Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.
Luxury retailers are
smiling. So are the owners of high-end restaurants, sellers of upscale cars,
vacation planners, financial advisors, and personal coaches. For them and their
customers and clients the recession is over. The recovery is now full speed. Protesters
rally against economic injustice.
But the rest of America
isn’t enjoying an economic recovery. It’s still sick. Many Americans remain in
critical condition.
The Commerce Department
reported Thursday that the economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate last quarter
(far better than the measly 1.8 percent third quarter growth). Personal income
also jumped. Americans raked in over $13 trillion, $3.3 billion more than
previously thought.
Yet it’s almost a certainly
that all the gains went to the top 10 percent, and the lion’s share to the top
1 percent. Over a third of the gains went to 15,600 super-rich households in
the top one-tenth of one percent.
Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Senator, excuse me, Justice Samuel Alito quoted Congressional Budget Office figures on Tuesday to talk about the insurance costs of the young. On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts sounded like the House whip in discussing whether parts of the law could stand if other parts fell. He noted that without various provisions, Congress “wouldn’t have been able to put together, cobble together, the votes to get it through.” Tell me again, was this a courtroom or a lobbyist’s office?
It fell to the court’s liberals—the so-called “judicial activists,” remember?—to remind their conservative brethren that legislative power is supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches.
As the Trayvon Martin case
draws national attention, we look at another fatal shooting of an
African-American male that has received far less scrutiny. Kenneth Chamberlain,
Sr., a 68-year-old African-American Marine veteran, was fatally shot in
November by White Plains, NY, police who responded to a false alarm
from his medical alert pendant. The officers broke down Chamberlain’s door,
tasered him, and then shot him dead.
Audio of the entire incident
was recorded by the medical alert device in Chamberlain’s apartment. We’re
joined by family attorneys and Chamberlain’s son, Kenneth Chamberlain, Jr., who
struggles through tears to recount his father’s final moments, including the
way police officers mocked his father’s past as a marine. "For them to
look at my father that way, (with) no regard for his life, every morning I
think about it," he says.
I’m far more interested in
forgiveness than justice.
I say this just to calm
myself down after a morning of media overkill, so to speak. There are so many
murdered mothers and children in the news, some with names and faces, so many
just adding anonymously to one death toll or another.
An Iraqi mom, 32 years old,
is beaten to death in her house in El
Cajon, Calif. A note
by her body reads: “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” Was it a hate
crime? An isolated incident?
The guy who killed Trayvon
Martin is still at large, somewhere. But his 2005 mug shot is everywhere,
making him the poster child of vigilante justice. Do I have to reduce the
killer to that viral scowl to feel compassion for Trayvon?
The show of paramilitary
force at the national party conventions held since the 9/11 attacks has been
nothing less than shocking, though the vast majority of America doesn’t know it
because they weren’t there, or they simply don’t care.
Still, since the Occupy
movement has brought on new
and creative crackdowns on Constitutionally-protected protest activity
in towns and cities all over the country, you can bet that when it comes to
security at this summer’s Republican and Democratic Party confabs, you
ain’t seen nothing yet.
Antiwar protesters
nevertheless plan to join demonstrators of myriad stripes, many under the Occupy rubric, as
they converge on three major events this spring and summer, beginning with the
NATO summit in Chicago in May, the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August, and the
twin Democratic confab in early September.
What would you do if you
came across someone on the street that had not had anything to eat for several
days? Would you give that person some food? Well, the next time you
get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the
homeless where you live. Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in
major cities all over America.
Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on
those that want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food
preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become "out of
reach" for most average people. Some cities are doing these things
because they are concerned about the "health risks" of the food being
distributed by ordinary "do-gooders". Other cities are
passing these laws because they do not want homeless people congregating in
city centers where they know that they will be fed. But at a time when
poverty and government dependence are soaring to unprecedented levels, is it
really a good idea to ban people from helping those that are hurting?
This is just another example
that shows that our country is being taken over by control freaks. There
seems to be this idea out there that it is the job of the government to take care
of everyone and that nobody else should even try.
But do we really want to
have a nation where you have to get the permission of the government before you
do good to your fellow man?
Given the rush to judgment
in the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, are we who are emphatically
claiming a case of racism really acting in a racist manner albeit
reversed? After all, innocent until proven guilty is still Justice's
credo so why are so many, as was the case of Casey Anthony, so quick to judge
and condemn Zimmerman without substantial proof? Is it because we do not
want to be seen as racist or in anyway supporting of it if it did in fact,
exist? By collectively hating a "hater" have we have become the same
kind of racist we so emphatically judge Zimmerman to be?
Ask yourself this: If Zimmerman
were a black man, would we all be so quick to judge this as racism or a hate
crime? Likewise; if Trayvon were white, would justice have been so slow in
rendering a verdict and would have investigators done their job
properly? The view of this incident is as murky as any other where none of
us were physically present when it transpired. We can only know what happened
in Sanford by information told to us in reports from news agencies which have
in the past, only been used to guide our opinion instead of reporting actual
fact. None of us were there. Supposition is not evidence nor is it enough
to render judgment in any case; even this one.
Racism and prejudice do
exist in America in a devastating way but this travesty cannot define exactly
why we see so much of it across this country and be solved it by electing a
martyr; nor can it be used to change the reality of Trayvon Martin’s death.
What it can do though, is open our eyes to the reality of how the color of skin
and ethnicity of those involved affects our reaction but also, how it opens the
door into a land of self awakening where we all realize that George Zimmerman
is not the only one who should be accused of racism. We all in some part, large
or small, should be judged of the same for not only our immediate desire to
look righteous but our desire to judge without evidence the guilt of one man
which if I recall from these same news agencies, was exactly what Zimmerman is
said to have done in his jugement of Martin.
These are not the only questions
to ponder. What about “Stand Your Ground” as a defense to justify a man killing
someone in a neighborhood when he was the one pursuing, not being pursued? I
teach my children to defend themselves if a stranger walks up to them and they
feel threatened but according to this Law, if they attempt to fight off a would
be abductor or attacker, that attacker now has the right to shoot them. This
incident has major potential to take gun control and those who use such Laws to
act as vigilantes to a deadly level and all but render us all victims rather
than allowing us the security we are told we have a right to. How many
more of these incidents do we have to witness or how many will go unnoticed in
this nation before we either self-destruct or we come together to find real
solutions to our ever growing social dilemmas?
As the last show was unfortunately cancelled, we will be discussing this as one of the stories - 04-02-12 - Breaking Taboo - Newdissidentradio.com - 7:00 PM EST - Be sure to tune in.
Racism is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Racism is not just a term though, it is an evil action of mind and body that both erodes and degrades our human race by poisoning it with beliefs of superiority when it is in and of itself, the very thing which makes us so inferior as a Nation.
This ugly word has become the singular issue surrounding the Trayvon Martin case in Florida this past month. Racism is being tossed into the ring regarding a vigilante neighborhood watchman with a weapon who somehow became compelled to shoot to death a young black teenager walking home from the store because he fit the profile of other black man who “always get away”. Those words sound perfectly normal from a racist but the fact remaining is how charges have not yet been filed because somehow, proof does not exist showing it was in fact, a hate crime.
So are you. And so is any
human being who has ever felt cornered, in a dark and desolate alley,
between life and death. Add
the grim reality of skin color in America, and you have the disastrous
spectacle of 250lb George Zimmerman, 28, pursuing 140lb Trayvon, 17, until
that man-child is screaming "Help!" – and then gasping for air after
a bullet from Zimmerman's 9mm handgun had punctured his chest. A
majority-white, gated community became, on 26 February, the makeshift mortuary
for a black boy who will not get a chance to live, to go to college with his
exceptional high school grades, to make something of his life. Trayvon's fatal
act: a mundane walk to the nearby convenience store to buy a can of iced tea
and a bag of Skittles.
This is what racism, the
American version of it, means to black boys like Trayvon, to black men like me.
That we often don't stand a chance when it has been determined, oftentimes by a
single individual acting as judge and jury, that we are criminals to be
pursued, confronted, tackled, and, yes, subdued. To be shocked and awed into
submission.
When Justin Bassett
interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and
references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else:
his Facebook username and password.
Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished
answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer
to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She
turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.
Bassett refused and withdrew
his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek
such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job
candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and
some of them cannot afford to say no.
Is there no end to these
endless, misguided wars that are bringing shame and dishonor upon this nation?
How much longer will this nation waste its wealth and resources on the
proliferation of unjustifiable wars? The image that America now projects to the world
is that of a warring nation, one that settles its differences with other
nations, not by diplomacy, but by military force.
Those shameless war
profiteers who dominate our nation's capitol are people who have no conscience
and have, long ago, lost their moral foundations. Money and power are what
drives them and if their sordid agenda results in the needless loss of lives of
people in other nations and our troops, it bothers them not in the least. They
live in their own world of wealth and privilege, with not the slightest concern
for their fellow human beings.
If President Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq based on lies and deception, please explain why the U.S. is not responsible for repairing the horrific damage inflicted on those two countries and for paying reparations. By some estimates more than 1 million Iraqis have been killed, more than a million have been wounded, more than a million have lost their homes, two million have fled the country, and millions are without adequate electricity and other services essential for civilized life.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s ongoing war in Afghanistan is claiming some 4,000 civilian lives a year and forcing hundreds of thousands of Afghan residents out of their homes. And what of those citizens of both nations who have lost their jobs, starved to death, been stricken by diseases which previously did not exist, such as cholera, and doused with radioactive poisons from uranium-tipped shells and have been unable to obtain medical care as doctors and health technicians fled in the face of the invasion or because hospitals, (yes, hospitals) were destroyed in the fighting or commandeered by the Pentagon?
At mid-evening, on Saturday,
March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in
Lower Manhattan, the NYPD initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS
activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might
venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression
across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.
After all, the NYPD suffered
no ill consequences from its search-and-destroy mission launched in the late
fall of 2011 to scour the park, renamed Liberty Square, of liberty.
In a police state, unjust
actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies
in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the
degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the
state’s assaults on civil liberties and common decency.
"Brace yourself: Drone
killings of US citizens will continue, more government whistle blowers will be
brought to trial, and Washington
will become even more secretive."
By now, you'd think
we'd be entering the end of the 9/11 era. One war over in the Greater Middle
East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaeda so
diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter.
You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze
back to first principles: the Constitution and its protections of rights and
liberties.
Yet warning signs abound
that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security,
those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most
notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies
continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely,
American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the
workings of our government to journalists and others.
Here and elsewhere, it looks
like we can expect the Obama administration to continue to barrel down the path
that has already taken us far from the country we used to be. And by next year,
if a different president is in the Oval Office, expect him to lead us even
further astray. With that in mind, here are five categories in the sphere of
national security where 2012 is likely to prove even grimmer than 2011.
How
shall the world view the apology by President Obama for the massacre of 16
Afghan villagers allegedly by a lone U.S.
serviceman in KandaharProvince when the
President is himself personally responsible for the extra-judicial killing of
hundreds of civilians by means of drone aircraft strikes whose crime he defends?
Army Staff Sgt., Robert Bales, of Lake Tapps, Wash., is being held in prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Mr. Obama is free to travel
the campaign trail.
“We’re
heart-broken over the loss of innocent life,” the president said of the Kandahar massacre. His
seeming expression of contrition rings hollow, though, particularly if one
considers how Mr. Obama goes about his daily routine ordering drone strikes and
seemingly is unaffected by the “loss of innocent lives” they cause, as
well as by the hated companion night raids on Afghan homes, also the result of
his policy.
Recently, the media had been ablaze with the reports of an American soldier who, after walking into an Afghanistan village, shot and killed 16 civilians, most of them, women and children. America’s response was quick and calculated: He will be tried for murder and will receive the death penalty when proven to have committed the acts. Afghanistan officials want him tried in their country but either way, the soldier has been slated to die.
The uni-polar decision to condemn this man for his actions, albeit somewhat justified, should be recognized as more than just a crazy man gone vigilantly; it should more appropriately be looked at as the result of a system that has taken our soldiers from people to property in the grand game of economic war paid for with the blood of those who are forced into endless tours of duty and the policies of death employed by the military industrial complex. When a drone kills innocent civilians, it is called an accident even when it was known the targets were civilians. When a lone soldier does so, it is defined as an act of murder by a mentally troubled person rather than by the machine he was trained to be.
In all US war
theaters, troops commit unspeakable atrocities. Trained to dehumanize enemies,
their mission involves killing, destruction, and much more.
Local treasures are looted.
Women are raped. Civilians are treated like combatants. Children are
indiscriminately harmed like adults. Prisoners are tortured. Mutilations are
common. Crimes of war and against humanity are institutionalized. It's all in a
day's work like taking out the garbage.
Viciousness defines US wars.
No crime's too great to commit. Human lives are valueless. Only winning
matters, then on to the next war. Lies, deception, unspeakable brutality, and
cover-up define them.
On March 16th, President
Obama signed a new Executive Order which expands upon a prior order issued in
1950 for Disaster Preparedness, and gives the office of the President complete
control over all the resources in the United States in times of war or
emergency.
The National Defense
Resources Preparedness order gives the Executive Branch the power to control
and allocate energy, production, transportation, food, and even water resources
by decree under the auspices of national defense and national security.
The order is not limited to wartime implementation, as one of the order's
functions includes the command and control of resources in peacetime
determinations.
It’s been exactly 50 years
since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty,
thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now
seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s
“discovery” of America,
it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and
“invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out.
Harrington’s book jolted a
nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the
spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter
of the population lived in poverty -- inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites,
farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as
President Nixon had done in his“kitchen
debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the
splendors of American capitalism.
Although
President Obama says “now is not the time for bluster” about Iran, his administration “has adopted a
strategic approach that is moving the United States closer to war,” “The
Nation” magazine warns in a March 26th editorial.
While
Iran has the right to
enrich uranium under international law, Mr. Obama has made it U.S. policy to stop Iran
from doing so despite the fact all 16 U.S.
intelligence agencies say Iran
has abandoned its earlier nuclear weapons program.
“Another
questionable proposition” (embraced by the Obama administration”) is that “an
Iranian nuclear weapon is a threat to Israel,
and therefore Israel and the
U.S.
have the right to launch a preventive military strike,” the magazine says in
its lead editorial.
We may never know what drove
a U.S. Army staff sergeant to head out into the Afghan night and allegedly
murder at least 16 civilians in their homes, among them nine children and three
women. The massacre near Belambai, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, has shocked the world and
intensified the calls for an end to the longest war in U.S. history.
The attack has been called tragic, which it surely is. But when Afghans attack U.S. forces,
they are called “terrorists.” That is, perhaps, the inconsistency at the core
of U.S.
policy, that democracy can be delivered through the barrel of a gun, that
terrorism can be fought by terrorizing a nation.
“I did it,” the alleged mass
murderer said as he returned to the forward operating base outside Kandahar, that southern
city called the “heartland of the Taliban.” He is said to have left the base at
3 a.m. and walked to three nearby homes, methodically killing those inside. One
farmer, Abdul Samad, was away at the time. His wife, four sons, and four
daughters were killed. Some of the victims had been stabbed, some set on fire.
Samad told The New York Times, “Our government told us to come back to the
village, and then they let the Americans kill us.”
Why are so many in support of this brutality; this insane reflection of greed and corruption. This is not what America stands for; it is not what We the People - the true Patriots - represent but still, so many blindly ignore it and by proxy, support it. Welcome to the America's quasi Democracy...America's death.
The Pentagon is attempting to quash coverage of its activities by
alleging that any reporter seeking classified information is collaborating with
the source and guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange says.
In an interview published in “Rolling Stone” magazine, Assange,
now under house arrest in England, said the Pentagon demanded “we not only
destroy everything we had ever published or were ever going to publish in
relation to the U.S. government, but that we also stop ‘soliciting’ information
from U.S. government employees.”
Assange asserts the Pentagon is trying to create a new legal precedent
that forbids “a journalist simply asking a source to communicate information.”
Last autumn, there was a
military coup in Thailand.
The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if
they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days,
democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent
armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued
restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain
activists into custody.
They were not figuring these
things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there
is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship.
That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and
less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and
arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one
down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to
contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10
steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush
administration (and continue to be implemented by those under Obama).
"Through all the
humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has been abused and suffered
more, and none has been helped less than Afghanistan."
He described what looked
more like a moonscape than a functioning nation. In Kabul, "contours of rubble rather than
streets (exist), where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake
victims waiting for rescue....(with) no light or heat."
If hell on earth exists,
it's headquartered in Afghanistan,
but has many global affiliate locations.
Testing is a part of every student’s life from athletics to
scholastics. In the latter case, children and young adults are tested to
determine their performance and retention of course information. These
tests are necessary to gauge in what area a student needs work in order to
enhance their education. To ensure that the students are achieving
the desired level of minimum educationn, in 2001, No Child Left Behind was
passed into Law requiring that schools test students in public
schools. In America’s
educational system today though, the testing process has taken a turn for the
worse, turning it into a performance-based institution rather than one which is
meant to stimulate intellectual prowess. This attempt to reform education
seemed harmless enough at first but when the reality of its implications began
to set in, many quickly realized how errant a policy it was.
As Anton Batey has stated,
“At first glance, the concept of standardized tests seems reasonable. Children
should be tested, and the tests are clear indicators either of how intelligent
they are, or of how much the school is teaching them. But what is the school
"teaching" them, exactly? The answer is simple but unfortunate:
They're teaching them how to take the test.” Testing is important
but when school administrators and teachers are given the sole task of ensuring
their students perform well else risk losing Federal funding or even, their
jobs, it only opens the door to fraudulent recording of scores, purposefully
omitting “special needs” students and dismissing all extracurricular efforts
only to appear as successful in their educational methodology.
Part of the issue with this
testing method is in it’s determination of “how intelligent a child is”.
When the child’s results, which may be recorded as poor; directly attributable
to their low performing school, are posted publicly as required under this Law,
the affects on a child’s confidence and future potential, can be extremely
destructive. But this is not the only test that can be detrimental in this
manner. Intelligence, personality and career testing all attempt to
assist young people in finding their place in our society but these
measurements may also negatively affect their self-image. While a child may be
incredibly artistic they could fail in reading or mathematics or be assigned a
low I.Q. and as determined by these tests, could very well be “left behind” as
a failure in their own minds, taking from them any hope for success.
The question becomes then;
is teaching our children to be performers as opposed to thinkers detrimental
and is this approach diminishing the true purpose of education; that of
empowerment. By using our children as gauges as opposed to encouraging free thinking, future leaders, we are doing more harm than good to not only their futures
but our collective society’s. What we all should be asking ourselves is:
Are we empowering our children and feeding their potential, inner genii or are
we handicapping them in an inane effort to simply adhere to an errant, short
term philosophy; doing more harm to them than good?
When
President George W. Bush was pretending to want to avoid a war on Iraq while
constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going, we had a
feeling he was lying. After all, he was a Republican. But it was
after the war was raging away that we came upon things like the Downing Street
Minutes and the White
House Memo.
Now
President Barack Obama is pretending to want to avoid a war on Iran and to want Israel not
to start one, while constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going.
We might suspect a lack of sincerity, given the insistence that Iran put
an end to a program that the U.S. government simultaneously says there is no
evidence exists, given the increase in free weapons for Israel to $3.1 billion
next year, given the ongoing protection of Israel at the U.N. from any
accountability for crimes, given the embrace of sanctions highly unlikely to
lead to anything other than greater prospects of war, and given Obama's refusal
to take openly illegal war "off the table." We might suspect
that peace was not the ultimate goal, except of course that Obama is a Democrat.
One way in which Americans
have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we
took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement”
made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education. And afterWorld War II, public support,
including the G.I. Bill and a huge expansion of public universities, helped
large numbers of Americans to get college degrees.
But now one of our two major
political parties has taken a hard right turn against education, or at least
against education that working Americans can afford. Remarkably, this new
hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic
conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney.
And this comes at a time
when American education is already in deep trouble.
About that hostility: Mr.
Santorum made headlines by declaring that President Obama wants to expand
college enrollment because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that destroy
religious faith. But Mr. Romney’s response to a high school senior worried
about college costs is arguably even more significant, because what he said
points the way to actual policy choices that will further undermine American
education.
America today is no longer a Land of Opportunity
but one of basic survival for the middle to lower class tax brackets. The hope
we once knew and looked toward in our daily struggles as a beacon of light at
the end of the labor tunnel is quickly being extinguished by corporatism and
entitlements for the rich while we at the bottom slave to minimally support our
families.
Our governmental
representatives sit in Washington,
D.C. deliberating our collective
future, while We the People can only hope they are doing so in our best
interests. To date though, this has not happened. To date, they have done
nothing but add to our national deficit with corporate bailouts and tax havens
for their contributors while our national education system has come under
attack, our teachers lose their jobs, citizens lose their homes and our elders
face the loss of Medicare and the elimination of social security, a fund into
which they have paid their whole, working lives. To date, they have only
appeased us with pointless debates while the same corporations that feed from
the public trough fill these politician’s pockets with “campaign contributions”.
In addition to this, the
military complex continues to cripple our economy under the guise of National
Security and the global trade policies pushed by a corporatist agenda have all
but rendered us global sheep in a broken field of dreams. Adding insult to
injury, American factories have been allowed to leave America,
exporting our jobs and are able to ship their goods in without tariffs or trade
restrictions through legislative manipulations like NAFTA and CAFTA. Currently,
our government is trying to initiate a Global free trade policy that will
further cripple our workforce by forcing them to labor for lower pay and fewer
benefits in order to remain competitive with third world workers.
The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is
part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the
making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding
the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech,
infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably
assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of
grievances.
This bill covers much more
than the Pres, VP, and their houses
(1) the term ‘restricted buildings or grounds’ means any posted, cordoned off,
or otherwise restricted area--
(A) of the White House or its grounds, or the Vice President’s official
residence or its grounds;
(B) of a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by
the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting; or
(C) of a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event
designated as a special event of national significance; and
(2) the term ‘other person protected by the Secret Service’ means any person
whom the United States Secret Service is authorized to protect under section
3056 of this title or by Presidential memorandum, when such person has not
declined such protection.
(a) Whoever--
(1) knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without
lawful authority to do so;
(2) knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of
Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive
conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds
when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly
conduct of Government business or official functions;
(3) knowingly, and with the intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of
Government business or official functions, obstructs or impedes ingress or egress
to or from any restricted building or grounds; or
(4) knowingly engages in any act of physical violence against any person or
property in any restricted building or grounds;
or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be punished as provided in subsection
(b)."
The course of action taken by the present day U.S. political
class in addressing the era's rising tide of economic hardship and ecological
peril has proven as helpful as tossing an anvil to a drowning man.
The following two, axiomatic headlines reveal much about the dovetailing
mindsets manifested by members of both the drowning class and the moral
compass-bereft captains of the ship of state:
Nike Foamposite Galaxy Shoe Spurs Frenzy At Malls (Associated Press, Saturday,
February 25, 2012)
Mitt Romney: Wife Ann Drives ‘A Couple Of Cadillacs’ (The Washington Post,
Friday, February 24, 2012)
Inadvertently, Mr. Romney's declaration, stated in his own blandly deranged
way, captures the As Above/So Below nature of consumer state psychology.
By means of incessant, womb to tomb, commercial propaganda, the corporate class
has promoted the idea that an individual's identity is based solely on the sum
total of his worldly possessions. Yet, when young people, denied a decent
education and stranded in circumstances where they have been deprived of a means
to gain a sense of identity by acquiring the skills and the development of the
talents necessary for the pursuit of their individual aspirations, have the
temerity to reflect the societal values they have internalized -- for example,
by acting in an aggressive manner in a mindless pursuit of material items that
they have been conditioned to believe will bestow a sense of self worth -- then
media elites and bamboozled bourgeois should not, as they can be counted on to
do, react with consternation, carrying on as if these acts of desperation on
the part of the young are wholly devoid of any cultural context.
Often lost in the political
wrangling over the controversial Keystone
XL pipeline – on hold afterPresident
Obama rejected TransCanada’s initial construction proposal – are some
key findings that run counter to the rosy picture of abundant supply and lower
prices so often painted by US politicians.
Canadian companies backing the
Keystone XL – touted as enhancing US energy security with a big new surge of
imported Canadian oil – actually expect it to supply more lucrative Gulf Coast export
markets as well as raise Midwest oil prices by reducing “oversupply” in that
region.
These little-publicized
findings are contained in the studies and testimony of experts working for
TransCanada, the company that wants to build the pipeline from Alberta’s
tar sands across America’s
heartland to GulfCoast refineries.
Some of these concerns
popped up, albeit briefly, in US congressional testimony last year on the
pipeline project, and have given rise to a recent proposal to bar the sale of
Keystone oil overseas.
Author and social critic
Morris Berman says the fact that we're a nation of hustlers lies at the root of
our decline.
Bottom
of Form
Several years after the Wall
Street-ignited crisis began, the nation’s top bank CEOs (who far
out-accumulated their European and other international counterparts) continue
to hobnob with the president at campaign dinners where each plate costs more
than one out of four US households make in a year. Financial bigwigs lead their
affluent lives, unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on
the nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the
American Dream.
This is not the American
Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents;
but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take
from others is unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring,
compassion, and connection have been devalued from the get-go. This is the flaw
in the entire premise of the American Dream: if we can have it all, it must by
definition be at someone else’s expense.
Residents of one Canadian
town are engaged in a David and Goliath-style battle over the dirtiest oil
project ever known.
Filmmakers: Niobe
Thompson and Tom Radford AlJazeera.com
The small town of Fort Chipewyan in northern Alberta
is facing the consequences of being the first to witness the impact of the Tar
Sands project, which may be the tipping point for oil development in Canada.
The local community has experienced a spike in cancer cases and dire
studies have revealed the true consequences of "dirty oil".
Gripped in a Faustian
pact with the American energy consumer, the Canadian government is doing
everything it can to protect the dirtiest oil project ever known. In the following
account, filmmaker Tom Radford describes witnessing a David and Goliath
struggle.
