Robert Naiman - Would It Make a Difference to Progressives if Norman Solomon Goes to Congress?

A key paradox for progressives of our national political life goes something like this: everybody complains about Congress, but nobody does anything about it.

Of course, it is far from true that nobody is doing anything about Congress. Lots of people are doing something about it. But if you hold the complaints of progressives about Congress in one hand, and the level of progressive activity to change who is in Congress and what they do when they get there in the other, there is a big mismatch. The level of complaint should provoke a much higher level of activity to do something about it.

Every four years it is revealed that at the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people in the U.S. are pragmatic idealists. They are people who have one eye on the horizon, and the other eye on the next practical step that can help get us closer to the horizon - or stop us from being pushed further away, which amounts to the same thing. The overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people will vote in the fall Presidential election, and they will vote for Obama; not because they think that doing so is the beginning and end of political engagement, but because they think - correctly - that it is the political choice in the context that best serves the interests of pragmatic idealists.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/22-7

NDAA's 'Indefinite Detention' Provisions Unconstitutional, says Judge

A federal judge in New York on Wednesday ruled in favor of a group of civilian activists and journalists and struck down highly controversial 'indefinite detention' and 'material support' provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last December. In their suit, the plaintiffs stated they could be detained 'indefinitely' for their constitutionally protected activities. Citing the 'vagueness' of certain language in the bill, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest -- who was appointed to the court by Obama -- agreed, and said the law could have "chilling impact on First Amendment rights" for journalists, activists, and potentially all US citizens.

"An individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an 'associated force' without even being aware that he or she was doing so," the judge said.

The ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by seven plaintiffs — Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Birgitta Jonsdottir, Alexa O’Brien, Kai Wargall, and Jennifer Bolen — alleging that the NDAA violates ”both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who has written critically and extensively of the NDAA, called the ruling "a sweeping victory for the plaintiffs."

"This is an extraordinary and encouraging decision," Greenwald continues, though he noted that many caveats still must be applied. "This is only a preliminary injunction (though the judge made it clear that she believes plaintiffs will ultimately prevail). It will certainly be appealed and can be reversed. There are still other authorities (including the AUMF) which the DOJ can use to assert the power of indefinite detention. Nonetheless, this is a rare and significant limit placed on the U.S. Government’s ability to seize ever-greater powers of detention-without-charges, and it is grounded in exactly the right constitutional principles: ones that federal courts and the Executive Branch have been willfully ignoring for the past decade."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/17

Shelly Bernal - Wall Street and Their Purchased Representatives

How is it that two years after passage of the much acclaimed Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform (four years after economic crash), Too Big To Fail (TBTF) institutions are not only bigger, but also too big to regulate and too big to jail? Don’t be fooled into believing that because a law has been passed by Congress and signed by the president, it has actually been implemented.

Keep in mind that Congress controls the funding for the federal regulators who are charged with carrying out the reform — Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities Exchange Commission. What would possess members of Congress, who bragged about banning banks from gambling with taxpayer money, to force regulators to strategically surrender significant rules by threatening budget cuts?

Answer: their livelihoods. Yes, the very livelihood of a member of Congress is indeed in the hands of the TBTF financial institutions. What better motivation is there than your career and financial future of your family? The financial sector is far and away the largest source of campaign contributions to federal candidates and parties, with insurance companies, securities and investment firms, real estate interests, and commercial banks providing the bulk of that money. In this 2012 election cycle alone, this industry has already donated $122 million to campaigns of members of Congress.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/wall-street-and-their-purchased-representatives-1336827827

Richard Eskow - Will Democrats Embrace American Austerity? Crash This Party and See

Heard about the meeting that's being held to decide your economic future? No? Don't feel bad: That's because you weren't invited.

But Tim Geithner was. So was Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican member of Congress whose radical right-wing plans for cutting Medicare have made him the subject of a Mitt Romney "bromance." And so was Bill Clinton, who showed up last year and uttered the usual Beltway insider's falsehoods [1]about what's really wrong with Social Security.

Maybe your invitation to billionaire Pete Peterson's "Fiscal Summit [2]" got lost in the mail. Or maybe they really, really didn't want you there. Who cares? That's no reason not to go anyway.

Hey, Sen. Bernie Sanders wasn't invited, and his proposal for Social Security was more popular with the American people than anything that's likely to be discussed at this little get-together.

It's Your Party

That's right: There's a "summit," and nobody invited the American people. They didn't even invite the guy who proposed the fiscal plan that most Americans - including most Republicans - wanted, according to the polling data [3]. But he's going anyway.

That's Bernie for ya.

In fact, there will be a rally outside [4] and Bernie will be speaking there. The rally's at 1 pm on May 15 (next Monday, in front of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit. The address is 1301 Constitution Avenue NW in Washington.

Read More:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/richard-eskow/43146/will-democrats-embrace-american-austerity-crash-this-party-and-see

Leeann Brown - Chemical Agriculture Goes to the Mattresses: A Short History of the Pesticide Lobby

The U.S. Department of Agriculture began testing fruits and vegetables for pesticide residues in 1991 after the public became concerned about their potential risks to children. Remember Alar? In 1993, at the request of Congress, several top public health experts released a seminal report, Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children. Three years later, Congress responded by passing unanimously the federal Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), which required the Environmental Protection Agency to implement health-based standards for all pesticides used in food, with special safeguards for infants and babies.

This flurry of activity grew out of one overarching conclusion embraced by scientists, physicians, policy makers, parents and the public interest community: Pesticides used in the cultivation of fruits and vegetables can cause serious and lasting harm to young children.

That didn't stop conventional agribusiness interests from trying hard to water down or remove provisions of the proposed law designed to protect infants and children. The industry argued that it would cut into their profits if they had to take children's health into consideration.

Read More:

http://www.enviroblog.org/2012/05/chemical-agriculture-goes-to-the-mattresses.html

Paul Craig Roberts - THE NEW TYRANNY: Does The West Have A Future?

Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence.  Consider:

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax.  The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they built one, they probably built more.”  

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder woman and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa.  The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect--what, fake plots?  In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives. 

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30799

Jon Mitchell - U.S. Veteran Exposes Pentagon’s Denials of Agent Orange Use on Okinawa

Thousands of barrels of Agent Orange were unloaded on Okinawa Island and stored at the port of Naha, and at the U.S. military's Kadena and Camp Schwab bases between 1965 and 1966, an American veteran who served in Okinawa claims.

In a Jacksonville Florida interview in early April with The Japan Times and Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV network based in Okinawa, former infantryman Larry Carlson, 67, also said that Okinawan stevedores were exposed to the highly toxic herbicide as they labored in the holds of ships, and that he witnessed it being sprayed at Kadena Air Base.

Carlson is one of only three American servicemen who have won benefits from the U.S. government over exposure to the toxic defoliant on Okinawa — and the first of them to step forward and reveal that massive amounts of it were kept on the island.

His claims, which are corroborated by five fellow soldiers and a 1966 U.S. government document, directly challenge the Pentagon's consistent denials that Agent Orange was ever stored on Okinawa.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/us-veteran-exposes-pentagon-s-denials-agent-orange-use-okinawa-1336665501

Drew Armstrong - Drugmakers’ Deal With Obama Said to Be Probed by House

Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and Merck & Co. (MRK) are being pulled into an expanding congressional investigation about the agreement drugmakers reached with the Obama administration to support the Democrats’ overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, according to three people familiar with the talks.

The probe began last year, with Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee seeking documents from an industry trade group, said the people, who aren’t authorized to speak publicly. When that group didn’t cooperate, the panel decided to target Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugmaker, along with Merck, Amgen Inc. (AMGN), Abbott Laboratories (ABT) and AstraZeneca Plc (AZN), said one of the people.

The Republicans last month began negotiating directly with the companies in e-mails, calls and meetings demanding documents and information outlining what the industry agreed to with President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, when the law was being worked on in Congress. Michael Burgess, a Representative from Texas, said he’s been frustrated by a lack of cooperation.

Read More:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-04/obama-deal-with-drugmakers-said-to-be-probed-by-house.html

Kristina Chew - CISPA Passes the House: Why We Should Be Wary, If Not Worried

Last night, after nearly seven hours of debate, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House of Representatives by  a vote of 248-168. CISPA is intended to protect websites and the government from hackers by giving internet companies the authority  to reveal users’ confidential records without facing legal action.  The bill also allows the government to share classified information with companies to help protect computer networks to improve the government’s and private companies’ ability to share information about possible security threats from China and other countries. But opponents have critiqued the bill as being too broad and vague about what it would regulate as a cybersecurity threat and for infringing too much on privacy.

CISPA still has to pass the Senate; as of yet, there is not a corresponding bill. The Senate is working on a bipartisan bill that instead calls for the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to create regulations that would protect “critical infrastructure” such as the “electric power grid, water and sewer systems, transportation hubs and financial service networks,” says the New York Times. On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget had said that it recommended a presidential veto on CISPA.

Read More:

http://www.care2.com/causes/cispa-passes-the-house-why-we-should-be-wary.html#ixzz1tTZ9PTKp

William John Cox - CHALLENGING AMERICA'S PLUTOCRACY: The Power of Individual Voters to Transform Their Government

America is once again in crisis! All three branches of its government and its major political parties are controlled by a plutocracy composed of large corporations and the wealthy elite. Irrespective of the candidates they elect, the voters are neither represented nor protected. Every American is at great risk, not only for their freedoms, but for the very safety and well being of their families and for the future of their children.

Individual voters are the essential element of every democracy. Their effectiveness and the power they exercise determine the quality and extent of the freedoms they enjoy and the protection of the government they employ.

U.S. voters appear to be increasingly powerless to fight the plutocracy which runs their government.  As a result, Americans are living in an ever more repressive police state that is illegally committing acts of violent aggression around the world.

The only thing that can possibly transform the U.S. government to one that cares for the voters who elect it, rather than for the plutocracy that controls it, is a unified opposition by all of the People, irrespective of their social class or political beliefs. The energy driving such a mass movement must flow from the personal actions taken by each of its individual participants.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30294