Clutching a sheaf of newspaper clippings in one hand and a medical bag in the other, Dr. Franklin Peterson Comstock III, knocking down pregnant ladies, students, the elderly, and even two burly construction workers who were waiting for a bus, rushed past me, leaving me in a close and personal encounter with the concrete. Since he had given up medicine to invest in a string of service stations and an oil distributorship, I assumed what was in his medical bag was the morning’s take from obscene profits.
If Juror B37 reflects the mindset of the jury, those five white and one black women made a collective decision to dismiss the actions of George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012 in their collective rush to convict Trayvon Martin. In that rainy, prematurely dark twilight, Zimmerman stalked Trayvon Martin, a young Black man walking to his father’s home during an NBA All-Stars half-time, talking to a friend on his phone, carrying some snacks for the second half of the game. They scuffled, and Zimmerman drew on Martin and killed him. In acquitting him, the jury decided Trayvon was responsible for his own death.
The Obama Administration has proposed new regulations for hydraulic fracturing on 756 million acres of public and tribal lands. The rules were written by the drilling industry and will be streamlined into effect by a new intergovernmental taskforce established by the president, to promote fracking — a practice that has been linked to water poisoning, air pollution, methane emissions and, most recently, earthquakes.
Environmentalists, many of whom are highly skeptical that fracking can even be regulated, hope to use a brief window for citizen participation in the rule approval process to leverage the growing anti-fracking movement.
This July, Bank of America was expecting to report an earnings increase of 32% from last year. The Washington Business Journaldeclared the bank among the top 10 “most improved brands” of the year. Bank of America is the second-largest bank in the United States following JPMorgan Chase.
So why does this bank deserve such an “improved” reputation? Perhaps it’s worth looking at a little of the bank’s record for some clarity.
During the first year of the global financial crisis, which the big banks helped to create and which they profited enormously from, the government stepped in to bail out …
Riddle of The Sphinx: What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?
Answer: Man — after crawling to safety, running for cover, then finally getting hit (just a matter of time; odds are against him; the House always wins…)
On July 16, Foreign Secretary William Hague answered questions in the British Parliament from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Developments on UK Foreign Policy.
Ann Clwyd (Labour, Cynon Valley) whose cheerleading and misleading for the invasion of Iraq and whose numerous visits to Iraqi Kurdistan and alleged close friendship with Kurdish war lord, Jalal Talabani, led Iraqis and Iraq watchers to dub her “Mrs Talabani”, is seemingly on the war path again.
She asked the Foreign Secretary: “ … to what extent the UK government is prepared to hold the (Syrian) opposition to account, as well as Assad, for serious human rights …
Those enchanted by pseudo-reality must have been at the edge of their seats as they watched ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, a Hollywood account of how US SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011.
But a recently leaked report shows that the ‘riveting’ Hollywood account of the ‘greatest manhunt of all time’ was hardly as glamorous as it was made to be. In fact, if it were not for the ‘shocking state of affairs’ in Pakistan itself, where local governance had ‘completely collapsed’, the raid would have been yet another botched attempt at killing a man that had been …
An intelligent, self-interested observer of this case, who happens to live in Florida, would not be wrong to do as George Zimmerman did – buy a gun, master the finer points of Florida self-defense law, and then wait.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, July 14, 2013
Deliberations in the law court are one thing, often dull, often sterile. The result can be something else. George Zimmerman’s acquittal has unleashed a furious storm, though it is a complex one, riddled with overtones of race and legalism.
Among the great U.S. curses is that of race. Colour blind legal systems only belong to the land …
The decision in the Florida murder trial of George Zimmerman is being treated as a case of racism, but while the murder itself could well have been motivated by race, the jury decision hardly needed to have been.
The crippling social disease of American racism is all too often dumped on individuals or groups or locales thereby leaving the social order relatively unquestioned and allowing certain Americans to feel free of the disease and superior to those who seem to more obviously suffer its worst aspects. Thus we have divisions of the public into “minorities” and Red state – Blue state …
No one outdoes Texan Diane Wilson for unflinching, off-the-wall, over-the-fence, ingeniously brilliant protests. That insight struck me after a phone chat about her dramatic, face-to-face White House fence insurgency against relentless Guantanamo abuses. Then, for perspective, I asked her celebrated CODEPINK cohort to pinpoint Diane’s special gifts and activist standing.
“One of a kind,” says the anti-war group’s co-founder, Medea Benjamin, amazed how this “fearless, clairvoyant visionary” brings to every protest action an “enormous compassion” for those wronged by official powers. “She gets it,” Benjamin explained, “how separate parts are linked, intuitively connecting human suffering with key corporate, environmental, legal …
The most important thing about the Zimmerman verdict is that it’s a clear demonstration of how the American legal system is only about law. It is not about justice. It is not even about the consequences of killing another person.
The verdict demonstrates that, despite the protestations of the law that it is about justice, that’s only a pretense to cover the reality: that when the law produces justice, it’s a fluke, an accident, a surprise. The law is only about the law.
And it’s no wonder, when you stop to think about …
"Is it naive to think Mr. Obama really believed this stuff?" YES.
by Nicholas C. Arguimbau / July 17th, 2013
Houston, The Economist “Secret government: America against democracy,” is a compelling and scary analysis of secret government in America — a nation that has become a caricature of the open government President Obama promised when he came to office.
There is nothing new about broken campaign promises. Obama, however, has taken that many steps farther. He offered us a vision in 2008 of a nation of open government, democracy operating as it was designed to operate. Reality is now so stunningly different that his maintenance of the same vision has become virtually psychotic.
In the midst of its short summer, Moscow is balmy and relaxed. Sidewalks brim with tables and merry customers, even traffic jams are less severe due to holiday season. The only danger for men is the girls’ dresses, they are precariously short.
In a few days, perhaps even tomorrow, the charms and dangers of the city will be available to Edward Snowden, who is about to receive a refugee ID, allowing him to roam freely the whole length and breadth of Russia and to socialise with its folk.
It will be a nice change from Sheremetyevo International Airport, where he was marooned …
It’s Corporate-loving/protecting Dogs Eat Pomeranian — that would be them eating us
Oh, can we reconcile the stupidity, meanness, vicious dog-eat-dog nature of the average American now when it comes to assessing our education systems? These people are in high and low office, and many are on boards and many are parents with kids, and, unfortunately, many are just done-with-anything-worthy-for-society people who pronounce More-Ett-Toes (mojitos) for their muddled drinks set out on slave-labor patio furniture next to the five-gallon bucket of Doritos and dog dish bowls of goo-wok-oh-mo-lee (guacamole).
Oh, maybe they were never worthy-for-society, somehow getting the shaft in elementary school, never …
How can we face a future of climate change if we have forgotten our past?
by Lesley Docksey / July 16th, 2013
Climate change, along with the disastrous effects it will have on the earth and humanity, is being ignored by much of society. I differentiate between the earth and humanity because many people only relate to the problems that humans might suffer, not fully understanding that what damages the earth also damages us. During the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio, media headlines were screaming “We’ve only got 20 years to save the earth!” An environmentalist dryly pointed out, “No. The earth will survive. We have 20 years to save humanity.”
But we cannot even begin to contemplate our own extinction. So …
Amid shock waves from the revelations of mass global NSA spying, the US government reaction to leaker Edward Snowden took a dramatic turn. From media smearing to overcharging him with espionage, this followed the predictable pattern of Obama’s war on whistleblowers; shooting the messengers by demonizing and discrediting them in order to kill the message or distract people from it.
This has occurred numerous times with the Obama administration with the aggressive attacks on WikiLeaks and its source Bradley Manning, as well as other NSA whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and imprisoned former CIA officer John Kiriakou.
Mass Hunger Strike by Californian prisoners protesting torture conditions
by Dylan Murphy / July 16th, 2013
We are certain that we will prevail . . . the only questions being: How many will die starvation-related deaths before state officials sign the agreement? The world is watching!
— Statement by California Hunger Strikers
On Monday 8 July over 30,000 prisoners in 24 of California’s jails started an indefinite hunger strike and work stoppage. This historic struggle is the third hunger strike by prisoners in three years. The prisoners are protesting against indefinite solitary confinement in Security Housing Units (SHU’s). An additional 2,300 prisoners refused to work or attend classes.
Donna Willmott of the Prison Hunger Strikers Solidarity Committee has said …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / July 16th, 2013
Another jobs report is in and it shows continued waddling along in job creation, just enough to keep the unemployment figure stable. The reality is the collapse has cost the nation 3 million jobs and that number is not shrinking. The “Lost Out-Put Clock” shows the nation has lost $4,602,667,601,6089 in national income and counting since the 2008 collapse.
To make matters worse we are now entering a new reality of poor jobs, part-time and temporary, and low-paid without benefits like health insurance. Big business makes big profits off these workers but treats them like they are disposable people. Workers who …
Cupid, lean, mean, boyish, but no brat, nor heavenly bun of baby fat, plunged wild-eyed into Psyche (lissome, fragrant, amber-thighed; like ripe, exotic fruit – denied).
Clever, subtle boy, at ease in darkness, wet with joy, his tongue danced dithyrambs the gods alone could hear, and some women in dreams, when youth was near. This long night, seasoned like years, this holiday from boredom, fear, was sliced like salmon-skin by ice-blue lights — flash! flash! — and screams of sexless sirens. Shrill, metallic.
Punishment for pleasures pursued prior to Law’s blessing.
Can’t we all just get along, whites and blacks, and agree that Barack Obama is a racist? Not that he hates white people like the Tea Partiers say — it’s black people that he can’t stand. Whether he’s trashing black males on Father’s Day or softening them up with body blows for the worldwide economic race to the bottom at a Morehouse College speech or indifferently presiding over the greatest destruction of black wealth in 100 years or simply singing a tune of betrayal of a longtime friendship (“Jeremiah Wright was a bullfrog– and no friend of mine!”), Obama is …
Several Saturdays ago, a Mourning Dove woke me, its pseudo-forlorn coo complimented by the light patter of rain on my tent. It was the most peaceful moment of the day. I didn’t want to get up, and I didn’t have to. I was camping northeast of San Antonio.
When it rains at my house, it’s mostly just something that happens outside my window or on my windshield. I rarely hear it or feel it. It’s hardly an inconvenience, much less an interesting experience. But it was a big deal that morning because it hadn’t rained in …
In the fall of 1990 and into the early weeks of 1991 millions of people around the world protested the anticipated US-led war against Iraq. From Washington, DC to London; Berlin to Tokyo; Bangladesh to Gaza, massive protests were held in the months leading up to the January 16, 1991 attack. I myself attended one of the most emotionally powerful antiwar protests I had ever attended the day before the war began. It was in Olympia, WA. Over 3000 people (in a county with a population of around 100,000) attended a rally and then marched to the Washington State Capitol. …
In distant memory’s flash of neural circuits there is nothing solid to behold.
We know too much of what we know. The necessity of keeping one’s True intact, that is, not to lose oneself to spectacles of sun and moon as cult objects littering the days, months, years digested and disbursed so long ago.
“Serious” can’t be serious if it’s not eternal. The eternal we contemplate, from the comfort of green chairs, the we we believe is in us is not us, we know, because of what we know, or think we know, is known by the ones …
First Central Florida, then the South 48 and finally the World According To Facebook, have all been agog over the past month with the ongoing Trial of George Zimmerman, or the triumph of Law over Justice. Or, as one Congresswoman put it the unacknowledged and silent trial of Trayvon Martin
As the trial date approached, instead of borrowing an orange bus from one of the old-folks’ conclaves that dot the Sunshine State, and sending it to Arkansas or Kansas to collect an impartial group of yokels who knew nothing about George Zimmerman (or Central Florida, …
Lynching: “Violent punishment or execution, without due process, for real or alleged crimes.”
Today, I stood in Leimert Park listening to the anguish of people working through the idea that they, their children, could be murdered for walking home in a hoodie. I listened to mothers and fathers who had to again live through the unjust deaths of their own children in the faces of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin. People proclaimed that the U.S. is a racist state, built on racism, and that in this racist system White people had no responsibility to see that Black people received justice. …
America, civilized, cult wired hard. Urban Uranium Ur. See plus-plus, sea town of Gloucester. Hardwired Olson. Creeley wired hard. Mainly framed, mocking programmers’ sea pearl of “mythic child-spray” said Creeley. Olson added, “Misty surge hormonal.”
There is a strange unplanned irony to history. Events that relate to each other often occur simultaneously. In this case, the not guilty verdict of George Zimmerman is paired with the public disgrace of Paula Deen. Both offended public sensibilities by reminding Americans of a time thought to be long passed. In Zimmerman’s case it was the days of extra-legal lynching and in Deen’s the days when a kind of “cracker-culture” ruled the South and was admired by mainstream Americans.
Deen’s is accused of brazenly employing the n-word when talking to an African-American employee of her restaurant chain. …
Whereas: Former Chad dictator Hissène Habré is about to be tried for crimes against humanity and atrocities, (Habré’s army was funded, armed and trained by Americans during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Habré, who seized power in a CIA-backed coup in 1982 and ruled with an iron fist until his own overthrow in 1990, was used to prevent African Union Chairman Gadaffi’s planned union of Libya and Chad). ((Former Chad leader Hissène Habré charged with crimes against humanity. Ronald Reagan’s support for dictator accused of killing and torturing tens of thousands of opponents offers cautionary tale for American intervention.))
In March 2013 Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was invited by some pro-business, pro-industry students at an American university to give a keynote address via video conference. Several staff and students petitioned against the keynote address by the one who has been accused repeatedly in the murder of several thousands of his state’s citizens, mostly Muslim men, women and children, (( “We Have No Orders To Save You,” Human Rights Watch, 2002 report on Gujarat communal violence.)) and “State- Sponsored Discrimination” against hundreds of thousands more in the decade that followed which has been documented by human rights organizations. …
