"William Rivers Pitt" - Bank on It -- They're Scared

Sunday 9 October 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/bank-it-theyre-scared/1318020817

Internal bank memo shows just how afraid of the occupiers the banks actually are.

Far be it from me to accuse Gandhi of missing a note, but in the case of the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests, the Mahatma's famous quote appears to be lacking a few essential words. "First they ignore you," he said, "then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

That's not quite correct.

Certainly, the OWS protests began with a great whistling silence from the "mainstream" news media. It is only because of the resources available to the average person in this marvelous technological age we live in that word of the protest ever reached beyond its original location.

Thanks to cell phones, video cameras, digital recorders, and of course, the internet - all wielded by patriot citizens - reports, images and video of the protest began to dribble out via Twitter, Facebook and a variety of blogs and alternative news media sites like Truthout. But from the "mainstream" news, there was nothing, and nothing, and nothing.

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"Doug Larkin" - ‘Before Today, I Was Afraid of Trees’ -- Rethinking Nature Deficit Disorder

Published on Monday, October 10, 2011 by Rethinking Schools

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/26_01/26_01_larkin.shtml

by Doug Larkin

The last week of February turned out to be the peak of the maple-sugaring season that winter, and an inch of snow remained on the ground as the juniors in my chemistry class disembarked from the bus. Kevin Kopp, our guide, met us with empty buckets, and he talked about the trees as we took a short walk around. The students ran their hands over the bark of the oaks, beeches, and maples with an uncharacteristic quietness as our guide talked about the different types of trees in downtown Trenton’s Cadwalader Park.

For the moment, it was possible to imagine that we were somewhere other than urban central New Jersey. To many of my students it was a revelation that we were not actually standing in a natural forest, but in a place where each of the towering trees had been purposefully planted decades ago. Their questions led to a discussion about how trees in urban environments not only look nice, but also help clean the air and lower energy costs by reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed by city surfaces on hot days.

When Kevin pointed out holes in one tree drilled by yellow-bellied sapsuckers, a group of students began racing from tree to tree, seeing who could be the first to find and run their fingers over undiscovered sapsucker holes. Another group raised their eyes to the treetops, looking for the birds. Kevin held up the metal spout and asked if anyone would like to hammer in the first tap

“Ain’t it gonna hurt the tree?” asked one of my more solemn students. Kevin assured him that it wouldn’t. We tapped two trees that day, and everyone who wanted a turn hammering got one. When the first bucket was finally hung from the tap, the students were clearly less than impressed with the leisurely drip, drip, drip of the watery tree sap. After explaining that the buckets would fill over the next few days, Kevin promised to bring them to us at school.

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Knocking On The Devil's Door - Thursday October 13th @ 7pm at Cinema Arts Center in Huntington, Long Island (423 Park Avenue, 631-423-7611)

KNOCKING ON THE DEVIL'S DOOR

Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy

Thursday, October 13 at 7pm

In Person: GARY NULL
award-winning investigative journalist

and “health guru”

All Tickets: $15   Includes Reception & DVD

Tickets can also be purchased at the box office during theatre hours or

by calling Brown Paper Tickets toll free at 1-800-838-3006. No refunds.

Attendees will receive a free copy of Knocking on the Devil’s Door

The nuclear reactor catastrophes at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now at Fukushima, Japan, remind us that a heinous specter continues to hover over the health and security of millions of people around the world. Not only does the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation linger but every nuclear station sits as a ticking bomb awaiting meltdown and terrorist attack. Many Russian studies conclude that Chernobyl killed approximately a million people since the 1986 meltdown. And the cost of the Daiichi Fukushima crisis may be substantially higher. Nuclear energy is neither clean nor green. From the mining of radioactive materials to their transportation and the storage of radioactive waste, the nuclear cartel is contaminating natural habitats, rivers and aquifers while endangering millions of lives. Knocking on the Devil’s Door deconstructs the corporate and political rhetoric feeding the media misinformation campaigns to seduce us into believing that low level radiation emitted from nuclear plants is perfectly safe and that our future depends upon nuclear energy. The US is prepared to give tens of billions of dollars to build 200 new nuclear power reactors. The liability for nuclear accidents and meltdowns falls upon taxpayers. Old decaying and leaking reactors are being relicensed, increasing the stakes that another catastrophe will occur. Knocking on the Devil’s Door features the world’s most vital voices demanding the cessation of nuclear power including Helen Caldicott, Harvey Wasserman, Vandana Shiva, Michio Kaku, Greg Palast, Karl Grossman, Ernest Sternglass and others. 

USA, 2011, 90 min.

Click HERE for trailer and the official website.

"Evan Osnos" - JAPAN: THE NUCLEAR VILLAGE

Dispatches by Evan Osnos.

OCTOBER 10, 2011

Posted by Evan Osnos

How close was the Fukushima meltdown to becoming a far larger disaster? Closer than most people know. And, yet, the details of the aftermath may surprise you. In the magazine this week, I reconstruct what happened and why—and examine just how close Japan came to the worst-case scenario. (“The Fallout” is available to subscribers. Here are the options, print and digital.)

Travelling back and forth to Fukushima this year, I encountered humbling examples of perseverance and sacrifice. I also came to understand how a nuclear accident creeps up on a place that never imagined it was vulnerable. Before this, I had never thought much about nuclear power. I will have a hard time forgetting about it now. The lessons of Fukushima are not what I thought when I started, and I’ll be writing more about that here this week.

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"Progressive Radio Network Danny Schechter, Fridays @ 1pm(EDT") - As the COP Blames Obama For Wall Street “Mobs’ The Occupy Movement Spreads Nationwide And Is No Friend of The President

By Danny Schechter

Author of The Crime Of Our Time

Who is behind the Wall Street protests?

The Republican minority leader, Eric Cantor, has searched up and down in his usual rigorous manner and found the culprit.

In his knee-jerk view, it’s President Obama. His latest crime: encouraging these “mobs:”

In one sentence, he blamed the President who in GOP conspiracy think, is to blame for everything, including bad weather. He also not so subtly conjures up the memory of the Mafia, New York’s perennial bad guys.

In one phrase, Obama stood accused of encouraging these…. pause for righteous indignation—MOBS!

Never mind that if you spend any time at Occupy Wall Street, you will encounter as many criticisms of the President’s policies---save the questions about his birth and “real Americaness” -- as you would at a conclave of the Tea Party.

Only the criticism is different. In the latter world of make-believe, he is a hard line Socialist. In the former, he is, in effect, a Republican, a backer of the Wall Street capitalists the occupiers are battling.

And if my memory of history has not faded, wasn’t it the British who called the original Tea Party a “mob?”

Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a partisan shmear.

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"Mercedes Diane" - Veterans protesting at Smithsonian met with pepper-spray

• By Mercedes Diane ..., DC Civil Rights The Examiner
• http://www.examiner.com/civil-rights-in-washington-dc/veterans-protesting-at-smithsonian-met-with-pepper-spray

Washington, DC -- All too often, when there is criticism of U.S. military actions it is the service members who receive the force of the backlash.  They are called criminals, they are accused of being brainwashed, and it is they that are punished when something goes wrong.  However, many sometimes feel that when they do speak out against U.S. military action, they do so without support and with the threat of being accused of being traitors hanging over their heads.  Veterans, on the other hand, are better positioned to be the voice of military personnel.

By giving first hand accounts of atrocities they’ve witness and the perceived senselessness of those atrocities, they leverage the fact that they have followed orders and have fought to defend freedom of speech and the right to protest.  Nevertheless, yesterday, activist where shocked and outraged to learn that not even veterans are safe from police aggression when employing their Constitutional rights, the very rights they had once laid their lives on the line to protect.

Approximately 50 members of Veterans For Peace (VFP) participated in a march this afternoon from Freedom Plaza to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum on the National Mall.  The museum was featuring an exhibit on unmanned drone bombers that a group of about 250 people from the October2011.org encampment at Freedom Plaza intended to protest.

'We had marched from the Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square occupations, taking over the streets of DC.  The museum knew we were coming.  Some of our group got in and dropped a banner.  Hundreds of us did not.  Instead, we were greeted at the door with cans of pepper spray.'  We intended to hold signs and sing inside the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, protesting its promotion of unmanned drones, missiles, and bombs, including its sponsorship by and promotion of weapons corporations.  We don't have any museums promoting health coverage or education or retirement security.' This was the statement given by David Swanson is the author of 'War Is A Lie.'

VFP Acting Director Mike Ferner said, 'I was at the first entranceway, holding the door open for people to enter. I saw a police or security officer in a white shirt hold his hands up, telling people to stop. The marchers continued and the officer began pepper-spraying everyone. From everything I saw until that moment, there was no reason for the pepper-spraying. The door of the museum clearly said 'free admission.' It did not say 'Free admission if you are quiet' or 'Free admission unless you have opinions contrary to government policy.’

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"Bill McKibben’s" - Speech at Occupy Wall Street

http://www.nationofchange.org/bill-mckibbens-speech-occupy-wall-street-1318175259

Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built.

On November 6, one year before the election, we’re going to be in DC with a huge circle of people around the White House and they’re going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to DC to find out where they have locked that guy up. We have to free Obama, because there is some sort of stunt double there now. So on November 6, I hope we can move, just for a day, Occupy Wall Street down to the White House and get them in the fight against corporate power.

The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.

I spend a lot of time in countries around the world organizing demonstrations and rallies in solidarity. In the last three years at 350.org, we’ve had 15,000 rallies in every country except North Korea. Everywhere around the world, poor people and black people and brown people and Asian people and young people are standing up. Most of those places, don’t produce that much carbon. They need us to act with them and for them, because the problem is 20 blocks south of here. That’s where the Empire lives and we’ve got to figure out how to tame it and make it work for this planet or not work at all.

Thank you guys very much.

"Ariel Dorfman" - Salvador Allende Has Words for Barack Obama from the Other Side of Death

Posted on October 9, 2011, Printed on October 9, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175451/

By Ariel Dorfman

The dead were then silent for years, which left me unprepared when Salvador Allende came to me offering advice for Barack Obama. It seemed, at first glance, a strange connection.  Elected president of Chile in 1970 by popular vote, Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup three years later. On that other September 11th, also (coincidentally enough) a Tuesday, terror rained down from the skies as the Chilean air force bombed the Presidential Palace where Allende died, ending an experiment in constructing socialism through peaceful, democratic means, and inaugurating the long dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

For the last decade, I have been haunted by voices from the other side of death. In this way, back in 2003 I transcribed the words of Pablo Picassoafter a tapestry version of his famed painting Guernica at the entrance to the Security Council was covered over at the U.N. just before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was to present the Bush administration case justifying an invasion of Iraq.  From the depths of ancient Mesopotamia, I transcribed the words of Hammurabi, the exalted prince of Babylon, as he reviled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for laying waste to his ancient land. And in that same year I found that Christopher Columbus, too, had words for the new warriors/conquerors of the twenty-first century, while the poets William Blake and Franceso Petrarca asked Laura Bush how she could sleep with the man responsible for so many deaths.

Barack Obama has never, of course, claimed to be a revolutionary like Allende, though he did once upon a short time ago give the impression of being a reformer dedicated to bringing about significant change. And though, like Allende, he has faced ferocious opposition to his plans from similarly conservative forces, there has never been the slightest rumor of a coup d’état in the United States (nor, as it turned out, any need for one) -- though who knows what would have happened had Obama decided to take on the military-industrial/national security behemoth that essentially governs the country.

And yet, I have no doubt that Allende would have sympathized with Obama on his entry into the Oval Office, and that he would have appreciated his urge to search for common ground with his adversaries, as well as the intelligence and sophistication of his mind. And I’m sure he would have greeted young Barack’s election in 2008, as I did, with a certain joy, seeing in it the popular wish for a different sort of politics, a different sort of world.

Evidently, based on what follows, Allende did feel that it was worth sending a message to the American president from the shores of death where so much becomes clearer, where we will all ultimately discover whether we truly kept faith with the lives and dreams of those who, in turn, had faith in us.

Here, then, is his message:

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"Mark Egan" - Occupy Wall St, The Start of a New Protest Era?

Published on Friday, October 7, 2011 by Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/07/us-wallstreet-protests-history-idUSTRE7964CY20111007

by Mark Egan and Ben Berkowitz

NEW YORK - When Paul Friedman met the rag-tag youth camped out near Wall Street to protest inequality in the American economy, he felt he was witnessing the start of a protest movement not seen in America since the 1960s.

And Friedman should know. The 64-year-old was a student organizer during the anti-Vietnam War movement, protesting from 1964 for 11 years until the war ended. He also joined Civil Rights actions against racial segregation in America.

On Wednesday, as thousands of union workers marched to show solidarity with the movement called Occupy Wall Street, he walked shoulder-to-shoulder with dreadlocked college dropouts, unemployed youth and students, who for three weeks have camped out near Wall Street and who have no plans to leave.

"It felt in my gut very much like what I was a part of in the 1960s," Friedman said. "What people are expressing ... is an experience that their opportunities are shrinking, not growing and their hopes are shrinking, not growing, and that is an unnatural feeling for the young," he said.

The protesters object to the Wall Street bailout in 2008, which they say left banks enjoying huge profits while average Americans suffered under high unemployment and job insecurity with little help from the federal government.

What the Occupy Wall Street movement has in common with the 1960s, he said, was that the weak economy hits home, just like racism or the chance that you or your boyfriend or brother or your son might be drafted to fight in Vietnam.

Most protests since the 1960s - against U.S. actions in Central America in the 1980s or against free trade in the 1990s or the impending Iraq War in 2003 - were in solidarity with an ideal. This, like Civil Rights and Vietnam, is personal.

That more than anything else is why the Occupy Wall Street movement could spread, Friedman said.

TEA AND SYMPATHY

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"Caroline Arnold" - Losing Hope in Obama and the Prospect of a Humane World

Published on Sunday, October 9, 2011 by The Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier (Ohio)

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/09

By: Caroline Arnold

Cleaning up my desk this week I found an Obama ‘08 HOPE button. After a moment’s reflection, I threw it in the trash.

Not because Obama lied or betrayed those of us who hope for a more humane world, although he did both.

I recognize that lies and misrepresentations are basic tools of information management in our socially-structured, media-mediated world. We all use them to manage information in pursuit of our interests, and I see no moral utility in categorically condemning lying, disinformation or persuasion. Advertising – commercial lying -- is an accepted, if not altogether honorable, industry in our society. And the effectiveness of our news media and entertainment depend on tweaking what information is used and how it is presented.

However, the political sphere, where scarce resources are allocated, risky and expensive actions like wars or nuclear power plants are undertaken, and where the public good is defined, is another matter. If the use of tools of information management is concealed, if the interests they serve remain undisclosed, or if their use can be bought with money, democracy will be compromised and individual freedom and integrity as well as social cohesion will be threatened. When we lie to one another we betray basic social bonds that make it possible to live together and fairly share risks, resources and rewards.

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