Cliff Schecter - How America Lost Its Collective Mind in the Drug War

Towards the beginning of the cult classic Dazed & Confused, a high school senior named Slater, inquires of baby-faced freshman Mitch, "are you cool?" What Slater was really asking--in this ode to 1970s youth and the counterculture--was do you smoke pot?

Ahh the 70s. Back before the Reagan Revolution kicked the kooky, corrupt and thoroughly counterproductive War On Drugs into high gear. Suddenly this country lost its collective mind, suffering a lapse in judgment that vaunted well past ill-advised and just beyond "they have weapons of mass destruction" to what might best be labeled "the mind of Ted Nugent."

By any measure; economically, morally, democratically, we are the worse for allowing special interests, from private prisons to the security industry, take us down this road. It has spiritually hollowed us out, while erecting a prominent prison culture that makes The People's Republic of China seem like Woodstock.

Read More:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201242362552429495.html

NSA Domestic Spying Continues Under Obama

WASHINGTON - April 25 - On Monday, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower and Government Accountability Project (GAP) client William Binney continued publicly revealing massive domestic surveillance beginning under President George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, and continuing rampantly under President Obama.

A senior crypto-mathematician, Binney served at NSA for over forty years, lastly as the Technical Director of the NSA World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting group, made up of thousands of NSA employees charged with analyzing massive volumes of electronic data gathered worldwide. Today, on the day of the annual Ridenhour Prizes that celebrate whistleblowers and truth-telling in the public interest, GAP is lauding Binney for courageously taking a stand and continuing to blow the whistle on NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance.

Binney’s explosive disclosures over the past few weeks include:

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/04/25-3?print

2012 Senate Farm Bill Does More Harm Than Good

Statement of Craig Cox, Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Environmental Working Group, on the Senate Agriculture Committee’s 2012 farm bill.

“The 2012 farm bill should do more to support family farmers, protect the environment, promote healthy diets and support working families. Unfortunately, the bill produced today by the Senate Agriculture Committee will do more harm than good. It needlessly sacrifices conservation and feeding assistance programs to finance unlimited insurance subsidies and a new entitlement program for highly profitable farm businesses. Rather than simply ending the widely discredited direct payment program, the Senate Agriculture Committee has created an expensive new entitlement program that guarantees most of the income of farm businesses already enjoying record profits. Replacing direct payments with a revenue guarantee program is a cynical game of bait-and-switch that should be rejected by Congress.

“The proposed legislation doubles down on unlimited subsidies to buy and deliver farm insurance – at a cost of $90 billion over the next ten years. Modest reforms to these heavily subsidized insurance programs, such as means-testing and capping premium subsidies, would save enough money to spare conservation and anti-hunger programs from the proposed cuts. Crop insurance has not only become an expensive new subsidy for large farm businesses, it has also become an entitlement program for insurance agents and insurers, including companies based in tax havens such as Bermuda and Switzerland.

Read More:

http://www.ewg.org/release/2012-senate-farm-bill-does-more-harm-good

Mark Ames - Independent and Principled? Behind the Cato Myth

It began as a fairly straight-forward story about a shareholder lawsuit [1]: The Koch brothers, Charles and David, who together own 50 percent of the libertarian Cato Institute, filed suit to recover a 25 percent stake held by longtime chairman William Niskanen, who died last autumn and whose widow has yet to relinquish those shares. 

Cato’s shareholder’s agreement is "pretty clear" according to legal writer Alison Frankel [2]: shareholders cannot sell or transfer their shares without first offering them back to the Institute and then to the remaining Cato shareholders. But there’s one legal ambiguity: Cato’s shareholder agreement “doesn’t specifically address what happens when a shareholder dies.”

What started as a rather arcane legal dispute between the Koch brothers and their longtime lieutenant, Cato president Ed Crane, quickly transformed into a PR-manufactured Washington melodrama: The famed and revered (in some quarters) Cato Institute has turned against its Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Koch, attacking its maker with the full range of PR-weaponry that has served Cato effectively over these past four decades. The same pundits who only yesterday fell over themselves defending the billionaire Koch brothers as principled libertarians now denounce their benefactors as venal Republican Party warmongers out to crush the Cato Institute’s “nonpartisan” “independent” “scholarship” for the crime of being, yes, principled libertarians.

Read More:

http://www.thenation.com/article/167500/independent-and-principled-behind-cato-myth

George Washington - Influential Senator Warned in 1975: “Th[e National Security Agency's] Capability At Any Time Could Be Turned Around On The American People, And No American Would Have Any Privacy Left …There Would Be No Place To Hide. [If A Dictator Ever Took Over, The N.S.A.] Could Enable It To Impose Total Tyranny, And There Would Be No Way To Fight Back”

Senator Church’s Prophetic Warning

Senator Frank Church – who chaired the famous “Church Committee” into the unlawful FBI Cointel program, and who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said in 1975:

“Th[e National Security Agency's]  capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.  [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“

Now, the NSA is building a $2 billion dollar facility in Utah which will use the world’s most powerful supercomputer to monitor virtually all phone calls, emails, internet usage, purchases and rentals, break all encryption, and then store everyone’s data permanently.

The former head of the program for the NSA recently held his thumb and forefinger close together, and said:

We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state

So Senator Church’s warning was prophetic.

Read More:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/george-washington-influential-senator-warned-in-1975-the-national-security-agencys-capability-at-any-time-could-be-turned-around-on-the-american-people-and-no-american-would-have-any.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Justin Elliott - Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency

News organizations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorializing in favor of open government.

But now many of the country's biggest media companies — which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations — are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.

The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism — NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and dozens of local TV news outlets — are lobbying against a Federal Communications Commission measure to require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Internet.

As we have recently detailed, political ad data is public by law but is not widely accessible because it is currently kept only in paper files at individual stations. The FCC has proposed fixing that by requiring broadcasters to post on the Internet details of political ad purchases including the identity of the buyer and the price.

Read More:

http://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-media-companies-lobbying-against-transparency

Lawrence Wittner - The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set for Spending on War

On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money -- and the tax money of other nations -- went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war

World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 -- an increase of $138 billion over the previous year. The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion. Some news reports have emphasized that, from the standpoint of reducing reliance on armed might, this actually represents progress. After all, the increase in “real” global military spending -- that is, expenditures after corrections for inflation and exchange rates -- was only 0.3 percent. And this contrasts with substantially larger increases in the preceding thirteen years.

But why are military expenditures continuing to increase -- indeed, why aren’t they substantially decreasing -- given the governmental austerity measures of recent years? Amid the economic crisis that began in late 2008 (and which continues to the present day), most governments have been cutting back their spending dramatically on education, health care, housing, parks, and other vital social services. However, there have not been corresponding cuts in their military budgets.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/23-2

Gary Younge - Abroad, as at home, Obama coasts on a wave of disappointment

In January 1903 the US signed a treaty with Colombia that would have provided unfettered access to the Panama canal. Unfortunately, the terms were not good enough for the Colombian senate, which refused to ratify it. At the time, Panama had been a region of Colombia for 80 years. Undeterred by the annoying matter of Colombian sovereignty the US encouraged, incited and facilitated Panama's secession from Colombia.

The newly independent Panama gave its American enablers all it wanted. In the face of considerable criticism, the US president, Theodore Roosevelt, looked to the closest members of his cabinet to help him justify his actions. Unable to articulate a principled defence they simply endorsed them with gallows humour. "You have shown that you were accused of seduction," said his secretary of war, Elihu Root. "And you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape."

This was not the last time Colombians would be screwed by the US. Earlier this month several secret service agents and military personnel were embroiled in a scandal with Colombian sex workers. More than 20 have so far been implicated in the scandal after local police intervened in a dispute between an agent and an escort. She said he'd agreed to pay her $800 for the night; he offered her only $30. She eventually left the hotel after being paid $225.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/22/abroad-obama-coasts-wave-disappointment

Juan Cole - How America Went Rogue: What We All Need to Know About Our Government's Shadow Wars

Covert operations are nothing new in American history, but it could be argued that during the past decade they have moved from being a relatively minor arrow in the national security quiver to being the cutting edge of American power. Drone strikes, electronic surveillance and stealth engagements by military units such as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), as well as dependence on private corporations, mercenary armies and terrorist groups, are now arguably more common as tools of US foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy. But these tools lend themselves to rogue operations that create peril for the United States when they blow back on us. And they often make the United States deeply unpopular.

Shadow power has even become an issue in the presidential campaign. Newt Gingrich advocates ramped-up “covert operations” inside Iran. President Obama replied to Mitt Romney’s charge that he is an “appeaser” by suggesting that his critics “ask bin Laden” about that.

Obama often speaks of the “tide of war receding,” but that phrase refers only to conventional war. In Afghanistan, where the administration hopes to roll up conventional fighting by the end of 2013, it is making plans for long-term operations by special forces through units such as JSOC. It is unclear what legal framework will be constructed for their activities, other than a wink and a nod from President Hamid Karzai.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/world/155000/how_america_went_rogue%3A_what_we_all_need_to_know_about_our_government's_shadow_wars?page=entire

Why Is It Necessary For The Federal Government To Turn The United States Into A Prison Camp?

There has been no society in the history of the world that has ever been 100% safe.  No matter how much money the federal government spends on “homeland security”, the truth is that bad things will still happen.  Our world is a very dangerous place and it is becoming increasingly unstable.  The federal government could turn the entire country into one giant prison camp, but that would still not keep us safe.  It is inevitable that bad stuff will happen in life.  But we have a choice.  We can choose to live in fear or we can choose to live as free men and women.  Our forefathers intended to establish a nation where liberty and freedom would be maximized.  But today we are told that we have to give up our liberties and our freedoms and our privacy for increased security.  But is such a trade really worth it?  Just think of the various totalitarian societies that we have seen down throughout history.  Have any of them ever really thrived?  Have their people been happy?  Unfortunately, the U.S. federal government has decided that the entire country needs to be put on lock down.  Nearly everything that we do today is watched and tracked, and personal privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.  Many of the things that George Orwell wrote about in 1984 are becoming a reality, and that is a very frightening thing.  The United States is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Sadly, we are rapidly becoming the exact opposite of that.

Read More:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/why-is-it-necessary-for-the-federal-government-to-turn-the-united-states-into-a-prison-camp.html