Amnesty Report Slams UN as Failure in the Wake of Global Uprisings

In its 50th global human rights report, rights group Amnesty International slammed the UN Security Council as a failure and "unfit for its purpose" in the wake of global uprisings.

In the backdrop of courageous protesters worldwide, the group says that the UN Security Council is "tired, out of step and increasingly unfit for purpose."  Salil Shetty, Amnesty International Secretary General, said, “Failed leadership has gone global in the last year, with politicians responding to protests with brutality or indifference."

“In the last year it has all too often become clear that opportunistic alliances and financial interests have trumped human rights as global powers jockey for influence in the Middle East and North Africa,” added Shetty. “The language of human rights is adopted when it serves political or corporate agendas, and shelved when inconvenient or standing in the way of profit.”

Amnesty cites the UN Security Council's lack of action on crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka and Syria.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/24-4

Vandana Shiva - Eco Warriors, Arise!

In June 2012, world leaders along with thousands of participants from governments, NGOs and environmental groups as well as the private sector will come together in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil for Rio+20, 20 years after the Earth Summit was organised by the UN in 1992, to address urgent ecological challenges such as extinction of species, erosion of biodiversity and climate change. The Earth Summit gave us two significant international environmental laws — the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It also gave us the Rio principles, including the precautionary principle, and the “polluter pays” principle.

The world has changed radically since 1992 and, sadly, not for the better. Ecological sustainability has been systematically sacrificed for a particular model of economy, which itself is in crisis.

The year 1995 saw a tectonic shift in values guiding our decisions together with a shift with regard to those who make those decisions. It was the year the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was established. Whereas the Rio principles — shaped by ecological movements, ecological science and by sovereign governments — were informed by values of ecological sustainability, social justice and economic equity across and within the countries, the WTO introduced the paradigm of global corporate rule, changing the values and structures of governance and decision-making through free trade agreements between nations.

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http://www.countercurrents.org/shiva230512.htm

Not so organic - USDA accused of conspiracy with agribusiness insiders

A watchdog group that handles issues dealing with the American agriculture industry is lashing out at the federal government for allegedly corrupting the advisory board that oversees organic food stuffs in the United States.

The Cornucopia Institute from the state of Wisconsin is calling out the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in their latest report by saying that the governmental panel that determines what is and isn’t considered “organic” is stacked with federal insiders with an alternative agenda.

According to the findings in The Organic Watergate paper released this week, the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) has taken a turn for the worse in recent years, hiring staffers in bed with corporate entities that aren’t as concerned with protecting consumers as they are with making a buck.

"This is the proverbial fox watching the organic chicken coop,” Mark A. Kastel, co-director of The Cornucopia Institute, says in a press release.

The NOSB was established in order to oversee and monitor any and all synthetic ingredients used in the farming or production of so-called “organic” foods to "assure that it is not a threat to human health or the environment,” as well as recommend policy and modifications “to the regulations governing organic agriculture and food processing” in the US. Without proper oversight, it is feared by some that a slippery slope will effectively erode the USDA’s original standards and allow for Big Business and the government’s corporate colleagues to remove the rules that currently exist to guide consumers.

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http://rt.com/usa/news/organic-usda-agriculture-board-820/

Lee Drutman - The changing complexity of congressional speech

Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.

Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing down of Congress, others will see as more effective communications. And lawmakers of both parties still speak above the heads of the average American, who reads at between an 8^th and 9^th grade level.

Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level. Most major newspapers are written at between an 11^th and 14^thgrade level. (You can find more comparisons here)

All these analyses use the Flesch-Kincaid test, which produces the 'reads at a n-th grade level' terminology that is likely familiar to many readers. At its core, Flesch-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences. It is important to understand the limitations of this metric: it tells us nothing about the clarity or correctness of a passage of text. But although an admittedly crude tool, Flesch-Kincaid can nonetheless provide insights into how different legislators speak, and how Congressional speech has been changing.

To see how different legislators rank, click here for a full database of all current members of Congress.

To see how many top SAT words lawmakers speak, click here.

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http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/21/congressional-speech/

Top Obama Officials, Secretive Process Create 'Assassination List'

US officials with firsthand knowledge of how the government determines who gets put on the CIA and Pentagon's lists for 'targeted killing' have confessed concern over the implications and nature of the process.  In conversations with the Associated Press, one official involved -- who spoke with assurances of anonymity -- said that some of those carrying out the policy have become leery of "how easy it has become to kill someone," under the rules established under the Obama administration and orchestrated by Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan.

Brennan, who last month offered the first public admission by a White House official of the existence of the clandestine drone assassination program in places like Pakistan and Yemen, has amassed unique powers by consolidating the decision-making process to a select and tightly-controlled group of people, according to AP's reporting.

"Under the new plan, Brennan's staff compiles the potential target list and runs the names past agencies such as the State Department at a weekly White House meeting," the report cites officials as describing. "Previously, targets were first discussed in meetings run by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen at the time, with Brennan being just one of the voices in the debate. Brennan ultimately would make the case to the president, but a larger number of officials would end up drawn into the discussion."

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/22-2

Dean Baker - Mortgage and Securitization Fraud: Where Is the Task Force?

It was almost four years ago that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paul Paulson, and then New York Fed Bank President Timothy Geithner ran to Congress warning that the end of the world was near. They told members of Congress that the banks were drowning in bad debt and without a massive bailout they would soon be forced into bankruptcy. Congress quickly coughed up the money in the form of $700 billion in TARP loans. The Fed contributed trillions more.

Undoubtedly most of the bad debt was due to stupidity, which does not seem to be in short supply on Wall Street despite the high paychecks. The folks running the major banks somehow could not see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. The fact that house prices had risen by more than 70 percent above their trend level, with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals of the housing market, did not trouble these high-flyers.

But there was more than just stupidity involved here. There was an epidemic of mortgage fraud that was identified by the FBI as early as 2004. The general story was that the big subprime issuers were pushing their agents to issue as many mortgages as possible, because they knew that they could sell almost any mortgage the next day in the secondary market. As a result, many mortgage agents put down information that they knew to be false, often changing information provided by applicants to allow borrowers to get mortgages for which they were not actually qualified.

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/Mortgage-and-Securitizatio-by-Dean-Baker-120522-871.html

Brett LoGiurato - If History Is A Guide, Obama Is Heading For A Loss In November

Gallup is out with a look today at some key indicators that look troublesome for Barack Obama's re-election prospects this fall. 

There are three main indicators, which Gallup looks at from historical perspective to judge Obama's prospects this year. They are his approval rating, economic factors and Americans' view of the direction in which the country is headed.

So, first is Obama's job approval. At 47 percent in May, it compares with other presidents that have lost their bids for re-election in recent history. At this point in 2004, George W. Bush had a 49 percent approval rating. That's the lowest for a president to win re-election since 1964.

The key here is whether the number improves as we head closer to November. Bush was back up to 50 percent by October. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — three presidents that lost re-election — plummeted down to the 30s. 

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http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-re-election-loss-signs-point-to-loss-2012-5

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."

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

Michael Lind - Why Do Conservatives Hate Freedom?

Why do conservatives hate freedom? The question may be startling. After all, don’t conservatives claim they are protecting liberty in America against liberal statism, which they compare to communism or fascism? But the conservative idea of “freedom” is a very peculiar one, which excludes virtually every kind of liberty that ordinary Americans take for granted.

I distinguish conservatives from libertarians, who, on issues of personal liberty, tend to side with liberals. Since World War II, mainstream conservatives have opposed every expansion of personal liberty in the United States.

During the civil rights era, the leading conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, and the leading conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., along with most of their followers opposed federal laws banning racial discrimination. To their credit, they later admitted they had been mistaken; indeed, both Buckley and Goldwater supported gay rights late in their careers. But at the time that conservative support for a color-blind society might have made a difference, the leaders of American conservatism sided with the Southern segregationists. They claimed they did so, not because of racial prejudice, but because they feared federal tyranny — a weaselly stance that, in practice, made them side with white supremacist tyranny at the state level. If they had truly believed in their own propaganda about federalism, conservatives could have opposed federal civil rights legislation while campaigning for civil rights laws at the state level. They didn’t.

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http://www.salon.com/2012/05/15/why_do_conservatives_hate_freedom/

William J. Astore - The National Security State Wins (Again)

Now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the media is already handicapping the presidential election big time, and the neck-and-neck opinion polls are pouring in.  But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.

The reasons are easy enough to explain.  Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner.  He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.

Similarly, to have a realistic chance of defeating him -- so goes American political thinking -- candidate Romney must be seen as even stronger and more uncompromising, a hawk among hawks.  Whatever military spending Obama calls for, however much he caters to neo-conservative agendas, however often he confesses his undying love for and extols the virtues of our troops, Romney will surpass him with promises of even more military spending, an even more muscular and interventionistforeign policy, and an even deeper love of our troops.

Indeed, with respect to the national security complex, candidate Romney already comes across like Edward G. Robinson’s Johnny Rocco in the classic film Key Largo: he knows he wants one thing, and that thing ismore.  More ships for the Navy.  More planes for the Air Force.  More troops in general -- perhaps 100,000 more.  And much more spending on national defense.

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175542/