Faith and the First Generation

Hype Session 2 - Herbal Hype

2011-09-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

Hype Session 1 - Herbal Hype

2011-09-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

Cruel and Unusual Punishment in the U.K.

2011-08-18T16:17:00.000-07:00

Rioting in London, Woolrich August 8 2011

2011-08-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

2011-08-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Racist Right

What were two Republicans thinking, calling Obama 'tar baby' and 'boy'?
Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado and commentator Pat Buchanan, a former candidate for president, both apologized Wednesday for using racially charged terms to refer to Obama.

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / August 3, 2011
Atlanta --Christian Science Moniter--

The specter of two national Republican figures apologizing for calling President Obama, the first African-American president, alternately a "tar baby" and "boy" gave new fuel to speculation on the left that, underneath much of the criticism of the president and his policies, lurks the shadow of racism.

Last week, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R) of Colorado, on a Denver talk radio show, said, “Even if some people say, ‘Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,’ they will hold the president responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away.”

The term tar baby comes from the 19th century Uncle Remus stories, where B'rer Fox uses a doll made of a lump of tar to trap B'rer Rabbit, who gets more stuck the more he pummels and kicks the tar baby. In more recent parlance, tar baby is widely considered racial slur.

Other Republicans, including Sen. John McCain and Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, have in recent years apologized for using the phrase "tar baby," although in reference to various government policies and projects, not a black man.

And then Tuesday night, former GOP presidential candidate and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan, in a tête-à-tête with the Rev. Al Sharpton, referred to Obama as "your boy." “My what?” Sharpton shot back. “My president, Barack Obama? What did you say?”

Mr. Buchanan hinted that he was using a boxing analogy, replying that the president was "your boy in the ring."

Lamborn, who apologized to Obama in a letter, said in a separate statement Wednesday that he shouldn't have used a term "that some find insensitive" and meant to criticize presidential policies that have "created an economic quagmire for the nation, and [which] are responsible for the dismal economic conditions our country faces."

“Some folks took what I said as some kind of a slur,” Buchanan said on Wednesday. “None was meant, none was intended, none was delivered.”

Nevertheless, to some critics, the gaffes are illuminating bits of evidence to underscore what many believe is an essentially racist view of Obama by some in America's conservative circles.

Given that language is the primary purveyor of our deepest thoughts, as well as the fact that language use is often unconscious, "even a slip of the tongue can reflect the kind of prevalence of racism that still exists within our culture," says Shawn Parry-Giles, director of the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland in College Park. "Progressives would say it's part of a larger conspiracy to target voters to use Obama's race as a means to help defeat him."

For especially conservative critics of the president, on the other hand, the gaffes hint how the shifting sands of language and perception have become intensified in the not-quite-post-racial Obama era, where some attempts to criticize the president have far overshot the lines of political correctness.

Progressives and tea party members, moreover, continue to be embroiled in a war of words and images where liberals charge tea partyers with latent racism for some depictions of Obama, and tea party folks say their critics use derogatory terms tied to social class.

"You talk about intent and reception in politics, where intent does matter, but reception is everything," says Professor Parry-Giles. "In an ideal world, when these situations happen ,they can be a source of productive discussion about how language can harm and hurt, and that what may have been appropriate 20 years ago or part of the vernacular is no longer there. Oftentimes, though, it just ends up being a partisan moment on either side."

2011-08-02T14:44:00.001-07:00

Fear The Radical Right and witness its assault on freedom

The Tea Party Doctrine - Kings of Patrimonialism
and Mujahideen Jihadist Theology

- Anders Brevik
- Jared Lee Loughner
- English Defense League
- Hutaree
- Christian Terrorism
- Lionheart (EDL expatriate)

*Big men, that is politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters- are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, including the U.S. congress. If political development implied movement beyond patrimonial relationships and paternalistic politics, one also had to explain why these practices survived in many places and seemingly modern systems often reverted to them. (pXIII)

*The conservatism of societies with regard to rules is then a source of political decay. Rules of institutions created in response to one set of environmental circumstances become dysfunctional under later conditions, but they cannot be changed due to people heavy emotional investments in them. This means that social change is often not linear- but rather follows constant small adjustments to shifting conditions- a pattern of prolonged stasis followed by catastrophic change. (p44)

*...the struggle to replace "tribal" politics with more impersonal form of political relationship continues in the twenty-first century (p50)

* the reciprocal exchange of favors between leaders and followers, whose leadership is won rather than inherited based on the leaders ability to advance the interest of the group; i.e. patron politics, political machines (p78)

*But of all the ways to make distinctions between people and classes, inequality of taxation is the most pernicious and most apt to add isolation to inequality. Tax exemption was (is) the most hated of all privileges.(p351)

*Democratic public's do not necessarily always resist high taxes, as long as they think they are necessary for an important public purpose like the defense of the nation. What they dislike is taxes being taken from them illegally, or public monies that are wasted, or that go to corrupt purposes. (p419)

*The idea of the equality of recognition- The rise of modern democracy gives all people the opportunity of ruling themselves, on the basis of the mutual recognition of the dignity and rights of their fellow humans. (p445)

*Two types of political decay- institutional rigidity and repatrimonilization- oftentimes come together as patrimonial officials with a large personal stake in the existing system seek to defend it against reform. And if the system breaks down altogether, it is often only patrimonial actors with their patronage networks that are left to pick up the pieces. (p454)

*The ability of societies to innovate instiutionally thus depends on wherther they can neurtralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform. Sometimes economic change weakens the position of existing elites in favor of new ones, who push for new institutions. (p456)

Quotes from Francis Fukuyama arguablu Neo-Conservative book The Origins of Political Order

2011-07-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

Boycotting fascism?

Policies that have frustrated Palestinians for years are now being applied to middle-class Israelis, too.
Mark LeVine
--aljazeera--
During the last week angry young residents of Tel Aviv have been staging a sit-in, or, more accurately, a tent-in, along fashionable Rothschild Boulevard to protest their being priced out of the housing market in Israel's cultural and economic capital. The protests have drawn the attention of the Israeli and international media, with The Guardian even comparing the protesters to the pro-democracy revolutionaries in Egypt and other Arab countries.

The protests might be new, but the process against which the tent-dwellers are protesting has been going on in Tel Aviv, like other world cities, for at least two decades. But until recently, the main victims of high housing prices weren't young middle-class Israeli Jews no longer able to afford to live close to the cultural and economic action in Tel Aviv, but poor Palestinian residents of Jaffa who were being pushed out by gentrification and had nowhere else to go.

In the wake of the 1948 war, when Jaffa, like most other Palestinian towns and villages, was emptied of the vast majority of its population, the once-proud city turned poor and decrepit neighbourhood of Tel Aviv underwent a process of Judaisation, with only around 5,000 of the former population of at least 70,000 Palestinians remaining. That population increased several-fold in later decades, but when Jaffa suddenly became a fashionable neighbourhood for Israel's emerging yuppie Jewish class beginning in the late 1980s, prices began to rise.

By a variety of legal and economic mechanisms the growing Palestinian population was squeezed out of Jaffa's remaining neighbourhoods like Ajami and Jebaliya, which were quite desirable because of their seaside location. Residents complained of a clear policy of Judaisation through planning and other mechanisms, but were rebuffed when they took their case to the Tel Aviv municipality.

"What can we do; the market is the market," more than one official would declare. In other words, it wasn't the explicit policy of the state, but rather natural market forces that were pushing working-class Palestinians, and their Jewish neighbours, out of these neighbourhoods.

Of course, this argument was nonsense. The Israeli state has been deeply involved in the neoliberalisation of the country's economy, of which Tel Aviv was the natural epicentre. As part of this process it was quite adept at using so-called "market forces" as part of its toolbox for enabling greater Jewish penetration of Palestinian towns and neighbourhoods that were deemed priorities for Judaisation. That Jews were also victims was not relevant, as they were being replaced by even more Jews, and those pushed out always had "somewhere else" to go.

Young Jews could "pioneer" neighbouring towns like Bat Yam - the equivalent of moving from Manhattan to less-desirable but soon-to-be-gentrifying parts of Brooklyn or Queens in the 1980s. Palestinians, however, had literally nowhere to move to except a few Palestinian cities which themselves were experiencing housing shortages.

Resistance was largely futile; more than one Palestinian family set up tents to live in Jaffa's ill-kept parks after being evicted from their homes, both as a protest against their eviction and because they couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The tents became part of the landscape after a while, and ultimately disappeared.

In the meantime, gentrification continued apace, whether faux-Ottoman-era monstrosities like the Andromeda Hill development or the even more perverse Peres Centre for Peace, built - tellingly - on land expropriated from Jaffan refugees including the neighbourhood's cemetery, whose remaining gravestones teeter on the hill along the Centre's southern border.

Meanwhile, late last year the Israeli Supreme Court okayed the construction of a housing development for a religious Zionist group in the heart of Ajami, on refugee land leased to them by the Municipality and Israeli Lands Administration, despite strong protests by local Palestinian residents and Israeli human rights groups.

And while this process plays out, the remaining Arab parts of Ajami suffer from drugs, violence and government neglect (as illustrated in the 2010 film "Ajami"), while activists who press too hard against the situation can be assured of receiving various grades of the "Shabak education" that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have always experienced when they challenged the basic premises of Israeli rule.

From markets to boycotts?

As long as this process was confined to Jaffa, most Israelis, including residents of Tel Aviv, didn't think too much about it. After all, what was happening in Jaffa was the same thing that happened across the country for decades; it was the modus operandi for how the State of Israel was built.

What's different today? Today it's middle-class Israelis who are being pushed out and have nowhere to go; at least not anywhere they want to go. Rich Israeli expats and Diaspora Jews who've bought up much of Ajami's housing stock are now also among the most important buyers of apartments in Tel Aviv, while the young Ashkenazi Jews who are currently living in tents are being told that they should move to the "periphery" and pioneer far less desirable parts of the country than Tel Aviv's satellite towns.

Gay activists complain that they only feel at home in Tel Aviv, while would-be cultural creatives have little desire to move to development towns populated by working-class Mizrahi Jews or recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Ethiopia.

This is a fascinating story, you might be saying to yourself. But what does it have to do with a story about "boycotting fascism," as this column is titled? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The suffering of young Israelis at the hands of the Tel Aviv housing market illustrates a larger phenomenon which is presently affecting the fabric of Israeli society as a whole: Processes and policies which for years or even decades have been deployed on or affected the Palestinian community, on both sides of the Green Line, are now affecting mainstream Jewish Israelis negatively as well. But hardly anyone understands the genesis of the problem, and so the anger is either misdirected or dissipates because, after all, the market is the market: what can you do?

Another example of this process is the debate surrounding the passing last week by the Knesset of the so-called "Anti-Boycott" bill that has now made it illegal for Israelis to call for or engage in boycotting Israel or even the settlements or settlement-made products, allowing the boycott's targets to sue boycott supporters for damages without having to prove actual harm from the action.

The new law has caused a firestorm of protest in and outside Israel, with left-wing critics claiming it will lead outsiders to wonder if "there is actually a democracy here", and, even more damaging, to argue that its
passage heralds the arrival of fascism in Israel, whether "quiet" or "purposeful and palpable".

Among the arguments that this law reflects such a move is that it restricts freedom of expression, reflects a clear tyranny of the majority within Israeli politics, erases the distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories, will cripple efforts of various peace groups to help resuscitate the moribund peace process, and is part of a larger process to strip the Supreme Court of its independence. More broadly, in the words of
the usually conservative Maariv columnist Ben Caspit, it represents a right wing that "is running amok" and threatening the supposedly democratic fabric of Israel.

But just as with the housing problem in Tel Aviv, these claims hold true only if one is considering Israeli Jewish society. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, and much more so for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel has always been - to use the word presently in play - fascist.

Fascism or nationalism the problem?

The basic formula for fascism, that of a highly militarised, corporatist state that manages relations between labour and capital in the name of a mythically defined "people" to the exclusion of all those deemed outside the collective, well defines the kind of ethnonationalism that has long dominated Zionist ideology.

Moreover, the kind of exclusivism that is at the heart of all nationalist identities is ramped up on ideological steroids in the authoritarian nationalist discourses that underlay fascism, as the Italian and German experiences have tragically shown. Ethnonationalisms, and particularly those that emerge in settler colonial settings such as Israel, South Africa, the United States, Australia and French Algeria, are also based on extreme forms of exclusivism and territorial expansionism that must deny basic rights and even humanity to indigenous populations in order to achieve the goal of securing control and/or sovereignty over the "homeland".

Israeli geographer Juval Portugali defines nationalism as the "generative social order" of Zionism, cementing the relationship between the Jewish/Israeli people and the territory it reclaimed. This generative order has historically been exclusivist far more often than it has been open to plural identities, which is why the (re)emergence of nationalisms have so often brought war in their wake - especially when they have been joined with a colonial settler project.

In Israel this process is evidenced in the powerful role of the Israeli state and army in all aspects of the life of the country, from the socialist Labour-dominated pre-1948 period through the neoliberal present. It has shaped a political reality in which Palestinians, whether citizens of the Israeli state or occupied inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, have always been accorded lesser rights, by law and custom, than Jews.

Political theorists might reasonably argue that Israel doesn't fit the classic mode of a fascist society, particularly since its ruling parties and ideologies do not self identify as such. But if you're Palestinian, the fact that the fascist tendencies have been "silent" to Israeli Jewish or much of the world's ears has not lessened their painful impact.

And so it is not surprising, to recall the complaints of those criticising the new anti-boycott law, that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have long been deprived of the basic civil and political rights of equal citizenship. Their freedom of expression has long been curtailed to varying degrees, they have always suffered from the tyranny of the Jewish majority, there has never been a distinction between the Occupied Territories and Israel (thus the massive expansion of the settlement enterprise even during Oslo), and the Supreme Court has never stepped outside the mainstream Israeli political consensus supporting the occupation - whether of Jaffa or East Jerusalem.

Put simply, the Left has "run amok" in the territories as much as the Right. Indeed, the whole notion that there is a basic difference between the Zionist Left and Right has historically been little more than a "good cop-bad cop" rhetorical strategy to confuse foreigners about their basic agreement on core issues surrounding control over the territory of Mandate Palestine.

Of course, Palestinians have long understood this, even if Americans and Europeans have chosen to remain more or less wilfully ignorant. Labour, Likud or Kadima: the occupation just keeps grinding on. (As I write these lines, Haaretz is reporting the the IDF Civil Administration is engaged in yet another major land grab in the heart of the West Bank, trying to have large tracts of land, including those containing "illegal" outposts, declared state land so they can be permanently taken over by Israel in advance of any peace agreement.)

The future of boycotts

Against this long-term level of institutionalised domination and discrimination, Palestinians have tried many means of resistance, none of which have proved very successful to date. In a recent column I have discussed some of the culturally-grounded, non-violent means of resistance that might achieve a measure of success against the power of the Israeli state.

As Yousef Munayyer points out in his recent op-ed, the new anti-boycott law has at least had the salutory effect of stimulating more interest in the boycott and larger BDS movement. He also points out, quite rightly, that since the occupation cannot exist without the massive support of the Israeli state, the whole premise of most of the movements against whom the law is intended - left-wing Israeli groups seeking to boycott settlement products or cultural/educational institutions - is deeply flawed, since only by taking on the entire apparatus of the Israeli state can a boycott movement hope to stop the occupation juggernaut.

The challenge confronting such a movement, however, is that ideologies sharing the DNA of fascism are genetically predisposed to believing that the world is against them and that their existence is constantly in peril from within and without. In the Israeli case, the more successful a boycott movement becomes, the more the Israeli state, with the support of a large share of the public, will feel justified in using any means at its disposal - from shooting unarmed protesters to launching massive propaganda campaigns - to fight back.

Moreover, its leaders and their foot-soldiers are becoming more willing to demonise and act against even members of the collective who challenge official ideology and policies. This is of course not unique to Israel today, nor to the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, as William Cook's July 21 op-ed describing similarities between Israeli and American government subversions of freedom of expression makes clear. And the rabid hatred of left-of-center Norwegians by mass murderer Behring Breivik attests to the ease with which this disease can spread to even the most seemingly stable and democratic societies.

Against such a powerful adversary, Palestinians and their supporters in the BDS movement will need to craft an extremely creative and persuasive set of arguments, and the strategies to spread them globally, in order to have a chance of overcoming the overwhelming advantages possessed by the Israeli government and its supporters. In my next column, I'll look at some of the key principles, strategies and tactics of the movement today and explore how their strengths and weaknesses bode for the near future of the struggle against the Occupation.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at the University of California: Irvine, and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the soul of Islam (Random House 2008) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

German Innocent but Accused of Terrorism by USA

2011-07-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

2011-07-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

Brit pol: 'Right-wing nutters' stop debt deal
--politico.com--
By: Reid J. Epstein
July 25, 2011 06:35 AM EDT

A top British finance minister says the world’s biggest economic threat is from “right-wing nutters” in Congress who would send the U.S. government into default.

Speaking to the BBC about the European rescue package for troubled Greece, U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable said Washington’s political showdown over the debt ceiling threatens to overshadow financial troubles on the continent.

“The irony of the situation at the moment, with markets opening (Monday) morning, is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few right-wing nutters in the American congress rather than the euro zone,” Cable said on Sunday, Reuters reported.

Cable is the second-ranking member of the left-wing Liberal Democratic Party in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats joined Conservatives to form a coalition government after the 2010 British elections.

Cable drew controversy in December when he was caught on tape saying he was “declaring war” on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Prime Minister David Cameron then stripped Cable of his authority to rule over the News Corp. takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB and forced him to apologize.

2011-07-25T08:22:00.000-07:00

"Dispatches: Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola" a British Channel 4 documentary. Political activist and journalist Mark Thomas travels to South America, India and the US to investigate the way in which Coca-Cola and its suppliers operate and the extent to which they upholds moral and ethical obligations.

"The Cost of a Coke Revisited" a documentary by Matt Beard. Since 1990, 8 Colombian union workers have been murdered in Coca-Cola bottling plants. This film investigates why schools around the world have kicked Coke off of their campuses and labeled Coke as the drink of the death squads. Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus.

--Coca Cola uses Death Squads--

2011-07-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election
By John Thorpe
Benzinga Staff Writer
July 21, 2011 1:07 PM

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.

Fitrakis isn't the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. His response sent a chill up my spine.

"Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not," Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and "big deal" for you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It's how hackers swipe your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad.

A mirror site, which SmarTech was allegedly supposed to be, is simply a backup site on the chance that the main configuration crashes. Mirrors are a good thing.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

Harvey Wasserman, who wrote a book on the stolen 2004 election, explained that the combination of computer hacking, ballot destruction, and the discrepancy between exit polling (which showed a big Kerry win in Ohio) and the "real" vote tabulation, all point to one answer: the Republicans stole the 2004 election.

"The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed," Wasserman said.

Mark Crispin Miller also wrote a book on the subject of stolen elections, and focused on the 2004 Ohio presidential election. Here is what he had to say about it.

There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to disenfranchise as many people as possible.

On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.

After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans will say to this day, 'There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.' That's a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a recount.

And now, it seems, there never will be.

You can reach the author by email john@benzinga.com or on twitter @johndthorpe.

2011-07-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

Rick Scott's dirtiest deeds
By Lisa Rab
published: July 14, 2011
--MiamiNewTimes--

"I've seen the mountaintop!" shouted a woman blowing a whistle and marching in combat-style boots down Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach.

"We shall overcome Rick Scott's tyranny!" added a man who followed closely behind, limping a little.

At least 50 members of the disgruntled masses gathered outside the Palm Beach County Convention Center on this brutally warm March morning, when Gov. Rick Scott was about to give a speech. Scott had just introduced some of the budget proposals that would earn him the wrath of citizens across the state. Teachers, police officers, advocates for the disabled, retirees — people from all walks of life would soon be unified in their hatred of Florida's most powerful politician.

By May, a Quinnipiac University poll put Scott's approval rating at a dismal 29 percent. This week, the Broward Police union is hosting a "Party to Leave the Party" protest against Scott in which cops who are Republicans plan to switch their voter registration and abandon the GOP en masse.

In response to this widespread discontent, Scott has urged supporters to send prewritten letters to the editors of local newspapers."Rick Scott deserves our unwavering and enthusiastic support," the letters say. He also uses recorded phone messages to tout his policy decisions, irritating voters with robocalls about pill mills and government spending cuts.

Born in Illinois, Scott , 58, was raised by a truck-driver dad and a mom who worked odd jobs. For about three years beginning when he was a toddler, his family lived in public housing — a humble beginning Scott emphasized in his campaign. By the time Scott was 10, his family had moved to a three-bedroom suburban house in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended high school and college.

He earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and worked for a big firm in town before starting a health-care company called Columbia. He built his fortune at Columbia, eventually merging with Hospital Corporation of America and growing the enterprise to one of the world's largest health-care companies, with more than 340 hospitals and 550 health-care offices in 38 states. But the flush times ended abruptly.

In 1997, as FBI agents raided its offices and hospitals in several states, Columbia/HCA's board of directors forced Scott to resign. The feds alleged the company had paid kickbacks to doctors in exchange for patient referrals and had overcharged Medicare. The U.S. Justice Department called the resulting criminal case the largest health-care fraud in American history. Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and paid $1.7 billion in fines. Scott was never charged.

He did, however, testify in a separate deposition in an unrelated civil case against Columbia/HCA in 2000. When asked basic questions, including whether he was ever employed by Columbia/HCA, Scott refused to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. In media interviews, Scott has said, "You have to take responsibility for what happens under your watch." But he also said he didn't know the company was doing anything wrong.

In 2003, Scott moved to Naples with his wife. Last year, the billionaire ran for governor as a political novice, in a surprise campaign funded primarily by $60 million of his own money. Elected in the Tea Party wave that swept the country, he preached about fiscal austerity and promptly took a knife to cherished social safety nets. In a brief, 60-day legislative session, he implemented a wide-ranging conservative agenda.

He slashed funding for public schools, disabled people, and the unemployed; gave health-care companies control of Medicaid; and privatized nearly all of the prisons in the southern part of the state. Meanwhile, he enacted some of the most restrictive voting laws Florida has seen since the 2000 election debacle.

In June, as the public outcry against his policies continued, one of Scott's top staffers resigned and another was transferred to the state Department of Veterans Affairs. The governor, watching his ship sink, hired a Tallahassee insider as his new chief of staff. He also backed off one of his most controversial executive orders, which required state employees to undergo drug tests.

Despite these changes, the influence of Scott's first, combustible legislative session has already been enormous. Here, New Times takes stock of his dirtiest accomplishments.

Outsourced Prisons to His Political Donors

Last year, the private prison industry gave nearly $1 million to political campaigns in Florida, according to the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in Politics. The majority of the cash went to Republicans, and the largest chunk, $822,000, came from the GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based prison company formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections. (GEO also contributed $25,000 to Scott's inauguration party.) The prison lobby's influence on the Republican-dominated Legislature was immediately evident.

In early February, Scott proposed a plan to transfer 1,500 inmates from state-run lockups to private ones. The next month, lawmakers in the state Senate slipped language into their massive budget bill that privatized nearly all of the state prisons in 18 counties, including Broward and Palm Beach. The budget passed in May, opening the door for the GEO Group and other companies to begin bidding for contracts.

Proponents said the prison contracts will go only to bidders who reduce costs by 7 percent, saving the state about $27 million a year. But a legislative analyst who testified before the state Senate in February admitted it was tough to figure out the cost savings, because private and public prisons often operate differently. "They're never apples to apples," analyst Byron Brown said.

And a 2010 study of prisons in Arizona, which also has a cost-savings requirement for its private lockups, questioned whether outsourcing is the cheapest option. The Arizona state auditor found that medium-security private prisons cost $1,200 more per inmate a year than state-run facilities. Reviewing prison studies in other states, the auditor also noted "cost savings from contracting with private prisons... are not guaranteed."

Enacted Jim Crow-Style Voting Laws

After squeaking into office with just 61,550 more votes than his opponent, Scott wasted no time in disenfranchising people who might oust him in the next election cycle. In March, the Florida Clemency Board — composed of Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other members of his cabinet — passed a ban on felon voting rights, forcing nonviolent offenders to wait five years after completing their sentences to apply to have their rights restored.

The new rule turned back the clock on Florida's voting laws. During the 2000 election, thousands of voters were wrongfully purged from the rolls because they were misidentified as felons. That mishap brought to light the painful fact that Florida had the largest number of disenfranchised felons in the nation — a disproportionate swath of whom were African-American.

Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist heeded the outcry over this injustice and made it easier for ex-felons to get their voting rights restored. But Scott undid all of their reforms, dismissing the racist implications of his decision.

The felon voting ban dates back to the years just following the Civil War. It was zealously employed — just like poll taxes — to keep African-Americans from voting, says Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor of public administration at Florida State University. "It was used to target and weaken voting rights for blacks, and that is what they're doing with it today," he says.

Scott wasn't done. In May, the Legislature passed new election requirements that can be used to prevent less-wealthy people — those who work long hours and move frequently — from voting. The law makes it tougher for get-out-the-vote groups to register new voters, requires voters to use a provisional ballot if they have moved from one county to another and not registered the address change before Election Day, and reduces the number of early voting days from 14 to eight.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in Miami seeking to block implementation of the new law. Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida branch of the ACLU, called the law "a trifecta of voter suppression."

Mandated Drug Testing for State Workers and Welfare Recipients

You know something has gone terribly wrong when a concerned group of Key West citizens feels the need to send a communal vat of urine to Florida's governor.

The group, called the Committee for the Positive Insistence on a Sane Society (PISS), collected the urine samples to protest an executive order that Scott issued in March, requiring all state employees to submit to drug tests. "Floridians deserve to know that those in public service, whose salaries are paid with taxpayer dollars, are part of a drug-free workplace," he said at the time.

In June, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit calling the pee test unconstitutional. Scott suspended the order, pending the lawsuit, although state Department of Corrections employees will still be tested.

He campaigned on, and delivered, a separate law signed in May that requires prospective recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — cash welfare for families with children — to pass a drug test. This rule struck close to home for Scott. He has a brother in Texas who has struggled with bipolar disorder, has a criminal history that includes drug possession, and now receives social security insurance.

With this law, Florida might be repeating an old mistake. Thirteen years ago, the state launched a pilot program to drug-test recipients of cash welfare, and it was an utter failure. Only 3.8 percent of the 8,800 people who took the test failed it. This little government experiment cost the state $2.7 million, and the program was ultimately scrapped, according to PolitiFact.com.

How's that for fiscal austerity?

Fought the Prescription Drug Database

At first, Scott seemed determined to allow Florida's deadly pill-mill addiction to flourish. In February, he proposed repealing the law that created a prescription drug database designed to track the sale of narcotics. He argued that the database, intended to help spot patients who are "doctor-shopping," was an invasion of privacy. His backers in the Legislature also argued that the database didn't solve the problem because doctors weren't required to check it before dispensing drugs.

Still, in a state where seven deaths a day are blamed on prescription drug abuse, Scott's opposition to the database seemed bizarre. Lawmakers and police officials around the country — particularly in states such as Kentucky, whose OxyContin drug trade is fueled by Florida's pill mills — bellowed in protest. Even Scott's fellow Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi fought to keep the database. Finally, Scott reversed course and agreed. In June, he signed a law that strengthens criminal penalties for overprescribing drugs, requires pain clinics to register with the state, and prohibits most doctors from dispensing narcotics.

Privatized Medicaid

In Broward County, doctors and patients have been participating in an experiment with privatizing Medicaid since 2006, when then-Governor Bush enacted reforms he said would control skyrocketing costs and improve care through competition. The pilot program hit many pitfalls, but that didn't stop Scott from signing a law to expand it statewide. Now 3 million of Florida's poorest citizens, including children, pregnant women, and elderly residents of nursing homes, will learn the joys of dealing with HMOs.

Currently, Medicaid patients either enroll in a state-contracted HMO or visit doctors who accept Medicaid's fee for the services they perform. Under the new plan — proposed by Scott's transition team and sponsored by Sen. Joe Negron (R-Stuart) — patients must enroll in private HMO plans. The HMOs will have more power to change the "scope, duration, and level of benefits," says Laura Goodhue, executive director of the community health advocacy group Florida CHAIN. She fears the HMOs will limit services and deny claims.

In the pilot program that has been operating in Broward and four other counties since 2006, the results have been troubling. According to a 2008 Georgetown University review of the program, a majority of doctors complained that their patients were having a more difficult time getting care because of the maze of paperwork and limited benefits.

"The complexity of the program has grown, causing confusion and increased administrative burdens for consumers and providers," the report says. "Access to needed services appears to be worsening, according to both physicians and beneficiaries."

"The only way to save money is to delay and deny care," Goodhue says. "People are getting the runaround."

A state-funded study by University of Florida researchers shows that Medicaid expenditures decreased in Broward and Duval counties during the first two years of the pilot program but cautioned, "It is not known whether these savings are sustainable over time."

The saving grace might be that before it can be implemented statewide, the reform plan must be approved by federal officials, because more than half of Medicaid's funding comes from the federal government, Goodhue says.

Acted Sketchy About Solantic

Let's say you're a billionaire who amassed his wealth running a health-care company and then decided to run for governor. Immediately after taking office, you begin proposing and supporting legislation regarding health-care issues: privatizing Medicaid, requiring drug tests for state workers and welfare recipients, opposing a database that would track the sale of addictive prescription drugs. Unfortunately, the citizens of Florida are not total morons, and they realize that you, as governor, might actually profit from some of these proposals.

Turns out you still own a chain of urgent-care clinics that happen to offer $35 drug tests! Technically the $62 million investment in Solantic is in your wife's name. You moved it to the Frances Annette Scott Revocable Trust a few days before taking office. But it's tough to believe you're not still raking in the dough.

So do you apologize? Do you stage a public mea culpa and admit your conflict of interest? Not if you're Rick Scott. Instead, you wait for the media and the public to get so angry that someone files an ethics complaint against you. Then you rush to sell off your shares in the company. That's not suspicious at all.

Axed Funding for People With Disabilities

Need to trim your budget? There's no swifter solution than taking money from people who are physically incapable of fighting back.

The state Agency for Persons With Disabilities was running a $170 million deficit this spring when Scott decided to start slicing. Tasked with supporting 30,000 people with developmental disabilities, the agency had never been good at living within its means. Since 2005, it has shifted 5,000 clients from its waiting list to its roster but has never sufficiently increased its budget, says Kimberley Thompson, director of community relations for Sunrise Community, a Miami-based nonprofit agency that serves the disabled. Scott insisted he was rescuing the agency by forcing it to tighten its belt.

He issued an emergency order cutting payments to caregivers — the behavioral therapists, nurses, and others who care for people with cerebral palsy, autism, and other disabilities — by 15 percent. The government sets their fees based on the service they provide — anything from driving clients to the grocery store to speech therapy — so the impact of the payment cut varied widely. But some smaller, nonprofit providers said the cuts would put them out of business, Thompson says.

After a storm of protests from concerned parents and advocates, the state Legislature found a way to temporarily fill the budget gap, and Scott rescinded his emergency order. The agency's funding was restored for 2011, but it now must make 4 percent cuts for the fiscal year that starts in July.

Thompson is glad Scott changed his mind but says the governor and legislators need to learn more about how the agency for the disabled is run and where the money goes.

"I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he didn't intentionally harm thousands of people around the state," she says. "Once he was educated, he did make a better decision."

Gave Tax Breaks to Businesses; Cut Jobless Benefits

The day after winning the election, Scott announced Florida was "open for business." He wasn't kidding.

In the budget proposal he made public in February, he suggested lowering the state's corporate income tax rate by 2.5 percent, or $459 million. But an ounce of sanity prevailed in the Legislature, and in May, Scott was forced to settle for a measly $30 million cut. This translated to an average savings of about $1,100 a year for small businesses, although it also gives tax breaks to larger corporations.

Scott and the Republican-dominated Legislature were far less generous to the state's legions of laid-off workers. Florida already has some of the most meager unemployment benefits in the nation — $229 a week — and now those sparse checks will end sooner, after 23 weeks instead of 26. Even more frightening, in the future, benefits will be tied to the unemployment rate, decreasing as the jobless rate goes down.

Yes, you read that correctly. If more people have jobs and are paying taxes, unemployment benefits will go down. For example, when the state unemployment rate is at or below 5 percent, the unfortunate few without jobs can collect unemployment for only 12 weeks. If the Florida unemployment rate reaches or exceeds 10.5 percent (as of May, it was at 10.6 percent), laid-off workers can collect their full 23 weeks of benefits.

This slap in the face to jobless workers was accompanied by a 10 percent cut in the unemployment tax paid by businesses. Thoughtful, no?

Shuns Emails, Reporters, and the Sunshine Law

Rick Scott doesn't hide his disdain for Florida's open government laws. In February, he invited three powerful state Senate leaders to his mansion for a private dinner. They discussed, among other topics, his budget proposal.

This was strange, because when three senators gather to discuss legislative business, Senate rules require the meeting to be open to the public. But the citizens of Florida didn't get a dinner invitation.

In March, Scott scheduled a coffee date with ten legislators. When a Miami Herald reporter inquired about who would be attending and what the politicians would discuss, Scott's spokesman snapped at him, saying the event was "purely social." Then he canceled the coffee date.

Scott, meanwhile, told workers at the Department of Elderly Affairs that he doesn't use email — which is a convenient way to avoid creating a public record of his conversations.

"I don't have email," he said in March. "It's easier if I never get emailed. I get embarrassed by it that way. It's not as easy to communicate."

Before publishing this article, New Times called Scott's press office three times to request an interview. On the third phone call — 11 days after the original request — Scott's press secretary gave a nonanswer.

"We have received your multiple requests, and if we can accommodate that, someone will let you know," Lane Wright said.

But clearly, no one had let us know. Instead, a government spokesman — whose entire job is to answer questions from the public — was employing the silent treatment. "We are not gonna be commenting for this story," Wright finally conceded.

Shocking.

Lied About High-Speed Rail Money

A proposed high-speed bullet train between Tampa and Orlando wasn't a politically sexy idea. Some critics questioned how many people in this gas-guzzling, highway-loving state would ride a train to Disney World.

But Florida's own transportation department predicted the train would make money from the start, and the federal government was willing to pony up $2.4 billion of the estimated $2.6 billion in construction costs. As gas prices reached $4 a gallon, the train looked more and more like sound public policy.

But Scott chose to believe a study by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank partially funded by oil companies, that called into question the number of people who would ride the train. He feared taxpayers would be on the hook for future costs. His general counsel, attorney Charles Trippe, had told the Florida Supreme Court that $110 million in state funds had already been spent on the proposed rail project.

So Scott sent the money back to Washington.

Only later did the citizens of Florida learn that Scott was fudging the numbers. Turns out the state had spent only $31 million. Trippe apologized to the court, but the money was already gone by then.

About $400 million of Florida's train funds were rescinded by Congress and used to solve the federal budget crisis. The other $2 billion was redistributed to rail projects in the Northeast, Midwest, and California. So our friends in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are benefiting now from Scott's creative accounting.

Meanwhile, Scott angered his Tea Party backers by approving the $1.3 billion SunRail, a slower, commuter rail line in the Orlando area. Scott said he feared he'd lose a legal battle if he axed the project.

Gutted Environmental Protection Programs

While campaigning for governor, Scott called the Department of Community Affairs, the state agency charged with overseeing local development projects, a "jobs killer." He said he'd heard complaints that development permits were issued too slowly. (That building boom? It was a myth.)

Once he was elected, his transition team made the unabashedly prodevelopment suggestion of merging community affairs with the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Transportation, forming a new entity called the Department of Growth Leadership.

That plan never materialized, but the Legislature followed Scott's lead and began gutting programs. In May, the state Senate quietly passed a bill that killed the Department of Community Affairs, farming out its various duties to other government agencies. The Legislature also agreed with Scott's proposal to chop property tax funding for local water management districts — including a 30 percent, $128 million budget cut for the South Florida Water Management District, the agency charged with restoring the Everglades. (And he appointed onetime incinerator czar Juan Portuondo to the SFWMD.)

Scott was also determined to end funding for the state's Florida Forever program, which buys land to conserve for parks and forests. State lawmakers proposed a way to rescue the program by selling off surplus land in order to buy more. But in May, Scott used his line-item veto power to ax that plan from the budget.

Slashed Public Education Funding

Public schools lost about $542 per student in this year's education budget — an 8 percent funding cut that wouldn't seem so troubling if it weren't accompanied by so many other changes to the education system.

Florida teachers, already some of the lowest-paid in the nation, will now see their raises and job security tied to students' test scores. They will be fired if their annual evaluations are "unsatisfactory" two years in a row, and they will have to contribute 3 percent to their pension funds, a change they consider a pay cut. The merit pay bill, known as the Student Success Act, was a top priority for Scott and was the first to get his signature in March.

Maribah Haughey, a retired teacher who spent 21 years in Palm Beach County schools, was livid about the pay cuts. "All of this is going to drive a lot of young teachers out of Florida," she said. "The salaries suck anyway. What are they making, $30,000 a year?"

Meanwhile, virtual charter schools — which are privately run and publicly funded — were approved under a "Digital Learning" bill that also requires all students to take one online course before graduating. In addition, high-performing charter schools got a break on the fees they must pay to school districts. After signing these school-choice bills in June, Scott promoted them in private and charter schools across the state, telling reporters he now wants to create savings accounts that allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools and pay for private school instead.

Yes, it seems Scott would rather invest taxpayer money in private and charter schools — which are now, thanks to his policy reforms, subject to less public oversight — instead of trying to help the struggling public classrooms where most kids spend their days.

2011-07-13T21:03:00.000-07:00

July 7 Turkmenistan blast at weapons depot

2011-07-04T20:38:00.001-07:00

Brutal conditions under the oppresive Belarus regime...

2011-07-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

Science of Spying- 1965 CIA Propoganda

2011-07-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... "

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.

2011-06-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

Conservative doctrine continues to plague the poor.

2011-06-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

Secret Government- A Constitution In Crisis

2011-06-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

"I’m not saying that Caylee Anthony’s death is less horrible because so many other children are killed by the adults in their short, brutal lives. But I am saying that all children who are murdered deserve attention, not just certain children."

Why I Won’t Follow The Casey Anthony Trial
Jun. 28 2011 - 6:21 pm --forbes.com--
By KIRI BLAKELEY

I admit I know virtually nothing about the trial of Casey Anthony, who is accused of killing her almost three-year-old toddler, Caylee. I find the media and the public’s obsessive preoccupation with this murder trial to be morbid, just as it was with the 1996 Jon Benet Ramsey murder case.

But, most of all, I just find it—put it politely— selective. Virtually every month in New York City a young child is murdered either by his or her mother or the mother’s boyfriend or the adult responsible for the child—and hardly any of them ever gets the kind of national round-the-clock media coverage that Caylee Anthony’s death is receiving.

In September of last year, four-year-old Marchella Brett-Pierce was found beaten and starved to death in her Brooklyn home. She’d been tied to her bed and weighed only 18 pounds. Her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, her grandmother, and even two child welfare workers who had falsified visitation documents were all arrested. Katie Couric did a small piece on it for CBS News, but there was no national outcry along the lines of what Caylee Anthony is getting.

In March, 18-month-old Louis Dewayne Mosely was beaten to death while in foster care in Brooklyn. I bet you’re asking, who? No People magazine cover for Louis like there was for Caylee. In June, 5-year-old Jamar Johnson was beaten to death by his mother for breaking the television set. She actually watched him writhe in agonizing pain for five days before he died. There will be no long lines to get into the trial of Jamar Johnson’s mother, if there ever is one, like the lines that form for the Casey Anthony trial. The New York Times even wrote on Sunday about how the trial has become a tourist destination, with people from all over the country traveling to see it.

Have I mentioned that Marchella, Louis and Jamar were all black?

I’m not saying that Caylee Anthony’s death is less horrible because so many other children are killed by the adults in their short, brutal lives. But I am saying that all children who are murdered deserve attention, not just certain children.

Kiri Blakeley writes about women, entertainment, and media. Follow her on Twitter.

2011-06-29T05:43:00.000-07:00

Is Clarence Thomas's Humble Georgia Museum a Huge Ethics Issue?
06/25/11 03:04 AM ET --ARTinfo---

A quaint historical museum in Pin Point, Georgia, that is set to open this fall has become the target of an exhaustive ethics examination by the New York Times. Why would the Times devote almost 3,000 words to a community heritage museum? Pin Point, as it turns out, is also the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and it was Thomas who introduced Pin Point residents to his friend Harlan Crow, a Dallas real-estate tycoon and major conservative donor, who would ultimately fund the museum. According to some legal analysts, Thomas's role in Crow's decision to donate may have troubling ethical implications.

Pin Point lies along the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor designated by Congress, a passage of coastal fishing towns settled by the descendants of slaves. Algernon Varn, whose father ran the fishing cannery there, long hoped to save the site from development, but it wasn't until he bumped into Thomas, who was in town promoting his memoir, that the project began to move forward. Thomas introduced Varn to Crow, a longtime friend. Through an exhaustive paper trail review, the Times confirmed that Crow is the anonymous donor behind the $1.3 million restoration of the property and forthcoming museum project. Varn was told to keep Crow's identity anonymous.

The question of ethics violations comes down to whether Thomas misused "the prestige of office" to persuade Crow to take on the project, said Raymond J. McKoski, a retired state judge in Illinois. (Supreme Court justices are not explicitly bound to the complex code of conduct for federal judges because it is enforced by lower ranking judges. That's right, they are literally above the law -- though the Times points to several justices who said they adhere to it regardless.) "Some of it depends on the conversations that took place," McKoski told the Times of the ethical quandary. "Who brought up the idea? How willing was Mr. Crow to do it? What exact questions were asked by Justice Thomas?"

This isn't the first time Crow has donated to projects directly or indirectly honoring Thomas. (According to the federal ethics code, judges are not supposed to know who makes a donation in their honor.) The Times gathers an exhaustive list of shady gifts and donations, including Mr. Crow's financing of a Savannah library dedicated to Justice Thomas and his gift of a bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass. Thomas also received a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln from a group affiliated with Crow.

So, after all this commotion, what will the museum actually look like? The modest, almost astonishingly unglamorous-sounding Pin Point Heritage Museum will be housed in the A.S. Varn & Son Factory, a former seafood cannery that was the economic backbone of Pin Point -- and where Thomas's mother worked as a crab picker -- until it closed in 1985.

Each structure on the property -- including the oyster factory, can storage building, and marshfront dock -- will be stabilized and restored. A patio area will host live demonstrations of crabbing, canning, and shrimp net making. Inside, 3,000 square feet of exhibition space -- modest by museum standards -- will house educational exhibits, live demonstrations, interactive displays, and a 30-minute documentary film, all devoted to the generations of residents in Pin Point.

2011-06-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics
By MIKE McINTIRE
6/18/2011 --NYtimes.com--

PIN POINT, Ga. — Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The project throws a spotlight on an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship that appears to be markedly different from those of other justices on the nation’s highest court.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.

Although the Supreme Court is not bound by the code, justices have said they adhere to it. Legal ethicists differed on whether Justice Thomas’s dealings with Mr. Crow pose a problem under the code. But they agreed that one facet of the relationship was both unusual and important in weighing any ethical implications: Justice Thomas’s role in Mr. Crow’s donation for the museum.

The code says judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors, out of concern that donors might feel pressured to give or entitled to favorable treatment from the judge. In addition, judges are not even supposed to know who donates to projects honoring them.

While the nonprofit Pin Point museum is not intended to honor Justice Thomas, people involved in the project said his role in the community’s history would inevitably be part of it, and he participated in a documentary film that is to accompany the exhibits.

Deborah L. Rhode, a Stanford University law professor who has called for stricter ethics rules for Supreme Court justices, said Justice Thomas “should not be directly involved in fund-raising activities, no matter how worthy they are or whether he’s being centrally honored by the museum.”

On the other hand, the restriction on fund-raising is primarily meant to deter judges from using their position to pressure donors, as opposed to relying on “a rich friend” like Mr. Crow, said Ronald D. Rotunda, who teaches legal ethics at Chapman University in California.

“I don’t think I could say it’s unethical,” he said. “It’s just a very peculiar situation.”

Justice Thomas, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, declined to respond to a detailed set of questions submitted by The New York Times. Mr. Crow also would not comment.

Supreme Court ethics have been under increasing scrutiny, largely because of the activities of Justice Thomas and Ms. Thomas, whose group, Liberty Central, opposed President Obama’s health care overhaul — an issue likely to wind up before the court. Mr. Crow’s donation to Liberty Central was reported by Politico.

In January, the liberal advocacy organization Common Cause asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia should have recused themselves from last year’s Citizens United campaign finance case because they had attended a political retreat organized by the billionaire Koch brothers, who support groups that stood to benefit from the court’s decision.

A month later, more than 100 law professors asked Congress to extend to Supreme Court justices the ethics code that applies to other federal judges, and a bill addressing the issue was introduced.

It is not unusual for justices to accept gifts or take part in outside activities, some with political overtones.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer has attended Renaissance Weekend, a retreat for politicians, artists and media personalities that is a favorite of Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in a symposium sponsored by the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a philanthropic foundation once tried to give her a $100,000 achievement award. She instructed that the money be given to charity.

But in the case of Justice Thomas and his dealings with Mr. Crow, the ethical complications appear more complex.

Conservative Ties

Mr. Crow, 61, manages the real estate and investment businesses founded by his late father, Trammell Crow, once the largest landlord in the United States. The Crow family portfolio is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes investments in hotels, medical facilities, public equities and hedge funds.

A friend of the Bush family, Mr. Crow is a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and has donated close to $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups. Among his contributions were $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group formed to attack the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and $500,000 to an organization that ran advertisements urging the confirmation of President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

The institute’s Project on Fair Representation later filed briefs in several cases, and in 2006 the project brought a lawsuit challenging federal voting rights laws, a case in which Justice Thomas filed a lone dissent, embracing the project’s arguments. The project director, an institute fellow named Edward Blum, said the institute supported his research but did not finance the brief filings or the Texas suit, which was litigated pro bono by a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.

“When it came time to file a lawsuit,” he said, “A.E.I. had no role in doing that.”

Coming Up With a Plan

In addition to his interest in politics and policy, Mr. Crow is well known for his keen devotion to history.

A backyard garden at his $24 million Dallas residence is dominated by old statues of dictators he has collected from fallen regimes, including Lenin and Stalin. His private library is packed with 8,000 rare books and artifacts, including a Senate roll call sheet from Justice Thomas’s confirmation and a “thank you” letter from the justice, according to local news reports.

There are a number of reasons Justice Thomas might be thankful to Mr. Crow. In addition to giving him the Douglass Bible, valued 10 years ago at $19,000, Mr. Crow has hosted the justice aboard his private jet and his 161-foot yacht, at the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat in California and at his grand Adirondacks summer estate called Topridge, a 105-acre spread that once belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress.

Christopher Shaw, a folk singer who said he had been invited several times to perform at Topridge, recalled seeing Justice Thomas and his family “on one or two occasions.” They were among about two dozen guests who included other prominent Republicans — last summer, the younger Mr. Bush stopped by.

“There would be guys puffing on cigars,” Mr. Shaw said. “Clarence just kind of melted in with everyone else. We got introduced at dinner. He sat at Harlan’s table.”

Mr. Crow’s $175,000 donation to the library in Savannah in 2001 started out anonymous, but it was eventually made public amid opposition to the project by some local black leaders who did not like Justice Thomas’s politics. Similarly, Mr. Crow sought to keep his role in the museum quiet.

At first glance the Pin Point Heritage Museum, scheduled to open this fall, would seem an unlikely catalyst for an ethical quandary. That Pin Point’s history is worthy of preservation is not in dispute.

Part of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor designated by Congress, it is representative of tight-knit Southern coastal settlements that trace their roots to freed slaves and were often based around fishing. In Pin Point, the Varn crab and oyster cannery, founded in the 1920s, was a primary source of jobs until it closed in 1985.

Mr. Varn and his wife, Sharon, said they had long hoped the property could be saved from commercial development but had little success coming up with a plan. That changed after their chance encounter with Justice Thomas, who was visiting his childhood home with a television news crew.

Justice Thomas, 62, was born and raised near the cannery overlooking the Moon River, where it was not uncommon for babies to rock in bassinets made of crab baskets while their mothers shucked oysters. He sympathized with the Varns’ wishes and said he had a friend who could help, Mr. Varn said.

The Varns eventually sold their property in April 2008. During a recent interview at their home near the cannery, they made it clear that they were “not supposed to say” who the buyer was, and a news release issued last November by a Savannah public relations firm said the museum was being “privately funded by an anonymous donor.”

But the paper trail leads back to Mr. Crow, and in interviews at the project site, people working on it acknowledged that he was financing it. Property records show a company called HKJRS/Pinpoint bought the land for $1.5 million, and incorporation records say the company is controlled by a Dallas-based partnership run by Mr. Crow.

Project documents reviewed by The Times show a preliminary construction budget of $1.3 million, but it is unclear if that includes expenses related to the content and design of the museum.

Justice Thomas remains closely involved with the project. Emily Owens, a museum spokeswoman who works for Mr. Crow’s company, said the justice “played a big part” in creating a video documentary that will be part of the museum experience. He hosted a design team from Dallas for a four-hour meeting at his Supreme Court offices in February.

And he has had a role in picking people to help with the museum. Barbara Fertig, a history professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, said that she was asked to meet with Justice Thomas last spring and that “by the end of the meeting, he said he would like me to work on this project.”

She said she had “never been particularly curious” about why Mr. Crow is financing it, adding that costly preservation projects are often possible only because of philanthropy motivated by friendships. Justice Thomas and Mr. Crow would seem to fall into that category, Ms. Fertig said.

“I’ve been in the company of the two of them together,” she said, “and they certainly really are friends.”

The Code of Conduct

That friendship is important to determining whether Justice Thomas’s interactions with Mr. Crow conflict with the code, said Raymond J. McKoski, a retired state judge in Illinois who wrote a law review article on charitable fund-raising by judges. If Justice Thomas did not “misuse the prestige of office” in getting Mr. Crow to take on the project, it should not be a concern, he said.

“Some of it depends on the conversations that took place,” Mr. McKoski said. “Who brought up the idea? How willing was Mr. Crow to do it? What exact questions were asked by Justice Thomas?”

Beyond the admonition against fund-raising, the code generally discourages judges from partaking in any off-the-bench behavior that could create even the perception of partiality. It acknowledges the value in judges’ being engaged with their communities, lecturing on the law and doing charitable work, but draws a line where those activities might cause a reasonable person to worry that a judge is indebted to or influenced by someone.

“The code of conduct is quite clear that judges are not supposed to be soliciting money for their pet projects or charities, period,” said Arn Pearson, a lawyer with Common Cause. “If any other federal judge was doing it, he could face disciplinary action.”

The justices are not bound by the federal judiciary’s conduct code, because it is enforced by a committee of judges who rank below the justices. Even so, Justices Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy said in testimony before Congress in April that the justices followed the code.

Beyond the code, the justices must comply with laws applying to all federal officials that prohibit conflicts of interest and require disclosure of gifts. Justice Thomas’s gift acceptances drew attention in 2004, when The Los Angeles Times reported that he had accumulated gifts totaling $42,200 in the previous six years — far more than any of the other justices.

Since 2004, Justice Thomas has never reported another gift. He has continued to disclose travel costs paid by schools and organizations he has visited for speeches and teaching, but he has not reported that any travel was provided by Mr. Crow.

Travel records for Mr. Crow’s planes and yacht, however, suggest that Justice Thomas may have used them in recent years.

In April 2008, not long after Mr. Crow bought the Pin Point property, one of his private planes flew from Washington to Savannah, where his yacht, the Michaela Rose, was docked.

That same week, an item appeared in a South Carolina lawyers’ publication noting that Justice Thomas was arriving aboard the Michaela Rose in Charleston, a couple of hours north of Savannah, where the Crow family owns luxury vacation properties. The author was a prominent lawyer who said she knew of the visit because of a family connection to Mr. Crow.

Justice Thomas reported no gifts of travel that month in his 2008 disclosure. And there are other instances in which Justice Thomas’s travels correspond to flights taken by Mr. Crow’s planes.

On Jan. 4, 2010, when Justice Thomas was in Savannah for the dedication of a building in his honor, Mr. Crow’s plane flew from Washington to Savannah and returned to Washington the next day. Justice Thomas reported in his financial disclosure that his travel had been paid for by the Savannah College of Art and Design, which owned the building.

In his 2009 financial disclosure, Justice Thomas reported that Southern Methodist University in Dallas — Trammell Crow’s alma mater — had provided his travel for a speech there on Sept. 30. Flight records show that Mr. Crow’s plane flew from Washington to Dallas that day.

Among the questions The Times submitted to Justice Thomas was whether he was on any of those flights, and if so, whether the colleges reimbursed him or Mr. Crow. The colleges declined to comment.

One item not required to be reported in Justice Thomas’s financial disclosures is the millions of dollars Mr. Crow is spending on the museum. That is because the money is not being given to the justice as a gift.

For Algernon and Sharon Varn, who said they were thrilled to see a cherished piece of local history being restored, the museum is a gift to the community. While it is about more than Justice Thomas, they said, he deserves credit for putting them together with someone who had the money and the interest to make the project a reality.

“He was instrumental in getting the process started, because he wanted it preserved to show that no matter where you came from, you can go where you want,” Mr. Varn said. “He had a meager existence, and yet look where he is today. It’s a great American story.”

2011-06-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

US police smash camera for recording killing

Miami man hid phone memory card in his mouth to preserve footage in battle over recording tools.
Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 21 Jun 2011 16:34

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but Narces Benoit's decision to videotape a shooting by Miami police landed him in jail after officers smashed his cell-phone camera.

It was 4am on May 30 when Benoit and his girlfriend Erika Davis saw officers firing dozens of bullets into a car driven by Raymond Herisse, a suspect who hit a police officer and other vehicles while driving recklessly. Herisse died in the hail of lead, and four bystanders also suffered gunshot wounds, the Miami Herald newspaper reported.

Police noticed the man filming the shooting and an officer jumped into his truck, and put a pistol to his head, Benoit said. The video shows officers crowding around Herisse's vehicle before opening fire, followed by indistinguishable yelling at onlookers, including Benoit, to stop filming.

The cop yelled: "Wanna be a [expletive] paparazzi?" Benoit recounted in a TV interview.

"My phone was smashed, he stepped on it, handcuffed me," the 35-year-old car stereo technician told CNN.
Despite his phone being destroyed, Benoit was able to save the footage by taking the memory card out of the device and putting it in his mouth before handing it over to police, he said, adding that officers smashed several other cameras in the chaos which followed the shooting.

Legal issues

"There are two questions at play here that need to be separated," said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California. "One is: to what extent is it illegal to record officers doing their duties? And secondly, did the police destroy someone's property and evidence?"

"Whether or not the recording was illegal, the police conduct as alleged would be illegal in any case," Volokh told Al Jazeera. In Florida, it is legal to record conversations, unless the conversation is "confidential", which this public altercation likely was not, Volokh said.

After having his phone smashed, and being taken to a police station to be photographed, Benoit was summoned to appear before the state attorney on June 3 with "any and all video and all corresponding audio recorded on May 30 that captured incidents occurring [sic] prior to, during and after a police-involved shooting", according to court documents.

Benoit and Davis have hired a lawyer. The couple stopped giving interviews soon after the incident, Reese Harvey, their attorney, told Al Jazeera. Harvey also declined to comment about the couple's possible plans for legal action against the Miami police.

The incident is the latest in a series of debacles involving citizens using mobile phones to record police actions.

"The impact of citizen recording of police brutality, or activity in general goes back at least 20 years to the LA riots," said James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a research organisation. "It [video recording] increasingly raises questions about surveillance; whether surveillance from citizens can put a check on power," he told Al Jazeera.

Sparked by video of police beating Rodney King, in what many saw as an example of institutionalised racism, the 1992 Los Angeles riots left more than 50 people dead and caused about $1bn in property damage.

"As almost everyone in the US has a cameraphone at this point, it's very common to have any kind of police activity in a crowded setting recorded by citizens, usually from multiple angles," said Jamais Cascio, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future. "These kinds of events are unusual and people will want to show friends and family, and, increasingly, because people are learning that it can be important to have evidence of police misconduct."

And, with the spread of easily accessible recording technology, US security forces are being joined by counter-parts around the globe in being concerned about mobile technologies.

"Echoes of Rodney King in Karachi and Miami", was the headline of a New York Times blog, analysing a recent case from Pakistan, where a television journalist recorded security forces killing Sarfraz Shah, an apparently unarmed teenager. The video sparked protests across the country.

Speaking about the recent case in Florida, Police Chief Carlos Noriega told the Miami Herald that the couple's allegations were the first he'd heard of officers allegedly threatening people or destroying cameras or mobile phones.

"It was quite a chaotic scene," the chief said of the late night shooting. "We were trying to figure out who was who and it was a difficult process. Not once did I see cameras being taken or smashed," he said, adding that Benoit's video is evidence which could help investigators.

Technology 'outpacing' laws

While visual evidence, through government surveillance cameras and individuals' phones, can help make prosecutions, police unions and likeminded groups argue that police officers might second-guess themselves if they know they are being recorded and delay making necessary decisions. There are also arguments about privacy; mainly that conversations between private individuals and security forces should not be recorded by third parties.

And even though Eugene Volokh and other legal experts believe recording public police activities isn't a crime in Florida, that doesn’t mean police are happy about it.

"In the United States, the laws about the recording of police activity vary considerably from state to state. In Massachusetts, for example, existing laws that forbid recording someone without their permission have been extended to prohibit the recording of police. In Illinois, the law now explicitly bans the recording of police," Cascio told Al Jazeera. "I believe that citizens should have the right to record the actions of officials on duty; Citizens can't really fight back when they see police misconduct, their only tool is the ability to document the misbehaviour."

Some experts argue that laws, often designed to deal with audio wiretapping of telephone conversations and now applied to video recordings, are not keeping pace with new technologies. Volokh, however, is not one of those people.

"It isn't a technical question; it might be a question about basic values," Volokh, the legal scholar, said. "How much do you value people’s ability to gather the news and how much you value privacy?"

There may be a debate on whether the increasing frequency of security forces, and society in general, being caught on tape is primarily a technological question or an issue of values. But advances in the former may make debates about the latter redundant.

"Efforts to forbid these recordings are ultimately futile. Cameras are becoming smaller, and are able to record and upload video quickly. I've seen otherwise normal-looking glasses with built-in cameras," Cascio said. "The technology is rapidly outpacing any attempt to control it using dated and misapplied laws."

2011-06-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

2011-06-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

40th Anniversary of the War on Drugs - June 17, 2011

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “War on Drugs.” To highlight the impact that the drug war has on communities around the world, more than a dozen SSDP chapters are organizing candlelight vigils in cities across the country.

2011 Lulz Boat oDYSSEY - Final Cut (ACt LIke YOu KNow)

2011-06-16T13:32:00.001-07:00

2011-06-07T18:18:00.000-07:00

With Humala's win, Peru turns to the left

With a former army officer winning the presidency, Peru joins Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela in tilting to the left.
Greg Grandin Last Modified: 07 Jun 2011 18:43
--thenation--

Add Peru to the list of Latin American countries that have turned left. On Sunday, Peruvians voted in a second-round run-off ballot and elected Ollanta Humala, a 48-year old former army officer, president. This is Humala’s second try for the office. In 2006, he came close to winning, but WikiLeaks cables reveal that Peru's establishment politicians put aside their differences and beat a path to the US embassy, asking for help smearing Humala as a Peruvian Hugo Chávez.

WikiLeaks also reveals that that same year the Mexican right and the US State Department worked together to defeat the populist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leading many in the US to gloat that the "left turn" in Latin America had run its course.

Humala's victory suggests otherwise. Here's just some of what has happened since 2006: In Bolivia, Evo Morales presided over the ratification of a new social-democratic constitution and was re-elected as president in 2009 with 64 per cent of the vote. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa also easily won reelection and ratified a new constitution that guarantees social rights and puts tight limits on privatization. Recently, Ecuadorians likewise voted on ten progressive ballot initiatives, passing them all. They included the strict regulation of two blood sports: banks are now banned from speculation and bulls can no longer be killed in bull fights.

And last year in Brazil, the trade unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left office the most popular politician on the planet, handing over the presidency of one of the world's largest economies to Dilma Rousseff, a former urban guerrilla and economist who vows to continue to try to make Brazil a more humane and equal nation.

All of these national left political projects—from Venezuela to Uruguay—have their problems and shortcomings, and are open to criticism on any number of issues by progressive folk. But combined, the Latin American left can claim a remarkable achievement: It has snatched the concept of democracy away from neoliberals and the corporate privateers who came close to convincing the world that democracy equals deregulated capitalism and returned the term to its more humane, sustainable definition. In Latin America, democracy means social democracy. So considering the otherwise bleak global landscape, the return of the Latin American left, now well into its second decade, is cause for great cheer.

What does Humala's victory mean for Peru? Most importantly in the short run, it has halted the return of Alberto Fujimori's style of death-squad neoliberalism. Humala's opponent was Fujimori's daughter, Keiko, who pledged to free her jailed father, who was convicted of murder, kidnapping and corruption.

In the long run, many Peruvians, particularly those outside of Lima, voted for Humala because they have seen little benefits from the country's celebrated macroeconomic performance over the last decade, driven by the high price of silver, zinc, copper, tin, lead and gold—which comprise sixty per cent of the country's exports.

Over thirty per cent of Peru's thirty million people live in poverty and eight per cent in extreme poverty. In rural areas, particularly in indigenous communities, more than half of all families are poor, many desperately so. Humala has promised to address this inequity with a series of pragmatic measures—a guaranteed pension to people over 65; expanding health care in rural areas, including the construction of more provincial hospitals; an increase in public sector salaries, to be paid for with a windfall profit tax on the mining sector.

In terms of foreign policy, Humala's election is another victory for Brazil in its contest with Washington for regional influence. If Fujimori had won, she would have aligned Peru politically with Washington and economically with US and Canadian corporations.

Humala, in contrast, will tilt toward Brazilian economic interests. Indeed, the Peruvian historian Gerardo Rénique said that the election, while representing an important victory for democratic forces, could also be understood in part as a contest between Brazil and the US over Peruvian energy and mineral resources. In this perspective, one could say that it didn't matter who won the Peruvian election: the Amazon lost.

Here then might be the question that determines the success of Humala's presidency: As he tries to put into place his "growth with social inclusion" agenda, will he be able to balance the conflicting interests of his Brazilian allies and the social movements that elected him, many of which are fighting for sustainable development and local control of resources?

In addition to reviving social democracy, the other major accomplishment of the renewed Latin American left has been to dilute the entrenched racism that has defined the continent for centuries. In Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela and other countries, Native Americans and peoples of African descent have led a remarkable, if still incomplete, democratization of politics and culture. Peru, with its 45 per cent Amerindian population, has largely been left out of this process. In fact, some say that racism has deepened over the last decade, with the mining boom wreaking havoc on the dark-skinned Andean countryside and Amazonian lowlands while financing the rise of luxury condos and malls in white, middle-class Lima.

So however hard it might be for Humala to take on international capital—Peru's stock market plunged 12 per cent the day after his election—an equally difficult challenge will be to tackle Peruvian racism. "El Indio Humala" lost Lima by a wide margin, driven mostly not by fears he would turn Peru into Chávez's Venezuela but into neighboring Indian-governed Bolivia. Candidate Humala did his best to deflect these concerns.

President Humala, however, will have to confront this racism directly if he is to succeed in democratising Peru. After all, even before all the votes where in, tens of thousands of his supporters began to fill the country's plazas, including Lima's. They raised high the rainbow wiphala flag that became ubiquitous in Bolivia, during the rise of the social movements that brought Evo Morales to power. Today, it is waved throughout the Andes as a symbol of indigenous pride and sovereignty.

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including most recently, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan 2009), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Inside a FARC unit

2011-06-04T06:00:00.001-07:00

Humanitarian Side of FARC

2011-06-04T05:12:00.000-07:00

2011-05-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

40th Anniversary of the War on Drugs June 17, 2011

Friday, June 17th, marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “War on Drugs.” To highlight the impact that the drug war has on communities around the world, more than a dozen SSDP chapters are organizing candlelight vigils in cities across the country.

2011-05-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

Dem lawmakers to Obama: Use executive tools to aid immigrants
By Mike Lillis - 05/25/11 01:19 PM ET
A group of liberal Democrats is urging President Obama to put his money where his mouth is regarding immigration reform. The lawmakers, led by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), say the president has prioritized the issue in sound but not in action.

While acknowledging that Congress has failed to enact any meaningful immigration reforms in recent years, the Democrats say the White House has similarly failed to use its own tools to ease the hardships on those affected. They're asking Obama to scale back his aggressive deportation policy, particularly in cases when children are seeking an education or families would be split apart. "While we must work to pass comprehensive immigration reform to fix our broken system, we must also stop needlessly deporting the parents and the spouses of U.S. citizens — and others who are here, who are studying and working and raising families and contributing to our country," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) told reporters Wednesday outside the Capitol.

"We are asking the president — who we know is on the side of the immigrants — to use his power now to stop these deportations," she said.

Gutierrez, who in March launched a national tour to bring the stories of illegal immigrants to 20 cities, announced Wednesday that he's adding 10 more cities to the tour. The purpose, he said, is "to have their stories heard until they finally penetrate the White House and we finally penetrate the consciousness of the president."

Naming steps the White House could take immediately, the Illinois Democrat promoted deportation deferrals for roughly 1 million illegal-immigrant students who would have been eligible under the DREAM Act, a Democratic bill creating a pathway for legal status for some college students and military personnel.

The DREAM Act bill passed the House in December, but failed in the Senate, not having the support to defeat a GOP filibuster.

The Democrats are also urging Obama to clarify the parameters of "extreme hardship" cases, a designation allowing those targeted for deportation to remain in the country. Current immigration law has no specific definition for extreme hardship.

"The president should define extreme hardship today," Gutierrez said. "He has the power. We don't need any more legislative action here [on that issue]."

Brittney Babo, a registered nurse living in Ridgeley, W.Va., said Wednesday that she recently filed for the extreme hardship waiver on behalf of her husband of more than four years, Serge, who was deported to his native Cameroon last August. Appearing with their two young children, Babo urged Obama to meet with families like hers who have been torn apart by current immigration laws.

"You're moving in the right direction," she said to Obama, "but it's not enough."

The Democrats said cases like Babo's are clear indications that current immigration laws are harming the country more than improving it.

"Are we better off for snatching the father of these children away from his family?" Schakowsky asked. "What sense does this make?"

It's not that Obama has ignored the issue; earlier this month, the president visited El Paso, Texas, where he delivered a headline-grabbing speech calling on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, including the DREAM Act.

"There is a consensus around fixing what’s broken," he said. "Now we need Congress to catch up to a train that’s leaving the station."

The president in recent weeks has also met with lawmakers, business leaders and religious figures in search of an immigration-reform solution that's eluded presidents of both parties for years.

Gutierrez said he was "happy and delighted" that Obama has the issue on his radar, but also charged that there's much more the White House could be doing.

"Do we really need a courtroom to prove that this mother is going to live in extreme hardship?" Gutierrez asked, referring to Babo. "The administration can do something right away."

Last month, Gutierrez warned that he could withhold support for Obama next year if the White House doesn't fight harder for immigration reform.

Since taking over the White House more than two years ago, Obama's Department of Homeland Security has cracked down aggressively on illegal immigrants, with deportations approaching 400,000 annually under his watch, according to Schakowsky.

In El Paso, the president defended the tough enforcement.

"Regardless of how they came, the overwhelming majority of these folks are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families," Obama said. "But they’ve broken the rules, and have cut in front of the line. And the truth is, the presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally."

Critics, including the Democrats who spoke out Wednesday, said he needs to pay more attention to the human toll of his deportation policies.

"These are families, they are not criminals," said Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). "The laws are broken, but it doesn't mean that we continue to break up families."

Reps. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) also appeared at Wednesday's event.

2011-05-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

Marine Survives Two Tours in Iraq, SWAT Kills Him
Tim Cavanaugh | May 16, 2011
--reason.com--
"Please send me an ambulance and you can ask more questions later, please!"

Guerena tells the dispatcher that her husband had returned home about 6:30 a.m. after work and was sleeping.

Prompted by the dispatcher, Guerena says her husband was shot in the stomach and hands.

The dispatcher asks Guerena to put her cheek next to her husband's nose and mouth to see if he's breathing, but she replies in Spanish that her husband is face- down.

The operator tells Guerena to grab a cloth and apply pressure to his wounds, but the wife responds frantically: "I can't! I can't! There's a bunch of people outside of my house. I don't know what the heck is happening!"

A dispatcher asks if the people outside are the SWAT members. "I think it's the SWAT, but they ... Oh my God!" Guerena says.

A dispatcher asks that she open the door for the SWAT, but Guerena replies that the door was already opened by police.

"Is anybody coming? Is anybody coming?" she asks.

The operator tells Guerena help is on the way, but they're still trying to figure out what happened.

"I don't know, that's it, whatever I told you, that's it," Guerena says.

Just after the five-minute mark, Guerena's end of the line goes silent.

The two dispatchers spend about four minutes talking to each other and calling out for Guerena while trying to figure out if the call is coming from the same residence where the warrant was served. At the end of the 10-minute 911 call, a dispatcher says she has confirmation that Guerena is outside with deputies on the scene.

This is from Arizona Daily Star reporter Fernanda Echavarri's effort to piece together the death of Jose Guerena, 26, at the hands of a Pima County, Arizona SWAT team. Guerena, who joined the Marines in 2002 and served two tours in Iraq, was killed just after 9 a.m. May 5. Guerera had just gone to bed after working a 12-hour shift at a local mine when his home was invaded as part of a multi-house crackdown by sheriff's deputies.

Like enemy of the state Osama bin Laden, Guerena died with his wife close by. Widow Vanessa Guerena, who hid with her four-year-old son when sheriff's deputies raided the home, fills in detail that has been slow to come from Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik’s office:

"When I came out the officers dragged me through the kitchen and took me outside, and that's when I saw him laying there gasping for air," Vanessa Guerena said. "I kept begging the officers to call an ambulance that maybe he could make it and that my baby was still inside."

The little boy soon after walked out of the closet on his own. SWAT members took him outside to be with his mother.

"I never imagined I would lose him like that, he was badly injured but I never thought he could be killed by police after he served his country," Vanessa Guerena said.

The family's 5-year-old son was at school that morning and deputies say they thought Guerena's wife and his other child would also be gone when they entered the home.

Guerena says there were no drugs in their house.

Deputies said they seized a "large sum of money from another house" that morning. But they refused to say from which of the homes searched that morning they found narcotics, drug ledgers or drug paraphernalia. Court documents showing what was being sought and was found have not been made public. A computer check on Guerena revealed a couple of traffic tickets and no criminal history.

Tucson KGUN’s Joel Waldman says the SWAT team prevented paramedics from going to work on Guerena for one hour and fourteen minutes.

The sheriff’s department maintains that Guerena was holding an AR-15 when the paramilitary force fired 71 bullets in his home, but other key parts of the government story have collapsed. While PCSD initially claimed Guerena fired the weapon he was alleged to have been holding, the department now says it was a misfire by one of the deputies that caused this deadly group panic inside a home containing a woman and a toddler:

A deputy's bullet struck the side of the doorway, causing chips of wood to fall on his shield. That prompted some members of the team to think the deputy had been shot, [PCSD spokesman Michael] O'Connor said.

2011-05-16T10:36:00.000-07:00

May 14, 2011
Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder
By MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER
--NYtimes.com--
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.

In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.

“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”

Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.

Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years.

The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.

For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.

Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name “Kingfish.” But three former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in security contracting described Mr. Prince’s central role.

The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims.

Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.

A Lucrative Deal

Last spring, as waiters in the lobby of the Park Arjaan by Rotana Hotel passed by carrying cups of Turkish coffee, a small team of Blackwater and American military veterans huddled over plans for the foreign battalion. Armed with a black suitcase stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of dirhams, the local currency, they began paying the first bills.

The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21 million in start-up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said.

Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince’s idea to build a foreign commando force for his country.

Savvy and pro-Western, the prince was educated at the Sandhurst military academy in Britain and formed close ties with American military officials. He is also one of the region’s staunchest hawks on Iran and is skeptical that his giant neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz will give up its nuclear program.

“He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces,” said a November 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its “pro-business” climate, he got another chance.

Mr. Prince’s exploits, both real and rumored, are the subject of fevered discussions in the private security world. He has worked with the Emirati government on various ventures in the past year, including an operation using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates. There was talk, too, that he was hatching a scheme last year to cap the Icelandic volcano then spewing ash across Northern Europe.

The team in the hotel lobby was led by Ricky Chambers, known as C. T., a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had worked for Mr. Prince for years; most recently, he had run a program training Afghan troops for a Blackwater subsidiary called Paravant.

He was among the half-dozen or so Americans who would serve as top managers of the project, receiving nearly $300,000 in annual compensation. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Prince soon began quietly luring American contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and other danger spots with pay packages that topped out at more than $200,000 a year, according to a budget document. Many of those who signed on as trainers — which eventually included more than 40 veteran American, European and South African commandos — did not know of Mr. Prince’s involvement, the former employees said.

Mr. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment.

He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in “placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas,” according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about $150 a day.

Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars, Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes, motorcycles, rucksacks — and 24,000 pairs of socks.

To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower — a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi’s Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government.

Emirati law prohibits disclosure of incorporation records for businesses, which typically list company officers, but it does require them to post company names on offices and storefronts. Over the past year, the sign outside the suite has changed at least twice — it now says Assurance Management Consulting.

While the documents — including contracts, budget sheets and blueprints — obtained by The Times do not mention Mr. Prince, the former employees said he negotiated the U.A.E. deal. Corporate documents describe the battalion’s possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment.”

One document describes “crowd-control operations” where the crowd “is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and stones).”

People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks and put down uprisings inside the country’s sprawling labor camps, which house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of the country’s work force. The foreign military force was planned months before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern.

An Eye on Iran

Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.

The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced.

In recent years, the Emirati government has showered American defense companies with billions of dollars to help strengthen the country’s security. A company run by Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser during the Clinton and Bush administrations, has won several lucrative contracts to advise the U.A.E. on how to protect its infrastructure.

Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince’s efforts to bolster the Emirates’ defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for the American government, which shares the U.A.E.’s concern about creeping Iranian influence in the region.

“As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.,” said an American security consultant with knowledge of R2’s work.

The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2 should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. “The overall goal,” the contract states, “is to ensure that the team members supporting this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny.”

But former employees said that R2’s leaders never directly grappled with some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States law?

Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company it might not need State Department authorization for its activities.

But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks if they did not get government approval to participate in training the foreign troops.

Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees said. What were the battalion’s rules of engagement? What if civilians were killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret?

Imported Soldiers

The first waves of mercenaries began arriving last summer. Among them was a 13-year veteran of Colombia’s National Police force named Calixto Rincón, 42, who joined the operation with hopes of providing for his family and seeing a new part of the world.

“We were practically an army for the Emirates,” Mr. Rincón, now back in Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. “They wanted people who had a lot of experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia.”

Mr. Rincón’s visa carried a special stamp from the U.A.E. military intelligence branch, which is overseeing the entire project, that allowed him to move through customs and immigration without being questioned.

He soon found himself in the midst of the camp’s daily routines, which mirrored those of American military training. “We would get up at 5 a.m. and we would start physical exercises,” Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said the troops — outfitted in Emirati military uniforms — were split into companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and practice sniper training.

R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never wanted for anything, and that their American leaders even arranged to have a chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups.

But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike environment. “We didn’t have permission to even look through the door,” Mr. Rincón said. “We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we could see was sand everywhere.”

The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians’ military skills fell far below expectations. “Some of these kids couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” said a former employee. Other recruits admitted to never having fired a weapon.

Rethinking Roles

As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as “advisers” during missions — meaning they would not fire weapons — but over time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their troops, former officials said.

Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the ground. Mr. Rincón developed a hernia and was forced to return to Colombia, while others were dismissed from the program for drug use or poor conduct.

And R2’s own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired, then fired within weeks.

To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries, including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for staging coup attempts or suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s. The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing over control to Emirati troops.

But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently, former employees said, the battalion’s size was reduced to about 580 men.

Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince’s next big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after Blackwater’s compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E. military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a “real world mission.”

That has yet to happen. So far, the Latin American troops have been taken off the base only to shop and for occasional entertainment.

On a recent spring night though, after months stationed in the desert, they boarded an unmarked bus and were driven to hotels in central Dubai, a former employee said. There, some R2 executives had arranged for them to spend the evening with prostitutes.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Washington.

2011-05-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

Santana blasts Ga. for 'cruel law'
Politico
May 15, 2011 06:45 PM EDT
Iconic guitarist Carlos Santana didn’t exactly ask the leaders of Georgia and Arizona to change their evil ways but he came awfully close.

Santana on Sunday used the occasion of baseball’s annual Civil Rights Game at Turner Field in Atlanta to excoriate those states for passing legislation aimed at illegal immigrants.

The 63-year-old native of Mexico, on the field to be honored with a Beacon of Change Award, said: “The people of Arizona, and the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

On Friday, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed an immigration bill that was meant to crack down on undocumented immigrants in his state, much in the vein of a law signed last year in Arizona by Gov. Jan Brewer. Similar legislation was also recently signed into law in Utah.

According to the Associated Press, Santana elaborated on his opinions after receiving his award.

“It’s a cruel law, actually,” he said.

“This is about fear. Stop shucking and jiving. People are afraid we’re going to steal your job. No we aren’t. You’re not going to change sheets and clean toilets,” he said.

“If people want the immigration laws to keep passing, then everybody should get out and leave the American Indians here,” he said.

Among those also in attendance for the event in Atlanta were Hall of Famers Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson and Ernie Banks, actor Morgan Freeman, singer-actor Harry Belafonte, former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young.

Banks received the Beacon of Life Award from Jackson, and Freeman received the Beacon of Hope Award from former Brooklyn Dodgers pitching great Don Newcombe. Aaron was also honored at the game, which was followed by a 3-2 Atlanta Braves victory over Roy Halladay and the Philadelphia Phillies.

Santana, who emigrated to San Francisco in the 1960s, released his first album in 1969 and appeared at Woodstock that same year. He became a star at least partially due to the 1970 film “Woodstock,” which showcased his band's searing performance of “Soul Sacrifice.” Among his hits: “Evil Ways,” “Black Magic Woman,” “Winning” and “Smooth.”

2011-05-09T12:24:00.000-07:00

Your High Excellencies
President Obama, Président Sarkozy, Bundeskanzlerin Merkel, Prime Minister Cameron,

by Kevin Galalae

It is with a heavy heart and a deep sense of responsibility that I deem it necessary to write to you on my 28th day of hunger strike at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, where I have so far failed to compel Commissioner Hammarberg and the Council of Europe to exercise their authority to condemn and shut down a covert program of surveillance and censorship (SAC) of students in universities that operates in the UK since 2007 and in the EU since 2010 under the cover of Resolution 1624 (2005), with the blessings of the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) and under the supervision of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED).

The very existence of this unlawful, unethical, divisive and discriminatory program demonstrates that the safeguards put in place to prevent violations of international law and the European Convention are ineffective and that neither the people in charge of the greater counter-radicalization agenda nor the supervisory bodies charged with enforcing respect for the law and democratic values are willing to admit that human rights, civil liberties and protection under the law are being trampled on with impunity and without accountability for questionable objectives that fall far outside the scope of the counter-radicalization strategy.

The powers accorded to the CTC and the CTED are being grossly abused with dire consequences for free speech, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of association, the right to privacy and family life, and academic freedom, to name but a few. Their brazen actions show that nothing is sacred for the self-serving cabal of international corruption and global autocracy that has taken root at the UN and that has begot a global industry of absolute control and oppression.
The damage they have done is incalculable. The freedom of the press, the integrity of civil society and the independence and impartiality of the courts have been annihilated to protect the operations, violations and secrecy of illegal and immoral programs like SAC that have been let loose on our societies, on our values, on our freedoms and on our children. Unless stopped, there will be nothing left of our democracies except empty shells and hypocrisy.

The forces of autocracy – empowered and emboldened by the self-serving indifference and incompetence of UN and EU high officials, who refuse to fulfill their duties; by the silence of the press and civil society, who are afraid to tell the truth; and by the perversion of the judiciary, who have been coerced to stand idle while violations are endemic – have most recently launched a vicious attack on the people’s court of last resort, the European Court of Human Rights, in an attempt to make justice unreachable to the ever-growing number of victims of abuse by State Parties that routinely violate their people in order to stifle legitimate dissent and democratic aspirations, defend the interests of the elites, silence criticism of misguided policies and political corruption, and reduce the poor the weak and the foreign to second class status under the cover of countering terrorism and radicalization.

I ask you as a father, as a Canadian and as a global citizen to halt the onslaught on our democracies and democratic aspirations, the debasement of our fundamental rights and liberties, the annihilation of good will among peoples and nations, and the destruction of our children’s futures committed by State actors in the name of countering radicalization. The powers granted by Resolution 1624 are too great to be controlled, too broad to be contained and too intrusive not to be abused. If the UK could not help but fall victim to its own creation, Resolution 1624, and Britain’s legal system and civil society could not confront its violations and defend the innocent, who are but children, then what hope is there for nations that lack democratic institutions and a legal culture or that are torn by ethnic divides, poverty and ignorance?

Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, the time has come to turn a new page and return to the values and norms we have abandoned and on which our freedom and dignity rest; values and norms that we have no right to proclaim and promote in the world when we no longer abide by them.

Not resurrecting democracy and freedom, truth and decency, the rule of law and due process would be pure folly since the damage done to our rights and freedoms and to our democracies by the bodies meant to protect us is far greater than the damage done by terrorists or the threat they pose. The only way to stop terrorism and radicalization is by tempering the excesses of capitalism and by creating societies of inclusion that are respectful of our inalienable rights, tolerant of differences, mindful of clashing worldviews and that welcome each and all in the fold of economic security and political self-determination.

Do not let institutional repression intimidate and deceive you as they have intimidated and deceived us and sully your reputations and legacies the way they have sullied our values and rights. You have the power to act and are the only people left who can restore our democracies and the rule of law.

Disband the CTC and CTED, scrap the counter-radicalization deception, and condemn and punish those responsible for debasing free speech and freedom of conscience on their most sacred ground, the universities, where they must be protected like humanity’s greatest treasures. As heads of state and close allies you have the authority to coordinate such a change of direction. You have tied the Gordian knot, you must now untie it. History will look harshly upon you if you don’t.

I shall stand guard at the gates of power, ragged and hungry, until you do.

(More from Kevin at Cryptome.org)

2011-05-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

Video shows Phoenix officer slam teen into wall
By AMANDA LEE MYERS
--AP--Friday, May 6, 2011 10:44 AM MST

The Phoenix Police Department has launched a criminal investigation into one of its officers after learning of a YouTube video that shows the on-duty officer slamming an unarmed 15-year-old girl into a wall and her slumping to the ground, a department spokesman said Thursday.

Caught on Tape: Houston Teen Beaten By Police
By OLIVIA KATRANDJIAN
Feb. 3, 2011

A surveillance video shot almost a year ago apparently shows Houston police officers relentlessly beating, kicking and stomping on a teen burglary suspect was just released to the public.

2011-05-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

Nine percent of Americans blame President Barack Obama and the U.S. government for this year's spike in gasoline prices, according to a new Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll.

DAN BERMAN | 5/6/11 9:04 AM EDT
--politico--

An additional 5 percent cited "not drilling enough" as an answer to the poll's open-ended question of who or what is to blame for high prices. By contrast, 30 percent blamed a combination of greed, profit and speculation. Nineteen percent pegged unrest in the Middle East and North Africa. As of Friday morning, the average price of a gallon of regular gas was $3.984, down a tenth of a cent from Thursday, according to AAA. The poll was conducted by phone with 1,006 respondents from April 28 to May 1, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

2011-05-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

May Day, support Workers Rights, support Labor, support Unions

The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day. The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.

In fact, what could give the workers greater courage and faith in their own strength than a mass work stoppage which they had decided themselves? What could give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and the workshops than the mustering of their own troops? Thus, the idea of a proletarian celebration was quickly accepted and, from Australia, began to spread to other countries until finally it had conquered the whole proletarian world.

The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage. On this day 200,000 of them left their work and demanded the eight-hour day. Later, police and legal harassment prevented the workers for many years from repeating this [size] demonstration. However in 1888 they renewed their decision and decided that the next celebration would be May 1, 1890.

In the meanwhile, the workers’ movement in Europe had grown strong and animated. The most powerful expression of this movement occurred at the International Workers’ Congress in 1889. At this Congress, attended by four hundred delegates, it was decided that the eight-hour day must be the first demand. Whereupon the delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, moved that this demand be expressed in all countries through a universal work stoppage. The delegate of the American workers called attention to the decision of his comrades to strike on May 1, 1890, and the Congress decided on this date for the universal proletarian celebration.

In this case, as thirty years before in Australia, the workers really thought only of a one-time demonstration. The Congress decided that the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. No one spoke of a repetition of the holiday for the next years. Naturally no one could predict the lightning-like way in which this idea would succeed and how quickly it would be adopted by the working classes. However, it was enough to celebrate the May Day simply one time in order that everyone understand and feel that May Day must be a yearly and continuing institution [...].

The first of May demanded the introduction of the eight-hour day. But even after this goal was reached, May Day was not given up. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.

Rosa Luxemburg (1894)

2011-04-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

MLB Speaks Out
Players, managers, and officials across Major League Baseball have been been courageously speaking out against SB 1070:

Carlos Beltrán (New York Mets–OF)

“I’m against this law. There are a lot of Latinos who come here and try to have a better future. It’s hard for the people who come here from Mexico to this country.” — July 20, NY Daily News

Albert Pujols (St. Louis Cardinals–1B)

“I’m opposed to it. How are you going to tell me that, me being Hispanic, if you stop me and I don’t have my ID, you’re going to arrest me? That can’t be.” — July 12, USA Today

Yovani Gallardo (Milwaukee Brewers–P)

“If the game is in Arizona, I will totally boycott.” — July 12, Associated Press

José Valverde (Detroit Tigers–P)

“To me, it’s the stupidest thing you can ever have. [...] Us Latinos have contributed so much to this country. [...] We’re the ones out there cleaning the streets. Americans don’t want to do that stuff. [...] As a public figure and with the heart I have, this affects me a lot. Because they’re not thinking about the children this effects. We’ve accomplished our goals. But what about the young kids who have only been here for a year or for months? They’re unable to make their way in the world.” — July 12, MLB.com

Miguel Batista (Washington Nationals–P)

“Because I have an accent, you have a right to ask me for my papers? Because I’m not blonde with blue eyes? What do you actually base the stereotype on to have to ask me for my papers?” — July 12, ESPN

Jerry Hairston Jr. (San Diego Padres–2B/SS)

“It’s not right. I can’t imagine my mom — who’s been a U.S. citizen longer than I’ve been alive, who was born and raised in Mexico — being asked to show her papers. I can’t imagine that happening. So it kind of hits home for me.” — July 12, ESPN

Edwin Rodriguez (Florida Marlins–Manager)

“I will tell you, as a minority, I’m concerned about the law.” — July 12, ESPN

Heath Bell (San Diego Padres–P)

“If Adrian is voted in next year and doesn’t go, I wouldn’t be surprised if I wouldn’t go to stick up for my teammate. [...] I have a lot of friends that are not white. Sometimes you need to stick up for your friends and family.” — July 12, ESPN

Jose Bautista (Toronto Blue Jays–OF)

“We have to back up our Latin communities.” — July 12, Associated Press

Joakim Soria (Kansas City Royals–P)

“They could stop me and ask to see my papers. I have to stand with my Latin community on this.” — July 12, Associated Press

Jorge Cantú (Florida Marlins–3B)

“This hits me in the heart. I do not accept it. It’s a shame. It is sad news for my country, but not only Mexicans. Latin people. It’s just a shame for all those people here looking for a better life. They are looking for a better standard of living, and this knocks down their dreams. It is really upsetting.” — May 17, Miami Herald

Augie Ojeda (Arizona Diamondbacks–SS)

“If I leave the park after a game and I get stopped, am I supposed to have papers on me? I don’t think that’s fair.” — May 17, Miami Herald

Michael Young (Texas Rangers–3B)

“You can quote me. It’s a ridiculous law. And it’s an embarrassment for American citizens.” — May 12, Sporting News

Frank Francisco (Texas Rangers–P)

“I put myself in that situation and it is scary. No way you are going to carry your passport everywhere you go because that is a very important document and, if you lose it, you endanger your ability to work. This [law] does not feel like America to me.” — May 12, Sporting News

Alexei Ramírez (Chicago White Sox–SS)

“I’m against it.” — May 6, Sports Illustrated

Adrian Gonzalez (San Diego Padres–1B)

“It’s immoral. They’re violating human rights. In a way, it goes against what this country was built on. This is discrimination. Are they going to pass out a picture saying “You should look like this and you’re fine, but if you don’t, do people have the right to question you?’ That’s profiling.” — May 1, San Diego Union-Tribune

Ozzie Guillén (Chicago White Sox–Manager)

“I’m not going. I have to support my people, people I believe in.” — May 1, NY Post

César Izturis (Baltimore Orioles–SS)

“It’s a bad thing. Now they’re going to go after everybody, not just the people behind the wall. Now they’re going to come out on the street. What if you’re walking on the street with your family and kids? They’re going to go after you.” — May 1, ESPN

Rod Barajas (New York Mets–C)

“If they happen to pull someone over who looks like they are of Latin descent, even if they are a U.S. citizen, that is the first question that is going to be asked. But if a blond-haired, blue-eyed Canadian gets pulled over, do you think they are going to ask for their papers? No.” — May 1, NY Times

Scott Hairston (San Diego Padres–OF)

“I definitely disagree with it, can’t really see anything positive about it, and I just hope it doesn’t lead to a lot of chaos. It just wasn’t necessary to pass a bill like that.” — May 1, San Diego Union-Tribune

Joe Saunders (Los Angeles Angels–OF)

“We’re behind you guys 100%.” — May 1, LA Times

Bobby Abreu (Los Angeles Angels–OF)

“You’re not going to be on the street every time with your passport, because you’re afraid you might lose it.” — May 1, LA Times

Yorvit Torrealba (San Diego Padres–C)

“This is racist stuff. It’s not fair for a young guy who comes here from South America, and just because he has a strong accent, he has to prove on the spot if he’s illegal or not. [...] I don’t see this being right. Why do I want to go play in a place where every time I go to a restaurant and they don’t understand what I’m trying to order, they’re going to ask me for ID first? That’s bull. I come from a crazy country (Venezuela). Now Arizona seems a little bit more crazy.” — May 1, San Diego Union-Tribune

Adrián Beltré (Boston Red Sox–3B)

“For an older guy, we can handle it. But you have guys 17 or 18 years old there for spring training. If they forget their papers, something could happen.” — May 1, FGNPR

José Guillén (Kansas City Royals–DH)

“I’ve never seen anything like that in the United States, and Arizona is part of the United States. I hope police aren’t going to stop every dark-skinned person. It’s kind of like, wow, what’s going on.” — April 30, Yahoo Sports

Kyle McClellan (St. Louis Cardinals–P)

“The All-Star game, it’s going to generate a lot of revenue. Look at what it did here for St. Louis. It was a huge promotion for this city and this club and it’s one of those things where it’s something that would definitely leave a mark on them if we were to pull out of there. It would get a point across.” — April 30, CBS News

MLB Players’ Association President Michael Weiner

“The Major League Baseball Players Association opposes this law as written. We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members.” — April 30, CNN

2011-04-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

2011 Readout of the President's Meeting with Stakeholders on Fixing the Broken Immigration System

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release April 19,

In a meeting in the State Dining Room this afternoon, the President and members of his Cabinet and senior staff met with a broad group of business, law enforcement, faith, and former and current elected leaders from across the political spectrum to hear their ideas and suggestions on how to tackle our shared challenge of fixing our nation’s broken immigration system in order to meet our 21st century economic and security needs.

The President reiterated his deep disappointment that Congressional action on immigration reform has stalled and that the DREAM Act failed to pass in the U.S. Senate after passing with a bipartisan majority in the U.S. House in December. The President listened to stakeholders describe a variety of problems that result from the broken system, including: educating the best and brightest but then shipping that talent overseas; concerns over the ability of businesses to reliably hire and retain a legal workforce; and the need to level the playing field for American workers by ending the underground labor market. In addition, local law enforcement officers expressed concern that without reform, enforcing federal immigration laws is a distraction from their important public safety and crime fighting mandates to keep their local communities safe, and faith leaders highlighted the damage to families and communities when families are separated, including parents who are taken away from their U.S. Citizen children.

The President reiterated his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform that both strengthens security at our borders while restoring accountability to the broken immigration system, and pointed out that perpetuating a broken immigration system is not an option if America is to win the future.

The President made it clear that while his Administration continues to improve our legal immigration system, secure our borders, and enhance our immigration enforcement so that it is more effectively and sensibly focusing on criminals, the only way to fix what’s broken about our immigration system is through legislative action in Congress. The President noted that he will continue to work to forge bipartisan consensus and will intensify efforts to lead a civil debate on this issue in the coming weeks and months, but also noted that he cannot be successful if he is leading the debate alone. The President urged meeting participants to take a public and active role to lead a constructive and civil debate on the need to fix the broken immigration system. He stressed that in order to successfully tackle this issue they must bring the debate to communities around the country and involve many sectors of American society in insisting that Congress act to create a system that meets our nation's needs for the 21st century and that upholds America's history as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. The President further committed that his Cabinet and White House team will follow up with each participant to maximize the outcome of this meeting in order to elevate the immigration debate.

2011-04-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

Workers must unite for better immigration policy
By Richard Trumka - 04/28/11 09:22 AM ET
--thehill.com--

Arizona and Wisconsin may seem like a world apart. But they have more in common than you think. In these states and many others, working people – immigrant and native-born alike – are under fierce attack by corporate-backed politicians.

From Arizona laws that mandate racial profiling to Wisconsin laws that strip workers’ rights to collectively bargain for a middle class way of life, working families everywhere are under assault. Corporate CEOs and the politicians they finance benefit from creating a toxic environment where immigrants, public employees and working men and women are scapegoated for all the problems we face. They tell us immigrants steal our jobs – hoping we forget the millions of American jobs they ship overseas. They say firefighters and policemen are overpaid – hoping we ignore Wall Street’s colossal bonuses, million-dollar salaries and endless corporate greed. They say immigrants don’t pay taxes – hoping we don’t notice that corporations like GE and Exxon Mobil rake in billions in profit and pay nothing in taxes.

Never mind the $11.2 billion in taxes immigrants just paid in 2010 alone. For years, immigrant families have been unfairly targeted and scape-goated. We should never forget that today’s immigrants are tomorrow’s new Americans. The policies and attitudes that divide working people only set us further back.

As we work together to achieve common-sense immigration reform, we must also ensure that today’s immigration enforcement policies treat our nation’s immigrants with the respect they deserve. We need to support them when they take the same steps new immigrants have always taken when they arrive in this country – improving our economy by obtaining an education, enriching our nation’s workplaces by working hard and having a collective voice, and bettering our communities by advocating for safe neighborhoods.

Too many of today’s immigration enforcement policies run counter to these important goals. Last year, ICE deported almost 393,000 people from the U.S.– at a cost of nearly $5 billion. The current administration has deported the highest number of immigrants in the history of the United States—separating mothers from their children, expelling college students and tearing apart America’s working families. When we deport a DREAM Act-eligible student, destroy a unionized workplace, or deport a mother pulled over for going 35 mph in a 25 mph zone because of ICE’s misnamed “Secure Communities” program, we tear up the foundation that allows tomorrow’s new Americans to have the opportunity to achieve their own American success stories and contribute to our great nation.

While President Obama’s commitment to comprehensive immigration reform is vitally important, so much more can and should be done now to help ensure a solid foundation for tomorrow’s new Americans. The president can announce a policy of allowing DREAM Act-eligible young people to stay in America until Congress passes comprehensive immigration legislation – so we can stop deporting the next generation of America’s doctors, teachers and engineers.

President Obama can direct ICE not to interfere in workplaces where workers have fought to improve conditions or are currently doing so. ICE should target employers that exploit workers, not employers trying to do the right thing. And the President can implement a humane and common-sense new prosecutorial discretion policy in keeping with ICE’s existing enforcement priorities.

For five years now, immigrant communities around the country have responded to the scapegoating and broken policies by taking to the streets on May Day to demand fair treatment, respect and a voice. These events have brought out hundreds of thousands of people — immigrants, clergy, and working families – everywhere from small towns to our largest cities. These rallies are driven by the same spirit of activism and commitment that drives working people in Wisconsin and every other community that is now fighting back against partisan, political attacks.

Now, as in past years, working people from Arizona to Wisconsin are standing together on May Day to remind the President and Congress that the fight for workers’ rights and immigrant rights are cut of the same cloth. On May 1, working people – immigrant and native born alike – will speak in one voice to fight for better wages and benefits, job security and safer workplaces for everyone. Together, we urge the President to use his power and provide the leadership to fix these broken immigration policies.

We have a choice to make: Do we want a generation of new Americans who will become our nation’s workers, leaders, neighbors, and voters to succeed? Or the tragedy of denied Americans – immigrants who do the right thing, but are denied the opportunity to become new Americans by our broken immigration policies?

Richard Trumka is the president of the AFL-CIO.

2011-04-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

State ignorance confused for State rights
--politico--
SCOTT WONG | 4/27/11 3:13 PM EDT Updated: 4/28/11 12:38

“It is a mistake for states to try to do this piecemeal. We can’t have 50 different immigration laws around the country,” Obama said Tuesday in an interview with Atlanta-based WSB-TV. “Arizona tried this and a federal court already struck them down.”

The ACLU, one of a handful of groups that sued Arizona last year to block the law from taking effect, has vowed to legally challenge attempts by states to pass so-called “copycat” immigration legislation. And other SB 1070 opponents are warning cash-strapped states that they’ll have to dig deep into their coffers to defend the laws.

2011-04-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the controversy surrounding the Arizona immigration law that allows authorities to ask for proper documentation if a person appears to be in the country illegally, some Major League Baseball players - many of whom are Hispanic - have said they will boycott the All-Star game if the situation is not resolved.

By Dominic Genetti
Hannibal Courier-Post
Posted Apr 19, 2011 @ 03:07 PM

A note to fans of the Arizona Diamondbacks, bring your cameras to the games and take a lot of pictures because you may not see your favorite player in the All-Star Game.

For those fans who are curious, the “Mid-summer classic” will be held in Phoenix this season but the turnout in the stands won’t be an issue as much as the turnout on the field. Thanks to the controversy surrounding the Arizona immigration law that allows authorities to ask for proper documentation if a person appears to be in the country illegally, some Major League Baseball players - many of whom are Hispanic - have said they will boycott the All-Star game if the situation is not resolved.

And I don’t blame them one bit.

Phoenix is a very diverse city and for a law to be in place that would allow police or any public authority to ask for proper papers is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is racist and stereotypical for lawmakers to even consider such a law and for the stars of Major League Baseball to come out and say that they would boycott the 2011 All-Star game is very noble. It’s one thing for citizens to come out and protest, but when popular athletes of such a diverse game like baseball step up to the plate and say that they won’t participate in the All-Star game just because Arizona government is considering the immigration law is quite the statement. Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols is one of the players said to be avoiding the game.

But what really grinds my gears is that the head honchos of baseball wouldn’t even take the concerns of fans and players to heart when they said the All-Star Game would not be relocated. The statement will be huge if Hispanic ballplayers stick to their word and avoid the game entirely, but think of the statement that will be made if MLB removed the game from Phoenix all together. It won’t happen.

Big baseball fans like myself have to be reminded from time to time that our widely loved national pastime does have a business side and at this point especially MLB as a business more than likely has put too much money into having the All-Star Game at Phoenix’s Chase Field (the home stadium of the Diamondbacks) and to move the game to another city would be very costly. There are logos, marketing and local events that go into promoting the All-Star Game along with countless other things. A relocation is now, unfortunately, out of the picture.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig received a 100,000 signed petition to have the All-Star Game moved out of Arizona - and while I see the business side of his decision to keep the game in Phoenix - the commissioner could’ve at least considered it. Instead he put his foot down immediately and didn’t even go over the pros and cons. The game is scheduled for Phoenix and that’s where it’ll stay. He could’ve told reporters that he’s considering moving the event to another city; Kansas City would’ve been a nice relocation since they’re hosting the game in 2012. And there were plenty of other options. Washington, D.C. hasn’t hosted an All-Star Game since the second generation of the Washington Senators played there before leaving for Texas; the Florida Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays haven’t even hosted an All-Star Game since they came into existence in the ‘90s.

The newer stadiums have been the top picks recently for the All-Star Game, but considering the situation in Arizona, any stadium would’ve done just fine, even if the ballparks in Florida are shared with football and played under a dome. Washington has a new stadium, again, a perfect setting, the nation’s game from the nation’s capitol.

I’m disappointed in Selig because he showed no sensitivity to the issue, but I loudly applaud the Hispanic players. Their absence will say much more than anyone could imagine. I hope a solution comes soon, Monday’s upholding of the Arizona immigration law in federal court in San Francisco already says a lot, but it’s not enough, the law needs to disappear.

You have my sympathy Arizona baseball fans, just be sure to clear the cards in your camera and take tons of snapshots, chances are some of the players that only come to Arizona for one road trip a year won’t be back, even if elected an All-Star.

2011-04-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

Boehner gas gaffe creates opening
By: Jonathan Allen and Darren Goode
April 26, 2011 07:45 PM EDT

Democrats think Speaker John Boehner stepped in a tar pit when he tried to dance around a question about taxing Big Oil, and now a White House concerned about its own vulnerability to rising gas prices is working overtime to make sure he's stuck.

The Ohio Republican left the door open to hiking taxes on oil and gas companies during a Monday night interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, saying Congress “certainly ought’ to take a look at it.” By midday Tuesday, the Democratic communications machine was pumping out an easily refined message: Agreed.

"It is almost too good to be true, but gas hitting $4 per gallon seems to have finally caused Speaker Boehner to see the light on the insanity of providing subsidies to profit-soaked Big Oil companies," New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic message maven in the Senate, said in a statement.

It's little wonder that Democrats were ready to pounce when they saw an opportunity to box Boehner into either defending oil companies or adopting Democratic-backed subsidy cuts. President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill already know they face serious voter backlash if gas prices don't settle down before the 2012 election.

Obama has addressed that vulnerability in the past, and a new Washington Post-ABC News poll suggests he's right to be worried. Sixty percent of independents who are feeling pain at the pump say they definitely will not back Obama for reelection, the survey found.

As Republicans prepare a series of hearings and votes intended to put heat on Obama over gas prices during the spring and summer months, Democrats hope the Boehner slip-up will give them a more even playing field on the issue. But Democrats still haven't explained how cutting profits would lead to lower — rather than higher — prices for consumers, and there's little chance that Boehner's half-dodge of an answer will turn the tables in the president's favor if gas prices remain high.

"Everybody's entitled to have a bad day. And he had a bad day," GOP strategist Mike McKenna said of Boehner's remark.

If nothing else, it turned Tuesday into a field day for Democratic politicians.
"I was heartened that Speaker Boehner yesterday expressed openness to eliminate these tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry," the president wrote to Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Republicans, worried about losing their advantage on an issue they have been hammering away on, sought Tuesday to make clear that they're not a bit interested in eliminating the tax breaks — which they say would lead to higher gas prices because oil companies would simply pass on their higher costs to consumers paying at the pump.

"The president's latest call to raise taxes on U.S. energy is as predictable as it is counterproductive," McConnell said in a statement. "If someone in the administration can show me that raising taxes on American energy production will lower gas prices and create jobs, then I will gladly discuss it. But since nobody can, and the president’s letter to Congress today doesn’t, this is merely an attempt to deflect from the policies of the past two years."

Tuesday's partisan blow up did nothing to lower the price of a gallon of gas, but it did reinforce two political realities of which both parties are well aware: There's almost nothing Washington can do to affect short-term gas prices, and voters become furious when a dollar doesn't get them as far as it used to.

Boehner's camp says the speaker won't raise taxes and that his intentions were misconstrued when he tried to avoid being pinned into defending oil companies. It's a sensitive topic for Republicans: Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) took bipartisan criticism after apologizing to BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill last year.

"The speaker made clear in the interview that raising taxes was a nonstarter, and he’s told the president that. He simply wasn’t going to take the bait and fall into the trap of defending Big Oil companies," Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said. "Boehner believes, as he stated in the interview, that expanding American energy production will help lower gas prices and create more American jobs. We'll look at any reasonable policy that lowers gas prices. Unfortunately, what the president has suggested so far would simply raise taxes and increase the price at the pump.”

But the transcript shows that Boehner was open to the idea of raising taxes on oil companies. Asked whether he would favor eliminating some of the subsidies, he replied, "We certainly oughta take a look at it. ... We're in a time when — when the federal government is short on revenues. We need to control spending but we need to have revenues to keep the government movin'. And they oughta be payin' their fair share."

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and the likeliest source to take on any Republican who seeks to raise taxes, told POLITICO that he's satisfied that Boehner would not approve of a net tax increase.
It won't be long before Republicans are back on offense on energy policy. They are expected to bring a bill to the House floor next week that would require the Interior Department to decide within 30 days whether to grant offshore drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico. For permits that weren't approved before a moratorium was imposed last year, Interior could extend the window by 15 days twice.

Two more energy bills approved by the House Natural Resources Committee could be considered as early as the following week.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 7:33 p.m. on April 26, 2011.

The View about President Obama

2011-04-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show - Moment of Zen - Tooth Fairy's Birth Certificate
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

2011-04-25T20:26:00.001-07:00

Kevin Galalae Hunger Strikes for Freedom of Education
19 April 2011

Mr. Thomas Hammarberg
Council of Europe
Commissioner for Human Rights
F-67075 Strasbourg Cedex
FRANCE
commissioner[at]coe.int
press.commissioner[at]coe.int

Dear Mr. Hammarberg,

A week has gone by since I first have hand delivered a letter to you at the fortified gates of the Council of Europe, where I wrote that upon arriving in France on the 12th of April I began a hunger strike on behalf of Freedom in Education.org, explained my reasons and that I need to speak to you. Next day I came to see you but I was told you are too busy. At your secretary's advice, I have followed my initial request for an audience with an email that very afternoon and then again on the 18th of April, but to no avail. I am now 20 pounds lighter, having lost 10% of my body weight, but tenfold stronger and more determined than ever to see to it that Europe rescinds its unlawful, discriminatory, divisive and unethical program of covert surveillance and censorship of students in universities, which I shall henceforth refer to by its acronym SAC.

The exigencies of your office must be great indeed, but if you are too busy to see a man who puts his life on the line so that the fundamental rights of our most vulnerable members of society, our children, are respected by the powers to be, then perhaps you ought to reconsider your priorities. It is bad form and bad manners, as well as callous and cruel to ignore a man who is starving at your door. It is also a breach of common and universal etiquette, especially since I am not appealing to you to push my own case, which is grinding its way through the European Court of Human Rights, but to make sure that SAC is shut down before other young men and women are hurt by it and to ensure that those young students whose lives have been damaged are properly compensated and apologised to. The latter point is particularly important since only a public mea maxima culpa from the EU leadership will ensure that SAC is not reincarnated under a different disguise or continues to exist under the cover of secrecy.

The men and women who have conceived this abominable program are as of today guests in your building for a three-day conference on how else to deprive the populace of their rights and liberties while maintaining a façade of democracy and law so as to allow the Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland and other officials to publicly and earnestly declare that:

"The Council of Europe has developed a unique three-pillar approach to fighting terrorism: strengthen the international legal framework, address the causes of terrorism and safeguard fundamental values. Our commitment to the rule of law and human rights is key in this approach".
Nothing could be further from the truth and I hope that you will give me the chance to show the participants the damage they have caused by allowing me to address them on the last day of the conference. What I shall tell them is that Europe does not need more counter-radicalisation measures but a psychological transformation within itself, a transformation that will allow it to embrace the world, not reject it. Continuing down the path of vindictive counter-radicalisation will lead only to the ghetoization of Europe's minorities and to yet another age of pseudo-Christians.

I speak now from bitter experience when I say that Europe's institutions have decayed to such an extent and have deviated from their true purpose - which is to serve the people - that Europeans consider themselves fortunate to be given the opportunity to beg for their constitutionally protected rights. Well, I do not beg for my rights. I am Canadian and we Canadians do not beg for our rights from those whom we pay from the public purse to serve us. We demand them and I am here to demand that our rights are respected. I should think that medieval barons were more considerate of their subjects than the public officials who make up the ranks of the EU nowadays. Adenauer would turn in his grave if he knew what had become of his noble dream.

Now that I have vented seven days worth of hunger strike frustration let me state a few inconvenient truths about Europe's counter-radicalization policies, their most abject progeny, SAC, and the EU institutions as a whole.

It has become clear to me from the evasive actions of the Council and the delays of the European Court that SAC is not only approved at the highest levels of the EU, but that it is also protected by the Council of Europe, the very institution entrusted with safeguarding legal standards, the rights of citizens, democratic development and the rule of law, all of which SAC tears into with impunity. Had this happened in Europe and not affected my fellow Canadians I would have let it go, but this unlawful, discriminatory, unethical and divisive program has violated my fundamental rights as a Canadian (see pp. 9-11 at https://wikispooks.com/w/images/1/19/Kevin_Galalae_vs._the_United_Kingdom%2C_
European_Court_of_Human_Rights.pdf.) and has deprived me and many others of parliamentary access and legal protection in my own country. I take that personally. More than this, it has perverted and corrupted the institutions of Canadian democracy, the freedom of the press, the impartiality of the courts, the humane activities of NGOs and civil society, and the inclusive nature of Canadian society, which is a society of immigrants that prides itself on multiculturalism and tolerance (for details see https://wikispooks.com/w/images/0/06/Covert_Censorship_at_Oxford_and_Leicester_University.pdf.) It has therefore damaged my country to the core.

This means that countless other Canadians and foreign nationals across the globe who are attending EU universities online or onsite are affected and their lives destroyed and dreams irrevocably altered by Europe's political decision to knowingly institute a program that is flawed in every way and that represents gross abuses of power directed at people and countries where the EU has no jurisdiction and no right to misshape public opinion by manufacturing consent or by imposing its cultural values.

Europe has no right to judge the religions, ideologies and thoughts of non-Europeans in the conceit that this will bring about peace, engagement and security, when Europe's religious schisms, ideologies and actions have been more violent, excessive and destructive than those of any other lands and cultures. Even today, Europe's and by extension the West's socio-economic system, which is being imposed on the globe, causes more pain and suffering through institutional manipulations, economic exploitation and immoral speculation than Al Qaeda could ever hope to achieve.

On a more philosophical level, no one, not even God (if He exists) has the right to interfere with man's thinking, for that constitutes an assault upon free will. No good practice manuals, however rigorously written and enforced, could possibly avoid the pitfalls of abuse on the part of the overseers and of humiliation on the part of the overseen. That is because the agents trained to apply the rules of surveillance and censorship, as indeed the writers of the manuals themselves, are conditioned by their own cultures and backgrounds, as well as unduly influenced by their own petty prejudices, political preferences, racist tendencies and religions or lack thereof.

At the very least, European universities must explicitly state that participation in their programs is subject to government interference and that the opinions expressed are censored by secret service agents according to the objectives of Europe's counter-radicalisation strategy. It should also clearly state what those objectives are and what one is allowed and not allowed to say in Europe's universities so that foreign students who choose to participate in studies at European universities can decide for themselves if they want thought control and ideological indoctrination to be part of their educational experience. I should think that most will opt out and will not pay the triple tuition fees that foreigners are charged. They will instead take their parents' hard earned money and study where the sanctity of the academic environment, free speech, and freedom of conscience are respected and not conditional on one's ability or willingness to conform to European norms and values.

The very least Europe can and must do is be honest and considerate of the fact that if it wants to profit from foreign students then it must respect their cultures and opinions. Europe cannot have its cake and eat it too; that is to say, it cannot secretly subject foreign students to thought control and ideological manipulation meant to purge the continent of foreign norms and values that are different or clash with those of Europeans while at the same time profit from the exorbitant tuition fees it charges its foreign students.

European universities are now in the business of exporting bigotry and prejudice instead of inculcating knowledge, mutual respect and a desire for truth. In the process, SAC is giving all Europe's universities a bad name for there is no way of knowing those that do not collaborate with SAC from those that do. In Britain alone, where SAC originates and has been fully operational since 2007, 2/3 have succumbed to SAC.

The fact that Europe has tried to get away with SAC without fully disclosing its perils to its foreign and, for that matter, its domestic students attests to the bigotry, prejudice, hypocrisy and arrogance of the European establishment of power; traits that have caused two world wars, a Holocaust and countless pogroms in the last century alone. Traits that have dragged the entire world into hell and that are once again threatening to cause a global conflict.

The crimes and abuses of the 3rd Reich, we must not forget, began with the burning of books written by Jews. SAC is eliminating the ideas and ideals of non-Europeans as they are expressed and before they have a chance to make it on paper, and it is doing this on the sacrosanct soil of its universities where free speech and freedom of conscience are supposed to be actively promoted and defended. This is happening despite the fact that the European constitution is crystal clear on that free speech gives one the "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers", that freedom of conscience gives everyone the right to publicly manifest their beliefs, and that education is for all and no one should be deprived of the right to education.

Well, on this last point it turns out that Europe makes a mockery of the right to education not only for counter-radicalisation reasons but also in the name of Chemical and Biological Weapons Convention and thus has given itself secret permission to pre-screen innocent foreign students from chemistry programs. The proof comes from a 2008 US embassy cable (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikileaks-files/nuclear-wikileaks/8297132/CWSBWC-CLOSE-
ALLIES-MEETING-JUNE-17-18-2008.html.)

"The Close Allies (U.S., UK, France, Germany) met in London on June 17-18 to discuss issues related to the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions. ...both Germany and France also expressed reservations about proposals that would increase the numbers of students from developing countries studying chemistry in Western countries, noting that their governments went to considerable lengths to limit and manage the degree to which students from countries of concern had access to such programs."
The "considerable lengths" used by Germany and France to "limit and manage" access to chemistry university programs, while not specified, indicate that deserving young people are denied entrance to university on false grounds just because they might pose a danger in the distant future. This is a clear and gross violation of Article 2, the right to education, enshrined in the 1st Protocol of the European Convention, both of which Germany and France are signatories of, not to mention a terrible injustice perpetrated on the young and innocent. While SAC weeds out students post-enrolment in university, by engineering various expulsion methods, the prerogatives of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Convention are used to selectively deny students access to chemistry programs in the pre-enrolment phase.

Those who still refuse to believe the reality that EU countries subject foreigners to discriminatory treatment in education, a reality I have lived through as a student at Oxford and Leicester universities, will say that SAC and other counter-radicalisation programs that comprise Europe's prevent strategy are merely after extremists who promote violence. Well, I am no extremist and I certainly do not subscribe to violence. Nevertheless, I was expelled from these two universities by overzealous SAC agents and I am neither Muslim nor Arab. If anything I am the antithesis of Muslim fundamentalists, being European by birth, agnostic, apolitical, non-ideological, fiercely independent, outspoken and perfectly peaceful. If I could fall victim to SAC's censors than anyone can because the programme is out of control and is animated by racist tendencies.

Knowing that SAC cannot be defended in a court of law or even in the court of public opinion, Europe's politicians have given themselves the right to act outside the law and to do this without the consent of the people. More than this, and what is most frightening, is that in order to get away with it, Europe's politicians and security service agents have played on the fears and prejudices of those in key positions to selectively shut down any and all possibilities of SAC being exposed in the media or contested in a court of law. For the first time in history, even the fifth pillar of democracy has been corrupted, the NGOs, becoming fully complicit in this grotesque conspiracy of silence.

The fact that Europe's politicians have succeeded in obtaining the collaboration and silence of the entire civil society shows just how riddled with fear and hatred Europe's populace is and demonstrates that Huntington's dire prediction of civilizational conflict is upon us, for this kind of extrajudicial and unethical collaboration dwarfs the greatest conspiracies and can only be explained in terms of cultural divides. It is a coalition of the willing; those willing to be partners in crime and to cover up their misdeeds at all costs and in the name of preserving the integrity of their cultures under the pretext of national security.

But even this mighty coalition of the willing can be brought down, especially now that I have already shattered its ranks. Universities UK, the definitive voice of all British higher education institutions, has followed my lead only one month after I exposed SAC and its abuses on Cryptome and published a report, entitled Freedom of speech on campus: rights and responsibilities in UK universities (http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/Publications/Documents/FreedomOfSpeechOnCampusRights
AndResponsibilitiesInUKuniversities.pdf. ) in which it tells the government in no uncertain terms that their members will no longer perform surveillance and censorship functions on behalf of the nation's intelligence apparatus.

Despite my small victory, the cost to democracy and freedom remains greater than any damage terrorists could have ever done. That cost I have elucidated in my by now infamous paper The Great Secret: Surveillance and Censorship in Britain and the EU (https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File:The_Great_Secret.pdf.) That Europe thought it could get away with SAC shows a complete lack of good judgment on the part of those who make executive decisions, in that they should have known better that once policies that give every Dick, Jane and Harry the right to judge the expressions of others will bring the worse human instincts to the fore and prejudice, bigotry and hypocrisy will multiply like mushrooms after the rain and lead to abuse. It also shows their reckless arrogance that they could suppress the truth forever, as though a country could be turned into a tribe and a continent into the cosa nostra.

It is no secret that I have made but few friends anywhere in the West while exposing the incestuous agreements and backroom deals that have made SAC possible and knowledge of its existence a well-kept secret. But that is of little importance, for what the world now needs is not more corruptible friends but unapologetic human rights defenders and freedom fighters who can still see beyond the blinding cultural divides, and that is exactly who and what I am. I will continue to poke my fingers in the eyes of power until I am dead or get the free world back to being free…and fair and just; for I am an idealist who believes it is not too late, a humanist who knows that nothing matters more, and a realist who reasons that this is the only right way.

I was taught to treat others as I want to be treated myself and to stand up for the underdog. It is an unspoken truth that the entire counter-radicalisation agenda is directed at foreigners in general and Muslims in particular and I am an unlikely defender of Islam because I am agnostic and highly suspicious of organised religion. But I am just as suspicious of governments who set themselves above the law. For what is lost in the blindness of fear and prejudice is the simple fact that a Muslim life is as much worth as a Christian life and that a Muslim's dreams are as valuable and precious as a Christian's dreams. That is why I will not allow Europe and indeed the entire Western world to squash those dreams and ruin those lives, be they Muslim, Christian or otherwise at university, where lives are supposed to be made not ruined. The victims, we have seen, come in all colours, creeds and political orientations. I will also not allow Europe to divide my country in the name of its own safety.

And if I die here in France fighting for equality under the law, mutual respect and human rights, then so be it. For I have no desire to live among a people who can justify such injustice because they are led by hatred, fear and prejudice towards those who are not like them. Sadly, the entire western world seems to now fall in this category to various degrees and to resemble thus more than ever the intolerance, sectarianism and factionalism of the Islamic world.

Since my arrival here in Strasbourg I have contacted several French newspapers, the Council of Europe press office, and just about every human rights organisation on earth. I have yet to hear from any of them, which is what I expected knowing what I know about the extent to which democracy, truth, and justice have been annihilated by Europe's counter-radicalisation strategy. The reason they are not interceding on my behalf or publishing my story and revelations is because these good Christians have decided that I am not one of their own and that in exposing them and their state-sponsored discrimination I have dealt a deadly blow to their efforts to purge Europe of foreign and especially Muslim elements, which is the hidden agenda of Europe's counter-radicalisation strategy.

Civil society will not breathe a word or help for reasons of civilizational loyalty, to put it kindly, and Muslim organisations are petrified that if they do help they will be seen as aggressive and will suffer further reprisals from an overbearing super-state on the hunt for victims and a population crazed with vigilante fervour. In the process the rule of law and equality under the law have been shattered and with them the lives and wellbeing of countless people. That is why I stand alone in this struggle and why no one will help even though most people on either side of the cultural divide want me to win. But that is fine with me for all I need is for the law to be applied without prejudice so the innocent can be protected from the cultural and religious conceits of civilizations gone mad. As it is, I want no part in either the Muslim or the Christian camp since they both behave according to their worse instincts.

Europe's good Christians and secularists alike must get it through their heads that it is not possible to live in a globalized world and isolate the continent in order to preserve its cultural purity - even if there was such a thing to preserve. These days are over and everyone must get used to this new reality and move on down the path of tolerance, acceptance and inclusiveness. Otherwise shut down your borders and become an island, but live also on your own devices and resources and stop exporting your goods and services and drawing profit from peoples and nations you are reluctant to coexist with on an equal basis.

While the reality is that Europe's people have not been considered in either the design or implementation of the counter-radicalisation strategy, it is quite clear that any measures aimed at purging the continent of foreigners meets with the approval of a great many Europeans and that if SAC were to be put to a referendum it would probably pass in those countries that feel threatened by their large Muslim and foreign minorities, which are mainly former colonial powers that by now should have learned to live with the effects of their past occupations and abuses of foreign lands. Until such democratic test, however, the fault and the responsibility lie with those in power and it is their interests that SAC best represents. Instituting programmes of oppression like SAC reflects the attitude of people who are locked up in ivory towers and have little or no connection with the common people or a desire to coexist with them on an equal basis. This kind of elitism is alive and well at the EU institutional level and breeds disdain for the fundamental rights of citizens, creating new lines of division in society.

This kind of elitism has also given rise to secrecy in government. Secrecy is antithetical to democracy. Nothing good could ever come out of secrecy and nothing good has ever come out of it, yet secrecy has become the modus operandi of the EU institutions resulting in an embarrassing gap between their public pronouncements and the actual reality. This gap is so great that the EU as a whole is becoming a simulacrum, a counterfeit and fraudulent product, being neither democratic nor consensual, neither respectful of human rights nor kind to its people, neither transparent nor accessible, as it bulldozes its policies over an increasingly resistant population. As a result, their decisions and policies no longer command respect but instil fear.

But let me now return to the reality of my hunger strike, to the bizarre and embarrassing spectacle of being on public display. The hunger is the easy part. The difficult part is having to subject myself to the judgment of strangers and their derisive smiles, even though they have no idea that I am starving myself so that they can live in freedom and their children can still have rights in a kind and fair society that is creed-, color- and culture-blind. The even more difficult part is being ignored by those who come out of the rarefied and climate-controlled offices of European power, as though I did not exist and should not exist or as though I were the one trapped in some fiction, when they are the ones caged up in institutional bunkers, both literally and figuratively, where fictions are passed as facts.

The hardest part is having to live with the knowledge that the world is ignorant of what is going on and apathetic, yet these very ignorant and apathetic people look upon me and other protestors with whom I share the space in front of the Court or Council, as "loose cannons". They fail to remember that if it were not for "loose cannons" like us - that is to say, people who are willing to make great personal sacrifices in the name of justice and truth - the world would have long succumbed to the tyranny of those reasonable masses who always choose the easiest path, the path that compromises away everything their forefathers have bled and died for, a path that always ends up in corruption, decay, lies and hypocrisy. Does that sound familiar? Is SAC and the entire counter-radicalisation fiasco not the embodiment of such compromises? And if the regime of surveillance, censorship and secrecy that has been instituted in the last ten years is allowed to continue and proliferate will democracy and freedom not be lost for generations to come?

This generation of leaders thinks it can cage the beast but it can not. Already the beast is out of control and devouring everything sacred the West purports to defend from terrorists and extremists. It is in fact so out of control that Europe and its allies will do anything to keep SAC secret and its abuses unpunished.

No sooner do I take my place in front of the Court that I am visited by two policemen in civilian clothes. Every day two different men come by and they are invariably polite and amiable so much so that I actually look forward to see whom I will meet next. Nevertheless, their visits are not courtesy calls but security precautions. None of the other protesters get this kind of attention. The establishment of power must be truly afraid of me. But that need not be the case for my heart is not ruled by hatred or anger but by love and peace and my intention is not to wreak havoc but to spread goodwill among men. To achieve my goal I use the power of persuasion, be it through the written word or my self-less actions. I am guided by the light of truth and the strength of courage, for I have nothing to fear and nothing to hide. The law and lady justice are on my side and I also have the moral high ground. This may not mean much in a world controlled by heartless institutions, self-serving bureaucracies and the profit motive. But it means the world to me. I have also nothing to lose. What Europe could take from me it has already taken: my wife, my children, my rights and my protection under the law. But Europe has not robbed me of my dignity, honour, courage and self-respect. And it never will.

It is my responsibility as a father to ensure that I leave behind a better world than the one I inherited and it is my responsibility as a citizen to keep our public officials honest. I intend to fulfill both of my responsibilities to the best of my abilities and whatever the cost to me.

I hope, dear Mr. Hammarberg, that you have not closed your eyes to the truth and the suffering and humiliation of students injured by the actions of those who want to hang on to and expand their illegitimate powers at all costs, and that I will not have to sacrifice myself to force your and their eyes open by reawakening your consciences. The only other alternative would be violence and I am not a violent man. Besides, violence cannot cure Europe's ills or the cancer that has taken hold of its government; it would only aggravate them. So as you watch me decay into a walking cadaver, I will watch your heart bleed with remorse and will hope that you will be able to live with yourself for having had the power to stop it, but not used it. The longer you let me suffer for Europe's sins and conceits, the greater the damage to the EU institutions and to Europe's reputation as a society of justice, freedom, and kindness.

I hope that you will act in accordance with the values and norms expected of your position and publicly condemn SAC. If you do not have the courage to do it, then you must resign. That way, the world will know that Europe is once again in the clutches of fascism and the people will rise to make sure that they will not suffer the same dire consequences for a second time in only 70 years.

Your actions will determine if Europe's good Christians, who are so keen on preserving their values and norms from foreign influences, will let me die for their sins.

Respectfully yours,

Kevin Galalae

P.S. Please note that this letter has been posted on the Internet at the same time as you received it.

2011-04-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

Boehner opens door to cutting U.S. oil tax breaks
--reuters--

The U.S. Congress should "take a look" at multibillion-dollar subsidies to oil companies amid rising concern over skyrocketing gas prices, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Monday.

2011-04-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

Standard and Poor's Ethics in Question
Written by Dean Baker
Tuesday, 19 April 2011 05:30
--Center for Economic and Policy Research--

S&P managed to capture the headlines yesterday when it announced that it had a negative outlook for the credit rating of the United States. After all, an actual credit downgrade for the United States government would be big news. While the immediate response was a boost to the deficit hawks’ efforts to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare, it is worth asking a few questions before we surrender these programs to the Wall Street numbers mavens.

The last time S&P was in the headlines it was for giving investment grade ratings to hundreds of billions of dollars of securities that were backed by subprime and ALT-A mortgages. These mortgages were used to buy over-priced homes at the peak of the housing bubble. Many of these mortgages not only carried high risks, but were fraudulent, with lenders having filled in false information to allow homebuyers to qualify for loans that their assets and income would not justify.

Serious people should ask what S&P has done to improve its ratings systems. Have they changed their procedures? Did the S&P analysts who gave AAA or other investment grade ratings to toxic junk get fired or at least get demoted? If not, should we assume that S&P used the same care in assigning a negative outlook to U.S. government debt as it did in assigning investment grade ratings to toxic assets?

Of course it was not just bad mortgage debt that stumped the S&P gang. It gave top quality investment grade ratings to Lehman until just before it imploded in the largest bankruptcy in history. The same was true of AIG, which would have faced a similar fate without a government rescue. Bear Stearns also had a top rating until the very end, as did Enron. In short, S&P has a quite a track record in missing the boat when it comes to assessing creditworthiness.

The markets seem to recognize S&P weak track record in assessing creditworthiness. It downgraded Japan’s government debt in 2002. The interest rate on 10-year government debt in Japan is currently under 1.5 percent, the lowest for any country in the world. Does S&P think that investors are mistaken in being willing to lend Japan money at such low rates?

It is worth noting that interest rates on U.S. bonds fell yesterday, suggesting that S&P’s negative outlook did not scare people who actually have money on the line. (Not to get too technical with our friends at S&P, but it is not even clear what a default on U.S. government debt would mean. After all, the debt is issued in dollars and as a practical matter we can print as many dollars as we want. But, we’ll leave that one for another day.)

Finally, we must remember that S&P is first and foremost a corporation that is run for profit. This is why they rated hundreds of billions of toxic trash as investment grade during the housing bubble. They were paid tens of millions of dollars to do it.

S&P and the other bond rating agencies had their lobbyists working overtime in the financial reform debate. The Senate had approved an amendment by Senator Franken, which would have taken away the power of the issuer to select the agency that rated its bonds. Under the Franken amendment this power would instead be given to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This amendment removed an obvious source of corruption. If the company issuing debt gets to pick the agency that rates the debt, then the bond-rating agency has an obvious incentive to give the debt a positive rating. Otherwise they will lose business. This likely explains how hundreds of billions of subprime mortgage backed securities got investment grade ratings.

However, the Franken amendment never took effect. In the conference committee, Representative Barney Frank, who was then head of the House Financial Services Committee, got language that delayed the implementation for at least two years. In the mean time, the current system, in which the issuer picks the rating agency, remains in place.

This should raise the obvious question: does S&P hope to influence the final resolution of the Franken amendment with its negative outlook on U.S. debt? It’s a terrible thing that we have to ask if the umpire is taking payoffs, but we do have to ask.

After all, this is Washington and Wall Street, a truly toxic combination. And we all know that S&P’s first commitment is to its bottom line, not to provide accurate information to investors. So who is S&P serving in its negative outlook on U.S. government debt?

2011-04-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

Not because it was ugly but because it showed his terrible flaw so clear: reminding him it was not Moldweorp he hated so much as a perverse idea of what is clean; not the girl he sympathized with so much a her humanity. Fate, it occured to him then, chooses weird agents.-- Thomas Pynchon, Under the Rose

2011-04-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

Emotional Blackmail- When subjected to emotional blackmail, we become the other's emotional hostage

Norman Finkelstein, pt2

2011-04-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

2011-04-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America --marxist.org--
Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

2011-04-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

Earth Day

Tunisian Martyr Mohamed Bouazizi

2011-04-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

Police abuse
And nearly everyday, he was bullied by local police officers. "Since he was a child, they were mistreating him. He was used to it," Hajlaoui Jaafer, a close friend of Bouazizi, said. "I saw him humiliated."

The abuse took many forms. Mostly, it was the type of petty bureaucratic tyranny that many in the region know all too well. Police would confiscate his scales and his produce, or fine him for running a stall without a permit. Six months before his attempted suicide, police sent a fine for 400 dinars ($280) to his house – the equivalent of two months of earnings. The harassment finally became too much for the young man on December 17.

That morning, it became physical. A policewoman confronted him on the way to market. She returned to take his scales from him, but Bouazizi refused to hand them over. They swore at each other, the policewoman slapped him and, with the help of her colleagues, forced him to the ground.

The officers took away his produce and his scale. Publically humiliated, Bouazizi tried to seek recourse. He went to the local municipality building and demanded to a meeting with an official. He was told it would not be possible and that the official was in a meeting. "It's the type of lie we're used to hearing," said his friend.

Return of the Mayan Macaw

2011-04-22T05:32:00.000-07:00

2011-04-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

The scam behind the rise in oil, food prices
Speculation on the futures market, rather than supply and demand, is driving up costs, analysts say.
--aljazeera--
Danny Schechter Last Modified: 19 Apr 2011 13:18

The global economy and its recovery, and the living standards of millions of plain folks, are now at risk from the sudden rise in oil and commodity prices. Gas at the pump is up, and going higher. Food prices are following.

The consequences are catastrophic for the global poor as their costs go up while their income doesn't. It's menacing American workers too, who in large part have not seen a meaningful raise since the days of Reagan (keeping it this way is clearly behind the current flurry of attacks on unions).

Already, unrest in the Middle East and many African countries is being blamed for these dramatic increases. It seems as if this threat to global stability is being largely ignored in our media, one that treats the oil business as just another mystical world of free market trading.

Why is it happening? Why all the volatility? Is oil getting scarcer, leading to price increases? Is the cost of food, similarly, a reflection of naturally increasing commodity prices?

Oil speculating

While it's true that natural disasters and droughts play some role in this unchecked price inflation, it also seems apparent that something else is attracting increasing attention, even if most of our media fails to explore what is a political time bomb, while most political leaders shrug their shoulder and ignore it.

President Obama recently said there is nothing he can do about the hike in oil and food prices.

Critics say the problem is that government and media outlets alike refuse to recognise what's really going on: unchecked speculation!

Not everyone buys into this suspicion. In fact, it is one of more intense subjects of debate in economics.

Princeton University economist Paul Krugman pooh-poohs the impact of speculation counter-posing the traditional argument that oil prices are set by supply and demand.

The Economist agrees, summing up its views with a pithy phrase, "Speculation does not drive the oil price. Driving does."

Others, like oil industry analyst Michael Klare of Hampshire College in the US, sees demand outdistancing supply:

Consider the recent rise in the price of oil just a faint and early tremor heralding the oilquake to come. Oil won't disappear from international markets, but in the coming decades it will never reach the volumes needed to satisfy projected world demand, which means that, sooner rather than later, scarcity will become the dominant market condition.

Usually you hear this debate in scholarly circles or read it in political tracts where orthodox views collide with more alarmist projections about the oil supply "peaking".

But officials in the Third World don't see the subject as academic. Reserve Bank of India Governor Duvvuri Subbarao charges that: "Speculative movements in commodity derivative markets are also causing volatility in prices".

The World Bank has held meetings on the issue, because it is seen as a matter of "utmost urgency".

"The price of food is a matter of life and death for the very poorest people in the world," said Tom Arnold, CEO of Concern Worldwide, the international humanitarian agency, ahead of his participation at The Open Forum on Food at World Bank headquarters.

"With many families spending up to 80 per cent of their income on basic foods to survive, even the slightest increase in price can have devastating effects and become a crises for the poorest," he said.

Journalist Josh Clark argues on the website "How Stuff Works" that much of the oil speculation is rooted in the financial crisis:

The next time you drive to the gas station, only to find prices are still sky high compared to just a few years ago, take notice of the rows of foreclosed houses you'll pass along the way. They may seem like two parts of a spell of economic bad luck, but high gas prices and home foreclosures are actually very much inter-related. Before most people were even aware there was an economic crisis, investment managers abandoned failing mortgage-backed securities and looked for other lucrative investments. What they settled on was oil futures.

Whistleblowers on oil speculation

The debate within the industry is more subdued, perhaps to avoid a public fight between suppliers and distributors who don't want to rock the boat.

But some officials like Dan Gilligan, president of the Petroleum Marketers Association, representing 8,000 retail and wholesale suppliers has spoken out.

"Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities," he argues. "Not by companies that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies. But by investors who profit money from their speculative positions."

Now, a prominent and popular market analyst is throwing caution to the wind by blowing the whistle on speculators.

Finance expert Phil Davis runs a website and widely read newsletter to monitor stocks and options trades. He's a professional's professional, whose grandfather taught him to buy stocks when he was just ten years old.

His website is Phil's Stock World, and stocks are his world. He's subtitled the site: "High Finance for Real People."

He is usually a sober and calm analyst, not known as maverick or dissenter.

When I met Phil the other night, he was on fire, enraged by what he believes is the scam of the century that no one wants to talk about, because so many powerful people armed with legions of lawyers want unquestioning allegiance, and will sue you into silence.

He studies the oil/food issue carefully and has concluded:

It's a scam folks, it's nothing but a huge scam and it's destroying the US economy as well as the entire global economy but no one complains because they are 'only' stealing about $1.50 per gallon from each individual person in the industrialised world.
It's the top 0.01 per cent robbing the next 39.99 per cent – the bottom 60 per cent can't afford cars anyway (they just starve quietly to death, as food prices climb on fuel costs). If someone breaks into your car and steals a $500 stereo, you go to the police, but if someone charges you an extra $30 every time you fill up your tank 50 times a year ($1,500) you shut up and pay your bill. Great system, right?

Phil is just getting started, as he delves into the intricacies of the NYMEX market that handles these trades:

The great thing about the NYMEX is that the traders don't have to take delivery on their contracts, they can simply pay to roll them over to the next settlement price, even if no one is actually buying the barrels. That's how we have developed a massive glut of 677 million barrels worth of contracts in the front four months on the NYMEX and, come rollover day – that will be the amount of barrels "on order" for the front 3 months, unless a lot barrels get dumped at market prices fast.
Keep in mind that the entire United States uses 'just' 18M barrels of oil a day, so 677M barrels is a 37-day supply of oil. But, we also make 9M barrels of our own oil and import 'just' 9M barrels per day, and 5M barrels of that is from Canada and Mexico who, last I heard, aren't even having revolutions. So, ignoring North Sea oil Brazil and Venezuela and lumping Africa in with OPEC, we are importing 3Mbd from unreliable sources and there is a 225-day supply under contract for delivery at the current price or cheaper plus we have a Strategic Petroleum Reserve that holds another 727 Million barrels (full) plus 370M barrels of commercial storage in the US (also full) which is another 365.6 days of marginal oil already here in storage in addition to the 225 days under contract for delivery.

These contracts for oil outnumber their actual delivery, a sign of speculation and market manipulation, as oil companies win government authorisations for wells but then don't open them for exploration or exploitation.

It's all a game of manipulating oil supply to keep prices up. And no one seems to be regulating it.

Danger met with silence

What Phil sees is a giant but intricate game of market manipulation and rigging by a cartel – not just an industry – that actually has loaded tankers criss-crossing the oceans but only landing when the price is right.

There is nothing that the conga-line of tankers between here and OPEC would like to do more than unload an extra 277 million barrels of crude at $112.79 per barrel (Friday's close on open contracts and price) but, unfortunately, as I mentioned last week, Cushing, Oklahoma (Where oil is stored) is already packed to the gills with oil and can only handle 45M barrels if it started out empty so it is, very simply, physically impossible for those barrels to be delivered. This did not, however, stop 287M barrels worth of May contracts from trading on Friday and GAINING $2.49 on the day.

He asks: "Who is buying 287,494 contracts (1,000 barrels per contract) for May delivery that can't possibly be delivered for $2.49 more than they were priced the day before? These are the kind of questions that you would think regulators would be asking – if we had any."

The TV news magazine 60 minutes spoke with Dan Gilligan who noted that investors don't actually take delivery of the oil. "All they do is buy the paper, and hope that they can sell it for more than they paid for it. Before they have to take delivery."

He says they make their fortunes "on the volatility that exists in the market. They make it going up and down."

Payam Sharifi, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, notes that even as the rise in oil prices threatens the world economy, there is almost total silence on the danger:

This issue ought to be discussed again with a renewed interest – but the media and much of the populace at large have simply accepted high food and oil prices as an unavoidable fact of life, without any discussion of the causes of these price rises aside from platitudes.

News Dissector Danny Schechter made the film Plunder The Crime of Our Time (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) on the financial crisis as a crime story. He wrote an introduction to the recent reissue of a classic two-volume expose of John D. Rockefeller's The Standard Oil Company, one of the top ten works top works of investigative reporting in America. (Cosimo Books) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

2011-04-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Flavius Factor, strength, be prepared for war and you wont have to fight one.....

2011-04-20T05:38:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party Propaganda Factory You Probably Don't Know About
By David Rosen, --AlterNet--
Posted on April 19, 2011, Printed on April 20, 2011

The 2010 Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited campaign spending by corporations, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, is one of the most momentous rulings in U.S. legal history. It transforms the long but unspoken truth of American politics – corporate wealth buys legislative power -- into the law of the land.

The Court’s judgment adds one more nail to the coffin of transparent governance based on popular democracy. The unlimited financing and unreported accountability of the media message complements generous campaign contributions, well-paid lobbyists and effective regulatory capture to further ensure that corporate wealth maintains political influence. The Court’s decision is the icing on the cake to an era of unprecedented class polarization, with the rich seizing an ever greater share of the nation’s wealth.

As has been much reported since the decision was handed down in January 2010, the Court overturned a lower court decision and found that a corporation’s First Amendment protections overruled the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act.

At issue was Hillary: The Movie, a film produced by Citizens United, a staunch rightwing political action group. Since its founding in 1988, Citizens United has matured into one of the nation’s leading documentary production companies. Its films are produced, written and directed by reputable industry professionals and hosted by well-known rightwing figures like Newt Gingrich and Fred Thompson. To date, it has released 17 full-length documentaries on such topics as Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, 9/11, Barack Obama, the UN, conservative womanhood, and religion.

Citizens United is a cornerstone member of a growing praetorian guard furthering the interests of the super-rich. This guard includes law firms, think tanks, policy groups, PR firms, astroturf organizations, co-opted civil-rights groups, talking-head bloviators and unquestioning reporters who further a well-orchestrated rightwing, corporatist propaganda agenda.

In the all-important areas of the media message, Citizens United is the leading voice and vision of the Tea Party agenda. Would-be “pranksters” James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart are creative hacks, having lost all credibility due to their ham-fisted manipulations of phony revelations.

In America’s secular-capitalist and corporate-religious society, the battle over ideas, beliefs and knowledge is the battle for the citizen’s soul. The Murdock enterprise and talk radio are the most obvious voices of rightwing propaganda. Citizens United is just as pernicious.

* * *

Sleaze runs deep in American politics. During the Revolutionary War, British propaganda circulated scurrilous rumors that General Washington engaged in a number of illicit relations. One alleged he had a mistress; another claimed he kept a corporal’s wife at his campsite; still another alleged he had an adulterous liaison with a neighbor’s wife and she bore his out-of-wedlock child.

In our modern era, the most controversial propaganda campaign is the notorious Willie Horton ad used in the 1988 presidential race. The election pitted George H.W. Bush against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The ad assailed Dukakis’ “liberal” prison polices, effectively painting him with the racist brush, the Republican party's unspoken secret weapon.

Horton was a Massachusetts felon serving a life sentence for murder; he was mysteriously granted a weekend pass, and while out of prison committed an assault, armed robbery and a rape. The ad, the brainchild of Floyd Brown, linked Horton to Dukakis and played a critical role in Bush’s victory.

Brown was the founder and first president of Citizens United. Prior to founding Citizens United, he served as political director of Americans for Bush and was president of the board of the Reagan Ranch, a division of the Young America's Foundation. Ever the opportunist, he now serves as president of Excellentia, Inc., an Internet video venture "specializing in marketing to conservatives and Christians.” Brown continues to do battle in rightwing politics, most recently serving as the media adviser to Joe Miller’s ill-fated 2010 Tea Party campaign in Alaska to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski.

The Horton ad is the leitmotif of rightwing media propaganda; it is the template for all Citizens United subsequent media productions. While Floyd Brown created the Horton ad, Citizens United's current head, David Bossie, has pushed the documentary as the vehicle of rightwing propaganda.

Bossie has a checkered career as a Republican operative. He got his start joining a long-line of dirty tricksters, the most modern examples beginning with Chuck Colson and continuing on with Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. In 1996, Bossie was outed for leaking the confidential phone logs of a former Commerce Department official. In 1998, he gained national attention when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich forced him out as chief investigator for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform pursuing the anti-Clinton Whitewater investigation. He took creative license selectively editing transcripts of recordings of phone conversations involving Hillary Clinton. Playing the dirty trickster’s game, Bossie edited the tapes to make it appear Clinton was complicit in billing irregularities.

Bossie hooked up with Brown and Citizens United in the early ‘90s. In 1996, in a fundraising letter, it promoted Bossie – then a Senate staffer -- as its "top investigator” and its insider “directing the [Whitewater] probe." This created quite a conflict-of-interest stir. So, when Bossie was booted off the Hill -- and in recognition of his invaluable dirty tricks against the Clintons – he was rewarded with a lucrative position at Citizens United, ultimately replacing Brown.

* * *

Over the last decade, Citizens United has become one of America’s major documentary production companies, with Bossie serving as either executive producer, producer or director of all its films. These docs frame the ultra-right’s propaganda campaign, set its agenda and give voice to the Tea Party. Its films are:

* Battle for America (2010) – a Tea Party promotion of "Constitutional Conservatives"; Bossie is executive producer/producer and Stephen Bannon is writer/director.

* Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman (2010) – a portrait of Tea Party women; Bossie is executive producer/ producer and Bannon is writer/director.

* America at Risk (2010) -- explores the “dangers” facing America in the post-9/11 decade; Bossie is executive producer/producer and Kevin Knoblock is writer/director.

* Nine Days That Changed the World (2010) -- a Tea Party morality tale hosted by Callista and Newt Gingrich; Bossie is executive producer/ producer and Knoblock is writer/director.

* Generation Zero (2010) – offers a conservative analysis of the causes of 2008-2009 global economic crisis; Bossie is executive producer/producer and Bannon is writer/director.

* Perfect Valor (2009) – a John-Wayneish portrait of six Marines who served in Iraq, narrated by Fred Thompson; Knoblock, Craig Haffner, Chetwynd and Bossie are co-executive producers; Matilda Bode, David Taylor and Bossie are co-producers; and Taylor is writer/director.

* Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny (2009) – an homage to Saint Gipper, hosted by the Gingrichs; Bossie, the Gingrichs and Lawrence Kadish are co-executive producers; Bossie and Knoblock are co-producers; and Knoblock is writer/director.

* Rediscovering God in America II: Our Heritage (2009) – the title speaks for itself, hosted by the Gingrichs; Bossie and the Gingrichs are co-executive producers; and Knoblock is writer/director.

* Rediscovering God in America (2008) – the original tale of “one nation under God,” hosted by the Gingrichs; Bossie and the Gingrichs are co-executive producers; and Knoblock is writer/director.

* Hype: the Obama Effect (2008) – a Tea Party slam against Obama during the ’08 campaign; Bossie is executive producer/producer and Alan Peterson is writer/director.

* Blocking the Path of 9/11 (2008) – an “investigative” report into a 2006 ABC mini-series into 9/11 that was pulled by the network; Bossie is executive producer/producer and John Ziegler is co-producer, writer and director.

* Hillary: The Movie (2008) – Hillary, the bashing; Bossie is executive producer/producer, Peterson and Lee Troxler are co-writers and Peterson is director.

* We Have the Power: Making America Energy Independent (2008) – Citizens United’s examination of alternate power sources, including nuclear, hydrogen and wind, hosted by the Gingrichs; Bossie, Newt Gingrich and Lawrence Kadish are co-executive producers; Bossie, Knoblock and Terry Moloney are co-producers; and Moloney is writer/ director.

* ACLU: At War with America (2007) – Citizens United war against the ACLU; Bossie is executive producer, producer, writer and director.

* Border Wars: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration (2006) – immigrants, the enemy; Bossie is executive producer/co-producer and Knoblock is co-producer, writer and director.

* Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60 (2005) – a dubious historical portrait of the UN; Bossie is executive producer/producer; Knoblock is the writer; and Knoblock and Ron Silver are co-directors.

* Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain … Begins to Die (2004) – Citizens United’s rejoinder to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 411; Bossie is executive producer/producer; Lionel Chewynd and Ted Steinberg are co-writes; and Knoblock is director.

* * *

In his role as head of Citizens United and executive producer of its production arm, Bossie has brought together some talented film industry pros to further the rightwing propaganda campaign. This distinguishes his efforts from those “adolescent” provocations by O'Keefe and Breitbart. Brief profiles of leading Bossie co-collaborators follow:

* Stephen Bannon runs Genius Products, a Hollywood production company, and is a co-founder of the National Tea Party Federation. He comes to filmmaking having served from 1976 to 1983 in the US Navy (including a stint at the Pentagon) and then 15 years in media investment banking and film financing at Goldman Sachs, Jefferies & Co. and his own firm. In addition to docs for Citizens United, he has a number of feature film credits.

* Kevin Knoblock is a documentary TV warhorse. In addition to docs for Citizens United, he has produced, written and/or directed programs for A&E, A&E Biography, TNN, The History Channel and the Travel Channel; he did magazine shows at NBC, MTV and KCBS was an executive at KABC-TV and "Entertainment Tonight."

* Terry Moloney is an established Hollywood writer/director who runs Proletariat Filmworks, an independent production company. In additional to work for Citizens United, his credits include a public-interest film featuring Sean Penn, a feature film and an executive position with PAX-TV.

* Alan Peterson is a Hollywood actor, producer and director. His all but forgotten 2004 doc, FahrenHYPE 9/11: Unraveling the Truth about Fahrenheit 9/11 and Michael Moore (2004), featured such luminaries as shoe-fetishist Dick Morris and former NYC mayor Ed Koch.

* David Taylor received a Peabody Award for a film about Lyndon Johnson following JFK’s assassination and an Emmy for a film exploring the rivalry between LBJ and Robert Kennedy. He has produced, written and/or director about 100 independent docs for everyone from the BBC and Channel 4 to PBS and the History Channel.

* Ron Silver was a well-known and respected actor in film, TV and on Broadway. He seems to have had an incoherent, if compelling, political outlook: He supported Bill Clinton, backed George Bush and voted for Obama.

* John Ziegler seems more a multimedia rightwing self-promoter than an established Hollywood media pro. He’s been a radio sportscaster talk-radio host, then moved to TV, authored a dubious book of the First Amendment, proudly promoted an attack on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, and has championed Sarah Palin while assailing Obama.

The Citizens United talented “team” of film industry professionals suggests how the propaganda battle has been professionalized.

Citizens United promotes what it -- and many among the conservative right and Tea Party movement -- consider “traditional values.” These values are grounded in what is known as an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution; an imperialist- and militaristic-based expansionist foreign policy; a monopolist (as opposed to a competitive, Adam Smith) concept of “free enterprise”; a belief in a white, Judeo-Christian notion of morality; and reverence to a heterosexual, monogamous patriarchal concept of the family as the basic social unit of American society. These values codify a 20th-century mindset in a 21st-century world. They distinguish Citizens United documentaries.

Citizens United films provide a false coherence to explain the real, complex history that is America and the postmodern life. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 411, Errol Morris’s Fog of War and Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job are outstanding calls-to-arms confronting Citizens United’s simplemindedness. However, their very success is witness to their weakness. They are one-shots in an era when maintaining a sustained message is critical.

America is in the midst of a profound economic, social and ideological battle. An oligarchy is taking control of the nation, refashioning democracy and popular values. The nation was once defined as welcoming those considered foreign, by a spirit of civility and community, of free social beings. But today, community has been replaced by self-interest, the body politic by personal greed.

Citizens United gives voice and vision to a concerted propaganda initiative attempting to reframe America from a nation of opportunity and mobility to one of social standing and privilege. It’s time for the progressive community to mobilize the infrastructure and to engage in the sustained ideological battle needed to challenge the new praetorian guard exemplified by Citizens United.

2011-04-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

Engineer immolates self for Sri Lankan Tamils' cause
--thehindu--
April 19, 2011 23:25 IST | Updated: April 19, 2011 23:31 IST TIRUNELVELI, April 19, 2011

A young engineer from a poor family of a sleepy hamlet in Tirunelveli district immolated himself on Monday, apparently as an expression of sympathy to Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Though 23-year-old R. Krishnamurthy, an electrical and electronics engineer from Sundaresapuram under Kuruvikulam police station limits, had not discussed anything about the Sri Lankan issue with his friends, according to his cousin Suresh, also an engineer, he was very disturbed after coming to his birthplace from Rajasthan, where he works.

Suicide note

The suicide note stated that the Tamils, who were tortured by the Sinhalese, should be compensated adequately.

“The new government in Tamil Nadu should not assume office until a separate State for Sri Lankan Tamils is ensured.”

The letter admired the “valour” of Muthukumar, who killed himself in Chennai in protest against the killing of Sri Lankan Tamils.

According to Krishnamurthy's mother R. Subbulakshmi, her son asked her to prepare tea around 5 a.m. Even as she was preparing it, Krishnamurthy poured petrol and immolated himself. She tried to save her son and suffered burns.

“Even after sustaining serious burns all over the body, my son was saying that the Tamils in Tamil Nadu should do something to save the Sri Lankan Tamils,” she said.

Arrangement for mother's treatment

Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam general secretary Vaiko, who met the bereaved family at Seegampatti on Tuesday morning, made immediate arrangements for taking Ms. Subbulakshmi to a Madurai-based multi-specialty hospital.

2011-04-20T04:29:00.000-07:00

Tax the Rich
Poll: Taxing the rich favored over Medicare cuts
JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 4/20/11 6:10 AM EDT

The potential solution to the debt crisis that gets the strongest support is raising taxes on Americans who make $250,000 or more annually, an idea that Obama campaigned on in 2008, backed away from last year to make a legislative deal with Republicans, but has returned to as he’s begun discussing his vision for long-term fiscal responsibility. Of those surveyed, 72 percent said they support tax increases on people with incomes of more than $250,000, including 54 percent who strongly support them. Twenty-seven percent are opposed, including 17 percent strongly.

2011-04-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

China tense as teen Tibet monk immolates self
Saibal Dasgupta, Times of India, Mar 18, 2011, 06.04am
Sichuan provinceRadio Free Asia-

BEIJING: Tension gripped politically-sensitive Aba county of southwest China's Sichuan province after a teenager Tibetan monk who set himself on fire died on Thursday. Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported quoting local Tibetans that the police put out the fire and then beat the monk to death.

The incident resulted in demonstrations by nearly 1,000 monks who shouted slogans and were dispersed by baton-wielding policemen. The police attack resulted in injuries to some of the demonstrators , it said. RFA also differed with the Chinese media on other counts, giving a different name for the monk describing him as Lobsang Phuntsog, aged 21.

Tibetan monastery sealed off following monk's death
Saturday, March 19, 2011 10:15 pm TWN
--chinapost.com--

International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) said the monks had rescued Phuntsog from the police, who started beating him after extinguishing the flames, and took him back to the monastery. The monks then took him to hospital, where he later died, ICT said.

Hundreds of monks and civilians then protested near the monastery, located in Aba county, the campaign group said, although residents contacted by AFP were unable to confirm the demonstrations were that large. Police detained an unknown number of monks, according to the ICT. Seven were later released, including three who had been detained prior to the protests, it said. One of the monks had a serious head injury.

According to ICT, this marks the second time a Kirti monk has set himself on fire since authorities imposed a broad crackdown across Tibet and neighboring regions of China with large Tibetan populations following the 2008 unrest. The death of Phuntsog sparked a demonstration in Dharamshala, the home of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, where about 500 people gathered at the Indian hill town's main temple.

Speaking beside a photograph of the dead monk projected onto a screen, local civil society leaders gave speeches denouncing the death and Chinese government crackdowns, leading to cheers and chanting from the crowd. Organisers said they wanted to “remind the government of China that the seismic waves of Tunisia and the Middle Eastern countries have reached Tibet” according to a statement handed to AFP.

2011-04-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust

2011-04-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

Evidence of "Extrajudicial" Death Squads Emerging in Mexico the narcosphere

The WikiLeaks cable, drafted by the U.S. consulate in Juárez in late January 2009, provides the following description of the Pepes-like paramilitary group established in Juárez:

…There have been indications that local businesses are taking a different approach to self-protection, that of vigilantism. In October, the press carried stories of business people forming paramilitary groups to protect themselves from extortionists and kidnappers. On November 28 [2008], seven men were shot dead outside a school a few blocks from the Consulate, and placards were hung over their bodies (a fact not reported to the public) claiming that the executions were carried out by the `Yonkeros Unidos (United Junkyard Owners of Juárez)'.

In another notorious incident, a burned body was left outside a Juárez police station with its amputated hands each holding a gas fire starter, and with a sign saying that this would be the penalty paid by arsonists. During the week of January 11 [2009] an email circulated through Juárez, claiming that a new locally funded group called the `Comando Ciudadano por Juárez (Juárez Citizen Command, or CCJ)' was going to "clean (the) city of these criminals" and "end the life of a criminal every 24 hours."

… City and state government officials have argued that there exists no evidence of a vigilante movement in Ciudad Juárez, and that the messages by the CCJ are a hoax. A Consulate contact in the press, however, suggests that the CCJ is a real self-defense group comprised of eight former `Zetas' hired by four Juárez business owners (including 1998 PRI mayoral candidate Eleno Villalba). According to the contact, the former `Zetas' paid a visit on local military commanders when they arrived in Juárez in September 2008, and purchased previously seized weapons from the army garrison. According to the contact, the former `Zetas' pledged not to target the army, and made themselves available to the army for extrajudicial operations. [Emphasis added.]

2011-04-15T10:55:00.001-07:00

Social Conservatism Based On Lies

By John P. Avlon, CNN Contributor
April 15, 2011 -- Updated 1740 GMT (0140 HKT)
New York (CNN)
This was the sound of the curtain coming back on what passes for political debate too often these days.

The now-infamous statement from Sen. Jon Kyl's office was released after he said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that abortions represent "over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

It turns out that the actual number is 3%, a mere rounding error of 87%. But it was presented to the American people and enshrined in the Senate Record as a means of arguing that Planned Parenthood should be entirely defunded in the current budget.

This has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility and everything to do with the disproportionate influence of social conservative activists.

Their most compelling argument is that the American people don't support federal taxpayer money paying for abortions, which is true -- and why federal funding of abortion has been banned since 1976.

But the facts are inconvenient, and so they are ignored. Instead, talking points taken from talk radio are repeated until they take on a life of their own and eventually get the validation of a U.S. senator.

The news wasn't that Kyl made a mistake; it was his staff essentially acknowledging that in the current hyper-partisan environment, facts are a secondary concern, even on the floor of the U.S. Senate, even when they are paraded as statistics. The important thing is to scare the hell out of people so that they remember your political point and pass it on.

Like the mirror image of some hippies of old, emotional truth is more important than literal truth. It creates a political tower of Babel.

In this absurd spin cycle, there's one dependable place to look for sanity: satire. And on cue came Stephen Colbert, who took Kyl's statement as a challenge and dialed it up to 11. Using the Twitter hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement, Colbert unleashed a steady stream of Jon Kyl mistruths with the requisite denial. Among my favorites:

• Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies.

• Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole.

• Every Halloween Jon Kyl dresses up as a sexy Mitch Daniels.

• Jon Kyl sponsored S.410, which would ban happiness.

• Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the '86 World Series.

• Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car.

You get the idea. But the problem is much bigger than Jon Kyl. Colbert is going to have to get a bigger hashtag. Because we're heading to a strange place where Daniel Patrick Moynihan's truism "everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts" no longer applies.

Exhibit B this week: Donald Trump's re-enflaming of the thoroughly discredited birther conspiracy theory. When he repeats this falsehood in interviews, he is too often treated as a man with an unorthodox opinion, not someone repeating a lie on national television.

As a result, more people are duped and the country more divided, not on the many rational reasons to oppose President Obama's policy agenda but on paranoid fantasies cut out of whole cloth.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a man responsible for pushing the birther myth -- and a reported recent Trump adviser -- Joe Farah of the fringe website World Net Daily freely admitted to Salon.com this week that his site publishes "some misinformation."

"Misinformation" is a fancy word for lying with an ideological agenda in mind. It has become more acceptable and more influential with the rise of partisan media. It preys on the gullible and the stupid and the ditto-head alike.

The cycle of incitement that afflicts our politics ensures that this dynamic bleeds into both sides of the aisle. For example, the liberal Campaign for America's Future recently declared that "Congressman Eric Cantor wants to eliminate Social Security," a flat-out "pants on fire" lie, as described by indispensable PolitiFact.

A little-noticed local example of this strangeness caught my eye this week, courtesy of the website ThinkProgress. It seems that Texas state Rep. Leo Berman put forward a bill to ban sharia law in the Lone Star State.

When he was asked why such a step was necessary, he cited the city of Dearborn, Michigan, six times in testimony: "It's being done in Dearborn, Michigan ... because of a large population of Middle Easterners. The judges in Dearborn are using and allowing to be used sharia law."

This would indeed be troubling (and unconstitutional) if true, but when Berman was pressed about the source of his facts, here's what he told J. Patrick Pepper of the Press and Guide in Dearborn: "I heard it on a radio station here on my way in to the Capitol one day. ... I don't know Dearborn, Michigan, but I heard it on the radio. Isn't that true?"

No, it's not, as Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly has been forced to make abundantly clear, stating that "these people know nothing of Dearborn, and they just seek to provoke and enflame their base for political gain."

But the misinformation percolating around the fringes of hyper-partisan media is creeping into state capitals and the U.S. Congress. Ignorance and incitement begin to blur, compounded by the civic laziness of speakers who don't care to fact-check.

"Not intended to be a factual statement" is an instant dark classic, a triumph of cynicism, capturing the essence of Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe in Washington: when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

No wonder "people are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke," as Will Rogers once said and Colbert increasingly embodies. But we can't keep depending on comedians to be the voices of sanity.

And don't be fooled. There are real costs to this careless courtship of the lowest common denominator. Without fact-based debates, politics can quickly give way to paranoia and hate. Our democracy gets degraded.

Americans deserve better, and we should demand better, especially from our elected representatives. Empowering ignorance for political gain is unacceptable.

2011-04-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

Veteran Loses Battle With Depression After Helping Others With Their Own
By JAMES DAO
April 15, 2011, 10:14 am
--NYtimes.com--

It was mid-January, 2010, just days after a powerful earthquake had reduced much of Haiti to rubble. Jake Wood, a former Marine and now the head of an international aid organization called Team Rubicon, arrived in Port-au-Prince with a group of volunteers to provide emergency medical care.

Out of the blue, an old friend, Clay Hunt, showed up. Mr. Hunt and Mr. Wood had served together in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Marine Corps and were almost brothers. Mr. Hunt had found them using a day-old GPS coordinate posted on Team Rubicon’s Web site. Minutes after arriving, he was helping to splint a patient’s leg.

“He couldn’t stand that we were down there and he wasn’t,” Mr. Wood said. “That was Clay.”

Mr. Hunt had battled depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in the year since he left the Marines, but volunteering with Team Rubicon and veterans organizations like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America seemed to have given him a new sense of purpose.

And yet it was not enough. On March 31, Mr. Hunt committed suicide in his apartment in Sugar Land, Tex. He was 28.

News of Mr. Hunt’s death has ricocheted through the veterans’ world as a grim reminder of the emotional and psychological strains of war — and of the government’s inability to stem military and veteran suicides, which have climbed steadily in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

“The message I’ve been trying to convey to people is that if this can happen to Clay Hunt, it can happen to anyone,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the president and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “He was involved. He had a supportive family. He was going to the V.A. He was doing the right things. And it still happened.”

According to a profile in the Houston Chronicle, Mr. Hunt grew up in Houston and attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles before joining the Marine Corps in 2005. He deployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province in January 2007 as part of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment.

Within weeks, several friends of his were killed, and then Mr. Hunt himself was shot through the wrist by a sniper, Mr. Wood said in an interview. He had to be medically evacuated, ending his deployment early. Back home, he felt anguish at not being in Iraq with his unit, Mr. Wood said.

When the battalion returned in late 2007, Mr. Hunt and Mr. Wood joined the sniper platoon and were deployed to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan the next year. During that deployment, at least two more friends of theirs from their former platoon were killed.

After returning home from that second deployment, Mr. Hunt got married. But he was already struggling with depression and what doctors diagnosed as P.T.S.D., Mr. Wood said.

“There were a lot of reasons,” Mr. Wood said. “Survivor’s guilt. Struggling with not knowing why guys had been lost for, what we were trying to accomplish, what we had accomplished. He carried that burden.”

He returned to Loyola Marymount, but felt adrift and unappreciated, Mr. Wood said. Then he began throwing himself into volunteer work.

He built bikes for Ride 2 Recovery, a rehabilitation program for injured veterans, went to Haiti and Chile with Team Rubicon and helped organize events for I.A.V.A. He even appeared in this well-received public service announcement by I.A.V.A. and the Ad Council encouraging veterans to seek help for mental health problems.

“Whenever we were doing an event on the West Coast, he put his hand up and said, ‘I want to help,’” Mr. Rieckhoff said.

But then came a series of troubles. His marriage began to crumble in the summer of 2010, Mr. Wood said. He quit college, and a full-time position at a refugee camp in Haiti fell through. He stopped taking his medications. By December, he showed up at Mr. Wood’s door looking for help.

“He had hit rock bottom,” Mr. Wood said.

Mr. Wood convinced him to seek help, and he did. He started going to a veterans’ clinic, returned to Houston, found work and started dating. He even discussed re-enlisting in the Marine Corps.

“I told him the structure would be good, and the pride would be good for him,” Mr. Wood said. It was the last time the two men spoke, just weeks before Mr. Hunt killed himself.

No one, of course, could say exactly what went wrong. Perhaps it was his failed marriage. Perhaps it was frustration with the government for rejecting his petition to increase his disability rating. Perhaps he still felt guilt that his friends had died while he had not.

“He had a big heart, with a high opinion of what the world should be,” Mr. Wood said. “But he was always disappointed about how petty and selfish the world was. For everything he did to try to make the world better, he didn’t see improvements.

“He couldn’t handle the disappointment of not being able to effect change.” More than 1,100 people showed up for Mr. Hunt’s funeral in Texas.

His family requested that memorial contributions in his name be directed to:

Team Rubicon, Inc.
P.O. Box 7476
Santa Monica, CA 90406

or

Ride 2 Recovery
23679 Calabasas Rd., #420
Calabasas, CA 91302

2011-04-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

1 out of 5 Barcelona citizens vote in favour of secession of Catalonia
AP - 04/11/2011 | Barcelona, Spain |
now The referendum had a 21.37 percent turnout with 257,745 participants, including registered foreign immigrants and anyone over 16.

The citizens of the Spanish city of Barcelona voted on Sunday by more than 90 per cent in favour of independence for the province of Catalonia from the central government in Madrid.

The unofficial referendum was organised by Decideix, which describes itself as "a citizen's initiative to organise a referendum in the city of Barcelona on Catalonia's independence from Spain."

The referendum had a 21.37 percent turnout with 257,745 participants, including registered foreign immigrants and anyone over 16.

By 23.30 local time (21.30GMT) some 44 percent of the votes had been counted, with just over 91 percent in favour of the secession of Catalonia from the rest of Spain.

Critics say this had more to do with warm spring-like weather than political commitment and democracy.

Barcelona is the last city, and the second biggest in Spain, to symbolically decide about independence following a series of plebiscites across Catalonia over the past 18 months.

The Spanish government has tried to stop all unofficial referendums but so far 515 Catalan towns and villages have held them, around half of Catalonia's municipalities.

Next Wednesday, April 13, the Catalan parliament will debate a bill to unilaterally declare independence from Spain.

Catalonia accounts for around one-fifth of Spain's economy, about one seventh of the population, and has long complained it contributes more than a fair share.

Along with the Basque region, Catalonia was heavily oppressed under the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, which made it a crime to speak the Catalan and Basque languages in the interest of promoting Spain as a Madrid-run Castilian-speaking unified country.

2011-04-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Texted Death Threats to Human Rights and Indigenous leaders Martha Giraldo and Aida Quilcue
The Black Eagles are a Colombian paramilitary organization. A prime example of the degree of violence and chaos that has spread through the current Machiavellian political system that embraces the paramilitary, mercenary, and police brutality.

At 9.39pm on 30th December 2010, the following text message was received by Martha Giraldo, coordinator of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes Valle del Cauca branch (MOVICE), and Aida Quilcue, ex-leader of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) and the Minga of Social and Communitarian Resistance:

“guerrilla rats, this is how we wanted to have you, cornered and crying for help all over the place. MOVICE, ECATE, CUT, NOMADESC, death to you communist dogs.

Tonight at midnight we start with Martha Giraldo, Berenice, Luz Marina, Cristina, the Indian Quilcue, Yon, Posso, Wilson and with every one of your children.

Black Eagles cleansing the country of these communist sons of bitches, you won’t see the New Year.”

The message was sent from the same number which has been used to send previous threats to the same organisations.

Impunity

2011-04-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

impunitythefilm.com
freedom for colombia

2011-04-13T21:45:00.000-07:00

Five Facts About Immigration
--MexicanAmericanLegalDefenseFund.org--
We all know that the United States is primarily a nation of immigrants and their descendants. But, it is also true that the United States is an independent nation in part because of a reaction to a restrictive immigration policy. Among the grievances against King George set forth in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was a concern that the king had worked to prevent and discourage immigration to the colonies.

Our status as one united nation also depends on having one immigration and immigration enforcement policy set by the federal government in Washington, DC. When the United States adopted its Constitution in 1787, the nation settled on being one united nation rather than a loose confederation of separate independent states. If each state, as Arizona attempted in SB 1070, could adopt its own immigration enforcement policy, we would cease to be one nation.

Critical industries in the United States depend on undocumented immigrant workers.Agricultural farming has been an important part of our history and remains a crucial industry today. Several studies have estimated that well over half of all agricultural crop workers in the United States are undocumented.(1) Moreover, there are no indications that American-born workers have an interest in adopting the lifestyle of migratory farm workers.

There is no single “line” to wait to immigrate legally to the United States.Our current immigration system discriminates on the basis of national origin, or ancestry, requiring much longer waits for those from countries like Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines. For example, the adult son or daughter of a United States citizen who comes from most countries in the world currently waits four to five years to immigrate, while the adult son or daughter of a naturalized United States citizen from Mexico must wait almost 18 years to receive a legal immigrant visa.(2)

More than two million undocumented immigrants came to this country as minor children.(3) Many of these immigrants went to school here and were raised as American kids. Our national values have never punished or blamed children for acts that they committed while under the direction of their parents.

------
1. 2002 National Agricultural Workers Survey
2. Oct. 2010 State Department Visa Bulletin
3. “DREAM vs. Reality” Report, Migration Policy Institute, 2010

2011-04-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

Brazilian deputy suspected in a series of murders
Thursday, April 14, 2011, 01:04 GMT 05:04 MCK
--bbc.co.uk/Russian--
The police of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro local parliamentarian arrested on suspicion of involvement in a series of murders.

According to investigators, André Luiz Ferreira da Silva heads the illegal paramilitary group, which controls the 13 districts in the west of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Such groups are operating in many poor neighborhoods of major Brazilian cities. Initially, many of them arose as a reaction to the lawlessness of drug cartels.

But some of these illegal units today are actually very engaged in extortion and robbery.

Sun during 3.2011

2011-04-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

Solar Flare at Earth, 4.19.11

2011-04-13T18:28:00.000-07:00

Aurora Borealis on flight from San Fransisco to Paris

2011-04-13T18:25:00.001-07:00

2011-04-13T18:06:00.000-07:00

Belarus bombing farce?
Colum Lynch
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - 7:56 PM
--foreignpolicy.com--
Earlier this week, a subway terror bombing reportedly occured in the Belarussian capital of Minsk, killing 12 and wounding about 150 people. Russia's U.N. envoy Vitaly I Churkin immediately issued a draft press statement asking for a standard condemnation on behalf of its regional ally.

But the problem was that not everyone believed Belarus was actually a target of terrorist violence. "Well informed sources around Minsk believe that there was an even chance that the government might be behind this," said one skeptical council member.

Reports from the region -- including this piece in the Christian Science Monitor -- also point out that there has been no history of violent opposition during the 17 years of repressive rule by Alexander Lukashenko, and that most of his political opposition leaders have been imprisoned during a sweep earlier this year.

Norman Finkelstein pt1

2011-04-13T05:43:00.000-07:00

2011-04-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

Migrants forced to fight for Gaddafi

-- Al Jazeera --
Anna Branthwaite
09 Apr 2011 16:14

Among the reports of atrocities occurring in Libya are claims from African migrants that they were abducted and forced to fight with Gaddafi's forces.

Nearly all migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who arrive at the desert refugee camp in Tunisia, have fled in fear of violent reprisals by Libyans who accuse them of being mercenaries. The extent to which Gaddafi's military has used foreign mercenaries, or press-ganged migrants into fighting, remains unclear.

A former Nigerian police officer, who had worked in Libya for eight years as a technician, alleges he was abducted in mid-March at a military checkpoint in Tripoli, along with other men from Ghana, Mali and Niger, before being taken to a military centre.

"There was up to 100 people in the courtyard and military trucks were arriving and leaving with more people. They started beating people, I saw them shoot one Ghanaian in front of me. The atmosphere was very intimidating," he explained. "They put us into a vehicle and we were driven into the desert. I saw an oil refinery, there was evidence of bomb strikes, burnt out vehicles and a strong smell. I think it was Ras Lanouf."

A Ghanaian worker claimed to have been abducted by Libyan military when they stormed his house in Sirte.

"They asked us why we were trying to leave the country and that we must stay to fight for when the Americans come," he explained. "We were taken to a police station and then to an underground hospital which they ordered us to clean."

Importing mercenaries

Reports of foreign mercenaries being shipped into Libya and shooting protesters emerged within the first weeks of the uprising.

"There's certainly evidence that Algeria sent pilots in before the no-fly zone and provided military transporters to move people, possibly mercenaries, maybe even equipment… but it is difficult to get them into the country," explains Jeremy Keenan, a professor specialising in the Maghreb who suggests that between 5,000 and 10,000 mercenaries may have entered Libya during this uprising, but that there is no concrete evidence.

"If you've got a million migrants milling around in Libya, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, all paperless with no ID, I suspect he's using them, not Libyans, as human shields… the key thing is he (Gaddafi) has got them over a barrel, they can't leave," said Keenan. "I think the opposition people, when they bump into anyone fighting against them who is speaking another language and looks black, irrespective of how they got into Gaddafi's hands, they are using the word mercenary. There is a lot of confusion there."

Gaddafi has supported past Tuareg rebellions and allegedly backed candidates in recent elections in Niger, who may be beholden to support him.

Local African media have recently reported the recruitment and movement of young men into Libya, but others indicate that Tuaregs were recruited by the Libyan military several years beforehand. What is certain in recent weeks is that more people are leaving Libya than entering.

"Certainly Gaddafi uses mercenaries from abroad and from the foreign community in Libya. In Misurata, there are reports that the Africans are on the frontline, but the snipers are foreigners, mostly from Belarus, Eastern Europe," says Sliman Bouchuiguir, secretary-general of the Libyan League of Human Rights. "He has already used poor Africans as a political weapon against Europe saying he will let this African population go to Italy and Europe."

In an interview with French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, in February Gaddafi warned, "You will have the immigration of thousands of people who will invade Europe from Libya, and there will be nobody to stop them."

One million sub Saharan migrants, among them political refugees, are estimated to live in Libya, but there is virtually no documentation of the population. Many make the treacherous journey through the desert into Libya, either en route to Europe or to settle in oil rich Libya.

On entering Libya, thousands of migrants have been arrested and held in detention centres. Many of them are now escaping Libya and can speak openly about the appalling living conditions in the centres, torture resulting in scores of deaths, corruption, lack of legal and medical aid, all of which corroborates with earlier reports made by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Global Detention Project.

Libya has never signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, and after allowing the UNHCR to provisionally re-open its office in Tripoli last year, the UNHCR has only ever been allowed to visit a few centres.

"There are 27 centres known to us. We can't even find out where the detention centres are, there is so little information. I would have little confidence that the treatment of detainees would be to EU standards," explains Michael Flynn, a researcher at the Global Detention Project based in Geneva.

Italy and other EU countries have made it policy to manage immigration from the source of its origins, and in recent years have collaborated with Gaddafi in stemming the flow of African migration – following the 2008 Friendship Pact, Italy has provided Libya with funding to build detention centres and surveillance equipment; the European Commission offered Libya up to 50 million Euros in aid last year to stop the flow of immigration.

"I don't know to what extent there were benchmarks built into these agreements between EU countries and Gaddafi, many of these were verbal agreements," explains Flynn. "There may have been some sort of reporting requirements on conditions, but I would have very little confidence that these requirements would have been met in Libya."

'I need to start again'

With the violence continuing in Libya, journalists and independent observers unable to access many parts of the country, the blight of Libyan and non-Libyans civilians remains largely unknown, but events inside Libya will have far reaching consequences beyond its borders.

As thousands of migrant workers return to their respective countries, Mediterranean and Western countries wrangle over their obligations to the displaced and refugees, neighbouring African states may face the migration of armed mercenaries crossing their desert borders, if, or when, they are no longer required in Libya.

Back in the desert camp in Tunisia, over 60,000 people have been evacuated by the UNHCR and the IOM to their respective countries, with on average of 2,000 flown out each day.

Others nationalities - Somalians, Eritreans, Sudanese, Iraqis and now Ivorians - with no safe country to be returned to, know they will be here for weeks if not months and attempt to make their desert camp as bearable as possible whilst awaiting to told where they will be resettled. Nearly all the families with young children belong to this group.

Waiting his turn to be told when he will be allocated a seat on a flight to Nigeria, the former police officer speaks of his future: "I left everything behind in Libya, all my clothes, savings, property and now I don’t even have one dinar with me. I need to start again. If I can go home I will start to look for a job."

He currently shares a tent with five other men, all facing the same predicaments. "But even though I should be relieved to be going home, I’m still very worried about the people who are trapped inside Libya, the ones who can't get out and have been left behind. I have a bad feeling about what will happen to them."

Anna Branthwaite worked at the Choucha transit camp in Tunisia, taking photographs and interviewing case studies as a freelancer for the Office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNHCR.

2011-04-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

Que le bon dieu vous garde... = That the good God be with you...

Appeasing Syria's Kurds - Inside Story - Al Jazeera English

2011-04-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

Zeitgeist

2011-04-10T16:58:00.001-07:00

2011-04-09T18:56:00.001-07:00

United States Shut Your Third Damn Eye America for a Reason!

Break Science, Further Than Our Eyes Can See

2011-04-09T18:50:00.000-07:00

Break Science, Zion Station

2011-04-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

2011-04-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

Clarence Thomas writes one of the meanest Supreme Court decisions ever.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, April 1, 2011, at 7:43 PM
In 1985, John Thompson was convicted of murder in Louisiana. Having already been convicted in a separate armed robbery case, he opted not to testify on his own behalf in his murder trial. He was sentenced to death and spent 18 years in prison—14 of them isolated on death row—and watched as seven executions were planned for him. Several weeks before an execution scheduled for May 1999, Thompson's private investigators learned that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that would have cleared him at his robbery trial. This evidence included the fact that the main informant against him had received a reward from the victim's family, that the eyewitness identification done at the time described someone who looked nothing like him, and that a blood sample taken from the crime scene did not match Thompson's blood type.

In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over to the defense any evidence that would tend to prove a defendant's innocence. Failure to do so is a violation of the defendant's constitutional rights. Yet the four prosecutors in Thompson's case managed to keep secret the fact that they had hidden exculpatory evidence for 20 years. Were it not for Thompson's investigators, he would have been executed for a murder he did not commit.

Both of Thompson's convictions were overturned. When he was retried on the murder charges, a jury acquitted him after 35 minutes. He sued the former Louisiana district attorney for Orleans Parish, Harry Connick Sr. (yes, his dad) for failing to train his prosecutors about their legal obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million for this civil rights violation, one for every year he spent wrongfully incarcerated. The district court judge added another $1 million in attorneys' fees. A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. An equally divided 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed again.

But this week, writing on behalf of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court and in his first majority opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can't be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor. The Thomas opinion is an extraordinary piece of workmanship, matched only by Justice Antonin Scalia's concurring opinion, in which he takes a few extra whacks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. (Ginsburg was so bothered by the majority decision that she read her dissent from the bench for the first time this term.) Both Thomas and Scalia have produced what can only be described as a master class in human apathy. Their disregard for the facts of Thompson's thrashed life and near-death emerges as a moral flat line. Scalia opens his concurrence with a swipe at Ginsburg's "lengthy excavation of the trial record" and states that "the question presented for our review is whether a municipality is liable for a single Brady violation by one of its prosecutors." But only by willfully ignoring that entire trial record can he and Thomas reduce the entire constitutional question to a single misdeed by a single bad actor.

Both parties to this case have long agreed that an injustice had been done. Connick himself conceded that there had been a Brady violation, yet Scalia finds none. Everyone else concedes that egregious mistakes were made. Scalia struggles to rehabilitate them all.

One of the reasons the truth came to light after 20 years is that Gerry Deegan, a junior assistant D.A. on the Thompson case, confessed as he lay dying of cancer that he had withheld the crime lab test results and removed a blood sample from the evidence room. The prosecutor to whom Deegan confessed said nothing about this for five years. While Scalia pins the wrongdoing on a single "miscreant prosecutor," Ginsburg correctly notes that "no fewer than five prosecutors" were involved in railroading Thompson. She adds that they "did so despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight." While Thomas states the question as having to do with a "single Brady violation," Ginsburg is quick to point out that there was far more than just a misplaced blood sample at issue: Thompson was turned in by someone seeking a reward, but prosecutors failed to turn over tapes of that conversation. The eyewitness identification of the killer didn't match Thompson, but was never shared with defense counsel. The blood evidence was enough to prove a Brady violation, but it was the tip of the iceberg.

In the 10 years preceding Thompson's trial, Thomas acknowledges, "Louisiana courts had overturned four convictions because of Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick's office." Yet somehow this doesn't add up to a pattern of Brady violations in the office, because the evidence in those other cases wasn't blood or crime lab evidence. Huh? He then inexplicably asserts that young prosecutors needn't be trained on Brady violations because they learned everything in law school.

Scalia and Thomas are at pains to say that Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates' unconstitutional conduct, except—as Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady, acknowledged that his prosecutors "were coming fresh out of law school," acknowledged he didn't know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had 'stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions' when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974." And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would "make [his] job more difficult." As Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen point out, the jury had "considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson."

It's not just that a jury, a judge, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Connick knew his staff was undertrained and he failed to fix it. It's that it's almost impossible, on reviewing all of the evidence, to conclude anything else. Nobody is suggesting that the legal issue here is simple or that there aren't meaningful consequences to creating liability for district attorneys who fail to train their subordinates in Brady compliance. But those aren't the opinions that Thomas and Scalia produced. Their effort instead was to sift and resift the facts until the injury done to Thompson can be pinned on a single bad actor, acting in bad faith. It's a long, sad, uphill trek.

Beyond that, there is no suggestion in either opinion that this is a hard question or a close call or even a hint of regret at their conclusion. There is only certainty that the jury, the appeals court, and above all Ginsburg got it completely wrong in believing that someone should be held responsible for the outrages suffered by John Thompson. If there is empathy for anyone in evidence here, it's for the overworked and overzealous district attorneys.

It's left to Ginsburg to acknowledge that the costs of immunizing Connick from any wrongdoing is as high as the cost of opening him to it: "The prosecutorial concealment Thompson encountered … is bound to be repeated unless municipal agencies bear responsibility—made tangible by §1983 liability—for adequately conveying what Brady requires and for monitoring staff compliance." As Scott Lemieux points out, by all-but-immunizing Connick for the conduct of his subordinates, the court has created a perfect Catch-22, since the courts already give prosecutors absolute immunity for their actions as prosecutors (though they may still be liable for their conduct as administrators or investigators). By immunizing their bosses as well, the court has guaranteed that nobody can be held responsible for even the most shocking civil rights violations.

I don't think that the failure at the court is one of empathy. I don't ask that Thomas or Scalia shed a tear for an innocent man who almost went to his death because of deceptive prosecutors. And, frankly, Ginsburg's dissent—while powerful—is no less Vulcan in tone than their opinions. But this case is of a piece with prior decisions in which Thomas and Scalia have staked out positions that revel in the hyper-technical and deliberately callous. It was, after all, Scalia who wrote in 2009 that "this court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent." It was Thomas who wrote that a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form had no constitutional claim.

The law awards no extra points for being pitiless and scornful. There is rarely a reason to be pitiless and scornful, certainly in a case of an innocent man who was nearly executed. It leads one to wonder whether Thomas and Scalia sometimes are just because they can be.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

2011-04-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

2012 GOP Poll by MSNBC/WSJ According to the latest national NBC/WSJ poll, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leads the hypothetical 2012 GOP pack with support from 21 percent of Republican primary voters -- followed by Trump and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 17 percent each, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 11 percent and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin at 10 percent. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is at 6 percent, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann gets 5 percent, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum receives 3 percent and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour gets 1 percent. Strikingly, Trump -- who has received a considerable amount of attention for incorrectly stating that President Obama wasn't born in the U.S. -- finishes first among Tea Party supporters (at 20 percent), followed by Romney (17 percent), Huckabee (14 percent), Palin (12 percent) and Gingrich (9 percent).

Brand New, Untitled #2

2011-04-06T15:02:00.000-07:00