Robert Reich - The First Amendment Upside Down

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-First-Amendment-Upside-by-Robert-Reich-111122-196.html

November 22, 2011 By Robert Reich When the freedom of speech goes to the highest bidder, moneyed interests have a disproportionate say. Now more than ever, the First Amendment needs to be put right side up. Nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake. You've been seeing this across the country " Americans assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed " Why? For exercising their right to free speech and assembly -- protesting the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top. And what's Washington's response? Nothing. In fact, Congress' so-called "supercommittee" just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise a penny of taxes on the rich. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision last year ended all limits on political spending. Millions of dollars are being funneled to politicians without a trace. And a revolving door has developed between official Washington and Wall Street -- with bank executives becoming public officials who make rules that benefit the banks before heading back to the Street to make money off the rules they created.

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Global Research - CHIEF PROSECUTOR OF THE KUALA LUMPUR WAR CRIMES COMMISSION v. GEORGE W BUSH & ANTHONY L. BLAIR

Transcript of Judgement 

By Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal

Global Research, November 23, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27821 

Global Research has been involved in the Kuala Lumpur initiative to criminalise war launched by former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in December 2005. 

The following judgement of the KL War Crimes Tribunal is the result of several years of work involving the collection of evidence and the hearing of witnessses. 

This is historical decision sends a clear message to acting heads of State and heads of government of the member States of the Atlantic Alliance. 

A war of aggression under a humanitarian pretext is a Crime against the Peace under international law.  

Michel Chossudovsky, Member of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission,  Director of Global Research 

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Dave Lindorff - Time for Obama to Act to End Police-State Violence Against the Occupiers

Monday 21 November 2011

by: Dave Lindorff , This Can't Be Happening [3] | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/time-obama-act-end-police-state-violence-against-occupiers/1321974759 

The growing number of video clips and photos showing police in Darth Vader-like riot gear assaulting peaceful demonstrators with everything from tear gas and mace to truncheons, point-blank shots with beanbags and rubber bullets, and of course the ubiquitous fist and club, have made a bad joke out of claims that America is either the land of the free or the home of the brave.

Scott Olson, a veteran of America's Iraq War, suffered a severe brain injury that nearly killed him, and left him with difficulty speaking, thanks to a shot to his head by an attacking police officer in Oakland who was firing teargas canisters from a gun-like weapon. Olsen is lucky to be alive and will hopefully recover over time. A comrade, veteran Kayvan Sabehgi, who was retreating from advancing police that same night with his hands tucked in his pockets, can be seen being chased and so brutally beaten [4] by another attacking thug cop that he had to be hospitalized for treatment of a lacerated spleen (although the cops left him writing in agony in a cell for hours before sending him to the hospital).

Old women, pregnant mothers-to-be, and even children have been hit with pepper spray, teargassed and terrorized by police goons in New York, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Dallas, Chicago, Boston and elsewhere in what is almost certainly a coordinated attack on the Occupy Movement being run out of Washington.

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David Holthouse - How White Supremacists Are Trying to Make an American Town a Model for Right-Wing Extremism

By David Holthouse, Media Matters for America

Posted on November 22, 2011, Printed on November 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153162/how_white_supremacists_are_trying_to_make_an_american_town_a_model_for_right-wing_extremism

At first glance the Pioneer Little Europe website seems like it could be the work of the Montana Office of Tourism. Photographs depict the rugged beauty of the Flathead Valley region near Glacier National Park in northwest Montana.

One image shows a young blond-haired girl playing in a meadow overlooking Kalispell, the largest town in the area, with a population around 20,000.

The site also features short news items about the Northwest Montana State Fair and a wildflower beautification program along with Kalispell job postings.

But then there's this: A scan of a full-page advertisement in a recent edition of the Flathead Beacon, the local paper, with photographs of 47 babies newly delivered in the Kalispell Regional Medical Center. All but one are fair-skinned with light-colored hair. "Wonderful white babies being born in Kalispell," the website reads. "What do the babies look like being born in your town?" Another item on the Pioneer Little Europe site depicts white families relaxing on the shore of a lake. A caption reads,"This is how white our beaches are, and I'm not talking about sand."

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Alliance for Natural Health - Durbin and Waxman Strike Again!

Alliance for Natural Health  November 22, 2011

http://www.anh-usa.org/durbin-and-waxman-strike-again/

Their latest move targets supplements while giving drugs and vaccines a free pass. New Action Alert! [1]

Senator Dick Durbin and Congressman Henry Waxman are trying a new tactic in their attack on supplements after previous legislative failures [2]. They have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review adverse event report data—but only for supplements. The GAO operates at the call of Congress, so some action on this request is inevitable. Here is their letter [3].

In a statement, Sen. Durbin said, “The FDA has the tools necessary to determine which supplements can cause and have caused severe health problems—they should use them effectively.”

This is nonsense. There is no evidence that legitimate supplements, those that comply with existing law, have caused severe health problems. What the FDA needs to do is not evaluate and approve each supplement, but rather enforce existing law.

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Henry Giroux - Occupy Colleges Now -- Students as the New Public Intellectuals

Monday 21 November 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-colleges-now-students-new-public-intellectuals/1321891418

The police violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of force that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future.

Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good.  

As people move or are pushed by authorities out of their makeshift tent cities in Zuccotti Park and other public spaces in cities across the United States, the harsh registers and interests of the punishing state become more visible. The corporate state cannot fight any longer with ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt,  fast losing any semblance of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency, resistance and collective struggle.

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William Pfaff - Why Does Obama Suddenly Want a War With China?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_does_obama_suddenly_want_a_war_with_china_20111122/

Posted on Nov 22, 2011

By William Pfaff

One might think that a bitter Central Asian war in Afghanistan, spilling into Pakistan, with no sign of ending, and an as yet ambiguous military commitment to a defeated and incompletely reconstituted Iraq, now overshadowed by Iran and the Arab Awakening across the Middle East, would be enough for President Barack Obama to cope with.

He was, after all, elected to reduce American military commitments. He was going to end things in Iraq, fight the “right war” in Afghanistan, which Gen. David Petraeus told him could be wound up in a year. Unaccustomed to generals as he might have been, he surely did not expect “Af-Pak” to turn into a permanent activity and a source of income for the Pentagon and the American arms industry.

Why then does he now want a war with China? No one seems to have made much of this in American press reports and comment, but others have noticed, most of all in China. His journey to Asia this month proclaimed a Pax Americana for Asia—which as such is absurd. The effort is likely to become just the opposite: a steadily deepening and costly engagement in suppressing China’s attempt to reclaim the Asian preeminence it held for more than a thousand years.

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David Swanson - The Last Whistleblowers

Counterpunch.org  November 22, 2011

by DAVID SWANSON

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/22/the-last-whistleblowers/print

Whistleblowing in our federal government may soon be a thing of the past, not because whistleblowers face more vicious retribution than ever before — although that is true; and not because important acts of whistleblowing now result in fewer reforms and less accountability than they used to — although that is also true and is getting closer; but fundamentally because the actions against which we need whistles blown are publicly acknowledged.

 How would one expose war or indefinite imprisonment or assassinations or drone attacks or wiretapping or profiteering or bribery or massive money transfers to Wall Street?  I understand how, even a few years ago, such things could be exposed by courageous whistleblowers.  I understand how retired officials who missed their chance at being timely whistleblowers can now expose the steps through which these crimes have been normalized.  But I have a hard time understanding how one would leak to the media or reveal on one’s blog what has been openly acknowledged, legalized, formalized, and normalized.

Starting from the model of whistleblowers, one is tempted to suggest that we begin supporting those individuals who will resist immoral orders and assignments: resisters instead of whistleblowers.  But we have one whistleblower for every 100,000 or so government employees informed of the abuses exposed.  We are likely to have infinitely fewer inside resisters.  Clearly we need a different model.  We need to all be whistleblowers, since we all know about the crimes.  We need to insist on viewing policies differently, rather than viewing different policies.  We need to expose what happens where the bombs land and the defunding of human needs hit home.  And we need to organize massive resistance from outside the government, with the potential for creating massive resistance within the government as well.

I expressed my concerns and raised these questions to some of our most praiseworthy whistleblowers at an event Monday evening in Washington, D.C.

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Rick Rozoff - U.S. Arms Persian Gulf Allies For Conflict With Iran

By Rick Rozoff
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27731
Global Research, November 18, 2011
Stop NATO
Rumors and reports of, speculation over and scenarios for attacks against Iran’s civilian nuclear power facilities and military sites by the United States, Israel or both have flared up periodically over the past several years, especially since early 2005. However, recent statements by among others the president and defense minister of Israel and a leading candidate for the American presidency in next year’s election – Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Mitt Romney respectively – before and after the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran’s nuclear program manifest a more stark and menacing tone that has been heard in a long time. Standing U.S. head of state Barack Obama recently stated, “We are not taking any options off the table.” The above threats and others of the same tenor have been noted in the capitals of countries around the world. Last week the Global Times, a publication of the Communist Party of China, featured an unsigned editorial entitled “Winds of war start blowing toward Iran,” which contained these excerpts:

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Garret Wood - Supplements Set to Become Illegal in 2012 under FDA

FoodFreedom.com   October 30, 2011

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/supplements-set-to-become-illegal-in-2012-under-fda/

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/supplements-set-to-become-illegal-in-2012-under-fda/

By Garret Wood

The FDA has issued new rules that, if enacted, will enable them to ban many of the supplements you are now taking.

Think I’m exaggerating? Then please listen to the full story …

Back in the early 1990s, the FDA tried to make many supplements illegal.  Consumers were so alarmed by the FDA’s bullying that they staged a massive revolt. The result was that Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). That law protected supplements from the FDA unless the FDA could prove a supplement wasn’t safe.

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