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. …
It has become one of Europe’s biggest music festivals. The current issue of the inflight travel magazine on Serbia’s national airline JAT goes so far as to call it a global event. They are not the only ones. The name of this barnstorming event is Exit (July 10-14), the venue Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, that beautiful Belgrade on Valium, to use an expression wedged in one of the tour guides. Held at the Austrian built fortress of Petrovaradin, it has become a tourist beacon, a noisy attraction if only for a few days.
Are you a fledgling journalist trying to plot a path to prosperity? Do you find yourself torn between high-minded activism and straight-news reportage? Between Michael Moore’s florid exposes and Britt Hume’s studied gravitas? Are you confused by corporate media efforts to discredit The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald when he scooped the the New York Times and other establishment media on the Edward Snowden revelations? Do you wonder if Greenwald is a journalist or just a partisan pundit engineering nefarious disclosures that threaten our troops? Should you simply trust in the defamatory columns by Thomas Friedman and other respectable men with …
… You Know We All Live in the Same Psycho Neighborhood
Interesting events in the neighborhood. Look, the school yard fight is all about how we have become so stupid when it comes to fighting the corrupt pigs running things. How we have failed to teach young and old that they don’t have to show up to work, that they have to show up to city hall and the state capitals, and they must at all costs get arrested en masse protesting the likes of almost every single corporation on the planet.
Fukushima Radiation Leaks Rise Sharply, Officials Are Baffled As to Why
by William Boardman / July 13th, 2013
Fukushima Situation Normal, in The SNAFU Sense of “Normal”
Bad as the situation is at Fukushima, it’s gotten worse.
Perhaps you’ve heard that radiation levels of the water leaving the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power plane and flowing into the Pacific Ocean have risen by roughly 9,000 per cent. Turns out, that’s probably putting a good face on it.
By official measurement, the water coming out of Fukushima is currently 90,000 times more radioactive than officially “safe” drinking water.
These are the highest radiation levels measured at Fukusmima since March 2011, when an earthquake-triggered tsunami destroyed the …
People are shocked by the scope of secret state spying on their private communications, especially in light of documentary evidence leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
While the public is rightly angered by the illegal, unconstitutional nature of NSA programs which seize and store data for retrospective harvesting by intelligence and law enforcement officials, including the content of phone calls, emails, geolocational information, bank records, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, even medical records–in secret, and with little in the way of effective oversight–the historical context of how, and why, this vast spying apparatus came to be is …
The game of secrets is the hot house of deception. In it, the child of truth is spared in favour of the rod of deceit. In the conspiracy matrix, involving a trading of secrets, the entertainment of exposures and the trafficking of lies, conspiracy theories are near friends. Speculation is never far. Move over the post-nuclear world, argued Paul Virilio – we are living in the age of the information bomb.
For one thing, there is an undercurrent of suspicion as to why Edward Snowden did, in fact, reveal what he did and when he did. Such is the insidiousness of …
Pennsylvanians want to put a moratorium on fracking.
And it’s not just a few thousand, but a majority of the state’s residents.
Pennsylvania lies in the heart of the Marcellus Shale, possibly the most productive shale for gas in the country.
A joint University of Michigan/Muhlenberg College study reveals that only 49 percent of Pennsylvanians support shale gas extraction and 58 percent of all Pennsylvanians want the state to order “time out” until the health and environmental effects of fracking can be fully analyzed. That same study revealed that 60 percent of Pennsylvanians believe fracking poses a major risk to …
Scientific evidence is compelling that something big is brewing up north in the Arctic, “the sleeping climate giant.” As follows, when this sleeping giant awakens, life may never be the same. Unfortunately, its long slumber is now coming back to life, and the scientists studying this event are deeply concerned.
The danger involves an Arctic meltdown, and, as this sleeping giant awakens, it will prompt events that will likely cause significant disruption of the global economy, intense political turmoil, and global war as worldwide food production is seriously impaired. Some leading scientists refer to this impending event as a prescription for …
On July 1, the unionized employees of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) went out on what became a four and a half day strike. Despite the melodramatic tone of the media—practically depicting these transit workers as a group of unpredictable and ungrateful renegades—it was the first shutdown of BART since 1997.
Although no agreement was reached, the union (Service Employees International Union, Local 1021 and Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1555) willingly returned to work, willingly extended the existing contract (which had expired) for 30 days, and promised to continue to bargaining in good faith.
Haaretzreported today that one third of Israeli Jews want the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem.
Apparently dozens of movements in Israel are attempting to change the status quo at Haram Ash-Sharif, widely considered the third holiest site in Islam. They aim towards a resurrection of the Jewish Temple at the site. Some are reconstructing ceremonial objects used in the Temple in the past, while others are making practical preparations for its rebuilding, including a renewal of animal sacrifice. Others deal in political lobbying and with encouraging Jews to visit the Mount.
“Attempts to distance the People of Israel from its …
Guantanamo Bay represents the worst aspects of the decaying US Imperialist system: war, land theft, loss of the right to a trial, torture, and rendition. The prison violates the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and ignores the World Court and UN. Graphic artist Doug Minkler illustrates Guantanamo Bay.
IPS — Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor who was prevented by Argentine President Cristina Kirchner from testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee investigating alleged Iranian terrorist networks in the Americas here this week, claimed in a recent report that Tehran was involved in a 2007 plot to blow up fuel tanks at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.
But his report offers no actual evidence that Iran was ever even aware of the airport plot, and the official documents in the case indicate that the U.S. government found no such evidence either.
Nisman’s sensational charge appears to be aimed at undermining the …
The obvious conclusion from Egypt is that political Islam’s ‘concordat’ with democracy has proven a failed experiment. As predicted by Essam Haddad, ‘the message will resonate throughout the Muslim world that democracy is not for Muslims.’ The message has in fact been enthusiastically taken up, with Islamists saying ‘we told you so.’ An article on one such website states, ‘recent experience in Egypt has once again exposed the reality of ‘democracy’ and the true face of democracy- worshippers… democracy isn’t meant for us Muslims.’ The few willing to undertake a deeper and more insightful analysis of the dynamics of political …
The first thing to know about the danger from the radioactive mass remaining on site in the three reactors that melted down at Fukushima is that nobody knows how much radioactive material there is, nobody knows how much uranium and plutonium it contains, and nobody knows how to make it safe — so no one knows how great the continuing danger is.
To prevent nuclear material from being diverted to use in weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency of the U.N. requires each country to report regularly on the volume of nuclear materials in its nuclear power plants. At …
