Tom Carter - US Congress passes authoritarian anti-protest law

A bill passed Monday in the US House of Representatives and Thursday in the Senate would make it a felony—a serious criminal offense punishable by lengthy terms of incarceration—to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Several commentators have dubbed it the “anti-Occupy” law, but its implications are far broader.

The bill—H.R. 347, or the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011”—was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, while only Ron Paul and two other Republicans voted against the bill in the House of Representatives (the bill passed 388-3). Not a single Democratic politician voted against the bill.

The virtually unanimous passage of H.R. 347 starkly exposes the fact that, despite all the posturing, the Democrats and the Republicans stand shoulder to shoulder with the corporate and financial oligarchy, which regarded last year’s popular protests against social inequality with a mixture of fear and hostility.

Read More:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/prot-m03.shtml

Steven Wishnia - The Truth About Drug-Testing the Unemployed

The new federal law that lets states drug-test applicants for unemployment compensation was a small win for the Republican-led efforts to examine the urine of everyone receiving government safety-net benefits. How many people it will affect depends on how the Department of Labor establishes the regulations—and on whether the courts continue to hold that such policies violate the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches.

House Republicans initially wanted to let states drug-test all 7.5 million people collecting unemployment compensation. The compromise reached in the payroll tax-cut deal, along with cutting six months off the time people can collect, authorizes states to test applicants for benefits in two circumstances: if they were fired for using drugs, or if the only occupation they’re suited for is one the Department of Labor lists as commonly requiring drug-testing.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/154364/the_truth_about_drug-testing_the_unemployed

Chris Hedges - AIPAC Works for the 1 Percent

The battle for justice in the Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is about living rather than dying. It is about communicating rather than killing. It is about love rather than hate. It is part of the great battle against the corporate forces of death that reign over us—the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the speculators on Wall Street, the oligarchic elites who assault our poor, our working men and women, our children, one in four of whom depend on food stamps to eat, the elites who are destroying our ecosystem with its trees, its air and its water and throwing into doubt our survival as a species.

What is being done in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is a pale reflection of what is slowly happening to the rest of us. It is a window into the rise of the global security state, our new governing system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is a reflection of a world where the powerful are not bound by law, either on Wall Street or in the shattered remains of the countries we invade and occupy, including Iraq with its hundreds of thousands of dead. And one of the greatest purveyors of this demented ideology of violence for the sake of violence, this flagrant disregard for the rule of domestic and international law, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/aipac_works_for_the_1_percent_20120304/

John Nichols - Battling Big Money: Vermont Town Meetings Will Move to Amend

If the polls are to be believed, big money—in the form of Mitt “Corporations Are People, My Friend” Romney—will be on the march this Super Tuesday in much of the country.

But it will lose some ground at the grassroots level in Vermont.

At town hall meetings across the state, in a great show of small-“d” democratic determination to renew the promise of the American experiment, thousands of Vermont voters will vote on resolutions urging that the US Constitution be amended to declare that corporations are not people.

The resolutions are a response to the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling by the US Supreme Court, one of a number of recent High Court decisions that have for all intents and purposes given corporations and wealthy individuals the “right” to spend whatever amount of money they choose to buy elections.

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/166616/battling-big-money-vermont-town-meetings-will-move-amend

John Mason - Landmark hydrofracking case in Otsego has local ties

A local law firm played a large part in recent developments that may have spelled the end of the road for the horizontal, high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, industry in New York state.

The firm Rapport, Meyers defended Middlefield, Otsego County against a suit brought by Cooperstown Holstein Corp. George Rodenhausen, the lawyer who argued the case, called the rulings “decisive” for the hydrofracking industry in New York state. 

“If I were working for the industry, I would not appeal,” he said. “I would go to Pennsylvania.” Also working on the case were Victor Meyers, Cheryl Roberts and Victoria Polidoro.

Hydrofracking is a process that involves sending a mixture of water, sand and chemicals deep into the ground to break apart rocks to release natural gas that is captured and brought to the surface. There has been resistance to it because of the possibility of aquifer contamination from the fracking as well as from containment ponds of contaminated water.

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http://www.thedailymail.net/articles/2012/02/29/news/doc4f4dc494ae62d264645426.txt

Michael Gormley - Records show NY Gov Cuomo skipped tough questions

 The record of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's first online chat with New Yorkers shows the Democrat skipped an onslaught of increasingly pointed questions about hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and some other thorny issues and criticism.

Several New Yorkers asked during the chat to see all the questions, or a way to obtain them. Cuomo didn't answer.

Five months later, the record of the online town meeting was released under a Freedom of Information Law request by The Associated Press, submitted in September.

"We get requests for thousands of pages of documents and respond as quickly as possible," Cuomo spokesman Josh Vlasto said Thursday.

The Sept. 24 chat was part of Cuomo's transparency effort. He plans to release the records obtained by the AP to his Citizens Connects website Thursday (www.governor.ny.gov/citizenconnects/).

Read More:

http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/records-show-ny-gov-cuomo-skipped-tough-questions-2210267.html

Vermont Town Meetings Model People-Driven Democracy

Voters in ten states take to the polls today for a 'Super Tuesday' focused mostly on the Republican race for the presidential nomination. As they do so, the national media busies itself cataloging the now requisite speculative horse race play-by-play while giving audience to uninvited strategic advice from political operatives and paid partisans. Quietly, however, in the thinly populated New England state of Vermont, a wonderfully quaint and seemingly-forgotten practice is taking place: democracy.

Tuesday, March 6th is Town Meeting Day for most Vermont cities and towns. Meeting day often doubles as election day for local officials, but they also offer a chance to discuss issues of public importance, help to set municipal budgets, and allow towns to make collective stands on policy or social issues of state, national, or even global, importance.  This year, in addition to the various local issues, at least 52 towns in Vermont will be voting on town resolutions calling attention to the woeful influence that corporate money has come to exert over all levels of US government.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/06-4

William T. Hathaway - Are Wars Inevitable?

These assumptions have become axioms of our culture. They generate despair but also a certain comfort because they relieve us of the responsibility to change.

Some politicians and pundits declare that human nature makes peace impossible, that war is built into our genes. They point to research by evolutionary biologists that indicates our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, make war. Therefore war must be part of our heredity. It's true that in certain situations chimpanzees do raid neighboring colonies and kill other chimps. Those studies on killer apes got enormous publicity because they implied that war is hardwired into human nature. Most scientists didn't draw those conclusions from the evidence, but the mass media kept reinforcing that message.

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http://www.countercurrents.org/hathaway230112.htm

David A Love - The US government's capital punishment prerogative

While much attention is paid to the 34 US states that still administer the death penalty, federal and military systems of executions also exist. The retention of the US federal death penalty undermines those states that have abolished capital punishment– and federal executions undermine Washington's claims of world leadership in human rights.

Historically, perhaps the most well-known federal executions were of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York. The Rosenbergs were convicted of Soviet espionage and electrocuted in 1953, at a time of anti-communist hysteria, amid charges of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct and a climate of antisemitism.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/27/us-government-capital-punishment

Peter Van Buren - Silent State – Washington’s Campaign Against Whistleblowers

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.

Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/