Great pic of Sierra Club pres Aaron Mair getting arrested as part of #democracyawakens this morning! (by @Javier_SC)
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It’s Worse Than You Think
It’s Worse Than You Think
New York City police officers guard Trump Tower, President-elect Donald Trump’s Manhattan home. (Richard Drew / AP)
Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.
Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle.
Fascism, as historian Gaetano Salveminipointed out, is about “giving up free institutions.” It is the product of a democracy that has ceased to function. The democratic form will remain, much as it did during the dictatorships in the later part of the Roman Empire, but the reality is despotism, or in our case, corporate despotism. The citizen does not genuinely participate in power.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Information or Disinformation? Only 32 Percent of Americans Trust the Media
Information or Disinformation? Only 32 Percent of Americans Trust the Media
A Gallup Poll released this week shows the largest decline in trust in the media since the organization started asking the public’s opinion on the subject in 1972. Conducted with people over 18, across 50 states, only 32 percent of those surveyed said they trust the media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.”
Only 14 percent of Republicans trust the media, down from 32 percent in 2015. According to the poll, the steep decline in trust among Republicans has been influenced by Republican leaders, conservative pundits and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who continually claims the media is biased toward his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Democrats (at 51 percent, compared to 55 percent in 2015) and independents (30 percent vs. 33 percent last year) have a little more faith in the Fourth Estate than Republicans.
Young and old alike are distrustful. For 18 to 49 age group, only 26 percent say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media, down 10 percent from 2015. For those 50 and older, it’s 38 percent, down 7 percent from 2015.
Gallup reports:
The divisive presidential election this year may be corroding Americans’ trust and confidence in the media, particularly among Republicans who may believe the “mainstream media” are too hyperfocused on every controversial statement or policy proposal from Trump while devoting far less attention to controversies surrounding the Clinton campaign. However, the slide in media trust has been happening for the past decade. Before 2004, it was common for a majority of Americans to profess at least some trust in the mass media, but since then, less than half of Americans feel that way. Now, only about a third of the U.S. has any trust in the Fourth Estate, a stunning development for an institution designed to inform the public.
With the explosion of the mass media in recent years, especially the prevalence of blogs, vlogs and social media, perhaps Americans decry lower standards for journalism. When opinion-driven writing becomes something like the norm, Americans may be wary of placing trust on the work of media institutions that have less rigorous reporting criteria than in the past. On the other hand, as blogs and social media “mature,” they may improve in the American public’s eyes. This could, in turn, elevate Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media as a whole.
Since 1972, the apex of trust in media by the general public was 76 percent in 1976.
2008 All Over Again
2008 All Over Again
Financial markets in the United States and worldwide face uncertainty and potential crisis after Britain voted to leave the European Union. (Sparkx 11)
Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has wiped out many bankers and global speculators. They will turn, as they did in 2008, to governments to rescue them from default. Most governments, including ours, will probably comply.
Will the American public passively permit another massive bailout of the banks? Will it accept more punishing programs of austerity to pay for this bailout? Will a viable socialism rise out of the economic chaos to halt further looting of the U.S. Treasury and the continued reconfiguration of the economy into neofeudalism? Or will a right-wing populism, with heavy undertones of fascism, ascend to power because of a failure on the part of the left to defend a population once again betrayed?
Whatever happens next will be chaotic. Global financial markets, which lost heavily on derivatives, are already in free fall. The value of the British pound has dropped by over 9 percent and British bank stock prices by over 25 percent. This decline has wiped out the net worth of many Wall Street brokerage houses and banks, leaving them with negative equity. The Brexit vote severely cripples and perhaps kills the eurozone and, happily, stymies trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It throws the viability of NATO and American imperial designs in Eastern Europe and the Middle East into question. The British public’s repudiation of neoliberal economics also has the potential to upend the presidential elections. The Democratic Party will orchestrate a rescue of Wall Street if there is a call for a bailout. Donald Trump and the Republicans, by opposing a bailout, can ride popular revulsion to power.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Real 9/11 Conspiracy
The Real 9/11 Conspiracy
Secretary of State John Kerry, center, poses with his Arab counterparts after a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Sept. 11, 2014. Kerry’s visit was aimed at pinning down Middle Eastern allies on what support they were willing to give to U.S. plans to beat back Islamic State, which had seized large chunks of Iraq and Syria. (Brendan Smialowski / AP)
I remember watching the towers fall.
My sister called early in the morning to tell me to turn on the television. My husband and I, who had been working closely with Afghan women organizing against the Taliban, stared at the screen, aghast as the buildings crumbled.
Like everyone else the world over, we realized it was a moment that was going to change history. We also realized that ordinary people, including our friends in Afghanistan, were going to pay the price for something they likely had nothing to do with. And sure enough, on Oct. 7, 2001, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, the U.S. went to war with Afghanistan. That war, the longest in U.S. history, remains a bloody weight on our collective conscience.
But as soon as the towers fell and Congress rushed to hand over blanket authority to President Bush to wantonly bomb, whispers of “an inside job” began circulating on the Internet.
Those whispers snowballed as the war expanded from Afghanistan to Iraq. Many anti-war activists, eager to undermine the flawed rationale for the Iraq War, insisted ever more shrilly that Bush and company were likely behind the attacks or knew ahead of time that the attacks were coming and failed to act purposefully. Complex and convoluted arguments about the temperatures at which the towers’ beams melted were vociferously trotted out on public radio and in Internet chat rooms. Jesse Ventura jumped into the fray.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Welcome to 1984
Welcome to 1984
Protester Bob Bowes, of Somerville, Mass., displays an American flag featuring corporate logos outside a meeting of U.S. elites in Boston. (Steven Senne / AP)
The artifice of corporate totalitarianism has been exposed. The citizens, disgusted by the lies and manipulation, have turned on the political establishment. But the game is not over. Corporate power has within its arsenal potent forms of control. It will use them. As the pretense of democracy is unmasked, the naked fist of state repression takes its place. America is about—unless we act quickly—to get ugly.
“Our political system is decaying,” said Ralph Nader when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It’s on the way to gangrene. It’s reaching a critical mass of citizen revolt.”
This moment in American history is what Antonio Gramsci called the “interregnum”—the period when a discredited regime is collapsing but a new one has yet to take its place. There is no guarantee that what comes next will be better. But this space, which will close soon, offers citizens the final chance to embrace a new vision and a new direction.
This vision will only be obtained through mass acts of civic mobilization and civil disobedience across the country. Nader, who sees this period in American history as crucial, perhaps the last opportunity to save us from tyranny, is planning to rally the left for three days, from May 23 to May 26 at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in what he is calling “Breaking Through Power” or “Citizen’s Revolutionary Week.” He is bringing to the capital scores of activists and community leaders to speak, organize and attempt to mobilize to halt our slide into despotism.
“The two parties can implode politically,” Nader said. “They can be divided by different candidates and super PACs. But this doesn’t implode their paymasters.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Panama Papers: Laundering Havens for War Budgets (Video)
The Panama Papers: Laundering Havens for War Budgets (Video)
In mid-April, economist Michael Hudson told The Real News Network that global oil and mining industries and the U.S. State Department created Panama and Liberia for the express purpose of tax evasion.
Read a full transcript of Hudson’s exchange with host Sharmini Peries below.
SHARMINI PERIES, TRNN: It’s the Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.
Within a week the 11 million documents called the Panama papers, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, has become a household name. The documents are connected to the Panama law firm Mossack Fonsesca that helped establish offshore accounts for some of the wealthiest and most powerful leaders to launder money and evade taxes.
On Tuesday the police in Panama raided the Mossack Fonseca law firm to search for more documents linked to illicit activities. But what are they expecting to find, since we have already known for some time now that offshore accounts are being used to evade taxes by the banking sector, essentially white-collar crooks, at institutions such as Credit Suisse and others? But who is really behind the creation of these mechanisms and loopholes for tax evasion?
Our next guest, Michael Hudson, says Panama was created as a tax haven by certain sectors of our economy for this purpose. Joining us now from New York is Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and he’s a former balance of payments economist for Chase Manhattan bank. He is the author of many books, and the latest among them is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. And if you want to know more about that book, on our site you’ll find Chris Hedges interviewing Michael Hudson on this book. Thanks for joining us, Michael.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Democracy in Action: Arrests at Capitol Building Protests Top 1,400
Democracy in Action: Arrests at Capitol Building Protests Top 1,400
Via Twitter
Protesters have made their voices heard in Washington D.C. Over the past week, more than 1,400 people were arrested at the Capitol for participating in the Democracy Awakening and Democracy Spring movements.
Members of Democracy Spring began protesting corporate financial influence in politics several weeks ago. They were soon joined by members of Democracy Awakening, who protested discriminatory voting laws.
USA Today reported Monday on the protests:
More arrests are expected Monday, the final day of protests when the focus of the non-violent protests turn to voting rights and timely consideration of … Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. U.S. Capitol Police have arrested more than 900 protesters through Saturday. …
Those arrested were charged with violating a D.C. statute prohibiting “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding,” which are misdemeanors, said police spokeswoman Eva Malecki. All of those arrested were Democracy Spring-related participants. Most were processed and then released on the scene.
On Sunday, Malecki said demonstrators remained “orderly and respectful,” just as they had through the previous week.
Democracy Awakening urged their protesters to wear their “Sunday best” and to bring $50 in cash in anticipation of the planned arrests Monday.
Groups including the NAACP, Sierra Club, Greenpeace and Every Voice participated in the protests. Actress Rosario Dawson, who has been vocal about income inequality, was arrested Friday afternoon. Ben & Jerry’s founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, famous for their political activism as well as their ice cream, were seen stamping bail money with the words “NOT TO BE USED TO BRIBE POLITICIANS.”
‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges, Michael Hudson Discuss How We Got to Junk Economics (Video)
‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges, Michael Hudson Discuss How We Got to Junk Economics (Video)
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In this episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt,” Chris Hedges interviews Michael Hudson on the history of classical economics and explores Marx’s interpretation of capitalism as exploitation.
Hudson is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.” Before becoming a professor, Hudson worked for many years on Wall Street.
“The essence of classical economics was to reform industrial capitalism, to streamline it, and to free the European economies from the legacy of feudalism,” Hudson said. “The legacy of feudalism was landlords extracting land-rent, and living as a class that took income without producing anything.”
Wall Street and the big-banking system have inverted classical economics. America is now over $19 trillion in debt, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that the debt will rise to $26.3 trillion by 2020. How did we get to this point?
“So we’ve turned the postwar economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out,” Hudson explained. “Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can’t get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end, the creditors always win. That’s why every society since Sumer and Babylonia has had to either cancel the debts, or you come to a society like Rome that didn’t cancel the debts, and then you have a dark age. Everything collapses.”
Watch Part I of the interview, posted by The Real News, below.
The Human Rights Risks of Encryption ‘Back Doors’
The Human Rights Risks of Encryption ‘Back Doors’
One fact that has received little attention in the current encryption debate is that many categories of individuals rely on strong encryption for their own security. These include sexual and gender-based rights activists, domestic violence victims, journalists and their sources, and human rights defenders. Strong encryption is necessary to protect fundamental human rights; as one technologist puts it, encryption saves lives.
Encryption, a process of scrambling communications to make them private, is frequently discussed simply as a privacy issue. But the same process that keeps banks’ communications secure is also, for many, a safeguard of many human rights including the right to life. For those who rely on secure communications in sensitive situations, the issue goes far beyond privacy.
Experts agree that “secure back doors”—which would give law enforcement secret access to digital storage or communications—are scientifically impossible. That explains the uproar over a federal magistrate judge’s recent decision ordering Apple to create a backdoor to an iPhone. On Feb. 25, Apple moved to vacate that decision and warned that the FBI is seeking a “dangerous power” in the case.
Back doors are wholly unnecessary for security. Law enforcement agencies already use hacking tools to track electronic communications and circumvent encryption. Information-sharing programs reportedly exist with intelligence agencies, which use keyloggers to record encrypted messages before they are sent. National Security Agency (NSA) supercomputers can even number-crunch to break some encoded messages. And encryption does not shield the “to” and “from” lines of messages—also known as metadata. The problem is not a lack of tools, but intelligence failures in analyzing existing information—perhaps one reason former NSA head Michael Hayden rejects the FBI’s position on back doors.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
VIDEO: ‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges and Jill Stein Confront the ‘Corporate Leviathan’
VIDEO: ‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges and Jill Stein Confront the ‘Corporate Leviathan’
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In the first installment of this two-part series for teleSUR‘s “Days of Revolt,” host and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges and Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein identified the problem: the “corporate leviathan,” a bought two-party political system. In this episode, they discuss solutions.
There’s been a lot of chatter this campaign season—much of it from unlikely or untrustworthy sources—about how the economy is rigged. Trying to attack that issue from within the existing framework, however, isn’t going to change anything, according to these two thinkers.
Hedges frames the discussion by asking what the response should be “for those of us who care about reclaiming our democracy and creating an equitable fair and just society.” Watch the full clip below to see what he and Stein come up with in the way of answers (via The Real News Network):
The Terror of Flint’s Poisoned Water
The Terror of Flint’s Poisoned Water
Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “Due to the vital importance of water to all life forms … the FBI considers all threats to attack the water supply as serious threats.” In 2003, a UPI article reported that an al-Qaida operative “(does not rule out) using Sarin gas and poisoning drinking water in U.S. and Western cities.’” Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents.
Michigan has one of the most severe “emergency manager” laws in the country, allowing the governor to appoint an unelected agent to take over local governments when those locales or institutions have been deemed to be in a “financial emergency.” Republican Gov. Rick Snyder pushed for and obtained two bills that strengthened the law, and has used it aggressively to impose his version of fiscal austerity on cities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, several large school districts and, now most notoriously, on Flint. In every case but one, the emergency manager has taken over cities that are majority African-American. The emergency manager is granted sweeping powers to override local, democratically elected governments and to make cuts to budgets, sell public property, cancel or renegotiate labor contracts and essentially govern like a dictator.
In April 2014, Darnell Earley, the fourth of five Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder, unilaterally decided to switch Flint’s water source from Detroit’s water system, with water from Lake Huron that they had been using for 50 years, to the long-contaminated Flint River.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Turkey-Russia Tensions Spike as Russia Moves Into Northern Syria
Turkey-Russia Tensions Spike as Russia Moves Into Northern Syria
Russian air strikes in Syria are coming closer and closer to the Turkish border in Latakia in the northwest, and there are rumors that Russia is looking at establishing an airbase at Qamishli in the largely Kurdish northeast of Syria. Turkey risks having Russia as a neighbor all along the Syrian border to Turkey’s south, as well as beyond the Black Sea to its north.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said at a news conference, “We have said this from the beginning: we won’t tolerate such formations (in northern Syria) along the area stretching from the Iraqi border up to the Mediterranean. . .”
Over on the Mediterranean side, Russian air strikes have enabled the Syrian Arab Army of the Bashar al-Assad regime to move back into northern Latakia Province, taking a large number of villages in the far northern areas of Turkmen Mountain and Kurd Mountain.
The strategic city of Rabia was surrounded on three sides by government troops.
Syrian government sources maintained that 150 rebels had been killed in the fighting, including guerrillas of the Nusra Front, while others had fled across the border into Turkey.
It was to protect the anti-regime Turkmen fighters of Turkmen mountain that last fall the Turkish air force shot a Russian fighter jet out of the air.
The SAA has also retaken Salma in the east of Latakia Province. Salma had been in rebel hands for 3 years and is in higher land and so was a useful way for the rebels to dominate the surrounding area.
This post originally ran on Truthdig contributor Juan Cole’s website.Russian strategy since last October has been to intervene from the air to give courage to the Syrian troops and allow them to push back the rebels from the key port city of Latakia in the province of the same name.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Budget Cuts and Negligence Poisoned the Drinking Water in Flint, Mich.
Budget Cuts and Negligence Poisoned the Drinking Water in Flint, Mich.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder in 2011. (Michigan Municipal League / CC BY-ND 2.0)
Calls for the resignation of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder are intensifying in the face of evidence that he allowed 100,000 residents of the city of Flint to continue cooking, drinking and bathing in water known to be contaminated with lead.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is among those demanding that Snyder leave office.
“There are no excuses,” Sanders said in a statement released Saturday. “The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign.”
“[F]amilies will suffer from lead poisoning for the rest of their lives,” Sanders continued. “Children in Flint will be plagued with brain damage and other health problems.”
Reports say the problem began in spring 2014, when the cash-strapped city switched water sources, hoping to save money. Corrosive water drawn from the Flint River stripped lead from pipes, resulting in high levels of the toxic metal appearing in the blood of children. Subsequently, the city switched sources again.
Julia Lurie at Mother Jones magazine reported that cases of Legionnaires’ disease in the area have spiked over the past year and a half, with 10 people dying out of a total of 87 cases. Marc Edwards, a scientist at Virginia Tech who helped expose the water’s lead contamination, told the Detroit Free Press that there’s a “very strong likelihood” that the change in water supply enabled the disease’s recent surge.
The New York Times reports:
In the last three weeks, a panel appointed by Mr. Snyder reported that state officials had for months wrongly brushed aside complaints about the contamination. The governor apologized for the state’s performance, Michigan’s top environmental regulator resigned, and federal agencies announced that they were investigating.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nations Scramble to Compete in ‘Currency War’ as China’s Yuan Falls to Five-Year Low
Nations Scramble to Compete in ‘Currency War’ as China’s Yuan Falls to Five-Year Low
Allan Ajifo / (CC BY 2.0)
China, Europe and Japan are driving down the value of their currencies in order to make their exports more attractive on the global market, leaving millions of workers in associated industries “protected or vulnerable, depending on which side they find themselves,” writes Guardian economics correspondent Phillip Inman.
Governments devalue their currencies to make their goods cheaper and thus increase the volume of their exports. It’s an attempt to shift what economists call the “balance of trade” in a country’s favor, with the intended net effect of increasing a home economy’s size and overall wealth.
Inman continues:
The phrase “currency war” speaks to a seemingly phoney battle between the world’s major trading powers over the price of exports. It has all the attributes of an illusory conflict because no one ever agrees that a genuine dispute has taken place. And as long as everyone denies they have drawn swords to slash their currency to compete with rival powers, talk of a war fizzles and dies.
There is a fringe constituency of analysts who have long argued that, much like the hundred years’ war of intermittent battles between England and France, currency wars make headlines only when there is a lurch in policy, which is the equivalent of deploying archers and unleashing the cavalry.
China’s decision to set its benchmark for the yuan at a five-year low is such a moment. It makes clear what has been true since last August, namely that the Communist leadership believes it needs a low-valued currency to help bail out its ailing export industries. The problem is that everyone wants to use the same trick.
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The American Empire: Murder Inc.
The American Empire: Murder Inc.
As Indonesia’s former President Suharto lay ill in 2008, a supporter displayed a portrait of him outside the Jakarta hospital where the military dictator died two weeks later. It was in Suharto’s brutal three-decade reign that Indonesia invaded East Timor, where investigative journalist Allan Nairn covered atrocities the general’s troops committed. (Vincent Thian / AP)
Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together. Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes, targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands, death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars.
Countries we seek to dominate, from Indonesia and Guatemala to Iraq and Afghanistan, are intimately familiar with these brutal mechanisms of control. But the reality of empire rarely reaches the American public. The few atrocities that come to light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The public is assured what has been uncovered will be investigated and will not take place again. The goals of empire, we are told by a subservient media and our ruling elites, are virtuous and noble. And the vast killing machine grinds forward, feeding, as it has always done, the swollen bank accounts of defense contractors and corporations that exploit natural resources and cheap labor around the globe.
There are very few journalists who have covered empire with more courage, tenacity and integrity than Allan Nairn. For more than three decades, he has reported from Central America, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti and Indonesia—where Indonesian soldiers fractured his skull and arrested him. His reporting on the Indonesian government massacres in East Timor saw him branded a “threat to national security” and officially banned from occupied East Timor.
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