal protection grounds for the federal law to say that legal marriage can only be between a man and a woman. But the Court did not declare a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

In a second decision, the Court held that a private group did not have legal standing to defend California’s Proposition 8, a same-sex marriage ban that was overturned by a lower federal court. Same-sex marriages can now resume in California, making it the 13th state to recognize these marriage. However, supporters in the state are likely to sponsor a new state ballot measure, making same-sex marriage legal, to remove the prospect of further legal fights by gay marriage opponents.

Supporters of marriage equality immediately hailed the decisions as big steps forward.

“Twelve years ago I came out to my parents. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and was not well received,” said Arshad Hasan, Executive Director 
of Democracy for America. “At the time, it was difficult to imagine them ever accepting this part of me.

Two weeks ago, I married the man I love–and received the blessing of love from my father, who overcame his prejudices and preconceptions to take a huge step forward.
Today, we as a country took a huge step forward. The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down DOMA is another milestone on the journey both my father and our country have taken: toward acceptance, equality, and love.”

“Today the nation took another historic step towards creating a more perfect union,” said Rick Jacobs, founder CourageCampaign.org, a California progressive coalition. “The judiciary has now caught up with the American public and the tremendous momentum our movement has had since the passage of Prop. 8 five years ago. Love should not be legislated or litigated.”

Taken together, the Court’s rulings means that progress on marriage equality is moving ahead, even if it will now proceed in a bifurcated fashion. In federal law, which includes 100s of programs and entitlements affecting married couples from healthcare to taxes, same-sex married couples will be treated the same as heterosexual couples. That is a major step for individuals exhausted by second-class treatment of their relationships.

But because marriage is a state-sanctioned institution, only those states that allow same-sex marriage will be able to marry same-sex couples. The result is marriage equality will face a continuing state-by-state march for equal status, even as federal law and programs are now opened to same-sex married couples.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown is telling county officials to issue marriage licenses “as soon as the Ninth Circuit confirms the stay is lifted.” He said, “After years of struggle, the U.S. Supreme Court today has made same-sex marriage a reality in California.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

Iran Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi says the Islamic Republic welcomes the establishment of direct flights between Iranian and US cities after more than three decades.

Å“We welcome direct flights between Iran and the United States, and have no problem with it,” Salehi told IRNA on Wednesday.

Å“Launching direct flights is for the sake of public welfare, and we have no problem with this issue.”

On Tuesday, Mehr News Agency reported that necessary preparations were made to sign a memorandum of understanding regarding the establishment of direct flights between Iran and the United States.

According to the report, Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines and the national Iranian flag carrier, Iran Air, are expected to transport passengers between Iran and the United States.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 26, 2013

Photo: TravelingOtter

Mother Jones, the progressive magazine published by the Foundation for National Progress, a Soros funded nonprofit, hopes the discovery that not just Tea Party groups were targeted by the IRS will defuse the scandal.

“Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee have obtained a list of group names IRS staffers used when applying extra scrutiny to applications for nonprofit status,” writes Andy Kroll for the magazine. His article is titled Poof! The IRS Scandal Evaporates.

The list of words include “Medical Marijuana,” “Occupied Territory Advocacy,” “Healthcare legislation,” “Paying National Debt,” and “Green Energy Organizations.” Kroll argues that the words signify that the IRS wasn’t simply targeting Tea Party groups, but “were on the watch for groups of all political stripes,” including ostensibly liberal or so-called progressive groups.

In order to equalize the investigation and downplay the Tea Party targeting, an IRS spokeswoman said that J. Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general, is reviewing to what extent the IRS harassed other groups.

“So is it case closed on the IRS debacle?” muses Kroll. “Not yet. The agency still needs to explain why its staffers singled out groups in this way, and how it further intends to streamline the vetting process. But is this a liberal political conspiracy? Sure doesn’t look like it.”

Kroll and Mother Jones are unable to see over the false left-right political divide. Obama, the IRS, and the totality of the federal government are controlled by a shadow government not beholden to or governed by liberal or conservative politics, as Mother Jones would have us believe. This should be painfully obvious, even to the most obtuse and brainwashed Democrat, by the fact that the political agenda under Obama has deviated little from his Republican predecessor. Obama’s social rhetoric is liberal and Democrat, but his political actions, most notably the subversion of the Constitution, are right out the authoritarian elite’s playbook.

Is it surprising that the IRS — long used as a political tool in addition to an agency of grand thievery — also targeted the Occupy movement or groups dedicated to promoting medical marijuana? Not at all. Naturally, and predictably, groups that do not follow the establishment script will be targeted for elimination.

Sheriff Mack: IRS Are White Collar Criminals

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 11:59 am

Tags: domestic news

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

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.

This article originally appeared on: Green Med Info

The illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in the occupied West Bank (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This article originally appeared on: Green Med Info

British govt. introduces new tough austerity measures amid economic failures

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 26, 2013

Photo: TravelingOtter

Mother Jones, the progressive magazine published by the Foundation for National Progress, a Soros funded nonprofit, hopes the discovery that not just Tea Party groups were targeted by the IRS will defuse the scandal.

“Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee have obtained a list of group names IRS staffers used when applying extra scrutiny to applications for nonprofit status,” writes Andy Kroll for the magazine. His article is titled Poof! The IRS Scandal Evaporates.

The list of words include “Medical Marijuana,” “Occupied Territory Advocacy,” “Healthcare legislation,” “Paying National Debt,” and “Green Energy Organizations.” Kroll argues that the words signify that the IRS wasn’t simply targeting Tea Party groups, but “were on the watch for groups of all political stripes,” including ostensibly liberal or so-called progressive groups.

In order to equalize the investigation and downplay the Tea Party targeting, an IRS spokeswoman said that J. Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general, is reviewing to what extent the IRS harassed other groups.

“So is it case closed on the IRS debacle?” muses Kroll. “Not yet. The agency still needs to explain why its staffers singled out groups in this way, and how it further intends to streamline the vetting process. But is this a liberal political conspiracy? Sure doesn’t look like it.”

Kroll and Mother Jones are unable to see over the false left-right political divide. Obama, the IRS, and the totality of the federal government are controlled by a shadow government not beholden to or governed by liberal or conservative politics, as Mother Jones would have us believe. This should be painfully obvious, even to the most obtuse and brainwashed Democrat, by the fact that the political agenda under Obama has deviated little from his Republican predecessor. Obama’s social rhetoric is liberal and Democrat, but his political actions, most notably the subversion of the Constitution, are right out the authoritarian elite’s playbook.

Is it surprising that the IRS — long used as a political tool in addition to an agency of grand thievery — also targeted the Occupy movement or groups dedicated to promoting medical marijuana? Not at all. Naturally, and predictably, groups that do not follow the establishment script will be targeted for elimination.

Sheriff Mack: IRS Are White Collar Criminals

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Brazilians protest in Belo Horizonte on June 26, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Dozens of people have been injured after supporters and opponents of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi clashed in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura, security sources say.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Ecuadorâ„¢s foreign minister has said it could take months for his government to decide whether to grant asylum to American whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Ricardo Patino also drew a parallel on Wednesday between Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was granted asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London last year.

Patino said Ecuador took “two months to make a decision in the case of Assange, so do not expect us to make a decision sooner this time.”

Ecuador said on Wednesday that the United States must “submit its position” regarding Edward Snowden in writing.

In a statement from its embassy in the United States, Ecuador said it would examine Snowdenâ„¢s asylum request Å“responsibly” and weigh Å“human rights obligations.”

Snowden is currently in a transit zone of Moscowâ„¢s Sheremetyevo Airport where he arrived after leaving Hong Kong on Sunday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed on Tuesday that Moscow would not extradite Snowden to the United States.

Patino confirmed a day earlier that Ecuador is considering a request for asylum by Snowden.

Meanwhile, Washington has reportedly revoked Snowdenâ„¢s passport, with State Department spokesperson, Jen Psaki, saying the fugitive Å“should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the US.”

In the beginning of June, Snowden leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Several US government officials including President Obama and FBI director Robert Mueller have defended the secret spying programs claiming that they are essential to the fight against terrorism.

CAH/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Ethan A. Huff
Natural News
June 26, 2013

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina)

If there is any remaining doubt in your mind about the fact that the federal government today has been completely overrun by sociopathic, freedom-hating enemies of the U.S. Constitution, some recent absurd statements made by South Carolina Senator (and full-fledged American traitor) Lindsey Graham, a Republican, should put all such doubt to rest.

When questioned recently about the unveiling of the massive and insanely illegal National Security Agency (NSA) spying and surveillance program, which involved tracking the online activities of innocent Americans without warrant, Graham expressed his full approval for the initiative. He also went a step further, indicating that he would also support intercepting and censoring postal mail as well if it was deemed necessary for “national security” purposes.

“In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we’re all in,” said a deranged Graham to reporters. “When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy. If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don’t think it is.”

Well, phew! Thank goodness Sen. Graham does not currently see fit to have government thugs rip open our mail and read our private letters without probable cause or a warrant, in direct violation of the Constitution. But the fact that he could approve of such illegal activity in the future shows just how much of a threat this domestic enemy is to American freedom.

Lindsey Graham, the type of domestic enemy our Founding Fathers warned us about

None of this is all that surprising really, given Sen. Graham’s extensive track record of trashing the Constitution every chance he gets — for your safety and security, of course. Concerning the brave and highly-patriotic whistleblowing activities of former NSA insider and CIA contractor Edward Snowden, for instance, Sen. Graham made the suggestion that this American patriot be followed “to the ends of the earth to bring him to justice.”

Snowden’s only “crime,” of course, was exposing a massive online surveillance program that makes the wiretapping activities of George Bush’s Patriot Act looks like mere child’s play. The real traitor and enemy in this case is none other than Sen. Graham, who should be immediately pulled from office and tried for treason for blatantly violating his oath of office, not to mention the many other traitors in Congress that are calling for Snowden to be prosecuted rather than hailing him as the hero he truly is.

“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” wrote Snowden in a note accompanying the release of documents showing that the NSA is in the process of building an advanced, global spying machine. “(But) I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Rather than back Snowden, Sen. Graham and others have viciously demonized him, exposing who they truly side with: The globalist powers rather than us, the American people. Thus, it is time for Sen. Graham to go, along with Obama, Republican Senator John McCain, Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, Republican Senator John Thune, and the many others in Congress from both sides of the aisle who have betrayed both their oaths of office and the people for whom they were enlisted to serve.

“[Lindsey Graham] is a traitor to these United States just as surely as a sworn member of al Qaeda is,” wrote Mark Shea for Patheos.com following the passage of Obama’s traitorous National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) back in 2011. Graham was a vehement supporter of this atrocious bill. “In a more civilized age, [those who supported such a bill] would be defenestrated and put in the stocks to be pelted with mud.”

Sources for this article include:

http://news.yahoo.com

http://www.ajc.com

http://www.patheos.com

June 26, 2013
 |

Last night, John Oliver wasted no time in hilariously scolding the Supreme Court for its horrendous decision to scuttle the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the landmark piece of civil rights legislation which has potected the rights of minority voters in states with a history of racism. “These states include: Whitesylvania, Pale-afornia, Klansas, Caucasicut and Mississippi,” the Daily Show host joked.

At least John Roberts gave a really good reason for the change, Oliver further mocked. “The country has changed,” said Chief Justice Roberts.

“It has changed,” Oliver replied. “We have iPads, Twitter, maxi-pads with wings, and everyone is allergic to bread.”

Texas, Oliver pointed out, wasted no time in reacting. Two hours later, the state was enacting redistricting and the most restrictive voter I.D. laws in the country. “It takes less time for them to disenfranchise minority voters than to barbecue a pig,” Oliver concluded.

Watch:

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

A controversial voter identification law in Texas is expected to go into effect immediately, according to the state attorney general, in the wake of a Tuesday ruling handed down by the United States Supreme Court.

Only moments after the high court invalidated part of the Voters
Rights Act of 1965 on Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott
said his state will begin “immediately” honoring local
legislation that many say limits the ability for minorities to
cast ballots.

Until this week’s SCOTUS ruling, states such as Texas have
required federal preclearance to make changes to voting rules.
With the invalidating of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 4,
however, Texas and other locales are now in the free to enact
their own rules for voters without awaiting permission from
Washington.

“The section determined which states must receive clearance
from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington
before they made minor changes to voting procedures, like moving
a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral
districts,” Adam Liptak wrote for the New York Times.

In a 5-4 decision this week, however, the court canned that
section of the Voters Right Act, prompting Abbott to say his
state will at once begin mandating photo ID cards inside of
polling places.

“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take
effect immediately,” Abbott said Tuesday. “Photo
identification will now be required when voting in elections in
Texas.”

“Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take
effect without approval from the federal government,” Abbott
added.

Gov. Rick Perry, who unsuccessfully vied for the GOP’s nod as
presidential nominee last year, called the ruling “a clear
victory for federalism and the states.”

“Texas may now implement the will of the people without being
subject to outdated and unnecessary oversight and the overreach
of federal power,” Perry said, according to the Dallas
Morning News.

Opponents of the Texas law feared that giving the state the
ability to enact its own voter ID program would disenfranchise
poor minority voters who would be unable to produce the
documentation necessary to obtain a state sanctioned
identification card. Last year a federal court said the state law
imposed “strict, unforgiving burdens” on many Texas
residents, but Tuesday’s ruling out of Washington will let Gov.
Perry and his administration soon enforcing the ID program.

“The Supreme Court has effectively gutted one of the nation’s
most important and effective civil rights laws,” Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law chief counsel Jon Greenbaum
told The Guardian. “Minority voters in places with a record of
discrimination are now at greater risk of being disenfranchised
than they have been in decades.”

“Today’s decision is a blow to democracy. Jurisdictions will
be able to enact policies which prevent minorities from voting,
and the only recourse these citizens will have will be expensive
and time-consuming litigation,” he said.

President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president,
called the SCOTUS ruling “deeply disappointing.”

Abbott plans to make the ID program mandatory as soon as
possible, but Susan Frederick, a legal expert with the National
Conference for State Legislatures, told the Houston Chronicle
that the attorney general may have jumped the gun.

“For any state to be able to move forward with legislative
that is previously adjudicated or dealt with in state court,
[officials] certainly have to go back and make sure it didn’t fly
afoul of the state constitution or any other currently valid
federal law,” she said.

This article originally appeared on: RT

The stock market rout continued on Monday as shares dropped sharply in markets around the world. China’s Hang Seng was particularly hard hit (down 449 pts) following reports on state media of a “moratorium on transfers, online banking, and counters.” The Bank of China’s aggressive steps to curtail nonbank “shadow” lending, has intensified a liquidity squeeze that’s now impacting normal banking activities. The unexpected cash crunch has intensified the fears of jittery investors who are still reeling from last weeks announcement by the Fed that it would reduce its long-term asset purchases as soon as the end of 2013. The FOMC’s statement put equities into a nosedive while bond yields on benchmark 10-year US Treasuries soared to their highest level in more than 2 years. The Fed—whose credibility has been badly damaged by its inability to hit its unemployment or inflation targets—now faces the prospect of sliding stock prices accompanied by rising long-term rates that will undercut the fragile economic recovery. This is from Bloomberg:

“U.S. stocks retreated, sending the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index to a nine-week low, as Chinese equities entered a bear market amid concern a cash crunch will hurt the world’s second-largest economy and speculation increased that the U.S. will begin curbing stimulus.

“Investors have been shaken by the concept of rising interest rates and a reduction in stimulus from the Federal Reserve, coupled with the uncertainty regarding effectively how robust the Chinese central banking system is,” Ethan Anderson, senior portfolio manager for Rehmann Financial in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said by phone.” (Bloomberg)

Markets have been bitch-slapped by rate shock and early fiat withdrawal symptoms. Four years of monetary pump-priming and unprecedented easing has reduced a cache of hardbitten Wall Street traders into a passel of whiny, liquidity-addicted basket cases who fall-to-pieces at the mere suggestion of an end to Bernanke’s massive monthly subsidy-handout.

The Fed’s announcement ended a long period of relative calm in the markets as extreme market volatility has returned with a vengeance. Rising yields and China woes have triggered a flight from interest-rate-sensitive emerging markets increasing the probability of a global slowdown. Investors pulled more than $3 billion out of EM stock funds last week alone. The Fed’s belief that economic data will steadily improve, has reversed flows which will be a damper on growth in the mainly raw materials-dependent countries.

The bond market has been walloped bigtime by the change in policy. Yields on benchmark 10-year USTs spiked to their highest level in nearly two years. The sudden uptick in yields could be fatal for housing which has rallied on the Fed’s historic low rates and dwindling inventory. Early reports from many of the hotter markets suggest some pullback on sales already although the extent of the damage won’t appear in the data for another month.

Adding to the foofaraw surrounding the Fed’s announcement, the Bank for International Settlements released a report on Monday calling for an end to quantitative easing. The BIS, which is called the bank of the central banks, posits that it’s time for the world’s CBs to end their “extraordinary actions” and “accommodation” and return to downsizing, deleveraging and austerity. Economist Paul Krugman ridiculed the BIS report in a post on his blog on Monday saying:

“Part of what makes the report so awesome is the way that it trots out every discredited argument for austerity, with not a hint of acknowledgement that these arguments have been researched and refuted at length.” (“Dead-enders in Dark Suits”, Paul Krugman, New York Times)

Naturally, the report was full of the expected attacks on labor protections, health care, and pensions, the perennial targets of bankers and the investors class. Here’s a clip from the report:

“By hindering the reallocation of capital and workers across sectors, structural rigidities put the brakes on the economic engine of creative destruction…. Measures to curb future increases in pension and health care spending are key to the success of these efforts.”

In other words, dying under a freeway overpass (no health care) is a small price to pay for bigger profits for rapacious mega-corporations. Where have we heard that before?

In any event, it’s hard to believe that anyone is going to follow the advice of the tone-deaf BIS. In fact, even the IMF has parted ways with the belt-tightening crackpots and called for a repeal of the ill-conceived budget cuts (aka—the “sequester”). Surprisingly, the IMF has said that “deficit reduction in 2013 has been excessively rapid and ill-designed”. Here’s more from the Fund’s statement:

“The automatic spending cuts (“sequester”) not only exert a heavy toll on growth in the short term, but the indiscriminate reductions in education, science, and infrastructure spending could also reduce medium-term potential growth. …. At the same time, the expiration of the payroll tax cut and the increase in high-end marginal tax rates also imply some further drag on economic activity. A slower pace of deficit reduction would help the recovery at a time when monetary policy has limited room to support it further.” (IMF)

Is the IMF really acknowledging that monetary policy (notably: QE) has been a flop? Bernanke’s uber-accommodative easing hasn’t lowered unemployment or boosted inflation. Long-term rates are higher now than they were when the program began 6 months ago! Only stock prices have rebounded. Equities are more than 140 percent higher than their March 2009 lows, mainly due to the Fed’s lamebrain “pedal-to-the-metal” policy which is now causing violent gyrations on stock indices around the world. And let’s not forget the $11.2 trillion US Treasuries market, which—according to Andy Haldane, Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England, “Is the biggest government bond bubble in history.” (Now, that’s saying something) Haldane added that “a disorderly reversion” in bond yields is the “biggest risk to global financial stability.”

Indeed. The dangers to the financial system and the broader economy are quite real. Even so, stocks will probably not fall of a cliff anytime soon, rather their steady retreat will be preceded by months of erratic rand excruciating rollercoaster swings signaling widespread loss of confidence in the Fed and growing uncertainty about the future. Journalist Adam Shell summed it up best on a Monday piece on USA Today. He said:

“The market is undergoing a real-life reality check that will show just how much of the market’s gains were due to the so-called “sugar rush” caused by the Fed’s QE program, which is currently injecting more than $1 trillion into the financial system annually….No one quite understands what the removal of that amount of liquidity over the next year will do to interest rates or stock prices.” (“Market eyes fresh ‘fix’ as Fed plans QE withdrawal”, Adam Shell, USA Today)

The question is whether the economy “can stand on its own two feet or not”?  If it can’t, then we must assume that QE was the wrong policy which, of course, it was.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Whitney’s story on declining wages for working class Americans appears in the June issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

The far-right EDL has made a fake, mocked up video of the iconic scientist Stephen Hawking.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iran Navy resolved to protect vessels in free waters: Navy cmdr.

File photo shows Iranian Navy ships during Velayat-90 war games in the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran on January 3, 2012.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

June 26, 2013
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In the first of two highly anticipated same-sex marriage cases, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sections of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)x is unconstitutional on equal protection grounds–that U.S. citizens cannot be treated differently under the law.

 “The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity, by seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others,” the Court held in 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

However, the ruling does not establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The Court’s was reviewing the part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 that defines marriage to be “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” in determining federal benefits violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause.  It came in a lawsuit about federal taxes where the plaintiff, Edith Windsor, claimed that she was entitled to a tax refund of more than $363,000 after her same-sex spouse died.  The Court’s right-wing Justices opposed the DOMA ruling and read from their dissents from the bench.  The immediate effect is that married same-sex couples in the twelve states that allow such unions, along with the District of Columbia, will now become subject to more than 1,000 federal laws and programs and start to receive federal benefits. Those states include: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, Iowa and Washington.

It is a little early to predict what the more general effect of the ruling will have on the rest of the 1996 law, but most legal experts have previously said that this this kind of ruling would effectively spell the end of the challenged part of the 1996 law. 

On the other hand, it is likely to have no direct effect on state-based bans on same-sex marriage. The Court’s second ruling on same-sex marriage is expected later this morning as well, but legal observers are already saying that language in this ruling suggests that it will dismiss a California suit challenging a lower court decision that overruled a state ballot measure banning same-sex marriage.

If so, the result is that the country will be further divided on red and blue state lines on the issue of same-sex marriage, with advocates forced to fight for years in state legislatures for state-based rights, while the federal government cannot make the legal distinction between different and same-sex married couples.   

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

A prominent Iranian cleric has strongly condemned the recent killing of Shia Muslims in Egypt, saying that Takfiri extremists are seriously damaging the reputation of Islam and the Muslim world through such vicious actions.

Å“The main problem facing the Muslim world is Salafist Takfiris, who are dealing heavy blows to the pillars of Islam and the reputation and dignity of Muslims worldwide through their brutal actions. They introduce Islam, which is a religion of mercy and kindness, as a religion of violence, bloodshed, cruelty and savagery,” Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi said in a statement released on Wednesday.

The statement also expressed the readiness of Iranian scholars to hold talks with their Egyptian counterparts in order to foster proximity among various schools of Islam and promote unity among Muslims.

Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi also asked all Muslim scholars not to remain silent on the recent massacre of Shias in Egypt, urging the Egyptian government to spare no efforts to bring those responsible for the crime to justice.

Å“Unfortunately, Egypt is facing a Zionist plot that seeks to undermine its stability, security and independence. It can spread to the entire region if no proper solution is sought,” the senior Iranian cleric stated.

On Sunday, a group of Takfiri extremists attacked the house of a Shia cleric at a village near Cairo in Giza Province.

The cleric and three of his followers were murdered after the house was surrounded by hundreds of people vowing to kill them for being Shias.

Their bodies were then dragged into the street by Takfiri extremists.

Takfiris believe that only their interpretation of Islam is correct and all other Muslims are unbelievers.

Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil has denounced the killing of the Shias and said he is closely following the investigation into the incident. He also promised that the culprits would be punished.

The incident comes a week after Salafist clerics insulted Shia Muslims during a demonstration.

The Shia community is being targeted by Salafists, with the support of various countries, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Shias, who form just one percent of Egyptâ„¢s population, are often attacked by extremist groups.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

British military vehicles are parked in a compound in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Friend of journalist reveals colleagues were “too scared” to release panicked email

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
June 26, 2013

The wife of Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, who was killed in what many people believe was a suspicious car crash last week, has vowed to “take down whoever did this,” according to the man who released an email in which Hastings told friends he was being harassed by the government.

Michael Hastings.

Staff Sergeant Joseph Biggs, who yesterday told Fox News that Hastings was working on “the biggest story yet” about the CIA before his untimely death, was responsible for releasing an email Hastings wrote 15 hours before his car crash in which the journalist stated he was “onto a big story” and needed “to go off the rada[r] for a bit.”

Biggs tweeted that the reason he released the email was because Hastings’ other friends and colleagues who received it were “too scared” to do so.

After the email was released, Hastings’ wife Elise Jordan thanked Biggs and vowed to “take down whoever did this,” according to Biggs.

Biggs, who met Hastings when he was an embedded journalist in Afghanistan in 2008, added, “I won’t let a man die in vein [sic] because I’m too scared of what will happen to me. If I sent that email to Mike he wouldn’t rest, he would fight.”

In his interview with Fox News yesterday, Biggs also said that Hastings “drove like a grandma” and that it was totally out of character for him to be speeding in the early hours of the morning.

Earlier this week, former counter-terror czar under two different presidents Richard Clarke told the Huffington Post that the fatal crash of Hastings’ Mercedes C250 Coupe was “consistent with a car cyber attack.”

Hastings had made numerous powerful enemies as a result of his exposure of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal in 2010, receiving several death threats in the process.

According to Hastings’ colleague Cenk Uygur, the writer was, “incredibly tense and very worried, and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,” and also a “nervous wreck” in response to the surveillance of journalists revealed by the AP phone tapping scandal and the NSA PRISM scandal.

BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith added that Hastings had told friends and family “he was concerned that he was under investigation.”

Another close friend who wishes to remain anonymous said that Hastings was “very paranoid that he was being watched by the FBI.”

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

Lawmakers have now introduced bills in both houses of Congress aimed at restraining President Obama and his lawless intervention in Syria on behalf of jihadist rebels, many of whom are openly fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda while massacring Christians and other minorities. If the legislation becomes law, it would make any military action – including the ongoing provision of weapons and training to opposition forces by the administration – contingent on congressional approval.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution already grants war powers to Congress, stating that wars must be declared by lawmakers – not the president. Obama, however, like previous administrations, has a long track record of ignoring his oath of office in virtually every field. In Libya, for example, he even launched an unconstitutional war to overthrow dictator Moammar Gadhafi without so much as a semblance of permission from Congress.

While the U.S. government has been funding opposition forces in Syria since long before open warfare began, the president has stepped up that assistance, offering everything from training and money to military weapons. Obama’s “regime change” operation, backed by the highest echelons of the global establishment, recently culminated with a deeply unpopular announcement this month that the administration would be openly supplying arms and other military aid to rebel forces. Having U.S. troops set up a “no-fly zone” is also being considered.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 10:49 am

Tags: government corruption, terrorism

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

AFP
June 26, 2013

Rick Miller kneels in front of a grave and uses his cell phone to scan a small barcode on a tombstone. Within seconds, he’s looking at photos and videos of a lost loved one.

But that’s not all.

Without leaving this vast cemetery in a suburb of Philadelphia, he can listen to the deceased’s favorite music, read remembrances, write in a guest book and even share pictures and feelings on Twitter or Facebook.

Here at Sunset Memorial Park, everyone equipped with a smartphone or tablet can do the same, provided they download the proper app.

All it takes is a simple scan of a QR code – a square, black barcode stuck to the tombstone – to learn about Lance Clinton Erb, laid to rest beneath a bronze plaque engraved with the years of his birth and death – “1947-1990″ – and a picture of his beloved pet Labrador.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 10:31 am

Tags: technology

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Gala Health
June 26, 2013

Agribusiness is in a mad rush to take over the earth, and seems willing to stop at nothing. Coming soon is cabbage with scorpion poison engineered in every cell. Of course, they claim it’s safe and will result in less pesticide use, but history and logic say otherwise. Who will wake from the insane mating between Agribiz and GMOs?

Get ready for genetically engineered cabbages that come complete with their own scorpion poison, just for you to eat. It’s touted as requiring less pesticide use and being, of course, completely safe. Close investigation, though, indicates that neither claim is likely true.

A pesticide made with scorpion poison genetically engineered into a virus was first tested back in 1994. Interestingly, the scientists who sprayed the test field wore full body suits to protect them from this “harmless” poison.

One must wonder at just how safe it could be when the developers themselves don’t trust it more than that! Of course, the head of the trial, Professor David Bishop, insisted that the trial was safe–though he himself opted to take a vacation, rather than be there for it.

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The spectacle of the US threatening Hong Kong, China, Russia and now little Ecuador with all manner of reprisals if they don’t respect the “rule of law” and hand over whistleblower Edward Snowden to the tender mercies of the US national security apparatus is delicious to watch.

The very idea of Secretary of State John Kerry lecturing Russia about “following the law” is laughable. He cites seven common criminals that the US handed over to Russia over the past year, but Russia no doubt recalls cases where the US used diplomatic pressure to extradite Russian citizens from countries like Lithuania and Thailand that the Russians did not believe had committed extraditable crimes.

Also comical is Kerry and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) referring to Russia as an “ally” or “friend” and asking how President Vladimir Putin can then behave so badly in refusing to hand over the vile traitor Snowden. Ally? Friend? If so, why is the US emplacing anti-missile batteries around Russia? Why is the US National Security Agency, as Snowden disclosed, secretly tapping Russian leaders’ cell phones during a G-8 conference? This is the behavior of a “friend” and “ally”?

Beyond that, Kerry is a fine one to talk about betrayal. He has famously betrayed his own Vietnam War comrades-in-arms – veterans who had, with him, risked their careers in the military and their futures in the US by coming forward in the Winter Soldier movement during the early 1970s to speak out about US war crimes the US, and often they themselves, had committed in Vietnam. But Kerry, in the interest of pursuing his political career, later abandoned that honorable stance and became instead an avid supporter of US empire, even becoming an apologist for the Vietnam War in his failed 2004 campaign for the presidency, when he tried to capitalize on his alleged heroism as a Navy riverboat captain. Such a stunning betrayal of one’s comrades and one’s conscience is hard to even contemplate.

Also stunning is hearing Kerry and the US government lecture Ecuador and other Latin American nations that might be considering offering Snowden asylum about respecting the “rule of law,” and threatening them with “consequences” if they offer him haven from US prosecution.

The US, almost since its founding, has treated all of Latin America as its private property, launching invasions to topple leaders it opposes, propping up fascist military dictators for centuries, orchestrating coups to overthrow legitimately elected governments, and even training generations of future fascist leaders at its School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, GA. This country is hardly in a position to issue such pious admonitions when Latin Americans of almost every nation can point to coups and murders and years of police state terror in their history that are all directly attributable to the US.

Indeed, the Obama administration itself was behind the latest coup against a democratic government in Honduras, and actively interfered in the last democratic presidential election in Venezuela in a failed effort to prevent the populist successor to the late Hugo Chavez from winning.

Ecuadorians certainly recall that in the early 1960s, the American CIA infiltrated the Ecuadorian government, setting up CIA-dominated news agencies and radio stations, bombing right-wing newspapers and churches and blaming the left, all to force a democratically elected president, Velasco Ibarra, out of office. When Carlos Arosemara, who replaced Ibarra, refused to cut off relations with Castro’s Cuba, the CIA orchestrated and financed a military coup, after which the ensuing military government outlawed Communism and cancelled elections scheduled for 1964.

The intervening decades have seen plenty more US interference in Ecuadoran politics, including a coup attempt widely believed to have been backed by the US as recently as 2010, during the first Obama administration. That coup by a group of National Police senior officers sought – unsuccessfully – to deny a second term to President Rafael Correa, the country’s current president. They held the wounded Correa captive for 12 hours in a hospital before he was finally rescued by the Ecuadoran military. Now in his third term after a resounding victory in the last election, Correa clearly has that incident burned in his memory.

Just a few days ago, Correa’s government bluntly ordered the US Embassy’s first secretary, Mark Sullivan, out of the country, accusing him of meddling in the Ecuador’s domestic affairs. Sullivan, a shady character who has long links with the military in Colombia, appears to have been the CIA’s station chief in Quito, using his embassy position as a cover, and was reportedly demanding a say in personnel decisions of the Ecuadorian National Police as a condition for US “law enforcement” aid. Given the US government’s suspected role in the strike by the National Police that morphed into the attempted coup only three years ago, and its earlier blatant intervention in presidential elections where it backed candidates trying to defeat Correa, that demand by Sullivan was tantamount to a demand for the US to be able to name the next coup leaders.

And then Kerry has the gall to go and lecture Ecuador, and other Latin American nations, about the need to adhere to “the rule of law,” and not to grant asylum to Snowden.

Are you laughing yet?

Ecuadorians and other Latin Americans are not.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

On Monday, 67 senators voted for cloture on Hoeven-Corker, a “border security” amendment to the immigration reform bill. The vote virtually guarantees that immigration reform will pass in the Senate. At the same time, it also guarantees the bill’s costs to immigrant communities will far outweigh its benefits.

The refrain that Democrats and their allies have been repeating — that the immigration reform bill offers a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants — is simply a lie. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if the bill were to pass, roughly 4 million of the current 11.5 million undocumented immigrants would be excluded. Their estimate is overly optimistic, and it’s possible that nearly half of undocumented immigrants would never benefit from the legalization. But even those who would eventually benefit are in for a long, difficult, precarious path.

Fifty Arizonas

The reform bill would create a bleak future for millions of undocumented immigrants. To kick off the post-reform era, ICE would be required to organize a massive deportation campaign, rounding up 90 percent of all immigrants who overstayed a visa in the previous year. As it progressed, day-to-day life would become significantly more difficult for undocumented people than it is currently.

Once all legitimate businesses adopt the E-Verify employment authorization system required under the proposal, more immigrants would end up in dangerous, unregulated jobs where they are misclassified as independent contractors for the shadiest of companies. If a worker presented a fake Social Security number to her boss, she could be imprisoned for five years.

Undocumented immigrants are currently issued driver’s licenses in nine states, but they would likely lose that privilege under reform. The immigration bill requires that state licenses comply with the REAL ID Act and other federal regulations restricting identification cards. If a state does not comply, most of its residents would be forced to obtain a US passport solely for work authorization purposes. That is more than enough incentive to guarantee states will restrict driver’s licenses.

There is also the matter of the border. Before the Hoeven-Corker amendment, the bill was set to infuse an additional $6.5 billion into militarizing the US-Mexico border. But under the amendment, which is so bad that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer initially expressed support, that number comes to well over $40 billion. The plan involves doubling the size of the Border Patrol, completing 700 miles of fencing, and flying more aerial drones over the area. The Border Patrol would set up more checkpoints in border communities and commit dozens more human rights abuses each day. Migrants would still cross, but in increasingly remote areas, and more people would die as a result. If apprehended, border crossers would face between one and 30 years in prison, depending on their prior criminal and immigration records.

A Raw Deal, Even for Immigrants Who Legalize

Most people who legalize under the reform bill would be granted status as registered provisional immigrants (RPIs). RPI status would be renewable in six-year increments. But immigrants earning below the federal poverty line who have also been unemployed for more than 60 consecutive days would lose their legal status. Day laborers, seasonal workers, and many others would likely face exclusion on this basis. (The Congressional Budget Office presumed that only a “small percentage” would lose RPI status, leading them to overestimate the number of immigrants that would be legalized).

To maintain RPI status, workers would be compelled to stay at jobs with abusive conditions so as not to risk unemployment. Women would be forced to stay married to abusive men so they could meet the household income requirement. Most immigrants would have to maintain RPI status for at least 10 years before obtaining green cards. It would be at least 15 years before they could qualify for most public benefits and at least 10 years before they could receive health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Many would struggle to access health care and other services over that time.

Another problem with RPI status is that it would lock immigrants into a single path to legalization. Immigration law is complicated, but many undocumented immigrants can obtain a green card fairly quickly once a citizen child or parent petitions for them. The reform bill would eliminate these options, however, and RPIs would be stuck on the 10-year track (there are limited exceptions in the case of marriage to a US citizen of the opposite sex). In effect, many immigrants would have their green cards significantly delayed under the reform bill.

Democrats and their Friends

In the two days before the Senate vote, Senator Chuck Schumer hosted a series of conference calls with his allies — unions and advocacy groups that claim to speak for immigrants. He let them know he agreed to include the Hoeven-Corker amendment, which would drastically increase deportations and border militarization. This was just the latest in a series of compromises, starting with the exclusion of same-sex couples from the bill’s initial version.

Schumer asked for his friends’ continued support in spite of the amendment and in spite of the collective punishment immigrant communities would have to accept in order for some to be legalized. His friends willingly obliged (they aren’t the ones being punished, after all). Organizations from SEIU to National Immigration Forum to Church World Service to America’s Voice each issued a press statement following the same talking points and accepting Hoeven-Corker as a necessary compromise.

Lately, Senator Schumer has even begun to promote himself as some sort of civil rights leader. In a CNN appearance, he stated, “This [immigration bill] has the potential of becoming the next major civil rights movement… I could see a million people on the Mall.” This is all very rich coming from a man who has accepted more than $100,000 from the private prison industry.

It’s possible that a million person march on Washington could actually happen. The organizations involved are good at mobilizing people, drawing on their hopes without actually discussing the substance of the bill or listening to their concerns. And the bill might contain just enough racist state violence to appease House Republicans after some modification, although that is an open question. More likely, the House will reject any Senate bill and the Democrats will try to capitalize off of the disappointment in the 2014 midterm elections.

Regardless of how far the legislative process continues, defenders of human rights need to push back hard against this immigration reform bill and the spineless grasstops advocacy groups that are promoting it. Luckily, it seems that a few organizations have started reflecting on whether or not continued support is worth it and Presente.org has come out to formally oppose the bill. Even PICO and United We Dream, two organizations that had been closely invested in immigration reform, staged a protest in Schumer’s office on Tuesday afternoon as it became clear that the senator was in the process of adding even more anti-immigrant amendments to win Republican votes.

If things continue down the same path, however, either Congress will pass an immigration reform bill that is far worse than the status quo, or the precedent Democrats have set will rear its ugly head the next time Congress tries to address immigration, with he nasty provisions resurfacing. When they haven’t been sycophantically supporting Schumer and other Senate Democrats, immigrant and civil rights groups have been either deluding themselves into thinking they can amend the bill or hiding behind a futile campaign to have Obama issue a moratorium on deportations. My hope is that they will all wake up and realize that the task at hand is to fight their “friends” in Congress and kill this bill.

Justin Feldman lives in Washington, DC and blogs at http://openborders.us

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi (R) meets his Tajik counterpart Hamrokhon Zarifi in Tehran on June 26, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Bahrainis take part in a protest to demand more rights at the village of Bilad al-Qadeem, in a suburb of Manama, on June 15, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV