Encouraging and Supporting the Resurgence of Liberalism in the U.S.A.
Quote
"If you assume that every child is sensitive, vulnerable, readily injured, and easily broken, then you will never be far from the truth. If you assume that all children are motivated by pride and justice, you will be able to communicate with them. If you assume that all children should be treated as sacred trusts who deserve your full measure of devotion, you will be on the right path. If you seek to find the vulnerable, precious child in yourself and in all other adults at all times in your dealings with yourself and others, you will have achieved enlightenment. You will become a gift to the children in your life to whatever degree that you remain enlightened in your dealings with them." Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Reclaiming Our Children: A Healing Plan for a Nation in Crisis
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Submitted by Maureen
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and remember we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak , to associate with and defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. . . .(Senator McCarthy) didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. . . Cassius was right, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Edward R. Murrow
The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens–and honor its own previous commitments–by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel’s right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.
Jimmy Carter / Palestine Peace Not Apartheid
'God shouldn't be put in charge of everything until we get to know Him a little better' Kurt Vonnegut, The Nation, 11/28/81
Kurt Vonnegut, The Nation, 11/28/81
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
Eugene O'Neill
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear.” Quote by: Marcus Tullius Cicero Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator Date: 42BC
It's coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here they got the range and the machinery for change and it's here they got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken and it's here the lonely say that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Leonard Cohen
Noah’s Ark : Everything I need to know, I learned from Noah’s Ark ..
ONE: Don’t miss the boat.
TWO: Remember that we are all in the same boat!
THREE: Plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark.
FOUR: Stay fit. When you’re 60 years old, someone may ask you to do something really big.
FIVE: Don’t listen to critics; just get on with the job that needs to be done.
SIX: Build your future on high ground.
SEVEN: For safety’s sake, travel in pairs.
EIGHT: Speed isn’t always an advantage. The snails were on board with the cheetahs.
NINE: When you’re stressed, float awhile.
TEN: Remember, the Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals.
ELEVEN: No matter the storm, there’s always a rainbow waiting.
Most people walk in and out of your life,
but FRIENDS leave footprints in your heart.
Unknown
'Newt Gingrich is a stupid person's idea of a smart person.'
Alan Grayson
“Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Molly Ivins
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shephers are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers and sisters,
To make music in the heart.
Howard Thurman
“Any life lost in war is the life of a human being, irrespective of whether it is an Arab or an Israeli...........................................
The wife who becomes widowed is a human being, entitled to live in a happy family, Arab or Israeli..............................................
Innocent children, deprived of paternal care and sympathy, are all our children, whether they live on Arab or Israeli soil, and we owe them the biggest responsibility of providing them with a happy present and bright future.”
Mohammed Anwar El-Sadat
Congress is not preparing to defend the people of the United States. It is planning to protect the capital of American speculators and investors…. Incidentally this preparation will benefit the manufacturers of munitions and war machines…. Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!
Helen Keller at Carnegie Hall January 5, 1916
there is no longer any doubt as to whether the (Bush) administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.
Maj. Gen. Antonio, M. Taguba / Investigator of Abu Ghraib
Hope........And it is not a dream of a fancy proud, With a fool for its dull begetter; There's a voice at the heart that proclaims aloud-- 'We are born for a something better!' And that Voice of the Heart, oh, ye may believe, Will never the Hope of the Soul deceive!'
Friedrich Schiller
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil …
is for good men to do nothing.~~
Edmond Burke
'The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer'
James Baldwin, The Nation, 7/11/66
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
"If you assume that every child is sensitive, vulnerable, readily injured, and easily broken, then you will never be far from the truth. If you assume that all children are motivated by pride and justice, you will be able to communicate with them. If you assume that all children should be treated as sacred trusts who deserve your full measure of devotion, you will be on the right path. If you seek to find the vulnerable, precious child in yourself and in all other adults at all times in your dealings with yourself and others, you will have achieved enlightenment. You will become a gift to the children in your life to whatever degree that you remain enlightened in your dealings with them." Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Reclaiming Our Children: A Healing Plan for a Nation in Crisis
The Republican Party is doing a great job in provoking such a dangerous episode by making consensual governance impossible in a time of awful practical problems and challenges. They’re in the process, right now, of transforming themselves from the party of “no” to the party of no decency, no common sense, no ideas, no conception of the public interest, and no respect for the traditions that they pretend to stand for, like due process of law. In the days since the passage of health care reform, they’ve gone as far as inciting mobs to violence against their fellow congressmen and senators — bricks thrown through windows, death threats made, coffins placed in the yards of their adversaries. One day soon, somebody with a gun or an explosive device, someone with a very sketchy sense-of-self, and perhaps a recent record of personal failure and humiliation, is going to sacrifice himself to become the Tea Party’s first martyr by shooting up a shopping mall in some blue district.
James Howard Kunstler
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives…inside ourselves.
The McGlynn: Highly recommend. Every American, every citizen of the World, should watch this series. To the students, do yourselves, our country and our world, a service and watch this series. Then get involved!
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Into a world of greed and recklessness that led to financial collapse
Episode One, The men who crashed the world
The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that led to financial collapse.Meltdown Last Modified: 21 Sep 2011 09:26
In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men
who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled
millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street
predator; and the power behind the throne.
The crash of September 2008 brought the largest
bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into
unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street
turned back the clock to 1929
But how did it all go so wrong?
Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US
housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government
regulations in place.
Also, London was competing with New York as the banking
capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time,
introduced ‘light touch regulation’ – giving bankers a free hand in the
marketplace.
All this, and with key players making the wrong financial
decisions, saw the world’s biggest financial collapse.
EDUCATION: Industrial School for Girls, Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes
Rosa Parks biography
Synopsis
Civil rights activist Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus spurred a city-wide boycott. The city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on public buses. Rosa Parks received many accolades during her lifetime, including the NAACP’s highest award.
Civil Rights Pioneer
Civil-rights activist. Born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus spurred on a city-wide boycott and helped launch nation-wide efforts to end segregation of public facilities.
Early Life and Education
Rosa Parks’ childhood brought her early experiences with racial discrimination and activism for racial equality. After her parents separated, Rosa’s mother moved the family to Pine Level, Alabama to live with her parents, Rose and Sylvester Edwards, on their farm. Both her grandparents were former slaves and strong advocates for racial equality. In one experience, Rosa’s grandfather stood in front of their house with a shotgun while Ku Klux Klan members marched down the street. The city of Pine Level, Alabama had a new school building and bus transportation for white students while African-American students walked to the one-room schoolhouse, often lacking desks and adequate school supplies.
Through the rest of Rosa’s education, she attended segregated schools in Montgomery. In 1929, while a junior in the eleventh grade, she left school to attend to her sick grandmother in Pine Level. She never returned, but instead got a job at a shirt factory in Montgomery. In 1932, Rosa married a barber named Raymond Parks who was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). With Raymond’s support, Rosa Parks finished her high school degree in 1933. She soon became actively involved in civil rights issues my joining the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, serving as the secretary to the president, E.D. Nixon until 1957.
Ordered to the Back of the Bus
The Montgomery, Alabama city code required that all public transportation be segregated and that bus drivers had the “powers of a police officer of the city while in actual charge of any bus for the purposes of carrying out the provisions” of the code. While operating a bus, drivers were required to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and black passengers by assigning seats. This was accomplished with a line roughly in the middle of the bus separating white passengers in the front of the bus and African-American passengers in the back. When an African-American passenger boarded the bus, they had to get on at the front to pay their fare and then get off and re-board the bus at the back door. When the seats in the front of the bus filled up and more white passengers got on, the bus driver would move back the sign separating black and white passengers and, if necessary, ask black passengers give up their seat.
On December 1, 1955, after a long day at work at the Montgomery Fair department store, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers. Though the city’s bus ordinance did give drivers the authority to assign seats, it didn’t specifically give them the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone (regardless of color). However, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the custom of requiring black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers, when no other seats were available. If the black passenger protested, the bus driver had the authority to refuse service and could call the police to have them removed.
As the bus Rosa was riding continued on its route, it began to fill with white passengers. Eventually, the bus was full and the driver noticed that several white passengers were standing in the aisle. He stopped the bus and moved the sign separating the two sections back one row and asked four black passengers to give up their seats. Three complied, but Rosa refused and remained seated. The driver demanded, “Why don’t you stand up?” to which Rosa replied, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” The driver called the police and had her arrested. Later, she recalled that her refusal wasn’t because she was physically tired, but that she was tired of giving in.
The police arrested Rosa at the scene and charged her with violation of Chapter 6, section 11 of the Montgomery City code. She was taken to police headquarters where later that night she was released on bail. On December 8, Rosa faced trial and in a 30 minute hearing was found guilty of violating a local ordinance. She was fined $10, plus a $4 court fee.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
On the evening Rosa Parks was arrested, E.D. Nixon, head of the local chapter of the NAACP, began plans to organize a boycott of Montgomery’s city buses. Ads were placed in local papers and handbills were printed and distributed in black neighborhoods. Members of the African-American community were asked to stay off the buses Monday, December 5 th in protest of Rosa’s arrest. People were encouraged to stay home from work or school, take a cab or walk to work. With most of the African-American community not riding the bus, organizers believed a longer boycott might be successful.
On Monday, December 5, 1955, a group of African-American community leaders gathered at Mt. Zion Church to discuss strategies. They determined that the effort required a new organization and strong leadership. They formed the “Montgomery Improvement Association” (MIA) and elected Montgomery newcomer Dr. Martin Luther King, the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The MIA believed that Rosa Parks’ case provided an excellent opportunity to take further action to create real change.
With the success of Monday’s refusal to ride the buses, the boycott continued. Some people carpooled. Others rode in African-American-operated cabs. Most of the estimated 40,000 African-American commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles to get to work. Dozens of the Montgomery public buses sat idle for months, severely crippling the transit company’s finances. But the boycott faced strong resistance, with some segregationists retaliating with violence. Black churches were burned and both Martin Luther King and E.D. Nixon’s homes were attacked. Other attempts were made to end the boycott as well. The taxi system used by the African-American community to help people get around had its insurance canceled. Other blacks were arrested for violating an old law prohibiting boycotts.
But the African-American community also took legal action. Armed with the Brown v. Board of Education decision that said separate but equal policies had no place in public education, a black legal team took the issue of segregation on public transit systems to federal court. In June of 1956, the court declared Alabama’s racial segregation laws for public transit unconstitutional. The city appealed and on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling. With the transit company and downtown businesses suffering financial loss and the legal system ruling against them, the city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on public buses. The combination of legal action, backed by the unrelenting determination of the African-American community made the 382-day Montgomery Bus Boycott one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history.
Discrimination
Although she had become a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks suffered hardship as a result. She lost her job at the department store and her husband lost his after his boss forbade him to discuss his wife or their legal case. They were unable to find work and eventually left Montgomery. Rosa Parks moved her family—husband and mother—to Detroit, Michigan. There she made a new life for herself, working as a secretary and receptionists in U.S. Representative John Conyer’s congressional office in Detroit. She also served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 1987, along with Elaine Eason Steele, a long-time friend, she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The institute runs the “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours, introducing young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country. In 1992, she published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography recounting her life in the segregated South. In 1995, she published her memoirs entitled Quiet Strength which focuses on the role religious faith played in her life.
Legacy
Rosa Parks received many accolades during her lifetime including the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s highest award. She also received the Martin Luther King Jr. Award. On September 9, 1996 President Bill Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the U.S. executive branch. The next year, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch. In 1999, Time magazine named Rosa Parks one of the 20 most influential people of the 20th century.
On October 24, 2005, at the age of 92, Rosa Parks quietly died in her apartment. She had been diagnosed the previous year with progressive dementia. Her death was marked by several memorial services, among them lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C. where an estimated 50,000 people viewed her casket. Rosa was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery in the chapel’s mausoleum. Shortly after her death the chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel.
The O’Leary: We need to remember each American soldier who has died and each who has suffered terrible, debilitating wounds,each Iraqi who has died, been maimed for life, fled his,her homeland not just under the Bush war but in the 3 years that Obama has waged it, knowing full well that the carnage was for naught. We also need to remember as we are celebrating Obama’s decision to leave Iraq, only because they would not give our soldiers immunity from prosecution, he still wages another “stupid” war in Afghanistan. Enough!
As the world learned Friday from the White House, the last 41,000 U.S. troops, save for a few Marines to guard the American embassy, will be out of Iraq 105 months after the Bush administration (with assistance from a supine media and a timid Congress) concocted the imperial lies that got the first troops sent there. As Avenging Angel has noted, Sen. John McCain and a boatload of others object to the withdrawal. That is so even though, after the troops’ departure, the State Department’s 5500 security contractors — read: mercenaries — will still be doing what they do without any pesky congressional meddlers harshing their operations. And, of course, the CIA, as well as organizations without public acronyms, will also be sticking around. So, to say the Iraq war is actually, truly over requires some fancy footwork. But, officially, it is.Which means we’re closer to answering for Iraq the question raised 40 years ago by then-Navy Lt. John Kerry regarding Vietnam:
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
If Russ Feingold’s August 2005 proposal for withdrawal had been adopted, the last American troops would have left Iraq five years ago. We would have long since have learned the name of the last one to die for the lies of the Neo-Conservatives, assorted riff-raff known as “public intellectuals” and self-righteous embedded pundits who called antiwar critics “traitors.” But the Senator’s proposal was demonized by the right and mostly ignored by his party colleagues. Consequently, the skulls kept being stacked: American, Iraqi and others.
If good fortune shines on all the thousands of Americans in uniform who will be leaving Iraq in the next 10 weeks, we finally may already know the names of the last U.S. soldiers to die for that “mistake”:
James R. Leep Jr. of Richmond, Va., a staff sergeant with the 116th Brigade Combat Team was the last U.S. soldier to die of non-hostile causes, in Babil, Iraq, on Oct. 17. Adrian G. Mills of Newnan, Ga., a specialist with the 272nd Military Police Company, was the most recent to die of hostile fire, in Kirkuk, on Sept. 29.
If these two do turn out to be the last, then the final tally for U.S. military fatalities in Iraq will be 4479. Add in U.S. allies and the total rises to 4797. The death toll of Iraqi civilians has been a good deal higher. Just how much will never be fully known because the Iraq government stopped counting civilian fatalities in December 2003. The excuse for this was that announcing the numbers amounted to propaganda which aided those fighting the Americans. Several statistical studies claiming as many as 1.2 million dead Iraqi civilians were roundly attacked, unsurprisingly by officials with an ax to grind, but also by statisticians who did not view the matter through a political lens. Whatever the actual total, at the very least118,000 civilians have been killed by military and paramilitary actions in Iraq since March 2003. Another 237 have been killed so far this month in a war that certainly was not over for them.
It’s not a difficult search to find the names of the American dead. Every single one of them. Not so with the Iraqis. Sure, their families know. But no dedicated web sites have compiled a comprehensive toll. Their names will never appear on any commemoration wall.
Don’t feed the delusion. Just as was the case in Vietnam, none of these dead lost their lives because of a “mistake.” Not the Americans, not their allies and not the Iraqis. That untruth will, unfortunately, continue to be the way the Iraq war is characterized by much of a traditional media that failed to yank off the faux-patriotic mask concealing the motives behind the propaganda assault the Bush administration (and its allies across the truncated American political spectrum) promoted to get the war under way. Two and three decades from now, our grandchildren may well be reading that this assault was a terrible “mistake.”
With the war officially over come year’s end, how often must it be repeated? Invading Iraq was not a friggin’ mistake. Not an accident. Not some foreign policy mishap. The guys in charge carried out a coldly though ineptly calculated act. They led a murderous, perfidious, pernicious end run around international law founded on a dubious “preventive” military doctrine piggybacked on the nation’s rage over the 9/11 attacks. An imperial, morally corrupt war ramrodded past the objections of those in and out of Congress who challenged the fabricated claims of administration advisors who had been looking for an excuse to take out Saddam Hussein years before the Supreme Court plunked George W. Bush into the Oval Office.
Though officially over, the Iraq war will continue, just as did Vietnam, to claim victims long after the official death roster has been stamped complete. Wounded veterans, officially there are some 33,000 of those, thousands with traumatic brain injuries, will live out psychologically and economically diminished lives. Families will see no end of suffering from the impact of PTSD and interrupted civilian careers. The trillions of dollars spent on shock and awe and all that has come since will weaken our economy for years to come.
In Iraq, far more families will face the same impacts. These will be made worse by lack of a social infrastructure capable of dealing with them. Hundreds of thousands of exiles and internally displaced Iraqis will continue to live a hand-to-mouth existence. Rebuilding what the war has destroyed will take decades. Just getting the electricity back on 24 hours a day in some major cities is still, after all this time, years away. Sectarian grudges engendered by the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the insurgency will not be easily submerged in the new Iraq.
All this, including tens of thousands dead, occurred because the likes of Dick Cheney and his pals stirred truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, outright fabrications, disinformation, misinformation, omissions, inventions, deceptions, deflections, revisions, excisions and other serpentine resourcefulness into a propaganda barrage specifically designed to persuade enough people not to stand in the way of their squalid project.
Thousands of Americans are dead because war criminals sent them abroad fraudulently in the name of liberation, security and prevention.
Apache helicopters on the move
Tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead because of slime who waved the bloody shirt of 9/11 in one hand, Old Glory in the other, and simultaneously managed to shred our Constitution and decades of international law. People who, if this were a just world, would some time ago have arrived in shackles at The Hague.As I wrote more than a year ago:
…even before George W. Bush was scooted into office 5-to-4, the men he came to front for were already at work plotting their rationale for sinking deeper military and economic roots in the Middle East, petropolitics and neo-imperialist sophistry greedily intertwined. When they stepped into office, as Richard Clarke explained to us, terrorism gave them no worries. Then, when they weren’t figuring out how to lower taxes on their pals and unravel the tattered social safety net, they focused — as Paul O’Neill informed us — on finding the right excuse to persuade the American people to go to war with Saddam Hussein as a prelude to going to war with some of his neighbors. In less than nine months, that excuse dropped into their laps in the form of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze crews.From that terrible day forward, Richard Cheney and his sidekick Donald Rumsfeld and their like-minded coterie of rogues engineered the invasion. They didn’t slip the U.S. into Iraq by mistake. Like the shrewd opportunists they showed themselves to be in the business world, they saw the chance to carry out their invasion plan and they moved every obstacle — most especially the truth — out of their way to make it happen. …
They created a cabal of renegades specifically to carry out the Project for a New American Century’s plans for Middle East hegemony. They didn’t carefully weigh options and evaluate the pros and cons and make errors in judgment. They studiously ignored everyone who warned them against taking the action they had decided upon years before the World Trade Centers were turned to ashes and dust. …
Planning for invasion, the concoction of evidence, the ignoring of counter-advice, and the lying to Congress, to the United Nations and to the American people were not “mistakes.”
Mistakes were definitely made. Nine years ago, too many elected Democrats and too many other Americans believed the president and vice president of the United States to be honorable men. To be patriots. To have the best interests of Americans at heart. They believed them and they believed a megamedia that operated like administration-owned megaphones instead of independent watch dogs. Those were gigantic mistakes.
Consequently, there are now vast numbers of dead who would be alive were it not for this war initiated out of American exceptionalism, hubris and doctored evidence. Thousands of dead Americans. Tens of thousands of dead Iraqis. Deaths in any war are terrible enough. Deaths in a fabricated war count as nothing short of murder. How dare anyone call such a war a “mistake.”
CIA Kidnapped, Tortured the
“Wrong Guy,” Says Former Agency Operative Glenn Carle
Jason
Leopold, Truthout: “Carle recounts what unfolded next in his riveting book, “The
Interrogator: An Education,” which stands as a damning indictment of the CIA’s
torture and rendition program and the Bush administration’s approach to the
so-called Global War on Terror…. Carle concluded not long after he began
interrogating Wazir that the agency had ‘kidnapped’ the ‘wrong guy.’” Read the Article and Watch the Video
(Un)occupy Albuquerque Connects Corporate Greed to Fight for
Native Land
Jorge Rivas, Colorlines: “The 99 percent movement
that’s swept the country has reached Albuquerque, New Mexico. But organizers
there have decided to alter the ‘Occupy’ name out of respect for area’s
indigenous communities, which have been forcibly occupied by the United States
for centuries. Instead, organizers are calling their protests ‘(Un)occupy
Albuquerque’ to connect corporate greed with the ongoing fight for indigenous
land rights.” Read the Article
Financing Questions Shadow Tunisian Vote, First of Arab
Spring
David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times News Service:
“As Tunisians prepare to vote on Sunday in the first election of the Arab
Spring, the parties and their supporters have ramped up a bitter debate over
allegations about the influence of ‘dirty money’ behind the scenes of the race.
Liberals, facing an expected defeat by the moderate Islamist party Ennahda,
charge that it has leapt ahead with financial support from Persian Gulf allies.”
Trigger
Laws: Does Signing a Petition Give Parents a Voice?
David
Bacon, Rethinking Schools: “Parent trigger laws, according to their proponents,
give parents power. Gregory McGinity, managing director of policy for the Broad
Education Foundation, calls them ‘a way for parents’ voices to be heard.’ Sounds
good. But is the parent trigger concept a way to put parents in charge of their
kids’ education, or is it part of a political agenda that will rob parents of
even more control?” Read the Article
US May
Have Concealed Deterrent Aim of Iranian Plan
Gareth Porter,
Inter Press Service: “Scepticism about the U.S. allegation of an Iranian plot to
assassinate the Saudi ambassador has focused on doubts that high-level Iranian
officials would have used someone like used car salesman Monssor Arbabsiar to
carry out the mission. But when the scanty evidence in the FBI account about
what Arbabsiar actually proposed is interpreted in the context of Iran’s past
strategy for deterring external attack, it suggests that Arbabsiar’s mission may
have been to arrange for surveillance of and contingency plans for targets to be
hit in the event that Iran is attacked by the United States or Israel.” Read the Article
In Sign
of Global Influence, China Cracking Down on Occupy Wall Street
Coverage
Zaid Jilani, ThinkProgress: “When the Occupy Wall
Street protests started last month, Chinese state media blasted the U.S. media
for its poor coverage of the events. Yet as the Financial Times reports, now
that the protests are spreading and igniting global unrest, Chinese censors are
cracking down on coverage.” Read the Article
Falling
for New Neocon Propaganda
Ray McGovern, Consortium News: “One
not-so-funny fact about Washington is that nearly all the news media stars who
fell for neoconservative falsehoods about Iraq are still around to fall for new
ones on Iran, even some like Richard Cohen who briefly regretted his earlier
gullibility.” Read the Article
Did Citi
Get a Sweet Deal?
Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein,
ProPublica: “The bank says it has settled all of its potential liability to a
key regulator – the Securities and Exchange Commission – with a $285 million
payment that covers a single transaction, Class V Funding III. ProPublica first
raised questions about the deal in August 2010. In announcing a case, the SEC
said it had identified one low-level employee, Brian Stoker, as responsible for
the bank’s misconduct. It made no mention of the dozens of similar
collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, Citi sold to investors before the
crash.” Read the Article
Wall
Street Firms Spy on Protesters In Tax-Funded Center
Paul
Martens, CounterPunch: “Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and
the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to
explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in
lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get
to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding
citizens.” Read the Article
Without
Credit Card Donations, WikiLeaks Facing Funding Crisis
Mark
Siebel, McClatchy Newspapers: “WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that has
been at the center of some of the world’s most controversial news for the past
18 months, is facing dire economic times, largely, the website says, because
Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have refused for more than 10 months to process
donations made on its behalf.” Read the Article
Our latest “Don’t Miss This” video spotlight presents a spontaneous aesthetic moment at a recent political gathering – when acclaimed cellist Matt Haimovitz sat down to perform the “Prelude” from Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G, BWV1007 during a recent gathering of Occupy Wall Street supporters in New York City. This is not the first Mr. Haimovitz has performed Bach’s masterful cello suites in an unusual public setting – as he’s done so at restaurants, night clubs, and other non-traditional venues throughout the US. The sound and sights of Bach’s famed “Prelude” amongst the gathered protesters, signs, and blankets is a provocative testimony to our freedom of expression.
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The McGlynn
