Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
A new American Hero: the Whistle-Blower
Your words and your actions have to match or your intentions make no difference. And that's one of the things we (in the US Military) fail to grasp. - Lt. Col. Daniel L. DavisListen to the story of our newest American Hero, Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis on 'To the Point', from KCRW in . After eleven years in Afghanistan, we still don't see an end in sight, it is past time to leave. Now it is just a training ground for US Troops, and a paycheck for the war profiteers.
Read the full story at the New York Times.
“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asksFrom Armed Forces Journal:
“No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.”
TELL THE TRUTH
When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.
Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.
“For Colonel Davis to go out on a limb and help us to understand what’s happening on the ground, I have the greatest admiration for him,” said Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Corporations Are Not PEOPLE, and money is not SPEECH!
Corporations Are Not People
by: Thom Hartmann, Truthout | Book Review
(Image: Berrett-Koehler Publishers)
"Corporations Are Not People"
Jeffrey D. Clements
Donate to Truthout to receive a copy of "Corporations Are Not People," this week's Progressive Pick.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Jeffrey D. Clements
Donate to Truthout to receive a copy of "Corporations Are Not People," this week's Progressive Pick.
Most Americans don't realize that the idea that "corporations are people" and "money is speech" are concepts that were never, ever considered or promoted or even passed by any legislature in the history of America. Neither were they ever promoted or signed into law by any president - if anything, the opposite, with presidents from Grover Cleveland in 1887 to Barack Obama in 2010 condemning them.
And Congress and the executive branch are the two of the three branches of government that are elected by the people, and thus the only two to which the founders of this country and the framers of the Constitution gave the right to create laws.
The Supreme Court is so much not supposed to create law, that Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution even says that it must operate "under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."
Nonetheless, as I pointed out in 2001 in my book "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People," the Supreme Court itself has invented, out of whole cloth, the doctrines of corporations as people and money as speech.
Now comes into our political milieu a new and significant contribution to the literature of "corporate personhood" (available directly from Truthout). Jeff Clements, a former assistant attorney general for Massachusetts, has written a brilliant and very accessible guide to the 2010 US Supreme Court Citizens United decision, how it came about and what can be done about it.
Most interestingly, Jeff's book also tracks the rise of corporate power over the past 40 years since Lewis Powell wrote his infamous memo to his friend and neighbor, who was the head of the US Chamber of Commerce - which led to everything from the Federalist Society to the Heritage Foundation.
Clements suggests that the modern revival of the doctrine of corporate personhood, which first appeared back in 1819 in the Dartmouth case, reached its 19th-century zenith with a misunderstood Santa Clara County, California, decision. It came into full flower in 2010 with the Citizens United ruling, which was, in fact, a direct child of that 1973 memo by Powell and subsequent corporate and Republican implementation of his recommendations.
"Corporations Are Not People" is accessible, readable, and fascinating. It's the book you want to hand to your co-worker or brother-in-law when they start spouting corporate drivel that they heard from Limbaugh or Romney. It's a nice, tight summary of the modern application of this doctrine, with a quick overview of its history, particularly its contemporary implications.
And Jeff hasn't just written a book.
With his friend and colleague John Bonifaz, he's co-founded freespeechforpeople.org - one of a half-dozen or so very accessible and well-done efforts to build grassroots support for a constitutional amendment that repudiates the notion that corporations are people and that money is speech.
As the movement grows to take back our rights under the Constitution from the transnational corporations that have hijacked them (and taken our legislators captive), "Corporations Are Not People" (with a foreword by Bill Moyers) will become an increasingly important handbook to the movement. It brilliantly makes the case for us all to recite the mantra, "Corporations are not people, and money is not speech!" and then to do something about it.
Don't just get one copy from Truthout- you will want to be passing this book around to everybody you know!
***
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Democracy Now with Chris Hedges lawsuit against Obama on 2012-NDAA
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges has filed suit against President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes controversial provisions authorizing the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world, without charge or trial. Sections of the bill are written so broadly that critics say they could encompass journalists who report on terror-related issues, such as Hedges, for supporting enemy forces. "It’s clearly unconstitutional," Hedges says of the bill. "It is a huge and egregious assault against our democracy. It overturns over 200 years of law, which has kept the military out of domestic policing." We speak with Hedges, now a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and former New York Times foreign correspondent who was part of a team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. We are also joined by Hedges’ attorney Carl Mayer, who filed the litigation on his behalf in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. [includes rush transcript]
Thursday, January 12, 2012
US Military Secret: Females attacked by their fellow soldiers more than enemies, and homosexual rape is rampit.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
From Truthout: Occupy Elections
Occupy Rigged Elections: A Call for the Second American Revolution in 2012
by: Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins, Truthout | Op-Ed
A protester with the Occupy movement is led away by law enforcement after interrupting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a campaign event for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. (Photo: Eric Thayer / The New York Times)
When candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent, the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
A great battle is coming. The 2012 elections are our chance to turn the tide back toward real democracy, but we must begin immediately. Only by organizing for a democratic revolution now can we break the hold of corporate criminals over our elections and take real power in 2012, legitimately and nonviolently.
Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement, millions of Americans are finally shaking off the depression and torpor of the past decade, heeding the mass-consciousness call to reclaim power from corporatist forces that have hijacked our country, our planet, and our future. We may not all have taken to the streets yet, but we will. Or we'll contribute in other creative, personally liberating ways, pitching in with prison-break fervor to unblock the channels of revolutionary energy.
Despite the jeering of the corporate media, the Occupy movement is not going to fade away, burn out or be crushed like the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. The Occupy movement is going to change the world, because the world itself has arrived at a momentous crossroads where change is inevitable. Occupy is part of an unstoppable transformation - the contractions of a new world desperate to be born, based on a renewal of community, tolerance, justice and deep respect for all life. A sane, resilient world capable of withstanding the ecological, climatic and economic upheavals we can no longer avoid.
Now is the time to prepare, in this newly awakened, prerevolutionary phase, for Occupy Elections 2012. Because the closer we get to democratically taking power - when candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent - the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.
Anarchists and many younger activists today reject representative democracy as unviable. They are rightly disgusted with the macabre, corporate-sponsored, electoral charade we endure every two years like a recurring nightmare. The Occupy movement has already birthed a powerful new form of roots-down direct democracy, where learning to communicate and really hearing each other is the first step toward rebuilding our shattered and alienated communities.
So, do elections matter anymore? Is representative democracy for the People even possible?
Wherever you are on the revolutionary road, whoever you are in your mind and soul, we ask you to please listen to the message we're conveying today, and consider how it impacts your activism in the coming year.
American elections are not going away any time soon. They are rigged, and we must end the rigging - for the sake of our planet and its 7 billion people, entwined in complex technological and social systems that do require some form of representative government to function.
Our electoral process is rigged in the following ways:
- Corporate personhood and the legal determination that money equals speech.
- Corporate campaign financing and lobbying; billions to buy our elected representatives.
- Corporate restriction of candidate access to the media and to participation in vital debates.
- Corporate media exit polling, which often alters results to manufacture a false "red shift" of rightward-moving electoral outcomes.
- Manipulation of electoral structures and mechanisms
- Partisan redistricting, which re-draws electoral district maps that favor a particular party.
- Voter ID laws that disenfranchise young, poor and minority voters.
- Fraudulent purging of voter rolls, including "caging" - removing a voter from the rolls or discarding their vote based on the return of direct mail to their listed address, a practice found to be used fraudulently and with racial bias, making it illegal under the Voting Rights Act.
- Disenfranchisement of felons, many poor, black or Hispanic, and convicted on drug offenses.
- The centralized rigging of computerized voting machines.
The battle to topple the corporatocracy must strategically attack all of these points. But for the purpose of this call to action - Occupy Rigged Elections - we're going to focus on the last, least understood bullet point: computerized election fraud.
In the end, how ballots are counted - the central control mechanism of democracy - could prove the easiest piece to reclaim; our first real step toward radically shifting power back toward the people.
Computerized Vote Rigging Is a Democratic Cancer
Undiagnosed, spreading through our nation's bones, centralized election rigging has been undermining the health of our democracy for decades, eating away at it from within, leaving us exhausted and hopeless - though unsure of why we're so sick.
But let's get something clear up front: not every election is rigged, so don't be confused by the few decent people who managed to get into office and stay there. First, ask yourself this question: Have they stopped the corporatist takeover? The answer is no.
Pay attention to the balance of power; watch it tipping ever further toward the corporatist/fascist side of the scale. Meanwhile, the spectacle of democracy maintains a pacified public. In other words, they will let some of "our" people in, or let some of our initiatives pass, while they keep winning more power, overall. Additionally - not all elections are easy to rig, and some have far higher stakes. But there is one constant in the equation:
Every election can be rigged. Undetectably.
If this is news to you, hang on to your hat. Once you understand how the machinery of the American voting system actually works, you're going to feel a little stunned, as if you came home from a three month vacation to discover you left your keys hanging in the front door.
Over the past 40 years - since computers first came online for use in processing and reporting votes - our secretaries of state and election supervisors have literally sold our democratic system to a small criminal cadre of extreme right-wing and religious ideologues who lurk behind shady voting machine companies. The top three are Diebold (purchased by ES&S in 2009), ES&S, and Sequoia Pacific (purchased by Dominion). They manufactured the majority of voting machines and software that secretly count our ballots.
Read it again. Let it sink in.
Yes, it's insane. For this reason alone, we have every reason to have lost faith in electoral democracy, but as you can see, we need to understand why it is failing. We need to know whose big, fat, dirty thumb is on the scale. We need to know how we lost our power before we can hope to reclaim it.
Hand-Counted Paper Ballots NOW!
This is the organic solution. Properly designed, cast in see-through plastic boxes, counted by hand, in public, on election day, with a stringent set of safeguards and a vigilant public - paper ballots can deliver fast results and provide a fully transparent and accountable voting system. Attempted fraud can be detected and prevented. Conversely, computerized election theft is accomplished secretly, within the "proprietary" software owned by the corporations who manufacture the machines.
Did you know that no one - not even an election supervisor - is allowed to view the software?
Did you know that the Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois just hacked a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen voting machine by remote control with $26 in computer parts?
We know these things because a small group of American election integrity activists have been working tirelessly, without much recognition or compensation, to compile a mountain of evidence:
- Detailing the criminal histories and the partisan and extremist ties of the voting machine manufacturers
- Demonstrating how the machines can be rigged and hacked
- Exposing Department of Justice (DOJ) coverups of election fraud evidence
- Exposing the roll of the corporate media in aiding and abetting election fraud
See the resource list at the end of this article to learn more. Get informed. Take action, and please help us fight back – WE NEED YOU.
Democracy is our birthright, but it has never been fully realized. We've had to fight and die for the right to fight and die for it. It's a dream, a shared vision, a work in progress that has been derailed. Though some activists idealize earlier times - pre-industrial, communal, tribal - we can't go backwards, only forward. What do we want today? Tomorrow? What do we want for ourselves and our children?
We want our damn democracy back.
We want the chance to make it real for the first time, with our own candidates who truly represent the needs of the people, and with a safe voting system accountable to the people.
Help us organize to secure hand-counted paper ballots before the 2012 elections. This is something we can do, if we start now. The stakes of those elections could not be higher.
Join Occupy Rigged Elections on Facebook, started by activists responsible for the historic occupation of the Statehouse in Madison, Wisconsin. They are organizing now to recall Koch-brother puppet Gov. Scott Walker in 2012.
We only have a small window of opportunity. Let's make 2012 the year we took our country back.
To learn more:
www.votescam.org
Www.votescam.org/paper_ballots_now
Www.votescam.org/the_evidence
www.blackboxvoting.org
www.bradblog.org
www.handcountedpaperballots.org
www.electiondefensealliance.org
Www.votescam.org/paper_ballots_now
Www.votescam.org/the_evidence
www.blackboxvoting.org
www.bradblog.org
www.handcountedpaperballots.org
www.electiondefensealliance.org
On Facebook:
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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