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

Bernie Sanders - Vermont Senate Votes to Overturn Citizens United

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) welcomed today's Vermont Senate passage of a resolution calling on Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to undo a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that threw out a ban on corporate campaign spending.

"I congratulate the Vermont Senate for this important vote. Citizens United was one of the worst decisions ever handed down by the Supreme Court. The people of Vermont and across America are totally disgusted with the huge amounts of money that billionaires and corporations are now throwing into the political process as a result of that misguided decision," Sanders said.

"The Vermont Senate has now added its strong voice to a grassroots movement that is growing all across the United States," he added. "We must overturn this disastrous decision."

The Vermont Senate resolution asks Congress to consider an amendment to clarify that "money is not speech and corporations are not persons under the U.S. Constitution."

Read More:

 http://www.opednews.com/articles/Vermont-Senate-Votes-to-Ov-by-Bernie-Sanders-120413-609.html

Laura Musikanski - The UN Embraces the Economics of Happiness

Imagine you open the paper tomorrow, and the headlines are not about the “sluggish economy,” but our nation’s quality of life. You turn to the business section, and find not just information about a certain company’s profitability, but also about its impact on community health and employee well-being.

Imagine, in short, a world where the metric that guides our decisions is not money, but happiness.

That is the future that 650 political, academic, and civic leaders from around the world came together to promote on April 2, 2012. Encouraged by the government of Bhutan, the United Nations held a High Level Meeting for Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm. The meeting marks the launch of a global movement to shift our focus away from measuring and promoting economic growth as a goal in its own right, and toward the goal of measuring—and increasing—human happiness and quality of life.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/un-embraces-economics-happiness-1334331113

Supreme Court to Rule on Monsanto Ruling

The US Supreme Court is set to rule on a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in which that court ruled that the doctrine of exhaustion did not cover second-generation genetically altered crops. To make sense of this, a little background may be in order.

In 1994, Monsanto obtained a patent covering a line of "Roundup Ready" crops genetically altered to resist Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. The modification is hereditary, which is to say that 2nd-generation (and subsequent generation) seeds inherit this resistance. To avoid buying new seeds from Monsanto next year, farmers had merely to save some of this year's crop and plant it next year. Monsanto defended against this possibility by forcing purchasers to sign an agreement promising not to replant n-generation seeds: no signature, no beans. However, farmers remained free to sell their crops on the open commodity market; almost all such crops feed either people or livestock.

So far, so good (at least for Monsanto, if not the farmers). However, upon occasion success can bite you in the ass. Monsanto's superbeans quickly dominated the market (94% of all acres in Indiana, for example). And therein lies the rub. Monsanto seeds were so dominant that all a farmer had to do was buy a bunch of commodity soybeans, and most or all of them would be Roundup Ready, not to mention significantly cheaper than the official beans sold by Monsanto.

Read More:

http://artfulopinions.blogspot.com/2012/04/supreme-court-to-rule-on-monsanto.html

Stephen Lendman - Obama Wreaks Duplicity

Like most in Congress, he serves wealth and power alone. People needs don't matter. Rule of law principles are spurned.

Peace is deplored. War is official policy. So are other duplicitous foreign policies for unchallenged global dominance.

Imagine what's ahead in a second term, regardless of which party controls Congress. Both are in lockstep on issues mattering most. They include pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran.

At the same time, Obama delivers mixed messages on Iran. Conciliatory comments follow baseless accusations and hawkishness, then more threats. In late March, he appealed directly to Iranians, saying there's "no reason for the United States and Iran to be divided from one another."

America seeks dialogue, not confrontation, he suggested, or did he? At the same time, he added:

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-Wreaks-Duplicity-by-Stephen-Lendman-120409-95.html

Paul Craig Roberts - Washington Leads The World Into Lawlessness

The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed. 

US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights.  

Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law.  President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30273

Michael Blanding - Who Sways the USDA on GMO Approvals?

Government agencies can be "captured" by the very companies or industries they regulate. Looking at how genetically altered food products are approved, Assistant Professor Shon R. Hiatt finds unexpected influencers on the US Department of Agriculture. Key concepts include:

"Regulatory capture" describes the phenomenon whereby regulatory agencies tasked with serving the public instead end up advancing the interests of the companies they regulate.

Traditional theories of capture such as lobbying and campaign contributions had little effect on whether the US Department of Agriculture approved any particular genetically altered agriculture product.

What did seem to affect the approval process was the influence of third-party groups such as associations and even related regulatory agencies.

Read More:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6959.html

Tom Philpott - The Worst Farm Bill Ever?

The farm bill—that vast, byzantine, twice-a-decade plan for federal food, ag, and hunger policy—expires on Sept. 30, just weeks before what promises to be an epically contested presidential election.

Under normal circumstances, getting Congress to agree on such complex and expensive legislation at a politically charged juncture would be daunting. This year, with both parties touting fiscal austerity and with the GOP-dominated House having recently approved a draconian budget proposal [1], getting a farm bill through the legislative process will be nearly impossible.

But none of that will likely stop Big Agribusiness from getting what it wants, which is programs that underwrite environmentally ruinous, nutritionally vapid corn/soy agriculture. Take Big Ag's lobbying power and add a big pinch of fiscal hysteria and what you get is thin gruel for everything else in the farm bill, which could could choke off the USDA's progressive-ag programs and even result in sharp cuts to hunger programs at a time of high un- and underemployment.

Read More:

http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/04/worst-farm-bill-ever

Renee Parsons - Operation Shamrock and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Despite an idealistic vision of the country's devotion to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights amendments, it may come as a shock to any American who has not been paying attention that the US government has been conducting illegal unconstitutional surveillance on its citizens for much of the last hundred years. 

In what may have been the country's earliest coordinated effort at unconstitutional snooping, a government agency ominously named Black Chamber was in cahoots with Western Union after WWI to retrieve copies of telegrams in violation of the Radio Communications Act of 1912 and the Fourth Amendment.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/operation-shamrock-and-th_b_1406643.html

Jack A. Smith - Big Brother's Getting Bigger

Government surveillance and attacks on the privacy of American citizens were bad enough under the Bush regime but they are getting even worse during the Obama years.

In addition to retaining President George W. Bush's many excesses, such as the Patriot Act, new information about the erosion of civil liberties emerges repeatedly during the era of President Barack Obama from the federal government, the courts and various police forces.

The Supreme Court added judicial insult to personal injury April 2 when it ruled 5-4 that jail officials may strip-search anyone arrested for any offense, even a trifle, as they are being incarcerated, even if they are awaiting a hearing or trial. The four ultraconservative judges were joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Read More:

http://www.countercurrents.org/smith100412.htm 

According to the ACLU's Steven R. Shapiro, the "decision jeopardizes the privacy rights of millions of people who are arrested each year and brought to jail, often for minor offenses. Being forced to strip naked is a humiliating experience that no one should have to endure absent reasonable suspicion."

A day before the strip-search outrage, the New York Times reported that "law enforcement tracking of cellphones... has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.... One police training manual describes cellphones as 'the virtual biographer of our daily activities,' providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels."