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When abortion was illegal

2012-01-22T20:03:00.003+01:00

This Academy Award-nominated film features compelling first person accounts which reveal the physical, legal, and emotional consequences during the era when abortion was a criminal act. Remembrances include those of women who experienced illegal abortions, doctors who risked imprisonment and loss of their licenses for providing illegal abortions, and individuals who broke the law by helping women find safe abortions.

China the roots of madness

2012-01-22T19:59:00.002+01:00

The World War on Democracy

2012-01-21T10:11:00.000+01:00

By John Pilger

January 20, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling girls!"

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, "I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

In the early 1960s, the Labor government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be "swept" and "sanitized" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lisette, "When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying."

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertilizer: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette’s youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other. "They died of sadness," she said. "They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction," the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "re-classifying" the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along." Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime — in exchange for a $14 million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine — was not on the agenda of a group of British "defense" correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defense when the US base was completed. "There is nothing in our files," said a ministry official, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantánamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalization, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "it never happened even while it was happening." Last July, American historian William Blum published his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy." Since the Second World War, the US has:

Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name – from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism, and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy ("Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as "the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century," the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers, and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright, or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that "disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue." And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.

Praise the Lord for all good things …

We blew their balls into shards of dust,

Into shards of fucking dust …

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in "Bugsplat." Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: "momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed …" The San Francisco Chronicle‘s columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet." Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the antiwar movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama’s most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil authorities." In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognizable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy." This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s "big society," the theft of 84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax "legally" avoided by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, "can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism." Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies" – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," said Lisette. "And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others." Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"

I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

www.johnpilger.com

Romney Hiding Millions in Dozens of Secret Offshore Accounts

2012-01-20T09:45:00.000+01:00

Romney Hiding Millions in Dozens of Secret Offshore Accounts: Report

By Stephen C. Webster

January 19, 2012 "Raw Story" -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been hesitant to disclose his tax records and personal finances, and now it might be clear why: the former Massachusetts Governor has hidden tens of millions from the U.S. Treasury in secret offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, according to ABC News.

Offshore accounts used as so-called “tax havens” cost the U.S. over $100 billion a year, and are commonly utilized by the wealthiest citizens and corporations as a means of avoiding U.S. taxes on lucrative profits.

Romney, one of the wealthiest people to ever seek the presidency, said recently he pays about 15 percent of his income in taxes, insisting that he follows all applicable laws. That tax rate is actually much lower than what most Americans pay — the average U.S. household can expect to pay roughly 19 percent in federal taxes each year, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington thinktank.

ABC News noted that Romney has invested over $33 million in more than a dozen funds listed in the Cayman Islands. In addition, their examination of securities records revealed that his former company, Bain Capital, holds 138 accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Romney’s campaign told the network that the candidate was simply investing in funds that provided the best opportunity for profits.

“Gov. and Mrs. Romney have money invested in funds that the trustee has determined to be attractive investment opportunities, and those funds are domiciled wherever the fund sponsors happen to organize the funds,” a campaign spokesperson told ABC News.

The candidate’s tax records have become a subject of recent concern among other Republicans seeking the party’s nomination, and Romney was directly challenged by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to release them as soon as possible. Romney said he’d likely do so in April, long after the crucial Republican primary races have ended.

Stephen C. Webster is the senior editor of Raw Story, and is based out of Austin, Texas. He previously worked as the associate editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford, Texas, where he covered state politics and the peace movement’s resurgence at the start of the Iraq war. Webster has also contributed to publications such as True/Slant, Austin Monthly, The Dallas Business Journal, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Weekly, The News Connection and others. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenCWebster.

Copyright © 2004-2012 Raw Story Media, Inc.

Ron Paul Introduces Repeal of Indefinite Detention

2012-01-20T09:32:00.001+01:00

18 January 2012

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce a very simple piece of legislation to repeal the infamous Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, quietly signed into law by the president on New Year’s Day.
Section 1021 essentially codifies into law the very dubious claim of presidential authority under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to indefinitely detain American citizens without access to legal representation or due process of law. Section 1021 provides for the possibility of the US military acting as a kind of police force on US soil, apprehending terror suspects – including Americans — and whisking them off to an undisclosed location indefinitely. No right to attorney, no right to trial, no day in court.

This is precisely the kind of egregious distortion of justice that Americans have always ridiculed in so many dictatorships overseas. A great man named Solzhenitsyn became the hero of so many of us when he exposed the Soviet Union’s extensive gulag system. Is this really the kind of United States we want to create in the name of fighting terrorism?

Some have argued that nothing in Section 1021 explicitly mandates holding Americans without trial, but it employs vague language radically expanding the detention authority to include anyone who has “substantially supported” certain terrorist groups or “associated forces.” No one has defined what those two terms mean. What is an “associated force”?

Sadly, too many of my colleagues are too willing to undermine our Constitution to support such outrageous legislation. One senator even said about American citizens picked up under this section of the NDAA, “When they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’” Is this acceptable in someone one who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution?

Mr. Speaker, of course I recognize how critical it is that we identify and apprehend those who are suspected of plotting attacks against Americans. But why do we have so little faith in our justice system? Have we not tried in civilian court and won convictions of hundreds of individuals for terrorist or related activities? I fully support our continuing to do so, but let us not abandon what is so unique and special about our system of government in the process.

I hope my colleagues will join my effort to overturn the shameful Section 1021.

hands-only cpr

2012-01-04T11:31:00.005+01:00

Forget mouth to mouth ....

The American Empire Is Over

2012-01-02T23:25:00.003+01:00

Chris Hedges "Brace Yourself! The American Empire Is Over
& The Descent Is Going To Be Horrifying!"

"We have undergone, I think, in the last few decades a kind of slow motion coup d'état."

Toy Soldiers

2011-12-31T06:53:00.000+01:00

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

December 30, 2011 "Information Clearing House" According to recent news accounts, shattered and shredded body parts and remains of U.S. servicemen were found in a landfill.

Despite political spins, this sobering image is a telling, true-life metaphor for what those in power really think of soldiers, many of whom are but boys and girls freshly loosed from High School.

In recent years, politicians, especially when on TV or radio talk shows, are apt to say, when addressing a vet, "I thank you for your service." In truth, this is robot-talk, kind of like when a parrot is trained to say, "Hello!", and about as meaningful.

The American poet, e.e. cummings once said, " A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat, except a man." John Africa said, "A politician will tell you he wasn't born of a woman, if it'll get you to vote for him."

In these passing years, since 9/11, wars have been fought that have devastated countries, economies, and world peace. Untold thousands have died, many for nothing more, nor less, than American paranoia. Thousands of U.S. soldiers have died defending American lies.

And tens of thousands have returned, bodies, minds, souls shattered by political calculations driven by arrogance, greed and sheer stupidity. Thousands of marriages have ended in divorce because of forced years apart, and families have been broken asunder because some greasy politician wanted to play 'War-President' (or Senator, or Representative.)

In a real sense, military body parts tossed into landfills as trash, is more than metaphor.

It is truth.

Suicide Kills More US Soldiers Than Combat

2011-12-24T18:20:00.000+01:00

The U.S. troop withdrawal leaves behind a country embittered by an occupation that's cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. And as U.S. soldiers return home for Christmas, the mood is far from joyful among veterans struggling to deal with the personal aftermath of the war. With soaring suicide rates, it's still too early to estimate the true cost of the invasion.

The Dark Side in Al Doura

2011-12-20T01:16:00.006+01:00

WARNING: Graphic and disturbing photos.

U.S. Army Ranger John Needham, who was awarded two purple hearts and three medals for heroism, wrote to military authorities in 2007 reporting war crimes that he witnessed being committed by his own command and fellow soldiers in Al Doura, Iraq. His charges were supported by atrocity photos which, in the public interest, are now released in this video. John paid a terrible price for his opposition to these acts. His story is tragic.

War Is A Crime

You Are Working For Criminals

2011-12-15T15:33:00.001+01:00

An Open Message to Police & Military

December 14, 2011 -- This is a message to the Police, to the military, to the TSA, to Homeland Security and to members of every other enforcement arm of the government.

Transcript

I know that most of you chose the life in uniform because you love your country; because you believed in what that uniform stood for; because you wanted to serve and protect... but I also know that deep down inside you sense that something has gone terribly wrong.

You've watched with the rest of us as elected officials have incrementally legislated our constitutional rights away, you've watched as the state surveillance apparatus has expanded like a cancer through the heart of the nation, and you've watched as the corruption has become more and more blatant. I can understand why you haven't wanted to acknowledge the implications of what you are witnessing. To face the reality of what is happening would mean admitting that you've been betrayed, and it would mean coming to terms with the fact that you... are working... for criminals.

I don't envy your position. I know your job depends on you following orders. I know you have families to support and bills to pay, and I know that if you stand up you could loose everything... but what you need to understand is that continuing to submit to unconstitutional, and immoral orders will not protect you from what is coming.

You may tell yourself that you will take a draw your line in the sand later, that there is a certain point where you will say no, but in reality, you crossed the line a long time ago. You are standing on the wrong side of history right now. You are already participating in the destruction of this country, in the trampling of our rights, of your children's rights, and grandchildren's rights. You are the enforcement arm of a criminal enterprise, you are a servant of a rapidly expanding police state, and you DO have a choice.

I'm not telling you this to condemn you. I'm telling you this because we the people desperately need you to take a stand. We desperately need you to have the courage to face your commanding officers, and tell them no, I didn't sign up for this. No this isn't right. No, I will not obey these unlawful orders.

You took an oath to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. Time to start taking that oath seriously
Waiting For The Storm

Police go military

2011-12-14T10:19:00.002+01:00

An onslaught of attacks with pepper-spray, tear gas guns and batons are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the arsenal of arms that the police are pulverizing peaceful protesters with.

No Country for Innocent Men

2011-12-14T01:31:00.001+01:00

n the night of March 24, 1985, Texas Tech sophomore Michele Murray was parking her car near campus when a tall black man in a yellow terry-cloth shirt approached and asked her for jumper cables. He reached into the window, unlocked the door, and shoved Murray to the passenger side. He forced her head down onto the seat and held a knife to her neck. He told her that if she kept screaming she wouldn't come back alive.

He smoked while he drove. He asked her name, her major. He took her to a field outside of town and raped her. He smoked when he was done. Then he made her drive him back to town, stole her jewelry and money, and took off on foot.

It was the fifth rape on or around the Texas Tech campus in four months. Female students were frantic. Police were on high alert. In all the cases, a young woman was approached in her car by a tall black man—identified as a smoker by three of the victims—who drove her outside of town at knifepoint and raped her. Composite sketches of the "Tech rapist" in the local papers seemed to change daily. Only about 500 of the 22,000 students on campus were black, and it became a grim joke among them: Don't walk around campus at night or they'll say you're the rapist.

Jerry Johnson at Tim Cole's exoneration hearing in 2009.: Harry Cabluck/AP PhotoJerry Johnson at Tim Cole's exoneration hearing in 2009 Harry Cabluck/AP Photo

The shoddy police investigation and sensational trial that followed were capped by a remarkable coincidence. When Cole was taken to the Lubbock County Jail after his sentencing, in September 1986, the real rapist was right there in a nearby cell. Johnson, who was awaiting trial for two other rapes and a murder, had followed Cole's story in the paper. He listened to Cole cry. "It was terrible to learn that Tim was…on trial for something I knew he hadn't done," Johnson wrote to me in a letter in 2010. "Seeing him cry his first night in jail and seeing him leave to be taken to prison was difficult, I cried." But he did nothing. He was already facing the death penalty. "I knew it wasn't good to say anything before I went to trial." Later he would learn in the prison library that there was also the statute of limitations to consider. So he kept his mouth shut—for nine years.

Johnson grew up in the 1960s on the east side of Lubbock, an impoverished neighborhood of cotton fields and ramshackle houses. He was raised mostly by his great-grandmother; his mother, JoNell Johnson, and grandmother lived nearby, as did his estranged father, Lorenzo Harris. "Sometimes Jerry would come over to the house, be out there at the fence," Harris recalls. "He knew I was his daddy, but my wife would run him off."

Read Jerry Johnson's full letter here.Read Jerry Johnson's full letter here.

Johnson was 12 years old the night in 1971 when his mother shot and killed a boyfriend after he assaulted her with a pool cue. (She was eventually sentenced to 10 years' probation.) He dropped out of high school but managed steady employment in blue-collar jobs. He had two children and got married in the early 1980s. But by 1985, Johnson says, he had lost control. "Obviously I had a psychological breakdown," he says. "Why, I don't know." When pressed, he demurs. "I cannot form a reason or cause for my actions."

Johnson raped Murray in March, he now admits, but investigators never pursued him as a suspect. He was arrested that July, however, for raping a woman he met at a party. In October, out on bond, he was arrested for kidnapping and raping a 15-year-old girl from Estacado High School; two years later, he was convicted of those crimes and sentenced to life in prison. He was also charged with murdering an insurance saleswoman, but those charges were dropped.

Johnson and I had been corresponding for about a year when we finally met in March 2010, in a bright, empty visitation room at the Price Daniel correctional facility in Snyder, Texas. Tall and thickly built, Johnson was dressed in the facility's standard white cotton shirt and pants and was soft-spoken and polite. Now 52, Johnson is certain he'll never be free again. "There's a lot of people live a false life; everything they do is a lie. Never no honesty. And you have those people that go to their death like that. I don't want to go to mine like that."

When I ask him about the four other Texas Tech rapes—so similar to Murray's but never solved—he says, "I don't have a comment about that stuff."

Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West

2011-12-12T20:38:00.005+01:00

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.
The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".
The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

Mom denied food stamps shoots kids, kills self

2011-12-07T18:07:00.000+01:00

Crime Scene tape is posted at the main entrance to the Texas Health and Human Services Offices in Laredo, Texas, Tuesday, Dec., 6, 2011. (AP Photo/The Laredo Morning Times, Cuate Santos)
(AP) SAN ANTONIO - A Texas woman who for months was unable to qualify for food stamps pulled a gun in a state welfare office and held a seven-hour standoff with police that ended with her shooting her two children before killing herself, officials said Tuesday.

The 10-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl remained in critical condition Tuesday. Authorities identified the mother as Rachelle Grimmer, 38, and children Ramie and Timothy.

When the family entered the office on Monday shortly before it closed, Grimmer asked to speak to a new caseworker, and not the one whom she worked with before, Texas Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said.

Grimmer was taken to a private room to discuss her case, then she revealed a gun and the standoff began, Goodman said.

Police negotiators stayed on the phone with Grimmer throughout the evening, but she kept hanging up, Laredo police investigator Joe Baeza said. She allegedly told negotiators about a litany of complaints against state and federal government agencies.

Grimmer let a supervisor go unharmed around 7:45 but stayed inside the office with her children. After hanging up the phone around 11:45, police heard three shots, and a riot police team entered the building. Inside, they found Grimmer's body and her two wounded children.

The children were "very critical" and unconscious, Baeza said.

Goodman said it's not unusual for caseworkers to confront angry or confused benefit-seekers, but that it's very rare for a situation to escalate to violence.

Baeza said Grimmer had recently moved to the border city from Ohio.

Grimmer first applied for food stamps in July but was denied because she didn't turn in enough information, Goodman said. She said it wasn't immediately clear what information was missing.

"We were still waiting, and if we had that, I don't know if she would still qualify or not," Goodman said.

Goodman didn't know whether Grimmer had a job, or whether her children were covered under Medicaid or the state children's health insurance program.

The family's move from Ohio may have complicated Grimmer's application if the family had no Texas records the agency could check electronically, Goodman said.

State welfare offices have come under scrutiny in the past for being overburdened, but Goodman said the agency has made significant progress in the past three years. She said wait times are shorter, and that Grimmer was scheduled for her initial interview just one day after applying. Grimmer didn't make the appointment, she said.

War is Prime Time and Journalism’s Role is Taboo

2011-12-03T11:52:00.000+01:00

Once Again, War is Prime Time and Journalism’s Role is Taboo

By John Pilger

December 02, 2011 "Information Clearing House" - On 22 May 2007, the Guardian’s front page announced: "Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq." The writer, Simon Tisdall, claimed that Iran had secret plans to defeat American troops in Iraq, which included "forging ties with al-Qaeda elements." The coming "showdown" was an Iranian plot to influence a vote in the US Congress. Based entirely on briefings by anonymous US officials, Tisdall’s "exclusive" rippled with lurid tales of Iran’s "murder cells" and "daily acts of war against US and British forces." His 1,200 words included just 20 for Iran’s flat denial.

It was a load of rubbish: in effect a Pentagon press release presented as journalism and reminiscent of the notorious fiction that justified the bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003. Among Tisdall’s sources were "senior advisers" to General David Petraeus, the US military commander who in 2006 described his strategy of waging a "war of perceptions … conducted continuously through the news media."

The media war against Iran began in 1979 when the west’s placeman Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a tyrant, was overthrown in a popular Islamic revolution. The "loss" of Iran, which under the shah was regarded as the "fourth pillar" of western control of the Middle East, has never been forgiven in Washington and London.

Last month, the Guardian’s front page carried another "exclusive": "MoD prepares to take part in US strikes against Iran." Again, anonymous officials were quoted. This time the theme was the "threat" posed by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon. The latest "evidence" was warmed-over documents obtained from a laptop in 2004 by US intelligence and passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Numerous authorities have cast doubt on these suspected forgeries, including a former IAEA chief weapons inspector. A US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks describes the new head of the IAEA, Yukiuya Amano, as "solidly in the US court" and "ready for prime time."

The Guardian’s 3 November "exclusive" and the speed with which its propaganda spread across the media were also prime time. This is known as "information dominance" by the media trainers at the Ministry of Defense’s psyops (psychological warfare) establishment at Chicksands, Bedfordshire, who share premises with the instructors of the interrogation methods that have led to a public enquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial warfare have historically had much in common.

Having beckoned a criminal assault on Iran, the Guardian opined that this "would of course be madness." Similar arse-covering was deployed when Tony Blair, once a "mystical" hero in polite liberal circles, plotted with George W. Bush and caused a bloodbath in Iraq. With Libya recently dealt with ("It worked," said the Guardian), Iran is next, it seems.

The role of respectable journalism in western state crimes — from Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Libya — remains taboo. It is currently deflected by the media theater of the Leveson enquiry into phone hacking, which Daily Telegraph’s Benedict Brogan describes as "a useful stress test." Blame Rupert Murdoch and the tabloids for everything and business can continue as usual. As disturbing as the stories are from Lord Leveson’s witness stand, they do not compare with the suffering of the countless victims of journalism’s warmongering.

The lawyer Phil Shiner, who has forced a public inquiry into the British military’s criminal behavior in Iraq, says that embedded journalism provides the cover for the killing of "the hundreds of civilians killed by British forces when they had custody of them, [often subjecting them] to the most extraordinary, brutal things, involving sexual acts … embedded journalism is never ever going to get close to hearing their story." It is hardly surprising that the Ministry of Defense, in a 2000-page document leaked to WikiLeaks, describes investigative journalists — journalists who do their job — as a "threat" greater than terrorism.

In the week the Guardian published its "exclusive" about the Ministry of Defense planning for an attack on Iran, General Sir David Richards, Britain’s military chief, went on a secret visit to Israel, which is a genuine nuclear weapons outlaw and exempt from media opprobrium. Richards is a highly political general who, like Petraeus, has worked the media to considerable advantage. No journalist in Britain revealed that he went to Israel to discuss an attack on Iran.

Honorable exceptions aside — such as the tenacious work of the Guardian’s Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor — our increasingly militarized society is reflected in much of our media culture. Two of Blair’s most important functionaries in his mendacious, blood-drenched adventure in Iraq, Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, enjoy a cozy relationship with the liberal media, their opinions sought on worthy subjects while the blood in Iraq never dries. For their vicarious admirers, as Harold Pinter put it, the appalling consequences of their actions "never happened."

On 24 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the feminist scholars Cynthia Cockburn and Ann Oakley attacked what they called "certain widespread masculine traits and behaviors." They demanded that the "culture of masculinity should be addressed as a policy issue." Testosterone was the problem. They made no mention of a system of rampant state violence that has rehabilitated empire, creating 740,000 widows in Iraq and threatening whole societies, from Iran to China. Is this not a "culture," too? Their limited though not untypical indignation says much about how media-friendly identity and issues politics distract from the systemic exploitation and war that remain the primary source of violence against both women and men.

John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him." www.johnpilger.com

Nato may reap what they sow in Pakistan

2011-12-03T11:42:00.000+01:00

Nato may reap what they sow in Pakistan
By George Galloway on Nov 28, 11 06:27 AM in

EVEN by the usual standards of American "friendly fire" incidents, the attack on Pakistani troops by US Apache helicopter gunships on Friday was potentially world changing.

This was no misguided drone attack, nor a missile misfiring.

It was the mass murder of 24 Pakistani soldiers.

That the deaths came so soon after the killings by Nato of five Afghan children in the city of Kandahar goes to show there are no blunders too great for our occupation force.

Our forces, we're told, were aiming at "terrorists" and the rest is just collateral damage. But what damage.

For the Pakistani community, this was a crime.

Think-tanks and working parties wonder why Muslims are being "radicalised".

All that's needed for such radicalisation is the ability to switch on the TV news.

Pakistan, a nuclear-armed power, is being abandoned to its fate - its government endlessly traduced, its institutions trashed.

And now it is being bombed although it is an ally of those doing the bombing.

I have been involved with Pakistan since the Seventies, when I joined the campaign to save the life of its greatest leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, eventually hanged by military dictator General Zia.

Zia turned the country into a base camp for the so-called Holy Warriors, then at war with Red Afghanistan and now at war with us.

Now, the radicalisation of Pakistan, its "Talibanisation" in think-tank speak, is being fuelled by every drop of blood spilled in incidents like this.

The slowly enraging populace are cut to the quick by every unauthorised military operation on their territory.

These operations won't, and can't, even work. There are millions of Pakistanis. For every "terrorist" sympathiser cut down, 100 will take his place. And we shall surely reap the whirlwind.

A lesson you'd think we, the British, would have learned from our own history trying to subjugate an empire so huge that the sun never set on it.

When I was a teenager Scottish regiments, under tabloid hero Colonel "Mad" Mitch Mitchell, were rampaging through the Crater District of Aden in the Yemen, shooting all that moved.

We were encouraged to believe murdering the natives was necessary to keep "our" possessions "East of Suez".

It failed, we failed. And the brave people of Yemen are showing every day, by overthrowing the dictatorship we helped to fashion, that no good can come of this endless killing.

As Burns would have put it, the natives are merely nursing their wrath, to keep it warm.

Honour attacks rising

2011-12-03T11:11:00.004+01:00

Honour Attack:
Violence against women no matter the religious attire it is paraded in.

Banaz Mahmod

Banaz Mahmod was strangled in 2006 on the orders of her father and uncle in a so-called honour killing
Nearly 3,000 so-called honour attacks were recorded by police in Britain last year, new research has revealed.

According to figures obtained by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (Ikwro), at least 2,823 incidents of "honour-based" violence took place, with the highest number recorded in London.

The charity said the statistics do not give the full picture of the levels of "honour" violence in the UK , but are the best national estimate so far. The data, taken from from 39 out of 52 UK forces, was released following a freedom of information request by Ikwro, the BBC reported. In total, eight police forces recorded more than 100 honour-based attacks in 2010.

The Metropolitan Police saw 495 incidents, followed by 378 in the West Midlands, 350 in West Yorkshire, 227 in Lancashire and 189 in Greater Manchester. Cleveland recorded 153, while Suffolk and Bedfordshire saw 118 and 117 respectively, according to the figures.

Between the 12 forces able to provide figures from 2009, there was an overall 47% rise in honour attack incidents. Police in Northumbria saw a 305% increase from 17 incidents in 2009 to 69 in 2010, while Cambridgeshire saw a 154% jump from 11 to 28. A quarter of police forces in the UK were unable or unwilling to provide data, Ikwro said.

"This is the first time that a national estimate has been provided in relation to reporting of honour-based violence," the report concluded. "The number of incidents is significant, particularly when we consider the high levels of abuse that victims suffer before they seek help."

"Honour" attacks are punishments usually carried out on women who have been accused of bringing shame on their family and in the past have included abductions, mutilations, beatings and murder.

A Home Office spokesman said: "We are determined to end honour violence and recognise the need for greater consistency on the ground to stop this indefensible practice.

"Our action plan to end violence against women and girls sets out our approach to raise awareness, enhance training for police and prosecutors and better support victims."

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84 Year Old Activist Dorli Rainey

2011-11-18T10:13:00.008+01:00

We Feed The World

2011-10-08T16:17:00.005+02:00

Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria's livestock while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages the result.

A New Standard of Deception

2011-10-08T16:07:00.000+02:00

Kevin Ryan delivers a damning indictment of the official investigations of the total collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7

We Can't Make It Here Anymore

2011-10-07T13:41:00.000+02:00

By James McMurtry

Will work for food will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the crack

Disability

2011-09-30T11:19:00.000+02:00

How we treat the most vulnerable in our society is a measuring stick of how humane & civilized we really are.

The End of Poverty

2011-09-30T10:39:00.000+02:00

Global poverty did not just happen. It began with military conquest, slavery and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals and forced labor. Today, the problem persists because of unfair debt, trade and tax policies — in other words, wealthy countries taking advantage of poor, developing countries.

Tears Of Gazza

2011-09-23T12:25:00.002+02:00

Tears of Gaza’ by Vibeke Lokkeberg is a documentary film that should be watched by every American, to see how Israel spends our taxes. Every European should watch it, to see the true face of Israel. It should be viewed by every Arab, to renew our resolve not to allow a racist nation to wipe Palestine and her children from the map and from history.