On Friday, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby declared that six police officers will face criminal charges including second degree heart murder, manslaughter, assault and false imprisonment for their role in the arrest and homicide of 25-year-old African American Freddie Gray. While this is welcome and encouraging news for those seeking justice for Gray and his family, past experience demonstrates the odds the accused criminals will be convicted are miniscule. Regardless, it is not enough to treat the Freddie Gray incident as merely a violation of domestic law. The actions by agents of the State …
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
–John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644
My main overriding message is far from new: that freedom of thought, opinion, and expression is the very basis of a fair society. That freedom of speech is the foundational individual right for a truly democratic system to exist or emerge. And that this freedom must be defended without compromise, and without bias against any particular view, no matter how distasteful or disturbing the particular view might be to some or most people.
Undemocratic powerful interests always benefit from any successful …
On the heels of his Papal Encyclical about sustainability, due in June ‘15, Pope Francis is scheduled to address Congress this coming September.
Meanwhile, and only four months before the Pope’s scheduled address: “The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology voted Thursday to cut deeply into NASA’s budget for Earth science, in a clear swipe at the study of climate change.” ((Michael Hiltzik (The Economy Hub), “The GOP Attack on Climate Change Science Takes a Big Step Forward”, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2015.))
The Holy See does not hand out Papal Encyclicals every day. Rather, an encyclical, which may address …
The merchants of the Olympic brand are running out of ideas. For decades, the deception of common humanity and the broader interests of building peace before the terror of war supposedly immunised the Olympics from slander and critique. Olympism was a high-ended spectrum of nobility, though it reeked of the body beautiful and a state sponsored cult of blood.
It also meant that countries, and more to the point cities, were encouraged to host the large scale event before a rather inflated name. Megalomaniacs, dictators, and gullible democracies joined in the profligate fun. Even mayor Jean Drapeau of Montreal, host city …
The business records provision of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, is scheduled to expire on June 1st. It’s the legal basis for the NSA’s collection of telephone meta-data inside American borders. A few days ago the House Judiciary Committee proudly announced that it had approved a bill, (HR 2048/S.1123) the USA Freedom Act of 2015, which alters the provisions of Section 215. The Judiciary Committee claims that their proposed legislation “ends bulk collection.” At best this is a mischaracterization that flagrantly ignores additional surveillance laws.
According to language of the bill the revisions defined …
In the UK social services are being cut because of lack of money. In one of the world’s wealthiest countries there are ‘one million Britons using food banks’.
The Conservatives say they will cut 12 billion pounds from the welfare system if they get elected on May 7th. We learn from an Oxford university research paper that this will push the number of people using food banks up to over two million. At the same time the UK government is spending one hundred billion pounds on renewing our arsenal of nuclear weapons which military leaders consider useless as weapons …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 4th, 2015
The announcement by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby that the six officers involved in the murder of Freddie Gray will be prosecuted was welcomed with cheers at City Hall and in Freddie Gray’s community, car horns were honked in celebration. The welcome announcement is a first step toward justice for the family of Freddie Gray and a hopeful beginning for the kind of accountability that has been missing in Baltimore when it comes to police violence.
Don’t expect the concept of extinction or omnicide to roll off the lips of nuclear warriors. Their brains focus on the win-ability of nuclear war to the exclusion of all other possibilities. Let’s take a minute to examine the myopic mindset of nuclear strategists and what we should be doing about it.
The story of nuclear weapons begins with the dropping of an atomic bomb named Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Since then, many authors have written and exposed this event as being more about starting a new war with our ally Russia than …
When the most highly degreed receive food stamps and eat Top Ramen on Fridays
by Paul Haeder / May 4th, 2015
The fight for the $15 an hour wage is alive and strong in Washington State, for faculty, AKA, professors at the college level. Think hard how the majority of faculty teaching young and old in Washington state, known for Bezos of Amazon, Gates of Microsoft, and Big Planes Brought to you by Intelligence Monitoring Boeing, are precarious, working semester-to-semester and quarter-to-quarter and subject to the whine or whim of disgruntled, uninformed and poorly formed students. One bad evaluation, or one helicopter parent against the teacher’s politics, and, bam, bye-bye $3100 a class. Bye-bye job. Bye-bye campus. Bye, sucker, and please …
The Hillary Clinton campaign is now focusing its public pitch at liberal fools to get them to ignore her record and believe her words. Here are examples:
The NBC ‘News’ political analyst (and perhaps a future President Clinton’s Press Secretary) Chuck Todd posted, on May 1, the following item:
*** Why Bernie Sanders likely helps Hillary: Bernie Sanders’ official entrance into the 2016 presidential race is most likely a good outcome for Hillary Clinton. Why? He will elevate many of the issues that Clinton and the entire Democratic Party want to discuss during the primary season (income inequality, curtailing the role of big money in presidential politics, climate change). And he’ll do so …
On April 30, Jonathan Cohn provided a perfect example of what America’s media get wrong about the meaning of “socialism” — and about the meaning of the new U.S. Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders.
Cohn said that “Socialism, as commonly understood by Americans, means widespread government ownership of business,” but Cohn said that, “that’s not the agenda Sanders has actually been promoting.”
We should all welcome the news of charges being brought against the six police officers in Baltimore for the death of Freddie Gray. At the very least, the Baltimore Police Department’s culpability in Gray’s death is uncontroversial.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, those of us not on the ground in Baltimore, anyway, in considering this matter resolved, either locally or nationally. Because it isn’t.
The idea that the “system” is “working” because of these charges is completely false. On the morning of May 1, soon after the charges were brought, Al Sharpton spoke to Tamron …
The war and its results have turned Yemen back a hundred years, due to the destruction of infrastructure … especially in the provinces of Oden, Dhalea, and Taiz.
— Izzedine al-Asbali, Yemeni Human Rights Minister
Yemen is devastated. There are no roads, water, or electricity. Nobody’s left but thieves.
— a resident of Sanaa, Yemen
The Euro-American and Japanese ruling classes, as well as their collaborators in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries, have accumulated vast profit. This has occurred through a complex stratified system re-concentrating the world’s wealth through: 1. The exploitation of labor in the First World (North America and Western …
First of all, spare me any #notallwhites vitriol because you haven’t personally lynched any black people today. (Incidentally, it may be a frivolous aside, but can there be any more depressing harbinger of non-change that this–Lynch–is the last name of the newly installed Attorney General?) If that is your initial reaction, you have already missed the points I haven’t even made yet. You might want to stop reading here (though you in particular should probably read the whole thing). It is a thing of sheer beauty–terrible, evil beauty to be sure. But beauty nonetheless in the way that a near …
A lane, a narrow passage to Jallianwala Bagh Garden inside the old city of Amritsar, in the state of Punjab. It is a monument now, one of the testaments to madness and crimes committed by the British Empire during its colonial reign over Sub-Continent.
This is where, on April 13 1919, thousands of people gathered, demanding release of two of their detained leaders, Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Saifuddin. It was right before the day of Baisakhi, the main Sikh festival, and the pilgrims came to the city, in multitudes, from all corners of Punjab.
The British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer brought fifty Gurkha …
I see my old friends, Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel, are still flogging their dead horse of a Holy Roman-Leninist Empire in their latest DV article, “The Future of Solidarity.”
My previous DV article, “No Marx Again,” criticised them for pushing the notion of a ‘Leninist Socialist State’; where workers who supposedly ‘owned the means of production’ could ‘go on strike’ presumably against themselves for better pay and conditions!
In their latest article, they now admit that their future ‘Marxist’ society would also incorporate both State and Government. This is strange! Doesn’t a ‘Government’ imply the existence of those …
Last week’s drownings in the Mediterranean were the foreseeable, and indeed deliberate, a result of the anti-human policies of strategic violence by a dying neo-colonial empire. They were the consequence, firstly, of a series of wars of aggression that have made life intolerable across vast swathes of Africa and West Asia, and, secondly, of the fateful EU decision last November to end Italy’s search-and-rescue programme, Mare Nostrum. This much has been admitted by politicians and commentators from across the entire British political establishment, from Nigel Farage and the Daily Telegraph to David Cameron and Ed Miliband. Whilst these admissions have often been …
“As you resume or take office, you will recognise one of the heaviest and most important burdens on your desk will be your responsibility for Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. That deterrent exists, as you will know, not as a military weapon but as a political one whose very purpose is for it never to be used in anger. It is there to deter aggression against this country and our allies and to counter any nuclear blackmail which would threaten Britain’s essential interests or survival.”
So, with just days to go before the UK general election, starts the letter in the …
Part Three: Wear jeans, millions of flies can’t be wrong.
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 30th, 2015
Colonel, later Major General, Edward Lansdale began his professional career in advertising. In other words, Lansdale was a corporate propagandist. He is credited with the campaign that made Levi’s Jeans into a “national craze” and converted plain working clothes into what has become the standard clothing item of the American empire. ((Douglas Valentine, “Whatever Happened to the CIA? Dirty Wars and the Cinema of Self-Indulgence”, Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, June 7-9, 2013))
Lansdale went to the Philippines in 1950 where he became infamous for his contributions to the development of US political warfare tactics. ((Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire (2009) …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / April 30th, 2015
TRNN’s Eddie Conway and Megan Sherman and Baltimore City firefighter Gary Nelson give the real account of the encounter between Baltimore youth and police on Monday and discuss the underlying conditions that produced it.
Report: Up to 75 House Republicans Oppose Fast Track, Almost All Democrats Oppose, Fast Track is Dozens of Votes Short of a Majority
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 30th, 2015
Opponents of fast track trade authority from Popular Resistance, Public Citizen, Communication Workers of America and Friends of the Earth rallied on Capitol Hill to welcome Japanese Prime Minister Shinz? Abe as he came to speak to a Joint Session of Congress with a three story tall Trojan Horse. The theme of the protest was ‘No Fast Track for Secret Corporate Trade Deals’. Banners read “No Fast Track for Secret Trojan Treaties” and “Stop the TPP: Transparency Release the Text.” There were also signs in Japanese which said: “U.S. citizens stand in solidarity with Japanese citizens against the TPP” and “TPP = Trojan …
The corporate media keeps churning out good news stories about the booming shale oil and gas industry in the United States. Apparently, the fracking industry is going to lead to America becoming the next Saudi Arabia with a hundred years of oil and natural gas. It will provide cheap energy supplies that will boost U.S. Industry and give a major boost to consumers and help the so-called economic recovery. Yet all of the over inflated claims for shale oil and gas are based upon a fantasy. The geological evidence ((See the exhaustive studies by University of Texas and by the …
…[G]enocide is a new technique of occupation aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost.
– Raphäel Lemkin, 1944
In 2008 I wrote a post-graduate research paper about the “Vietnam War”. I believe I showed quite clearly that Viet Nam lost its war with the United States by any reasonable criteria apart from the most obvious surface events. We are now at the 40th anniversary of the time when North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. Christian Appy has just published a piece criticising a popular revisionism that misrepresents the events of 40 years ago as an uncontextualised …
Once upon a time, the famous criminal Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, and his response was simple, eloquent, and humorous: “Because that’s where the money is.”Well, soon that adage may be proven untrue. What exactly is the meaning of legal tender? In order to place money in its proper perspective, examine what the U.S. Treasury says.
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled “Legal tender,” which states: “United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) …
Chiapas, Mexico — In May of last year, José Luis Solís López, a teacher in the Zapatista community of La Realidad (one of five affiliated communities of the now 20-year-old Zapatista experiment in autonomy and self-governance) was killed by paramilitaries during an ambush in which several other unarmed Zapatistas were also injured. The paramilitaries proceeded to destroy the community’s clinic and seriously damage its school. Such tensions have been a constant part of life in Zapatista territory in the remote south of Mexico. Failing to dislodge the Zapatistas by force after their initial uprising in 1994, the Mexican government, wealthy …
Social Security and Medicare are under attack from Wall Street, conservatives, and free market economists. The claims are that these programs are unaffordable and that the programs can be run more efficiently and at less cost if privatized.
The programs are disparaged as “entitlements.” The word has come to imply that entitled people are getting something at great cost to everyone else. Indeed, entitlements have become conflated with welfare.
In fact, Social Security and Medicare are financed by an earmarked payroll tax paid by employees. (Economists regard the part of the payroll tax that is paid by employers as part of the …
If all of us rolled down our car windows at 5 pm on weekdays, we would hear a single great voice booming out across the land as if God himself were thundering from the heavens. In reality it would be countless car radios beaming out in unison All Things Considered, sometimes known as “Small Things Considered,” so stunted is its coverage of the news. Such jokes abound, “Boring Edition” at morning commute time, with the whole operation labeled “National Propaganda Radio” or “National Pentagon Radio.” My contribution: “National Pablum Radio.”
It’s hard for me to celebrate on Mother’s Day. I feel the absence of my 23-year-old son Sean Elijah Bell, who was killed on November 25, 2006. He was out celebrating at his own bachelor party with his friends in New York City. It was only a matter of a hours before his wedding, and I was so thrilled.
Sean and his friends were enjoying their night at a club where there happened to be three undercover police officers present, conducting an investigation of the club. A confrontation between patrons erupted outside. One of the undercover officer’s, Isnora, said …
The year 2015 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first comical novel in the Western world, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The first part of the irreverent work, published in Madrid in 1605, introduced the world to the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and its definitive sequel of 1615 furthered their misbegotten quest to reactivate knight errantry while doubling down on the pranks and misfortunes they suffered at the hands of fellow Spaniards eager for a laugh. It was doubtless the humorous quality of these pranks and misfortunes that was partly responsible …
The reason the dispossessed turn to violence is because violence is the only thing power understands.
Baltimore is burning, embroiled in riots and protest against the city’s horrifically racist and oppressive police. That it took the death of Freddy Gray, a young man whose spine was severed in police custody, to spark the violence is perhaps less important than the fact that the explosion was inevitable.
Whenever protests against institutional injustice occur, there is the possibility for violence. People do not join in actions against the power of the state without some understanding that their safety may be compromised. The possibility of …
