The Slip of a Lip?

Be careful what you say on the telephone -- you are being recorded. This has recently been admitted publicly by Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente. Asked about an investigation of involvement in the Boston bombings by the widow of deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Clemente said, " We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. . . welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not." more here from the Guardian.

The authorities used to have to get a warrant to wiretap your phone. Now it is done in advance -- to everyone. This would clearly be a violation of our Constitutional rights but like the rest of the Constitution, that right has been all but nullified by the NDAA and the growing national security state justified by the endless "war on terror." This endless abstract and purposefully unwinnable conflict is based on the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Continuing the justification for it requires expanded military conflicts like our government intervening (even more) in the Syrian civil war and elsewhere. New enemies must always be created and citizens like you must always be suspect. This kind of Machiavellian power feeds on itself and on your fear.

We who opposed the global rule of wealth must find other ways of communicating. As an ancient Chinese sage once said, "When the government becomes oppressive, the People become cunning." Be careful how you say things, be inventive. Use direct, non-digital communication whenever possible. If you must use the computer, consider fake emails and the use of proxies IP sites like Web Proxy. Remember, "everything you say will be used against you . . ."

More timely than ever

A May Day though and a dream that persists. Too and from better times




Now, about that land . . .

Blowback Again in Boston?

I would not classify the monstrous bombing of the Boston Marathon as "terrorism" in that there doesn't seem to be a political goal or any attempt at manipulation through fear. On the surface it seems an insane tragedy wrought by a young man twisted by his upbringing in a war zone and his influence on a younger brother. But nothing occurs in a vacuum.

Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former chief division counsel in Minneapolis, writes:

I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia.

Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including former CIA Director James Woolsey.

For instance, see this 2004 article in the UK Guardian, entitled, “The Chechens’ American friends: The Washington neocons’ commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own.”

Author John Laughland wrote: “the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’

“They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be ‘a cakewalk’; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.”

The ACPC later sanitized “Chechnya” to “Caucasus” so it’s rebranded itself as the “American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus.”

My observations are not meant to be a direct comment about the motivations of the two Boston bombing suspects whose thinking remains unclear. It’s still very premature and counterproductive to speculate on their motives.

But the lies and disinformation that go into the confusing and ever-morphing notion of “terrorism” result from the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (and its little brother, the “National Security Surveillance Complex”) and their need to control the mainstream media’s framing of the story.

So, a simplistic narrative/myth is put forth to sustain U.S. wars. From time to time, those details need to be reworked and some of the facts “forgotten” to maintain the storyline about bad terrorists “who hate the U.S.” when, in reality, the U.S. Government may have nurtured the same forces as “freedom fighters” against various “enemies.”

The bottom line is to never forget that “a poor man’s war is terrorism while a rich man’s terrorism is war” – and sometimes those lines cross for the purposes of big-power politics. War and terrorism seem to work in sync that way. full article here

The War on Terror Comes Home

This documentary can be ordered free. The subject is one I recently wrote about in my regular column for a local magazine.

We're All Outlaws in the Eyes of America
The “War on Terror” Comes Home

Beyond writing, I am an activist. I have been active in issues ranging from work against racism and apartheid to anti-war protests, labor solidarity, issues of human rights, economic justice, and civil liberties going back to the 1970's. That said, in many ways these are increasingly troubled times. As someone who pays attention to the news; who searches beyond the U.S. and mainstream media to stay informed, I find a the news increasingly disturbing as of late. Not the news you hear about, superficial as that often is, but the news you increasingly do not hear about as real journalism is replaced by shallow tabloid reporting. Examples include the sentencing of former CIA officer John Kiriakou to 30 months in prison for revealing in 2007 interviews that that Abu Zubaydah and other terrorism suspects were being waterboarded. None of the people who ordered or engaged in torture, people like Donald Rumsfeld, have been charged with war crimes or human rights violations.


Bradly Manning also faces charges for exposing abuses. The Manning case is extremely important. Bradley Manning has admitted releasing information of wartime human rights abuses in an attempt to spark debate and alter policy. It should be noted that he went to the New York Times first but was turned away. As columnist Glenn Greenwald explains, “The government has never been able to identify any substantial harm that has come from any of the leaks that Bradley Manning is accused of and now admits to being responsible for. Certainly nobody has died as a result of these leaks, . . . the theory that the government is proceeding on is one that’s really quite radical and menacing. All the evidence indicates that he did it for exactly the reason that he said, with the intent that he said, which was to spark reform and to bring attention to these abuses. The government is proceeding on the theory that simply because the information that’s leaked ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda had an interest in it, that it constitutes aiding and abetting the enemy. What that essentially does is convert every form of whistleblowing or leaks into a form of treason.”


Julian Assange remains holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London fearing extradition to the US for his exposure of sensitive information via Wikileaks that the official press ignored. More recently, Aaron Schwartz, a cyber-activist who brought us the creative-commons and worked tirelessly for an open internet and freedom of information committed suicide because of government harassment and the possibility of a 30 year sentence. His crime? He attempted to make public scientific journal articles which were accessible at M.I.T. The university chose not to press charges and opened the information to the public after Mr. Schwartz returned it. The US Sentencing Commission, acting on behalf of the Obama Administration, insisted on prosecuting Schwartz as part of a crackdown on cyber-activism. It is part of a disturbing pattern.

The Obama Administration has also launched an investigation of the New York Times for it's reporting on the cyber-operation that targeted Iran’s nuclear program to find out who leaked the information. As reported in the Washington Post, “The Obama administration has prosecuted six officials for disclosing classified information, more than all previous administrations combined. But the Stuxnet investigation is arguably the highest-profile probe yet.”

But there is much more going on here; corporations, most recently Trans-Canada are bringing crushingly expensive lawsuits against activists using what is called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. While some jurisdictions have made such suits illegal, they remain a big threat, as activists opposing the XL Tar sands pipeline have discovered. As usual, the infamous corporate front, the “American Legislative Exchange Counsel” or ALEC plays a big role. They recently helped expand the never-ending “War on Terror” to include citizen activists and investigative journalists with the “Animal and Ecological Terror Act” designed to protect agri-business and the fossil fuel industry against the dangers of public exposure and citizen resistance. The Act defines an “animal or ecological terrorist organization” as “two or more persons with the primary or incidental purpose of supporting any politically motivated activity intended to obstruct, impede or deter any person from participating in a lawful animal activity” or in “mining, foresting, harvesting, gathering, or processing natural resources.” This and other passages in the Act could be used to prosecute and label as “terrorists,” mainstream environmental groups engaged in nonviolent advocacy work as well as whistleblowers and investigative journalists. In addition, the ALEC legislation creates a “terrorist registry” managed by each state’s Attorney General to list anyone pleading guilty to or convicted of “animal and ecological terrorism.” Interestingly, a few years back a Freedom of Information release showed that in our area the focus of FBI surveillance was on the Catholic Worker for their antiwar activism and on PETA. These lovers of peace and of animals are the “terrorists” among us?


We are now living with the most intrusive government we as Americans have ever experienced. Our emails and cell phone communications are increasingly monitored and, outside of a few places like Rolling Stone, New Yorker Magazine, and alternative news venues, investigative journalism has all but vanished, replaced by shallow human interest stories and outright propaganda.


The confirmation hearings for John Brennan, President Obama's choice to head the CIA has brought to light the President's expansion of Executive power to include assassination, even of US citizens, without oversight as well as the increasing use of drones. John Brennan is the architect of the drone program and Obama's decision to put him at the head of the CIA is both disappointing and telling as is his echoing of John Yoo's defense of executive power expansion to include torture.


Much of the foundation of what we are seeing is rooted in Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip us of due process and hold us indefinitely in military detention centers. As the “white paper” released by the Obama administration makes clear, this is now being used to justify murder as well. As legal scholar and editor Marjorie Cohn explains, “The White Paper allows the government to kill a U.S. citizen who is not on the battlefield, if some high government official who is supposedly informed about the situation thinks that the target is a senior Al-Qaida leader who poses an imminent threat of a violent attack against the United States. So how do they define “imminence”? . . . The very nebulous test that the White Paper lays out even allows the targeted killing of somebody who is considered to be a “continuing threat,” whatever that means. The most disturbing part of it says that US citizens can be killed even when there is no “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”


Though some will defend this in a vacuum citing foreign “terrorists” bent on attacking us, this goes much further and now includes cyber-activists and the “continuing threat” of those resisting climate destruction or exposing corporate or government or malfeasance of any kind. Journalist Chris Hedges has challenged the NDAA section authorizing the detention of Americans without charges in Federal court. He writes, “The section permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who 'substantially support' – an undefined legal term – Al-Qaida, the Taliban or 'associated forces,' again a term that is legally undefined. Those detained can be imprisoned indefinitely by the military and denied due process until 'the end of hostilities.' In an age of permanent war this is probably a lifetime. Anyone detained under the NDAA can be sent, according to Section (c)(4), to any 'foreign country or entity.' This is, in essence, extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens. It empowers the government to ship detainees to the jails of some of the most repressive regimes on earth. Section 1021(b)(2) was declared invalid in September after our first trial, in the Southern District Court of New York. The Obama administration appealed the Southern District Court ruling.” Regarding the “white paper" justification for assassination, Hedges states, “What they’re attempting to do is legally justify what they’re already doing. They have argued that under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act they have a right to assassinate American citizens. That is, to be generous, a radical interpretation of the AUMF. And so, what they’re seeking to do is legally justify, in the same way that Bush Counsel John Yoo was attempting, to legally justify torture. They’re essentially looking for kind of legal cover. I think it’s all connected. It’s all a part of this very rapid descent into a frightening form of corporate totalitarianism. And that is just writ large across the landscape. And as we go down – and they know we’re going down, these forces are cannibalistic. Forty percent of the summer Arctic sea ice melts, and here we’re literally watching the death throes of the planet, and these corporations, like Shell, look at it as a business opportunity. They know only one word, and that’s "more." They have commodified everything. Human beings are commodities, disposable commodities. The ecosystem is a disposable commodity. And they will, now with no impediments, push and push and push.”


Hedges is right and We the People have to push back. We have no choice. We must demand a roll back of Executive power, the repeal of the National Defense Authorization Act and the Authorization to Use Military Force. United we have the power to defeat the tyranny of an increasingly corporatized police state and demand real representative democracy. Even if we were to assume that the basis for a “War on Terror” were originally sound, the corporate coup has turned it against us to crush any resistance to its agenda of insane avarice. It's not about an out of sight them anymore or about defending our shores or our way of life. The War on Terror has come home and increasingly its about you.

Fighting for a Future

The Ecosocialist Conference

Saturday, April 20th 2013 @ Barnard College (118th & Bway), New York City
Suggested donation: $5-20, no one turned away for lack of funds. Free childcare provided upon request. Please contact michaelware1205@gmail.com to reserve or for more info.
Registration opens at 9:30am. Opening plenary at 10am followed by three workshop sessions and a closing plenary from 6-7:30pm. Post-conference dinner and drinks (unfortunately not included) immediately afterward.


Register here

Hosted by the Ecosocialist Contingent, a new and hopefully growing alliance of socialist and progressive organizations and activists who understand that the climate crisis cannot be addressed without overcoming the main cause and obstacle -- capitalism.

A Terrible Normality

Written by Michael Parenti

Through much of history the abnormal has been the norm. This is a paradox to which we should attend.

Aberrations, so plentiful as to form a terrible normality of their own, descend upon us with frightful consistency. The number of massacres in history, for instance, are almost more than we can record.

There was the New World holocaust, consisting of the extermination of indigenous Native American peoples throughout the western hemisphere, extending over four centuries or more, continuing into recent times in the Amazon region.

There were the centuries of heartless slavery in the Americas and elsewhere, followed by a full century of lynch mob rule and Jim Crow segregation in the United States, and today the numerous killings and incarcerations of Black youth by law enforcement agencies.

Let us not forget the extermination of some 200,000 Filipinos by the U.S. military at the beginning of the twentieth century, the genocidal massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and the mass killings of African peoples by the western colonists, including the 63,000 Herero victims in German Southwest Africa in 1904, and the brutalization and enslavement of millions in the Belgian Congo from the late 1880s until emancipation in 1960—followed by years of neocolonial free-market exploitation and repression in what was Mobutu's Zaire.

French colonizers killed some 150,000 Algerians. Later on, several million souls perished in Angola and Mozambique along with an estimated five million in the merciless region now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The twentieth century gave us—among other horrors—more than sixteen million lost and twenty million wounded or mutilated in World War I, followed by the estimated 62 million to 78 million killed in World War II, including some 24 million Soviet military personnel and civilians, 5.8 million European Jews, and taken together: several million Serbs, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and a score of other nationalities.

In the decades after World War II, many, if not most, massacres and wars have been openly or covertly sponsored by the U.S. national security state. This includes the two million or so left dead or missing in Vietnam, along with 250,000 Cambodians, 100,000 Laotians, and 58,000 Americans.

Today in much of Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East there are "smaller" wars, replete with atrocities of all sorts. Central America, Colombia, Rwanda and other places too numerous to list, suffered the massacres and death-squad exterminations of hundreds of thousands, a constancy of violent horrors. In Mexico a "war on drugs" has taken 70,000 lives with 8,000 missing.

There was the slaughter of more than half a million socialistic or democratic nationalist Indonesians by the U.S.-supported Indonesian military in 1965, eventually followed by the extermination of 100,000 East Timorese by that same U.S.-backed military. Consider the 78-days of NATO's aerial destruction of Yugoslavia complete with depleted uranium, and the bombings and invasion of Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Western Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now the devastating war of attrition brokered against Syria.

And as I write (early 2013), the U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iran are seeding severe hardship for the civilian population of that country. All the above amounts to a very incomplete listing of the world's violent and ugly injustice.

A comprehensive inventory would fill volumes. How do we record the countless other life-searing abuses: the many millions who survive wars and massacres but remain forever broken in body and spirit, left to a lifetime of suffering and pitiless privation, refugees without sufficient food or medical supplies or water and sanitation services in countries like Syria, Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Mali.

Think of the millions of women and children around the world and across the centuries who have been trafficked in unspeakable ways, and the millions upon millions trapped in exploitative toil, be they slaves, indentured servants, or underpaid laborers. The number of impoverished is now growing at a faster rate than the world's population. Add to that, the countless acts of repression, incarceration, torture, and other criminal abuses that beat upon the human spirit throughout the world day by day.

Let us not overlook the ubiquitous corporate corruption and massive financial swindles, the plundering of natural resources and industrial poisoning of whole regions, the forceful dislocation of entire populations, the continuing catastrophes of Chernobyl and Fukushima and other impending disasters awaiting numerous aging nuclear reactors.

The world's dreadful aberrations are so commonplace and unrelenting that they lose their edge and we become inured to the horror of it all. "Who today remembers the Armenians?" Hitler is quoted as having said while plotting his "final solution" for the Jews.

Who today remembers the Iraqis and the death and destruction done to them on a grand scale by the U.S. invasion of their lands? William Blum reminds us that more than half the Iraq population is either dead, wounded, traumatized, imprisoned, displaced, or exiled, while their environment is saturated with depleted uranium (from U.S. weaponry) inflicting horrific birth defects.

What is to be made of all this? First, we must not ascribe these aberrations to happenstance, innocent confusion, and unintended consequences. Nor should we believe the usual rationales about spreading democracy, fighting terrorism, providing humanitarian rescue, protecting U.S. national interests and other such rallying cries promulgated by ruling elites and their mouthpieces.

The repetitious patterns of atrocity and violence are so persistent as to invite the suspicion that they usually serve real interests; they are structural not incidental. All this destruction and slaughter has greatly profited those plutocrats who pursue economic expansion, resource acquisition, territorial dominion, and financial accumulation. Ruling interests are well served by their superiority in firepower and striking force. Violence is what we are talking about here, not just the wild and wanton type but the persistent and well-organized kind.

As a political resource, violence is the instrument of ultimate authority. Violence allows for the conquest of entire lands and the riches they contain, while keeping displaced laborers and other slaves in harness. The plutocratic rulers find it necessary to misuse or exterminate restive multitudes, to let them starve while the fruits of their land and the sweat of their labor enrich privileged coteries.

Thus we had a profit-driven imperial rule that helped precipitate the great famine in northern China, 1876-1879, resulting in the death of some thirteen million. At about that same time the Madras famine in India took the lives of as many as twelve million while the colonial forces grew ever richer. And thirty years earlier, the great potato famine in Ireland led to about one million deaths, with another desperate million emigrating from their homeland. Nothing accidental about this: while the Irish starved, their English landlords exported shiploads of Irish grain and livestock to England and elsewhere at considerable profit to themselves.

These occurrences must be seen as something more than just historic abnormalities floating aimlessly in time and space, driven only by overweening impulse or happenstance. It is not enough to condemn monstrous events and bad times, we also must try to understand them. They must be contextualized in the larger framework of historical social relations.

The dominant socio-economic system today is free-market capitalism (in all its variations). Along with its unrelenting imperial terrorism, free-market capitalism provides "normal abnormalities" from within its own dynamic, creating scarcity and maldistributed excess, filled with duplication, waste, overproduction, frightening environmental destruction, and varieties of financial crises, bringing swollen rewards to a select few and continual hardship to multitudes. Economic crises are not exceptional; they are the standing operational mode of the capitalist system. Once again, the irrational is the norm.

Consider U.S. free-market history: after the American Revolution, there were the debtor rebellions of the late 1780s, the panic of 1792, the recession of 1809 (lasting several years), the panics of 1819 and 1837, and recessions and crashes through much of the rest of that century. The serious recession of 1893 continued for more than a decade. After the industrial underemployment of 1900 to 1915 came the agrarian depression of the 1920s—hidden behind what became known to us as "the Jazz Age," followed by a horrendous crash and the Great Depression of 1929-1942.

All through the twentieth century we had wars, recessions, inflation, labor struggles, high unemployment—hardly a year that would be considered "normal" in any pleasant sense. An extended normal period would itself have been an abnormality. The free market is by design inherently unstable in every aspect other than wealth accumulation for the select few.

What we are witnessing is not an irrational output from a basically rational society but the converse: the "rational" (to be expected) output of a fundamentally irrational system. Does this mean these horrors are inescapable? No, they are not made of supernatural forces. They are produced by plutocratic greed and deception. So, if the aberrant is the norm and the horrific is chronic, then we in our fightback should give less attention to the idiosyncratic and more to the systemic. Wars, massacres and recessions help to increase capital concentration, monopolize markets and natural resources, and destroy labor organizations and popular transformative resistance. The brutish vagaries of plutocracy are not the product of particular personalities but of systemic interests.

President George W. Bush was ridiculed for misusing words, but his empire-building and stripping of government services and regulations revealed a keen devotion to ruling-class interests. Likewise, President Barack Obama is not spineless. He is hypocritical but not confused. He is (by his own description) an erstwhile "liberal Republican," or as I would put it, a faithful servant of corporate America. Our various leaders are well informed, not deluded. They come from different regions and different families, and have different personalities, yet they pursue pretty much the same policies on behalf of the same plutocracy.

So it is not enough to denounce atrocities and wars, we also must understand who propagates them and who benefits. We have to ask why violence and deception are constant ingredients. Unintended consequences and other oddities do arise in worldly affairs but we also must take account of interest-driven rational intentions. More often than not, the aberrations—be they wars, market crashes, famines, individual assassinations or mass killings—take shape because those at the top are pursuing gainful expropriation. Many may suffer and perish but somebody somewhere is benefiting boundlessly.

Knowing your enemies and what they are capable of doing is the first step toward effective opposition. The world becomes less of a horrific puzzlement. We can only resist these global (and local) perpetrators when we see who they are and what they are doing to us and our sacred environment.

Democratic victories, however small and partial they be, must be embraced. But the people must not be satisfied with tinseled favors offered by smooth leaders. We need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire's heart with the full force of democracy, the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come from nowhere while carrying everything before it.

Michael Parenti’s most recent books are The Culture Struggle (2006), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), God and His Demons (2010), Democracy for the Few (9th ed. 2011), and The Face of Imperialism (2011). For further information about his work, visit his website.

Bradly Manning Speaks

Bradley Manning's Full Statement

Download

• full_statement.mp3 (63M)
• full_statement.ogg (37M)

He explains to the military court in his own cadence and words how and why he gave the Apache helicopter video, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars Logs, and the State Department Diplomatic Cables to WikiLeaks. Manning explains his motives, noting how he believed the documents showed deep wrongdoing by the government and how he hoped that the release would "spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan." In conjunction with the statement, Private First Class Manning also pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him.

Bradley Manning is a political prisoner and, if anything, a national hero.

The GateKeepers: Exposing the Tragedy of Zionism

“If this film does not lead to change, there is no hope for Israel,” said Israeli director Dror Moreh. He was referring to his new documentary The Gatekeepers, which has been nominated for an Academy Award. The title of the film refers to the six directors of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, who, in a series of extraordinary interviews with the director, speak about their work in detail for the first time.

Perhaps partly in response to Moreh’s personal charisma and partly out of what seems to be deep concern born of real patriotism, these men are strikingly candid and thoughtful. Avraham Shalom, head of the Shin Bet under Menachem Begin, speaks for the first time about the 1984 Kav 300 affair, when terrorists who attacked an inter-city bus were photographed alive upon arrest and were then killed in custody. Carmi Gillon speaks about his personal crisis after failing to prevent the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. They speak openly about the great danger posed by Jewish terror, particularly given that the men who plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, for example, are part of the Israeli establishment. They describe in detail the process of establishing control over occupied territory — learning to speak fluent Palestinian Arabic and memorizing the layout of every Palestinian village and town, building by building, house by house. The suffocating sense they convey is that the Palestinians living in occupied territory have no personal freedom; they are under perpetual surveillance, no matter what they are doing.

What these men describe is the process by which Israel became after 1967 a state that is ruled by the Shin Bet, rather than governed by the prime minister’s office. And in doing so, they confirm everything the so-called loony left has been saying about the occupation and its destructive effect on Israeli society. more here

Anonoymous Strikes Back At The Empire

Anonymous takes down US Sentencing Commission website

Hacking collective threatens to make public classified material and that when Aaron Swartz killed himself 'a line was crossed'




Hacktivist group Anonymous said Saturday it had hijacked the website of the US Sentencing Commission in a brazen act of cyber-revenge for the death of internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz.

More Here


From the persecution of Whistle blowers instead of torturers compounded by the immunity from prosecution of Wall Street thieves to the Prosecution of cyber protesters the rule of law has been turned on its head in defense of an increasingly fascist, capitalist National Security State.


While many of us do not have the skills to be hackers or the access to inside information to make public, we all suffer the consequences of a top-heavy system of corruption which robs us daily not only of our ability to make a living but of our future and that of life on earth.


The struggle for freedom and for life itself must no doubt escalate as the Empire metastasizes, becoming ever more intrusive and oppressive. That struggle takes many forms from online petitions to Occupations to national protests and Hactivism.

Progress?

According to reports in the Guardian, President Obama is 'seriously considering' hosting climate summit in hopes of launching a national climate action strategy. Will this be another photo-op moment by a President who has overseen the expansion of oil drilling, fracking, shale oil mining and who has all but approved the Tarsands Keystone XL pipeline?


Now that the record is clear that 2012 was the hottest year on record and with the memory and lingering destruction of superstorm "Sandy" still fresh, the climate consciousness of the public is turning. It is vital that we flood the Whitehouse demanding real action on the climate issue including the disapproval of the XL pipeline, an end to fracking and subsidies to big oil, and funding for research and conversion to ecologically sustainable public utilities.


What can we really expect from a corporate oligarchy? Honestly, very little. I am not naive enough to think that capitalists and the governments they own and control will sacrifice profits and control even to save life on earth. What is vitally important here is the building of a strong unified movement stripped of illusions and aware of the obstacles we face to our continued survival. That is what it will take to move beyond the destructive juggernaut of corporate dictatorship to a sustainable, democratic post capitalist system. As the history of political movements demonstrates, that awareness and unity can only be forged in the struggle.

the crisis which could make all the others irrelevant

Yes, class and economic justice are central but the reality of climate change, if unaddressed, makes them irrelevant. At the same time, one cannot separate class from environmental issues. The only thing standing in the way of the survival of civilization much less life on earth is capitalism. The capitalist system has outlived its time and has become a juggernaut of global destruction.


We changed the conversation over the last two years bringing class, the reality of economic disparity, and the connection of wealth and power. Now it is vital that we connect the dots on the environment and take it to the streets.


We need to be doing everything we can to shut this deadly system down and rebuild it in an ecologically sustainable way and that requires moving beyond capitalism. We must replace it with eco-socialist systems. We have no choice. Failure to do so will result in our extinction. The world belongs to all of us. It's time to take it back from the insanity of profiteers.

Capitalism & Climate Change

Bill Moyers interviews Naomi Kline who makes clear that the choice we face is whether we will let capitalism kill all life on earth or move beyond it to eco-socialism.

America's Post Election Hangover

Nothing has changed but at least it hasn't changed for the worse. Well, a few things have changed: Gay marriage is legal in more states as is marijuana but the reality is that little would change whatever the outcome because as an excellent article in Der Speigel correctly points out: America is a country of total capitalism. Its functionaries have no need of public hospitals or of a reliable power supply to private homes. The elite have their own infrastructure. Total capitalism, however, has left American society in ruins and crippled the government. America's fate is not just an accident produced by the system. It is a consequence of that system. The struggle for Working Class Democracy and the empowerment of the 99% must continue. It is a matter of life or death.

I got the Swing State Blues

The sun hesitates
just below the horizon
this morning;
two nations in an unsettled dawn
of fear and loathing

The campaign signs uprooted,
the bunting
torn and trampled
in the grim stillness
of a deepening winter

OK, I did it. I swore I wouldn't and I feel sick about it. I wanted to vote for Jill Stein but it's tight here in this swing state where we've been inundated with hype and badgered by party activists. As bad as Obama is, Ryan and Romney are worse, posing a real danger. I argued with myself about the benefit of having the wolf minus the sheep's clothing; about no illusions among the half-assed liberals and slack wannabe revolutionaries and who would really be better for the struggle. But reality is merciless and given where we are with climate change, we really can't afford a coal and oil frenzied fascist at the helm. I know, I know, and I've pointed out on this blog Obama's caving to the corporatists and his expansion of the repressive pig-state but wiser folks than I concur that I should vote for Obama to defeat Romney. I was moved by Robert Scheers's reasoning as well as others. I bit the bullet, or more accurately, slugged down a few drinks and touched the drones, nodded like a zombie to the Assassin in Chief acknowledging that Romney would be worse. I did the Amerikan thing and voted against the greater of evils knowing that the lesser gets more evil all the time. I've washed my hands compulsively since and continue to drown my guilt in high quality spirits.

Whoever comes out on top, you and I will still be on the bottom, struggling to survive a failing and increasingly oppressive system as the ecosystem spirals to collapse. The fight for a better world will continue because our "campaign" doesn't depend on spin, corporate backing and bullshit. We fight for a life worth living, much less life itself. As Ma Joad said, "We're the People and we just keep going."

See you in the streets.

Can We Talk About Climate Change Now?

Mother Nature refuses to be ignored by those who vie for power. As it KO's the US, we need to demand it be dealt with as an issue. Romney not only has taken the lead by denying climate change and berating the President for even hinting at the issue. His answer? More coal and less government regulation! He has also recently spoken out against federal disaster relief. Can you hear that in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania? Obama, as usual, remains silent except to brag that oil drilling has increased under his administration and to talk up "clean coal" and shale oil.

Mike Tidwell, Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network writes in The Nation:

The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, but climate change has decided to speak to them. And what is a thousand-mile-wide storm pushing eleven feet of water toward our country’s biggest population center saying just days before the election? It is this: we are all from New Orleans now. Climate change—through the measurable rise of sea levels and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms—has made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophe as the victims of Hurricane Katrina were seven years ago.

Arriving atop fantastically warm water and aided by a full foot of sea-level rise during the last century, Hurricane Sandy is just the latest example of climate change’s impact on human society. Unless we rapidly phase out our use of fossil fuels, most Americans within shouting distance of an ocean will—in coming years—live behind the sort of massive levees and floodgates that mark Louisiana today.

The New York Academy Sciences has already begun examining the viability of three massive floodgates near the mouth of New York Harbor, not unlike the Thames River floodgate that protects London today. Another floodgate has been proposed for the Potomac River just south of Washington, fending against tsunami-like surge tides from future mega storms. Plus there will be levees—everywhere. Imagine the National Mall, Reagan National Airport and the Virginia suburbs—all well below sea level—at the mercy of “trust-us-they’ll-hold” levees maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Oceans worldwide are projected to rise as much as three more feet this century—much higher if the Greenland ice sheet melts away. Intense storms are already becoming much more common. These two factors together will in essence export the plight of New Orleans, bringing the Big Easy “bowl” effect here to New York City and Washington, as well as to Charleston, Miami, New York and other coastal cities. Assuming we want to keep living in these cities, we’ll have to build dikes and learn to exist beneath the surface of surrounding tidal bays, rivers and open seas—just like New Orleans.

Meanwhile, it’s not our imagination that hurricanes have grown more ferocious than in the past. Multiple scientific studies in the past few years have found that rising sea-surface temperatures linked to global warming are causing an increase in the number of stronger hurricanes. Sandy, right now, is approaching the East Coast atop Atlantic sea-surface temperatures a full five degrees Fahrenheit above normal. One study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that hurricane wind speeds have doubled in the past thirty years. This may account for the fact that among the six most powerful hurricanes recorded in the Atlantic Basin—going back 150 years—three occurred over fifty-two days in 2005: Katrina, Rita and Wilma. And Sandy, as measured by its area of influence, is now the biggest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic.

Higher sea levels create other conditions that will only enhance hurricanes. In 1985, Hurricane Gloria made landfall north of New York Harbor. As a Category 2 storm, it could have had a serious surge tide. But it was a relative dud, causing only minor flooding. New York got lucky because the storm struck at maximum low tide. But with three feet of sea-level rise, we will be creating what amounts to permanent high-tide conditions in the New York region and everywhere else, guaranteeing that future storms like Sandy will become surge-tide heavyweights.

What can we do? Three major options: (1) abandon our coastal cities and retreat inland, (2) stay put and try to adapt to the menacing new conditions or (3) stop burning planet-warming fossil fuels as fast as possible.

Retreat, of course, is no one’s first choice. But adapting means committing fully to the New Orleans model. It means potentially thousands of miles of levees and floodwalls across much of the East Coast. And that’s just to handle the rising sea. For hurricane surge tides, the only solution might be to build those major floodgates across New York Harbor, the Potomac Rivers and elsewhere. But are we truly ready to become New Orleanians, casting our lot behind ever-higher, unsustainable walls? Once we commit to fortified levees and massive floodgates, there’s no turning back. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition, as New Orleans has graphically demonstrated.

In truth, we must combine some level of adaptation with the third option: switching away from fossil fuels and onto clean energy. Clean energy is less expensive, less risky and overall much better for us. It’s the option that treats the disease of global warming, not just the symptoms. Only by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas pollution—by putting a price on carbon fuels and ushering in real gains in wind and solar power and efficiency—can we slow the sea-level rise and potentially calm the growth in hurricane intensity.

Perhaps now, after seeing the full wrath of Sandy, the next president will move from total silence to real action.

The real issue is of course, corporate rule. Neither official candidate will challenge the interests of those who fund their campaigns. It is up to us. We have never faced as big a challenge or as vital a struggle. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.

Land of the Free?

The Criminalization Industry and its Costs






An article in my local paper last July caught my attention. It was about the building of an extension at the Chesapeake Jail which was done without proper permits. Several articles focusing on that followed but the real issue shouldn't have been the permitting error. The bigger issue is that the Chesapeake Jail, built to house 543 inmates is now averaging 1,150. Chesapeake is not alone in having to deal with this problem. Virginia Beach expanded its jail several years ago and remains overcrowded as do all city jails and prisons in our region. An Urban Institute report states, “Virginia’s incarceration and reentry trends are similar to those observed at the national level. Between 1980 and 2003, the Virginia prison population more than quadrupled, increasing from 8,521 to 35,429 people. The per capita rate of imprisonment in Virginia rose from 159 to 471 per 100,000 residents in the state between 1980 and 2002, an increase of almost 200 percent.” As the report indicates, this is part of a national trend.

Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world, even more than China, a much larger and more populous nation not known for civil liberties.

Our national prison population remained relatively stable throughout most of the last century. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Nevertheless, America's prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year. I have to wonder why this is. Have we become a nation of criminals? What Gives?

In looking at this issue I've found some troubling trends. Most of the people locked away in our penal institutions are not violent criminals. Most are poor. The majority are are black and brown, in fact, our population of black and brown prisoners alone is greater than the entire prison population of China. About 70% are illiterate and roughly 200,000 suffer from mental illness. More troubling is the growing industry of private prisons and peripheral industries that profit from high inmate populations.

Much money is made by the building and contracting of private prisons and the many peripheral industries feed at that trough, from builders and those that supply guards to food service and telephone companies that grossly overprice inmate telephone services. As bad as abuses are in state prisons like Virginia's Red Onion Supermax, plagued by scandals of abuse, torture and overuse of solitary confinement, private prisons are even worse for lack of oversight and cost cutting for profits.

How did we get here? Tough on crime legislation which makes better political sense than it does policy is partly to blame. The recently exposed American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a consortium of business interests that influence legislation, plays a major role. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, tougher immigration policy and “truth in sentencing” laws.
In 1995 alone, ALEC’s “Truth in Sentencing Act” eliminating time off for good behavior was signed into law in twenty-five states including our own. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.)

The use of cheap prison labor for industry used to be illegal in the US to avoid unfair competition but ALEC changed that with its “Prison Industries Act,” and a little-known federal program known as PIE or the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification which, under the guise of vocational rehabilitation, allows the use of prison labor to contracting corporations like Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises, Inc. that make products from office furniture to eyeglass frames and clothes to missile parts, paying captive inmate workers only 14 cents an hour. Hard to compete with that on the open market! Vocational rehabilitation or, job training, is a good thing but it already existed in the prison system without the use of inmates as cheap labor. My stepson learned welding and plumbing in prison and has benefited as a hard-working taxpaying plumber ever since. Publicly funded skills training is a good and much needed investment but one shouldn't have to go to prison to get it and one shouldn't have to compete with prison labor to use it. Free labor cannot compete with slave labor.

The Prison Industrial system that has developed over the last few decades results from and is fed by the “War on Drugs” which keeps our prison population up. This failed policy disproportionately affects African Americans. Over the past 40 years, the War on Drugs has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for more than 45 million arrests. Since 1994, the disparity between white and non-white prisoners as a percentage of the total prison population has widened dramatically. Although whites account for 69% of drug offenses, state prison incarceration rates for African Americans for drug law violations are almost 20 times those of whites and more than double those of Hispanics. From 1990 to 1994, incarceration for drug offenses accounted for 60% of the increase in the black population in state prisons and 91% of the increase in Federal prisons. In 2009 nearly 1.7 million people were arrested in the U.S. for nonviolent drug charges – more than half of those arrests were for marijuana possession alone.

Though many people in law enforcement are opposed to the continuing war on drugs, police departments have a financial incentive to continue it. When someone is found guilty of selling drugs in any quantity, police departments are authorized to seize and auction off all their property, keeping the money made. Though police departments can always use the money, it sets up a conflict of interest that encourages abuse. The cost of this failed policy has been devastating to those serving years of their lives in our penitentiaries for even minor drug infractions as well as to their families and to our communities. As we saw in the Ryan Frederick case in Chesapeake, unreliable snitches are often used to justify raids and prosecute offenses and lives are needlessly lost. Many innocent people have been locked away for years on the flimsiest of evidence. Many otherwise law abiding people using marijuana for medical reasons are criminalized as well.

As Marc Mauer, the author of the book The Race to Incarcerate says, "We have embarked on a great social experiment . . . No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control." It seems we are becoming a prison nation. I note that many of our most loudly patriotic citizens are often the most vociferous in voicing tough on crime attitudes, ready to condemn and lock others away – often using the term “thug” with racist overtones. It has become part of our mindset and culture. I have to wonder, is this nation we want to be?

What are the alternatives? How can we turn this around? It seems to me that the privatization of prisons and the incentive of property seizures and slave-cheap prison labor must end. The failed and costly mass criminalization resulting from bad immigration policy and the war on drugs must end.
Nobody wants dangerous criminals running free but is imprisonment really the best and only consequence for non-violent offenders?

Historically, jail is where the condemned awaited punishment, whether hanging or lashing or the public degradation of the stocks. I don't know that we want to return to public lashings though I would prefer a painful beating to a decade in prison. Public lashings were banned in the early 19th century as cruel and unusual but is seems to me that taking years of someones life is far crueler and often worse than the offense being punished. The only people we should lock away are those violent criminals who otherwise would be a danger to others. I think that for many minor and non-violent infractions, fines, public service of some kind, public degradation, home monitoring and sentences served on weekends are better alternatives. Efforts to standardize sentencing guidelines, though well intentioned, have limited judicial discretion and can prove an obstacle to real reform. That this is the kind of subject opportunist politicians avoid fearing the repercussions of being labeled “soft on crime” reflects another problem in itself. Given the growing number of us behind bars and the incentive to capitalize off incarceration in an otherwise tough economy, this is something we need to talk about and reconsider. I believe the time is now.