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.
In times of crisis people strive for easy answers to complex situations. In Egypt this has resulted in absurdly digestible sound bites, where one side is labeled “good”(the Muslim Brotherhood), the other “bad” (the army), and the revolution as a whole is condemned as an atrocity. But the situation in Egypt is especially contradictory, and untying the social-political knots of the revolution requires avoiding pre-packaged catchphrases.
Contrary to the claims of many, reports of the revolution’s death are greatly exaggerated. Those who predict that Egypt will inevitably enter a long period of military dictatorship forget that the Egyptian revolution destroyed …
I’m no expert on 9/11 and do not believe in esoteric theories. My attitude towards 9/11 has been marked by a certain curiosity, but also by healthy skepticism. When I initially stumbled across articles questioning the official 9/11 narrative, I just read them and put them away. With Davidsson’s book, it was different: it immediately captivated me.
Having hitch-hiked extensively all over the United States and studied international relations at …
The individual human mind, with its inherent capacity for critical analysis of received “truths,” remains the final, not yet entirely colonized, frontier. I remain convinced that this capacity, if resistant to the flood of unremitting propaganda, can still find its way to real understanding of perplexing, camouflaged governmental policies and crimes. It is not that the average U.S. citizen is incapable of critical thinking, but that there is little incentive to exercise it. Everywhere she turns, she feels boxed-in, blocked from the free exercise of her principles and values. From …
As we watch the Egyptian military and police forces kill and maim their fellow Egyptians we can wonder if Washington will cut off all aid to the Egyptian junta. That’s what it is, a junta. Even if it was a progressive military coup (which it is not), it would still be in power because of a coup. Therefore, it is a junta.
Democracy in the modern world is deceptive. In a true expression of its origins in the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, modern day democracy represents one class in every society where it exists. …
Glacier outburst floods may be broadly defined as the sudden release of water stored either within a glacier or dammed by a glacier (Fountain and Walder, 1998). Outburst floods have been reported in all glaciated regions of the world and may be triggered by:
The sudden drainage of an ice-dammed lake below or through an ice dam;
Lake water overflow and rapid fluvial incision of ice, bedrock or sediment barriers; or
The growth and collapse of subsurface reservoirs (Benn and Evans, 1998).
Due to their high and rapid discharge, the outburst floods originating from high mountain/alpine glaciers have devastating impacts on …
Earlier this month, I wrote an article about Edward Snowden, an NSA whistleblower who bravely spilled the beans about how the NSA and their affiliates are wiretapping the planet. Snowden is a wise man who made the right decision in not trusting the U.S. Justice system, who recently was granted temporary asylum in Russia. However, I want to focus on a different unique individual and give credit to whistleblowers in general.
Many of us will never truly understand the significance of giving oneself for a worthy cause… the selfless act of becoming a “whistleblower.” To sacrifice everything you hold dear …
Victim of Black Gang Is Posthumous Right-wing Propaganda Tool
by William Boardman / August 17th, 2013
This Example of Rightwing Intellectual Dishonesty Starts With a Death
The story began, according to news reports and arrest warrants, after 1 a.m. on Sunday, June 30, when Joshua Chellew, 36, an unmarried, redheaded white man stopped at a Chevron station in Mableton, Georgia, where he lives. According to the 19-year-old woman who was waiting in Chellew’s car, he went into the gas station to get something. When he came out he met up with four young black men, ages 18 and 19, the witness said:
“He was coming outside of the store talking to himself like …
Tom Swanky is the author of The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhquot’in and Other First Nations Resistance, ((See review.)) an investigative account that includes the First Nations narrative. The First Nations narrative is one that includes knowledge passed on by oral tradition, knowledge that had long been dismissed by the western narrative bound more so to the written record. However, the oral culture has its own disciplines that help to preserve the validity of the narrative, ((Marlene Brant Castellano, “Updating Aboriginal Traditions of Knowledge” in Indigenous …
Part 6 of 6: The Internationalization of the Amazon and Blackwater Death Squads.
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 16th, 2013
When President Barack Obama visited Brazil in 2011, he was greeted by protestors denouncing US imperialism in the region and its plans for a War on Libya. Protestors also denounced the 2 billion dollar loan given by the US government to state oil company Petrobras after it discovered one of the biggest oil fields in the world in Tupi in 2007. Protestors firebombed the US embassy before the protests and the police used plastic bullets and tear gas to crush the uprisings. These Brazilians were certainly not in need of an ‘awakening’.
Many of the protestors were members of the Workers …
It is a pity that an Attorney General with the surname of Dreyfus has decided that history, notably one of injustice, is something for other people. The Dreyfus Affair, France’s divisive scandal involving Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ alleged communication of French military secrets to the German embassy in Paris, plagued France from 1894 to 1906.
The point of it was that Dreyfus was framed and made an example of, banished to Devil’s Island. He was convicted – twice. He was exonerated only in 1906. The military establishment, with its baubles and pleasantries, had been keen to keep evidence coming to light that …
A couple of good things happened on the labor front recently. Granted, thirty-five years ago, neither of these events would have merited more than a casual footnote, let alone be considered “good.” But that was back in 1978, when there was still hope. Considering how toxic and treacherous the labor climate has become in the ensuing thirty-five years—and how rare anything remotely resembling “good news” is—both are worth mentioning.
The Senate finally approved all five NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) nominees. As modest as it seems, this was no small feat. Given all the game-playing, stone-walling and obstructionism that animate the …
I don’t know if the Guinness Book of World Records has a special section for “Chutzpah.”
If it does not, it should. That’s the one competition where we might take home a few gold medals.
The first one would surely go to Binyamin Netanyahu.
This week, on the eve of the first round of serious negotiations between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu did two interesting things: he announced plans for several large new settlement projects and he accused the Palestinians of grievous incitement against Israel.
Let’s take the settlements first. As explained by Israeli diplomats to their American colleagues, and …
Many US shale companies that have been beating the drums of shale “revolution” are now facing oil and gas well depletion. In February 2013 the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) warned that “diminishing returns to scale and the depletion of high productivity sweet spots are expected to eventually slow the rate of growth in tight oil production”. It was a cautious but intriguing statement.
Arthur Berman, a prominent shale skeptic who runs Labyrinth Consulting firm in Sugarland, Texas, is not surprised. “The shale gas phenomenon has been funded mostly by debt and equity offerings. At this point, further debt and …
In its weekend supplement devoted to geopolitics French daily Le Monde published 8 March, 2013 a report entitled “Syrie : à Atmé, entre révolution et désenchantement” – “Syria: Atme, between revolution and disenchantment”- Christophe Ayad, a regular embedded journalist with NATO’s mercenary forces in Syria, reports on the mixture of despair and chaos that reigns in rebel controlled territory. One of the rebels tells the French reporter that “three former soldiers of the Irish military elite” provided training to Syrian rebels. It is claimed the Irish soldiers were acting as “independent mercenaries”. These “former soldiers of the Irish military …
