“Products are supposed to be based on valid scientific data. Strong Choices and the Universal Prevention Model are based on perceptions and opinions.”
In March of 2012 an article was published outlining some of the allegations of fraud, waste and abuse within the US Army’s Center for Substance Abuse Programs (ACSAP). Since the publication of that piece, sources say, only minor changes were made: one employee resigned, another was reprimanded.
Indeed, sources now report that the ACSAP program has become a lucrative for-profit business operating within the US Federal government (ostensibly a non-profit operation). ACSAP management there, Leslie …
There are a wide variety of leakers, some of them from the corporate world, government workers, public servants, military personnel or security contractors. Different avenues are taken regarding the vetting process, the platform chosen to express indignation and the logistics behind the leak itself. Most stay behind to act within the judicial framework. Some, like Edward Snowden, leave the ship in a bid for self preservation. One common theme we can all agree on is the gravity of the consequences faced by whistleblowers.
In contrast with both Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and Snowden relieved with temporary …
For forty years people have been bombarded with claims that economic well being depends on private capital not on governments. Public utilities and services have been privatized. Regulations on corporations have been weakened. Taxes paid by corporations and the top income brackets have been slashed. Capital has been freed to move jobs from higher wage to lower wage countries.
Capitalist minorities — major shareholders and top corporate executives, two percent and less of populations — have increased their share of total income from ten percent to twenty percent. Capitalists have increased funds for private investment, but roads, bridges, rail lines, sewage …
This week, to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the CIA-MI6 overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossaddegh, on August 19th, 1953, the (US) National Security Archive has released documents confirming the details of the coup and the grubby US-UK involvement.
The document makes fairly clear that the British government has fought for much of the sixty years to prevent revelations of details of another shameful event – which has anyway long been public knowledge, if not in minute detail.
The document, “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup”, a posting of recently declassified documents, “includes what …
Word trauma. Print culture dead after all those years. True, nearly all web pages are mostly print, but talk, written or otherwise, is cheap. Everyone writes, though no one reads the everyones’ always writing, no one but themselves at any rate, adding more junk, more artifacts – albeit digital and easily erased – to the proverbial Pile. Screaming raging ranting raving blogging texting worse than television, shut it, shut it, shut, shut, shut the damn thing off.
Some, noticeably more than others, are sensitive to the pain of repetition. Honestly, Gertrude, I’ve known “more of the same” but no repetition in …
When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn’t believe it.
The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.
The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret …
Helen Caldecott is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a world renowned campaigner against nuclear weapons. She says that our species is “mentally sick… The whole society is sick”. We are in the grip of a death wish. She points out that 1 in 25 people are sociopaths with “no moral conscience” and these are the people who rise to the top; who are in charge. Is she right? Have we really become insane? There is good reason to believe so. By insane behaviour I am referring to avoidable behaviour which will result in our own destruction …
It’s hard to believe another day could end this way. That we won’t finally, after all, wake up. “Just a dream,” and all that.
Honestly, I never imagined it would come so — not sudden, there was a kind of sequence of degeneracies, noticeable in sum, but hard to detect from within the slow slide down – never imagined it would come so run-of-the-mill. The process, I mean. Not the thing itself. Which is, which cannot possibly exist. You can be living, you can’t be dead. Well, relative to others around you, sure, you can be dead, as in “he was …
[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay on a 2009 article by Rotella for the Los Angeles Times about an alleged bomb plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2008. It offers a very good illustration of some of the problems raised in my original critique of Rotella’s most recent work, notably the virtually exclusive reliance on sources that are clearly hostile to …
“Lord! You know well that my keen desire is to carry out Your commandments and to serve Thee with all my heart, O light of my eyes. If I were free I would pass the whole day and night in prayers. But what should I do when you have made me a slave of a human being?”
These were the words of the female Muslim mystic and poet, Rabia Al-Adawiya. Her journey from slavery to freedom served as a generational testament of the resolve of the individual who was armed with faith and nothing else.
Based on everything that’s happened in the last 70 years or so, one might reasonably assume the Republican Party is labor’s chief adversary. After all, it was the Republicans who sponsored the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, a squalid piece of pro-business legislation that pretty much defanged and de-clawed the landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act (known as the Wagner Act).
Among other things, Taft-Hartley outlawed jurisdictional and wildcat strikes, secondary boycotts and secondary picketing, the closed shop, and most importantly, provided the legal underpinnings that made “right-to-work” states possible. And, as late as 2009, it was congressional Republicans who torpedoed the proposed …
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
At long last Britain is discussing and objecting to fracking – or we would be if the general public had access to accurate information. As it is, Prime Minister David Cameron is going all out to promote a country-wide embrace of shale gas.
Forgotten is his promise to lead the ‘greenest government ever’. Forgotten is the fact that shale gas is yet one more fossil fuel that increases the risks from climate change; that methane is far worse than most carbon emissions where global warming …
‘We of course recognise that this is it-make or break time for us to make the long overdue change occur now-per our core demands and are thus in it for the long haul-the sacrifice is minor compared to what we’ve endured for 30 years!
— Todd Ashker, prison hunger strike representative 44 days on hunger strike
As the hunger strike enters its eighth week California prison officials have got approval from a federal judge to force feed prisoners. Prison policy is to let prisoners starve to death if they have signed a do not resuscitate request. The judge’s ruling will allow …
The removal of elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, the ongoing crackdown on the Muslim Brothers, the sad deaths of hundreds of people from both sides, and the destruction that ensued have ignited fiery debates between those who support the action and those who oppose it.
It is curious to see how diverse the front of the opponents is. Imperialists, Zionists seeking confusion, governments of diverse political orientations, pretenders of human rights, some Arab writers, many progressive western writers, and sizeable internet writers with hazy understanding of revolutionary issues all joined in the play of a theater of the absurd before Egypt’s …
when you believe that there are no teachers anymore, that’s when you have no idea how dumb your culture really is
It’s what most of us called precarious college faculty want to say, or have deep within, cultured like intellectual bacterium waiting to take over all synaptic functioning –
Henry Giroux —
Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. The reform movement is also determined to underfund and disinvest resources for public schooling so that public education can be completely divorced from any democratic notion of …
Promises, and more promises. First, of a punishment that would be over a century. Then, a reduction to a punishment less than a century. And then, sixty years incarceration with a hefty fine of $100 thousand., though this may well be trimmed to 25 years All of this, for leaking information to a media outfit, history’s foremost moral vigilante in the form of Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks Party.
Bradley Manning did not need to apologise for his actions, to show remorse, but the depths of human emotion can be cavernous, even eternal. Guilt comes galloping up after a decision is made. Remorse …
He was not famous. He never invented anything. He never created a great work of art. He never composed a symphony. But there was something special about him. He had lived a life of moral perfection. He never told a lie. Never disappointed a friend. Never disrespected his parents.
On March 21, 2013, while sleeping in his stroller, someone fired a bullet into his head. In an instant Antonio Santiago was dead…just six weeks after his first birthday. One more dead child in America’s war with itself. Another dead baby in a nation that celebrates violence.
by Medea Benjamin and Pam Bailey / August 20th, 2013
“Blowback” is a lesson the United States government should have learned in the mountains of Afghanistan, the streets of Iraq and the wild territories of Pakistan: Be careful what you sow, because you will reap it tomorrow.
A small delegation of CODEPINK peace activists travelled to the beautiful country of Yemen in June (and yes, despite the images in Western media of a dangerous country overrun by terrorists, it is a country rich with culture and a welcoming population).
We were greeted with some wise words from Abdul-Ghani Al Iryani, a political analyst and founder of Tawq, Yemen’s Democratic Awakening Movement:
If the 16th century statesman and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon could have foreseen America’s 21st century corporations he would have appended “and so too is pretense” to his dictum, “knowledge is power.” Corporations today along with their government stooges maintain power partly by keeping the public in the dark and by pretending to be and do what they are not being and doing.
A corporation is made up of many parts. Some of them are charades. One of them is the corporate ethics program. This article is about it. Other articles will eventually follow on the other parts. The next essay …
Why Eliot Spitzer Is Wall Street’s Worst Nightmare
by Ellen Brown / August 19th, 2013
Before Eliot Spitzer’s infamous resignation as governor of New York in March 2008, he was one of our fiercest champions against Wall Street corruption, in a state that had some of the toughest legislation for controlling the banks. It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers.” The editorial exposed the collusion between the Treasury, the Federal …
Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, many people, including myself, thought that all the “struggles” of that period were linked: the Cultural Revolution in China, the guerillas in Latin America, the Prague Spring and the East European “dissidents”, May 68, the civil rights movement, the opposition to the Vietnam war, and the nominally socialist anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. We also thought that the “fascist” regimes in Spain, Portugal and Greece, by analogy with WWII, could only be overthrown through armed struggle, very likely protracted.
None of these assumptions were correct. The Cultural Revolution had nothing to do …
Her lavender musk was more like life than poetry or lace. She sailed through simple trees; waded gracefully through pools of laughter and all things simply social.
Sweat-hot breathed her skirt: she drank free, more or less, at the common exchange of tongue-on-tongue and ass-squeeze, or flash of tit.
Occasions she sank Lethe-ward, to the rigorously cultivated, carefully tended mind-scape in the place where phrases hide from noise, where language begets other language, and her self-sentence, wide as the cervix of a whale, yet daintily protective of itself, streaked like a train between hills, her ability to bounce back instantly, regain the …
I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange.
– Michael Grunwald, Twitter, Aug 17, 2013
He regrets having tweeted it on Saturday. According to Time Magazine, Michael Grunwald’s endorsement of assassinating WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange via a drone strike was “offensive.” While Twitter is a notorious medium of unreliable guff, its spontaneity, its allowance for rawness, can be a window on the mind. The mind here was particularly disturbed, and disturbing.
What Grunwald, senior national correspondent for Time has been doing is glossing the language of murder with “statist” hygiene, showing …
On 19 June, Barack Obama delivered his unwelcome speech in Berlin. His focus was on overcoming the harms of walls, exclusion and fears in the world, although not making any suggestion of more government transparency by the United States itself. Standing in a bullet-proof box as he spoke to a small non-hostile audience, the man did his best to excuse and justify rampant paranoia, deception and state brutality while simultaneously arguing for a world open and free, without walls and fear.
Adding to the irony, members of the audience also held celebratory signs calling for the end of divisions …
Saying No to the Architecture of Solitary Confinement and Cruelty
by Angola 3 News / August 19th, 2013
Friday, August 16 marked the 40th consecutive dayof a multi-ethnic statewide prisoner hunger strike initiated from inside the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. When the strike first began on July 8, the ‘California Department of Corrections and Reform’ (CDCR) reported 30,000 participants statewide, which the Los Angeles Times wrote “could be the largest prison protest in state history.” In response, the hunger strikers have been shown support from around the world (watch our videos from Oakland, CA).
This week, as the striking prisoners’ health continued to …
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, 2012) is a searing, angry indictment of capitalism in the United States. Pulitzer prize winning journalist and avowed socialist Chris Hedges has teemed up with cartoonist Joe Sacco to catalogue America’s “internal colonies” where the most downtrodden sections of US society survive against the odds. Hedges and Sacco rail against the destruction of working class communities and the obliteration of the environment by big business in its aggressive pursuit of super profits.
The book is divided into five sections. The first four sections …
Mayor of Upper Nazareth exposes the logic of exclusion that defines the current Israeli political and social landscape
by Neve Gordon / August 19th, 2013
The Israeli mayor of Upper Nazareth, Shimon Gaspo, is an honest man. As part of his bid for re-election in the town which overlooks the ancient Palestinian city of Nazareth, he has launched a well-orchestrated political campaign. During the first stage, which began early in August, he furtively posted billboards which quoted left-wing politicians—including Haneen Zoabi from the political party Balad and Ahmed Tibi from the United Arab List-Ta’al—clamouring for his removal.
Zoabi was quoted as saying, “Upper Nazareth was built on Arab land. We will fight to the end against Shimon Gapso’s racism. [Send] the racist home; Arabs to Upper …
The economic crash of 2008 left people in their millions across the globe bewildered and shocked by the catastrophe and devastation inflicted on their lives: the hopelessness of the unemployed young facing a bleak uncertain future, pensioners struggling to survive on pensions that have lost their value, the employed poor accepting a cut in their working hours and wages to avoid losing their jobs, the very poor, the sick and disabled trying to survive the cuts to the welfare safety net. People find it difficult to comprehend how a few powerful bankers could cause so much damage and misery to …
Whistleblower Bradley Manning was beaten down, day and night. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. He was locked in solitary, denied access to a support group, separated from his supporters (the many thousands of us), and worked over by psychologists whose mission was to break him. And it appears to me, based on what I can make of the scanty reports of his incarceration and trial, that in the end he did break, as his tormentors are now triumphantly proclaiming to the world. He apologized for his supposed “crimes,” despite having done …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / August 18th, 2013
In a new episode of Reality Asserts Itself, Paul Jay and Max Blumenthal discuss how the Egyptian military has manipulated the revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood to reestablish a dictatorship by the generals.
