Jonathan Turley - So, Eric Holder, we should just trust that the president won't assassinate us?

Attorney General Eric Holder was at Northwestern University law school Monday explaining President Barack Obama's claimed authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation. The choice of a law school was a curious place for discussion of authoritarian powers. Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a "trust me" pledge that Holder repeated Monday at Northwestern.

The good news is that Holder promised not to hunt citizens for sport. Holder proclaimed that:

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/06/eric-holder-trust-targeted-assassination

Michelle Chen - Student Labor Scandal Illuminates the Gray Market for Guestworkers

The students came for a summer learning experience with a job at a classic American company. Instead, they got a crash course in the realities of the global economy.

Following months of campaigning, young foreign students who have waged a bitter labor battle against a U.S. candy giant, the Department of Labor has cited two subcontractors that helped import the students into the Hershey plant in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, where they were reportedly subjected to coercive, exploitative conditions. Though Hershey itself wasn't targeted, subcontractors involved in the work program, Exel Incorporated and SHS Group, were charged with several occupational safety violations, including failure to provide adequate safety-training and a repeated failure to record injuries and illnesses.

Though the citations include various fines, they didn't really address the core of the shadowy labor supply chain that entangled several hundred students from China, Nigeria, and other countries. According to workers' testimonies, they came for an “educational” work experience under the J-1 visa program and ended up stuck on an assembly line packing candies for obscenely low wages. The recruits eventually revolted and launched a high-profile campaign with the National Guestworker Alliance and other advocacy groups.

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12827/student_labor_scandal_illuminates_the_gray_market_for_guestworkers/

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

Ralph Nader: Obama Can Do More On Oil Prices

Gasoline and heating oil prices are ratcheting up. In California, some motorists are paying over $5 per gallon. President Obama declared that “there is no quick fix” for this problem. Meanwhile, the hapless but howling Republicans are blaming him for the fuel surge as if he is a price control czar.

Indeed, President Obama has some proper power to cool off retail petroleum prices. David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director, said it plainly on CNN last week, “Stop beating the war drums right now [against Iran], and Obama could do that, and he could say the neocons are history.” Having done his stint on Wall Street, Stockman knows that war talk by the war hawks inside and outside of our government is just what the speculators on the New York Mercantile Exchange want to hear as they bid up the price. Your gasoline prices are not charging up due to strains between supply and demand. Speculation, with those notorious derivatives and swaps, is what is poking larger holes in your fuel budget, according to Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement lawyers. The too-big-to-fail Wall Street gamblers – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley – are at it again.

Read More:

http://www.eurasiareview.com/07032012-ralph-nader-obama-can-do-more-on-oil-prices-oped/

Jillian C. York & Trevor Timm - Surveillance Inc: How Western Tech Firms Are Helping Arab Dictators

Reliance means vulnerability, and the activists and citizen journalists of the Arab uprisings rely heavily on the Internet and mobile technology. They use text messaging to coordinate protests, for example, or social media sites to upload the photos and videos that then make it into mainstream global media. In the first protests in Tunisia, because traditional journalists could not get access, citizen journalists filled in, using YouTube and the live-streaming platform UStream to give the world -- including, for example, the Egyptians and Syrians who later began revolts of their own -- a window into the events there.

For all of the good this technology has done, activists are also beginning to understand the harm it can do. As Evgeny Morozov wrote in The Net Delusion, his book on the Internet's darker sides, "Denying that greater information flows, combined with advanced technologies ... can result in the overall strengthening of authoritarian regimes is a dangerous path to take, if only because it numbs us to potential regulatory interventions and the need to rein in our own Western corporate excesses."

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/surveillance-inc-how-western-tech-firms-are-helping-arab-dictators/254008/

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

Katrina vanden Heuvel - Super Tuesday’s Big Winner Is Already Settled

The polls haven’t closed, but here’s one thing we already know: The big winners of Super Tuesday are the super PACs and big-money politics. In the run-up to Tuesday’s vote, the super PACs’ farcically described “independent expenditures” were far greater than the spending of the candidates’ campaigns.

A Las Vegas billionaire single-handedly has kept Newt Gingrich in the race. Mitt Romney’s “vulture capitalist” biography may raise doubts in some voters’ minds, but it has helped him sweep the money primary. And while Romney has found it hard to win significant support from Republican voters, his “independent” super PAC — Restore Our Future — has used that dough to carpet-bomb with negative ads any opponent who has risen to challenge him.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/06-2

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

Senator McCain Wants to Wage War Against Syria

Republican US Senator John McCain, his party's nominee for president in 2008 and a perennial war hawk, urged US military intervention in Syria on Monday. On a speech from the Senate floor, McCain said the US should use its "full weight of air power" against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

"Providing military assistance to the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups is necessary. But at this late hour, that alone cannot be sufficient to stop the slaughter and save innocent lives.The only realistic way to do so is with foreign air power." He added, "The United States should lead an international effort to protect key population centers in Syria, especially in the north, through airstrikes on Assad's forces."

Read More:

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