From ths at psalience.org  Mon Nov 21 23:38:57 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:38:57 +0100
Subject: [THS] !!! Tomgram: Andy Kroll,
 Occupy Wall Street's Political  Victory in Ohio
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111121233123.046a6a08@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175470/tomgram%3A_andy_kr

Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Occupy Wall Street's Political Victory in Ohio
Posted by Andy Kroll at 5:50pm, November 20, 2011.

Twelve hours after Mayor Bloomberg?s cops evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment from Zuccotti Park, the space had been scrubbed down and repopulated with police and private-security types, up to 150 of them. In essence, since September there had been two occupations in the Wall Street area and the second of them, the massive one the police were running, had now quite literally replaced the first. Odder yet, by mid-afternoon the police, barricaded in the park, were ringed by the returning protesters, awaiting a judge?s decision on whether they could again set up camp. It was as if in a single night the situation had somehow been turned inside out.

As Occupy Wall Street's website wryly put it: ?NYPD Occupying Liberty Square; Demands Unclear.? That caught the strangely high-spirited post-eviction moment.  But something else caught my eye that afternoon. The ?park? itself, demonstrator-less, filled with bored cops, had morphed into a bare and pitiful space. It wasn?t a park at all, but a thumbnail slab of concrete with lights embedded in it, trees with yellowed leaves, and scattered, plinth-like stone benches, cold as death.

What more reminder did anyone need that the zeitgeist-inspired Occupy Wall Street protesters had brought a mythic quality to a postage-stamp-sized bit of privatized public property? They had made it, tents and all, larger than life, bigger than anything specific that happened there.  They had somehow put it on a world stage. If they head elsewhere, that mythic quality goes with them. The police have now, as is their wont, turned the park into something like an open-air prison. It?s the only thing they evidently know how to do, just as they tried to imprison in metal barricades the giant march from Manhattan?s Foley Square across the Brooklyn Bridge on Thursday night -- with far less success than expected thanks to the effervescent, surging power of the crowd.

As a crew, the OWS protesters are no slouches. By the afternoon of their park eviction, some were already carrying around signs that said: ?You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.?  It?s a rousing instant slogan, and who can deny that there are ideas aplenty swirling around in the OWS ether? As for myself, though, I don?t think Occupy Wall Street is an idea. To me, it seems more like an embodied feeling, as hard to pin down, yet powerful and all embracing, as that 99% label.

Along with its hope and high-spiritedness, OWS has, I suspect, caught and crystalized an American feeling of loss, of a world going down (which always has the possibility of the new somewhere inside it). The outrage that it has transformed into activity is over those who are still living high and profiting off that world?s demise -- the privateers, looters, subprime hucksters, corporate grifters, Wall Street gamblers, and all those willing to take a buck to shill for them, to make sure in every way that they thrive as other Americans crash and burn.

All of this, by the way, was available for anyone to see in clear, even cartoonish, form in the crony-capitalist version of the occupation of Iraq with its urge to privatize everything, make money off Iraqi suffering while the going was good, and stick the Iraqis with a subprime ?reconstruction? program so shoddy that nothing would work and no services would ever be delivered, while the companies hired to reconstruct took home the cash.

As it happened, while few Americans cared what befell the Iraqis, a subprime crook?s version of the occupation of Iraq was heading home. So here?s the truth of it: before anyone decided to ?occupy? any park, we wuz occupied! And the truth of now is perhaps this: a feeling embodied is even harder to suppress than an idea, no matter how often you play whack-a-mole with its encampments. A feeling embodied, as TomDispatch associate editor and Mother Jones reporter Andy Kroll makes clear, can have genuine on-the-ground political power. It can deliver the goods. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Kroll discusses Occupy Wall Street's unlikely first political victory click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

    How the 99% Won in the Fight for Worker Rights
    The Unsung Victors in the Hottest Election of 2011
    By Andy Kroll

    No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that?s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.

    You might have missed OWS's win amid the recent wave of Occupy crackdowns. Police raided Occupy Denver, Occupy Salt Lake City, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Portland, and Occupy Seattle in a five-day span. Hundreds were arrested. And then, in the early morning hours on Tuesday, New York City police descended on Occupy Wall Street itself, fists flying and riot shields at the ready, with orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict the protesters. Later that day, a judge ruled that they couldn't rebuild their young community, dealing a blow to the Occupy protest that inspired them all.

    Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists praised it or highlighted what they considered its bright side. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote that Bloomberg had done Occupy Wall Street a favor. After all, he argued, something dangerous or deadly was bound to happen at OWS sooner or later, especially with winter soon to arrive. Zuccotti Park, Klein added, "was cleared... in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next."

    The New York Times' Paul Krugman wrote that OWS "should be grateful" for Bloomberg's eviction decree: "By acting so badly, Bloomberg has made it easy to see who won?t be truthful and can?t handle open discourse.  He?s also saved OWS from what was probably its greatest problem, the prospect that it would just fade away as time went on and the days grew colder."

    Read between the lines and what Klein, Krugman, and others are really saying is: you had your occupation; now, get real. Start organizing, meaningfully connect your many Occupy protests, build a real movement. As these columnists see it, that movement -- whether you call it OccupyUSA, We Are the 99%, or the New Progressive Movement -- should now turn its attention to policy changes like a millionaire's tax, a financial transaction fee, or a constitutional amendment to nullify the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision that loosed a torrent of cash into American elections. It should think about supporting political candidates. It should start making a nuts-and-bolts difference in American politics.

    But such assessments miss an important truth: Occupy Wall Street has already won its first victory its own way -- in Ohio, when voters repealed Republican governor John Kasich's law to slash bargaining rights for 350,000 public workers and gut what remained of organized labor's political power.

    Commandeering the Conversation

    Don't believe me? Then think back to this spring and summer, when Occupy Wall Street was just a glimmer in the imagination of a few activists, artists, and students. In Washington, the conversation, such as it was, concerned debt, deficit, and austerity. The discussion wasn?t about whether to slash spending, only about how much and how soon. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent called it the "Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop" -- and boy was he right.

    A National Journal analysis in May found that the number of news articles in major newspapers mentioning "deficit" was climbing, while mentions of "unemployment" had plummeted. In the last week of July, the liberal blog ThinkProgress tallied 7,583 mentions of the word "debt" on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News alone. "Unemployment"? A measly 427.

    This all-deficit, all-the-time debate shaped the final debt-ceiling deal, in which House Speaker John Boehner and his "cut-and-grow"-loving GOP allies got just about everything they wanted. So lopsided was the debate in Washington that President Obama himself hailed the deal's bone-deep cuts to health research, public education, environmental protection, childcare, and infrastructure.

    These cuts, the president explained, would bring the country to "the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president." After studying the deal, Ethan Pollock of the Economic Policy Institute told me, "There's no way to square this plan with the president's 'Winning the Future' agenda. That agenda ends." Yet Obama said this as if it were a good thing.

    Six weeks after Obama's speech, protesters heard the call of Adbusters, the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine, and followed the lead of a small crew of activists, writers, and students to "occupy Wall Street." A few hundred of them set up camp in Zuccotti Park, a small patch of concrete next door to Ground Zero. No one knew how long the occupation would last, or what its impact would be.

    What a game-changing few months it?s been. Occupy Wall Street has inspired 750 events around the world, and hundreds of (semi-)permanent encampments around the United States. In so doing, the protests have wrestled the national discussion on the economy away from austerity and toward gaping income inequality (the 99% versus 1% theme), outsized executive compensation, and the plain buying and selling of American politicians by lobbyists and campaign donors.

    Mentions of the phrase "income inequality" in print publications, web stories, and broadcast transcripts spiked from 91 times a week in early September to nearly 500 in late October, according to the website Politico -- an increase of nearly 450%. In the second week of October, according to ThinkProgress, the words most uttered on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were "jobs" (2,738), "Wall Street" (2,387), and "Occupy" (1,278). (References to "debt" tumbled to 398.)

    And here?s another sign of the way Occupy Wall Street has forced what it considers the most pressing economic issues for the country into the spotlight: conservatives have lately gone on the defensive by attacking the very existence of income inequality, even if to little effect. As AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put it, "Give credit to the Occupy Wall Street movement (and historic inequality) for redefining the political narrative."

    Wall Street in Ohio

    The way Occupy Wall Street, with next to no direct access to the mainstream media, commandeered the national political narrative represents something of a stunning triumph. It also laid the groundwork for OWS's first political win.

    Just as OWS was grabbing that narrative, labor unions and Democrats headed into the final stretch of one of their biggest fights of 2011: an up-or-down referendum on the fate of Ohio governor John Kasich?s anti-union law, also known as SB 5. Passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature in March, it sought to curb the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 police, firefighters, teachers, snowplow drivers, and other public workers. It also gutted the political clout of unions by making it harder for them to collect dues and fund their political action committees. After failing to overturn similar laws in Wisconsin and Michigan, the SB 5 fight was labor's last stand of 2011.

    I spent a week in Ohio in early November interviewing dozens of people and reporting on the run-up to the SB 5 referendum. I visited heavily Democratic and Republican parts of the state, talking to liberals and conservatives, union leaders and activists.  What struck me was how dramatically the debate had shifted in Ohio thanks in large part to the energy generated by Occupy Wall Street.

    It was as if a great tide had lifted the pro-repeal forces in a way you only fully grasped if you were there. Organizers and volunteers had a spring in their step that hadn?t been evident in Wisconsin this summer during the recall elections of nine state senators targeted for their actions during the fight over Governor Scott Walker?s own anti-union law. Nearly everywhere I went in Ohio, people could be counted on to mention two things: the 99% -- that is, the gap between the rich and poor -- and the importance of protecting the rights of the cops and firefighters targeted by Kasich's law.

    And not just voters or local activists either.  I heard it from union leaders as well. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told me that her union had recruited volunteers from 15 different states for the final get-out-the-vote effort in Ohio. That, she assured me, wouldn't have happened without the energy generated by OWS. And when Henry herself went door-to-door in Ohio to drum up support for repealing SB 5, she said that she could feel its influence in home after home. "Every conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion sparked by Occupy Wall Street."

    This isn't to take anything away from labor's own accomplishments in Ohio. We Are Ohio, the labor-funded coalition that led the effort, collected nearly 1.3 million signatures this summer to put the repeal of SB 5 on the November ballot.  (They needed just 230,000.) The group outspent its opponents $30 million to $8 million, a nearly four-to-one margin. And in the final days before the November 8th victory, We Are Ohio volunteers knocked on a million doors and made nearly a million phone calls. In the end, a stunning 2.14 million Ohioans voted to repeal SB 5 and only 1.35 million to keep it, a 61% to 39% margin. There were repeal majorities in 82 of Ohio's 88 counties, support that cut across age, class, race, and political ideologies.

    Nonetheless, it?s undeniable that a mood change had hit Ohio -- and in a major way. Pro-worker organizers and volunteers benefited from something their peers in Wisconsin lacked: the wind of public opinion at their backs. Polls conducted in the run-up to Ohio's November 8th vote showed large majorities of Ohioans agreeing that income inequality was a problem. What's more, 60% of respondents in a Washington Post-ABC poll said the federal government should act to close that gap. Behind those changing numbers was the influence of Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy protests.

    So, as the debate rages over what will happen to Occupy Wall Street after its eviction from Zuccotti Park, and some "experts" sneer at OWS and tell it to get real, just direct their attention to Ohio. Kasich's anti-union law might still be on the books if not for the force of OWS. And if the Occupy movement survives Mayor Bloomberg's eviction order and the winter season, if it regroups and adapts to life beyond Zuccotti Park, you can bet it will notch more political victories in 2012.

    Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. He has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, Democracy Now, and Current TV's "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann. His email is akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. To catch Timothy MacBain?s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Kroll discusses Occupy Wall Street?s unlikely first political victory click here, or download it to your iPod here.

    Copyright 2011 Andy Kroll


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 11:58:52 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:58:52 +0100
Subject: [THS] Al Gore won a mini-landslide in 2000
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122114817.065608b0@mail.messagingengine.com>

Unadjusted State Exit Polls and the True Vote Model tell us that 
Al Gore won a mini-landslide in 2000


by Richard Charnin


Nov. 21, 2011


http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/unadjusted-state-exit-polls-indicate-that-al-gore-won-a-mini-landslide-in-2000/


First there was the 2000 Judicial Coup, and then the 

long-running media con that Bush really did win.


Let's take another look. 


Al Gore won the unadjusted state exit polls (58,000 respondents) by 50.8-44.4%?a marging of 6 MILLION

VOTES, compared to the 540,000 recorded. There were nearly 6 MILLION UNCOUNTED votes. The great majority were Gore votes. 


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjAk1JUWDMyRdFIzSTJtMTJZekNBWUdtbWp3bHlpWGc#gid=4


The True Vote Model confirms the Gore landslide. Based 

on 1996 and 2000 votes cast with 75% of Uncounted Votes allocated to Gore, he has a 50.0% vote share. This is a virtual match to his unadjusted state exit poll aggregate 50.8% share.


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjAk1JUWDMyRdGN3WEZNTUFaR0tfOHVXTzA1VGRsdHc#gid=0


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 13:58:13 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:58:13 +0100
Subject: [THS] !!!! Ignorance is bliss when it comes to challenging social
 issues
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122135537.065b8740@mail.messagingengine.com>

[So, on the way to fascism, de-educate your people a bit and they will take it the rest of the way all by themselves... -ths]

Ignorance is bliss when it comes to challenging social issues

November 21st, 2011 in Psychology & Psychiatry 

The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"These studies were designed to help understand the so-called 'ignorance is bliss' approach to social issues," said author Steven Shepherd, a graduate student with the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "The findings can assist educators in addressing significant barriers to getting people involved and engaged in social issues."

Through a series of five studies conducted in 2010 and 2011 with 511 adults in the United States and Canada, the researchers described "a chain reaction from ignorance about a subject to dependence on and trust in the government to deal with the issue."

In one study, participants who felt most affected by the economic recession avoided information challenging the government's ability to manage the economy. However, they did not avoid positive information, the study said. This study comprised 197 Americans with a mean age of 35 (111 women and 89 men), who had received complex information about the economy and had answered a question about how the economy is affecting them directly.

To test the links among dependence, trust and avoidance, researchers provided either a complex or simple description of the economy to a group of 58 Canadians, mean age 42, composed of 20 men and 38 women. The participants who received the complex description indicated higher levels of perceived helplessness in getting through the economic downturn, more dependence on and trust in the government to manage the economy, and less desire to learn more about the issue.

"This is despite the fact that, all else equal, one should have less trust in someone to effectively manage something that is more complex," said co-author Aaron C. Kay, PhD, of Duke University. "Instead, people tend to respond by psychologically 'outsourcing' the issue to the government, which in turn causes them to trust and feel more dependent on the government. Ultimately, they avoid learning about the issue because that could shatter their faith in the government."

Participants who felt unknowledgeable about oil supplies not only avoided negative information about the issue, they became even more reluctant to know more when the issue was urgent, as in an imminent oil shortage in the United States, according the authors. For this study, 163 Americans, with a mean age of 32 (70 men and 93 women), provided their opinion about the complexity of natural resource management and then read a statement declaring the United States has less than 40 years' worth of oil supplies. Afterward, they answered questions to assess their reluctance to learn more.

"Beyond just downplaying the catastrophic, doomsday aspects to their messages, educators may want to consider explaining issues in ways that make them easily digestible and understandable, with a clear emphasis on local, individual-level causes," the authors said.

Another two studies found that participants who received complex information about energy sources trusted the government more than those who received simple information. For these studies, researchers questioned 93 (49 men and 44 women) Canadian undergraduate students in two separate groups.

The authors recommended further research to determine how people would react when faced with other important issues such as food safety, national security, health, social inequality, poverty and moral and ethical conflict, as well as under what conditions people tend to respond with increased rather than decreased engagement.

Provided by American Psychological Association

"Ignorance is bliss when it comes to challenging social issues." November 21st, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-bliss-social-issues.html


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 14:11:49 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:11:49 +0100
Subject: [THS] Greenhouse gases soar; no signs warming is slowed
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122140619.065b8888@mail.messagingengine.com>

[And, we are using enormous amounts of hydrocarbons blasting the crap out of each other trying to grab control of and burn up the rest of the gas, oil, - and then coal - that Gaia so patiently put below ground so that the biosphere could develop so as to produce "intelligent life-forms". I think next time, Gaia will take steps to avoid the last stages of that process - the part about "intelligent life forms". -ths]

Greenhouse gases soar; no signs warming is slowed

November 21st, 2011 in Space & Earth / Environment 

(AP) -- Heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are building up so high, so fast, that some scientists now think the world can no longer limit global warming to the level world leaders have agreed upon as safe.

New figures from the U.N. weather agency Monday showed that the three biggest greenhouse gases not only reached record levels last year but were increasing at an ever-faster rate, despite efforts by many countries to reduce emissions.

As world leaders meet next week in South Africa to tackle the issue of climate change, several scientists said their projections show it is unlikely the world can hold warming to the target set by leaders just two years ago in Copenhagen.

"The growth rate is increasing every decade," said Jim Butler, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Global Monitoring Division. "That's kind of scary."

Scientists can't say exactly what levels of greenhouse gases are safe, but some fear a continued rise in global temperatures will lead to irreversible melting of some of the world's ice sheets and a several-foot rise in sea levels over the centuries - the so-called tipping point.

The findings from the U.N. World Meteorological Organization are consistent with other grim reports issued recently. Earlier this month, figures from the U.S. Department of Energy showed that global carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 jumped by the highest one-year amount ever.

The WMO found that total carbon dioxide levels in 2010 hit 389 parts per million, up from 280 parts per million in 1750, before the start of the Industrial Revolution. Levels increased 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s and 2.0 per year in the first decade of this century, and are now rising at a rate of 2.3 per year. The top two other greenhouse gases - methane and nitrous oxide - are also soaring.

The U.N. agency cited fossil fuel-burning, loss of forests that absorb CO2 and use of fertilizer as the main culprits.

Since 1990 - a year that international climate negotiators have set as a benchmark for emissions - the total heat-trapping force from all the major greenhouse gases has increased by 29 percent, according to NOAA.

The accelerating rise is happening despite the 1997 Kyoto agreement to cut emissions. Europe, Russia and Japan have about reached their targets under the treaty. But China, the U.S. and India are all increasing emissions. The treaty didn't require emission cuts from China and India because they are developing nations. The U.S. pulled out of the treaty in 2001, the Senate having never ratified it.

While scientists can't agree on what level of warming of the climate is considered dangerous, environmental activists have seized upon 350 parts per million as a target for carbon dioxide levels. The world pushed past that mark more than 20 years ago.

Governments have focused more on projected temperature increases rather than carbon levels. Since the mid-1990s, European governments have set a goal of limiting warming to slightly more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) above current levels by the end of this century. The goal was part of a nonbinding agreement reached in Copenhagen in 2009 that was signed by the U.S. and other countries.

Temperatures have already risen about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Ron Prinn, Henry Jacoby and John Sterman said MIT's calculations show the world is unlikely to meet that two-degree goal now.

"There's very, very little chance," Prinn said. "One has to be pessimistic about making that absolute threshold." He added: "Maybe we've waited too long to do anything serious if two degrees is the danger level."

Andrew Weaver at the University of Victoria, Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University and Gregg Marland of Appalachian State University agreed with the MIT analysis that holding warming to two degrees now seems unlikely.

"There's no way to stop it. There's so much inertia in the system," Morgan said. "We've committed to quite a bit of warming."

Prinn said new studies predict that if temperatures increase by more than two degrees, the Greenland ice sheets will start an irreversible melting. And that will add to sea level rise significantly.

"Over the next several centuries, Greenland slowly melts away," Weaver said.

More information: 
World Meteorological Organization's Greenhouse Gas Bulletin: http://bit.ly/vu04vB

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Annual Greenhouse Gas Index: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/

?2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

"Greenhouse gases soar; no signs warming is slowed." November 21st, 2011. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-greenhouse-gases-soar.html


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 14:13:47 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:13:47 +0100
Subject: [THS] Calling all American professors!
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122141253.04610ae8@mail.messagingengine.com>

Subject: [MCM] Calling all American professors! 
Our colleges and universities must be declared "safe protest zones"! (PETITION)

>From Corey Robin:

Dear friends and colleagues,

I know you're all being inundated with petitions these days, but this one seems especially worthy of your attention. It's addressed to all chancellors and presidents of American universities and colleges, asking that they ensure that their campuses are and remain "safe protest zones," protected from the intimidation and violence of the police. It's a sign of our times that we must petition for something like this, but there we are.  I've signed the petition, as have Jonathan Lethem, Bruce Ackerman, Todd Gitlin, Etienne Balibar, Wendy Brown, Kaja Silverman, and Craig Calhoun.  I ask that you do the same.

If you wish to sign the petition, please DO NOT email me; email Matt Smith (matthew.noah.smith at yale.edu), who is cc'd on this, and give him your name and affiliation. There is already interest in this letter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The Huffington Post.

Many thanks,

Corey


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 14:15:46 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:15:46 +0100
Subject: [THS] Did feds help plan the raids on OWS? NLG Files FOIA Requests
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122141449.04604ca8@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.nationofchange.org/national-lawyers-guild-files-foia-requests-seeking-evidence-federal-role-occupy-crackdown-1321891106

National Lawyers Guild Files FOIA Requests Seeking Evidence of Federal Role in Occupy Crackdown

By Dave Lindorff

With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending the US Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the National Parks Service to release "all their information on the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown on Occupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course of recent days and weeks."

According to a statement by the NLG, each of the FOIA requests states, "This request specifically encompasses disclosure of any documents or information pertaining to federal coordination of, or advice or consultation regarding, the police response to the Occupy movement, protests or encampments."

National Lawyers Guild leaders, including Executive Director Heidi Beghosian and NLG Mass Defense Committee co-chair and PCJ Executive Director Mara Veheyden-Hilliard both told TCBH! earlier this week that the rapid-fire assaults on occupation encampments in cities from Oakland to New York and Portland, Seattle and Atlanta, all within days of each other, the similar approach taken by police, which included overwhelming force in night-time attacks, mass arrests, use of such weaponry as pepper spray, sound cannons, tear gas, clubs and in some cases "non-lethal" projectiles like bean bags and rubber bullets, the removal and even arrest of reporters and camera-persons, and the justifications offered by municipal officials, who all cited "health" and "safety" concerns, all pointed to central direction and guidance.

As we reported, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted publicly in an interview on a San Francisco radio program earlier this week that prior to her first order to police to clear Oscar Grant Plaza of occupiers on Oct. 25, she had participated in a "conference call" with 17 other urban mayors to discuss strategy for dealing with the movement. At the time of that call, her mayor's office legal advisor, who subsequently resigned over the harsh police tactics used against demonstrators, says Quan was, significantly, in Washington, DC.

The NLG says the Occupy Movement, which is now in over 170 cities around the U.S., "has been confronted by a nearly simultaneous effort by local governments and local police agencies to evict and break up encampments in cities and towns throughout the country."

Veheyden-Hilliard says, "The severe crackdown on the occupation movement appears to be part of a national strategy," which she said is designed to "crush the movement," an action she describes as "supremely political."

She adds, "The Occupy demonstrations are not criminal activities and police should not be treating them as such."

The police conducting these coordinated raids look more like Imperial Storm Troopers than cops in their riot gear get-ups. The attacks show how the nation's local police are becoming more of a national paramilitary force, curiously akin to the widely despised and feared Armed Police or Wu Jing who do the heavy riot-control and repression duty in China. Equipped with federally-supplied body armor and military-style weapons like stun grenades, sound canons and of course assault rifles, domestic US police forces responding to even garden variety, peaceful protest actions often look more like an occupying army than police. Meanwhile their actions have even been condemned by the Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans who are increasingly coming to and supporting the occupation movement. These vets say the police are employing tactics that they themselves were not even permitted to use in dealing with unrest in occupied or war-torn lands.

The Guild and other observers strongly suspect that the 72 so-called Fusion Centers created buy the Homeland Security Department around the country, and the many Joint Terror Task Forces operated by the FBI in conjunction with local police in many cities, are serving as coordination points for the increasingly systematic attacks on the Occupy Movement.

It will be instructive to see how the Obama administration and the targeted agencies respond to the Guild's FOIA requests, and even more interesting to see what kinds of documents--if any--are forthcoming.

?We?re calling for expedited processing, because this is an urgent effort, and if we don?t get that, we can go to court over that issue,? says Verheyden-Hilliard. ?Government delays in responding defeat the purpose of an open government law, with people in the streets and under attack by police now.? Normally, she says, government agencies have 20 days to respond to a FOIA request, but with an expedited request the agencies should have to respond even faster.

National Security and privacy are the only grounds for federal agencies to withhold information sought in a FOIA request, and clearly there is no national security issue involved in this protest movement, at least not in a strictly legal sense of the term. The Occupy Movement is protesting economic inequality, and the political corruption that allows the wealthiest people who run the nation's biggest banks and companies to run the country in their own interest and to run rough-shod over the broader public interest. Of course, from the perspective of the ruling elite, and from the perspective of their political lackeys in the White House and Congress, any protest movement calling for a reordering of the political system to make it more responsive to the public interest would be seen as a national security threat.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Movement is continuing to grow.

Ousted from their base in Zuccotti Park, where a New York state court judge has ruled that they can stay, but cannot sleep or bring in sleeping gear or protection from the weather, movement activists are switching to a decentralized strategy. Some 30,000 people rallied around New York City on Thursday (the two-month anniversary of the start of the Zuccotti occupation), to protest the police action two days earlier. Some hardy souls still keep Zuccotti occupied round the clock, and a General Assembly has been held there several times despite police efforts to limit access. Rallies in support of and solidarity with the New York Occupy Movement were held simultaneously in 30 other cities yesterday.

Kenny Clark, 32, dressed in military fatigues he said dated from his Army service (he was stationed in Korea) stood in Zuccotti Park in the pouring rain on Wednesday, more than a day after police had cleared away the tarps, the 5500-book library, and the free kitchen, and said, with a determined smile, "We're not going away!" A meat counter worker at A&P, where he has worked for 20 years, Clark said he and his co-workers were being asked to take a 20-percent pay cut by the firm, which is using a bankruptcy filing to try and break out of its union contracts. "We'll vote down their offer, and then we'll strike, and then they'll probably fire our asses," he laughed, "but with help from all these occupiers, we'll be marching in front of their stores and organizing a boycott like they've never seen! Nobody's going to shop there!"

Clark noted that the Occupy Movement is developing plans for a national occupation of the National Mall, the big park that runs between the Capitol and the Lincoln Monument that has been the scene of many historic rallies and occupations in decades past. A national General Assembly is being planned for April 1, which will focus on " the failure of the Democrats and Republicans in Congress to represent the views of the majority of people, the Supreme Court for allowing the Constitution to be perverted and for ignoring the rule of law and the Chamber of Commerce and lobbyists on K St for dominating the political process in favor of the 1% at the expense of the 99%."

This thing ain't over. It's just getting going.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/national-lawyers-guild-files-foia-requests-seeking-evidence-federal-role-occupy-crackdown-1321891106. All rights are reserved.


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 14:19:05 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:19:05 +0100
Subject: [THS] Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear bash
 poet laureate
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122141759.046050c0@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html

November 19, 2011

Poet-Bashing Police
By ROBERT HASS
Poet Laureate

Berkeley, Calif. 

LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs. 

The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar?s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department. 

It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio?s words are prominently displayed: ?There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can?t take part. You can?t even passively take part.? 

Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been ?beaten viciously.? I didn?t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students. 

Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy?s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down. 

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan?s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt?s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, ?It?s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they?ve done.? But it took far fewer than 50 years. 

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me ? it must be a generational reaction ? was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines. 

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn?t have dispersed if we?d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is ?remonstrate.? I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, ?You just knocked down my wife, for Christ?s sake!? A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one?s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine. 

My ribs didn?t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren?t slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn?t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O?Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest. 

I won?t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don?t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn?t pay them back. 

?Whose university?? the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else?s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world. 

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read ?Beat Poets, not beat poets.?) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air. 

Robert Hass is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States. 

Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941, San Francisco) is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.[1] He was awarded the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Time and Materials


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 14:21:23 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:21:23 +0100
Subject: [THS] Glenn Greenwald : The roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122142057.065b8220@mail.messagingengine.com>

-  Glenn Greenwald  SUNDAY, NOV 20, 2011 7:09 AM EST

The roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying

VIDEO 
By Glenn Greenwald 


police5 

(updated below)

The now-viral video of police officers in their Robocop costumes sadistically pepper-spraying peaceful, sitting protesters at UC-Davis (details here) shows a police state in its pure form. It?s easy to be outraged by this incident as though it?s some sort of shocking aberration, but that is exactly what it is not. The Atlantic?s Garance Franke-Ruta adeptly demonstrates with an assemblage of video how common such excessive police force has been in response to the Occupy protests. Along those lines, there are several points to note about this incident and what it reflects:

(1) Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, ?America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.? Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.


The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed ? or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet ? many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That?s a natural response, and it?s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to ?decide? on their own to be passive and compliant ? to refrain from exercising their rights ? out of fear of what will happen if they don?t.

The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. They believe that they are free to do everything they choose to do, because they have been ?persuaded? ? through fear and intimidation ? to passively accept the status quo. As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: ?Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.? Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it?s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.

Pervasive police abuses and intimidation tactics applied to peaceful protesters ? pepper-spray, assault rifles, tasers, tear gas and the rest ? not only harm their victims but also the relationship of the citizenry to the government and the set of core political rights. Implanting fear of authorities in the heart of the citizenry is a far more effective means of tyranny than overtly denying rights. That?s exactly what incidents like this are intended to achieve. Overzealous prosecution of those who engage in peaceful political protest (which we?ve seen more and more of over the last several years) as well as rampant secrecy and the sprawling Surveillance State are the close cousins of excessive police force in both intent and effect: they are all about deterring meaningful challenges to those in power through the exercise of basic rights. Rights are so much more effectively destroyed by bullying a citizenry out of wanting to exercise them than any other means. These two short video clips ? regarding the openly abusive treatment of Bradley Manning and the extra-judicial attempt to destroy WikiLeaks ? are how I?ve been trying to make this point over the past month in the various speeches I?ve given around the country:


 

(2) Although excessive police force has long been a reflexive response to American political protests, two developments in the post-9/11 world have exacerbated this. The first is that the U.S. Government ? in the name of Terrorism ? has aggressively para-militarized the nation?s domestic police forces by lavishing them with countless military-style weapons and other war-like technologies, training them in war-zone military tactics, and generally imposing a war mentality on them. Arming domestic police forces with para-military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil; they will simply find other, increasingly permissive uses for those weapons. Responding to peaceful protests and other expressions of growing citizenry unrest with brute force is a direct by-product of what we?ve allowed to be done to America?s domestic police forces in the name of the War on Terror (and, before that, in the name of the War on Drugs).

The second exacerbating development is more subtle but more important: the authoritarian mentality that has been nourished in the name of Terrorism. It?s a very small step to go from supporting the abuse of defenseless detainees (including one?s fellow citizens) to supporting the pepper-spraying and tasering of non-violent political protesters. It?s an even smaller step to go from supporting the power of the President to imprison or kill anyone he wants(including one?s fellow citizens and even their teenaged children) with no transparency, checks or due process to supporting the power of the police and the authorities who command them to punish with force anyone who commits the ?crime? of non-compliance. At the root of all of those views is the classic authoritarian mindset: reflexive support for authority, contempt for those who challenge them, and a blind faith in their unilateral, unchecked decisions regarding who is Bad and deserves state-issued punishment.

It?s anything but surprising that a country that has cheered as its Presidents seize the most limitless powers against allegedly Bad People ? all as part of the ultimate instrument of citizen degradation: Endless War ? cheer just as loudly when that same mindset is applied at home to domestic trouble-makers. The supreme threat has never been from foreign Terrorists, but rather from what was done by our own public- and private-sector authorities (and the mentality they successfully implanted) in their name.

 

(3) Beyond the light it is shedding on how power is really exercised in the U.S., this UC-Davis episode underscores why I continue to view the Occupy movement as one of the most exciting, inspiring and important political developments in many years. What?s most striking about that UC-Davis video isn?t the depraved casualness of the officer?s dousing the protesters? faces with a chemical agent; it?s how most of the protesters resolutely sat in place and refused to move even when that happened, while the crowd chanted support (this video, taken from a slightly different vantage point, vividly shows this, beginning at 4:15). We?ve repeatedly seen acts of similar courage spawned by the Occupy movement.

It was the NYPD?s abusive pepper-spraying, followed by Mayor Bloomberg?s lawless destruction of the Zuccotti Park encampment, that prompted far more people than ever to participate in the next march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Atear gas attack on Occupy Oakland was followed by a general strike of 20,000 people. And this truly extraordinary, blunt and piercing open letter demanding the resignation of the heinous UC-Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi was written by a young, untenured Assistant Professor ? Nathan Brown ? who obviously decided that his principled beliefs outweigh his careerist ambitions.

This is the most important effect of the Occupy movement: acts of defiance, courage and conscience are contagious. Just as the Arab Spring clearly played some significant role in spawning, sustaining and growing the American Occupy movement, so too have the Occupy protesters emboldened one another and their fellow citizens. The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and ? most important of all ? a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The state reactions to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it. This is why I hope to see the Occupy movement ? even if it adopts specific demands ? remain an outsider force rather than reduce itself into garden-variety partisan electioneering: in its current form, it is demanding and re-establishing the indispensable right of dissent, defiance of unjust authority, and sustained protest.

 

UPDATE: Regarding the last point ? the uniquely effective, inspiring activism this movement is spawning ? here is video of Chancellor Katehi walking to her car while being forced to confront a wall of silent condemnation and shaming. It?s not the accountability she should face (firing), but one can see from this video that it?s quite potent nonetheless; moreover, it really reveals who the actual threats are to public safety ? not the protesters but rather those using force against them:

Glenn Greenwald 

Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/the_roots_of_the_uc_davis_pepper_spraying/singleton 


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Nov 22 14:53:33 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:53:33 +0100
Subject: [THS] Prof. Michael Hudson: Reforming the U.S. Financial and Tax
 System
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111122145028.065dc378@mail.messagingengine.com>

Reforming the U.S. Financial and Tax System 
Restore America?s past prosperity and rescue the future from the financial grabbers


By Prof. Michael Hudson
 
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27759
 
Global Research, November 19, 2011 


On November 3, 2011, Alan Minsky interviewed Economic Professor and Global Research author Michael Hudson on KPFK?s program, ?Building a Powerful Movement in the United States? in preparation for an Occupy L.A. teach-in. To clarify my points I have edited and expanded my answers from the interview transcript. 

Alan Minsky: I am joined now by Michael Hudson. He is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and also is president of the Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael Hudson: Thank you very much.

Alan Minsky: Michael Hudson is scheduled to address Occupy L.A. as part of a teach-in that includes William Black and Robert Scheer, who will be moderating the panel that Michael will be on this weekend. Michael, I?m familiar with your work and I know that you are a big-picture economic thinker. This is definitely a movement that is asking the big questions about how the global economy and the national economy should be re-organized. What would you say to the movement at large about how best to organize a high-tech modern industrial economy in a way that would produce more social and economic justice? 

America is being radicalized by coming to realize how radical Wall Street?s power grab is

Michael Hudson: The Occupy Wall Street movement has many similarities with what used to be called the Great Awakening periods in America. Such periods always begin by realizing how serious the problem is. So diagnosis is the most important tactic. Diagnosing the problem mobilizes power for a solution. Otherwise, solutions will seem to come out of thin air and people won?t understand why they are needed, or even the problems that solutions are intended to cure.

The basic problem today is that nearly everyone is in debt. This is the problem in Europe too. There are Occupy Berlin meetings, the Greek and Icelandic protest, Spain?s ?Indignant? demonstrations and similar ones throughout the world.

When debts reach today?s proportions, a basic economic principle is at work: Debts that can?t be paid; won?t be. The question is, just how are they not going to be paid? People with student loans are not permitted to declare bankruptcy to get a fresh start. The government or collection agencies dock their salaries and go after whatever property they have. Many people?s revenue over and above basic needs is earmarked to pay the bankers. Typical American wage earners pay about 40 percent of their wages on housing whose price is bid up by easy mortgage credit, and another 10 to 15 percent for credit cards and other debt service. FICA takes over 13 percent, and federal, local and sales taxes another 15 percent or so. All this leaves only about a quarter of many peoples? paychecks available for spending on goods and services. This is what is causing today?s debt deflation. And Wall Street is supporting it, because it extracts income from the bottom 99% to pay the top 1%.

Half a century ago most economists imagined that the problem would be people saving too much as they got richer. Saving meant non-spending. But the problem has turned out to be just the opposite: debt. Overall salaries have not risen in decades, so many people have borrowed just to break even. Instead of an era of free choice, very little of their income is available for discretionary spending. It is earmarked to pay the financial, insurance and real estate sectors, not the ?real? production and consumption economy. And now repayment time has arrived. People are squeezed. So when America?s saving rate recently rose from zero to 3 percent of national income, it takes the form of people paying down the debts. 

Many people thought that the way to get rich faster was to borrow money to buy homes and stocks they expected to rise in price. But this has left the economy financially strapped. People are feeling depressed. The tendency is to blame themselves. I think that the Occupy Wall Street movement, at least here in New York, is like what has occurred in Greece and also in the Arab Spring. People are coming together, and at first they may simply watch what?s going on. Onlookers may come by to see what it?s all about. But then they think, ?Wait a minute! Other people are having the same problem I?m having. Maybe it is not really my fault.?

So they begin to see that all these other people who have a similar problem in not being able to pay their debts, they realize that they have been financially crippled by the banks. It is not that they have done something wrong or are sore losers, as Herman Cain says. Something radically wrong with the system. 

Fifty years ago an old socialist told me that revolutions happen when people just get tired of being afraid. In today?s case the revolution may grow nearer when people get over being depressed and stop blaming themselves. They come to think that we are all in this together ? and if this is the case, there must be something wrong with the way the economy is organized. 

Gradually, observers of Occupy Wall Street begin to feel stronger. There is positive peer pressure to reinforce their self-confidence. What they intuitively feel is that the Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama presidencies have squeezed their lives. The economy has become untracked.

What?s basically wrong is that the financial system is running the government. For years, Republicans and Democrats both have said that a strong government, careful regulation and progressive taxation is the road to serfdom. The politicians and neoliberal economists who write their patter talk say, ?Let?s take planning out of the hands of government and put it in the ?free market.?? But every market is planned by someone or other. If governments step aside, then planning passes into the hands of the bankers, because of their key role in allocating credit.

The problem is that they have not created credit to finance industrial investment and employment. They have lent for speculation on asset price inflation using debt leveraging to bid up housing prices, stock and bond prices, and foreign exchange rates. They have convinced borrowers that they can get rich on rising housing prices. But this merely makes new homebuyers go deeper into debt to buy a home. And when banks say that rising stock and bond prices are good for the economy, this price rise lowers the dividend or interest yield. This means that pension funds and individuals have to save much more for retirement. Instead of improving their life, it makes them work harder and borrow more just to stay in place.

The banking system?s alternative to ?the road to serfdom? thus turns out to be a road to debt peonage. This financial engineering turns out to be worse than government planning. The banks have taken over the Federal Reserve and Treasury and put their lobbyists in charge ? men such as Tim Geithner and the others with ties to Rubinomics dating from the Clinton administration, and especially to Goldman Sachs and other giant Wall Street firms. 

So the first thing to realize is something that is characteristic of all great reform movements. Voters are not yet supporting a radical position to restructure the whole system. But at least they are coming to see that small marginal reforms won?t work, or are simply trick promises, like President Obama?s promise that banks would renegotiate mortgages for homes in negative equity as part of the quid pro quo for the bailouts they received from Treasury Secretary Geithner. There?s been no quid pro quo, merely talk. 

People see that law enforcement is missing when it comes to the banks and Wall Street. So simply restoring the criminal justice system would be progress. It used to be that if you ran a fraud, if you cheated people, if you lied on your income tax and falsified statistics, then you would be sent to jail. But the Obama administration has appointed Eric Holder to represent Wall Street. He has not thrown any bankers in jail, recognizing that they are the major campaign contributors of the party, after all. 
What is easiest for most people to accept is the idea of restoring the way the economy used to be more in balance ? back when people earned income by being productive rather than getting rich by transferring other peoples? savings and public giveaways into their own pockets. But what I sensed in New York was anger not only at this economic problem, but the fact that the political system is broken. There is no one to vote for as an alternative to pro-bank candidates. So what began as anger has become a gathering awareness that Mr. Obama was simply fooling voters instead of leading the change he promised. That?s what politicians do, of course. But people hoped that he might be different. That was the gullibility he played on. He has turned into the nightmare they thought they were voting against. 

Moving to the right of the Republicans, he started his administration by appointing the Simpson-Bowles Commission staffed by opponents of Social Security. He recently followed that up by appointing the Congressional Super-committee of Twelve to come out with an even more anti-Social Security, anti-Medicaid and anti-minority position that the Republicans could get away with. If they would have tried to pass such a right-wing policy, the Democratic Congress would have refused to pass it. But they don?t know how to deal with a Democratic president who appoints Wall Street lobbyists to his cabinet and acts like Margaret Thatcher saying that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to making Social Security recipients, labor and minorities pay for Wall Street?s bad gambles and bank losses. He has helped Wall Street capture the government ? on behalf of the 1%.

The man whom Mr. Obama asked to be his mentor when he joined the Senate was Joe Lieberman. He evidently gave Obama expert advice about how to raise funds from the financial class by delivering his liberal constituency to his Wall Street campaign contributors. So the problem is not that President Obama is well meaning but inept ? an idealist who just can?t fight the vested interests and insiders. He?s thrown in his lot with them. In fact, he really seems to believe the right-wing, pro-Wall Street ideology ? that the economy can?t function without a financial system that guarantees ?savers? (the top 1%) against loss, even when the bottom 99% have to pay more and more.

And on a personal level, Mr. Obama knows that his fund raising comes mainly from Wall Street, and the only way to get this money is to sell out his constituency. You?ve got to give him enough credit to recognize this obvious fact. 

The upshot is that we now have a political nightmare. Yet Mr. Obama still seems to be the best that the Democrats can offer! This is why I think the protestors are saying they are not going to let the Democrats jump in front of the parade to try and mobilize support for their party. Like the Irish say: ?Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.? They realize that the financial system is broken and that neither party is trying to do much about it. So the political system has to be changed as well as the economic system. 

Suppose you were going to design a society from scratch. Would you create what we have now? Or would you start, for instance, by reforming the most egregious distortions of campaign finance? As matters stand, Goldman Sachs has been able to buy the right to name who is going to be Treasury Secretary. They selected Geithner, who gave them $29 billion from A.I.G. just before he was appointed. It?s like that all down the line ? in both parties. Every Democratic congressional committee chairman has to pay to the Party a $150,000 to buy the chairmanship. This means that the campaign donors get to determine who gets committee chairmanships. This is oligarchy, not democracy. So the system is geared to favor whoever can grab the most money. Wall Street does it by financial siphoning and asset stripping. Politicians do it by getting money from the beneficiaries ? the 1%. 

Once people realize that they?re being screwed, that?s a pre-revolutionary situation. It?s a situation where they can get a lot of sympathy and support, precisely by not doing what The New York Times and the other papers say they should do: come up with some neat solutions. They don?t have to propose a solution because right now there isn?t one ? without changing the system with many, many changes. So many that it?s like a new Constitution. Politics as well as the economy need to be restructured. What?s developing now is how to think about the economic and political problems that are bothering people. It is not radical to realize that the economy isn?t working. That is the first stage to realizing that a real alternative is needed. We?ve been under a radical right-wing attack ? and need to respond in kind. The next half-year probably will be spent trying to spell out what the best structure would be. 

There is no way to clean up the mess that the Democratic Party has become since politics moved into Wall Street?s pockets. The Republicans also have become a party of lobbyists. So it looks like there is no solution within the existent system. This is a revolutionary, radical situation. The longer that the OWS groups can spend on diagnosing the problem and explaining how far wrong the system has gone, the longer the demonstrators can gain support by showing that they share the feelings everybody has these days ? a feeling of being victimized. This is what is creating a raw material that has to potential to flower into political activism, perhaps by spring or summer next year.

The most important message is that all this impoverishment and indebtedness is unnecessary. There is no inherent economic reason for things to be this way. It is not really the way that ?markets? need to work. There are many kinds of markets, with many different sets of rules. So the important task is to explain to people how many possibilities there are to make things better. And of course, this is what frightens politicians, Wall Street lobbyists and the other members of the pro-oligarchic army of financial raiders. 


Alan Minsky: Well, let me ask you this ? and of course, it is something of an intellectual speculative game. Let?s say that it?s January 2013, and the radical progressive candidate X, Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders, is miraculously elected president, and Michael Hudson is the chief economic advisor. What would you do, given the opportunity with a favorable congress, to transform the American economy in ways that would produce policies you think would at least start to help break the grip that the financial sector has had in devastating the economy in terms of its performance for average households? 

Michael Hudson: There are two stages to any kind of a transformation. The first stage is simply to start re-applying the laws and the taxes that the Bush and Obama administrations have stopped applying. You don?t want Wall Street to be able to put its industry lobbyists in charge of making policy. So the first task is to get rid of Geithner, Holder and the similar pro-financial administrators whom Obama has appointed to his cabinet and in key regulatory positions. This kind of clean-up requires election reform ? and that requires a reversal of the Supreme Court?s recent Citizens United ruling that enables a financial oligarchy to lock in its control of American politics.

One of the first things that is needed ? and only a President could do it ? would be to demand a new Supreme Court. This is what Roosevelt threatened, and it worked. You make them an offer they can?t refuse. If this can be done only by expanding the number of court justices, then you nominate ones who are not radicals on the right ? judges who will reverse the 19th-century ruling that corporations are the same as people and indeed have even more rights (and certainly more campaign money) than people have. You then move to clean up the corruption of the legal system that has protected financial crooks instead of sending them to jail. Financial fraud has effectively been decriminalized, at least by Wall Street?s largest campaign contributors. 

But this is really Bill Black?s area. I?m only going to talk about financial and tax reforms here, because they are the easiest to understand and ultimately the most immediate task. 

Prevent monopoly price gouging. Bring bank charges in line with the real cost of doing business. 

What is needed today is more than just going back to the past ideals. After all, the good old class warfare was not so rosy either. But at least the Progressive Era had a program to subordinate finance to serve industry and the rest of the economy. The problem is that its reformers never really had a chance to carry out the ideas that classical economists outlined. 
The classical idea of a free market economy was radical in its way ? precisely by being natural and thus getting rid of unnatural warping by special privileges for absentee landlords and banks. This led logically to socialism, which is why the history of economic thought has been dropped ? indeed, excluded ? from today?s academic curriculum. What is needed is to complete the direction of change that World War I interrupted and that the Cold War further untracked. After 1945 you didn?t hear anything any more about what John Maynard Keynes called for at the end of his General Theory in 1936: ?euthanasia of the rentier.? But this was the great fight for many centuries of European reform, and it even was the path along which industrial capitalism was expected to evolve. So let me begin with what was discussed back in the 1930s, trying to recover the Progressive Era reforms.

Setting up a more fair banking and financial system requires changing the tax favoritism as well, which I will discuss below. There are a number of good proposals for reform. One of the easiest and least radical is set up a public option for banking. Instead of relying on Bank of America or Citibank for credit cards, the government would set up a bank and offer credit cards, check clearing and bank transfers at cost. 

The idea throughout the nineteenth century was to create this kind of public option. There was a Post Office bank, and that could still be elaborated to provide banking services at cost or at a subsidized price. After all, in Russia and Japan the post office banks are the largest of all!

The logic for a public banking option is the same as for governments providing free roads: The aim is to minimize the cost of living and doing business. On my website, michael-hudson.com, I have posted an article just published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology on Simon Patten. He was the first professor of economics at the Wharton Business School. He spelled out the logic of public infrastructure as a ?fourth? factor of production (alongside, labor, capital and land). Its productivity is to be measured not by how much profit it makes, but by how much it lowers the economy?s price structure.

Providing a public option would limit the ability of banks to charge monopoly prices for credit cards and loans. It also would not engage in the kind of gambling that has made today?s financial system so unstable and put depositors? money at risk. Ideally, I would like to see banks act more like the old savings banks and S&Ls. In fact, the most radical regulatory proposal I would like to see is the Chicago Plan promoted in the 1930s by the free marketer Herbert Simon. This is what Dennis Kucinich recently proposed in his National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2011 (NEED).

This may seem radical at first glance, but how else are you going to stop the banks from their mad computerized gambling, political lobbying and creating credit for corporate raiders to borrow and pay their financial backers by emptying out pension funds and cutting back long-term investment, research and development?

The guiding idea is to take away the banks? privilege of creating credit electronically on their computer keyboards. You make banks do what textbooks say they are supposed to do: take deposits and lend them out in a productive way. If there are not enough deposits in the economy, the Treasury can create money on its own computer keyboards and supply it to the banks to lend out. But you would rewrite the banking laws so that normal banks are not able to gamble or play the computerized speculative games they are playing today. 

The obvious way to do this is to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act so that they can?t gamble with insured deposits. This way, speculators would bear the burden if they lost, not be in a position to demand ?taxpayer liability? by threatening to collapse the normal vanilla banking system. Abolishing Glass-Steagall opened the way for Wall Street to organize a protection racket by mixing up peoples? deposits with bad gambles and with the growth of debts way beyond the ability to be paid. 

To sum up, the idea is to shape markets so as to steer the banks to lend for actual capital formation and to finance home ownership without credit inflation that simply bids up prices for homes as well as for other real estate, stocks, and bonds. 


Today?s economic problem is systemic. This is what makes any solution so inherently radical. In changing part of the economic system, you have to adjust everything, just as when a doctor operates on a human body. Financial reform requires tax reform, because much of the financial problem stems from the tax shift off real estate and finance onto labor and industry. Taxes are the business of Congress, not the President or his advisors, but I assume that your question really concerns what I think the economy needs. 

The most obvious fiscal task that most people understand ? and support ? is to restore the progressive tax system that existed before 1980, and especially before the Clinton and Bush tax cuts. It used to be that the rich paid taxes. Now they don?t. But the key isn?t just income-tax rates as such. What needs to be recognized is the kind of taxes that should be levied ? or how to shift them back off labor onto property where they were before the 1980s. You need to restore the land taxes to collect the ?free lunch? that is not really ?free? if it is pledged to pay the banks in the form of mortgage interest.

Over the past few decades the tax system has been warped more and more by bank lobbyists to promote debt financing. Debt is their ?product,? after all. As matters now stand, earnings and dividends on equity financing must pay much higher tax rates than cash flow financed with debt. This distortion needs to be reversed. It not only taxes the top 1% at a much lower rate than the bottom 99%, but it also encourages them to make money by lending to the bottom 99%. The result is that the bottom 99% have become increasingly indebted to the top 1%. The enormous bank debt attached to real estate does not reflect rising rents as much as it reflects the tax cuts on property. Wall Street lobbyists have backed Congressional leaders who have shifted taxes onto consumers via sales taxes and income taxes, as well as FICA payroll withholding. This ploy treats Social Security and Medicare as ?user fees? rather than paying them out of the overall budget ? and financed out of progressive taxation on the top 1%. If wage earners pay more in FICA, you can be sure that the wealthy get a tax cut.

This anti-progressive tax shift is largely responsible for the richest 1% doubling their share of income. It also has led to the 99% having to pay banks what they used to pay the tax collector. They pay interest rather than taxes. If I were economic advisor, I would explain just how this works ? which is what I already try to do on my website. In a nutshell, the tax shifts since World War II have left more and more of the land?s site value to be capitalized into interest payments on bank loans. So the banks have ended up with what used to be taken by landowners. There is no inherent need for this. It doesn?t help the economy; it merely inflates a real estate bubble. Economic growth and employment would be much stronger if income tax rates were lowered for most people. Property owners and speculators would pay. There would be less free lunch and more ?earned? income.

The Obama Administration has proposed the worse of both worlds ? getting rid of the tax deductibility of interest for homeowners. This would squeeze them, without scaling down the bank debts that have absorbed the cuts in property taxes. So Mr. Obama is sponsoring yet another anti-consumer proposal to make the bottom 99% pay for government ? while using government funds to subsidize the banks and bail out their bad bets. 

What needs to be done is to remove the tax deductibility of interest for investors in general. This tax favoritism is a subsidy for debt financing ? and the main problem that the U.S. economy faces today is over-indebtedness. A good policy would aim at lowering the debt overhead. Debt leveraging should be discouraged, not encouraged. 

Speculators have borrowed largely to make capital gains. They originally were taxed as normal income in the 1913 income tax. The logic was that capital gains build up a person?s savings, just as earning an income does. But the financial and real estate interests fought back, and today there is only a tiny tax on capital gains ? a tax that sellers don?t have to pay if they plow their money into another property or investment to make yet more gains! So when Wall Street firms, hedge funds, and other speculators avoid paying normal taxes by saying that they don?t ?earn? money but simply make capital gains, this is where a large part of today?s economic inequality lies.

I would tax these asset-price gains (mainly land prices) either at the full income-tax rate or even higher. The wealthy 1% make their gains in this way, claiming that they don?t really ?earn? income, so they shouldn?t have to pay taxes as if they are wages or profits. But that?s precisely the problem: Why would you want to subsidize not earning income, but merely making money by speculating ? and then demanding that the government bail you out if you make a capital loss when your speculations go bad, on the logic that you have tied up most peoples? normal bank deposits in these gambles? This is what exists today. And it is why people think the system is so unfair. Most of the super-rich families have made their fortunes by insider dealing and financial extraction, not by being productive. They are not ?job creators? these days. They have become job destroyers by demanding austerity to squeeze out more money from a shrinking economy to pay themselves.

Many people ? especially homeowners ? are sucked into thinking that low capital gains taxes make them rich, and that high property prices leave them with less to spend. But this turns out not to be the case once the process works its way through the economy. These workings need to be more widely explained.

For many years families got rich as the price of their home rose. But they also got much deeper in debt. The real estate bubble was debt-financed. A property is worth whatever a bank will lend against it. The end result of ?easy lending? and tax distortions to favor interest-bearing debt is that most families own a smaller and smaller proportion of their homes? value ? and have to pay rising mortgage debt service. This doesn?t really make them better off. The job of a president or economic advisor should be to explain how this game works, so people can get off the debt treadmill. The economy will shrink if it doesn?t lower its debt overhead.

I would close down tax avoidance in offshore banking centers by treating offshore deposits by Americans as ?earned but hoarded? income and tax it at 90%. You restore the rates of the Eisenhower administration when the country had the most rapid debt growth that it had. You reinstate criminal penalties for financial fraud and tax evasion by misrepresentation. But the tax avoiders are asking the Obama administration to do just the opposite: to declare a ?tax holiday? to ?induce? them bring this offshore money home ? by not taxing it at all! This kind of giveaway should be blocked. Tax avoiders among the top 1% should be penalized, not rewarded.

The Bush-Obama administration has promoted ?neoliberal? tax and financial policies that have reversed a century of Progressive Era reforms. The past 30 years have suffered a radical transformation of tax policy and financial policy. So it takes an equally deep response to undo their distortions and put the American economy back on track. The guiding idea is simply to restore normalcy. The Progressive Era that emerged from classical economics understood the economic benefits of taxing unearned wealth (?rent extraction?) at the top of the economic pyramid, provide basic infrastructure services at cost rather than creating fiefdoms for privatizers to install tollbooths and make their gains tax-exempt. Radical neoliberalism has reversed this. It has vastly multiplied the debts owed by the bottom 99% to the top 1%. 

This is leading to debt peonage and what really is neo-feudalism. We are seeing a kind of financial warfare that is as grabbing as the old-style military conquests. The aim is the same: the land, basic infrastructure, and use of the government to extract tribute. 

A financial Clean Slate

To restore the kind of normalcy that made America rich, most important long-term policy would be to recognize what is going to be inevitable for every economy. Debts need to be written down ? and the politically easiest way to cut through the tangle is to write them off altogether. That would free the bottom 99% from their debt bondage to the top 1%. It would be a Clean Slate, starting over ? and trying to do things right this time around. The creditors have not used the banking system to make America more productive and richer. They have used it as a vehicle to reduce the population to debt serfdom.

A debt write-down sounds radical and unworkable, but it?s been done since World War II with great success. It is the program the Allies carried out in the German economy in that country?s 1947 currency reform. This was the policy that created Germany?s Economic Miracle. And America could experience a similar miracle.

Any economy would benefit from cancelling the bad debts that have been built up. Keeping them on the books will handcuff the economy and cause debt deflation by diverting income to pay debt service rather than to spend on goods and services. We are going into a new economic depression ? not just a ?Great Recession? ? because most spending is now on finance, insurance and real estate, not on goods and basic services. So markets are shrinking, and unemployment is rising. That is what will happen if debts are not written down.

This can be done either by a Clean Slate across the board, or it can be done more selectively, by applying what?s been New York State law since before the Revolution, going back to when New York was still a colony. I?m referring to the law of fraudulent conveyance. This law says that if a creditor lends to a borrower without having any idea how the debtor can pay in the normal course of business, without losing property, the loan is deemed to be fraudulent and declared null and void. 

Applying this law to defaulting homeowners would free the homes that are in negative equity throughout the country. It would undo the fraudulent loans that banks have made, the trick loans with exploding interest rates, balloon mortgages and so forth. It also would free debt-strapped companies from being forced to sell off their parts to make their corporate raiders rich. 

As an associated law, pension funds should be first in line in any bankruptcy, not at the end of the line as they now are. Current practice lets companies replace defined-benefit programs with defined contribution programs ? where all that employees know is how much is taken out of their paychecks each month, not what they will be receiving when they retire. Only the managers have protected their pensions with special contracts and golden parachutes. This is the reverse of what pension plans were supposed to do. 

Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs) also are being looted. This is what has recently happened at the Chicago Tribune by Sam Zell, who borrowed money and repaid it by looting the Tribune?s ESOP. A fraudulent conveyance law applied at the nationwide level would stop this. People like Zell are looters, and so are the bankers behind him. This is the class warfare that is being waged today. And the war is being won by the 1% ? while pushing the American economy into depression.

As part of the rules to define what constitutes ?fraudulent? or irresponsible lending, mortgage debt service should be reduced to the rate that FDIC head Sheila Bair recommended: 32 percent. The problem with debt write-downs, of course, is that when you cancel a debt, you also cancel some party?s savings on the other side of the balance sheet. In this case, the banks would have to give up their claims. But this is what used to happen in financial crashes. When debts go bad, so do the loans. So the government is radical in saying that America?s debts will be kept on the book, but it will create new public debt to give to Wall Street for its own debts that have gone bad as a result of its reckless lending. 

The banks obviously would prefer to bankrupt millions of homeowners than to take even a penny?s loss. Their fight to make the government pay for their bad debts ? while keeping the debts of the bottom 99% on the books ? explains why the richest 1% of Americans have doubled their share of income and the returns to wealth in the last thirty years. That?s inequitable. Their accumulation of financial savings has not taken the form of tangible capital investment in factories or other enterprises to employ labor. It?s looted labor?s savings and got employees so deep into debt that they?re ?one paycheck away from homelessness.? They?re afraid to go on strike, because they would miss a mortgage payment or an electric utility payment, and their credit-card interest rates would jump to 29 percent. They?re even afraid to complain about working conditions today, because they?re afraid of getting fired.

This wasn?t formerly the case. It is the result of ?financial engineering? that should be reversed. There?s no reason to treat the savings that the top 1% have got in this predatory way as being sacrosanct. Their gain ? their increase in financial wealth, in bonds, savings and ownership of bank loans ? equals the debts that have been imposed on the bottom 99%. This is the basic equation that needs to be more widely understood. It is not an equilibrium equation. At least, it won?t be political equilibrium when people start to push back.

We are seeing a financial grab for special privilege and for political power to use the government to subsidize the top 1% at the expense of the bottom 99%, by scaling back social spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and federal revenue sharing with the states. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have printed new debt to give to Wall Street ? some $13 trillion and still counting since Lehman Brothers went under in September 2008. Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson used the crisis as an opportunity to give enormous U.S. debt to Wall Street. That?s more radical than reversing this to restore the economy?s financial structure to the way it used to be. If you don?t restore it, you?ve replaced economic democracy with financial oligarchy.

The way to reverse this power grab is to reverse the giveaways by cancelling the bad debts that have been loaded onto the economy. That is the only way to restore balance and prevent the polarization that has occurred. The problem is that savings by the top 1% have been used in a parasitic, extractive manner. It has been lent to the bottom 99 percent to get them deeper and deeper into debt. So they ?owe their soul to the company store,? as the song Sixteen Tons put it. ?You get a day older, and deeper in debt.? 

The government itself has become more indebted, most recently by the $13 trillion in new debt printed and given to the banks to make sure that no financial gambler need surfer a loss. At the same time the Obama administration did this, it claimed that a generation in the future, the Social Security system may be $1 trillion in deficit. And that, Mr. Obama says, would cause a crisis ? and not leave enough to continue subsidizing his leading campaign contributors. So in view of this new debt creation ? while moving debts to consumers and Social Security contributors to the bottom of the list ? if you are going to reverse the bad-debt polarization that we?ve reached today, it is necessary to do more than simply reinstate progressive taxation and shift the tax system so that you collect predatory unearned income ? what the classical economists call economic rent. The burdensome debts need to be written off. 

This probably will take half a year to get most people to realize and accept the idea is to reconstitute the system by lending for productive purposes, not speculation and rent-seeking opportunities. You want to stop the banks from lobbying for monopolies to create a market for leveraged buy-outs of these opportunities ? and of course also for real estate speculation and outright gambling. 

Wall Street has orchestrated and lobbied for a rentier alliance whose wealth is growing at the expense of the economy at large. It is extractive, not productive. But this fact is concealed by the national income and product accounts reporting financial and other FIRE sector takings as ?earnings? rather than as a transfer payment from the economy at large ? from the 99% ? to the 1% of Americans who have got rich by making money off finance, monopolies and absentee real estate rent-seeking.

It is not really radical to resist Wall Street?s financial attack on America. Resistance is natural ? and so is a reversal of the savings they have built up by indebting the rest of the economy to themselves. They have taken their money and run, stashing it offshore in tax-avoidance islands, in Switzerland, Britain and other havens. Shame on the political hacks who defend this and who attack Occupy Wall Street simply for resisting the financial sector?s own radical power grab and shifted taxes off themselves onto the bottom 99%. 

Privatization is an asset grab masquerading as full employment policy

Alan Minsky: I have one final question for you. Would you support programs that are put forward similar to what Randy Wray, an associate of yours, suggests in terms of government employment projects to guarantee full employment?

Michael Hudson: Yes, of course I approve. In fact, it was I who introduced Randy, Pavlina Tchernova and others to Dennis Kucinich?s staff to help write his full-employment proposal along these lines. My first caveat is to warn against letting the Obama administration turn these projects into a military giveaway. I think Randy and I are in agreement with that. 

My second caveat is to prevent this full-employment program from creating a later privatization giveaway to Wall Street ? that is, infrastructure that the government will sell off to the ruling party?s major campaign contributors for pennies on the dollar. This is what Public/Private Partnerships have become, as pioneered in England under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Wall Street is rubbing its metaphoric hands and saying, ?That?s a great idea! Let the government pay for infrastructure and spend a billion dollars on a bridge ? and then sell it to us for a dollar.? The ?us? may not be the banks themselves, but their customers, who will borrow the money and pay the banks an underwriting commission as well as interest on the money they use to buy what the government is privatizing.

The pretense is that privatization is more efficient. But privatizers add on interest and financial fees, high executive salaries and bonuses, and turn the roads into toll roads and other infrastructure into neofeudal fiefdoms to charge monopolistic access fees for people to use. This is what has happened in Chicago when it sold off its sidewalks to let bankers finance parking meters in exchange for a loan. Chicago needed this loan because the financial lobbyists demanded that it cut taxes on commercial real estate and on the rich. So the financial sector first creates a problem by loading the economy down with debt, and then ?solves? it by demanding privatization sell-offs under distress conditions. 

This is happening not only in America, but in Greece and other countries under the insistence of Europe?s bank lobbying organization, the European Central Bank. That?s why there are riots in Athens. So the financial war against society is not only being waged here, but throughout the world.

To answer your question about how best to promote full employment, the aim should be to invest public money in a way that the Republicans and Democrats cannot later turn around and privatize the capital investment at a giveaway price. So I am all on favor of public infrastructure spending as long as you have safeguards against the financial fraud and giveaways to insiders of the sort that that the current administration is sponsoring. The privatizers and their banks would like to install tollbooths on new bridges and get a free ride to turn America into a tollbooth economy. But that?s really another story.

Alan Minsky: Michael Hudson, I want to thank you for joining us on KPFK.

Michael Hudson: Thanks a lot, Alan.
 


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From ths at psalience.org  Wed Nov 23 00:33:21 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:33:21 +0100
Subject: [THS] Michael Powell: Reporters Meet the Fists of the Law
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111123002942.04adb270@mail.messagingengine.com>

GOTHAM

Reporters Meet the Fists of the Law

By Michael Powell

Published: November 21, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/nyregion/nypd-stops-reporters-with-badges-and-fists.html?scp=2&sq=Reporters+Meet+the+Fists+of+the+Law&st=nyt

In the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street eviction from Zuccotti Park, a mayoral aide e-mailed reporters.

The aide, Stu Loeser, said that he had heard of journalists ?supposedly? wearing police press badges who ?allegedly encountered problems on the streets of New York.?

As I sling nouns and verbs for a living, I almost admired his artful euphemisms. A less refined sort might phrase it this way:

Over several days, New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers.

Reporters with The Associated Press and The Daily News were arrested while taking notes. A radio reporter was arrested as she recorded several blocks from the park.

All of this behavior ?allegedly? occurred ?on the streets of New York.?

This is the point in articles where it is customary to aver: the Police Department has done a fine, historic job battling crime. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is a brilliant tactician, and he deserves much credit. That is true.

Another truth co-exists. At least since the Republican National Convention of 2004, our police have grown accustomed to forcibly penning, arresting, and sometimes spraying and whacking protesters and reporters. On Monday, The New York Times and 12 other organizations sent a letter of protest to the Police Department. ?The police actions of last week,? the authors said, ?have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.?

Their letter offered five examples. I?ll mention one: As the police carried off a young protester whose head was covered in a crown of blood, a photographer stood behind a metal barricade and raised his camera. Two officers ran at him, grabbed the barrier and struck him in the chest, knees and shins. You are not permitted, the police yelled, to photograph on the sidewalk.

Covering New York can be a contact sport. We grunt, curse and toss elbows. I?ve run across the Brooklyn Bridge as protesters tossed bottles at cops, stood inside illegal squats on the Lower East Side as police massed outside, and walked through Crown Heights as communal tensions exploded. The rough rule was this: Treat cops reasonably and you can go about your business of recording and bearing witness.

Those feel like ancient days. Paul J. Browne, police deputy commissioner, denies what you see with your own eyes. ?There?s no change in policy,? he wrote in an e-mail, saying the police establish lines for safety and to ensure that evidence is preserved.

As for the press secretary, Mr. Loeser, he and his staff took to Twitter like a cloud of gnats, insisting that the Associated Press and Daily News reporters had ?clearly trespassed? by following demonstrators and the police through a fence into a vacant lot.

When I, as a columnist for The Times, questioned these arrests, a Bloomberg spokesman advised: ?N.Y.T. policy does not allow breaking law to gather news as you know.?

My newspaper?s ethics policy instructs us to be law abiding; we cannot steal documents, break into offices or tap phones. We also follow the story. And nothing those reporters are seen doing on video, which is to say taking notes in broad daylight with press passes dangling from their necks, appears to violate those guidelines.

Last week, Mr. Loeser instructed his staff to compare the names of those arrested against the roster of reporters with police press passes. His resulting e-mail suggested Captain Renault discovering gambling in Casablanca.

?Imagine my surprise,? he wrote, ?when we found that only five of the 26 arrested reporters actually have valid NYPD-issued press credentials.?

Here?s the rub. A majority of the city?s working reporters do not possess police passes. Leonard Levitt is a veteran reporter who writes the prodigiously well-sourced NYPD Confidential. ?The police want to accredit as few reporters as possible, and they make it exceedingly hard for nonmainstream reporters to get press passes,? he said.

Mr. Levitt has tried to renew his pass for a year. ?Needless to say,? he noted, ?they are resisting.?

There is another problem: a police pass has become a ticket for a quick removal. My Times colleague Colin Moynihan stood on that darkened square last Tuesday morning when a police spokesman shouted, ?Who has press credentials??

Many reporters and photographers dutifully raised their hands. With that, the police removed the ?credentialed? reporters, under threat of arrest, to a press pen, out of sight of the square. Only shouts and yells could be heard.

E-mail: powellm at nytimes.com


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Nov 23 14:18:46 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:18:46 +0100
Subject: [THS] About Pepper Spray - It Should be Banned
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111123141526.04919298@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/11/21/about-pepper-spray/

About Pepper Spray

By Deborah Blum | November 21, 2011


One hundred years ago, an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper?s burn. The scale ? as you can see on the widely used chart to the left ? puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habanero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units.

[= 9.5 on the open-ended Richter-Pepper Scale - a major gustatory sesnsequake]

I checked the Scoville Scale for something else yesterday. I was looking for a way to measure the intensity of pepper spray, the kind that police have been using on Occupy protestors including this week?s shocking incident involving peacefully protesting students at the University of California-Davis.

As the chart makes clear, commercial grade pepper spray leaves even the most painful of natural peppers (the Himalayan ghost pepper) far behind. It?s listed at between 2 million and 5.3 million Scoville units. The lower number refers to the kind of pepper spray that you and I might be able to purchase for self-protective uses. And the higher number? It?s the kind of spray that police use, the super-high dose given in the orange-colored spray used at UC-Davis.

The reason pepper-spray ends up on the Scoville chart is that ? you probably guessed this -  it?s literally derived from pepper chemistry, the compounds that make habaneros so much more formidable than the comparatively wimpy bells. Those compounds are called capsaicins and ? in fact ? pepper spray is more formally called Oleoresin Capsicum or OC Spray.
 

Photo courtesy: California Aggie

But we?ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.

Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison.  That we?re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry.  So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice  ? and certainly, it?s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup -  it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.

My own purpose here is to focus on the dangers of a high level of capsaicin exposure. But as pointed out in the 2004 paper, Health Hazards of Pepper Spray, written by health researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the sprays contain other risky materials:

Depending on brand, an OC spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents.(3) Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.

Their paper focuses mostly, though, on the dangerous associated with pepper-based compounds. In 1997, for instance, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco discovered that the ?hot? sensation of habaneros and their ilk was caused by capsaicin binding directly to proteins in the membranes of pain and heat sensing neurons.  Capsaicins can activate these neurons at below body temperature, leading to a startling sensation of heat. Repeated exposure can wear the system down, depleting neurotransmitters, reducing the sensation of the pain. This knowledge has led to a number of medical treatments using capsaicins to manage pain.

Its very mechanism, though, should remind us to be wary. As the North Carolina researchers point out, any compound that can influence nerve function is, by definition, risky. Research tells us that pepper spray acts as a potent inflammatory agent. It amplifies allergic sensitivities, it irritates and damages eyes, membranes, bronchial airways, the stomach lining ? basically what it touches. It works by causing pain ? and, as we know, pain is the body warning us of an injury.

In general, these are short term effects. Pepper spray, for instance, induces a burning sensation in the eyes in part by damaging cells in the outer layer of the cornea.  Usually, the body repairs this kind of injury fairly neatly. But with repeated exposures, studies find, there can be permanent damage to the cornea.

The more worrisome effects have to do with inhalation ? and by some reports, California university police officers deliberately put OC spray down protestors throats.  Capsaicins inflame the airways, causing swelling and restriction. And this means that pepper sprays pose a genuine risk  to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.

And by genuine risk, I mean a known risk, a no-surprise any police department should know this risk,  easy enough to find in the scientific literature. To cite just three examples here:

1) Pepper Spray Induced Respiratory Failure Treated with Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation

2) Assessing the incapacitative effects of pepper spray during resistive encounters with the police.

3) The Human Health Effects of Pepper Spray.

That second paper is from a law enforcement journal. And the summary for that last paper notes: Studies of the effects of capsaicin on human physiology, anecdotal experience with field use of pepper spray, and controlled exposure of correctional officers in training have shown adverse effects on the lungs, larynx, middle airway, protective reflexes, and skin. Behavioral and mental health effects also may occur if pepper spray is used abusively.

Pepper spray use has been suspected of contributing to a number of deaths that occurred in police custody. In mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice cited nearly 70 fatalities linked to pepper-spray use, following on a 1995 report compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union of California. The ACLU report cited 26 suspicious deaths; it?s important to note that most involved pre-existing conditions such as asthma. But it?s also important to note a troubling pattern.

In fact, in 1999, the ACLU  asked the California appeals court to declare the use of pepper spray to be dangerous and cruel. That request followed an action by northern California police officers against environmental protestors ? the police were accused of dipping Q-tips into OC spray and applying them directly to the eyes of men and women engaged in an anti-logging protest.

?The ACLU believes that the use of pepper spray as a kind of chemical cattle prod on nonviolent demonstrators resisting arrest constitutes excessive force and violates the Constitution,? wrote association attorneys some 13 years ago.

Yesterday, the University of California-Davis announced that it was suspending two of the police officers who pepper-sprayed protesting students. Eleven of those students were treated by paramedics on scene and two were sent to a hospital in Sacramento for more intensive treatment.

Undoubtedly, these injuries will factor into another scientific study of pepper spray, another acknowledgement that top of the Scoville scale is dangerous territory. But my own preference is that we start learning from these mistakes without waiting another 13 years or more, without engaging in yet another cycle of abuse and injury.

Now would be good.

Cross-posted from Speakeasy Science.
Deborah BlumAbout the Author: Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the best-selling author of The Poisoner?s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. A professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, she blogs about chemistry culture at Speakeasy Science. Follow on Twitter @deborahblum. 


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Nov 23 14:28:13 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:28:13 +0100
Subject: [THS] Russell Simmons Hires Civil Rights Icon In Historic
	Partnership
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111123142716.043e2248@mail.messagingengine.com>

Subject: Russell Simmons Hires Civil Rights Icon (Dr. Ben Chavis) In Historic Partnership
From: Michael Carmichael <mc at planetarymovement.org>


As a team, Russell Simmons and Dr. Ben Chavis, will strengthen the OWS movement immensely, especially in New York and all urban areas in America.

This development is nothing less than a merger of OWS with the American Civil Rights Movement, and it will not be surprising if the NAACP takes a more prominent role in seeking economic justice via the strategy of occupation.

Dr. Ben Chavis served on the staff of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; headed the Commission on Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ; was elected Executive Director of the NAACP; founded the National African-American Leadership Summit and served as the Executive Director of the Million Man March.  

Russell Simmons and Dr. Ben Chavis are co-founders of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN).

Dr. Ben Chavis hails from North Carolina, and he will be attending the annual forum on the Wilmington Ten in Chapel Hill this February.

See announcement below.

Michael Carmichael
Planetary/USA
1818 Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard
Suite 111
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514
USA

www.planetarymovement.org


Russell Simmons Hires Civil Rights Icon In Historic Partnership (DETAILS)

Posted 5 hours 34 min ago by GlobalGrind Staff 
in Occupy 



Russell Simmons  has just hired civil rights icon Dr. Ben Chavis to help coordinate his efforts for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

EXCLUSIVE: Russell Simmons Makes Historic Announcement 

Russell has brought on Dr. Ben, the man who put together the Million Man March,  in hopes of bringing the black clergy and its congregation together with union support, in order to amplify his efforts to get the money out of Washington.

EXCLUSIVE: You Can't Evict An Idea By Russell Simmons 

Last week while in Boston, Uncle Rush proposed a constitutional amendment that would ban private donations for U.S. politicians running for federal office.

Now that Dr. Ben has joined Russell, their collective efforts will surely take the movement to the next level!


Read more: http://globalgrind.com/news/russell-simmons-hires-civil-rights-icon-historic-partnership-details#ixzz1eUWHFb1h


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Nov 23 14:34:54 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:34:54 +0100
Subject: [THS] !!!!! Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here? ...a
 proposal from Michael Moore
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111123143008.04aa3658@mail.messagingengine.com>

Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here? ...a proposal from Michael Moore 

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 

Friends, 

This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street: 

We Envision: [1] a truly free, democratic, and just society; [2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus; [3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making; [4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others; [5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments; [6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few; [7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings; [8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible; [9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed. 

The next step will be to develop a specific list of goals and demands. As one of the millions of people who are participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I would like to respectfully offer my suggestions of what we can all get behind now to wrestle the control of our country out of the hands of the 1% and place it squarely with the 99% majority. 

Here is what I will propose to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street: 

10 Things We Want
A Proposal for Occupy Wall Street
Submitted by Michael Moore

1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street (where they currently pay 0%).

2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America. Our jobs are the most important national treasure and they cannot be removed from the country simply because someone wants to make more money. 

3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings (normally, the middle class pays about 6% of their income to Social Security; someone making $1 million a year pays about 0.6% (or 90% less than the average person). This law would simply make the rich pay what everyone else pays. 

4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks. 

5. Investigate the Crash of 2008, and bring to justice those who committed any crimes. 

6. Reorder our nation's spending priorities (including the ending of all foreign wars and their cost of over $2 billion a week). This will re-open libraries, reinstate band and art and civics classes in our schools, fix our roads and bridges and infrastructure, wire the entire country for 21st century internet, and support scientific research that improves our lives. 

7. Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time. 

8. Immediately reduce carbon emissions that are destroying the planet and discover ways to live without the oil that will be depleted and gone by the end of this century. 

9. Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company?s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job. (For any U.S. businesspeople freaking out at this idea because you think workers can't run a successful company: Germany has a law like this and it has helped to make Germany the world?s leading manufacturing exporter.) 

10. We, the people, must pass three constitutional amendments that will go a long way toward fixing the core problems we now have. These include: 

a) A constitutional amendment that fixes our broken electoral system by 1) completely removing campaign contributions from the political process; 2) requiring all elections to be publicly financed; 3) moving election day to the weekend to increase voter turnout; 4) making all Americans registered voters at the moment of their birth; 5) banning computerized voting and requiring that all elections take place on paper ballots. 

b) A constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and do not have the constitutional rights of citizens. This amendment should also state that the interests of the general public and society must always come before the interests of corporations. 

c) A constitutional amendment that will act as a "second bill of rights" as proposed by President Frankin D. Roosevelt: that every American has a human right to employment, to health care, to a free and full education, to breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat safe food, and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age. 

Let me know what you think. Occupy Wall Street enjoys the support of millions. It is a movement that cannot be stopped. Become part of it by sharing your thoughts with me or online (at OccupyWallSt.org). Get involved in (or start!) your own local Occupy movement. Make some noise. You don't have to pitch a tent in lower Manhattan to be an Occupier. You are one just by saying you are. This movement has no singular leader or spokesperson; every participant is a leader in their neighborhood, their school, their place of work. Each of you is a spokesperson to those whom you encounter. There are no dues to pay, no permission to seek in order to create an action. 

We are but ten weeks old, yet we have already changed the national conversation. This is our moment, the one we've been hoping for, waiting for. If it's going to happen it has to happen now. Don't sit this one out. This is the real deal. This is it. 

Have a happy Thanksgiving! 

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint at MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint
MichaelMoore.com 


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Nov 23 14:37:06 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:37:06 +0100
Subject: [THS] Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111123143633.03f02c40@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-colleges-now-students-new-public-intellectuals/1321891418

Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals
Monday 21 November 2011
by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

Police pepper spray students at a UC Davis demonstration on Friday, November 18. (Screengrab: asucd - Click here for video)

    The police violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of force that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future.

Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good. 

To see other articles by Henry A. Giroux visit The Public Intellectual Project. 

As people move or are pushed by authorities out of their makeshift tent cities in Zuccotti Park and other public spaces in cities across the United States, the harsh registers and interests of the punishing state become more visible. The corporate state cannot fight any longer with ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt,  fast losing any semblance of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency, resistance and collective struggle.

In short, they have become the new public intellectuals, using their bodies, social media, new digital technologies, and any other viable educational tool to raise new questions, point to new possibilities, and register their criticisms of the various antidemocratic elements of casino capitalism and the emerging punishing state.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are occupying colleges and universities, setting up tents, and using the power of ideas to engage other students, faculty, and anyone else who will listen to them. The call is going out from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Florida State University, Duke University, Rhode Island College, and over 120 other universities that the time has come to connect knowledge not just to power, but to the very meaning of what it means to be an engaged intellectual responsive to the possibilities of individual and collective resistance and change. This poses a new challenge not only for the brave students mobilizing these protests on college campuses, but also to faculty who often relegate themselves to the secure and comfortable claim that scholarship should be disinterested, objective and removed from politics.

There is a great deal these students and young people can learn from this turn away from the so-called professionalism of disinterested knowledge and the disinterested intellectual by reading the works of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Elaine Scarry, Pierre Bourdieu and others who offer a treasure trove of theoretical and political insights about what it means to assume the role of a public intellectual as both a matter of social responsibility and political urgency.

As the world rises up against economic injustice, Truthout brings you the latest news and analysis, free of corporate influence. Help support this work with a tax-deductible donation today.

In response to the political indifference and moral coma that embraced many universities and scholars since the 1980s, the late Said argued for intellectuals to move beyond the narrow interests of professionalism and specialization as well as the cheap seductions of celebrity culture being offered to a new breed of publicity and anti-public intellectuals. Said wanted to defend the necessity - indeed, keep open the possibility - of the intellectual who does not consolidate power, but questions it, connects his or her work to the alleviation of human suffering, enters the public sphere in order to deflate the claims of triumphalism and recalls from exile those dangerous memories that are often repressed or ignored.

Of course, such a position is at odds with those intellectuals who have retreated into arcane discourses that offer the cloistered protection of the professional recluse. Making few connections with audiences outside of the academy or to the myriad issues that bear down on everyday lives, many academics became increasingly irrelevant, while humanistic inquiry suffers the aftershocks of flagging public support. The Occupy Wall Street protesters have refused this notion of the deracinated, if not increasingly irrelevant, notion of academics and students as disinterested intellectuals.

They are not alone.

Refusing the rewards of apolitical professionalism or obscure specialization so rampant on university campuses, Roy has pointed out that intellectuals need to ask themselves some very "uncomfortable questions about our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our 'democratic institutions,' the role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community."[1] Similarly, Scarry points to the difficulty of seeing an injury and injustice, the sense of futility of one's own small efforts, and the special difficulty of lifting complex ideas into the public sphere.[2] Derrida has raised important questions about the relationship between critique and the very nature of the university and the humanities, as when he writes:

    The university without condition does not, in fact, exist, as we know only too well. Nevertheless, in principle and in conformity with its declared vocation, its professed essence, it should remain an ultimate place of critical resistance - and more than critical - to all the power of dogmatic and unjust appropriation.[3]

Chomsky and the late Zinn have spoken about and demonstrated for over 40 years what it means to think rigorously and act courageously in the face of human suffering and manufactured hardships. All of these theorists are concerned with what it means for intellectuals both within and outside of higher education to embrace the university as a productive site of dialogue and contestation, to imagine it as a site that offers students the promise of a democracy to come, to help them understand that there is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical power and the social movements that can make it happen.

But there is more at stake here than arguing for a more engaged public role for academics and students, for demanding the urgent need to reconnect humanistic inquiry to important social issues, or for insisting on the necessity for academics to reclaim a notion of ethical advocacy and connective relationships. There is also the challenge of connecting the university with visions that have some hold on the present, defending education as more than an investment opportunity or job credential, students as more than customers, and faculty as more than technicians or a subaltern army of casualized labor.

At a time when higher education is increasingly being dominated by a reductive corporate logic and technocratic rationality unable to differentiate training from a critical education, we need a chorus of new voices to emphasize that the humanities, in particular, and the university,  in general, should play a central role in keeping critical thought alive while fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and prevent that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished. Corporations and the warfare state should not dictate the needs of public and higher education, or, for that matter, any other democratic public sphere. 

As the Occupy student protesters have pointed out over the last few months, one of the great dangers facing the 21st century is not the risk of illusory hopes, but those undemocratic forces that promote and protect state terrorism, massive inequality, render some populations utterly disposable, imagine the future only in terms of immediate financial gains, and promote forms of self-serving historical reinvention in which power is measured by the degree to which it evades any sense of actual truth and moral responsibility.

Students, like their youthful counterparts in the 1960s, are once again arguing that higher education, even in its imperfect state, still holds the promise, if not the reality, of being able to offer them the complex knowledge and interdisciplinary related skills that enable existing and future generations to break the continuity of common sense, come to terms with their own power as critical agents, be critical of the authority that speaks to them, translate private considerations into public issues, and assume the responsibility of not only being governed but learning how to govern. Inhabiting the role of public intellectuals, students can take on the difficult but urgent task of reclaiming the ideal and the practice of what it means to reclaim higher education in general and the humanities, more specifically, as a site of possibility that embraces the idea of democracy not merely as a mode of governance but, most importantly- as journalist Bill Moyers points out - as a means of dignifying people so they can become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. 

Students are starting to recognize that it is crucial to struggle for the university as a democratic public sphere and the need to use that sphere to educate a generation of new students, faculty and others about the history of race, racism, politics, identity, power, the state and the struggle for justice.  They are increasingly willing to argue in theoretically insightful and profound ways about what it means to defend the university as a site that opens up and sustains public connections through which people's fragmented, uncertain, incomplete narratives of agency are valued, preserved, and made available for exchange while being related analytically to wider contexts of politics and power. They are moving to reclaim, once again, the humanities as a sphere that is crucial for grounding ethics, justice and morality across existing disciplinary terrains, while raising both a sense of urgency and a set of relevant questions about what kind of education would be suited to the 21st-century university and its global arrangements as part of a larger project of addressing the most urgent issues that face the social and political world. 

The punishing state can use violence with impunity to eject young people from parks and other public sites, but it is far more difficult to eject them from sites that are designed for their intellectual growth and well-being, make a claim to educate them, and register society's investment and commitment to their future. Students can be forced out of parks and other public spaces, but it is much more difficult to force them out of those sites designed to educate them - places that are identified with young people and register the larger society's obligation to their future and well-being. The police violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of force that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future.

But there is more. It is also crucial not to allow casino capitalism to transform higher education into another extension of the corporate and warfare state. If higher education loses its civic purpose and becomes simply an adjunct of corporate and military power, there will be practically no spaces left for dissent, dialogue, civic courage, and a spirit of thoughtfulness and critical engagement. This is all the more reason to occupy colleges and use them as a launching pad to both educate and to expand the very meaning of the public sphere. Knowledge is about more than the truth; it is also a weapon of change. The language of a radical politics needs more than hope and outrage; it needs institutional spaces to produce ideas, values, and social relations capable of fighting off those ideological and material forces of casino capitalism that are intent in sabotaging any viable notion of human interaction, community, solidarity, friendship, and justice.

Space is not the ultimate prize here.[4] Politics and ideology are the essence of what this movement should be about. But space becomes invaluable when it its democratic functions and uses are restored. In an age when the media have become a means of mass distraction and entertainment, the university offers a site of informed engagement, a place where theory and action inform each other, and a space that refuses to divorce intellectual activities from matters of politics, social responsibility and social justice.

As students and faculty increasingly use the space of the university as a megaphone for a new kind of critical education and politics, it will hopefully reclaim the democratic function of higher education and demonstrate what it means for students, faculty, and others to assume the role of public intellectuals dedicated to creating a formative culture that can provide citizens and others with the knowledge and skills necessary for a radical democracy.

Rather than reducing learning to a measurable quantity in the service of a narrow instrumental rationality, learning can take on a new role, becoming central to developing and expanding the capacity for critical modes of agency, new forms of solidarity, and an education in the service of the public good, an expanded imagination, democratic values, and social change. The student intellectual as a public figure merges rigor with civic courage, meaning with the struggle for eliminating injustice wherever it occurs and hope with a realistic notion of social change.

Hopefully, the Occupy Wall Street movements will expand their appropriation of public space to the university. And if so, let's hope that higher education will be viewed as a crucial public good and democratic public sphere. Under such circumstances, the university might be transformed into a new and broad-based community of learning and resistance. This is a huge possibility, but one worth struggling for. Unlike the youth movements of the past, such a movement will not crystallize around specific movements, but will create, hopefully, a community of the broadest possible resistance and political clout.

In this way, the Occupy movement will connect to the larger world through a conversation and politics that links the particular with broader notions of freedom and justice. And against the pedagogical machine and political forces of casino capitalism, this expanding movement will fight hopefully with renewed energy. It will be determined in its mission to expand the capacities to think otherwise, and courageous in its attempts to take risks. It will be brave in its willingness to change the nature of the questions asked, fight to hold power accountable, and struggle to provide the formative culture for students and others to fight for those economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that are essential both to their future and to democracy itself. 

 

Notes
 1. Arundhati Roy, "Power Politics" (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), p.3.
2.Cited in Edward Said, "Scholarship and Commitment: An Introduction," Profession (2000), p.6
3.Jacques Derrida, "The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University," in Derrida Downunder, Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth, eds. (Auckland, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 2001), pp. 233-247.
4. This issue is taken up by brilliantly by Peter Marcuse. See Peter Marcuse, "The Purpose of the Occupation Movement and the Danger of Fetishizing Space." Peter Marcuse's Blog (November 15, 2011). Marcuse is especially helpful in rejecting the fetishization of Zuccotti Park while distinguishing among seven functions of the movement: A confrontation function, "taking the struggle to the enemy's territory, confronting, potentially disrupting, the operations at the center of the problem." A symbolic function which registers a collective and "deeply felt unhappiness about things as they are and the direction in which they are going." An educational function, "provoking questioning, exploration, juxtaposition of differing viewpoints and issues, seeking clarification and sources of commonality within difference." A glue function, "creating a community of trust and commitment to the pursuit of common goals; [providing] a way of coming together in a community for those who are deeply affected and concerned. "An umbrella function, "creating a space ... in which quite disparate groups can work together in pursuit of ultimately consistent and mutually reinforcing goals ... a political umbrella, an organizing base for an ongoing alliance, not just a temporary coalition, of the deprived and discontented." An activation function, "inspiring others to greater militancy and sharper focus on common goals and specific demands ... providing space for ... cross discussions among supporting groups and interests, organizing ... events in support of ... reforms that [suggests] Occupy's own ultimate goals of change." A model function, "showing, by its internal organization and methods of proceeding, that an alternative form of democracy is possible."

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. His most recent books include: Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave, 2009); Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy (Paradigm, 2010); Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Paradigm, 2010); The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (co-authored with Grace Pollock, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Lang, 2011); Henry Giroux on Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011). His newest books:   Education and the Crisis of Public Values (Peter Lang) and Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm Publishers) will be published in 2012). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Nov 23 14:22:32 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:22:32 +0100
Subject: [THS] Pepper Spray on the Seine
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111123142016.04919008@mail.messagingengine.com>

Inhale THIS, you pointilliste bitches!
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From ths at psalience.org  Wed Nov 23 15:16:28 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:16:28 +0100
Subject: [THS] Peter Dale Scott: The Doomsday Project and Deep Events
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111123151552.04855550@mail.messagingengine.com>

The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: 
    JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

By Prof. Peter Dale Scott

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27806

Global Research, November 22, 2011
Asia Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 47, No 2, - 2011-11-21

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

       -- Senator Frank Church (1975)

I would like to discuss four major and badly understood events ? the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. I will analyze these deep events as part of a deeper political process linking them, a process that has helped build up repressive power in America at the expense of democracy. 

In recent years I have been talking about a dark force behind these events -- a force which, for want of a better term, I have clumsily called a ?deep state,? operating both within and outside the public state. Today for the first time I want to identify part of that dark force, a part which has operated for five decades or more at the edge of the public state. This part of the dark force has a name not invented by me: the Doomsday Project, the Pentagon?s name for the emergency planning ?to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis.?1

My point is a simple and important one: to show that the Doomsday Project of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency planning that developed into it, have played a role in the background of all the deep events I shall discuss.

More significantly, it has been a factor behind all three of the disturbing events that now threaten American democracy. The first of these three is what has been called the conversion of our economy into a plutonomy ? with the increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, the one percent and the 99 percent. The second is America?s increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, which has become more and more routine and predictable, to wage or provoke wars in remote regions of the globe. It is clear that the operations of this American war machine have served the one percent.2

The third ? my subject today -- is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of structural deep events: mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.

There are any number of analyses of America?s current breakdown in terms of income and wealth disparity, also in terms of America?s increasing militarization and belligerency. What I shall do today is I think new: to argue that both the income disparity ? or what has been called our plutonomy -- and the belligerency have been fostered significantly by deep events.

We must understand that the income disparity of America?s current economy was not the result of market forces working independently of political intervention. In large part it was generated by a systematic and deliberate ongoing political process dating from the anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and 1970s that control of the country was slipping away from them.

This was the time when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum, warned that survival of the free enterprise system depended on ?careful long-range planning and implementation? of a well-financed response to threats from the left.3 This warning was answered by a sustained right-wing offensive, coordinated by think tanks and funded lavishly by a small group of family foundations.4 We should recall that all this was in response to serious riots in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for a revolution were coming from the left (in Europe as well as America). I will focus today on the right?s response to that challenge, and on the role of deep events in enhancing their response.

What was important about the Powell memorandum was less the document itself than the fact that it was commissioned by the United States Chamber of Commerce, one of the most influential and least discussed lobbying groups in America. And the memorandum was only one of many signs of that developing class war in the 1970s, a larger process working both inside and outside government (including what Irving Kristol called an ?intellectual counterrevolution?), which led directly to the so-called ?Reagan Revolution.?5

It is clear that this larger process has been carried on for almost five decades, pumping billions of right-wing dollars into the American political process. What I wish to show today is that deep events have also been integral to this right-wing effort, from the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 to 9/11. 9/11 resulted in the implementation of ?Continuity of Government? (COG) plans (which in the Oliver North Iran Contra Hearings of 1987 were called plans for ?the suspension of the U.S. constitution?). These COG plans, building on earlier COG planning, had been carefully developed since 1982 in the so-called Doomsday Project, by a secret group appointed by Reagan. The group was composed of both public and private figures, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.




Oliver North testifying in the Iran Contra Hearings

I shall try to show today that in this respect 9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence of deep events reaching back to the Kennedy assassination if not earlier, and that the germs of the Doomsday Project can be detected behind all of them.

More specifically, I shall try to demonstrate about these deep events that

1) prior bureaucratic misbehavior by the CIA and similar agencies helped to make both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 happen;

2) the consequences of each deep event included an increase in top-down repressive power for these same agencies, at the expense of persuasive democratic power;6

3) there are symptomatic overlaps in personnel between the perpetrators of each of these deep events and the next;

4) one sees in each event the involvement of elements of the international drug traffic ? suggesting that our current plutonomy is also to some degree a narconomy;

5) in the background of each event (and playing an increasingly important role) one sees the Doomsday Project -- the alternative emergency planning structure with its own communications network, operating as a shadow network outside of regular government channels.

Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a Factor Contributing to both the JFK Assassination and 9/11

Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 were facilitated by the way the CIA and FBI manipulated their files about alleged perpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswald in the case of what I shall call JFK, and the alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of this facilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963 of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance. This was shortly after Oswald?s arrest in New Orleans in August and his reported travel to Mexico in September. Obviously these developments should normally have made Oswald a candidate for increased surveillance.7

This misbehavior is paradigmatic of the behavior of other agencies, especially the CIA, in both JFK and 9/11. Indeed Gheesling?s behavior fits very neatly with the CIA?s culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same month of October, information that Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.8 This also helped ensure that Oswald would not be placed under surveillance. Indeed, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that the CIA?s withholding of information was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.9

A more ominous provocation in 1963 was that of Army Intelligence, one unit of which in Dallas did not simply withhold information about Lee Harvey Oswald, but manufactured false intelligence that seemed designed to provoke retaliation against Cuba. I call such provocations phase-one stories, efforts to portray Oswald as a Communist conspirator (as opposed to the later phase-two stories, also false, portraying him as a disgruntled loner). A conspicuous example of such phase-one stories is a cable from the Fourth Army Command in Texas, reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman who was also in an Army Intelligence Reserve unit:

Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party.?10

This cable was sent on November 22 directly to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.11

The cable was not an isolated aberration. It was supported by other false phase-one stories from Dallas about Oswald?s alleged rifle, and specifically by concatenated false translations of Marina Oswald?s testimony, to suggest that Oswald?s rifle in Dallas was one he had owned in Russia.12

These last false reports, apparently unrelated, can also be traced to officer Don Stringfellow?s 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.13 The interpreter who first supplied the false translation of Marina?s words, Ilya Mamantov, was selected by a Dallas oilman, Jack Crichton, and Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin.14 Crichton and Lumpkin were also the Chief and the Deputy Chief of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.15 Crichton was also an extreme right-winger in the community of Dallas oilmen: he was a trustee of the H.L. Hunt Foundation, and a member of the American Friends of the Katanga Freedom Fighters, a group organized to oppose Kennedy?s policies in the Congo.

We have to keep in mind that some of the Joint Chiefs were furious that the 1962 Missile Crisis had not led to an invasion of Cuba, and that, under new JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed ?that US military intervention in Cuba is necessary.?16 This was six months after Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October 1962, had given explicit (albeit highly qualified) assurances to Khrushchev, that the United States would not invade Cuba.17 This did not stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) from producing a menu of ?fabricated provocations to justify military intervention.?18 (One proposed example of ?fabricated provocations? envisioned ?using MIG type aircraft flown by US pilots to ... attack surface shipping or to attack US military.?)19

The deceptions about Oswald coming from Dallas were immediately post-assassination; thus they do not by themselves establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May ? the mindset that produced a menu of ?fabricated provocations? to attack Cuba. (According to Crichton there were ?about a hundred men in [the 488th Reserve unit] and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.?)20 

It can hardly be accidental that we see this bureaucratic misbehavior from the FBI, CIA, and military, the three agencies with which Kennedy had had serious disagreements in his truncated presidency.21 Later in this paper I shall link Dallas oilman Jack Crichton to the 1963 emergency planning that became the Doomsday Project.

Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in the Case of 9/11

Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, again flagrantly withheld crucial evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if shared, would have led the FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This sustained withholding of evidence provoked an FBI agent to predict accurately in August, 2001, that ?someday someone will die.?22 After 9/11 another FBI agent said of the CIA: ?They [CIA] didn?t want the bureau meddling in their business?that?s why they didn?t tell the FBI....  And that?s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened. . . . They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands?23 The CIA?s withholding of relevant evidence before 9/11 (which it was required by its own rules to supply) was matched in this case by the NSA.24

Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have developed in the manner in which they did. As I wrote in American War Machine, it would appear that

Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had at some prior point been selected as

designated subjects for an operation. This would not initially have been for the commission of a crime against the American polity: on the contrary, steps were probably taken to prepare Oswald in connection with an operation against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [I suspect] for an operation against al-Qaeda. But as [exploitable] legends began to accumulate about both figures, it became possible for some witting people to subvert the sanctioned operation into a plan for murder that would later be covered up. At this point Oswald (and by analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer just a designated subject but also now a designated culprit.25

Kevin Fenton, in his exhaustive book Disconnecting the Dots, has since reached the same conclusion with respect to 9/11: ?that, by the summer of 2001, the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.?26 He has also identified the person chiefly responsible for the misbehavior: CIA officer Richard Blee, Chief of the CIA?s Bin Laden Unit. Blee, while Clinton was still president, had been one of a faction inside CIA pressing for a more belligerent CIA involvement in Afghanistan, in conjunction with the Afghan Northern Alliance.27 This then happened immediately after 9/11, and Blee himself was promoted, to become the new Chief of Station in Kabul.28

How CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidence in the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident, Contributed to War with North Vietnam

I will spare you the details of this withholding, which can be found in my American War Machine, pp. 200-02. But Tonkin Gulf is similar to the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, in that manipulation of evidence helped lead America ? in this case very swiftly ? into war.

Historians such as Fredrik Logevall have agreed with the assessment of former undersecretary of state George Ball that the US destroyer mission in the Tonkin Gulf, which resulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents, ?was primarily for provocation.?29 The planning for this provocative mission came from the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same unit that in 1963 had reported concerning Cuba that, ?the engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible.?30

The NSA and CIA suppression of the truth on August 4 was in the context of an existing high-level (but controversial) determination to attack North Vietnam. In this respect the Tonkin Gulf incident is remarkably similar to the suppression of the truth by CIA and NSA leading up to 9/11, when there was again a high-level (but controversial) determination to go to war.

Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events

All of the deep events discussed above have contributed to the cumulative increase of Washington?s repressive powers. It is clear for example that the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of

the Warren Commission?s controversial recommendations that the Secret Service?s domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.31

This pattern would repeat itself four years later with the assassination of

Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobby?s shooting and his

death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute? drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) ? that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates.32

This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency.33

The change also contributed to the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called ?Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups.?34

In this way the extra secret powers conferred after the RFK assassination contributed to the disastrous turmoil in Chicago that effectively destroyed the old Democratic Party representing the labor unions: The three Democratic presidents elected since then have all been significantly more conservative.

Turning to Watergate and Iran-Contra, both of these events were on one level setbacks to the repressive powers exercised by Richard Nixon and the Reagan White House, not expansions of them. On the surface level this is true: both events resulted in legislative reforms that would appear to contradict my thesis of expanding repression.

We need to distinguish here, however, between the two years of the Watergate crisis, and the initial Watergate break-in. The Watergate crisis saw a president forced into resignation by a number of forces, involving both liberals and conservatives. But the key figures in the initial Watergate break-in itself ? Hunt, McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, and their Cuban allies -- were all far to the right of Nixon and Kissinger. And the end result of their machinations was not finalized until the so-called Halloween Massacre in 1975, when Kissinger was ousted as National Security Adviser and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was notified he would be dropped from the 1976 Republican ticket. This major shake-up was engineered by two other right-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford White House.35

That day in 1975 saw the permanent defeat of the so-called Rockefeller or liberal faction within the Republican Party. It was replaced by the conservative Goldwater-Casey faction that would soon capture the nomination and the presidency for Ronald Reagan.36 This little-noticed palace coup, along with other related intrigues in the mid-1970s, helped achieve the conversion of America from a welfare capitalist economy, with gradual reductions in income and wealth disparity, into a financialized plutonomy where these trends were reversed.37

Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeper accumulation of repressive power under the surface of liberal reforms. At the time not only the press but even academics like myself celebrated the termination of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the victory there of the Contadora peace process. Not generally noticed at the time was the fact that, while Oliver North was removed from his role in the Doomsday Project, that project?s plans for surveillance, detention, and the militarization of the United States continued to grow after his departure.38

Also not noticed was the fact that the US Congress, while curtailing aid to one small drug-financed CIA proxy army, was simultaneously increasing US support to a much larger coalition of drug-financed proxy armies in Afghanistan.39 While Iran-Contra exposed the $32 million which Saudi Arabia, at the urging of CIA Director William Casey, had supplied to the Contras, not a word was whispered about the $500 million or more that the Saudis, again at the urging of Casey, had supplied in the same period to the Afghan mujahedin.40 In this sense the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress can be thought of as a misdirection play, directing public attention away from America?s much more intensive engagement in Afghanistan ? a covert policy that has since evolved into America?s longest war.

We should expand our consciousness of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-Afghan-Contra. And if we do, we must acknowledge that in this complex and misunderstood deep event the CIA in Afghanistan exercised again the paramilitary capacity that Stansfield Turner had tried to terminate when he was CIA Director under Jimmy Carter. This was a victory in short for the faction of men like Richard Blee, the protector of al-Mihdhar as well as the advocate in 2000 for enhanced CIA paramilitary activity in Afghanistan.41

Personnel Overlaps Between the Successive Deep Events

I will never forget the New York Times front-page story on June 18, 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in. There were photographs of the Watergate burglars, including one of Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had already written about two years earlier in my unpublished book manuscript, ?The Dallas Conspiracy? about the JFK assassination.




Frank Sturgis

Sturgis was no nonentity: a former contract employee of the CIA, he was also well connected to the mob-linked former casino owners in Havana.42 My early writings on the Kennedy case focused on the connections between Frank Sturgis and an anti-Castro Cuban training camp near New Orleans in which Oswald had shown an interest; also in Sturgis? involvement in false ?phase-one? stories portraying Oswald as part of a Communist Cuban conspiracy.43

In spreading these ?phase-one? stories in 1963, Sturgis was joined by a number of Cubans who were part of the CIA-supported army in Central America of Manuel Artime. Artime?s base in Costa Rica was closed down in 1965, allegedly because of its involvement in drug trafficking.44 In the 1980s some of these Cuban exiles later became involved in drug-financed support activities for the Contras.45

The political mentor of Artime?s MRR movement was future Watergate plotter Howard Hunt; and Artime in 1972 would pay for the bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars. The drug money-launderer Ram?n Mili?n Rodr?guez has claimed to have delivered $200,000 in cash from Artime to pay off some of the Cuban Watergate burglars; later, in support of the Contras, he managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.46

It is alleged that Hunt and McCord had both been involved with Artime?s invasion plans in 1963.47 It was I believe no accident that the organization of Hunt?s prot?g? Artime became enmired in drug trafficking. Hunt, I have argued elsewhere, had been handling a U.S. drug connection since his 1950 post in Mexico City as OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) chief.48 

But McCord not only had a past in the anti-Castro activities of 1963, he was also part of the nation?s emergency planning network that would later figure so prominently in the background of Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned ?to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war.?49 His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating ?contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian ?security risks,? who would be placed in military ?camps.??50 In other words, these were the plans that became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, the Continuity of Government planning on which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together for twenty years before 9/11.

A Common Denominator for Structural Deep Events: Project Doomsday and COG

McCord?s participation in an emergency planning system dealing with telecommunications suggests a common denominator in the backgrounds of almost all the deep events we are considering. Oliver North, the Reagan-Bush OEP point man on Iran-Contra planning, was also involved in such planning; and he had access to the nation?s top secret Doomsday communications network. North?s network, known as Flashboard,  "excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints...[and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, ... by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad."51

Flashboard was used by North and his superiors for extremely sensitive operations which had to be concealed from other dubious or hostile parts of the Washington bureaucracy. These operations included the illegal shipments of arms to Iran, but also other activities, some still not known, perhaps even against Olof Palme?s Sweden.52 Flashboard, America?s emergency network in the 1980s, was the name in 1984-86 of the full-fledged Continuity of Government (COG) emergency network which was secretly planned for twenty years, at a cost of billions, by a team including Cheney and Rumsfeld. On 9/11 the same network was activated anew by the two men who had planned it for so many years.53

But this Doomsday planning can be traced back to 1963, when Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was part of it in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, ?Because it was intended for ?continuity of government? operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment.?54 A speech given at the dedication of the Center in 1961 supplies further details:

This Emergency Operating Center [in Dallas] is part of the National Plan to link Federal, State and local government agencies in a communications network from which rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan.55

Crichton, in other words, was also part of what became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, like James McCord, Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney after him. But in 1988 its aim was significantly enlarged: no longer to prepare for an atomic attack, but now to plan for the effective suspension of the American constitution in the face of any emergency.56 This change in 1988 allowed COG to be implemented in 2001. By this time the Doomsday Project had developed into what the Washington Post called ?a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing ?continuity of operations plans.??57


It is clear that the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP, known from 1961-1968 as the Office of Emergency Planning) supplies a common denominator for key personnel in virtually all of the structural events discussed here. This is a long way from establishing that the OEP itself (in addition to the individuals discussed here) was involved in generating any of these events. But I believe that the alternative communications network housed first in the OEP (later part of Project 908) played a significant role in at least three of them: the JFK assassination, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.

This is easiest to show in the case of 9/11, where it is conceded that the Continuity of Government (COG) plans of the Doomsday Project were implemented by Cheney on 9/11, apparently before the last of the four hijacked planes had crashed.58 The 9/11 Commission could not locate records of the key decisions taken by Cheney on that day, suggesting that they may have taken place on the ?secure phone ? in the tunnel leading to the presidential bunker ? with such a high classification that the 9/11 Commission was never supplied the phone records.59 Presumably this was a COG phone.

It is not clear whether the ?secure phone? in the White House tunnel belonged to the Secret Service or (as one might expect) was part of the secure network of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). If the latter, we?d have a striking link between 9/11 and the JFK assassination. The WHCA boasts on its Web site that the agency was ?a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.?60  However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, for the WHCA logs and transcripts were in fact withheld from the Warren Commission.61

The Secret Service had installed a WHCA portable radio in the lead car of the presidential motorcade.62 This in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.63 Records of the WHCA communications from the motorcade never reached the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board.64 Thus we cannot tell if they would explain some of the anomalies on the two channels of the Dallas Police Department. They might for example have thrown light upon the unsourced call on the Dallas Police

tapes for a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.65

Today in 2011 we are still living under the State of Emergency proclaimed after 9/11 by President Bush. At least some COG provisions are still in effect, and were even augmented by Bush through Presidential Directive 51 of May 2007. Commenting on PD-51, the Washington Post reported at that time,

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers [including Cheney] to rotate secretly to [COG] locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation?s survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing ?continuity of operations plans.?66

Presumably this ?shadow government? finalized such long-standing COG projects as warrantless surveillance, in part through the Patriot Act, whose controversial provisions were already being implemented by Cheney and others well before the Bill reached Congress on October 12.67 Other COG projects implemented included the militarization of domestic surveillance under NORTHCOM, and the Department of Homeland Security?s Project Endgame?a ten-year plan to expand detention camps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone.68

I have, therefore, a recommendation for the Occupy movement, rightfully incensed as it is with the plutonomic excesses of Wall Street over the last three decades. It is to call for an end to the state of emergency, which has been in force since 2001, under which since 2008 a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team has been stationed permanently in the United States, in part to be ready ?to help with civil unrest and crowd control.?69

Democracy-lovers must work to prevent the political crisis now developing in America from being resolved by military intervention.

Let me say in conclusion that for a half century American politics have been constrained and deformed by the unresolved matter of the Kennedy assassination. According to a memo of November 25 1963, from Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, it was important then to persuade the public that ?Oswald was the assassin,? and that ?he did not have confederates.?70 Obviously this priority became even more important after these questionable propositions were endorsed by the Warren Report, the U.S. establishment, and the mainstream press. It has remained an embarrassing priority ever since for all succeeding administrations, including the present one. There is for example an official in Obama?s State Department (Todd Leventhal), whose official job, until recently, included defense of the lone nut theory against so-called ?conspiracy theorists?71

If Oswald was not a lone assassin, then it should not surprise us that there is continuity between those who falsified reports about Oswald in 1963, and those who distorted American politics in subsequent deep events beginning with Watergate. Since the deep event of 1963 the legitimacy of America?s political system has become vested in a lie -- a lie which subsequent deep events have helped to protect.72

 

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here http://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html  

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, 'The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 47 No 2, November 21, 2011.

Articles on related subjects

? Peter Dale Scott, Norway?s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites

? Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents

? C. Douglas Lummis, The United States and Terror on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

? Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America?s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods

? Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System

? Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?

? Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States

Notes

1 Tim Weiner, ?The Pentagon?s Secret Stash,? Mother Jones Magazine Mar-Apr 1992, 26.

2 J.A. Myerson ?War Is a Force That Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy,? Truthout, November 14, 2001, link. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 6, etc.

3 Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 29, 98.

4 Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 97.

5 Scott, Road to 9/11, 21, 51-52; Kristol as quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, ?Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History,? Harper?s Magazine, September 2004, 36.

6 E.g. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 204-05.

7 Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 354.

8 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 387; Scott, American War Machine, 152.

9 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City, MO:

Andrews, McMeel, and Parker, 1987), 268, quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.

10 Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; HSCA Critics Conference of 17 September 1977, 181, link. Stringfellow worked under Jack Revill in the Vice Squad of the DPD Special Services Bureau. As such he reported regularly to the FBI on such close Jack Ruby associates as James Herbert Dolan, a ?known hoodlum and strong-arm man? on the FBI?s Top Criminal list for Dallas (Robert M. Barrett, FBI Report of February 2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026, 12 [Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-10212-10012, 4 [hoodlum], NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [Top Criminal]). Cf. 14 WH 601-02 Ruby and Dolan]. Robert Barrett, who received Stringfellow?s reports to the FBI, had Ruby?s friend Dolan under close surveillance; he also took part in Oswald?s arrest at the Texas Theater, and claimed to have seen DPD Officer Westbrook with Oswald?s wallet at the site of the Tippit killing [Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (Milford, MI: Oak Cliff Press, 1998), 287-90]).

11 It was sent for information to Washington, which received it three days later (Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; Scott, War Conspiracy, 382).

12 Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383. (Marina?s actual words, before mistranslation, were quite innocuous: ?I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles? (Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep Politics, 168-72).

13 Stringfellow himself was the source of one other piece of false intelligence on November 22: that Oswald had confessed to the murders of both the president and Officer Tippit (Dallas FBI File DL 89-43-2381C; Paul L. Hoch, ?The Final Investigation? The HSCA and Army Intelligence,? The Third Decade, 1, 5 [July 1985], 3),

14 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 119-22.

15 Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J. Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in Acapulco (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 128.

16 Joint Chiefs of Staff, ?Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),? Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12. Cf. pp. 15-16: ?The United States should intervene militarily in Cuba and could (a) engineer provocative incidents ostensibly perpetrated by the Castro regime to serve as the cause of invasion...?

17 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; James A. Nathan, The Cuban missile crisis revisited, 283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 9.

[18 Joint Chiefs of Staff, ?Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),? Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12.

19 ?Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),? NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I see nothing in this document indicating that the President should be notified that these ?fabricated provocations? were false. On the contrary, the document called for ?compartmentation of participants? to insure that the true facts were not leaked (?Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),? NARA #202-10002-10018, 19).

20 Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets, 122. One of these, DPD Detective John Adamcik, was a member of the party which retrieved a blanket said to have contained Oswald?s rifle; and which the Warren Commission used to link Oswald to the famous Mannlicher Carcano. Adamcik was later present at Mamantov?s interview of Marina about the rifle, and corroborated Mamantov?s account of it to the Warren Commission. There is reason to believe that Mamantov?s translation of Marina?s testimony was inaccurate (Scott, Deep Politics, 268-70, 276).

21 See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).

22 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower:

Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352?54 (FBI agent).

23 James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America?s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004, 224. For a fuller account of the CIA?s withholding before 9/11, see Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots; Rory O?Connor and Ray Nowosielski, ?Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA?s 9/11 Story,? Salon, October 14, 2011, link.

24 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7-12, 142-47, etc.

25 Scott, American War Machine, 203.

26 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95. Quite independently, Richard Clarke, the former White House Counterterrorism Chief on 9/11, has charged that "There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information" (Rory O?Connor and Ray Nowosielski, ?Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA?s 9/11 Story,? Salon, October 14, 2011).

27 Coll, 467-69.

28 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 107-08.

29 James Bamford, Body of Secrets, 201. Cf. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51.

30 ?Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),? Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, JCS 2304/189, NARA #202-10002-10018, link.

31 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280.

32 Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L.

Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random

House, 1976), 443?46.

33 Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that ?the big build-up in [Army] information gathering...did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King? (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728).

34 George O?Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in

Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278?79.

35 Scott, Road to 9/11, 52-53.

36 Scott, Road to 9/11, 53-54.

37 Scott, Road to 9/11, 50-64.

38 Peter Dale Scott, ?Northwards without North,? Social Justice (Summer 1989). Revised as "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011.

39 Scott, Road to 9/11, 132.

40 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 13 (Contras); Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 93-102 (mujahedin).

41 Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457-59, 534-36,

42 According to testimony from CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, only ?Hunt and McCord had ever been CIA full-time employees. The others [including Sturgis] were contract employees for a short duration or a longer duration? (Watergate Hearings, 3427). Cf. Marshall, Scott, and  Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 45 (casino owners).

43 Peter Dale Scott, ?From Dallas to Watergate,? Ramparts, December 1973; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, 356, 363.

44 Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 20.

45 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 25-32, etc.

46 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press  (London: Verso, 1998), 308-09; Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994), 368 (Frigorificos).

47 Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 96-97.

48 Scott, American War Machine, 51-54. Hunt helped put together what became the drug-linked World Anti-Communist League. Artime?s Costa Rica base was on land whose owners were part of the local WACL chapter (Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 87, 220).

49 Woodward and Bernstein, All the President?s Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23

50 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16, citing Department of Defense Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965, amended May 21, 1971.

51 Peter Dale Scott, "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards Without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power." Social Justice (San Francisco), XVI, 2 (Summer 1989), 1-30; Peter Dale Scott, "The Terrorism Task Force." Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12-15.

52 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 140-41, 242 (Iran, etc.); Ola Tunander, The secret war against Sweden: US and British submarine deception in the 1980s, 309 (Sweden).

53 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.

54 Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.

55 ?Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairman of City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission at the Dedication of the Emergency Operating Center at Fair Park,? May 24, 1961, link.

Six linear inches of Civil Defense Administrative Files are preserved in the Dallas Municipal Archives; a Finding Guide is viewable online here.  I hope an interested researcher may wish to consult them.

56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.

57 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

58 9/11 Report, 38, 326, 555n9; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 224.

59 Scott, Road to 9/11, 226-30. A footnote in the 9/11 Report (555n9) says:

?The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. government?s plans and capabilities to ensure the continuity of constitutional government and the continuity of government operations. We did not investigate this topic, except as needed to understand the activities and communications of key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair, and senior staff were briefed on the general nature and implementation of these continuity plans.?

The other footnotes confirm that no information from COG files was used to document the 9/11 report. At a minimum these files might resolve the mystery of the missing phone call which simultaneously authorized COG, and (in consequence) determined that Bush should continue to stay out of Washington. I suspect that they might tell us a great deal more.

60 ?White House Communications Agency,? Signal Corps Regimental History, link.

61 The Warren Commission staff knew of the WHCA presence in Dallas from the Secret Service (17 WH 598, 619, 630, etc.).

62 Statement of Secret Service official Winston Lawson, 17 WH 630 (WHCA radio).

63 Pamela McElwain-Brown, ?The Presidential Lincoln Continental SS-100-X,? Dealey Plaza Echo, Volume 3, Issue 2, 23, link (police radio); Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).

64 In the 1990s the WHCA supplied statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington on November 22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA #172-10000-10008).  The Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: ?The Review Board?s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.? See Assassinations Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, link. In November 2011 AP reported that Gen. Chester Clifton?s personal copy of the Air Force One recordings was being put up for sale, with an asking price of $500,000 (AP, November 15, 2011, link).

65 See Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 347-48, 385-87.

66 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

67 Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 348: ?One of the first efforts we undertook after 9/11 to strengthen the country's defenses was securing passage of the Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on [sic] October 2001.? Cf. ?The Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on October 2001,? link; ?Questions and Answers about Beginning of Domestic Spying Program; link.

68 Scott, Road to 9/11, 236-45; Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society," November 28, 2010, http:/1/japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.

69 ?Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,? Army Times, September 30, 2008, link. As part of the Army?s emergency plan GARDEN PLOT in the 1960s, there were until 1971 two brigades (4,800 troops) on permanent standby to quell unrest.

70 ?Memorandum for Mr. Moyers? of November 25, 1963, FBI 62-109060, Section 18, p. 29, link. Cf. Nicholas Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 131-36.

71 Leventhal?s official title is (or was) ?Chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State? (link). In 2010 the U.S. State Department ?launched an official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories....The "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation" page... insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on 9/11? Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010, (link). The site still exists here, (?Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored.?) The site still attacks 9/11 theories, but a page on the Kennedy assassination has been suspended (link). Cf. Robin Ramsay, ?Government vs Conspiracy Theorists: The official war on "sick think,? Fortean Times, April 2010, link; ?The State Department vs 'Sick Think'

The JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Tory MP spiked with LSD,? Fortean Times, July 2010, link; William Kelly, ?Todd Leventhal: The Minister of Diz at Dealey Plaza,? CTKA, 2010, link.

72 For Nixon?s sensitivity concerning the Kennedy assassination, and the way this induced him into some of the intrigues known collectively as Watergate, see e.g. Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, The Assassinations, 374-78; Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up (Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), 33, 64-66.



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From ths at psalience.org  Thu Nov 24 12:33:10 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:33:10 +0100
Subject: [THS] The Meaning of Thanksgiving
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111124123108.04584a08@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/The_Meaning_of_Thanksgiving

The Meaning of Thanksgiving

by Alex Doherty, Robert Jensen

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. New Left Project?s Alex Doherty talked to him about Thanksgiving, the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists.


You choose not to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday and you have urged other Americans to do the same. Can you explain why you oppose this celebration?

For years I had felt uncomfortable at Thanksgiving Day dinners, not just because of the gluttonous consumption but because of the disjuncture between my evolving radical political ideas and the distortion of history embedded in the holiday. As it became increasingly difficult for me to be ?normal? on that day, I struggled to understand why and what to do about it.

Here?s what I eventually came to understand: Thanksgiving Day is part of the national mythology that obscures the reality of the European/American genocide against indigenous people. White America tells a lovely story about the English Pilgrims?their search for freedom took them to Massachusetts, where aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims? first winter.

Some aspects of the conventional story are accurate, but by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the genocidal project that opened up additional land to the English invaders. That was the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent, until 95 to 99 percent of American Indianshad been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations.

That is the American holocaust, and the Thanksgiving story wraps that holocaust in fantasies of innocence. Instead of celebrating a day of thanksgiving, we should be observing a day of atonement. In short, Thanksgiving Day is holocaust denial.

Defenders of Thanksgiving often argue that whatever the original meaning of the holiday for many it is now a rare chance to spend time with family and to show appreciation for what one has. What is your view?

Even in radical circles where that basic critique of the genocide is accepted, only a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don?t define holidays individually or privately?holidays are rooted in a collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can?t magically redefine it in private. To pretend that is possible is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

The argument about spending time with family is a rationalization. We can show appreciation for the material comforts we enjoy by coming to terms with the crimes that allowed us to have them, which can be done collectively. Families could spend time together reflecting on that history and the contemporary consequences. We could dump Thanksgiving Day for a Day of Atonement without losing that time together.

It is often argued that we cannot condemn the early American settlers by the standards of our own time. What do you make of that claim?

First, we should remember that not all people alive at that time endorsed genocide. Indigenous people fought wars, but they typically did not engage in the wholesale slaughter of anyone who got in their way. And within European society there were dissenting voices, such as Tom Paine, the most radically democratic of the ?founding fathers? (and, hence, the founding father most ignored).

But that?s really not relevant to the question we face today. My critique of Thanksgiving is not aimed at condemning people in the past but dealing with history in the present. Let?s say, for the sake of argument, that we decide to make no moral judgment of the Europeans who committed or endorsed genocidal policies. The question today is whether we celebrate a holiday that covers up the genocide, whether we routinely lie about that history.

My focus is not on the standards of the past but our intellectual, political, and moral standards today. The crimes of the United States are, of course, not confined to centuries past. The genocide of indigenous people and African slavery are particularly gruesome aspects of U.S. history, but the large-scale assault on other peoples and cultures to expand the wealth of elites in the United States has continued up to this day. The U.S. wars of empire?covert and overt?in Latin America, southern Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia have produced millions of corpses and left societies in ruins. If we can?t be honest about the past, we won?t be able to tell the truth about the present, which increases the likelihood of repeating the crimes in the future.

You have claimed that a close parallel to the conquest of America is the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe. To many that will seem an outlandish and even an offensive comparison - can you explain why you think it is apt comparison?

I?m not comparing the events but rather the reaction to them. Here?s my argument I have made: Imagine that Germany had won World War II and that a Nazi regime endured for some decades, eventually giving way to a more liberal state with a softer version of German-supremacist ideology. Imagine that a century later, Germans celebrated a holiday based on a sanitized version of German/Jewish history that ignored that holocaust and the deep anti-Semitism of the culture. Would we not question the distortions woven into such a celebration and denounce such a holiday as grotesque?

Now, imagine that left/liberal Germans?those who were critical of the power structure that created that distorted history and who in other settings would challenge the political uses of those distortions?put aside their critique and celebrated the holiday with their fellow citizens, claiming that they could change the meaning of the holiday in private. Would we not question that claim?

Comparisons to the Nazis are routinely overused and typically hyperbolic, but this is directly analogous. When I offer this critique in left/liberal circles, some people acknowledge that the argument is valid but make it clear they will continue to celebrate Thanksgiving. Others get angry and accuse me of posturing. It?s not posturing, but rather a struggle to understand how to live in a culture that cannot tell the truth.

How significant is Thanksgiving - what are some of the negative effects of continuing to deny the American holocaust?

Thanksgiving is, by itself, not all that important. What does matter is the denial of history at the heart of Thanksgiving, which is commonplace in the United States, especially in education and media. After years of talking about this, I have come to the conclusion that the dominant culture cannot come to terms with two realities: Without the genocide of indigenous people, there would be no United States. Without African slavery, the United States would not have so quickly become the dominant industrial nation in the world. That means that the wealth concentrated in the United States is the direct result of two of the most grotesque crimes in recorded human history, perpetrated by the nation that claims to be the birthplace of modern democracy. The contradictions of this seem to be too much for the culture to absorb. My hope is that Thanksgiving could be a day set aside for facing that contradiction.

Surely leftists and radicals should give some priority to interventions where they face decent prospects of connecting with those beyond its ranks. However, it seems unlikely that a boycott of Thanksgiving would resonate with much of the American population and, moreover, it might throw up even more cultural barriers between those on the left and the rest of society. How do you respond to this line of thought?

I?m not arguing that the left should initiate a boycott of Thanksgiving aimed at the general public. I have for years wanted to hold an alternative Thanksgiving public event, but I haven?t done it precisely because I cannot figure out how to make it politically viable. So, for now, I?m only talking about the need for an honest conversation within the left and targeted outreach in our discussions with friends and family. In my experience, many people feel uncomfortable with the holiday, and we should not be afraid to talk about the sources of that discomfort. The discussion about Thanksgiving can be a route into a conversation about the importance of a left analysis more generally.

Links to past writing on the subject:
2005: http://www.alternet.org/story/28584/
2007: http://www.alternet.org/story/68170/why_we_shouldn%27t_celebrate_thanksgiving/
2009: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/15-2

Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html


From ths at psalience.org  Thu Nov 24 13:11:47 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:11:47 +0100
Subject: [THS] Climate change episode of Frozen Planet won't be shown in the
 U.S.
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111124130856.045dcaa0@mail.messagingengine.com>

[maybe the Supreme Court has exempted the USA from climate change./..]


Climate change episode of Frozen Planet won't be shown in the U.S. as viewers don't believe in global warming

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061663/Frozen-Planet-Climate-change-episode-wont-shown-US.html 


Climate change particularly sensitive during presidential race 
BBC says Attenborough features heavily on final episode, and he is not famous outside UK 

Environment groups brand decision 'unhelpful' 

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Last updated at 1:46 PM on 15th November 2011


An episode of the BBC's Frozen Planet documentary series that looks at climate change has been scrapped in the U.S., where many are hostile to the idea of global warming.


British viewers will see all seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature series throughout the Autumn.


But U.S. audiences will not be shown the last episode, which looks at the threat posed by man to the natural world.


It is feared a show that preaches global warming could upset viewers in the U.S., where around half of people do not believe in climate change. 
Sir David Attenborough presents and 

Sir David Attenborough presents and authors the 'On Thin Ice' episode. It looks at how the planet's ice is changing and what it means not only to the animals and people at the Poles but also the rest of the planet


The series of six episodes has been sold to 30 countries, including China, one of the world's biggest polluters.


World TV networks have the option to buy a seventh 'companion' episode, along with behind-the-scenes footage.


Ten of the countries have chosen not to use the final episode on climate change

In the U.S., Frozen Planet is being aired by Discovery. They were involved in the joint-production of the series. Yet they are still refusing to accommodate Frozen Planet in its entirety.
 

More...

Lara Croft lookalike Charlotte Uhlenbroek says female academics must look like 'frumps' to be taken seriously 


The timing of a one-sided global warming programme could be particularly sensitive in the U.S., where climate change is an issue in the presidential race.


GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry accuses climate scientists of lying for money.


A poll earlier this year found that the majority of Americans believe that if climate change does exist, it is not caused by humans.


Fifty-three per cent of Republicans say there is no evidence of climate change, while the number is far higher among Tea Party supporters, with 70 per cent saying the theory is 'junk science' pushed by groups with a vested interest.


Sir David Attenborough presents and authors the series, the seventh episode of which, entitled 'On Thin Ice', looks at how the planet's ice is changing and what it means not only to the animals and people at the Poles but also the rest of the planet.
In mother's footsteps: More than 30 

In mother's footsteps: More than 30 international networks have bought the Frozen Planet series
The series examines various aspects of 

The series examines various aspects of the polar wilderness over the seasons and follows the lives of creatures from polar bears and wolves in the Arctic to killer whales and penguins in the Antarctic


A spokesman for the BBC said it would not make sense to force television networks outside the UK to buy the episode as it features 85-year-old Sir David talking a lot of the time to camera, and in many parts of the world he is not famous.


The broadcaster refused to say which countries had shunned 'On Thin Ice'. They said it wasn't included in the main package because it features Sir David 'in vision' which would make it hard for other countries to translate into their own language.


Discovery had dropped the full seventh episode due to 'scheduling issues', the spokesman added.


However, environmentalists branded the decision 'unhelpful'.


Harry Huyton, head of climate change for the RSPB, accused networks who haven't bought the final episode of 'censoring the issue'. 


A Greenpeace spokesman said: 'Climate change is the most important part of our polar story.'


The show cost an estimated ?16million and took four years to make and has proved hugely popular. 


It examines various aspects of the polar wilderness over the seasons and follows the lives of creatures from polar bears and wolves in the Arctic to killer whales and Adelie penguins in the Antarctic.


It has been produced by the BBC's Natural History Unit in Bristol in conjunction with the Discovery Channel and The Open University. 


The climate change episode will be aired on December 7 at 9pm.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061663/Frozen-Planet-Climate-change-episode-wont-shown-US.html#ixzz1eZXUigc0


From ths at psalience.org  Fri Nov 25 14:21:30 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:21:30 +0100
Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?MEDIA_LENS=3A_The_IAEA=2C_Iran_And_=91Fantas?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?y_Land=92?=
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111125142035.04610360@mail.messagingengine.com>

November 24, 2011
MEDIA LENS

?They Found Nothing. Nothing.?

The IAEA, Iran And ?Fantasy Land?

Earlier this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its much-trailed report ?presenting new evidence?, said the BBC, ?suggesting that Iran is secretly working to obtain a nuclear weapon.?

Relying on ?evidence provided by more than 10 member states as well as its own information?, the IAEA said Iran had carried out activities ?relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device?.

Having looked deeply into the claims, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh commented this week in an interview with Democracy Now!:

?But you mentioned Iraq. It?s just this ? almost the same sort of ? I don?t know if you want to call it a "psychosis," but it?s some sort of a fantasy land being built up here, as it was with Iraq, the same sort of ? no lessons learned, obviously.?

Indeed, informed scepticism in the corporate media has been muted or non-existent - the image of Iran as a ?nuclear threat? has yet again been imposed on the public mind. Any reasonable news reader and viewer would find it extremely difficult to question the emphatic declarations offered right across the media ?spectrum?.

Thus, a Guardian editorial asserted: ?It really is time to drop the pretence that Iran can be deflected from its nuclear path.?

Two days earlier, the Guardian?s diplomatic editor, Julian Borger, anticipated the report?s publication on his ?Global Security Blog? with a piece titled ?Iran ?on threshold of nuclear weapon??. The accompanying photograph helpfully depicted a giant mushroom cloud during a 1954 nuclear test over Bikini Atoll. His article was linked prominently from the home page of the Guardian website.

In a later article, Borger gave prominence to a quote from an unnamed ?source close to the IAEA?:

?What is striking is the totality and breadth of the information [in the IAEA report]. Virtually every component of warhead research has been pursued by Iran.?

Presumably all-too-aware of increased public scepticism in the wake of Iraq, the anonymous source continued in the Guardian:

?The agency has very, very, high confidence in its analysis. It did not want to make a mistake, and it was aware it had a very high threshold of credibility to meet. So it would not be published unless they had that high level of confidence.?

In similar vein, a New York Times report opened with:

?United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a ?credible? case that ?Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,? and that the project may still be under way.?

The Daily Telegraph declared its version of the truth unequivocally in a leader titled ?Iran?s nuclear menace?. It noted that the IAEA report ?has for the first time acknowledged that Tehran is conducting secret experiments whose sole purpose is the development of weapons.?

Presumably drawing on clairvoyant powers, the editors added:

?Indeed, the IAEA has known for years that Tehran was building an atomic weapon, but has been reluctant to say so.?

The title of an editorial (November 10, 2011) in The Times was similarly categorical and damning: ?Deadly Deceit; Iran's bellicose duplicity is definitively exposed by an IAEA report?:

?Tehran's decade-long nuclear programme is obviously not intended purely for generating electricity. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed this week that it has credible evidence that Iran has worked on the development of nuclear weapons.?

The editorial stamped this with the required emphasis:

?This will sound, and is, a statement of such banality that it ought not to need saying.?

And then continued without a shred of uncertainty:

?The IAEA report is extensive and understated. Founded on intelligence sources from ten countries, it explains in detail how Iran has established a programme to develop the technologies for a nuclear weapon. Its findings are entirely consistent with all that has been known and exposed before. Indeed, the IAEA is late in stating them.?

For anyone relying solely on corporate news media coverage, the case against Iran was closed. All that remained was to decide the necessary course of international action: ramped-up ?diplomacy?, international sanctions and perhaps ? the threat was left ?lying on the table? ? war.

What is so breathtaking is that the apparent consensus on Iran, like the case against Iraq, is a fraud.

 

Burying The Cable ? WikiLeaks And IAEA Chief Yukiya Amano

One of the stunning omissions in corporate media coverage of the IAEA report are the WikiLeaks disclosures concerning IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano. According to a US Embassy cable from a US diplomat in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, Amano described himself as ?solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.?

Amano?s predecessor as IAEA chief was Mohammed ElBaradei who had refused to bow before US war-mongering, and who was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As ElBaradei came to the end of his term in 2009, the Americans sensed an opportunity to work with someone more compliant. They lobbied successfully on Amano?s behalf. Following his election as IAEA chief, a US cable reported on a meeting with him:

?This meeting, Amano's first bilateral review since his election, illustrates the very high degree of convergence between his priorities and our own agenda at the IAEA. The coming transition period provides a further window for us to shape Amano's thinking before his agenda collides with the IAEA Secretariat bureaucracy.?

This ?very high degree of convergence? would presumably be useful in hyping the alleged ?nuclear threat? of Iran.

A US mission cable from Vienna commented that Amano was ?DG [Director-General] of all states, but in agreement with us.?

The Guardian reported the Amano cable in a blog back in November 2010, but not in the paper itself. Our newspaper database search revealed that not a single UK national newspaper has mentioned the WikiLeaks cable revealing that Amano is ?solidly in the U.S. court? in coverage of the latest IAEA report. The sole exception we could find anywhere in the UK print media was an article in the New Statesman by Mehdi Hasan.

Rather than report this vital evidence from WikiLeaks, the British media have either tried to silence or vilify its founder, Julian Assange. This is a truly damning indictment of the ?free press?.

By contrast, Seymour Hersh is a rare voice of rationality exposing this latest propaganda hype. On Democracy Now!, Hersh commented of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney:

?Cheney kept on having the Joint Special Operations Force Command, JSOC ? they would send teams inside Iran. They would work with various dissident groups ? the Azeris, the Kurds, even Jundallah, which is a very fanatic Sunni opposition group ? and they would do everything they could to try and find evidence of an undeclared underground facility. We monitored everything. We have incredible surveillance. In those days, what we did then, we can even do better now. And some of the stuff is very technical, very classified, but I can tell you, there's not much you can do in Iran right now without us finding out something about it. They found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization. In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities for building a bomb. This is simply a fact. We haven?t found it, if it does exist. It?s still a fantasy.? 

Hersh said that Iran did look ?at the idea of getting a bomb or getting to the point where maybe they could make one. They did do that, but they stopped in ?03. That?s still the American consensus. The Israelis will tell you privately, ?Yes, we agree.??

He described the new IAEA report as ?not a scientific report, it?s a political document?, noting that ?Amano has pledged his fealty to America.?

Amano had been ?a marginal candidate? for the position of IAEA chief but the US wanted him in place:

?We supported him very much. Six ballots. He was considered weak by everybody, but we pushed to get him in. We did get him in. He responded by thanking us and saying he shares our views. He shares our views on Iran... it was just an expression of love. He?s going to do what we wanted.?

In a blog on The New Yorker website, Hersh added that one of the classified US Embassy cables from Vienna described Amano as being ?ready for prime time.? The cable also noted that Amano?s ?willingness to speak candidly with U.S. interlocutors on his strategy 
 bodes well for our future relationship.?

In his Democracy Now! interview, Hersh pointed out that his blog piece was thoroughly researched and checked by The New Yorker, and that it included expert testimony shunned by the major newspapers:

?These are different voices than you?re seeing in the papers. I sometimes get offended by the same voices we see in the New York Times and Washington Post. We don?t see people with different points of view
 And I get emails, like crazy, from people on the inside saying, ?Way to go.? I?m talking about inside the IAEA. It?s an organization that doesn?t deal with the press, but internally, they?re very bothered by the direction Amano is taking them.?

Hersh cited Robert Kelley, a retired IAEA director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the US Department of Energy?s nuclear-weapons programme:

?He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, ?were old news,? Kelley said, and known to many journalists. ?I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ?new information? by the same reporters.? ?

An assessment of the IAEA report was published by the Arms Control Association (ACA), a non-profit organisation campaigning for effective arms control. Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst who was one of the authors of the ACA assessment, told Hersh:

?There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb. Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.?

 

The BBC ?Notes? Privately That There Are Dissenting Views

On November 9, 2011, a BBC news piece carried a side bar ?analysis? by James Reynolds, the BBC?s Iran correspondent. We wrote to him the same day:

I hope you?re safe and well there. In your analysis which is included in the BBC News article ?UN nuclear agency IAEA: Iran ?studying nuclear weapons??, you note that:

?The agency stresses that the evidence it presents in its report is credible and well-sourced.? 

You then add:

?Iran?s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed the IAEA as puppet of the United States. His government has already declared that its findings are baseless and inauthentic.?

You attribute such views to Iran, an officially-declared enemy of the West. A more balanced approach might be to report that a US Embassy Cable published last year revealed that Yukiya Amano, the IAEA director general, is ?solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision?. 

And according to a recent New York Times report: ?the Obama administration, acutely aware of how what happened in Iraq undercut American credibility, is deliberately taking a back seat, eager to make the conclusions entirely the I.A.E.A.?s, even as it continues to press for more international sanctions against Iran.?

Shouldn?t these crucial facts be noted in your analysis?

The NYT report continues:

?When the director of the agency, Yukiya Amano, came to the White House 11 days ago to meet top officials of the National Security Council about the coming report, the administration declined to even confirm he had ever walked into the building.?

Isn?t all this relevant in assessing the context, realpolitik and implications of the IAEA report? Can you not find critical commentators outside the Iranian government whom you can quote?

Given the stakes involved, would you perhaps consider addressing the above points in your analysis in future, please?

Many thanks.

Rather than address any of the above points, Reynolds emailed back:

?thanks for your message. I appreciate your comments and insight.? (Email, November 9, 2011)

Just over a week later, a new BBC piece appeared in which the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany claimed to have ?deep and increasing concern? over Iran's nuclear programme. We emailed Reynolds again (November 18, 2011):

Have you considered interviewing sceptical and informed commentators? 

For example, you could approach the experienced investigative journalist Gareth Porter. He says that the recent IAEA report?s ?dubious intelligence [is being] used as pretext for tougher sanctions?:

Porter?s analysis is backed up by Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer who has carried out IAEA inspections. Kelley believes that ?the report misleads and manipulates facts in [an] attempt to prove a forgone conclusion.?

He also says that the IAEA report ?recycles old intelligence and is meant to bolster hard liners.?

Shouldn?t you also be including such important and informed views in your reporting for BBC News?

Not hearing from him, we nudged Reynolds on November 21 when he again avoided addressing the points made:

?I received your message - thanks. I shall reflect on the points you raise.

?It is always important for me to hear from licence-fee payers - the lifeblood of the BBC.? (James Reynolds, email, November 21, 2011)

We tried once more to elicit a response from the BBC?s Iran correspondent that actually addressed the points put to him:

I appreciate your reply.

But with the resources of the BBC at your disposal, you surely cannot be unaware of the informed commentators and important points presented to you [in the previous emails]. It is notable that you do not appear to have included them in any of your BBC reports to date. Why not?

Nor have you reported - although I may have missed it -  that IAEA chief Yukiya Amano is regarded by the US, according to a WikiLeaks cable, as 'solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.' 

Why remain silent about this astonishing fact? Isn't this crucially relevant for public understanding of what is happening over Iran? Perhaps there are editorial reasons that are making it difficult for you to properly report these vital issues? (Email, November 22, 2011)

To no avail: the response was even more terse this time:

?points noted.? (James Reynolds, email, November 22, 1011)

Curiously, ?the lifeblood of the BBC? deserves no better than this.

Can journalists really have forgotten the propaganda offensive that predated the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq ? a tsunami of disinformation in which they were accomplices? Have they really learned nothing? What gives them the right to absolve themselves and to start with a clean slate now that Iran is the next hyped ?threat??

Surely now more than ever - as the spectre of yet another war in the Middle East looms, perhaps the greatest conflagration yet - it is vital that journalists should be wary of repeating propaganda claims over Iran.

 

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Please write to:

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Email: julian.borger at guardian.co.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/julianborger

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Email: james.reynolds at bbc.co.uk

Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor

Email: jeremy.bowen at bbc.co.uk

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From ths at psalience.org  Fri Nov 25 14:09:01 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:09:01 +0100
Subject: [THS] Why Police Are Treating Americans Like Military Threats?
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111125140641.069cca00@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.alternet.org/story/153170/%22how_could_this_happen_in_america%22_why_police_are_treating_americans_like_military_threats?page=entire

   
AlterNet / By William Hogeland

"How Could This Happen in America?" 
Why Police Are Treating Americans Like Military Threats
Why is the armed might of the state, (necessary in waging war against foreign enemies) being applied to domestic policing of local communities and peaceful protests?
November 22, 2011  |  
 

"How could this happen in America?"

"Is this still my country?"

In the past few days, those and similarly poignant Twitter posts have appealed to fundamental American values in objecting to the notorious U.C. Davis event, where police pepper-sprayed seated protesters, and to cities generally cracking down on the Occupy movement. The crackdowns have brought a military level of combativeness to what many Americans -- even those not in sympathy with the protesters -- would normally see as a police, not a military matter.

Police, not military. The distinction may seem academic, even absurd, when police are bringing rifles, helmets, armor, and helicopters to evict unarmed protesters. But it's an old and critical distinction in American law and ideology and in republican thought as a whole. The 17th-century English liberty writers, on whose ideas much of America's founding ethos was based, believed that turning the armed might of the state, (necessary in waging war against foreign enemies), to domestic policing of local communities tends to concentrate power in top-down executive action and vitiate treasured things like judiciary process, individual liberty, representative government, and free speech.

Constabulary and judiciary matters, high Whigs came to think, should never be handled by what they condemned as "standing armies." It's true, on the other hand, that keeping public order, not just aiding in prosecutions, is a duty of local police. When concerted crowd violence occurs against people and property, policing may be expected to be pretty violent too, and distinctions between combat and policing sometimes naturally blur.

But where protest is peaceful -- maybe loud, maybe deliberately annoying, combative in its rhetoric, even possibly illegal, yet not actually violent or dangerous -- treating it the way a state normally treats an outside military threat will give many Americans, across a broad political spectrum, a gut problem.

We've seen military hardware and tactics used in the Occupy crackdowns. We've seen them in post-9/11 federal funding in the states and municipalities for homeland security. We've seen them in the aptly named "war on drugs." And anyone who has watched shows like "Cops" has seen -- and may by now take for granted -- techniques and technologies of military-style police raids on homes, raids that in more upscale neighborhoods might amount to nothing more than knocking on a door and serving a warrant. A Twitter post from Joy Reid, of the blog the Reid Report, put it this way last week: "Disconnect: liberals see a suddenly 'militarized,' possibly federalized police force. Black people see 'the usual.'"

The police behavior at U.C. Davis -- manifestly not "rogue-cop," a trained, planned exercise -- reveals the cool military thinking behind the operation. Pepper-spraying looked surgical, preemptive, even robotic. The strategic directive must have been to conserve police effort and maintain police maneuverability at virtually any cost. Such efficiencies and capabilities would be important in a riot; they're not important when hoping to evict unarmed, seated protesters. It's not as if officers have been resorting to battle gear under otherwise unmanageable pressure or initiating violence only as a last resort. They've been arriving in battle gear. They've been construing noncompliance as potential attack. They've moved preemptively to disable attack where none existed, not just trying to evict but seemingly hoping to inspire fear, to punish and defeat.

The mood these operations convey is that failure to achieve police objectives must result in something awful for the body politic. In reality, leaving citizens sitting around a park or campus a few more days, even possibly illegally, might be frustrating for police and others; it's hardly the end of the world. Sometimes taking a few deep breaths is the only thing to do. But military training, tactics, and weaponry seem to inspire the idea in civic strategists that failure to achieve an objective is tantamount to fatal defeat by a hostile enemy. Intolerable. Not an option.

That mentality tends to place American governments at enmity with their dissident citizens -- and vice versa. The fact that much militarizing of police, over the past twenty years, has federal sources raises endlessly complicated questions that reflect strangely on the histories of American federalism and government suppression. A horrific theme of the Civil Rights Movement was police violence, and many Americans have branded on their brains the watercannons, clubs, dogs, fists, and boots used against nonviolent protesters in the 1950s; police involved were generally state and local. Then in 1957 federal troops -- the 101st Airborne Paratroopers -- entered Little Rock, Arkansas, with fixed bayonets, to enforce federal law by ensuring the entry of African American students to state school there; states-rights advocates talked about federal overreaching and police state, the end of liberty. Then again, in the 1960s and '70s the federal government, via its law-enforcement arm the FBI, carried out a covert war -- involving assassination, it's fairly uncontroversial to say -- on the militant activist group the Black Panthers, who it's fairly uncontroversial to say were not always peaceful protesters.

Responding now to police efforts against demonstrators, liberals and leftists have begun raising anew the issue of inappropriate police militarization and violence. Yet it's the libertarian right that has done much of the reporting and research on the issue in recent decades (Democracy Now! is among left-liberal institutions that have also covered the issue for many years). The current state of heightened awareness means there's a possibly interesting opportunity for people of varying backgrounds and politics to begin a new conversation. That conversation would involve some very strange bedfellows -- and might spark new enmities. The Salon columnist Joan Walsh's suggestion last weekend on Twitter that if police violence has federal sources, then President Obama bears some responsibility set off a torrent of invective violent even by Twitter standards.

James Madison may offer some long-range perspective. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, arguing for forming a nation instead of retaining the confederation of states, he said that force applied to citizens collectively rather than individually ceases to be law enforcement and becomes war; groups so treated will seize the opportunity to dissolve all compacts by which they might otherwise have been bound. Madison's argued against militarism in favor not of anarchy but of a higher kind of law and order.

And in 1794, Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, advising President Washington (to no avail) to eschew military adventure against the so-called Whiskey Rebels, and to use prosecutions instead, argued passionately that the real strength of government always lies not in coercion but in the affection of the people. Randolph was facing an actual insurrection, with threat of secession, not a peaceful protest; there were federal crimes involved. Still he advised against a military operation. The loathing of military suppression as a substitute for due process of law, going back to our first administration, runs deep in the American psyche.

But it's worth remembering that equally strong feelings have always run the other way. Long before events known as the Whiskey Rebellion had risen to any kind of crisis, Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, was urging Washington to bring military force against citizens somewhere in the country; otherwise, Hamilton believed, authority would always be in question. When Washington did so, he ignored habeas corpus and nearly every individual right set out in the new Bill of Rights, federalizing militias to bring overwhelming force to shock and awe innocent citizens of an entire region of the country. In his book Crisis and Command, John Yoo, author of the notorious "torture memo," has defended the George W. Bush administration's tactics in dealing with suspected terrorists by citing precedent -- not wrongly -- in Washington's behavior in the 1790s.

"Is this still my country?" That's been a question from day one, asked by Americans of widely diverging views in response to government crackdowns on protest. Objecting to military violence against protesting citizens may be inherently American. The urge to crack down can look inherently American too.
William Hogeland is the author of the narrative histories 'Declaration' and 'The Whiskey Rebellion' and a collection of essays, 'Inventing American History.'
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From ths at psalience.org  Sat Nov 26 15:05:05 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:05:05 +0100
Subject: [THS] Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup A Tourist Draw
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111126150310.064efc00@mail.messagingengine.com>

Pubdate: Wed, 23 Nov 2011
Source: Metro Times (Detroit, MI)
Copyright: 2011 C.E.G.W./Times-Shamrock
Contact: letters at metrotimes.com
Website: http://www.metrotimes.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1381
Author: John Sinclair

Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup A Tourist Draw

And to Think, Americans Don't Want This Source of Tax Revenue!

Highest greetings from the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, where I'm
enjoying the heady ambience of this society where they just don't care
if you want to get high and where a couple thousand American youths
are staggering around this week flashing their judge's badges and
sampling the wares of the city's 250 coffee shops.

About 10 percent of Amsterdam's coffee shops pony up the entrance fees
required to be showcased by High Times in its growing and consuming
competition and thus gain the patronage of the American weed tourists
during the week of the cup - and indeed all year round. The winning
coffee shops get the business when the drug tourists come to town, the
winning strains get purchased over the counter, and the winning seeds
are prized by the international growing community.

Cannabis is a booming business in the Netherlands, and the High Times
Cannabis Cup is its annual trade fair and exposition. But it's a world
of good, clean fun too - after all, we're dealing with marijuana here!
- and the businesspeople derive a lot more pleasure from their
commercial activity than, say, their fellow merchants who are selling
Buicks and Chevrolets.

Until fairly recently, the cannabis business has been allowed to grow
and prosper, although the orthodox Christian convictions of the Queen
and the governing class have conspired to keep marijuana from being
declared fully "legal." Instead cannabis exists in what they call a
"gray area" where it is perfectly OK for the consumer to possess and
smoke weed and hashish in reasonable amounts and for the retailer to
sell amounts of as much as 5 grams per customer over the counter in
the coffee shops.

But it's strictly illegal to grow marijuana for commercial
consumption, to deliver the weed to commercial outlets for profit, or
to possess more than 500 grams at one time - the legal limit allowed
for coffee shops to have on their premises. The individual smoker may
grow as many as five plants at home for personal consumption, but
commercial growing is strictly verboten.

As in America and throughout the world, the legal justifications for
such proscription are just so much mumbo-jumbo in service of a social
order wherein pleasurable bodily sensations and intense mental
stimulation are ruled immoral and out of bounds even to the detriment
of their principal god, Mammon.

They could be making a whole lot more money from cannabis commerce,
but fear of God or burning eternally in hell seems to put a damper on
that particular avenue of exploitation, even where turning widows and
children out of their homes, making millions of honest toilers
"redundant" and without jobs, bombing innocent civilians or depriving
whole segments of the population of their inalienable human rights are
deemed acceptable.

With respect to the United States, the dollar figures are staggering
to contemplate. Of course it all happens off the charts, without
direct social benefit to the governmental bodies that could use the
money to help underwrite public services. Like their Dutch
counterparts, a significant proportion of Americans are engaged in
cannabis consumption and the concomitant growing, distribution and
sales involved with servicing their smoking needs.

It never ceases to amaze me that in a society in which everything else
- intelligence, beauty, creativity, quality of daily life - has been
sacrificed to Mammon, the crusading forces draw the line at the
pursuit of happiness through consciousness expansion.

You can buy (or manufacture and sell) all the liquor you want, all the
pills of whatever potency, all the pornography, all the instruments of
bondage and torture, all the weapons of destruction, all the idiotic
mammoth automobiles, all the ugliest movies and recordings and
television programs imaginable, but you have to risk going to prison
or into treatment if you want to get high on a harmless little weed or
some other mind-altering product of organic origin.

And instead of legalizing drugs, regulating and taxing their
manufacture and sale, and utilizing the revenues in a socially useful
manner, the modern crusaders have elected to exact their tribute
through the machinery of the War on Drugs, financing dizzying levels
of law enforcement employment, the proliferation of courts and their
attendant personnel, jail and prison construction and the
ever-increasing number of persons required to operate them.

Dear readers, let's step forward and bring this godawful state of
affairs to a merciful end. Free the Weed. Let it grow.

Bits & pieces: Ben Horner of Michigan Medical Marijuana Report
magazine announces that the Vote Green Initiative Project (VGIP) will
host a conference in Ann Arbor on Jan. 27-29, with medical marijuana
speakers, vendors, doctor certifications, grow classes and more. In
the meantime, VGIP is circulating the Recall Bill Schuette petition
via its website at mmmrmag.com/elections.

Michigan legalization activist Tim Beck had some fun recently with
U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra at a meeting of the Grosse Pointe
Eastside Republican Club when he posed the question to the candidate:
"Would you be willing to support Congress rescheduling marijuana under
the Controlled Substances Act from Schedule 1 to a different level?"

Hoekstra: "Um, I just can't tell you. I don't know the answer to that."

At that point, Beck reports, "A man in the audience ... stood up and
declared in a loud voice: 'What's your problem, Hoekstra? Why won't
you answer the man's question? My brother almost died [from] prostate
cancer and medical marijuana saved his life... How dare you say this
is not medicine.' He refused to shut up when urged by the moderator
and a melee came close to breaking out."

DAVID BORDEN REPORTS in Stop the Drug War Speakeasy that it's smart
kids, not dumb kids, who use drugs as adults. Duh! Ever hearda Steve
Jobs? "So much of what we've been told about drugs and drug users
turns out to be the opposite of the truth," Borden says, "it's amazing
that the anti-drug fanatics are able to find any audience at all anymore.

"News like this comes as a surprise only if you understand remarkably
little about what drugs actually are and why people use them."

In a recent British study cited by Borden, "Researchers discovered men
with high childhood IQs were up to two times more likely to use
illegal drugs than their lower-scoring counterparts. Girls with high
IQs were up to three times more likely to use drugs as adults."

"It ought to be intuitive," Borden concludes, "that the curiosity
which comes along with above-average intelligence would also be
correlated with a heightened interest in experiencing altered states
of consciousness. No doubt, a little extra brain-power also serves to
inoculate against believing a lot of the BS we're fed about how
certain substances will turn your brain into a turnip."

No show: At the end of my last column I mentioned that there were
plans afoot to mount a 40th Anniversary Reunion of the 1971 John
Sinclair Freedom Rally on December 10 at Masonic Temple. Despite our
best efforts we were unable to realize our plans and the concert is
not happening. Sorry! It would've been a blast!
___________________________________________________


From ths at psalience.org  Sat Nov 26 15:06:18 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:06:18 +0100
Subject: [THS] Four Former Vancouver Mayors Back Call For An End To Pot
 Prohibition
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111126150601.064ef970@mail.messagingengine.com>

Pubdate: Thu, 24 Nov 2011
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2011 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/ul9sADjz
Author: Kim Bolan, Postmedia News

Four Former Vancouver Mayors Back Call For An End To Pot Prohibition

VANCOUVER - Four former Vancouver mayors have endorsed a coalition 
calling for an end to pot prohibition in Canada that they blame for 
rampant gang violence.

Larry Campbell, Mike Harcourt, Sam Sullivan and Philip Owen all 
signed an open letter to politicians in B.C. Wednesday claiming a 
change in the law will reduce gang violence.

The former mayors support the position of the Stop the Violence BC 
coalition, which recently released a survey showing most B.C. 
residents favour an end to the current marijuana laws.

The letter says "marijuana prohibition is - without question - a 
failed policy."

"It is creating violent, gang-related crime in our communities and 
fear among our citizens, and adding financial costs for all levels of 
government at a time when we can least afford them. Politicians 
cannot ignore the status quo any longer, and must develop and deliver 
alternative marijuana policies that avoid the social and criminal 
harms that stem directly from cannabis prohibition," the letter says.

The letter was sent to MPs, members of the provincial legislature and 
city councillors and is designed to drive debate on new marijuana policies.

"It is unconscionable, unacceptable and unreasonable that the 
criminal element in B.C. is allowed to grow and thrive in B.C. due to 
inaction on the part of the politicians," said Sullivan, who served 
12 years as a city councillor before being elected mayor of Vancouver 
in 2005. "Politicians must play a key role in the development of new 
policies that can really provide safer, stronger communities."

The coalition said that a recent poll showed B.C. residents don't 
have faith that politicians can design policies that effectively 
reduce criminal, health and social harms stemming from the illegal 
marijuana trade.

The Angus Reid poll showed that just 32 per cent of British 
Columbians trust municipal politicians to develop an effective 
marijuana policy. Trust in federal and provincial politicians is even 
lower - at 28 per cent (federal) and 27 per cent (provincial).

Meanwhile, far more British Columbians say they distrust municipal 
(62 per cent), provincial (69 per cent), or federal (68 per cent) 
politicians to design policies to effectively reduce harms stemming 
from the illegal marijuana trade.

Campbell, who is now a senator, challenged politicians to "prove the 
public wrong."

"Politicians have tremendous access to information, expertise and the 
levers of power, and must use all of the tools at their disposal to 
fight gang violence by implementing rational marijuana policies," 
Campbell said.

The Angus Reid poll was commissioned by the anti-violence coalition, 
made up of academic, legal, law enforcement and health experts.

The coalition is promising to keep the pressure on with continued 
polling and reports.

"These poll results reinforce the fact that British Columbians are 
way ahead of those they have elected in recognizing the destructive 
outcomes from marijuana prohibition," said Dr. Evan Wood, a coalition 
member and Director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the 
B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

"It's time politicians of all stripes consider the gang violence and 
criminal activity resulting from marijuana prohibition, and enact 
policies that reflect the desire of British Columbians for change."

kbolan at vancouversun.com
____________________________________________


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:09:31 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:09:31 +0100
Subject: [THS] NATO Kills 28 Pakistani Troops, Outrage in Islamabad
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127120514.03e0b9c0@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29819.htm

NATO Kills 28 Pakistani Troops, Outrage in Islamabad

By PTI

November 6, 2011 "PTI" -- At least 28 Pakistani soldiers were killed today when NATO helicopters and combat jets fired on two border posts in the country's northwest, prompting army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to direct his troops to prepare for ''an effective response'' even as authorities cut off all supplies for US forces in Afghanistan.

The attack, the worst single incident of its kind in one decade, looked set to plunge US-Pak relations, already deeply frayed, further into crisis.

A major and a captain of the Pakistan Army were among those killed when NATO aircraft fired at the borders posts in Baizai area of Mohmand tribal region at 2 am.

Fifteen more personnel were wounded and the death toll could rise as some of the injured were in a serious condition, several officials said.

A military statement said the NATO aircraft "carried out unprovoked firing" on the border posts.

Pakistani troops "effectively responded immediately in self-defence to NATO/ISAF's aggression with all available weapons".

Gen Kayani strongly condemned "NATO/ISAF's blatant and unacceptable act".

While lauding the effective response by Pakistani soldiers, he issued orders for taking all necessary steps for "an effective response to this irresponsible act".

Within hours of the attack, Pakistani authorities sealed off the country's border stopping all container trucks and tankers carrying supplies for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir called in US Ambassador Cameron Munter to lodge a "strong protest on the unprovoked NATO/ISAF attack", the Foreign Office said in a statement. 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29820.htm

Pakistan: US Must Vacate Suspected Drone Base

By SEBASTIAN ABBOT

November 26, 2011 "Associated Press" -- ISLAMABAD ? The Pakistani government has demanded the U.S. vacate an air base within 15 days that the CIA is suspected of using for unmanned drones.

The government issued the demand Saturday after NATO helicopters and jet fighters allegedly attacked two Pakistan army posts along the Afghan border, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Islamabad outlined the demand in a statement it sent to reporters following an emergency defense committee meeting chaired by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

Shamsi Air Base is located in southwestern Baluchistan province. The U.S. is suspected of using the facility in the past to launch armed drones and observation aircraft to keep pressure on Taliban and al-Qaida militants in Pakistan's tribal region.

Pakistan stops NATO supplies after deadly raid

By Shams Momand

YAKKAGHUND, Pakistan (Reuters) - NATO helicopters and fighter jets attacked two military outposts in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing as many as 28 troops and plunging U.S.-Pakistan relations deeper into crisis.

Pakistan retaliated by shutting down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, used for sending in nearly half of the alliance's land shipments. It also said it would ask U.S. forces to quit an air base used for CIA drone strikes on militants.

The attack is the worst incident of its kind since Pakistan uneasily allied itself with Washington following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The NATO-led force in Afghanistan confirmed that NATO aircraft had probably killed Pakistani soldiers in an area close to the Afghan-Pakistani border.

"Close air support was called in, in the development of the tactical situation, and it is what highly likely caused the Pakistan casualties," said General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

He added he could not confirm the number of casualties, but ISAF was investigating. "We are aware that Pakistani soldiers perished. We don't know the size, the magnitude," he said.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said the killings were "an attack on Pakistan's sovereignty", adding: "We will not let any harm come to Pakistan's sovereignty and solidarity."

The Foreign Office said it would take up the matter "in the strongest terms" with NATO and the United States, while the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, said steps would be taken to respond "to this irresponsible act".

"A strong protest has been launched with NATO/ISAF in which it has been demanded that strong and urgent action be taken against those responsible for this aggression."

Two military officials said up to 28 troops had been killed and 11 wounded in the attack on the outposts, about 2.5 km (1.5 miles) from the Afghan border. The Pakistani military said 24 troops were killed and 13 wounded.

EARLY MORNING ATTACK

The attack took place around 2 a.m. (2100 GMT) in the Baizai area of Mohmand, where Pakistani troops are fighting Taliban militants. Across the border is Afghanistan's Kunar province, which has seen years of heavy fighting.

"Pakistani troops effectively responded immediately in self-defence to NATO/ISAF's aggression with all available weapons," the Pakistani military statement said.

The commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen, offered his condolences to the family of Pakistani soldiers who "may have been killed or injured".

Around 40 troops were stationed at the outposts, military sources said. Two officers were reported among the dead. "They without any reasons attacked on our post and killed soldiers asleep," said a senior Pakistani officer, requesting anonymity.

The border is often poorly marked, and Afghan and Pakistani maps have differences of several kilometres in some places, military officials have said.

However Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said NATO had been given maps of the area, with Pakistani military posts identified.

"When the other side is saying there is a doubt about this, there is no doubt about it. These posts have been marked and handed over to the other side for marking on their maps and are clearly inside Pakistani territory."

The incident occurred a day after Allen met Kayani to discuss border control and enhanced cooperation.

A senior military source told Reuters that after the meeting that set out "to build confidence and trust, these kind of attacks should not have taken place".

BLOCKED SUPPLIES

Pakistan is a vital land route for nearly half of NATO supplies shipped overland to its troops in Afghanistan, a NATO spokesman said. Land shipments account for about two thirds of the alliance's cargo shipments into Afghanistan.

Hours after the raid, NATO supply trucks and fuel tankers bound for Afghanistan were stopped at Jamrud town in the Khyber tribal region near the city of Peshawar, officials said.

The border crossing at Chaman in southwestern Baluchistan province was also closed, Frontier Corps officials said.

A meeting of the cabinet's defence committee convened by Gilani "decided to close with immediate effect NATO/ISAF logistics supply lines," according to a statement issued by Gilani's office.

The committee decided to ask the United States to vacate, within 15 days, the Shamsi Air Base, a remote installation in Baluchistan used by U.S. forces for drone strikes which has long been at the centre of a dispute between Islamabad and Washington.

The meeting also decided the government would "revisit and undertake a complete review of all programmes, activities and cooperative arrangements with US/NATO/ISAF, including diplomatic, political, military and intelligence".

A similar incident on Sept 30, 2010, which killed two Pakistani service personnel, led to the closure of one of NATO's supply routes through Pakistan for 10 days. NATO apologised for that incident, which it said happened when NATO gunships mistook warning shots by Pakistani forces for a militant attack.

Relations between the United States and Pakistan were strained by the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by U.S. special forces in Pakistan in May, which Pakistan called a flagrant violation of sovereignty.

Pakistan's jailing of a CIA contractor and U.S. accusations that Pakistan backed a militant attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul have added to the tensions.

"This will have a catastrophic effect on Pakistan-U.S. relations. The public in Pakistan are going to go berserk on this," said Charles Heyman, senior defence analyst at British military website Armedforces.co.uk.

Other analysts, including Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, predicted Pakistan would protest and close the supply lines for some time, but that ultimately "things will get back to normal".

(Additional reporting by Bushra Takseen, Saud Mehsud, Jibran Ahmad and Saeed Achakzai in Pakistan, Tim Castle in London, and Hamid Shalizi and Christine Kearney in Afghanistan; Writing by Augustine Anthony, Chris Allbritton and Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Copyright ? 2011 Reuters


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:22:05 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:22:05 +0100
Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Ray_McGovern=3A_Ask_the_Candidates_Real_Ques?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?tions_=96_Like_These?=
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127121531.044e9ff8@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29821.htm

Ask the Candidates Real Questions ? Like These

During recent presidential debates, moderators have asked mostly predictable questions and ? except for some notable gaffes ? have elicited mostly talking-point answers. But ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern says it?s time for citizens to put politicians on the spot with some more pointed questions.


By Ray McGovern

November 26, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --  Pity the pundits. It must be hard to pretend to be a journalist and live in constant fear of being one question or comment away from joining the jobless.

This Thanksgiving holiday weekend we can be thankful for the obscene transparency of the ?mainstream? pundits? efforts to avoid at all cost offending the corporations that own and use them.

Rather, media personalities who wish to be around for a while must do what they can to promote the notion of American exceptionalism and the need to sacrifice at home in order to defend and expand the Empire ? ?so that we don?t have to fight them here.?

From a global perspective looking back a few decades, it is hard to believe that major powers like China and Russia were fiercely competing with each other for improved relations with the U.S., and that we were able to play one off against the other to advance America?s interests.

They are now laughing at us ? smiling at how far we have outreached ourselves in our attempts to project power and corner the world market.

It is, actually, hard to believe: Marines now stationed in Australia, which our national security experts apparently believe is near China (well, kind of near); U.S. troops now in Africa where there?s still a lot of untapped oil; U.S threats to use a ?military option? against Iran.

And the coup de grace: the feckless effort to build anti-ballistic missile defense systems that can defeat all countermeasures ? the U.S. defense-industrial project that has long been one of the most expensive and lucrative corporate welfare programs.

Check out the breaking story, which brings still more good news for the military-industrial complex: Russia is threatening to defeat American missile defense systems in Europe, absent a bilateral agreement regulating them. And so, it?s back to the drawing board and then the production line in the quixotic search for technical systems that cannot be countered. Is this a great country for weapons researchers and manufacturers, or what?

The pundits will explain, and our diplomats will try to convince others, particularly incredulous Europeans ? that such defense systems are needed to defend against an eventual missile threat from Iran, which our national security gurus believe to be near Europe (well, kind of near).

All this at a time when one out of three children in America live in poverty. Our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM), substantially owned and operated by the arms makers, war profiteers and their friends, does what it can to disguise this, as well as other grim statistics.

Be thankful, say the One Percent. Relax already. After all, even poor children ? or most of them, anyhow ? can watch football on TV and be enticed by heroic advertisements to join the military or some other part of the national security apparatus. Thus, maybe they can qualify for a credit card that enables them to shop like crazy on Black Friday and on future Black Fridays.

To further buck up national morale, our TV networks can be counted on to carry the usual orgy of flag-waving ?God-bless-America? renditions ? accompanied by those explicit and implicit tutorials on American exceptionalism, expressed with jet-fighter flyovers and cutaways to U.S. troops ?defending our freedoms? in Afghanistan and other faraway places.

The message from the One Percent ? the ultra-wealthy whom Republican lawmakers are fond of lauding as the ?job creators? ? was that ALL of you must be grateful this Thanksgiving holiday, including the ungrateful Ninety-Nine Percent, some of whom are grumbling about inequities at ?Occupy? protests around the country.

Ask Real Questions

Is there a medicine for this infection of militarism, consumerism and mindless politics? I think there is, but only if we all do our part. We need to find ways to raise the kinds of questions that FCM pundits and journalists avoid like the plague. Go to the rallies, the press conferences, the campaign speeches; press for cogent answers to the real questions.

That?s what I?m going to try to do in the coming weeks and months. Here are three lines of questioning I think we might try to pursue with the candidates themselves. You may wish to try them out yourselves and/or devise your own. I include below the three questions, supplemented by background and potential lead-ins:

?Question 1:

Background: The aims of U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II period were essentially to enforce a global system in which the Western powers under American leadership would maintain global dominance. This essentially meant being in control of the world?s resources at the expense of non-Western nations.

This fundamental objective of U.S. foreign policy in the post-war period shines through with bare-knuckled candor in a TOP SECRET policy document written by George Kennan in February 1948. He was head of the State Department?s Policy Planning Staff, and this was its first memorandum. Here is an excerpt:

?We have about 50 per cent of the world?s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. 
 Our real task in the coming period is to maintain this position of disparity. 
 To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming. 
 We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism. 
 We should cease to talk about vague, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts.?

Lead-in: Five years after approval of the basic policy aim of controlling more than our share of ?the world?s wealth,? the policy was implemented by throwing millions of dollars at the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran. You see, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had the revolutionary, unacceptable notion that more of the profits from Iranian oil should stay in Iran for the Iranian people and not simply go to oil giants like the predecessor of British Petroleum (BP).

The Question: Do you think we had a right to overthrow the leader of Iran in 1953? And would you again give millions of dollars to the CIA to overthrow the Iranian government under your presidency?

?Question 2

Background: Further on Iran: During the Dec. 5, 2006, Senate hearing on the nomination of Robert Gates to be Secretary of Defense, he was questioned by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and the threat to Israel if it did. Gates said that he believed Iran was trying to acquire nuclear weapons and was lying when it said it wasn?t.

However, amazingly, Gates added that Iran?s motivation was largely self-defense. Sen. Graham asked: ?Do you believe the Iranians would consider using that nuclear weapons capability against the nation of Israel??

Gates replied: ?I don?t know that they would do that, Senator. 
 And I think that, while they are certainly pressing, in my opinion, for nuclear capability, I think that they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent. They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us in the Persian Gulf.?

This remarkably candid reply explains Iran?s possible motive in seeking nuclear weapons as deterrence against aggression by nuclear powers in the region, including Israel and the United States. In other words, according to Gates, Iran is seeking nuclear weapons to prevent others from attacking it, rather than to attack other states ? like Israel.

This comes close to saying that the U.S. should be able to live with a nuclear-armed Iran (and Israel should be able to as well). And, remember, all this talk is properly put in the subjunctive mood. It remains a very big IF; namely, on whether or not the Iranian leaders opt to go for a nuclear weapon.

We were formally reminded last March that the jury is still out on this key question. James R. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that the intelligence community judges that Iran has not yet made that decision. So, despite all the current media hype regarding Iran?s nuclear program, there remains some reason to hope against hype, so to speak.

In the above reply, Gates also acknowledged what U.S. officials officially seek to obfuscate: that Israel has nuclear weapons. Remember, that at the time of his confirmation hearing, Gates had already served as CIA director and held other senior national security position in several administrations.

He had been around long enough both to know the details of Israel?s undeclared nuclear arsenal and the longstanding U.S. policy NOT to acknowledge that Israel has nukes. That policy was designed to have the double benefit of not undermining Israel?s policy of studied ambiguity on the issue and of not requiring the U.S. to take a position for or against Israel?s possession of nuclear weapons and its refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed.

America?s supposedly ?objective? FCM also readily puts on the blinders when focusing on Iran?s alleged nuclear weapons program and simultaneously ignoring Israel?s real one. The truth is that there are no U.N. weapons inspectors crawling into crevices in Israel, as they regularly do in Iran.

Lead-in to question: A portion of intelligence funding goes to support intelligence analysis. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates worked in the analysis part of the CIA. [Actually, as an apprentice analyst 40 years ago, he worked in the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch that I led. His portfolio was Soviet policy toward the Middle East.]

Fast-forward 35 years to Dec. 5, 2006, when the Senate held a one-day hearing on Gates?s nomination to become Secretary of Defense. When Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Gates whether he thought the Iranians would consider a nuclear attack on Israel, Gates answered:

?I think that they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent. They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us in the Persian Gulf.?

This is tell-it-like-it-is intelligence analysis [which exceeded my hopes as his erstwhile mentor]. It even included matter-of-fact mention of Israel?s nuclear capability, which President Barack Obama himself has refused to acknowledge. When Helen Thomas pressed the issue at Obama?s inaugural press conference (Feb. 9, 2009), the President awkwardly ducked the question, explaining he did not want to ?speculate.?

The Question: Do you agree with Mr. Gates that Iran would see a nuclear capability ?in the first instance as a deterrent?? And how many nuclear weapons do Western experts believe Israel has? President Carter has said 150, but that was some time ago.

A Follow-up: Let?s assume Iran does get a nuclear weapon: Do you think it would commit suicide by firing it off in the direction of Israel?

?Question 3

Background and Lead-In: This question deals with torture, an issue that has been given new life recently, with more and more Republican presidential candidates speaking in favor of it. We have surely come a long way since Virginia patriot Patrick Henry insisted passionately that ?the rack and the screw,? as he put it, were barbaric practices that had to be left behind in the Old World, or we are ?lost and undone.?

The Question: On Sept. 6, 2006, Gen. John Kimmons, then head of Army intelligence told reporters at the Pentagon, in unmistakable language: ?No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.?

Gen. Kimmons knew that President George W. Bush had decided to claim publicly, just two hours later, that the ?alternative set of procedures? for interrogation ? methods that Bush had approved, like water-boarding ? were effective. Whom do you think we should believe: President Bush? Or Gen. Kimmons?

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties and then for 27 years as a CIA analyst. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

This article was originally posted on Consortiumnews.com. 


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:28:20 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:28:20 +0100
Subject: [THS] !!!! Naomi Wolf: The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on
 Occupy
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127122236.044e9c20@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29822.htm

The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

By Naomi Wolf

November 26, 2011 "The Guardian" - - US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women ? targeted seemingly for their gender ? screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture ? was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? ? the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being ? falsely ? informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks ? under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop ? awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act ? the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list ? and especially the last agenda item ? the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces ? pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS ? to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) ? but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known ? and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating ? a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally ? and immensely ? from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement 
 well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:30:25 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:30:25 +0100
Subject: [THS] Bush, Blair Found Guilty of War Crimes
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127122904.044e9ad8@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29815.htm

Bush, Blair Found Guilty of War Crimes

By Press TV

November 25, 2011 --- A War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia has found former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair guilty of war crimes for their roles in the Iraq war.

The five-panel Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal decided that Bush and Blair committed genocide and crimes against humanity by leading the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a Press TV correspondent reported on Tuesday.

In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction allegedly stockpiled by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.

Bombings and other forms of violence became commonplace in Iraq shortly after the US-led invasion of the country.

In their ruling, the tribunal judges also stated that the US, under the leadership of Bush, fabricated documents to make it appear that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

However, the world later learned that the former Iraqi regime did not possess WMDs and that the US and British leaders knew this all along.

Over one million Iraqis were killed during the invasion, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.

The judges also said the court findings should be provided to signatories to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and added that the names of Bush and Blair should be listed on a war crimes register. 


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:38:18 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:38:18 +0100
Subject: [THS] Ex-ambassador exposes government cover-up: Is Britain
 Plotting With Israel to Attack Iran?
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127123623.044e9848@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29816.htm

Is Britain Plotting With Israel to Attack Iran?

Ex-ambassador exposes government cover-up

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

November 25, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- Last February Britain?s then defense minister Liam Fox attended a dinner in Tel Aviv with a group described as senior Israelis. Alongside him sat Adam Werritty, a lobbyist whose ?improper relations? with the minister would lead eight months later to Fox?s hurried resignation.

According to several reports in the British media the Israelis in attendance at the dinner were representatives of the Mossad, Israel?s spy agency, while Fox and Werritty were accompanied by Matthew Gould, Britain?s ambassador to Israel. A former British diplomat has now claimed that the topic of discussion that evening was a secret plot to attack Iran.

The official inquiry castigating the UK?s former defence secretary for what has come to be known as a ?cash-for-access? scandal appears to have only scratched the surface of what Fox and accomplice Adam Werritty may have been up to when they met for dinner in Tel Aviv.

Little was made of the dinner in the 10-page inquiry report published last month by Gus O?Donnell, the cabinet?s top civil servant.

Instead O?Donnell concentrated on other aspects of Werritty?s behaviour: the 33-year-old friend of Fox?s had presented himself as the minister?s official adviser and jetted around the world with him arranging meetings with businessmen.

The former minister?s allies, seeking to dismiss the gravity of the case against him, have described Werritty as a harmless dreamer. Following his resignation, Fox himself claimed O?Donnell?s report had exonerated him of putting national security at risk.

However, a spate of new concerns raised in the wake of the inquiry challenge both of these assumptions. These include questions about the transparency of the O?Donnell investigation, the extent of Fox and Werritty?s ties to Israel and the unexplained role of Gould.

Craig Murray, Britain?s former ambassador to Uzbekistan until 2004, when he turned whistle blower on British and US collusion on torture, said senior British government officials were profoundly disturbed by the O?Donnell inquiry, seeing it as a ?white wash.?

Murray himself accused O?Donnell of being ?at the most charitable interpretation, economical with the truth.?

Two well-placed contacts alerted Murray to Gould?s central ? though largely ignored ? role in the Fox-Werritty relationship, he said.

Murray has pieced together evidence that Fox, Werritty and Gould met on at least six occasions over the past two years or so, despite the O?Donnell inquiry claiming they had met only twice. Gould is the only ambassador Fox and Werritty are known to have met together.

In an inexplicable break with British diplomatic and governmental protocol, officials were not present at a single one of the six meetings between the three men. No record was taken of any of the discussions.

Murray, who first made public his concerns on his personal blog, said a source familiar with the O?Donnell inquiry told him the parameters of the investigation were designed to divert attention away from the more damaging aspects of Fox and Werritty?s behaviour.

Subsequently, the foreign office has refused to respond to questions, including from an MP, about the Tel Aviv dinner. Officials will not say who the Israelis were, what was discussed or even who paid for the evening, though under Whitehall rules all hospitality should be declared.

Also unexplained is why Fox rejected requests by his own staff to attend the dinner, and why Werritty was privy to such a high-level meeting when he had no security clearance.

Nonetheless, O?Donnell appeared inadvertently to confirm that Mossad representatives were present at the dinner during questioning from an MP at a meeting of the House of Commons? Public Administration Committee this week.

Responding to a question about the dinner from opposition MP Paul Flynn, O?Donnell said: ?The important point here was that, when the Secretary of State [Fox] had that meeting, he had an official with him?namely, in this case, the ambassador [Gould]. That is very important, and I should stress that I would expect our ambassador in Israel to have contact with Mossad. That will be part of his job.?

The real concern among government officials, Murray said, is that Fox, Werritty and Gould were conspiring in a ?rogue? foreign policy ? opposed to the British government?s stated aims ? that was authored by Mossad and Israel?s neoconservative allies in Washington.

This suspicion was partially confirmed by a report in the Guardian last month, as O?Donnell was carrying out his investigation. It cited unnamed government officials saying they were worried that Fox and Werritty had been pursuing what was termed an ?alternative? government policy.

Murray said the Tel Aviv dinner was especially significant. His contact with access to O?Donnell?s investigations had told him that the discussion that night focused on ways to ensure Britain assisted in creating favourable diplomatic conditions for an attack on Iran.

Israel is widely believed to favor a military strike on Iran, in an attempt to set back its nuclear program. Israel claims Tehran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon under cover of a civilian nuclear energy project.

Israel has its own large but undeclared nuclear arsenal and is known to be fearful of losing its nuclear monopoly in the region.

Britain, like many in the international community, including the US government, officially favors imposing sanctions on Iran to halt its nuclear ambitions.

The episode of the Tel Aviv dinner, Murray said, raises ?vital concerns about a secret agenda for war at the core of government, comparable to [former British prime minister Tony] Blair?s determination to drive through a war on Iraq.?

The Guardian revealed this month that the defense ministry under Fox had drawn up detailed plans for British assistance in the event of a US military strike on Iran, including allowing the Americans to use Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian ocean, as a base from which to launch an attack.

The O?Donnell inquiry has done little to allay many officials? concerns about the series of strange meetings involving Fox, Werritty and Gould.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, has so far refused opposition demands to hold a full public inquiry into Fox and Werritty?s relationship. And the three men at the centre of the saga have refused to discuss the nature of their ties.

This month revelations surfaced that Werritty had had dealings with other government ministers.

?It is deeply inadequate of the prime minister to continue to refuse to probe this issue further,? said shadow defense spokesman Kevan Jones, in response to the new information.

The British media have cautiously raised the issue of apparent Israeli links to Fox and Werritty.

The Daily Telegraph reported that the pair secretly met the head of the Mossad ? possibly at the Tel Aviv dinner, though the paper has not specified where or when the meeting took place.

Last month the Independent on Sunday claimed that Werritty had close ties to the Mossad as well as to ?US-backed neocons? plotting to overthrow the Iranian regime. The Mossad were reported to have assumed Werritty was Fox?s ?chief of staff.?

In addition, the O?Donnell report revealed that Werritty?s many trips overseas alongside Fox had been funded by at least six donors, three of whom were leading members of the pro-Israel lobby in Britain.

The donations were made to two organisations, Atlantic Bridge and Pargav, that Werritty helped to establish. Werritty apparently used the organizations as a way to gain access to Conservative government ministers, including three in the defense ministry.

The advisory board of Atlantic Bridge, which Werritty founded with Fox, included William Hague, the current foreign minister, Michael Gove, the education minister, and George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Despite Werritty?s apparently well-established connections to the ruling Conservative party, the media coverage has implied at most that he was a lone ?rogue operator,? hoping to use his contacts with Fox and other ministers to manipulate British government policy.

Murray, however, raises the more troubling question of whether Werritty was actually given access, through Fox and Gould, to the heart of the British government. Were all three secretly trying to pursue a policy on Iran favored by Israel and its ideological allies in the US?

The answer, according to Murray, may lie in a series of meetings between the three that have slowly come to light since O?Donnell published his findings.

According to the 2,700-word report, Werritty joined Fox on 18 of his official trips overseas, and the pair met another 22 times at the defense ministry, with almost none of their discussions recorded by officials. The Guardian has also reported that Fox?s staff repeatedly warned him off his relationship with Werritty but were overruled.

Despite the serious concerns raised about Werritty by defense ministry staff, Gould, one of the country?s most senior diplomats, appears nonetheless to have cultivated a close relationship with Werritty as well as Fox.

According to Murray?s sources, Gould and Werritty ?had been meeting and communicating for years.? The foreign office has refused to answer questions about whether the two had any contacts.

When Murray sent an email request late at night this week for ?all communications? between Gould and Werritty, he received a response from the foreign office in less than 90 minutes stating that providing an answer was ?likely to exceed the cost limit?.

As well as noting that the answer should have been straightforward unless Gould and Werritty had had a protracted correspondence, Murray wrote on his blog: ?The Freedom of Information team in the FCO is not a 24 hour unit. Plainly not only are they hiding the Gould/Werritty correspondence, they are primed and on alert for this cover-up operation.?

O?Donnell?s report mentions a second meeting between the three men, in September 2010. On that occasion, Gould met Fox in what a foreign office spokesman has described as a ?pre-posting briefing call? ? a sort of high-level induction for ambassadors to acquaint themselves with their new posting.

Werritty was also present, according to O?Donnell, ?as an individual with some experience in
the security situation in the Middle East.? His participation at the meeting was ?not appropriate,? O?Donnell concluded.

However, Murray said such briefings would never be conducted at ministerial level, and certainly not by the defense minister himself.

He added that a senior official in the defense ministry had alerted him to two other peculiar aspects of the meeting: no officials were present to take notes, as would be expected; and their conversation took place in the ministry?s dining room, not in Fox?s office.

?As someone who worked for many years as a diplomat, I know how these things should work,? Murray said. ?So much of this affair simply smells wrong.?

Murray?s queries to the foreign office about this meeting have gone unanswered but have revealed other unexpected details not included in the O?Donnell report.

In a statement in late October, after the report?s publication, a foreign office spokesman said Gould had met Fox and Werritty earlier than previously known ? before Gould was appointed ambassador to Israel and when Fox was in opposition as shadow defense minister.

The foreign office has refused to answer questions about this meeting too ? including when it occurred and why ? or to respond to a parliamentary question on the matter tabled by MP Jeremy Corbyn. All that is known is that it must have taken place before May 2010, when Fox was appointed defense minister.

In replying to Corbyn?s questions, William Hague, the foreign minister, acknowledged yet another meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould ? at a private social engagement in the summer of 2010.

Again, the foreign office has refused to answer further questions, including one from Corbyn about who else attended the social engagement.

The trio were also together shortly before the Tel Aviv dinner, when Fox made a speech at the hawkish Herzliya security conference in a session on the strategic threat posed by Iran.

And a sixth meeting has come to light. Fox and Gould were photographed together at a ?We believe in Israel? conference in London in May 2011. Werritty was again present.

?That furtive meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould in the MOD dining room [in September 2010], deliberately held away from Fox?s office where it should have taken place, and away from the MOD officials who should have been there, now looks less like briefing and more like plotting,? Murray wrote on his blog about the Ministry of Defense meeting.

Murray said he believed more meetings will surface. During questioning at the Commons? Public Administration Committee this week, O?Donnell made two references to ?meetings? between Gould and Fox before the general election and Fox?s appointment to the post of defence secretary.

Until now, only one such meeting had been admitted by the foreign office.

Murray noted: ?A senior British diplomat cannot just hold a series of meetings with the opposition shadow Defence Secretary and a paid zionist lobbyist. What on earth was happening??

Both Werritty and Gould are considered to have an expertise on Iran.

Gould was the deputy head of mission at the British embassy in Iran from 2003 to 2005, a role in which he was responsible for coordinating on US policy towards Iran. Next he was moved to the British embassy in Washington at a time when the neoconservatives still held sway in the White House.

Werritty, meanwhile, has travelled frequently to Iran where he has teamed up with opposition groups seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime. On his return from one trip to Iran he was called in by Britain?s MI6 foreign intelligence service for a debriefing, according to the Independent on Sunday.

Werritty also arranged for Fox to travel with him to Iran in summer 2007, when Fox was shadow defense minister. And he organised a meeting in May 2009 at the British parliament between Fox and an Iranian lobbyist with links to the current regime in Tehran.

The murky dealings between Fox, Werritty and Gould, and the government?s refusal to clarify what took place between them, is evidence, said Murray, that a serious matter is being hidden. His fear, and that of his contacts inside the senior civil service, is that ?a neo-con cell of senior [British] ministers and officials? were secretly setting policy in coordination with Israel and the US.

Gould?s unexamined role is of particular concern, as he is still in place in his post in Israel.

Murray has noted that, in appointing Gould, a British Jew, to the ambassadorship in Israel in September last year, the foreign office broke with long-standing policy. No Jewish diplomat has held the post before because of concerns that it might lead to a conflict of interest, or at the very least create the impression of dual loyalty. Similar restrictions have been in place to avoid Catholics holding the post of ambassador to the Vatican.

Given these traditional concerns, Gould was a strange choice. He is a self-declared Zionist who has cultivated an image that led the Forward, the most prominent Jewish newspaper in the US, to describe him recently as ?not just an ambassador who?s Jewish, but a Jewish ambassador.?

A version of this story was first published in Al-Akhbar English, Beirut: http://english.al-akhbar.com

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are ?Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East? (Pluto Press) and ?Disappearing Palestine: Israel?s Experiments in Human Despair? (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. The Independent has learnt.


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:43:11 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:43:11 +0100
Subject: [THS] Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair (1988)
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127124212.044e95b8@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23621.htm

Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair (1988)

Video Documentary

Coverup exposes a tale of politics, drugs, hostages, weapons, assassinations, covert operations and the ultimate plan to suspend the US Constitution.

Accusations are levied that a "shadow government" regularly carries out covert activities at home and abroad, and the CIA is implicated in dealing in huge shipments of cocaine and with the profits supplying weapons to the right-wing activities of the Nicaraguan Contras. Also examined are the actions of Oliver North, who willfully ignored the Constitution in masterminding covert weapons deals with Middle-Eastern governments to additionally fund the Nicaraguan Contras. This documentary raised more questions than answers in a post-Watergate political climate where the public had become desensitized to scandal.

Illuminated are the delays by the Reagan-Bush ticket in releasing the American hostages until after the election -- after outgoing President Jimmy Carter worked tirelessly to free them.

This is the only film which presents a comprehensive overview of the most important stories suppressed during the Iran Contra hearings.

Video - Posted October 03, 2009


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:48:48 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:48:48 +0100
Subject: [THS] Paul Craig Roberts: The Roads To War And Economic Collapse
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127124335.04500300@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29817.htm

The Roads To War And Economic Collapse

By Paul Craig Roberts

November 25, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- November 23, 2011: The day before the Thanksgiving holiday brought three extraordinary news items. One was the report on the Republican presidential campaign debate. One was the Russian President?s statement about his country?s response to Washington?s missile bases surrounding his country. And one was the failure of a German government bond auction.

As the presstitute media will not inform us of what any of this means, let me try.

With the exception of Ron Paul, the only candidate in either party qualified to be the president of the US, the rest of the Republican candidates are even worse than Obama, a president who had the country behind him but sold out the American people to the special interests.

No newly elected president in memory, neither John F. Kennedy nor Ronald Reagan, had the extraordinary response to his election as Barak Obama. A record-breaking number of people braved the cold to witness his swearing in ceremony. The mall was filled for miles distant from the Capitol with Americans who could not see the ceremony except as televised on giant screens.

Obama had convinced the electorate that he would end the wars, stop the violation of law by the US government, end the regime of illegal torture, close the torture prison of Guantanamo, and attend to the real needs of the American people rather than stuff the pockets of the military/security complex with taxpayers? money.

Once in office, Obama renewed and extended the Bush/Cheney/neoconservative wars.

He validated the Bush regime?s assaults on the US Constitution. He left Wall Street in charge of US economic policy, he absolved the Bush regime of its crimes, and he assigned to the American people the financial cost necessary to preserve the economic welfare of the mega-rich.

One would think such a totally failed president would be easy to defeat. Given an historic opportunity, the Republican Party has put before the electorate the most amazingly stupid and vile collection of prospects, with the exception of Ron Paul who does not have the party?s support, that Americans have ever seen.

In the November 22 presidential ?debate,? the candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, revealed themselves as a collection of ignorant warmongers who support the police state. Gingrich and Cain said that Muslims ?want to kill us all? and that ?all of us will be in danger for the rest of out lives.?

Bachmann said that the American puppet state, Pakistan, is ?more than an existential threat.? The moron Bachmann has no idea what is ?more than an existential threat.?
However, it sounded heavy, like an intellectual thing to say for the candidate who previously declared the long-defunct Soviet Union to be today?s threat to the US.

Unfortunately for Americans and the world, the US electorate lacks the intelligence and the awareness of their plight as denizens of a police state to elect Ron Paul, the last defender together with Rep. Dennis Kucinich of the US Constitution. 

Nevertheless, there would be a silver lining in one of the Republican morons being elected president of the ?world?s only superpower.? Once the rest of the world realized that a war-crazed idiot had his or her finger on the nuclear button, the rest of the world would organize and close down the Washington horror before it destroys life on earth.

Any sentient American who watched or read about the Republican presidential debate must wonder what there is to be thankful for as the national holiday approaches.

The Russian government, which prefers to use its resources for the economy rather than for the military, has decided that it has been taking too many risks in the name of peace. The day before Thanksgiving, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, in a televised address to the Russian people, that if Washington goes ahead with its planned missile bases surrounding Russia, Russia will respond with new nuclear missiles of its own, which will target the Amerikan bases and European capital cities.

The President of Russia said that the Russian government has asked Washington for legally binding guarantees that the American missile bases are not intended as a threat to Russia, but that Washington has refused to give such guarantees.

Medvedev?s statement is perplexing. What does he mean ?if Washington goes ahead?? The American missile and radar bases are already in place. Russia is already surrounded. Is Medvedev just now aware of what is already in place?

Russia?s and China?s slow response to Washington?s aggression can only be understood in the context of the two countries experience with communism. The sufferings of Russians and Chinese under communism was extreme, and the thinking part of those populations saw America as the ideal of political life. This delusion still controls the mentality of progressive thinkers in Russia and China. It might prove to be a disaster for Russia and China that the countries have citizens who are aligned with the US.

Belief in Washington?s trustworthiness even pervades the Russian government, which apparently, according to Medvedev?s statement, would be reassured by a ?legally binding guarantee? from Washington. After the massive lies told by Washington in the 21st century--?weapons of mass destruction,? ?al Qaeda connections,? ?Iranian nukes?--why would anyone put any credence in ?a legally binding guarantee? from Washington, which refuses to respect the Geneva Conventions? The guarantee would mean nothing. How could it be enforced? Such a guarantee would simply be another deceit in Washington?s pursuit of world hegemony.

The day prior to Thanksgiving also brought another extraordinary development--the failure of a German government bond auction, an unparalleled event.

Why would Germany, the only member of the EU with financial rectitude, not be able to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds? Germany has no debt problems, and its economy is expected by EU and US authorities to bear the lion?s share of the bailout of the EU member countries that do lack financial rectitude.

I suspect that the answer to this question is that the failure of the German government?s bond auction was orchestrated by the US, by EU authorities, especially the European Central Bank, and private banks in order to punish Germany for obstructing the purchase of EU member countries? sovereign debt by the European Central Bank.

The German government has been trying to defend the terms on which Germany gave up control over its own currency and joined the EU. By insisting on the legality of the agreements, Germany has been standing in the way of the ECB behaving as the US Federal Reserve and monetizing the debt of member governments.

>From the beginning the EU was a conspiracy against Germany. If Germany remains in the EU, Germany will be destroyed. It will lose its political and economic sovereignty, and its economy will be bled in behalf of the fiscally irresponsible members of the EU.

If Greeks will not submit to the tyranny, why should Germans?


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:55:10 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:55:10 +0100
Subject: [THS] !!! Robert Reich: Why We Must Occupy Democracy
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127125430.044fff28@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29812.htm

  	
The First Amendment Upside Down.
Why We Must Occupy Democracy

By Robert Reich

November 25, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --   You?ve been seeing this across the country 
 Americans assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed 
 Why? For exercising their right to free speech and assembly ? protesting the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.

And what?s Washington?s response? Nothing. In fact, Congress?s so-called ?supercommittee? just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise a penny of taxes on the rich.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people. The Supreme Court?s Citizens United decision last year ended all limits on political spending. Millions of dollars are being funneled to politicians without a trace.

And a revolving door has developed between official Washington and Wall Street ? with bank executives becoming public officials who make rules that benefit the banks before heading back to the Street to make money off the rules they created.

Other top officials, including an increasing proportion of former members of congress, are cashing in by joining lobbying power houses and pressuring their former colleagues to do whatever their clients want.

Millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street and in executive suites aren?t contributing all this money out of sheer love of country. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.

Why else do you suppose tax rates on the super rich are now lower than they?ve been in three decades, and why ? even though the long-term budget deficit is horrendous ? those rates aren?t rising? Why else do the 400 richest Americans (whose wealth is larger than the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans) now pay an average tax rate of only 17 percent?

Why do you think Wall Street got bailed without a single string attached ? not even being required to help homeowners to whom they sold mortgages, who are now so far under water they?re drowning? And why does the financial reform legislation have loopholes big enough for bankers to drive their Ferrari?s through?

And why else are oil companies, big agribusinesses, military contractors, and the pharmaceutical industry reaping billions of dollars of government subsidies and special tax breaks?

Experts say the 2012 presidential race is likely to be the priciest ever, costing an estimated $6 billion. ?It is far worse than it has ever been,? says Republican Senator John McCain.

If there?s a single core message to the Occupier movement it?s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top endangers our democracy. With money comes political power.

Yet when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they?re told the First Amendment doesn?t apply. Instead, they?re treated as public nuisances ? clubbed, pepper-sprayed, thrown out of public parks and evicted from public spaces.

Across America, public officials are saying Occupiers have to go. Even in universities ? where free speech is supposed to be sacrosanct ? peaceful assembly is being met with clubs and pepper spray.

The First Amendment is being stood on its head. Money speaks, and an unlimited amount of it can now be spent bribing and cajoling politicians. Yet peaceful assembly is viewed as a public nuisance and removed by force.

This is especially worrisome now that so many Americans are in economic trouble. The jobs recession grinds on, seemingly without end. Homes are being foreclosed upon. Qualified students cannot afford college. Or they?re forced to take on huge debt loads they can?t repay in a jobless economy. Schools are firing teachers. Vital social services are being axed.

How are Americans to be heard about what should be done about any of this if they are not allowed to mobilize and organize? When the freedom of speech goes to the highest bidder, moneyed interests have a disproportionate say.

Now more than ever, the First Amendment needs to be put right side up. Nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. He is also Common Cause's board chairman. www.robertreich.org/
? 2011 Robert Reich


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:57:10 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:57:10 +0100
Subject: [THS] Iran: Stories
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127125646.044ffb50@mail.messagingengine.com>

U.S. Blocks Iranian Gas Exports To The East, Russian To The West:  "The Pak-Iran gas pipeline is not a good idea, as Iran is unreliable," said US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter on Friday, according to Pakistani news sources. http://en.trend.az/regions/iran/1961875.html

 
Iran 'Arrests 12 CIA Agents':  Influential politician says US spies had been gathering intelligence on military units and nuclear activities http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29806.htm

 
'Iran CIA agent arrests linked to missile testing':  Senior Iran analyst tells 'Post' that Tehran moving missiles "that would form first response" to Israeli strike on nuclear sites. http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=246913

  
Mysterious explosions pose dilemma for Iranian leaders:  Despite the official denial of foreign involvement in the latest blast, suspicions have been raised in Iran by what industry experts say is a fivefold increase in explosions at refineries and gas pipelines since 2010. http://wapo.st/vO0q4C


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 13:00:53 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:00:53 +0100
Subject: [THS] Egypt: Stories
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127125954.044ff8c0@mail.messagingengine.com>


Protester killed near Cairo's Tahrir Square:  Activist killed in front of government buildings, as death toll rises to 42 following eight days of clashes in Egypt. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/11/201111268431165617.html

Egypt new PM claims more powers than predecessor:  Egypt's military rulers picked a prime minister from ousted leader Hosni Mubarak's era to head the next government, according to state television, a choice that will almost certainly intensify criticism by tens of thousands of protesters accusing the generals of trying to extend the old guard and demanding they step down immediately. http://bit.ly/w1igIC

Egyptians Angry Over Military's Choice of Prime Minister:  Kamal el-Ganzouri, who was Egypt's prime minister from 1996-1999 and deputy prime minister and planning minister before that, was picked by the country's military leaders to govern the country, according to state television. He served as prime minister under President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in February. http://bit.ly/soJuE3

Health Ministry - 30 Killed in Local Unrest:  A total of 30 people have been killed in three days of deadly clashes in several Egyptian cities. http://allafrica.com/stories/201111250253.html

Egypt's Tahrir filling for anti-military protest:  Tens of thousands of protesters chanting, "Leave, leave!" are rapidly filling up Cairo's Tahrir Square in what promises to be a massive demonstration to force Egypt's ruling military council to yield power. http://bit.ly/vGpcjc

Egypt protesters killed by live ammunition during Tahrir clashes:  Egypt's ruling generals have been accused by a human rights organisation of having blood on their hands after medical workers confirmed that live ammunition had been used against anti-junta demonstrators in Tahrir Square. 
http://bit.ly/vnid1p

EU calls for civilian government in Egypt:  The European Union condemned "excessive violence" in Egypt's handling of protesters seeking an end to military rule and urged Cairo to move quickly towards a civilian government. http://bit.ly/sLIcuW


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 13:04:50 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:04:50 +0100
Subject: [THS] Categories: Paranoia,
 Surveillance: 9 Reasons Wired Readers  Should Wear Tinfoil Hats
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127130251.044ff630@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/reasons-to-wear-tinfoil-hats/

9 Reasons Wired Readers Should Wear Tinfoil Hats

By David Kravets 

  
November 24, 2011  |   
6:30 am  |   
Categories: Paranoia, Surveillance 


The FBI's Digital Collection System connects FBI offices and telecom providers around the country to coordinate collection of phone taps for investigations of all sorts.

There?s plenty of reason to be concerned Big Brother is watching.

We?re paranoid not because we have grandiose notions of our self-importance, but because the factsspeak for themselves.

Here?s our short list of nine reasons that Wired readers ought to wear tinfoil hats, or at least, fight for their rights and consider ways to protect themselves with encryption and defensive digital technologies.

We know the list is incomplete, so if you have better reasons that we list here, put them in the comments and we?ll make a list based off them.

Until then, remember: Don?t suspect a friend; report him.

Warrantless Wiretapping

The government refuses to acknowledge whether the National Security Agency is secretly siphoning the nation?s electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges. The lawsuit was based on evidence provided by a former AT&T technician Mark Klein that showed that AT&T had installed a secret spying room in an internet hub in San Francisco. The spying got so bad that Attorney General Ashcroft threatened to resign over it.

When a federal judge said a lawsuit on that issue could go forward, Congress passed legislationstopping the case in its tracks. Two American lawyers for an Islamic charity did, however, prevail in their suit that they were wiretapped without warrants, but the Administration is appealing. Much of the program was legalized in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act.

The FBI has also built a nationwide computer system called the Digital Collection System, connected by fiber optic cables, to collect and analyze wiretaps of all types, including ones used in ultra-secret terrorism investigations.

Warrantless GPS Tracking

The Obama administration claims Americans have no right to privacy in their public movements. The issue surfaced this month in a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if law enforcement agents should be required to obtain a probable-cause warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on a citizen?s car. The government admitted to the Supreme Court that it thinks it would have the power to track the justices? cars without a warrant.

The invasive technology allows police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to engage in covert round-the-clock surveillance over an extended period of time, collecting vast amounts of information about anyone who drives the vehicle that is being tracked. The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with ?great frequency,? and GPS retailers have told Wired that they?ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

Tracking Devices in Your Pocket

That mobile phone in your pocket chronicles almost everything. Once-secret software developed by a private company pretty much chronicles all you do on your smartphone and sends it to the carriers. The carriers themselves keep a wealth of information, such as text messages, call-location data, and PINs ? though none of them disclose to their customers what data they store or how long they keep the data.

Law enforcement can get at much of that historical data ? and often get real-time tracking information without proving probable cause to a judge.

Fake Cell Phone Towers

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier?s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.

So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.

The government maintains that the stingrays don?t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don?t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower. While the technology sounds ultra-new, the feds have had this in their arsenal for at least 15 years, and used a stingray to bust the notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1995.


The Border Exception

The Fourth Amendment doesn?t exist along the U.S. border. You know that if you?re a close supporter of WikiLeaks or a friend of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning. You?re no doubt very familiar with the U.S. government?s laptop border search policy, which allows Customs and Border Protection agents to seize and search a laptop belonging to anyone crossing a border into the U.S.

Agents can search through files on a traveler?s laptop, phone or other mobile device, read e-mail or view digital snapshots to uncover incriminating evidence, and they don?t need any reason to do so.

The government argues, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court agrees that searching through a person?s laptop for copyright violations is no different than looking through their suitcase for cocaine ? and thus fits squarely with what is known as the ?border exception? to the Fourth Amendment. That means a border agent doesn?t need reasonable suspicion, probable cause or even a hunch to open your laptop, seize it and make copies of your data.

At least three supporters of WikiLeaks, including security researcher Jacob Appelbaum. have been subject to the policy and had devices seized and searched as they re-entered the U.S. from foreign trips. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seem to particularly like searching Appeblaum?s devices and questioning him, despite the fact that Wikileaks has never been charged with a crime in the U.S..

The ?6 Months and It?s the Government?s? Rule

If you?re already not wanting a dose of Prozac, consider that the law allows the government to obtain Americans? e-mails, without a warrant, if it?s stored on some other company?s servers for more than six months. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, adopted in 1986, turned 25 this year. When written, the law assumed e-mails left on a server for that long were abandoned.

In the age of Gmail, that?s simply ridiculous. A proposal to demand a court warrant for any and all e-mail never got a Senate hearing and was opposed by the Obama administration.

The Patriot Act

No paranoia list would be complete without including the Patriot Act, the now 10-year-old law adopted in the wake of September 11. The act, which has remained largely the same since former president George W. Bush signed the legislation six weeks after 9/11, gives the government, among other things, the power to acquire phone, banking and other records via the power of a so-called ?national security letter,? which does not require a court warrant.

National security letters, perhaps the most invasive facet of the law, are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, bank records and arguably websites you have visited.

The FBI need merely assert, in writing, that the information is ?relevant? to an ongoing terrorism or national security investigation. Nearly everyone who gets a national security letter is prohibited from even disclosing that they?ve received one. More than 200,000 letters have been issued by the FBI, despite a series of stinging reports from the Justice Department?s internal watchdog, who found FBI agents weren?t just routinely sloppy; they also violated the law.

Moreover, a decade after Bush?s signature, information is sketchy about how the law is being used in practice. For instance, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) claims the government applies a far broader, andclassified, legal interpretation of the Patriot Act?s power to let the government seize most anything it deems relevant to an investigation (Section 215).

?We?re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,? the Senate Intelligence Committee member said in a recent interview with Wired. ?When you?ve got that kind of a gap, you?re going to have a problem on your hands.?

Government Malware

It?s little known, but governments have their own malware/spyware that it deploys against suspected lawbreakers. The FBI?s version, the last time we checked, was called CIPAV. Once an FBI agent convinced a target to install it (by clicking an e-mail attachment or link on the web), the spyware reports back everything that computer does online.

German states recently came under fire for misusing a similar program that reportedly could turn on a computer?s camera and take screenshots. And a recent Wall Street Journal story catalogs a surveillance software company which trumpeted its ability to infect users via a fake iTunes update. The company sells its wares to governments around the world.

Known Unknowns

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took an unfair amount of abuse for his deployment of the phrase ?known unknowns.? And it?s these known unknowns that might be the most disturbing part of the list. For instance, does the government think the Patriot Act allows it to force Google to turn over information about anyone who has searched for certain keywords using orders that come with a gag order? Is the NSA sucking up everything we say on our phones and that we do online, under the theory it pushed in a court case that it?s not a search until a human actually looks at the data? How often do police investigating a crime ask wireless providers to give them a list of all the people whose phones were in use in the area when they think a crime was committed? What kind of sweeping surveillance orders have been issued under the 1998 law that Congress passed to legalize much of the warrantless wiretapping of Americans? And finally, how long is the government storing all this data, and how can we be sure that our future governments won?t start using this data to target Americans based on activities protected by the First Amendment?

And no ? a tinfoil hat won?t help you at all.
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
Follow @dmkravets and @ThreatLevel on Twitter. 


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 13:13:11 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:13:11 +0100
Subject: [THS] New Documentary Tracks Cultural Genocide of American Indians
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127131252.044ff3a0@mail.messagingengine.com>

New Documentary Tracks Cultural Genocide of American Indians
Thursday 24 November 2011 
by: Rose Aguilar, Truthout | Report 

http://www.truth-out.org/new-documentary-tracks-cultural-genocide-american-indians/1322003627
  

 In 1892, US Army officer Richard Pratt delivered a speech in which he described his philosophy behind US government-run boarding schools for American Indians. "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," he said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

>From 1879 until the 1960s, more than 100,000 American Indian children were forced to attend boarding schools. Children were forcibly removed or kidnapped from their homes and taken to the schools. Families risked imprisonment if they stood in the way or attempted to take their children back. 

Many of the country's 100 schools were still active up until the 1970s. Generations of children were subjected to dehumanization, cruelty and beatings, all intended to strip them of their Native identity and culture. The ultimate goal was to "civilize" the children.

A new documentary, "The Thick Dark Fog," [4] shines a light on the traumatic boarding school experience through the telling of personal stories. The film focuses on Walter Littlemoon, a Lakota who was forced to attend a federal government boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1950s. Littlemoon says his culture, language and spirituality were brutally suppressed. 

"The government school had tried to force me to forget the Lakota language and I wouldn't do it," he says in the film. "We had a deep sense of preservation for our culture, so we would go and hide in order to speak Lakota. If we got caught, they were allowed to beat us with whatever they could, but we took that chance. The Lakota language is something that comes from deep inside of you. It comes from how you look at things and how you see things."

"The Thick Dark Fog" profiles Walter's healing process and attempt to reclaim his heritage. "It wasn't until my sixtieth year that I began to realize that there was more to me. Something was missing. It was like I was a nonbeing," he says. "I didn't know the medical words of multigenerational trauma or the complex post-traumatic stress disorder, so I called the problem what I felt it to be: the thick dark fog."

One of the film's more haunting moments provides a montage of excerpts of interviews with Indians describing their boarding school experiences:

"We had all our clothes taken from us."

"I remember always going to bed hungry."

"We were being punished, but none of us really knew why."

"It wasn't punishment. It was beatings. You'd put your hands down and they'd slam the desk down on your hands. They'd take you downstairs and make you kneel down on either a broom handle or a pencil."

"Soap. That's what she used to wash my mouth. I'll never forget the burning, the choking, the helplessness, the fading out that I went through."

Will the US government ever come to terms with and acknowledge its dark brutal past? In 1999, the state of Maine, in collaboration with the Wabanaki tribes, set up the Maine Tribal-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission [5]. In 2008, the Canadian government set up a truth and reconciliation commission to help indigenous peoples tell their stories and heal. What should the US government do to help indigenous people heal from the abuses they suffered in government-run boarding schools? 

Listen to Your Call [6] discuss "The Thick Dark Fog," accountability and the power of healing. 

Listen here:  http://www.truth-out.org/new-documentary-tracks-cultural-genocide-american-indians/1322003627

Guests:

Randy Vasquez is the director of "The Thick Dark Fog." It debuted earlier this month at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco.  

Marilyn La Plant St. Germaine is a member of the Blackfeet and Cree tribes from Browning, Montana. She spent the eight grade at the Pierre Boarding School in Pierre, South Dakota, in the 1950s. She says her boarding school experience was bittersweet. She's been a social worker in American Indian communities for over 40 years.

Denise Alvater is a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe. She is lead organizer of the Maine Tribal-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is recording the testimony of the Wabanaki Peoples about their boarding school experiences. When Alvater was just seven years old, she and her siblings were forcibly removed from her home and put in an abusive foster home. They were tortured for four years.  


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 13:15:45 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:15:45 +0100
Subject: [THS] Hunger in America, By the Numbers
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127131446.04232718@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.truth-out.org/hunger-tn-america-numbers/1322317958

Hunger in America, By the Numbers
Thursday 24 November 2011
by: Travis Waldron and Pat Garofalo, ThinkProgress | Report

(Photo: mdavidford / Flickr)

Last year, 17.2 million households in the United States were food insecure, the highest level on record, as the Great Recession continued to wreak havoc on families across the country. Of those 17.2 million households, 3.9 million included children. On Thanksgiving weekend, here?s a look at hunger in America, as millions of Americans struggle to get enough to eat in the wake of the economic crisis.

    17.2 million: The number of households that were food insecure in 2010, the highest number on record. They make up 14.5 percent of households, or approximately one in seven.

    48.8 million: People who lived in food insecure households last year.

    3.9 million: The number of households with children that were food insecure last year. In 1 percent of households with children, ?one or more of the children experienced the most severe food-insecure condition measured by USDA, very low food security, in which meals were irregular and food intake was below levels considered adequate by caregivers.?

    6.4 million: Households that experienced very low food security last year, meaning ?normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.?

    55: The percentage of food-insecure households that participated in one or more of the three largest Federal food and nutrition assistance programs (SNAP, WIC, School lunch program).

    19.4: The percentage of food insecure households in Mississippi, which had thehighest rate in the nation last year.

    3.6 percent: The amount by which food prices increased last year.

    30 percent: The amount by which food insecurity grew during the Great Recession.

    44: The percentage increase in households using food pantries between 2007 and 2009.

    20 million: The number of children who benefit from free and reduced lunchper day.

    10.5 million: The number of eligible children who don?t receive their free and reduced lunch benefits.

    $167.5 billion: The amount that the U.S. lost in 2010 due to hunger (lost educational attainment + avoidable illness + charitable giving to fight hunger). This doesn?t take into account the $94 billion cost of SNAP and other food programs.

    8: The number of states (FL, TX, CA, IL, NY, OH, PA, GA) where the annual cost of hunger exceeds $6 billion.

Last year, ?nearly half of the households seeking emergency food assistance reported having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food. Nearly 40 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food.? This Thanksgiving, as you sit down to enjoy a meal with family and friends, please spare a thought for those who, due to the country?s continuing economic woes, may not have enough to eat.

This holiday season, please consider donating to a local food bank. You can find one nearby ordonate online through the Feeding America website. You can also give to Operation Homefront, a group that provides assistance to military families.
Originally published on ThinkProgress


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Nov 27 12:52:15 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:52:15 +0100
Subject: [THS] An Open Letter to the Winter Patriot
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111127125157.044fff28@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29814.htm

An Open Letter to the Winter Patriot

By Mitch Green

 
The following letter reflects my view on the subject of civil disobedience and does not necessarily mirror the general opinion of New Economic Perspectives. I offer my opinion as an Army veteran, student of the economy, and critic of an ongoing effort to wage economic war on the vast majority the population. If these words move you, I urge you to consider honestly the consequences if you decide to act.

November 25, 2011 "New Economic Perspectives" -- As the occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent?  And if our nation?s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?
 
If history is our guide then we know that story all too well.  Behind a thin veil of red, white and blue stands a nation that has used its military might to respond forcefully to any public contempt for the very institutions which bind us in exclusion from the liberty those colors evoke.  Just as a training collar keeps a dog in check, a highly militarized police force responds mercilessly, sharply, and without hesitation with an array of chemical warfare and thuggish brutality.  And where they fail, divisions of soldiers stand ready to deliver a serious and painful lesson to all who demonstrate their unwillingness to wait for democracy.
 
This has been the history of democracy in America.  The ink on the pages that chronicle the use of state violence towards an unruly citizenry is dry.  We cannot rewrite them.  We read them in lament.  But for each new day history waits; at the dawn of each morning we are presented with the gift of creation.  The prevailing thought woven into the fabric of our society today, threaded through both patterns of conservative and liberal ideology, remains the recognition that something is very wrong with the world.  Naturally, we form the question:  Can we do things differently?  Once we animate that thought and present it to society as a question demanding an answer, we begin to sketch out our draft of the world in the pages of history.
 
I call upon my brothers and sisters in the armed forces to ink their pens and help us write these next few, and most important pages in the history of our social life.  Soon, it is quite likely that you will be mobilized to aid the police in their effort to contain or disperse what their bosses see as an imminent threat to the sanctity of their authority.  As that day draws near, I remind you of these familiar words:
 
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
 
Those that take this oath seriously are faced with a terrible conflict.  You must battle internally between the affirmation that you will place your body between the social contract embedded in the Constitution and those that seek its destruction, while maintaining your loyalty to the government you serve and the orders issued by its officers.  Sadly, society has placed a twin tax upon you by asking that you sacrifice both your body and your morality.  This tax has been levied solely upon you overseas, and soon they?ll come to collect domestically.  Your government in its expression of corporate interests relies upon your tenacity to endure, and your relentless willingness to sacrifice.  And so you do. 
 
Now, more than ever we need your sacrifice.  But, I?m asking you to soldier in a different way.  If called upon to deny the people of their first amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievance, disregard the order.  Abstain from service.  Or if you are so bold, join us. Make no mistake: The consequences for such decisions are severe.  You will be prosecuted under the full extent of the law.  But sacrifice is your watch word. 
 
Thomas Paine wrote in 1776:
 
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
 
Today we are faced with a new revolution.  This time we are fighting to preserve our democracy, rather than to establish a new one.  And just as a grateful nation relied upon the Winter Soldier to deliver us from the colonial yoke of oppression, we ask that you aid us in our struggle to be free from the bonds of debt peonage and false representation.  In return we will stand in your defense as the elite, who have gained so much from your service, attempt to strip you of your hard won honor.