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This is HISTORY and made me almost weep with JOY!!
Obama wins right to indefinitely detain Americans under NDAA
Published: 18 September, 2012, 19:55
http://rt.com/usa/news/obama-lohier-ndaa-stay-414/
A lone appeals judge bowed down to the Obama administration late Monday and reauthorized the White House’s ability to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or due process.
Last week, a federal judge ruled that an temporary injunction on section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 must be made permanent, essentially barring the White House from ever enforcing a clause in the NDAA that can let them put any US citizen behind bars indefinitely over mere allegations of terrorist associations. On Monday, the US Justice Department asked for an emergency stay on that order, and hours later US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier agreed to intervene and place a hold on the injunction.
The stay will remain in effect until at least September 28, when a three-judge appeals court panel is expected to begin addressing the issue.
On December 31, 2011, US President Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law, even though he insisted on accompanying that authorization with a statement explaining his hesitance to essentially eliminate habeas corpus for the American people.
“The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it,” President Obama wrote. “In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”
A lawsuit against the administration was filed shortly thereafter on behalf of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and others, and Judge Forrest agreed with them in district court last week after months of debate. With the stay issued on Monday night, however, that justice’s decision has been destroyed.
With only Judge Lohier’s single ruling on Monday, the federal government has been once again granted the go ahead to imprison any person "who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners" until a poorly defined deadline described as merely “the end of the hostilities.” The ruling comes despite Judge Forrest's earlier decision that the NDAA fails to “pass constitutional muster” and that the legislation contained elements that had a "chilling impact on First Amendment rights”
Because alleged terrorists are so broadly defined as to include anyone with simple associations with enemy forces, some members of the press have feared that simply speaking with adversaries of the state can land them behind bars.
"First Amendment rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and cannot be legislated away," Judge Forrest wrote last week. "This Court rejects the Government's suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention."
Bruce Afran, a co-counsel representing the plaintiffs in the case Hedges v Obama, said Monday that he suspects the White House has been relentless in this case because they are already employing the NDAA to imprison Americans, or plan to shortly.
“A Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued Friday claiming that the riots [in the Middle East] are likely to come to the US and saying that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely riots,” Afran told Hedges for a blogpost published this week. “It is my view that this is why the government wants to reopen the NDAA — so it has a tool to round up would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any protest, violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power. Since the request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the day of the riots, and following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that the two are connected. The government wants to reopen the NDAA injunction so that they can use it to block protests.”
Within only hours of Afran’s statement being made public, demonstrators in New York City waged a day of protests in order to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Although it is not believed that the NDAA was used to justify any arrests, more than 180 political protesters were detained by the NYPD over the course of the day’s actions. One week earlier, the results of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union confirmed that the FBI has been monitoring Occupy protests in at least one instance, but the bureau would not give further details, citing that decision is "in the interest of national defense or foreign policy."
Josh Gerstein, a reporter with Politico, reported on the stay late Monday and acknowledged that both Forrest and Lohier were appointed to the court by President Obama.
Thanks 8th! I've posted more on the past:) Will get back in that groove as the farm/garden/work settle back down this fall.
I'm sticking with date of death as Dec 2001 from kidney failure for $200.00 Alex...
Lol
Inside story of Obama’s struggle to keep Congress from controlling outcome of debt ceiling crisis
By Bob Woodward, Published: September 8
President Obama summoned the top four congressional leaders to the White House on Saturday morning, July 23, 2011. The night before, House Speaker John A. Boehner had withdrawn from negotiations to raise the $14 trillion federal debt limit and save the government from a catastrophic default. “Nobody wanted to be there,” Boehner later recalled. “The president’s still pissed.”
They had about 10 days left before the government would run out of money. Given the global importance of U.S. Treasury securities, failing to extend the debt limit could trigger a worldwide economic meltdown.
Boehner said he believed that he and the others — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — had a plan. He told Obama: We think we can work this out. Give us a little more time. We’ll come back to you. We are not going to negotiate this with you.
Obama objected, saying that he couldn’t be left out of the process. “I’ve got to sign this bill,” he reminded the leaders as they sat in the Cabinet Room off the Oval Office.
“Mr. President,” Boehner challenged, “as I read the Constitution, the Congress writes the laws. You get to decide if you want to sign them.”
Reid, the most powerful Democrat on Capitol Hill, spoke up. The congressional leaders want to speak privately, he said. Give us some time.
This was it. Congress was taking over. The leaders were asking the president to leave the meeting he had called in the White House.
Fine, Obama said. Talk. Knock yourselves out. There is no pride of authorship here, just do it — if you can.
How did it feel, I asked the president in an interview on July 11, 2012, to be voted off the island in his own house?
“I’m not concerned about protocol,” he said. His concern was “an end run around the White House.”
Before the meeting, without telling Obama, the four leaders had tentatively agreed on the framework of a deal. The congressional plan guaranteed that the debt limit would have to be revisited during the 2012 presidential campaign, and Obama was insisting that any agreement would have to take the country through the election.
Around 10 p.m., Obama called Boehner, who was at dinner with friends.
I am not going to sign a bill that requires me to deal with the debt ceiling a second time before the election, the president told him. He was furious.
“Listen,” Boehner said he told Obama, “I understand it. All right? But you’re not going to have a choice. We’ve got an agreement.”
The speaker recalled, “He was moaning and groaning and whining and demanding . . . threatening. .?.?. He was pretty desperate.” Obama again said he would veto such a bill.
We’re too close to default to reopen the talks, Boehner said. Congress is going to move forward on its own.
Asked recently about Boehner’s description of their late-night call, Obama said, “Listen, anybody who knows me knows I don’t moan, I don’t groan, I don’t whine.” He laughed, “I’m not desperate. I was very angry about how he had behaved, and more concerning was the fact that we were now only a few days from there literally being $5 billion left in the Treasury for the United States government.”
Just $5 billion was about half a day’s worth of the federal government’s expenditures — closer to the wire than the public had been told.
The president told his senior staff that the call with Boehner had led nowhere.
“So we’ve got to figure out Plan B. Which is, how do we get out of this thing?” he said.
The problem was that they did not have a Plan B.
It was increasingly clear that no one was running Washington. That was trouble for everyone, but especially for Obama. Although running things is a joint venture between the president and Congress, a president has to dominate Congress — or at least be seen as dominating Congress. The last president to fold was George H.W. Bush, who gave in to Democrats’ demands that income taxes be raised in a 1990 budget deal. And Bush had been a one-term president.
When Obama learned that the deal negotiated among the congressional leaders would require a two-step increase in the debt limit, he told Rob Nabors, the White House director of legislative affairs, “The one thing I said I actually needed, they didn’t get,” referring to Reid and Pelosi. “I needed this to go past the election, and they didn’t get it for me. This can’t work.”
Obama sent word that he wanted the two Democratic leaders at the White House at 6 p.m. that Sunday, July 24. No reason was given.
Reid arrived in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, David Krone.
“Harry,” the president began, “I hear you have kind of an outline, a framework of something.”
Reid began to lay out the two-step $2.7 -trillion debt limit extension, then stopped. He was not a details guy. “Well, let David just tell you what it is,” he said.
It was highly unusual for someone to pass the ball so completely to a staffer. The 44-year-old Krone outlined the plan, including a secret Republican pledge to count $1 trillion in savings from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan toward deficit reduction. That was surprising. Earlier, Boehner had not been willing to accept this accounting gimmick.
“I don’t trust these guys,” the president said dismissively.
Krone either would not or could not conceal his anger.
“Wait a second,” Obama said, interrupting someone else who was about to speak. “I can tell David has something else to say.”
“Mr. President, I am sorry — with all due respect — that we are in this situation that we’re in, but we got handed this football on Friday night. And I didn’t create this situation. The first thing that baffles me is, from my private-sector experience, the first rule that I’ve always been taught is to have a Plan B. And it is really disheartening that you, that this White House did not have a Plan B.”
Several jaws dropped as the Hill staffer blasted the president to his face.
“So I don’t have a lot of options, in the past 36, 48 hours, to put together,” Krone continued. “We’re supposed to be the ones that fend off an economic catastrophe. And what we find ourselves is now, with no deal, we’re going to have to root for the worst possible things to happen in order to prove to the Republicans that you cannot be so callous and let the debt limit expire.
“That is a horrible position that we’re in,” Krone said. “And so this may not be the perfect deal, but it’s the only deal that we have on the table right now in the situation that we find ourselves.”
Obama replied: “I understand what you think you’re doing. I’m not doing that. The one thing that we need to bring stability to this economy is not throwing the debt limit increase back into the political arena. I’m not doing that under any circumstances. So if that means that I’m not signing this bill, I’m not signing the bill.”
After the meeting, Obama made a beeline for Krone. The others stepped back so the two could talk, but they still overheard the president’s words.
“I’m sorry,” Obama said, putting an arm around Krone’s shoulder. “You didn’t deserve that. I know how hard you’re working, and I know we wouldn’t even have a chance without you.”
Reid gave Krone a ride back to the Capitol. The majority leader was almost like a father to him.
“You stood up to him,” Reid said. “He needed to hear it, and nobody was telling him.”
Asked later about the meeting with Reid and Krone, Obama said, “What I said to them is, essentially, any short-term deal is not going to be acceptable. We can go back to the drawing board, but we’re running out of time. They need to understand we’re not going to do a short-term deal.”
After more pressure from Obama, Reid split from the other congressional leaders. Later that night, he released a $2.7 trillion deficit reduction plan with a single-step debt limit increase that would last through 2012.
Five days later, on Friday, July 29, by a narrow margin of 218 to 210, the House passed Boehner’s version of the proposal. It included the two-step procedure that the president adamantly opposed.
In the White House at 10 later that night, Obama’s key advisers discussed the House vote. There was a chance the Senate Democrats would fold, because the fastest solution would be to pass the House bill and get out of town for their summer recess. If the bill managed to gain Senate approval, would the president really veto it?
“You can’t veto,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the group. “You cannot be responsible for default.” Anything had to be done to prevent it. Anything to preserve the global economy.
“If he caves,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s senior political adviser, “it will have long-lasting political repercussions that we may never get out of. If we draw a line in the sand on something this important and cross it, we may never be able to come back.”
Accepting a two-step deal would not work, Plouffe said. “We will not get credit for doing anything. We’ll look like we got bullied by a bunch of very unpopular and irresponsible people.”
Geithner had to deal with the possibility that the House bill could reach Obama’s desk. “My recommendation to the president would be, we’ve got to sign this. If that’s what they offer us, we sign it.”
Obama appeared unexpectedly at the door of William Daley, his chief of staff. “What’s going on? What are you guys talking about?”
He knew, of course. They quickly recapped.
Could I actually veto it? Obama asked, adopting his law professor manner. What would happen on the day of the veto? The day after?
“It would have massive effects,” Geithner said. Treasury had to conduct a bond auction in the open market in about five days, the regular Tuesday auction, with settlement on Thursday. That first auction could be a kind of tripwire, setting off a chain reaction. The federal government couldn’t pay its bills. “Why would anyone buy U.S. bonds if it’s an open question whether we are going to have the authority to pay for them?”
Another possible outcome, Geithner said, was perhaps worse. “Suppose we have an auction and no one shows up?”
The cascading impact would be unknowable. The world could decide to dump U.S. Treasuries. Prices would plummet, interest rates would skyrocket. The one pillar of stability, the United States, the rock in the global economy, could collapse.
“So,” the president said, “if we give $1.2 trillion now in spending cuts” — the amount in the House bill to get the first increase in the debt ceiling for about six to nine months — “what happens next time?” The Republicans would then come back next year, in the middle of the presidential campaign, and impose more conditions on the next debt ceiling increase. He could not give the Republicans that kind of leverage, that kind of weapon. It was hostage taking. It was blackmail. “This will forever change the relationship between the presidency and the Congress.
“Imagine if, when Nancy Pelosi had become speaker, she had said to George W. Bush, ‘End the Iraq war, or I’m going to cause a global financial crisis.’ ”
So, Obama said, they had to break the Republicans on this. Otherwise, they would be back whenever it suited them politically.
They were out of options, Geithner said. The only one might be accepting the House bill, loathsome as it might be. “The 2008 financial crisis will be seen as a minor blip if we default,” he said.
The president said, “The Republicans are forcing the risk of a default on us. I can’t stop them from doing that. We can have the fight now, or we can have the fight later on, but the fight is coming to us.”
So, no, Obama said, he was not going to cave. Period. He said good night, got up and left. He was very agitated.
Geithner thought there was one other consideration. He did not mention it to anyone, not even the president, but he had thought about it a great deal. It was not just that Obama faced an economic choice or a political choice. He faced a moral choice.
The president should not put himself in the position of saying unequivocally that he would veto, Geithner concluded, for one simple reason: No one could be sure how to put the American or the global economy back together again. The impact would be calamitous.
“And the people who would bear the pain of that would be the people less prepared,” Geithner told others, “less able to absorb that cost. It would be something you could not cure. It is not something you can come back and say, a week later, ‘Oh, we fixed it.’ It would be indelible, incurable. It would last for generations.”
Obama never had to confront the veto question. A few days later, House Republicans dropped their insistence on the two-step plan. The final plan accepted a debt limit increase that would take the country through the 2012 presidential contest. It also postponed $2.4 trillion in spending cuts until early 2013.
The long-term deficit crisis had not been solved, but merely put off, leaving the United States at the edge of the fiscal cliff, where it remains today.
Rob Garver and Evelyn Duffy contributed to this report.
Adapted from “The Price of Politics,” by Bob Woodward
to be published on Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-president-sidelined/2012/09/08/a463793c-f6db-11e1-8253-3f495ae70650_print.html
What we have here folks is an "Illusion of choices"--George Carlin
Soap Opera Over Kabul
Not the Roman Legions
By Fred Reed
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32359.htm
September 04, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - Oh lordy, lordy, how I love the Afghan war: It just goes on and on, without end. By comparison death and taxes seem long shots.
In the latest episode of this long-running sitcom, the Afghan army is killing GIs. Yes. Blowing them away right and left. In Washington, the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel is in shock and maybe awe. It has stopped training Afghan troops because it is scared of them. It has ordered our soldiers to stay armed to protect themselves against our devoted allies, to whom we are bringing democracy, because they want to kill us.
How can this be, you ask? The brass are puzzled too. The reason can’t be that Afghans don’t like night raids, torture, GIs going house to house and shooting women and kids, drone strikes blowing up weddings, and other routine mechanisms of democratization. Instead, it must be…Taliban infiltrators. Yes. This being decided, all is now well. Just as the military calls routine atrocities “isolated incidents,” it attributes Afghani hostility to Taliban infiltrators. Problem solved. In the modern marketing military, you don’t need a solution, just a saleable explanation.
OK. In the Guardian, I learn that actual Pentagonal military psycho-wonks have done a study on what Afghans and gringos think of each other. (report) Saith the Guardian:
"One group sees the other as a bunch of violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving, profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology; and the other group [the US soldiers] generally view the former as a bunch of cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous, and murderous radicals. Such is the state of progress in the current partnering programme. Over a decade of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder had created mutual loathing that was impossible to camouflage.”
Who would have thought it?
Anybody with the slighytest acquaintance with reality. Tell you what, brothels and cisterns, I could have written every word of it, and I’ve never been to Afghanistan. It’s Viet Nam all over again. Which means that it’s all over, again. GIs and Afghans hate each other.
What do you expect when you put combative, not too bright, half-educated, unsophisticated lower-middle-class guys into an illiterate thirteenth-century culture with a history of detesting invaders? I know, I know: you figured it would spark a love-in, koom-bah-yah, Oprah as featured speaker.
This comedy occurs because the military inhabits a parallel reality. In its experience, you tell a thing to happen, and it does. If the base commander decides that all dumpsters should be painted Day-Glo chartreuse, he issues orders, paint crews go out, and three days later the dumpsters glow sort of greenly. The military also believes that things work. Put 6000 sailors and a hundred airplanes on an aircraft carrier, obviously an unworkable idea—and it works. It works because everyone wants it to work and does what he is told.
Afghanistan isn’t an aircraft carrier. It has a different shape, it isn’t as flat, and it is full of Afghans. These are important distinctions.
Further, the military thinks that policy determines existence. American policy is that Afghanistan is an allied country like Germany, which it isn’t, that Karzai is chief of state like Angela Merkel, which he isn’t, that the Afghan population are our allies, which they are not, and that if you train Afghans who hate us to say Ooo-rah!, they will want to kill other Afghans that we don’t like—which, obviously they don’t.
Add to the military’s eternal misunderstanding of the enemy’s motivation a matching underestimation of his capacity to fight, plus hypertrophied self-confidence, and you get an over-armed, under-brained, excessively ooo-rahed pack of losers. Don’t think so? How is it that a trillion-dollar military with fighter-bombers, helicopters, armor, electronics, drones, and such can’t beat pissed-off goat-herders with rifles? What do you think would happen if GIs had to fight on equal terms—sandals and a smoke pole, no PX?
Please don’t send me growly mail about Our Boys and their courage, training, sacrifice, honor, and the rest of that string of beads. For one thing, there is no honor in going to someone else’s country and butchering people you don’t know because some political general, which is to say some general, told you to; A hit man for the Mafia is exactly as honorable. For another thing, an army’s job is not to be brave, selfless, yada yada, but to win wars. Look at the record:
Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos: Dead losses. Underestimated the Vietnamese, the AK, the RPG, the IED. By policy the Pentagon said the war was about communism, while the Viets thought it was about getting invaders out of their country, which they did. The GIs hated the Viets as they always hate their allies. The Pentagon left with its tail between legs.
Beirut, 1983: Dead loss, 241 Marines killed versus one Arab. Underestimated the enemy and the truck bomb, had amateurish security, and misunderstood local motivations. Left with tail between legs.
Jarheads coming ashore in the Root. I had never seen worse security. They didn't understand where they were. Boom. Phredphoto.
Mogadishu, 1993: Dead loss. Underestimated the enemy, the AK, the RPG. Left dead GIs being dragged through the streets. Tail between legs.
Gulf I: Victory. Enemy tried to fight Pentagon’s kind of war with fifth-rate forces. Tail high.
Iraq: Dead loss. Did not get the oil, permanent bases, or docile puppet government. Clueless about politics, urban war. Underestimated the enemy, the IED, the AK, the RPG. Left, tail high, fooling few.
Afghanistan: Dead loss, as yet unadmitted.. Underestimated enemy, IED, AK, RPG. Clueless about politics. Tail in default position.
Several things explain this Gilbert-and-Sullivan performance. Since 1945 the Pentagon has never fought a war it had to win. Nor will it. The possession of nuclear weapons by the First World ensures that no seriously dangerous country will attack any other seriously dangerous country. This leaves the Pentagon and its suppliers free to buy phenomenally expensive weapons of no purpose. The B1, B2, and Airborne Laser come to mind and, now that pilotless airplanes are coming into their own, the US spends hugely on the piloted F35, for which there is no enemy.
But what the military seems particularly not to grasp is that the nature of war has changed. The day of massed armor roaring across deserts under gorgeous sunsets, of fighter aircraft duking it out gloriously at Midway, of huge formations of Marines storming ashore, is over. In Afghanistan there are no targets of high value to destroy, no clear lines of supply to be cut, no cities whose capture means you win, and no concentrations of enemy to be easily killed. World War Two ended a long time ago.
This should be obvious, but militaries don’t do obvious. They run on the hormonal aggression built into men—males, grrr, bow-wow, woof—which is why all of history roils with pointless wars and slaughtered innocents. Herd combat is as biologically determined as a teen-age boy’s newfound interest in girls. Oh good.
Coming soon on these same channels: Days of Yemen, a heartwarming series about a handsome young GI’s illicit love affair with his aging Ma Deuce. Brought to you by the New! New! Tide, with three special antioxidants that work together to remove all trace of rationality.
Fred's Biography: As He Tells It. - Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune.
We're One Crucial Step Closer to Seeing Tony Blair (Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc??) at The Hague
Desmond Tutu has helped us see the true nature of what the former prime minister did to Iraq and increased pressure for a prosecution
By George Monbiot
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32355.htm
September 04, 2012 "The Guardian" -- For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.
When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.
The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.
That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair's cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: "self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case." Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.
His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, "i) there must be an armed attack upon a state or such an attack must be imminent; ii) the use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) the acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack." None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him: "A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers' advice, none currently exists."
Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed.
Blair's diminishing band of apologists cling to two desperate justifications. The first is that the war was automatically authorised by a prior UN resolution, 1441. But when it was discussed in the security council, both the American and British ambassadors insisted that 1441 did not authorise the use of force. The UK representative stated that "there is no 'automaticity' in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the council for discussion as required in paragraph 12." Two months later, in January 2003, the attorney general reminded Blair that "resolution 1441 does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council".
Yet when Blair ran out of options, he and his lieutenants began arguing that 1441 authorised their war. They are still at it: on Sunday, Lord Falconer tried it out on Radio 4. Perhaps he had forgotten that it has been thoroughly discredited.
The second justification, attempted again by Blair this weekend, is that there was a moral case for invading Iraq. Yes, there was one. There was also a moral case for not invading Iraq, and this case was stronger.
But a moral case (and who has launched an aggressive war in modern times without claiming to possess one?) does not provide a legal basis. Nor was it the motivation for the attack. In September 2000, before they took office, a project run by future members of the Bush administration – including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – produced a report which said the following: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Their purpose, they revealed, was "maintaining American military pre-eminence". The motivation for deposing Saddam Hussein was no more moral than the motivation for arming and funding him, two decades before.
But while the case against Blair is strong, the means are weak. Twenty-nine people have been indicted in the international criminal court, and all of them are African. (Suspects in the Balkans have been indicted by a different tribunal). There's a reason for this. Until 2018 at the earliest, the court can prosecute crimes committed during the course of an illegal war, but not the crime of launching that war.
Should we be surprised? Though the Nuremberg tribunal described aggression as "the supreme international crime", several powerful states guiltily resisted its adoption. At length, in 2010, they agreed that the court would have jurisdiction over aggression, but not until 2018 or thereafter. Though the offence has been recognised in international law for 67 years, the international criminal court (unlike the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals, which hear cases from before they were established) will be able to try only crimes of aggression committed beyond that date.
The other possibility is a prosecution in one of the states (there are at least 25) which have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws. Perhaps Blair's lawyers are now working through the list and cancelling a few speaking gigs.
That the prospect of prosecution currently looks remote makes it all the more important that the crime is not forgotten. To this end, in 2010 I set up a bounty fund – www.arrestblair.org – to promote peaceful citizens' arrests of the former prime minister. People contribute to the fund, a quarter of which is paid out to anyone who makes an attempt which meets the rules. With our fourth payment last week, we've now disbursed more than £10,000. Our aim is the same as Tutu's: to de-normalise an act of mass murder, to keep it in the public mind and to maintain the pressure for a prosecution.
That looked, until this weekend, like an almost impossible prospect. But when the masonry begins to crack, impossible hopes can become first plausible, then inexorable. Blair will now find himself shut out of places where he was once welcome. One day he may find himself shut in.
Twitter: @GeorgeMonbio
California Passes Resolution Defining Criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism
By Tom Carter
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32358.htm
September 04, 2012 "WSWS" - Last month, the California State Assembly passed a resolution urging state educational institutions to more aggressively crack down on criticism of the State of Israel on campuses, which the resolution defines as “anti-Semitism.” The anti-democratic resolution is the latest step in the broader campaign to stifle and suppress dissent on California's increasingly volatile campuses.
The California State Assembly is the lower house of the state legislature, consisting of 80 members. The resolution—H.R. 35: “Relative to anti-Semitism”—was passed by a vote of 66 to 80, including a majority of both Republicans and Democrats in the Assembly.
The resolution was drafted by Republican Linda Halderman and passed without public discussion. The vote on the resolution came when most students were between semesters and away from their campuses.
The resolution (available here) uses the classic trick employed by defenders of Israel’s Zionist regime: lumping together any criticism of the Israeli state’s policies or of the US government’s support for them with racist attacks on Jews.
On the one hand, the resolution denounces “swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti in residential halls, public areas on campus, and Hillel houses,” and denounces those who accuse “the Jewish people, or Israel, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”
On the other hand, the bulk of the resolution is dedicated to defining criticism of the state of Israel as “anti-Semitism.” It lists the following as examples of “anti-Semitism”:
• “language or behavior [that] demonizes and delegitimizes Israel;”
• “speakers, films, and exhibits” that indicate that “Israel is guilty of heinous crimes against humanity such as ethnic cleansing and genocide;”
• describing Israel as a “racist” or “apartheid” state;
• “student-and faculty-sponsored boycott, divestment, and sanction campaigns against Israel;”
• “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination;”
• “applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation;” and
• “actions of student groups that encourage support for terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”
This list makes clear that the accusations of anti-Semitism are a red herring, employed to attack students’ democratic rights and stifle dissent. The resolution recalls the smear campaign against German author Günter Grass and his poem “What Must Be Said” earlier this year.
Defending the poem, the World Socialist Web Site explained: “Anti-Semitism is the term used to describe racist hatred aimed at the oppression and persecution of Jews—and in the case of the Third Reich, the extermination of Jews. Grass’s criticisms of the war policy of the Netanyahu government are not directed against Jews, nor against Jews in Israel. His overwhelming concern is the well-being of both the Jewish population in Israel and the Iranian people. This is in stark contrast to the Israeli government.
“The Israeli regime does not represent the interests of the Jewish population, but rather a tiny rich and corrupt clique that has always worked closely with American imperialism.” (See Defend Günter Grass!)
The aggressive narrowness of the resolution's definition of acceptable political discussion, combined with its broad definition of anti-Semitism, prompted the University of California to distance itself from the resolution, though without rejecting or denouncing it. “We think it's problematic because of First Amendment concerns,” UC spokesman Steve Montiel told the San Francisco Chronicle last week.
The resolution does clearly implicate the First Amendment, which protects not only criticism of the state of Israel, but generally protects anti-Semitic hate speech as well.
Moreover, it must also be said that the State of Israel is, as a matter of fact, guilty of crimes against humanity.
To cite only a more recent example, the 574-page UN Goldstone Report published in 2010 found that the State of Israel had deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza during the 2008-2009 “Operation Cast Lead.” The invasion of Gaza saw 1,400 Palestinians killed compared with 13 Israelis killed. More than 21,000 buildings, factories, and apartments were damaged or destroyed.
Under California H.R. 35, it appears that the Goldstone report is now to be considered “anti-Semitic.”
The resolution also contains a denunciation of “suppression and disruption of free speech that presents Israel's point of view.” This appears to be a reference to the “Irvine 11” incident last year, in which 11 students shouted down Israeli ambassador Michael Oren during his speech at the University of California at Irvine.
The 11 students shouted, “Michael Oren, you’re a war criminal,” and “You, sir, are an accomplice to genocide.” These students were later arrested, charged, and convicted of the crimes of “conspiracy” and violating Oren’s rights. (See University of California students convicted for protesting Israeli ambassador’s speech.)
The resolution goes on to state that the “Assembly recognizes recent actions by officials of public post secondary educational institutions in California [e.g., the prosecutions of the Irvine 11] and calls upon those institutions to increase their efforts to swiftly and unequivocally condemn acts of anti-Semitism on their campuses and to utilize existing resources . . . to help guide campus discussion about, and promote, as appropriate, educational programs for combating anti-Semitism on their campuses.”
On California's campuses, as on campuses and workplaces internationally, explosive class antagonisms are increasingly apparent. Massive tuition hikes year after year coupled with job losses and skyrocketing youth unemployment present an entire generation of young people with an increasingly impossible situation.
State authorities in California, which is controlled by the Democratic Party, have watched the large campus protests that took place across state campuses over the past two years with hostility, consternation, and fear.
Over the past year, at the behest of Democratic Party officials, demonstrating students across the state have been attacked by paramilitary police squads armed with batons, tear gas, and flash grenades, with hundreds of students arrested and jailed. The world's attention was captured when students peacefully protesting tuition hikes at UC Davis were pepper sprayed by police in cold blood.
In the face of increasing tensions and protests, state authorities are moving to clamp down on the campuses, intervening to “guide campus discussion” and criminalize criticism of both domestic and foreign policy. Under the guise of criticizing “anti-Semitism” the state government signaling that the persecution of student protesters will be tolerated or welcomed.
The resolution concludes that “strong leadership from the top remains an important priority so that no administrator, faculty, or student group can be in any doubt that anti-Semitic activity will not be tolerated in the classroom or on campus, and that no public resources will be allowed to be used for anti-Semitic or any intolerant agitation.
Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site
June food stamp recipients peak as three times as many Americans enter poverty as find jobs
Posted on September 4, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/june-food-stamp-recipients-peak-as-three-times-as-many-americans-enter-poverty-as-find-jobs/
September 4, 2012 – WASHINGTON – Following a brief period in which it seemed that US food stamp recipients may have peaked, with those living in poverty maxing out at 46.514 million in December 2011, and then declining modestly for the next few months, June saw a new surge in those Americans living in poverty and thus eligible for food stamps, with 173,600 new entrants into the system, bringing the total to a new all time high of 46.670 million and once again rising fast. Furthermore, with subsequent emergency events affecting the heartland due to the drought, the administration has made sure even more Americans will be eligible going forward. As a result expect the July and August numbers to promptly surpass 47 million on their way to the psychological resistance level of 50 million. Indicatively, the 173,600 increase in Food stamps recipients in June was three times greater than Americans finding jobs (64,000, most of which part-time) according to the BLS. Finally, a new record was also breached for American households on food stamps, which now hit 22.4 million, an increase of 106,298 households. The average benefit per household decline once more, this time to $276.5. Not an all time low, but just above it. –Zero Hedge
Obama’s Justice Department Grants Final Immunity to Bush’s CIA Torturers (and Obama and themselves...)
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/obamas-justice-department-grants-final-immunity-to-bushs-cia-torturers/20495/
8 Ways to Improve Society Without the Political Process
By J.G. Vibes
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32349.htm
September 03, 2012 "Activist Post" - When a problem occurs or when something is wrong we have traditionally been conditioned to find someone who is “in charge”, a final arbiter of decision making who will have all of the answers and know all of the right things to say and do.
Typically, those who have found themselves “in charge” are no more qualified or knowledgeable than those who are not, yet nonetheless these false prophets continue to swindle generation after generation of people.
The worst thing about this whole situation is that these so called “authorities” maintain a monopoly on problem solving, meaning they are really the only ones who are allowed to solve problems. Thus over time people begin to believe that those in authority are the only ones who are actually capable of solving problems, when in reality, they are no more qualified than anyone else.
If we apply this understanding to the realm of government, it is not difficult to see that the current system of electoral politics is not an effective or moral way for people to actually create meaningful change in their communities and the planet as a whole. Year after year, administration after administration the faces change, but the oppression continues to escalate.
Even if your vote is actually counted, which it probably isn’t, it still won't matter who wins in the end anyway because they are all going to carry out the exact same policies with just slightly rhetoric behind them. It should be obvious by now that this system is not only inherently corrupt, but is also failing miserably and currently in the process of collapse.
So what do we do? How do we solve these problems? Do we look to authority? Do we put someone else in charge? Of course not! How has that been working out for us all along? Not so well, right?
Yet when I suggest that everyone needs give up on voting and take matters into their own hands in their personal lives, people always seem to get the impression that I am suggesting they “do nothing”. In reality the complete opposite is true. I am suggesting that they actually get out and do something to make an impact on the problems that bother them instead of just pushing a button in an election booth, throwing the problem on some politicians lap and thinking that something is actually going to get done.
If anything, that political approach that I just described is the lazy way of going about change, but actually working on solutions yourself is truly meaningful action. There are a ton of ways that you can contribute to helping the global situation without politics. In fact, you will do much better than the politicians at actually achieving the goal. Below is just a few ways that I have recently seen people solving problems in their community by themselves, without the government.
(1) Opt Out in Every Way Possible – Non-Compliance is a long-term strategy and won't achieve overnight results, but this is still a necessary part of this social evolution that I am speaking of. Opting out is a way of pulling your support out of the system, and putting your support in something that will eventually outshine the system and make it obsolete. That is a lot of the idea behind pulling yourself out of the political process and refusing to vote. Voting takes a lot of time and energy, especially if you are donating money to political parties and campaigning for candidates. Opting out will instantly free up that time, energy and money for causes that will be more effective in achieving your goal of improving society.
(2) Be Your Own President – Presidents are not “leaders” as the masquerade to be, they are appointed masters who seek to control the thoughts and actions of large groups of people. You have the choice to disobey any random code or policy that doesn't stand up to the non-aggression principle and natural law. Exercising that choice is a way of finding freedom in a seemingly unfree world. If you break government laws and no one gets hurt in the process, and no property has been damaged or stolen, then you have done nothing wrong. Be your own master instead of letting someone else control your behavior.
(3) Campaign for Philosophy – After watching puppet after puppet go through office we should all know by now that “getting the right guy in there” isn’t any kind of possibility, and even it was a possibility, it would be like giving a really nice guy a sledgehammer to repair a complicated supercomputer. What really needs to happen is an advancement of philosophy and a change in the way that this species looks at the world. All of the answers for exactly how the future will be built is not yet known and truly unpredictable, but the problems in our current system are obvious enough that they are easy to identify. The fundamental flaws with our traditional way of life as a species is that it has been acceptable for people to force their will on one another, through both private and political means. As a result violence has plagued our species for ages when we could have easily shed this neurotic tendency just after the stone ages.
For centuries humanity has been trapped in this loop of violence because a philosophical advancement has failed to occur. We have known the path to take for ages, we all talk about it in every culture, in the hypocritical rhetoric of every government. Equal rights and universal standards, peace, freedom and justice. These are the ideals that we all speak of, but many fail to live by. These are the ideals that will change the world if embraced, but it is not going to happen by voting an aristocratic liar into a position of power. It will only happen through intelligent people talking about these ideas and coming up with new ways to actually integrate them into society.
(4) Support or Start Mutual Aid Groups – As an article pointed out this week, mutual aid groups were one of the most popular ways that people ensured the welfare of their families and neighbors before the government created programs to make everyone depend on them for help. Years later we can see the results of this approach, as these programs are in total disarray because their purpose was never actually to help people, and those involved have no real incentive to make these programs productive because they aren’t even a part of the community that depends on them. This is what makes mutual aid groups different. First off, these are all programs which are joined by choice and funded voluntarily and they allow people to directly interact with whoever they are helping and with whoever is helping them. These programs are highly efficient and realistic even in today's world. As I pointed out last week a variation of this idea is already becoming popular among jobless people in Spain, who have been using mutual aid organizations called time banks, to help each other weather the tough times.
(5) Support or Create Alternative Currency - There are alternative currencies popping up all over the world, and all over the Internet as well. Bitcoin has been the primary currency used online, but the market is open to competitors so Bitcoin will have to actually continue to satisfy customers, or it will surely give way to a more user friendly currency, something that the Federal Reserve System has never had to do because they monopolize the currency. For close communities and urban markets coupon based, community backed currencies are starting to develop, which allow people to opt out of the Federal Reserve System, and barter with their neighbors using a mutually agreed upon medium of exchange which has no tie to politics at all. In Baltimore many use “Bnotes” to trade amongst themselves, out west they have something called mountain hours that works in much the same way. If there is one of these currencies in your community see what you can do to get involved, if not there are plenty of places online that will tell you how to start this kind of project yourself.
(6) Support or Create a Community Garden – Food prices are getting high and quality is getting lower, making times extremely tough for anyone trying to be healthy. If there is already a garden in your community, try to get involved and support them as much as possible. If there isn’t one in your community, think about starting one yourself!
(7) Support or Create Alternative Media – It's no secret that the mainstream media is a dying entity that has totally lost the confidence of the general population. CNN has been reporting an 80% decrease year after year, and the outlets on either side of the aisle aren’t doing much better either. They are all losing their audience to the people-powered alternative media which is run by large networks of individual activists, most of which really need and deserve some support from the people who appreciate their media. Cancelling your cable subscription and putting that money towards your favorite alternative media organization is a big step in shifting the control of information back into the hands of free people exchanging ideas, instead of government monopolists.
(8) Act with Kindness and Compassion in Your Own Life – Self-explanatory, be excellent to each other.
J.G. Vibes is an author, and artist with an established record label and event promotion company that hosts politically charged electronic dance music events. You can keep up with him and his new 87 chapter book Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance, as well as his show Voluntary Hippie Radio at www.aotmr.com
Inherit The Wind… The Evil of Two Lessers
By Philip A Farruggio
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32348.htm
September 03, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - The fine 1960 film Inherit the Wind was more than just about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. Yes, it had as its focal point the law forbidding the teaching of evolution in schools. However, when one views this film, or reads the play it was developed from, one sees a doorway to totalitarianism. Added to that warning is the observation that many of us humans seem to need to be led. In the fictitious town of Hillsdale, Tennessee, the common folk were led by their religious leaders, who determined how they should not only act… but think. When the great statesman and Christian scholar, Mathew Harrison Brady comes to town to lead the prosecution of the case, he surpasses even their pastor in influencing their minds. During the trial, Brady’s counterpart, attorney Henry Drummond for the defense decides to put the right to think for oneself on the witness stand. The right to question authority, and yes, to dissent from it, is what was really on trial in that case.
Sadly, very few of our contemporaries, our neighbors and our political and media celebrities can see that America has become nothing more than a cartoon! Politics, advertising and consumerism, blended in with so called news and information from our mainstream media, has taken the majority of us by the nose. Look at the boob tube and instead of muting the volume when commercials come on, watch and listen to them. Do the same when the politicians stand before the microphone, or when the pundits and phony journalists speak. What you will observe is how they all treat you as if you were an adolescent, perhaps 12 years old. There is no real intellectual flow from these people at all. The commercials for products and services always allude how everyone selling something to us really cares for us. Ditto for the politicians and the pundits: They all care about us and our families. They all care for our troops and the peoples of the countries that we are destroying with our superior military force. They tell you to place yellow ribbons and flags all over the ying yang and simply accept the fact that this military empire is bankrupting us all!
So, we have another horserace election cycle. Once again, we are told how this election is the most crucial one in our history. The right wing will tell you that Mr. Obama is a Marxist who wants to create a totalitarian socialist state. They reveal how it is the entitlements to lower classes (code word for blacks and illegals) and the unions that are destroying our economy. Of course, in the same breath they stand tall with the little flags on their lapels and demand that we do not touch the military spending… matter of fact they want increases! Of course, no mention of the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq or the deaths of our soldiers there… because those are bipartisan occupations of sovereign nations. Then you have the Democrats in this latest horserace who rant and rave about how the right wing wants to destroy the middle class. Yet, the Democrats never do squat for the middle class! They too vote to keep our military empire intact and all over the damn globe. They brought forth a health care law that only helps the private insurers stay in control and reap mega profits. Only a fool would think that Mr. Obama would insist on a public option to help create a Medicare for All scenario, after you look at his 2008 campaign donations. The health care industry gave over 7 million to McCain… and over 21 million to Obama.
So, we have two evils controlling our nation’s political system. Well, not really controlling; shall we say they are navigating it for others? Who are these others? Well, all one needs to do is see who is benefiting despite the fact that over 90% of us are not. Follow the age old adage and ‘follow the money ‘. As many small businesses either fold up or cut labor and services, see what companies and individuals are doing so well during these tough times. They are who the both political parties and the mainstream media are serving. Isn’t it time to follow the creed of ‘Your vote counts… use it? ‘And go into that booth November 8th and refuse to support any of them? The only inheritance they will leave to us is the wind… hot air wind at that!
Philip A Farruggio is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He is a free lance columnist, an environmental products sales rep and an activist. Since 2010, Philip is a spokesperson for the 25% Solution Movement to Save Our Cities by cutting military spending 25%. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net
Life Is Sacred
By Chris Hedges
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32351.htm
September 03, 2012 "TruthDig.com" -- I retreat in the summer to the mountains and coasts of Maine and New Hampshire to sever myself from the intrusion of the industrial world. It is in the woods and along the rugged Atlantic coastline, the surf thundering into the jagged rocks, that I am reminded of our insignificance before the universe and the brevity of human life. The stars, thousands visible in the night canopy above me, mock human pretensions of grandeur. They whisper the biblical reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Love now, they tell us urgently, protect what is sacred, while there is still time. But now I go there also to mourn. I mourn for our future, for the fading majesty of the natural world, for the folly of the human species. The planet is dying. And we will die with it.A village boy leads his goat past a parched pond on the outskirts of the eastern Indian city of Bhubaneswar. (AP/Biswaranjan Rout)
The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival in Tampa and the one coming up in Charlotte divert us from the real world—the one steadily collapsing around us. The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.
My family and I hike along the desolate coastline of an island in Maine that is accessible only by boat. We stop in the afternoons on remote inlets and look out across the Atlantic Ocean or toward the shoreline and the faint outline of the Camden hills. My youngest son throws pebbles into the surf. My daughter toddles over the rounded beach stones holding her mother’s hand. The gray and white seagulls chatter loudly overhead. The scent of salt is carried by the wind. Life, the life of my family, the life around me, is exposed at once as fragile and sacred. And it is worth fighting to save.
When I was a boy and came to this coast on duck hunting trips with my uncle, fishing communities were vibrant. The fleets caught haddock, cod, herring, hake, halibut, swordfish, pollock and flounder. All these fish have vanished from the area, victims of commercial fishing that saw huge trawlers rip up the seafloor and kill the corals, bryozoans, tubeworms and other species that nurtured new schools of fish. The trawlers left behind barren underwater wastelands of mud and debris. It is like this across the planet. Forests are cut down. Water is contaminated. Air is saturated with carbon emissions. Soil is depleted. Acidity levels in the oceans skyrocket. Atmospheric temperatures soar. And someone, somewhere, makes obscene sums of money from it. Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as another investment opportunity. They are scurrying to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish. And since the corporations dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, the chances of our survival look bleaker and bleaker. The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity.
“All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby-Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”
The ocean floor off the coast of Maine, which this summer has seen a staggering five-degree rise in water temperature, is now covered in crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—that no longer have any predators. The fish stocks have been killed for profit. This crustacean monoculture carries with it the fragility of all monocultures, a fragility that corn farmers in the Midwest also have experienced. Lobsters provide 80 percent of Maine’s seafood income. But how much longer will they last? When a diverse and intricately balanced biosystem is wiped out, what future is there? After you dismantle nature and throw away the parts, what happens when you desperately need to put them back together? And even if you can nurture back to life the fish stocks decimated by the commercial fleets, as valiant organizations such as Penobscot East Resource Center are attempting to do, what happens when sea temperatures and acidity levels continue to rise amid global warming, dooming most life in the oceans?
The warmer water this year caused lobsters to shed six weeks earlier than usual. What happened to the sea further south is now happening off New England. Long Island Sound, two decades ago, had an abundance of lobsters. Then as the water heated up they disappeared. They fell prey to parasite infestations and shell disease, and the survivors migrated to colder water.
All natural resources are being exploited until exhaustion. They will diminish and soon vanish. Droughts are affecting forests in the Northeast as well as the Northwest. The wintertime die-off of pine beetles and other pests—a reduction vital for the health of the forests—is no longer happening as the planet steadily warms. The traditional hardwoods of the northern forests and the great conifer trees are dying. They are being replaced by oak-hickory forests, dooming the biodiversity, eradicating the habitat of a variety of songbirds and other wildlife and ending the maple syrup industry. Maple syrup was produced a few decades ago in Connecticut and Massachusetts. As a child I would hike in snowshoes to the farmers’ sheds deep in the woods containing vats of boiling syrup. We would pour syrup on the blanket of snow outside to make brittle winter candy. But production in the southern New England states has been largely extinguished and shifted to northern Maine and Canada. These are the small natural indicators that something is terribly wrong.
The daily loss of Arctic sea ice this summer is the most severe on record. The amount of sea ice has fallen by 40 percent since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s. The complete disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice may be no more than a decade or two away. And with the disappearance of the summer ice our planet’s weather patterns will become dominated by freakishly powerful and sudden storms and other violent natural disturbances. Droughts will devastate some parts of the Earth, and in others there will be unrelenting rainfall. It will be a world of extremes. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Floods. Dust bowls. Fire and water.
Our political leaders, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in our demise. Our political system, like that in the declining days of ancient Rome, is one of legalized bribery. Politicians, including Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, serve the demented ends of corporations that will, until the final flicker of life, attempt to profit from our death spiral. Civil disobedience, including the recent decision by Greenpeace activists to chain themselves to a Gazprom supply vessel and obstruct a Russian oil rig, is the only meaningful form of resistance. Voting is useless. But while I support these heroic acts of resistance I increasingly fear they may have little effect. This does not mean we should not resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. We cannot use the word “hope” if we do not fight back. But the corporations will employ deadly force to protect their drive to extract the last bit of profit from life. We can expect only mounting hostility from the corporate state. Its internal and external security apparatus, as the heedless exploitation and its fatal consequences become more apparent, will seek to silence and crush all dissidents. Corporations care nothing for democracy, the rule of law, human rights or the sanctity of life. They are determined to be the last predator standing. And then they too will be snuffed out. Unrestrained hubris always leads to self-immolation.
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
© 2012 TruthDig.com
No Accountability for Torturers
By Marjorie Cohn
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32352.htm
September 03, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - The Obama administration has closed the books on prosecutions of those who violated our laws by authorizing and conducting the torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that his office would investigate only two incidents, in which CIA interrogations ended in deaths. He said the Justice Department “has determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted.” With that decision, Holder conferred amnesty on countless Bush officials, lawyers and interrogators who set and carried out a policy of cruel treatment.
Now the attorney general has given a free pass to those responsible for the deaths of Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi. Rahman froze to death in 2002 after being stripped and shackled to a cold cement floor in the secret Afghan prison known as the Salt Pit. Al-Jamadi died after he was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists which were bound behind his back. MP Tony Diaz, who witnessed al-Jamadi’s torture, said that blood gushed from his mouth like “a faucet had turned on” when he was lowered to the ground. A military autopsy concluded that al-Jamadi’s death was a homicide.
Nevertheless, Holder said that “based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Amnesty for torturers is unacceptable. General Barry McCaffrey declared, “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.” Major General Anthony Taguba, who directed the Abu Ghraib investigation, wrote that “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” Holder has answered Taguba’s question with a resounding “no.”
Some have suggested that Holder’s decisions have been motivated by political considerations. For example, Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that “dredging up the crimes of the previous administration was seen as too distracting and too antagonistic an enterprise when Republican votes were needed.” And closing the books on legal accountability for Bush officials may remove one more Republican attack on Obama in the next two months before the presidential election.
But the Obama administration’s decision to allow the lawbreakers to go free is itself a violation of the law. The Constitution says that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When the United States ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, we promised to extradite or prosecute those who commit, or are complicit in the commission, of torture. The Geneva Conventions also mandate that we prosecute or extradite those who commit, or are complicit in the commission of, torture.
There are two federal criminal statutes for torture prosecutions—the U.S. Torture Statute and the War Crimes Act; the latter punishes torture as a war crime. The Torture Convention is unequivocal: nothing, including a state of war, can be invoked as a justification for torture.
By letting American officials, lawyers and interrogators get away with torture – and indeed, murder – the United States sacrifices any right to scold or punish other countries for their human rights violations.
Marjorie Cohn is a former president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law. She lectures throughout the world on human rights and US foreign policy. marjoriecohn.com/
A Major Failure by Washington
A Blast From the Past: The Non-Aligned Movement
By Eric Margolis
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32345.htm
September 03, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - This week’s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) conference in Tehran brought nostalgic memories of the Cold War and world-bestriding leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Castro, Nkrumah, and Sukarno. However, most of them were disasters for their nations, but they certainly were colorful and interesting.
In spite of intense efforts by the US and Israel to deter attendance at the Tehran meeting – backed by a wave of western media attacks on the conclave – over 150 nations and international bodies attended.
This big turnout marked a major failure by Washington to further tighten its siege of Iran. Of particular note was the presence of India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh. India refused to bow to US pressure to boycott the event and announced future energy, trade and transport deals with Tehran.
Iran plays a key role in India’s plans to expand its influence over Afghanistan and Central Asia. India is building a new, strategic rail line linking the Iranian port of Chahbahar to western Afghanistan. Iran supplies over 11% of India’s fast-growing demand for energy. Delhi increasingly worries about the security of its Mideast energy imports.
As I wrote a decade ago in my first book, War at the Top of the World, the US and India may one day become rivals for Mideast oil and gas resources – and, indeed, for control of the Gulf. India’s refusal to go along with US policy further underlines the gradual shift to Asia of the world’s center of strategic and economic gravity.
To Washington’s further annoyance, Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, shrugged off threats of a cut in US aid and flew to Tehran. Under the 30-year Mubarak dictatorship, Egypt had been a bulwark against Iran. But no more. The increasingly assertive, independent Morsi made clear that Egypt would follow its own foreign policy interests rather than those of the US and Israel, as in the past.
Morsi has surprised just about everyone. When he stumbled into power earlier this year he was regarded as a plodding nobody, selected by the all-powerful military to do its bidding and not make trouble. The Muslim Brotherhood leader, a former space engineer, threw off his cloak of humility and quickly proceeded to muzzle Egypt’s bullying US-backed military, the key to US domination of Egypt for the past 40 years.
How Morsi pulled this off without facing a military coup remains a mystery. But he certainly had the backing of most Egyptians. It took Turkey’s Islamist Lite government a decade to push the swaggering generals back to their barracks and bring real democracy.
The Egyptian leader stunned everyone by openly blasting the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, calling for its replacement by an elected, democratic government. Egyptian intervention in the bloody Syrian conflict may help pave a way to a peaceful settlement. It could also rekindle ancient Egyptian-Syrian rivalry for leadership of the Arab world.
In spite of issuing dulcet banalities about Egypt’s turn to democracy, Washington is extremely unhappy with Egypt’s newly elected government. Egypt will no longer be a discreet defender and ally of Israel, as under Mubarak, but a rival power that genuinely demands a Palestinian state and sees no reason to confront Iran or other US foes.
The US is responding to Egypt’s newfound independence by muttering about cuts to its annual $1.3 billion donations to Egypt’s military and millions more in secret payments. However, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs are lending cash-strapped Cairo $3 billion and the US-run IMF another $4.8 billion in loans. Interestingly, President Morsi just visited China where he received pledges of aid.
In past years, most non-aligned conferences, whose objective was to find a middle way between the West and Soviet Empire, produced only hot air, often quite anti-American. As America’s world power declines after the loss of two wars and deep recession, the NAM meeting in Tehran maybe a step, albeit small, towards moving away from today’s unipolar world towards a more balanced, equitable international system.
Iran’s supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei loosed a Parthian Shaft at the summit’s end. He called the United Nations Security Council outdated, unbalanced, and an instrument of the western powers. Khamenei called for a major reform of the world institution. Few delegates disagreed with him.
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia. ericmargolis.com
Copyright © 2012 Eric Margolis
US Will Not Support Israeli Attack On Iran
'Iran must steer clear of US interests in Gulf'
Washington reportedly sends Tehran indirect message saying it will not back Israeli strike on nuclear facilities as long as Iran refrains from attacking American facilities in Persian Gulf
By Shimon Shiffer
September 03, 2012 "YNet News" -- The United States has indirectly informed Iran, via two European nations, that it would not back an Israeli strike against the country's nuclear facilities, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Monday.
According to the report, Washington used covert back-channels in Europe to clarify that the US does not intend to back Israel in a strike that may spark a regional conflict.
In return, Washington reportedly expects Iran to steer clear of strategic American assets in the Persian Gulf, such as military bases and aircraft carriers.
Israeli officials reported an unprecedented low in the two nations' defense ties, which stems from the Obama administration's desire to warn Israel against mounting an uncoordinated attack on Iran.
The New York Times reported Monday that US President Barack Obama is promoting a series of steps meant to curb an Israeli offensive against Iran, while forcing the Islamic Republic to take the nuclear negotiations more seriously.
One of the steps considered is "an official declaration by Obama about what might bring about American military action, as well as covert activities that have been previously considered and rejected," the report said.
Several of Obama's top advisors believe that Jerusalem is seeking an unequivocal American statement regarding a US strike on Iran – should it actively pursue a nuclear bomb.
Israel hopes such a statement is made during Obama's address before the UN General Assembly on September 25.
Others in the White House said Israel is trying to drag the US into an unnecessary conflict in the Gulf.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday that "There is absolutely no daylight between the United States and Israel when it comes to preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon."
Carney said that all options remain on the table for Iran. He said the "window for diplomacy remains open," adding that the diplomatic process remains the best way to deal with the Islamic Republic, though "that window will not remain open indefinitely."
Cyber war a go?
According to the New York Times, Washington has also sent Iran a back-channel deal suggesting they curb their nuclear ambitions, but Tehran rejected the deal, saying no agreement is possible sans lifting all West-imposed sanctions.
According to the report, the Obama administration is exploring the possibility of mounting a covert operation, as well as waging a "quiet" cyber war against Iran.
President Obama had previously rejected the notion, fearing such cyber assaults would wreak havoc on Iranian civilian life.
Later in September, the United States and more than 25 other nations will hold the largest-ever minesweeping exercise in the Persian Gulf, in what military officials say is a demonstration of unity and a defensive step to prevent Iran from attempting to block oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz.
In fact, the United States and Iran have each announced what amounted to dueling defensive exercises to be conducted this fall, each intended to dissuade the other from attack.
Copyright © Yedioth Internet. All rights reserved.
Obama Denies Israeli Newspaper Report of Secret Iran Contacts
By Reuters
September 03, 2012 -- The White House on Monday denied an Israeli newspaper report that accused Washington of secretly negotiating with Tehran to keep the United States out of a future Israel-Iran war.
The Jewish state also played down the front-page report in its biggest-selling daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, which followed unusually public disagreement between the allies about how to tackle Iran's controversial nuclear program.
"It's incorrect, completely incorrect," White House spokesman Jay Carney told Reuters while accompanying President Barack Obama on a campaign trip in Ohio. "The report is false and we don't talk about hypotheticals."
Without naming its sources, Yedioth said Washington had approached Tehran through two unidentified European countries to convey the message that the United States would not be dragged into fighting if Israel carried out threats to attack Iran.
Yedioth said the United States told Iran it should in return refrain from retaliating against U.S. interests, including its military in the Gulf.
In Jerusalem, an Israeli official, who asked not to be identified, described the report as illogical.
"It doesn't make sense," the official said. "There would be no need to make such a promise to the Iranians because they realize the last thing they need is to attack U.S. targets and draw massive U.S. bombing raids."
In appearances on Sunday and Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged world powers to set a "clear red line" for Tehran's atomic program that would convince Iran they were determined to prevent it from obtaining nuclear arms. Such remarks have been portrayed in Israel as criticism of Obama.
Obama, who seeks re-election in November, is fighting accusations from his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, that he is lax in support for Israel.
The Obama administration says it is strongly committed to Israel's security and to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Iran says its nuclear program is entirely peaceful and has vowed far-ranging reprisals if attacked.
The United States and Israel both accuse Iran of secretly seeking the means to make nuclear arms and say they reserve the right to take military action to prevent Iran from getting them.
MESSAGES
However, the Obama administration has repeatedly made clear in public that it thinks diplomacy and tough new sanctions have not yet run their course, even as Israeli officials say the window for effective military action is rapidly closing.
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor said he still believed Obama's assurances that Washington was prepared to use force if needed to prevent Iran from developing a bomb.
"I don't know what kind of messages Yedioth Ahronoth heard," Meridor said. "But I think the Iranians understand ... that if they cross a line towards a bomb, they could encounter very strong resistance, including all the options that are on the table - as the American president has said."
Obama has had frosty relations with the right-wing Netanyahu, who is due to visit the United States this month.
The Nov. 6 presidential election is seen hinging mostly on the U.S. economy with foreign policy taking a back seat. But support for Israel is an important issue for many U.S. voters, including evangelical Christians as well as Jews who could prove critical in battleground states like Florida and Pennsylvania.
Obama wants to shore up his advantage among Jewish voters. He received 78 percent of the Jewish vote in the 2008 election, but a nationwide Gallup poll in June showed him down to 64 percent backing versus Romney's 29 percent.
Administration officials have also made clear they regard the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran with alarm.
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted in Britain's Guardian newspaper as saying of a prospective Israeli attack on Iran: "I don't want to be complicit if they choose to do it."
The Obama administration and the European Union imposed harsh new sanctions on Iran in July. U.S. officials say they hope that this will persuade Iran to curb its nuclear projects.
Of Dempsey's comments, Meridor said: "I'm sorry we've reached the situation where Dempsey said what he said, but this campaign (against Iran) is continuing and it must be conducted very wisely."
Netanyahu's cabinet is divided over the wisdom of attacking Iran, and Israeli officials have dropped heavy hints of a retreat on their strategy, under which Netanyahu would shelve threats of an attack now in return for a stronger public pledge from Obama on conditions that would provoke U.S. action in the future.
"The greater the resolve and the clearer the red line, the less likely we'll have conflict," Netanyahu said on Monday. (Writing by Matt Spetalnick in Washington and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Editing by Eric Beech)
© 2012 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.
See also - Netanyahu Says Clear ‘Red Line’ Could Avert Strike Against Iran: Military action against Iran’s nuclear program could be averted if the international community sets a clear “red line” it will not permit Iran to cross, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32354.htm
Earth, Wind & Fire - September
Thanks stuffit! Hope all's going well:)
Jangled nerves in California, as scientist at a loss to explain present Southern California quake swarm
Posted on August 29, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/jangled-nerves-in-california-as-scientist-at-a-lost-to-explain-present-southern-california-quake-swarm/
August 29, 2012 – CALIFORNIA – An unusual swarm of hundreds of mostly small earthquakes has struck Southern California over the last three days and shaken the nerves of quake-hardy residents, but scientists say the cluster is not a sign a larger temblor is imminent. The earthquakes, the largest of which measured magnitude 5.5, began on Saturday evening and have been centered near the town of Brawley close to the state’s inland Salton Sea, said Jeanne Hardebeck, research seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists were monitoring the earthquake cluster, which continued on Tuesday, to see if it approaches the Imperial Fault, about three miles away. A destructive and deadly earthquake of magnitude 7.0 struck on that fault in 1940, she said. “We don’t have any reason to believe that the (earthquake) storm is going to trigger on the Imperial Fault, but there’s a minute possibility that it could,” Hardebeck said, adding that the swarm of quakes was not moving closer to that fault. The Brawley quake cluster, which is caused by hot fluid moving around in the Earth’s crust, is different than a typical earthquake, in which two blocks of earth slip past each other along a tectonic fault line. After that kind of an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 or above, there is a 5 percent chance a larger quake will follow, Hardebeck said. But she added the same kinds of probability estimates were not possible with earthquake clusters caused by the movement of hot fluid. “We understand them even less than we understand normal earthquakes,” Hardebeck said, adding that scientists do not know why a cluster of earthquakes will occur at one time rather than another. The swarm led to jangled nerves in Brawley, a town of about 25,000 residents 170 miles southeast of Los Angeles near the border with Mexico. “It’s pretty bad. We had to evacuate the hotel just for safety,” Rowena Rapoza, office manager of a local Best Western Hotel, said on Sunday. There were two earthquakes on Sunday afternoon, one with a 5.5 magnitude and one measuring 5.3, Hardebeck said. Those were the largest quakes in the cluster amid hundreds of others, she said. In the past, earthquake clusters have gone on for as long as two weeks, Hardebeck said. Before this recent cluster in Brawley, the last swarm of this size to hit the area was in 1981, she said. –Reuters
Geothermal Region: Gulf of California Rift Zone
The Gulf of California rift zone is a complex transition zone between the dextral (right-lateral) motions of the San Andreas transform fault system and the northwestward progressing spreading ridge complex of the Gulf of California segment of the Eastern Pacific Rise. The Gulf of California and its onshore extension, the Salton Trough (which includes Mexicali, Imperial, and Coachella Valleys), are located over a series of rifts in the Earth’s crust which are filling with sediment from above, chiefly from the Colorado River, and magmatic material from below. The Cerro Prieto geothermal field in Mexico and the Brawley Seismic zone in the U.S. are located above two of these rifts, and young volcanoes in these locations are evidence of intrusion of magma from below. The volcanics in this exploration region are less then 5-million year old and associated with northwest folding, block- and thrust- faulting. Dacite is the most common volcanic rock, with a composition that ranges from basalt to rhyolite. The volcanic activity appears to be related to extension associated with the San Andreas Fault system. The most recent volcanic activity is dated to 10,000 years ago. The heat source for the Geysers geothermal field is provided by a silicic magama chamber. Clear Lake Volcanic Field, California. -GE
Jews have been repeatedly demonstrating against the State of Israel and the mainstream media has been repeatedly suppressing their demonstrations.
Most Americans are not seeing these Jews demonstrating against Israel, because media isn't showing most Americans the demonstrations.
It is amazing that they can hold large demonstrations in major cities like New York, yet the media refuses to give them fair coverage. It's incredible that journalists are willing to violate journalistic standards in order to protect the Zionist agenda.
"We're not allowed to steal. We're not allowed to kill. So all that is being done to the Palestinian people is forbidden by the Torah. We also want the people of Palestine to know, and the people who are in Lebanon and wherever they're suffering because of this Zionist entity called the "State of Israel," that there is Jewish people who stand up since day one, since the State of Israel came to being and even prior to that when they started making their attempts for a state, the Jewish people stood up and demonstrated and were murdered. And we kept on demonstrating and we will never stop demonstrating."
Fight over NDAA’s police-state provisions continues in court
By Jake Olzen
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32286.htm
August 27, 2012 "Information Clearing House" ---- The Obama administration continues to defend its right to violate the rights of the people it is supposed to govern. On August 6, Department of Justice lawyers filed an appeal in federal court against a recent ruling that temporarily enjoined section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which gives powers to the military to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens — on U.S. soil — without charge or trial. The case, and the organizing that surrounds it, will have profound implications for basic constitutional rights, though it has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.
The so-called anti-terrorism legislation was signed on New Year’s Eve by President Barack Obama and went into effect on March 1, 2012. The NDAA had been the target of little public scrutiny in 2011, but after its passage both Congress and the Obama administration became targets of outrage among liberals and conservatives alike for the act’s alleged unconstitutionality.
On January 3, 2012, Occupy Wall Street organized a press conference on the steps of the New York Public Library, where a broad coalition of civil rights and legal groups condemned the NDAA as dangerous and unconstitutional. Activists then visited New York senators’ offices and, in a “spontaneous show of people power,” organized a flash mob in Grand Central Station to raise public awareness of the NDAA’s passage. Three were arrested for disorderly conduct. In Washington, D.C., more than 50 citizens were arrested in acts of civil disobedience at the White House in January (here and here).
As anti-NDAA sentiment spread in the blogosphere, often thanks to Occupy social media networks, the influential journalist Chris Hedges announced on January 17 that he was suing Barack Obama for infringing on his constitutionally-protected rights.
In a widely discussed article, Hedges contended that the NDAA was “a catastrophic blow to civil liberties” and that the vague and opaque wording of the law left too much room for broad interpretation of who was to be considered:
Section 1021 of the bill defines a “covered person” — one subject to detention — as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”
The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”
Six others joined Hedges as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. All of them expressed worry over the broad powers defined in the NDAA and how its provisions might apply to them, their work and their colleagues. Lawyers for the plaintiffs — Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran — agreed that their clients had the standing and the right to challenge the NDAA in court.
Plaintiff Tangerine Bolen, co-founder of the pro-transparency organization Revolution Truth, wrote in an a recent op-ed about the surreal nature of suing her own government:
We are fighting for due process and for the first amendment — for a country we still believe in and for a government still legally bound by its constitution. If that makes us their “enemies”, then so be it. As long as they cannot call us “belligerents,” lock us up and throw away the key — a power that, incredibly, this past week U.S. government lawyers still asserted is their right. Against such abuses, we will keep fighting.
I spoke with Alexa O’Brien, another plaintiff and a key organizer of US Day of Rage, by phone about her involvement in the case. She spoke about the relief she has felt from the experience of being able to publicly expose the government’s intimidation of activists — including herself — and the deep regard she had for her co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “It really is an honor to be part of such distinguished company,” said O’Brien.
Accompanying the lawsuit was an aggressive campaign to spread awareness about the consequences of the NDAA. Preliminary arguments in the class-action lawsuit were made on March 29, 2012, and were joined by days of action across the country — mostly organized by various Occupy groups — to express public opposition to the law.
Lucas Vazquez is a volunteer organizer with Revolution Truth, one of the partners providing media support for the lawsuit. Vazquez, an early planner of Occupy Wall Street who became involved with the litigation because of his concerns about government repression of the Occupy movement and other activist groups, helped organize some of the days of action in New York City that opposed the NDAA. When we spoke by phone last week, Vazquez emphasized the need for more outreach to the press.
“We’ve had good media coverage,” said Vazquez. “No one [in the media] has really denounced the lawsuit, which is giving us some degree of merit. Still, we need to continue raising awareness and giving updates to people.”
In May, Judge Katherine Forrest — an Obama appointee to the Southern District of New York — issued a temporary injunction on section 1021 of the NDAA, which prevents the government from enforcing the indefinite detention clause of the NDAA. In a panel discussion organized by Revolution Truth, lawyers, plaintiffs and other concerned persons emphasized the importance of Judge Forrest’s ruling, which ruled the NDAA unconstitutional. Still, as the case moves into the court of appeals, the struggle is far from over.
The court documents reveal an ambiguous interpretation of what the government believes its powers to be over its citizens. Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer and scholar, reported on the government’s inability — some might say refusal — to further define the categories named in section 1021 before the court. The government’s reluctance to specify the broad and vague terms such as “substantially supported” and “associated forces” highlights the legal gray area that the executive branch tries to maintain surrounding the powers under its purview.
When the hearings resumed last week in federal court, plaintiffs were hoping for a permanent injunction, but the government gave notice of appeal before Forrest issued a final ruling. Regardless, the temporary restraining order remains even as there are suspicions that the government may be in contempt of Judge Forrest’s ruling because the government says it does not track those whom it detains or for what reasons. The case will be heard in appellate court before likely heading toward the Supreme Court.
The government’s actions reveal its commitment to giving the military broad policing and detention power over U.S. citizens. Hedges, in an email after the ruling, commented that the government’s actions send a clear signal: “The Obama administration is determined to continue its assault on basic civil liberties, including due process, despite interference from the courts.”
For Alexa O’Brien, the appeal didn’t come as a surprise, and it further reveals the need for change. “I hope the judicial branch checks this kind of abomination,” she said. “The executive branch doesn’t want to give an inch. The executive has access to 16 intelligence agencies, finances, the military. We need to educate Americans about the actuality of checks and balances in the post-9/11 world.”
The ongoing litigation challenging the NDAA highlights the potential efficacy of judicial action. While the Hedges v. Obama case seems to hold the most promise for challenging the constitutionality of the NDAA — and for drawing attention to the increasing frequency of detention issues and the apparent neglect of the writ of habeas corpus — this legal approach is just one tactic for those trying to oppose the NDAA’s most troubling provisions.
Organizations like the ACLU have had success in drumming up support for counter-legislation, for example. The ACLU toolkit has model legislation that would repeal, nullify, or prevent state and local enforcement of sections 1021 and 1022 of the law. Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel at the ACLU, believes that grassroots opposition to the NDAA can lead to its eventual repeal in Congress. Anders explained in an email that Congress has noticed that “the state and local resolutions condemning the NDAA detention provisions, and prohibiting state and local officials from participating in the indefinite detention without charge or trial in the United States, have had an impact in Congress.”
The opposition is coming from across the traditional political spectrum. The Tenth Amendment Center — a libertarian organization committed to protecting states’ rights — is also promoting model legislation for state and local opposition to the NDAA. The progress of such legislation in dozens of towns, cities, and states — including resolutions in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Arizona and elsewhere — can be tracked on the center’s website.
Demand Progress — a key ally in the coalition fighting against the NDAA — has worked hard to put pressure on Congress to undo the indefinite detention provision. Hundreds of thousands of emails were sent to members of Congress opposing the NDAA, as well as many phone calls, when the Smith-Amash amendment — which would have prohibited the government from indefinitely detaining U.S. citizens — was up for a vote in the House of Representatives in May 2012. The bill was ultimately defeated 237–182. Now, Demand Progress is targeting the Senate to have the provision overturned in the 2013 version of the annual NDAA.
When asked what others could do, Alexa O’Brien replied, “Organize rallies, call representatives, because they can also nullify this. People, within their communities, have other recourse to fight against this legislation.” In the meantime, she, her fellow plaintiffs and their legal team will continue their struggle in the courts.
Jake Olzen is an activist/organizer, farmer, and graduate student at Loyola University Chicago. He is part of the White Rose Catholic Worker community.
This article was originally published at Waging Nonviolence
US “Fifty Wealthiest Lawmakers” list: A Congress of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich
By Eric London
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32300.htm
August 27, 2012 "WSWS" -- Last week’s report by Washington, D.C. political blog The Hill details the vast wealth of the nation’s legislative representatives and serves as an indictment of the anti-democratic nature of the American political system. The “50 Wealthiest Lawmakers” list shows that dozens of congressional politicians have amassed huge fortunes while simultaneously slashing the wages, benefits and social services of the American people.
In other words, not only are these members of Congress overseeing a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the ruling class; they are also profiting from this transfer.
The report reveals the bipartisan composition of the extremely wealthy in congress. Seven of the top 10 richest members of congress are Democrats; overall, Republicans make up 60 percent of the list.
According to The Hill, 17 members of Congress have amassed fortunes of over $20 million, and a total of 35 members of Congress have a net worth valued at over $10 million.
These numbers are slightly skewed compared with past surveys. Due to the passage of the STOCK Act, members of Congress now are legally required to report mortgages as liabilities. The STOCK Act was passed after revelations were made regarding banks giving members of Congress and their staffs “friendly” deals on their personal mortgages in return for favorable legislation.
The list also sheds light on the nature of wealth accumulation amongst the super-rich in America. Among the elite today, wealth accumulation has less to do with productive work than it does with parasitism, inheritance, and family ties.
Rep. Michael McCaul (Republican of Texas) tops the list with a total fortune of $290.5 million. McCaul’s wealth comes in part from his marriage to the daughter of Lowry Mays, the founder of radio giant Clear Channel Communications. Belying the claim that these fortunes come from productive hard work, McCaul’s 2011 financial report explained that “certain assets owned by spouse were acquired via gift from spouse’s parents.”
Democratic Party leadership is featured prominently at the top of the list.
Sen. John Kerry (Democrat of Massachusetts), the party’s nominee for president in 2004, is second, with a net worth of $198.8 million. Like McCaul, much of this wealth comes from family. His wife Theresa Heinz’s “numerous family trusts” have helped push Kerry’s fortune up $5 million in the last year.
Democratic Senators Jay Rockefeller (West Virginia), Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), and Dianne Feinstein (California) are also featured in the top 10. The respective fortunes of these three senators ($83.1 million, $80.1 million, and $47.2 million) come in large part from family inheritances and trusts.
Feinstein’s net worth is partially explained by her marriage to investment banker Richard Blum, who also sits on the University of California’s Board of Regents. Blum has been a strong supporter of privatization and fee hikes. Feinstein also reported owning homes in the Lake Tahoe area, the Coachella Valley, the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, and San Francisco.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ranks as the thirteenth wealthiest member of Congress, with a net worth of $26.4 million. Much of Pelosi’s fortune comes from her husband Paul Pelosi, a land developer. Pelosi’s fortune actually declined since 2010, but this can largely be explained by $6 million in mortgages on two properties in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco that are now counted as liabilities.
Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin reported a net worth of $10.2 million. Among other reported assets, “his prized stamp collection … is now worth at least $150,000.”
Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican, ranks 35th on the list. A portion of her $9 million fortune comes from investments in Education Management Corporation, a for-profit post-secondary education company. Snowe’s husband, former Maine governor John McKernan Jr., sits on the company’s board of directors.
All of the Congressional members on the list amassed their vast sums of money on the backs of the working people they purport to represent.
The web site OpenSecrets.org reports that land speculation is the industry in which members of Congress make the most money. Financial speculation, securities and investments, oil and gas production, and commercial banking are also featured in the top 10 profitable industries for members of Congress.
The report from The Hill underlines what was already clear about American politics: the vast majority of Americans are given no representation in government. Their “elected” representatives are chosen from the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
The lives of these members of Congress compare starkly with the realities that their constituents face on a day-to-day basis. In the years following the financial crisis, the average American family has lost 40 percent of its net worth. Half of America lives either under the poverty line or one paycheck away from it. In some states, a quarter of the population struggles to afford food. Meanwhile, Congress cuts unemployment benefits, funding for health care, education, and housing. Both parties have agreed that slashing pensions and food stamps are next on the agenda.
For the richest members of Congress, these cuts will result, as they evidently have already, in an increase in net worth. For their working class constituents, the cuts pose a more urgent threat: hunger, disease, poverty, and a loss of life.
Interesting video - Revolution 2012: It's Time To Rise
5 Minute Video
The time has come. Be the change you want to see in this world.
Posted August 27, 2012
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32297.htm
Israel Breaks Silence Over Army Abuses
Ex-soldiers admit to appalling violence against Palestinian children
By Donald Macintyre
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32299.htm
August 27, 2012 "The Independent" -- Hafez Rajabi was marked for life by his encounter with the men of the Israeli army's Kfir Brigade five years ago this week. Sitting beneath the photograph of his late father, the slightly built 21-year-old in jeans and trainers points to the scar above his right eye where he was hit with the magazine of a soldier's assault rifle after the patrol came for him at his grandmother's house before 6am on 28 August 2007.
He lifts his black Boss T-shirt to show another scar running some three inches down his back from the left shoulder when he says he was violently pushed – twice – against a sharp point of the cast-iron balustrade beside the steps leading up to the front door. And all that before he says he was dragged 300m to another house by a unit commander who threatened to kill him if he did not confess to throwing stones at troops, had started to beat him again, and at one point held a gun to his head. "He was so angry," says Hafez. "I was certain that he was going to kill me."
This is just one young man's story, of course. Except that – remarkably – it is corroborated by one of the soldiers who came looking for him that morning. One of 50 testimonies on the military's treatment of children – published today by the veterans' organisation Breaking the Silence – describes the same episode, if anything more luridly than Hafez does. "We had a commander, never mind his name, who was a bit on the edge," the soldier, a first sergeant, testifies. "He beat the boy to a pulp, really knocked him around. He said: 'Just wait, now we're taking you.' Showed him all kinds of potholes on the way, asked him: 'Want to die? Want to die right here?' and the kid goes: 'No, no...' He was taken into a building under construction. The commander took a stick, broke it on him, boom boom. That commander had no mercy. Anyway the kid could no longer stand on his feet and was already crying. He couldn't take it any more. He cried. The commander shouted: 'Stand up!' Tried to make him stand, but from so much beating he just couldn't. The commander goes: 'Don't put on a show,' and kicks him some more."
Two months ago, a report from a team of British lawyers, headed by Sir Stephen Sedley and funded by the UK Foreign Office, accused Israel of serial breaches of international law in its military's handling of children in custody. The report focused on the interrogation and formal detention of children brought before military courts – mainly for allegedly throwing stones.
For the past eight years, Breaking the Silence has been taking testimonies from former soldiers who witnessed or participated in human rights abuses in the occupied territories. Most of these accounts deal with "rough justice" administered to minors by soldiers on the ground, often without specific authorisation and without recourse to the military courts. Reading them, however, it's hard not to recall the Sedley report's shocked reference to the "belief, which was advanced to us by a military prosecutor, that every Palestinian child is a 'potential terrorist'".
The soldier puts it differently: "We were sort of indifferent. It becomes a kind of habit. Patrols with beatings happened on a daily basis. We were really going at it. It was enough for you to give us a look that we didn't like, straight in the eye, and you'd be hit on the spot. We got to such a state and were so sick of being there."
Some time ago, after he had testified to Breaking the Silence, we had interviewed this soldier. As he sat nervously one morning in a quiet Israeli beauty spot, an incongruous location he had chosen to ensure no one knew he was talking, he went through his recollections about the incident – and several others – once again. His account does not match the Palestinian's in every detail. (Hafez remembers a gun being pressed to his temple, for example, while the soldier recalls that the commander "actually stuck the gun barrel in the kid's mouth. Literally".)
But in every salient respect, the two accounts match. Both agree that Hafez, on the run after hearing that he was wanted, had slipped into his grandmother's house before dawn. Hafez showed us the room in his grandmother's house, the last on the left in the corridor leading to her room, where he had been hiding when the soldiers arrived. Sure enough, the soldier says: "We entered, began to trash the place. We found the boy behind the last door on the left. He was totally scared."
Both Hafez – who has never read or heard the soldier's account – and the soldier recall the commander forcing him at one point during his ordeal to throw a stone at them, and that the boy did so as feebly as possible. Then, in the soldier's words "the commander said: 'Of course you throw stones at a soldier.' Boom, banged him up even more".
Perhaps luckily for Hafez, the second, still uncompleted, house is within sight of that of his aunt, Fathia Rajabi, 57, who told us how she had gone there after seeing the soldiers dragging a young man behind a wall, unaware that he was her nephew. "I was crying, 'God forbids to beat him.' He recognised my voice and yelled: 'My aunt, my aunt.' I tried to enter but the two soldiers pointed their guns at me and yelled rouh min houn, Arabic for 'go away'. I began slapping my face and shouting at passers-by to come and help. Ten minutes later the soldiers left. I and my mother, my brother and neighbours went to the room. He was bleeding from his nose and head, and his back."
The soldier, who like his comrades mistook Ms Rajabi for the boy's mother, recalls: "The commander said to [her]: 'Keep away!' Came close, cocked his gun. She got scared. [He shouted:] 'Anyone gets close, I kill him. Don't annoy me. I'll kill him. I have no mercy.' He was really on the edge. Obviously [the boy] had been beaten up. Anyway, he told them: 'Get the hell out of here!' and all hell broke loose. His nose was bleeding. He had really been beaten to a pulp."
Finally, Hafez's brother Mousa, 23, a stone cutter who joined his aunt at the second house, recalls a second army jeep arriving and one soldier taking Hafez's pulse, giving Mousa a bottle of water which he then poured over Hafez's face and speaking to the commander in Hebrew.
"I understood he was protesting," says Mousa. This was almost certainly the 'sensitive' medic whom the soldier describes as having "caught the commander and said: 'Don't touch him any more. That's it.'" The commander goes: 'What's with you, gone leftie?' And he said: 'No, I don't want to see such things being done. All you're doing to this family is making them produce another suicide bomber. If I were a father and saw you doing this to my kid, I'd seek revenge that very moment.'"
In fact Hafez, did not turn into a "suicide bomber". He has never even been in prison. Instead, the outcome has been more prosaic. He no longer has nightmares about his experience as he did in the first two months. But as a former mechanic he is currently unemployed partly because there are few jobs outside construction sites and the Hebron quarries, where he says his injuries still prevent him from carrying heavy loads, and partly because he often does "not feel I want to work again". And he has not – so far – received any compensation, including the more than £1,100 he and Mousa had to spend on his medical treatment in the two years after he was taken.
The report by Sir Stephen Sedley's team remarks that "as the United Kingdom has itself learned by recent experience in Iraq, the risk of abuse is inherent in any system of justice which depends on military force". Moreover, Britain, unlike Israel, has no organisation like Breaking the Silence that can document, from the inside, the abuse of victims like Hafez Rajabi who never even make it to court.
But as the Sedley report also says, after drawing attention to the argument that every Palestinian is a "potential terrorist": "Such a stance seems to us to be the starting point of a spiral of injustice, and one which only Israel, as the occupying power in the West Bank, can reverse."
Breaking the silence: soldiers' testimonies
First Sergeant, Kfir Brigade
Salfit 2009
"We took over a school and had to arrest anyone in the village who was between the ages of 17 and 50. When these detainees asked to go to the bathroom, and the soldiers took them there, they beat them to a pulp and cursed them for no reason, and there was nothing that would legitimise hitting them. An Arab was taken to the bathroom to piss, and a soldier slapped him, took him down to the ground while he was shackled and blindfolded. The guy wasn't rude and did nothing to provoke any hatred or nerves. Just like that, because he is an Arab. He was about 15, hadn't done a thing.
"In general people at the school were sitting for hours in the sun. They could get water once in a while, but let's say someone asked for water five times, a soldier could come to him and slap him just like that. I saw many soldiers using their knees to hit them, just out of boredom. Because you're standing around for 10 hours doing nothing, you're bored, so you hit them. I know that at the bathroom, there was this 'demons' dance' as it was called. Anyone who brought a Palestinian there – it was catastrophic. Not bleeding beatings – they stayed dry – but still beatings."
First Sergeant, Combat Engineering Corps
Ramallah 2006-07
"There was this incident where a 'straw widow' was put up following a riot at Qalandiya on a Friday, in an abandoned house near the square. Soldiers got out with army clubs and beat people to a pulp. Finally the children who remained on the ground were arrested. The order was to run, make people fall to the ground. There was a 10- to 12-man team, four soldiers lighting up the area. People were made to fall to the ground, and then the soldiers with the clubs would go over to them and beat them. A slow runner was beaten – that was the rule.
"We were told not to use it on people's heads. I don't remember where we were told to hit, but as soon as a person on the ground is beaten with such a club, it's difficult to be particular."
First Sergeant, Kfir Brigade
Hebron 2006-07
"We'd often provoke riots there. We'd be on patrol, walking in the village, bored, so we'd trash shops, find a detonator, beat someone to a pulp, you know how it is. Search, mess it all up. Say we'd want a riot? We'd go up to the windows of a mosque, smash the panes, throw in a stun grenade, make a big boom, then we'd get a riot.
"Every time we'd catch Arab kids.You catch him, push the gun against his body. He can't make a move – he's totally petrified. He only goes: 'No, no, army.' You can tell he's petrified. He sees you're mad, that you couldn't care less about him and you're hitting him really hard the whole time. And all those stones flying around. You grab him like this, you see? We were mean, really. Only later did I begin to think about these things, that we'd lost all sense of mercy."
Rank and unit unidentified in report
Hebron 2007-08
"One night, things were hopping in Idna village [a small town of 20,000 people, about 13km west of Hebron], so we were told there's this wild riot, and we should get there fast. Suddenly we were showered with stones and didn't know what was going on. Everyone stopped suddenly; the sergeant sees the company commander get out of the vehicle and joins him. We jump out without knowing what was going on – I was last. Suddenly I see a shackled and blindfolded boy. The stoning stopped as soon as the company commander gets out of the car. He fired rubber ammo at the stone-throwers and hit this boy.
"At some point they talked about hitting his face with their knees. At that point I argued with them and said: 'I swear to you, if a drop of his blood or a hair falls off his head, you won't sleep for three nights. I'll make you miserable.'
"They laughed at me for being a leftie. 'If we don't show them what's what, they go back to doing this.' I argued with them that the guy was shackled and couldn't do anything. That he was being taken to the Shabak [security service] and we'd finished our job."
Donald Macintyre, The Independent's Jerusalem correspondent since 2004, Donald Macintyre was the paper’s Chief Political Commentator for eight years and before that Political Editor of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. He has written for the Daily Express, Sunday Times, Times and Sunday Telegraph.
© independent.co.uk
Feds: Too few Americans ‘turn to government for assistance’
August 27, 2012 | 2:18 pm
http://washingtonexaminer.com/feds-too-few-americans-turn-to-government-for-assistance/article/2506052#.UDvIhGzCz8B
More Americans rely on their families for assistance than the government, so federal officials have undertaken an effort to help people to apply for federal assistance.
“Given that only 15 percent of you turn to government assistance in tough times, we want to make sure you know about benefits that could help you,” USA.gov announced today. The ”government made easy’ website has created a “help for difficult financial times” page for people to learn more about the programs.
The government got that statistic from a poll asking Americans what helps them the most during tough times. Here are the results:
•Savings 44%
•Family 21%
•Credit cards/loans 20%
•Government assistance 15%
“Government assistance comes in different forms—from unemployment checks and food assistance to credit counseling and medical treatment,” USA.gov reminded readers.
This leg of the financial assistance push has ended. “Although our campaign to highlight Help for Difficult Financial Times has ended, we know that your struggles may continue,” said USA.gov today. “We will keep updating the tools and information we provide to help you get back on your feet.”
Counterfeit money to hold up a consumer-based bubble/fraud "economy".
Food - the next currency
Goldman Non-Prosecution:
AG Eric Holder Has No Balls
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32193.htm
By Matt Taibbi
August 15, 2012 "Information Clearing House" I’ve been on deadline in the past week or so, so I haven't had a chance to weigh in on Eric Holder’s predictable decision to not pursue criminal charges against Goldman, Sachs for any of the activities in the report prepared by Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn two years ago.
Last year I spent a lot of time and energy jabbering and gesticulating in public about what seemed to me the most obviously prosecutable offenses detailed in the report – the seemingly blatant perjury before congress of Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman executives, and the almost comically long list of frauds committed by the company in its desperate effort to unload its crappy “cats and dogs” mortgage-backed inventory.
In the notorious Hudson transaction, for instance, Goldman claimed, in writing, that it was fully "aligned" with the interests of its client, Morgan Stanley, because it owned a $6 million slice of the deal. What Goldman left out is that it had a $2 billion short position against the same deal.
If that isn’t fraud, Mr. Holder, just what exactly is fraud?
Still, it wasn’t surprising that Holder didn’t pursue criminal charges against Goldman. And that’s not just because Holder has repeatedly proven himself to be a spineless bureaucrat and obsequious political creature masquerading as a cop, and not just because rumors continue to circulate that the Obama administration – supposedly in the interests of staving off market panic – made a conscious decision sometime in early 2009 to give all of Wall Street a pass on pre-crisis offenses.
No, the real reason this wasn’t surprising is that Holder’s decision followed a general pattern that has been coming into focus for years in American law enforcement. Our prosecutors and regulators have basically admitted now that they only go after the most obvious and easily prosecutable cases.
If the offense committed doesn’t fit the exact description in the relevant section of the criminal code, they pass. The only white-collar cases they will bring are absolute slam-dunk situations where some arrogant rogue commits a blatant crime for individual profit in a manner thoroughly familiar to even the non-expert portion of the jury pool/citizenry.
In other words, they’ll take on somebody like Raj Rajaratnam, who stacked his illegal insider trades so brazenly and carelessly that his case almost reads like a finance version of Jeff Dahmer tripping over bodies in his Milwaukee apartment. Or they’ll pursue Bernie Madoff on the tenth or eleventh time he crosses their desk, after years of nonaction, and after he breaks down weeping and confessing. Basically, if someone backs a dump truck up to the DOJ and unloads the entire case, gift-wrapped, a contrite and confessing criminal included, a guy like Eric Holder might, after much agonizing deliberation, decide to prosecute.
But here’s the thing: most of the crimes Wall Street people commit involve highly specific, highly individualized transactions that won’t fit Eric Holder’s bag of cookie-cutter statutory definitions. That is not the same thing as saying they’re not crimes. They are: the crimes of the crisis period were and are very basic crimes like fraud, theft, perjury, and tax evasion, only they’re dressed up in millions of pages of camouflaging verbiage.
Or, even more often, the crimes have also been sanctified in advance by “reputable” law and accounting firms, who (for huge fees) offered their clients opinions that, if X and Y are signed in accordance with Z, and A and B are stipulated by the parties, and everyone’s sitting Indian-style and facing the moon when the deal is agreed to, then it’s not fucked up and illegal when Goldman Sachs tells you it’s a co-investor in your deal when it’s actually got $2 billion bet against you.
You know that look a dog gives you when you show it something confusing, like an electric razor or a lawn sprinkler? That’s the look federal prosecutors give when companies like Goldman wave their attorneys’ sanctifying opinions at them. They scratch their heads and say: “Oh, wow, well since this was signed in Australia by three millionaire lawyers wearing magic invisibility cloaks, it really isn’t fraud! They’re right!”
As one high-profile attorney currently working on a closely-watched case involving a Wall Street bank put it to me yesterday: “With these Justice guys, everything the Wall Street lawyers say makes perfect sense to them, no matter how dumb it is.”
You can almost feel the relief emanating from Washington when these prosecutors decide against matching wits with the wizened 60 year-old legal Sith Lords from Harvard and Yale who’ve seen everything, know every judge by his or her first name, and in a trial would be basically bringing absolutely everything a lawyer can bring to the table, except consciences of course.
It’s political, sure, these decisions not to go after the Goldmans of the world, but more than that what usually rules the day is just pure intellectual fear – appropriate in many cases, since any prosecutor who buys for a second any of the high-priced excuses being shoveled at them from corporate defense firms like Davis Polk or criminal defense mercenaries like Reid Weingarten (retained to defend Blankfein against possible criminal charges) probably really is no match, intellectually, for Wall Street’s lawyers.
They’re also no match morally. Wall Street firms pay their lawyers millions of dollars for their creativity, for their willingness to fight. They say to their lawyers, as Lehman Brothers said before it crashed: “We’d like to book $50 million in loans as sales. Find a way for us to call that legal.”
As it happens Lehman couldn’t find even one American law firm to go for that one, so they went to England and got a firm called Linklaters to find a way, which they did. The Linklaters opinion was just a duller version of the, “It’s legal if we’re all sitting Indian style and facing the moon” defense. Here’s the New York Times explanation:
Enter Linklaters, which grounded its legal brief in English, rather than American, law. The firm explicitly said: “This opinion is limited to English law as applied by the English courts and is given on the basis that it will be governed by and construed in accordance with English law.”
Otherwise, Linklaters provided Lehman with exactly what it wanted to hear. The law firm decreed in its briefs, at least as outlined in the 2006 iteration obtained by Mr. Valukas, that intent matters. If two parties intend to exchange assets for cash, and then later the party receiving the assets decides to hand back “equivalent assets (such as securities of the same series and nominal value) rather than the very assets that were originally delivered,” that amounts to a sale.
That’s how law works on Wall Street. The bank walks into the room with the sordid activity, and the law firm’s partners huddle up and whip their associates – for hundreds and hundreds of billable hours straight, if necessary – until a way is found to call stealing or tax evasion or accounting fraud or whatever legal.
That’s the way it should work on the prosecutorial side, too. You should start with a simple moral premise – this group of crooks ripped off X group of victims for fifty million dollars – and then you should bury yourself in law books until you find a way to put them all in jail. If Linklaters gets paid to be creative, well, Mr. Holder, we’re paying you to be creative, too.
Again, though, Holder didn’t need to be creative in the Goldman case. Levin gift-wrapped the whole thing for him. He could have had a dozen easy convictions just on the evidence in that report, and if he had been creative, if he had used his vast power to roll up the guilty and flip them into more revelations, then he’d have had enough cases to last the AG’s office the next decade.
But the Holders of the world do not want to be creative when the targets are politically influential rich people. Instead, they use their creativity against Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, immigrant housekeepers, and guys who knock over liquor stores. They like to flex muscles against bank robbers, celebrity tax evaders (we can’t have Wesley Snipes on the loose!), truck hijackers, and drug dealers. As Gene Wilder would say, "You know – morons."
Holder’s non-decision on Goldman is more than unsurprising. It amounts to an official announcement that the government is no longer in the business or prosecuting smart criminals. It’s pathetic. The one thing you pay any lawyer to have is balls, and our nation’s top attorney has none.
Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. He’s the author of five books, most recently The Great Derangement and Griftopia, and a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary.
This article was originally published at Rolling Stone
Copyright ©2012 Rolling Stone
"Your Vote WILL Be Stolen And Here's How"
Millions of votes were wiped from the voter rolls in 2008, and when compared to what might happen in the 2012 election, 2008 will look sparkling clean. There are ways you can stand up and fight for this democracy. Learn them. [more at LeeCamp.net]
Mississippi River dries up as drought worsens: how a dying river could help crash the U.S. economy
Posted on August 15, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/mississippi-river-dries-up-as-drought-worsens-how-a-dying-river-could-help-crash-the-u-s-economy/
August 15, 2012 – MIDWEST – The worst drought in more than 50 years is having a devastating impact on the Mississippi River. The Mississippi has become very thin and very narrow, and if it keeps on dropping there is a very real possibility that all river traffic could get shut down. And considering the fact that approximately 60 percent of our grain, 22 percent of our oil and natural gas, and and one-fifth of our coal travel down the Mississippi River, that would be absolutely crippling for our economy. It has been estimated that if all Mississippi River traffic was stopped that it would cost the U.S. economy 300 million dollars a day. So far most of the media coverage of this historic drought has focused on the impact that it is having on farmers and ranchers, but the health of the Mississippi River is also absolutely crucial to the economic success of this nation, and right now the Mississippi is in incredibly bad shape. In some areas the river is already 20 feet below normal and the water is expected to continue to drop. If we have another 12 months of weather ahead of us similar to what we have seen over the last 12 months then the mighty Mississippi is going to be a complete and total disaster zone by this time next year. Most Americans simply do not understand how vitally important the Mississippi River is to all of us. If the Mississippi River continues drying up to the point where commercial travel is no longer possible, it would be an absolutely devastating blow to the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, vast stretches of the Mississippi are already dangerously low. The following is an excerpt from a transcript of a CNN report that aired on August 14th. A lot of barges have been forced to go with greatly reduced loads so that they will sit higher in the river, and other commercial craft have been forced to stop operating completely. For example, the Mississippi has dropped so low at this point that the famous American Queen Steamboat can no longer safely navigate the river. Down south, the Mississippi River has gotten so low that saltwater is actually starting to move upriver. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is fighting hard to keep that contained. Other waterways in the middle part of the country are in even worse shape. For example, a 100 mile stretch of the Platte River has already dried up. Millions of fish are dying as rivers and streams all over the country continue to get shallower and warmer as a result of the ongoing drought. The last time the condition of the Mississippi River was this bad was back in 1988. At that time, a lot of barge traffic was stopped completely and the shipping industry lost approximately a billion dollars. If a similar thing were to happen now, the consequences could potentially be far worse. –ETF Daily
Social Security Administration To Purchase 174 Thousand Rounds Of Hollow Point Bullets
http://www.prisonplanet.com/social-security-administration-to-purchase-174-thousand-rounds-of-hollow-point-bullets.html
Russian attack submarine sailed in Gulf of Mexico undetected for weeks, U.S. officials say
Posted on August 14, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/russian-attack-submarine-sailed-in-gulf-of-mexico-undetected-for-weeks-u-s-officials-say/
August 14, 2012 – RUSSIA – A Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine armed with long-range cruise missiles operated undetected in the Gulf of Mexico for several weeks and its travel in strategic U.S. waters was only confirmed after it left the region, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. It is only the second time since 2009 that a Russian attack submarine has patrolled so close to U.S. shores. The stealth underwater incursion in the Gulf took place at the same time Russian strategic bombers made incursions into restricted U.S. airspace near Alaska and California in June and July, and highlights a growing military assertiveness by Moscow. The submarine patrol also exposed what U.S. officials said were deficiencies in U.S. anti-submarine warfare capabilities—forces that are facing cuts under the Obama administration’s plan to reduce defense spending by $487 billion over the next 10 years. The Navy is in charge of detecting submarines, especially those that sail near U.S. nuclear missile submarines, and uses undersea sensors and satellites to locate and track them. The fact that the Akula was not detected in the Gulf is cause for concern, U.S. officials said. The officials who are familiar with reports of the submarine patrol in the Gulf of Mexico said the vessel was a nuclear-powered Akula-class attack submarine, one of Russia’s quietest submarines. A Navy spokeswoman declined to comment. One official said the Akula operated without being detected for a month. “The Akula was built for one reason and one reason only: To kill U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarines and their crews,” said a second U.S. official. “It’s a very stealthy boat so it can sneak around and avoid detection and hope to get past any protective screen a boomer might have in place,” the official said, referring to the Navy nickname for strategic missile submarines. –Free Beacon
Potassium iodide tablets distributed in commonwealth to residents to prepare for nuclear public health emergencies
Posted on August 14, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/potassium-iodide-tablets-distributed-in-commonwealth-to-residents-to-prepare-for-nuclear-public-health-emergencies/
August 14, 2012 – HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The Pennsylvania Department of Health is once again providing free potassium iodide tablets to help residents of the commonwealth prepare for public health emergencies involving nuclear facilities. People who live, work or attend school within a 10-mile radius of the state’s five nuclear power plants can get the tablets, which can help protect the thyroid gland against harmful radioactive iodine. The tablets were distributed Aug. 9 at 14 locations statewide, or can be obtained at state, county or municipal health agencies. Four 65-milligram tablets will be provided to each adult. Smaller doses will be given to children based on their age. The department says people should only take potassium iodide tablets when directed to do so by health officials or the governor. –Bloomberg Business
Radiation crisis: ‘Severe abnormalities’ found in Fukushima butterflies
Posted on August 14, 2012
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/radiation-crisis-severe-abnormalities-found-in-fukushima-butterflies/
August 14, 2012 – JAPAN - Exposure to radioactive material released into the environment has caused mutations in butterflies found in Japan, a study suggests. Scientists found an increase in leg, antennae and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected following the 2011 Fukushima accident. The link between the mutations and the radioactive material was shown by laboratory experiments, they report. The work has been published in the journal Scientific Reports. Two months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in March 2011, a team of Japanese researchers collected 144 adult pale grass blue (Zizeeria maha) butterflies from 10 locations in Japan, including the Fukushima area. When the accident occurred, the adult butterflies would have been overwintering as larvae. By comparing mutations found on the butterflies collected from the different sites, the team found that areas with greater amounts of radiation in the environment were home to butterflies with much smaller wings and irregularly developed eyes. “It has been believed that insects are very resistant to radiation,” said lead researcher Joji Otaki from the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa. “In that sense, our results were unexpected,” he told BBC News. The Japanese researchers have been studying the species for more than a decade. Prof Otaki’s team then bred these butterflies within labs 1,750km (1,090 miles) away from the accident, where artificial radiation could hardly be detected. It was by breeding these butterflies that they began noticing a suite of abnormalities that hadn’t been seen in the previous generation – that collected from Fukushima – such as malformed antennae, which the insects use to explore their environment and seek out mates. –BBC
Obama Administration Looking at Ethanol Rules
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-10/obama-administration-looksing-at-ethanol-rules.html?cmpid=yhoo
USDA hacked estimate corn yields this week (AGWEB AUDIO)
August 13, 2012 1:29 pm
Something we have been watching closely as there are a few stocks that may benefit if corn pricing calms down a bit.
From Agweb:
For prices, USDA is estimating the 2012/13 season-average farm price for corn to be a record $7.50 to $8.90 per bushel, up sharply from the $5.40 to $6.40 per bushel projected in July. For soybeans, the U.S. season-average price is projected at $15.00 to $17.00 per bushel.
Jerry Gulke, president of the Gulke Group, was not surprised by the lowered yield estimates, but that doesn’t make them any easier to swallow.
“These prices ought to scare the blazes out of ethanol and livestock producers. It appears that the biggest bulk of this cutback will fall on the backs of the livestock, poultry and hog industry. They have some serious decisions to make. And, once you write it on the wall in blood by USDA, I’d say you have a tendency to believe it.”
Listen to Gulke’s full audio analysis HERE.
Ethanol, feed/residual usage and exports were all majorly decreased. “They had to whack all the line items in usage in order to say we’re going to have 650 million bushel carryout.” Gulke says what makes him the most nervous is looking ahead into 2013 and 2014. “We are on the verge of demand destruction. What price in 2013 do we have to sell our corn at to get demand back, should we produce 96 million acres again and get an average crop?”
The best thing to do at this point, Gulke says, is so the make the best of this year and try to capture the current high prices.
If you have unsold bushels at harvest, sell them immediately. “You have no incentive to store crops this fall,” Gulke says. “Nor will the elevator operator, they will probably move grain out as fast as you can get it to them.”
http://www.thedisciplinedinvestor.com/blog/2012/08/13/usda-hacked-estimate-corn-yields-this-week-agweb-audio/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedisciplinedinvestor%2FEBHR+%28The+Disciplined+Investor%29
62: Tofua volcano erupts, sending ash cloud 3,000 feet above Tonga Islands
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/62-tofua-volcano-erupts-sending-ash-cloud-3000-feet-above-tonga-islands/
August 14, 2012 – TONGA - A “new” volcano just entered the watch list: Out in the Pacific, a pilot observed an ash cloud rising from Tofua volcano to 3,000 ft (ca. 1 km) in the Tonga Islands at 04:42 GMT, VAAC Wellington reports. The volcano last erupted in 2009. –Volcano Discovery. Historical background: Tofua Caldera, in Tonga, is the summit caldera of a steep-sided composite cone that forms Tofua Island. Tofua Island is in Tonga’s Ha’apai island group. Pre-caldera activity is recorded by a sequence of pyroclastic deposits and lavas constituting the older cone, followed on the northern part of the island by froth lavas or welded and unwelded ignimbrite. Following caldera collapse, lavas were erupted from the northern part of the island and the caldera-rim fissure zone, scoria and lavas from the caldera-wall fissure zones, pyroclastics and lavas from intracaldera cones, and recent pyroclastic fall deposits on the outer cone. Eruptive products are mainly basaltic andesites and andesites, plus occasional dacite flows within the older cone. A post-caldera cone with fumarolic activity (Lofia) is situated in the northern part of the caldera; a crater lake with 500 m (1,600 ft) depth occupies most of the remainder. Most historical eruptions have been small explosions from Lofia cone along the northern caldera rim. The eruptions of 1958-59 caused most of the islanders to evacuate for a year or more. –Wikipedia
#62: Tofua volcano erupts, sending ash cloud 3,000 feet above Tonga Islands
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/62-tofua-volcano-erupts-sending-ash-cloud-3000-feet-above-tonga-islands/
August 14, 2012 – TONGA - A “new” volcano just entered the watch list: Out in the Pacific, a pilot observed an ash cloud rising from Tofua volcano to 3,000 ft (ca. 1 km) in the Tonga Islands at 04:42 GMT, VAAC Wellington reports. The volcano last erupted in 2009. –Volcano Discovery. Historical background: Tofua Caldera, in Tonga, is the summit caldera of a steep-sided composite cone that forms Tofua Island. Tofua Island is in Tonga’s Ha’apai island group. Pre-caldera activity is recorded by a sequence of pyroclastic deposits and lavas constituting the older cone, followed on the northern part of the island by froth lavas or welded and unwelded ignimbrite. Following caldera collapse, lavas were erupted from the northern part of the island and the caldera-rim fissure zone, scoria and lavas from the caldera-wall fissure zones, pyroclastics and lavas from intracaldera cones, and recent pyroclastic fall deposits on the outer cone. Eruptive products are mainly basaltic andesites and andesites, plus occasional dacite flows within the older cone. A post-caldera cone with fumarolic activity (Lofia) is situated in the northern part of the caldera; a crater lake with 500 m (1,600 ft) depth occupies most of the remainder. Most historical eruptions have been small explosions from Lofia cone along the northern caldera rim. The eruptions of 1958-59 caused most of the islanders to evacuate for a year or more. –Wikipedia
Paul Ryan's faith in Ayn Rand is a political problem for Romney
http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/smFwKDTGXIwKuj41C1_S3Xg/view.m?id=15&gid=commentisfree/2012/aug/13/paul-ryan-ayn-rand-romney&cat=commentisfree
Mitt Romney's running mate may be Catholic but his admiration for an author hostile to Jesus's teachings risks losing him votes.
When I was a teenager, my American girlfriend at the time gave me Ayn Rand's cult novel Atlas Shrugged to read. It changed her life, she said. It changed mine, too. She was not my girlfriend by the morning. It was the most unpleasant thing I'd ever had the misfortune to read.
As a work of literature, Atlas Shrugged is drivel, and not simply because it is so up itself with its own perceived radicalism; fundamentally, all propaganda is drivel, even if it is propaganda in a good cause. Rand's cause was to celebrate what she called "the virtue of selfishness", to denigrate the poor as scroungers and to celebrate the muscular individualism of the creative heroes of capitalism. Altruism, she contends, is "complete evil". The question she poses: what would happen if all the bankers and captains of industry went on strike? What would happen if these Atlas-like gods, who hold up the world, decided one day to shrug and refuse to support everyone else? Then the world would be buggered, she contends. Atlas Shrugged is cheap pornography for the nastiest side of capitalism.
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," said Mitt Romney's now running mate Paul Ryan four years ago. He also admitted he made all his interns read Atlas Shrugged, dishing them out as Christmas presents.
But here's the political problem for Ryan. Many were queasy when George Bush cheesily described Jesus as his favourite philosopher, but at least he knew his market. In contrast, few books can be as hostile to the Christian faith as Atlas Shrugged. For Rand, the good Samaritan was not simply a chump: he was in fact doing something wicked. We are saved only by selfishness. So how can an American politician, who has described himself as a "staunch Catholic" and in what is supposed to be an electorate dominated by Christian values, side with one who so thoroughly rejected all the teachings of Jesus?
Ryan has now predictably backtracked. "I reject her philosophy. It's an atheist philosophy. If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas." By the way, this is the same Thomas Aquinas who insisted that, "Man should not consider his material possession his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need," thus espousing the very collectivism that Rand so loathed.
Words are cheap, especially on the campaign trail. By your deeds shall you know them. And Ryan's deeds, and in particular his budget plan for slashing the role of the state, are pure Rand, as a group of Jesuits from Georgetown University have insisted: "Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favourite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love." The US Catholic bishops' conference, not well-known for its progressive politics, has said much the same.
It feels odd to be arguing that there ought to be more religion in US politics. In many ways, I'd prefer there to be a lot less. And certainly a lot less of the hard-right hogwash that borrows the wardrobe of Christianity but has no intention of being subject to its moral values. Jesus said nothing whatsoever about homosexuality or abortion. He said a great deal about poverty and our responsibility for the vulnerable. Which is why Paul Ryan is little more than Ayn Rand in Christian drag.
Ironically, he is a "second-hander" – Rand's terminology for those who take their values, prêt-à-porter, from others. The trouble is that Christianity in the US has become so widely hijacked by the right that not enough people will actually notice. As the Ryan case aptly demonstrates, the Christian right is neither: that is, Christian nor right.
Warning: Get Your Money Out: “All Legal Bank Deposit Protections Are Now Officially Gone”
Mac Slavo - August 12th, 2012
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/warning-get-your-money-out-all-customer-deposits-in-the-united-states-are-now-the-legal-property-of-jp-morgan-goldman-sachs-megabanks_08122012
Former money manager Ann Barnhardt, who in November of 2011 made the decision to cease operations of her brokerage firm and return funds to her customers citing “systemic” problems within the entire financial industry, has issued a new warning about the stability of US banks and the safety of individual deposit accounts.
The warning, stemming from a recent federal appeals court ruling surrounding customer funds lost during the 2007 collapse of Chicago futures broker Sentinel, indicates that individuals who lose deposited funds because a financial institution improperly manages that money, even if those funds are supposed to be “segregated” from other operations of the firm, are essentially left with no recourse if the firm goes belly-up. According to the court, a misallocation of those customer funds, “is not, on its own, sufficient to rule as a matter of law that Sentinel acted ‘with actual intent to hinder, delay, or defraud’ its customers.”
The implications of the ruling, according to Barnhardt, will affect the monies of all private individuals who have seen their deposit accounts wiped out in the collapse of firms like John Corzine’s MF Global and put all deposit account holders in the country at risk should their bank be faced with a financial windstorm:
The NFA in collusion with the banksters, government and judiciary have achieved their goal. The entire concept of “customer segregated funds” is officially, completely, legally dead.
Guys, it is OVER. I know that many of you are still cowering in normalcy bias, unable to deal with reality, unable to face the world as it is, but you have GOT to snap out of it. The marketplace is DESTROYED. You CANNOT be in these markets. All legal protections are now officially gone.
…
The federal appeals court ruled yesterday that not only does BNYM stay at the front of the line, but that using customer segregated funds as collateral is NOT a crime, and that co-mingling customer segregated funds with proprietary funds is NOT fraud.
…
What this means is that even if Jon Corzine is somehow dragged into court by private citizens, because you know damn good and well that the Justice Department will never, ever touch him, Corzine now has a legal precedent, likely from a bribed or otherwise coerced Federal Appeals Court, explicitly stating that an FCM can use customer deposits to pay its debts, and that the customers themselves are subjugated and have basically no legal right to their own monies, no matter what the law says, or what legal assurances, claims or guarantees are made to that customer about their funds held with an FCM or any other brokerage or depository institution. The “secured” party at the front of the line will always be the mega-bank who made the fraudulent loan using the stolen customer funds as collateral.
In other words, all customer funds in the United States are now the legal property of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BNYM, or whichever megabank is the counterparty on the loans the FCM or depository institution takes out in order to fund its mega-levered proprietary in-house trading desks.
Source: Ann Barnhardt via Steve Quayle
The ruling is specifically designed to protect large financial institutions that have (purposefully) mismanaged customer funds and used the hard-earned life savings of Americans to gamble on equities, commodities and bond markets. If those firms happen to make the wrong bet, as MF Global, Sentinel and a handful of others have recently done, depositors who have placed funds with the banks under the belief that their bank account is securely protected from trading liabilities are now completely exposed and liable for the incompetence and negligence of those who engage in market trading.
This latest ruling combined with recent actions by the Federal Reserve and other government regulators suggests a massive fraud has taken place and the financial system itself is under extreme strain with the potential to make the financial collapse of 2007/2008 look like just a training exercise.
In recent days, for example, it’s come to light that the government has secretly called on the country’s five major banks to prepare themselves for collapse by creating stress recovery plans to be used in the event of worst case scenarios.
A few weeks ago, the Federal Reserve also implemented a new policy for money market funds held by financial institutions. Per the new policy, money market funds, which account for some $2.7 trillion in deposits across the United States, can be frozen in the event of an emergency or financial panic. This means that if and when the system does go into a tailspin, at exactly the time people will want to pull their money out of their bank account, they will be restricted from doing so.
These latest actions by government regulators, judges and financial institutions point to one thing: that we have an unprecedented financial collapse in the making. If such a financial crisis comes to pass it is clear that the policies and procedures now in place will transfer the legally owned deposits and money market savings of individual Americans into the hands of the banks at which those funds are kept.
Get Your Money Out.
"Of all the creatures, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." ---Mark Twain