Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

YEAR ELEVEN IN THE ERA OF PERPETUAL WAR

Why March, Again, on October 7?

Same reason as before

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0

Mass Student/Worker Resistance Across Europe–it’s not Austerity, it is Capitalism in Rapid Decay Angry and violent protests against austerity measures continue to flare across Europe, with thousands of students across Italy fighting cutbacks.
Thousands of university and high school students clashed with Italian police during a number of marches in major cities, including Rome, Milan and Naples, where the crowds chanted slogans and carried banners such as ‘save schools not banks’.
Up to six policemen were wounded in Rome, police said, after students wearing motorcycle helmets and carrying home-made shields pelted them with stones and tried to rush a police van before being driven back in a baton charge. ..Young people have borne the brunt of rising joblessness in Italy, where the youth unemployment rate is 35 per cent, more than three times the overall level.
‘We are worried about our prospects and about the future of our country,’ Madalina Ursu, 19, told Reuters…..Yesterday in Athens more than 100 protesters forced open the shuttered entrance to the defence ministry complex, crossing the courtyard and blocking the entrance to the general staff building.
Riot police were called in to force back the demonstrators, who were demanding to meet with ministry officials.
Greece’s top military officer, General Michalis Kostarakos, was heckled by the shipyard workers when he came out to speak to them by using their portable loudspeaker.  …If Greece were to hold new elections soon, Golden Dawn could emerge as the third-largest party in Parliament, behind Mr. Samaras’s New Democracy and the left-wing Syriza. Currently, Golden Dawn is the fifth largest, with 18 out of 300 seats.   www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2213535/Students-riot-Italy-protest-austerity-measures-Greek-shipyard-workers-demonstrate-support-arrested-strikers.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Congratulations for the publication of

Congratulations to Doug Valentine for Sex, Drugs and the CIA [Editors’ Note: We are once again pleased to publish an exclusive
investigative report by Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program, the best book on the CIA’s assassination program in Vietnam. This time  Valentine, who has just put the finishing touches on Strength of the Wolf  (a history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the origins of the war on  drugs), explores one of the Agency’s more disgusting chapters, the doping  of unsuspecting American citizens with LSD. With the Bush administration  and members of congress from both parties clamoring to unfetter the spy  Agency in the wake of 9/11, this cautionary tale from the CIA’s recent past  couldn’t come at a more apt time. For more on George Hunter White and the  CIA’s MK-Ultra program read our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the
Press.–jsc/ac]     richgibson.com/sexdrugscia.html

School Worker Resistance in India (Ravi Kumar) They need to recognize that teacher is a worker like any other worker only the sites of production are different
They need to recognize that the teachers are not a privileged set of people
They need to recognize that teachers will have to fight continuously against rule of capital that imposes itself undemocratically on the teachers-workers in different ways, through different instruments that it has at its disposal.
They need to recognize that only an all-encompassing working class unity can save the university and its democratic ethos.    againstcapital.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/university-administration-echoes-desires-of-capital/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Robert Lansing, former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, wrote in 1924 that “Mexico is an extraordinarily easy country to dominate, as it necessary to control only one man: the President. We must abandon the idea of installing an American citizen in the Mexican presidency, as that would only lead us, once again, to war. The solution requires more time: we must open the doors of our universities to young, ambitious Mexicans and make the effort to educate them in the American way of life, in our values, and in respect for the leadership of the United States. Mexico will need competent administrators, and over time, these young people will come to occupy important positions and will eventually take posession of the presidency itself. And without the United States having to spend a single cent or fire a single shot, they will do what we want, and do it better and more radically than we ourselves would have done.”

MSU getting $45 million to educate 185 African students Michigan State University is getting $45 million for the education of 185 African students over the next nine years under a new scholarship program.
The East Lansing school says the money comes out of a $500 million effort that the MasterCard Foundation unveiled Wednesday.
The university says the money will pay for the education of 100 undergraduates and 85 master’s degree students. It says it’s the only university in the Midwest participating in the program.
Michigan State President Lou Anna Simon says “Africa now hosts seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing national economies and is the world’s youngest continent demographically.”
But she says poverty in Africa is responsible for a lag in secondary and higher education rates there.    www.detroitnews.com/article/20120930/SCHOOLS/209300333/1026/schools/MSU-getting-45-million-educate-185-African-students

Race to To Totalitarianism Goose Step Two The U.S. Department of Education has released the detailed application for the states that are eligible for funding in round two of the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge. The $133 million sweepstakes aimed at improving the quality of early-childhood education programs is a more modest cousin to the first round of the competition when nine states split a $500 million pot of money.
Five states that scored well in round one, but not high enough to make it to the winner’s circle, will be vying for the fresh batch of grants. They are Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Much like the bridesmaid edition of the Race to the Top round three, phase two is not really a competition at all, like in the first go-round when 37 states were all jockeying to win.
The five states will, for the most part, submit the same proposals as they did in the first phase. They can make adjustments, if necessary, to reflect changes they’ve made to their early-childhood systems since the time of their first application. But because the potential winnings aren’t as robust, the states can only apply for up to 50 percent of what they proposed in their original applications, so they will all have big decisions to make about where to scale back.
In the first round of the Early Learning Challenge, the grants were worth from $50 million to $100 million, depending on the details of a state’s proposal and its population of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This time, the maximum amount any of the five states can get varies, with Illinois able to win the most at just under $35 million.
There will also be no peer review process this time, since their applications were already closely examined and scored by judges last fall. For a thorough description of what the five states can expect, read this handy summary written by the Education Counsel that the folks at First Five Years Fund have shared with the masses.
The states have until Oct. 28 to rewrite and file their applications.   blogs.edweek.org/edweek/early_years/2012/09/phase_two_of_race_to_top_early_learning_challenge_kicks_off.html

Michigan Kids Still to do the Seig Heil (read comments) Gov. Rick Snyder has signed laws that give kids the opportunity to say the Pledge of Allegiance each day in Michigan public schools.
The laws kick in during the next school year. All students will have a chance to say the pledge but no one will be compelled. U.S. flags are required in classrooms where the pledge is recited. Veterans will help districts that can’t afford flags. More than 40 states require public schools to offer a recitation of the pledge.    www.detroitnews.com/article/20121006/POLITICS02/210060390/1026/schools/Pledge-Allegiance-school-law-Michigan

Poor Michigan Schools Bribe Kids for Count Days, Rich Suburbs Don’t. Why? Metro Detroit school districts plan a variety of incentives, from prizes to pizza, to persuade students to show up Wednesday for Count Day, when attendance counts toward 90 percent of per-pupil state aid for the year.   www.detroitnews.com/article/20121002/SCHOOLS/210020404/1026/SCHOOLS/Some-Metro-Detroit-schools-roll-out-incentives-Count-Day

Those Healthy School lunches Don’t Have to be more Expensive nor Tasteless They are high school students, and their complaint is about lunch — healthier, smaller and more expensive than ever.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required public schools to follow new nutritional guidelines this academic year to receive extra federal lunch aid, has created a nationwide version of the age-old parental challenge: persuading children to eat what is good for them.
Because the lunches must now include fruits and vegetables, those who clamor for more cheese-laden nachos may find string beans and a peach cup instead. Because of limits on fat and sodium, some of those who crave French fries get baked sweet-potato wedges. Because of calorie restrictions, meat and carbohydrate portions are smaller. Gone is 2-percent chocolate milk, replaced by skim.
“Before, there was no taste and no flavor,” said Malik Barrows, a senior at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, who likes fruit but said his classmates threw away their mandatory helpings on the cafeteria floor. “Now there’s no taste, no flavor and it’s healthy, which makes it taste even worse.”   www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/nyregion/healthier-school-lunches-face-student-rejection.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121006

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B2JikABjA8

Blame Lawrence

Why Qatar Wants to Invade Syria thinks about it. Obama – who defines the Emir as a “pretty influential guy” – seems to imply that even though “he himself is not reforming significantly” and “there’s no big move towards democracy in Qatar”, just because the emirate’s per capita income is humongous, a move towards democracy is not so pressing.
So let’s assume the Emir is not exactly interested in turning Syria into Scandinavia. That opens the way to an inevitable motive – connected to, what else, Pipelineistan.
Vijay Prashad, author of the recent Arab Spring, Libya Winter, is currently writing a series on the Syria Contact Group for Asia Times Online. He got a phone call from an energy expert urging him to investigate “the Qatari ambition to run its pipelines into Europe.” According to this source, “the proposed route would have run through Iraq and Turkey. The former transit country is posing to be a problem. So much easier to go north (Qatar has already promised Jordan free gas).”   www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NI28Ak03.html

Nothing can Go Wrong. Nothing Can Go Wrong. Ooops. Only two days after joint operations between American and Afghan forces were said to be returning to normal, five people — two Americans and three Afghans — were killed when a pitched battle broke out between soldiers of the two sides, American and Afghan officials said Sunday.  Afghan officials said that the clash on Saturday was a misunderstanding and that the Americans apparently attacked an Afghan National Army unit in error. A top coalition officer said the Americans were attacked first in what might possibly have been an insurgent attack. Nonetheless, he expressed regret for what ensued.
An initial statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, commonly referred to as ISAF, on Sunday described the episode as “a suspected insider attack,” which killed a foreign soldier and a civilian contractor. If so, that would bring to 53 the number of coalition forces killed in the so-called insider attacks this year.   www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/world/asia/suspected-insider-attack-in-afghanistan.html?ref=global-home

Insider attack kills 2000th US Troop An Afghan soldier opened fire on a group of US and Afghan forces today, killing the 2,000th US soldier to die in Afghanistan since the war began. He also killed a civilian contractor and three Afghan soldiers.
The US has made repeated changes on the ground to try to get the situation under control, canceling training missions and ordering all recruits re-screened. They also briefly halted joint operations last week but quickly backtracked.    news.antiwar.com/2012/09/30/afghan-soldier-kills-2000th-us-troop-4-others/

The Talibs are Coming. The Talibs are Coming. A Taliban suicide bomber rammed a motorcycle packed with explosives into a joint U.S.-Afghan patrol on Monday, killing 14 people including three Americans in the latest attack on an increasingly fraught program to help Afghan forces take over security so foreign troops can withdraw from the country over the next two years.   The attack followed more American casualties over the weekend that pushed the U.S. military’s death toll for the 11-year-war above 2,000 — a figure that has climbed steadily in recent months as attacks on the so-called “partnering” initiative have risen.   www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/10/01/world/asia/ap-as-afghanistan.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

The Dilemma: The US Cannot Leave Afghanistan, defeated–US Cannot Stay/ Win vs AfPak The catastrophic breach of a major NATO base in Afghanistan and killings by turncoat local forces are spurring concerns about the pace and strategy of the U.S. military pullout, including the end last week of the surge of extra troops.
The spectacle of brazen suicide attacks like the Sept. 14 assault on Camp Bastion and a demoralizing spate of insider killings of Marines and other service members signaled a change in insurgent tactics as U.S. troop levels fell from a high of about 100,000 to 68,000.   www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/sep/29/attacks-test-coalition-drawdown-plans/

Bush’s September 11th Lies Kurt Eichenwald, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a former reporter for The New York Times, makes his methodical case against the Bush administration with detailed examples rather than flat assertions. With each piece of evidence, it becomes clearer that in late 2001 and in 2002, President Bush and Vice President Cheney had begun panicking. Mistaking rumors and lies fabricated by victims of torture as actionable information and elbowing aside skeptics, they gave rein to their fears that the worst was yet to come — and their hysteria spread to and infected parts of the national security ­establishment.
The assistant attorney general John Yoo comes across as particularly determined in his wrongheadedness, and full of passionate intensity. Furious over a federal judge’s decision to uphold habeas corpus rights for a detainee held on American soil, he snapped to colleagues, “I don’t think this one guy, this one judge, this outlier should, because of the luck of the draw, be allowed to dictate how American detention policies can work.”

The administration’s lack of self-control led the president to repeatedly make baseless assertions to the American people. Bush said in his first State of the Union address that American soldiers had apprehended people in Bosnia who were plotting to bomb the American Embassy there. As Eichenwald shows, this was untrue. No evidence supporting that charge was ever found, and five of the six men were set free after being held for seven years, their detention ruled illegal by a federal judge. (The sixth remained in detention on the basis of secret intelligence.)  A more deadly consequence of this heedlessness was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false belief that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. An exchange from that time conveys the mind-set of the Bush administration. When Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, told Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary, that there was no intelligence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, “Wolfowitz tightened his lips,” Eichenwald writes. “ ‘We’ll find it,’ he said with certainty in his voice. ‘It’s got to be there.’ ” The run-up to the Iraq war also elicits one of the most pungent lines in the book. After Bush told Jacques Chirac that biblical prophecies were being fulfilled and specifically that “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” the French president decided, in Eichenwald’s words, that “France was not going to fight a war based on an American president’s interpretation of the Bible.”

Bill Blum on the Last Gasps of the Empire The United States began blasting Libya with missiles with the full knowledge that they were fighting on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. Benghazi was and is the headquarters for Muslim fundamentalists of various stripes in North Africa. However, it’s incorrect to claim that the United States (aka NATO) saved the city from destruction. The story of the “imminent” invasion of Benghazi by Moammar Gaddafi’s forces last year was only propaganda to justify Western intervention. And now the United States is intervening — at present without actual gunfire, as far as is known — against the government of Syria, with the full knowledge that they’re again on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. A rash of suicide bombings against Syrian government targets is sufficient by itself to dispel any doubts about that. And once again, the United States is participating in the overthrow of a secular Mideast government.
At the same time, the Muslim fundamentalists in Syria, as in Libya, can have no illusions that America loves them. A half century of US assaults on Mideast countries, the establishment of American military bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and US support for dictatorships and for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians have relieved them of such fanciful thoughts. So why is the United States looking to forcefully intervene once again? A tale told many times — world domination, oil, Israel, ideology, etc. Assad of Syria, like Gaddafi of Libya, has shown little promise as a reliable client state so vital to the American Empire.

Surrounding China, doubling Down on S. Korea’s Missile Systems The US is to allow its ally South Korea develop ballistic missiles with more than double the range it is allowed to deploy today, reports say. The proliferation-harming move is meant as a reaction to Pyongyang’s military build-up.
The future announcement on Sunday by the Korean government will present the move in response to North Korea’s ballistic missile program, reports Reuters citing a US State Department notice to lawmakers.
Seoul has been seeking permission for years to expand the range limit for its ballistic missiles from the current 300km. The limit was set by a military alliance pact with the US, which hosts some 28,500 of its troops in Korea and is obliged to intervene militarily should the country be attacked.
Earlier, South Korean new agency Yonhap reported that Seoul would be allowed to deploy missiles with the range of up to 800km. This is likely to give a second thought to North Korea, but also to China and Japan, which would be within range of 800km South Korean missiles.    rt.com/news/south-korea-missile-range-807/

Still Using Japan as a US Aircraft Carrier, US Sends Crashing Ospreys The United States military sent the first batch of a sophisticated but accident-plagued new aircraft to an air base on Okinawa on Monday, going forward with its planned deployment despite unexpectedly fierce opposition by islanders and warnings that any crash could threaten the huge American military presence on the island.  The first six of the MV-22 Osprey aircraft arrived at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, the Japanese Defense Ministry said. It said another six of the ungainly-looking aircraft were due to arrive this week at the base, in the center of the crowded city of Ginowan. The United States is counting on the deployment to serve as part of the Obama administration’s plan to increase the American military presence in the region and offset the growing strength of China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.
The Osprey — whose tilting rotors allow it to take off like a helicopter but fly like a fixed-wing aircraft — flies four times as far as the Vietnam-era helicopters it is replacing, putting the more than 15,000 Marines on Okinawa within reach of potential hot spots like Taiwan and a group of disputed islands in the East China Sea known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.
The Japanese government has backed the deployment, apparently at least partly out of hopes that it will help deter China’s recently assertive claims to those islands, which Japan controls. The United States Defense Department says it has displayed sensitivity to local feelings by delaying the Osprey deployment as long as possible.   www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/world/asia/united-states-military-sends-ospreys-to-okinawa-despite-fierce-opposition.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Behind Social Fascist African National Congress, 12,000 Miners fired The world’s top platinum producer fired 12,000 workers who refused to return to work on Friday, apparently an attempt by the company to stem the tide of wildcat strikes that have shaken South Africa’s mining industry and unsettled Africa’s biggest economy…Leaders of the African National Congress, South Africa’s governing party, have struggled to contain the mining crisis despite their deep ties to trade unions. The wildcat strikes have been initiated by rival unions that criticize the A.N.C. and the traditional unions as being too complacent now that they are in power.    www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/world/africa/12000-striking-miners-are-fired-in-south-africa.html

Inheritors of the Vile History of Stalinism, the reality of the SACP, ANC and the Mandelaites The new black elite in South Africa, whose numbers and influence had been growing steadily during the latter racial apartheid years, understood the part they would play following “liberation”. Their “historic mission”, wrote Frantz Fanon in his prescient classic The Wretched of the Earth, “has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.
This applied to leading figures in the African National Congress, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, now a corporate multi-millionaire, who negotiated a power-sharing “deal” with the regime of de F.W. Klerk, and Nelson Mandela himself, whose devotion to an “historic compromise” meant that freedom for the majority from poverty and inequity was a freedom too far. This became clear as early as 1985 when a group of South African industrialists led by Gavin Reilly, chairman of the Anglo-American mining company, met prominent ANC officials in Zambia and both sides agreed, in effect, that racial apartheid would be replaced by economic apartheid, known as the “free market”.
Secret meetings subsequently took place in a stately home in England, Mells Park House, at which a future president of liberated South Africa, Tabo Mbeki, supped malt whisky with the heads of corporations that had shored up racial apartheid. The British giant Consolidated Goldfields supplied the venue and the whisky. The aim was to divide the “moderates” – the likes of Mbeki and Mandela – from an increasingly revolutionary multitude in the townships who evoked memories of uprisings following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and at Soweto in 1976 – without ANC help.    johnpilger.com/articles/apartheid-never-died-in-south-africa-it-inspired-a-world-order-upheld-by-force-and-illusion

Post Debate Slapping by Mitt the Unfit, Pontificating Obamagogue grabs for a Billion $ President Obama’s reelection campaign, which only two months ago fretted that it was losing the money race to Republican challenger Mitt Romney, said Saturday that it was on the cusp of raising $1 billion for the 2012 election after posting its strongest fundraising month of the year.
The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised $181 million last month, easily eclipsing the $114 million that they had raised together in August. The number falls just shy of the all-time monthly record of $193 million, however, which was set by Obama in September 2008.    www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/obama-raises-181-million-in-september-record-for-2012/2012/10/06/d6c1aa20-0fc2-11e2-a180-7d0c112201c9_story.html?hpid=z1

Another Reason The Obamagogue is the Empire’s Most Effective Evil A wildly unpopular American president prone to military adventurism helped Mr. Chávez rally the continent against Washington. One country after the next joined the radical axis. First Bolivia, then Nicaragua, Honduras and Ecuador, joined a growing roll call of radicals in 2005 and 2006.
Now the political landscape is almost entirely transformed. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory badly undermined the radicals’ ability to rally opposition to gringo imperialism. Meanwhile, the alternative was becoming increasingly attractive.    www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/opinion/how-hugo-chavez-became-irrelevant.html

Bernie’s in the Slammer but what of the rest of the Banksters? Bernie Madoff’s multibillion-dollar fraud began as far back as the early 1970s, about two decades earlier than had been previously disclosed, prosecutors said.
The revelation came Monday in a rewritten indictment boosting charges against four longtime employees of the investment firm that the Wall Street swindler ran out of his Manhattan offices, The Associated Press reported.
In a November 2010 indictment, prosecutors alleged the conspiracy to defraud Madoff’s clients began in 1992.
Authorities said that thousands of investors lost roughly $20 billion in the fraud as Madoff failed to put their money into markets. Madoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges and is serving a 150-year prison sentence in Butner, N.C.   www.nydailynews.com/new-york/madoff-fraud-began-back-early-1970s-prosecutors-article-1.1172536?localLinksEnabled=false

The Great Financial Crisis now Four Years Along (stagnation and collapse) The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world. Austerity is being forced on working people in many countries. Matters are especially difficult in Greece, a country that is being compelled by the demands of bankers, including the International Monetary Fund, to squeeze its workers in return for loans from abroad to help pay down government debts. Official unemployment in the United States is still around 10 percent, and real unemployment is much higher. An unprecedented 44 percent of the officially unemployed have been without work for over six months. A record number of people are receiving government food assistance as well as meals and groceries from charities. Many U.S. states and cities, facing large shortfalls in their budgets due to falling tax revenues, are cutting jobs and reducing funding for schools and social programs.   monthlyreview.org/2010/10/01/the-great-financial-crisis-three-years-on

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFaLIs2NDO4

Corruption Endemic to Capitalism, Amex Wrist Slapped, no Criminal Charge Credit card giant American Express Co. has agreed to refund $85 million to 250,000 customers and pay $27.5 million in civil penalties after federal and state regulators determined numerous violations of consumer protection laws.
Among the alleged infractions were misleading some people who signed up for the company’s Blue Sky credit card program into believing they would get a $300 payment they never received, charging improper late payments and deceiving customers about the benefits of paying off old debts, the regulators said.
The violations took place “at all stages of the game — from the moment a consumer shopped for a card to the moment the consumer got a phone call about long overdue debt,” said Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Greek Children Orphaned by Capitalism As the Greek government prepares new austerity packages demanded by EU creditors, Greece sees its younger generation feel the sting of economic upheaval. Parents are being increasingly forced to abandon their children, unable to support them.
Following a meeting this week, the Troika – the European Central Bank (ECB), European Commission (EC) and International Monetary Fund – is upping the pressure on Greece’s coalition government to introduce more cuts to qualify for another bailout.
Recent cuts to social benefits and state institutions have sparked public outrage and led to mass protests over worsening situation in the country. The new budget plans will see 7 billion euro (US$9 billion) worth of cuts in 2013, largely targeting public employees’ wage packets and public services.
The austerity itself is biting increasingly hard, with increasing numbers of children being offloaded by parents into orphanages.
“During the past two years we have seen a large rise in the number of children coming to us because their families can’t support them. As taxes and prices have risen, things like food, clothing, schooling and housing have become too expensivestrong,” Akis Drepanidis, director of SOS Children’s Village in Plagiari told RT. He said that there has been a 70 per cent increase for help in 2012.    rt.com/news/greek-orphans-crisis-abandoned-707/

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

The Militarization of the Coppers in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.
Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared war on terrorism, there has been a crucial, yet often unrecognized, shift in United States policy. Before 9/11, law enforcement possessed the primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States. Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear. This shift appears to be permanent: in 2006, the White House’s National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had “broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.” www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-war-on-terror-has-militarized-the-police/248047/

Detroit Cops to Tiger Fans Entering the City: “This is a DANGER ZONE! (unionites–will you support this corrupt vicious gang?)   About 300 officers in plain clothes handed out pamphlets and fliers urging people to vote against the emergency manager law ballot proposal and for the collective bargaining ballot proposal as fans headed in to Game 1 of the American League Division Series.
“The city is getting more dangerous,” said DPOA President Joe Duncan. “In fact, the only thing I know that’s going down in the city of Detroit is my paycheck and my membership.”
Originally the union had planned a rally, but shifted focus on passing out the campaign literature for Proposals 1 and 2 in a half-mile radius around Grand Circus Park.
The DPOA and the city of Detroit are currently at odds over a new contract that calls for 10 percent pay cuts and 12-hour shifts for police officers.   www.detroitnews.com/article/20121007/METRO01/210070313/Detroit-police-union-warns-visitors-city-more-dangerous-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Greek Fascists on the March vs People of Color (click on youtube below)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhJntEn4ddA&feature=player_embedded

The video, which went viral in Greece last month, shows about 40 burly men, led by Giorgos Germenis, a lawmaker with the right-wing Golden Dawn party, marching through a night market in the town of Rafina demanding that dark-skinned merchants show permits. Some do, and they are left alone. But the action quickly picks up, as the men, wearing black T-shirts with the party’s name, destroy a stall with clubs and scatter the merchandise. “We saw a few illegal immigrants selling their wares,” Mr. Germenis says in the video. “We did what Golden Dawn has to do. And now we’re going to church to pay our respects to the Madonna.”    www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/world/europe/amid-greeces-worries-the-rise-of-right-wing-extremists.html?ref=global-home

Solidarity for Never

Compete! Who Can Sell Out the Ranks Best? CAW or UAW? The Chrysler agreement includes a ratification bonus of 3,000 Canadian dollars, or $3,049, for workers, as well as cost of living lump sum payments of 2,000 Canadian dollars for each of the next three years. It offers protection of current pension benefits for existing workers, as well as job commitments in all locations.
It also pays new employees less and extends the time it takes them to rise to the top of the pay scale.
United States workers at the Detroit automakers approved a similar two-tier wage agreement five years ago, but in those agreements, workers do not automatically earn the top wage after 10 years.
In addition, the United Automobile Workers union in the United States has agreed to steeper concessions than the Canadian union, making United States labor costs less expensive. Going into the talks, the Detroit automakers were paying an estimated $60 to $62 an hour for labor and benefits in Canada, compared with $50 an hour at Chrysler, $56 at Ford and $58 at G.M. in the United States, according to the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit research group.   www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/business/global/canadian-auto-workers-ratify-chrysler-deal.html

What would Bill Do?

Spy versus Spy

above, Tommy the Traveler who Spied on the US Anti-war movement

The Fubared Fusion Centers (yes, they are watching) Their scathing report, to be released Wednesday, looked at problems in regional intelligence-gathering offices known as “fusion centers” that are financed by the Department of Homeland Security and created jointly with state and local law enforcement agencies.
The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
The investigators reviewed 610 reports produced by the centers over 13 months in 2009 and 2010. Of these, the report said, 188 were never published for use within the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies. Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete. And some of the reports appeared to be based on previously published information or facts that had long since been reported through the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The Congressional investigators also found that the reports were often derided by homeland security analysts who reviewed the work. “I see nothing to be gained by releasing this report,” one analyst wrote repeatedly on several draft reports.
“This report does not provide the who, what, when, where, how,” another official complained about a document.
The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist.    www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/us/inquiry-cites-flaws-in-regional-counterterrorism-offices.html?pagewanted=all

Argo and the CIA (check the comments too) He decided he would have the diplomats pose as a Canadian film crew allied with a (nonexistent) sci-fi B-movie called “Argo.” That’s how he ended up working with John Chambers, a Hollywood makeup artist who famously gave Spock pointy ears. They opened a real production office in Los Angeles and promoted the fake film — after which Mendez flew to Tehran to escort the diplomats out. (He denies reports he did so with a fake nose but said he had “certain appliances I was using.”)   www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/magazine/the-spy-behind-argo-out-hollywoods-hollywood.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

The Flores Twins and the DEA The brothers, now in U.S. custody and acting as informants in a plea deal whose details remain secret, will be the star witnesses in the Chicago trial of Jesús Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a head of the Sinaloa cartel and the biggest Mexican drug kingpin ever to be prosecuted in a U.S. courtroom. A status hearing on October 9 will set a new date for the trial, which has been delayed several times.
In court filings, Zambada-Niebla’s lawyers claim he, like the Flores brothers, was working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and that in exchange for intel on rival cartels, the U.S. government turned a blind eye as “tons of illicit drugs continued to be smuggled into Chicago and other parts of the United States.” In the months building up to the trial, a litany of court documents has been released that describe Chicago as a major distribution hub. The filings also suggest that damning details will be revealed about U.S. cooperation with some of the world’s most powerful narcos.    timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/15692116/behind-the-chicago-trial-of-a-mexican-drug-kingpin?page=0,0

Busted on this Day, Iran Contra

Eugene H. Hasenfus (born January 22, 1941 in Florida) is a United States citizen who was alleged by Nicaragua Sandinista authorities to be employed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), after a plane he was aboard crashed on Nicaraguan soil.
Hasenfus was a former Marine from Marinette, Wisconsin, who had been an unemployed construction worker, at the time when he secured work, alleged by Sandinistas to be as a cargo handler for the CIA. This was stated by Hasenfus himself, who later retracted that statement.
Hasenfus was aboard the Fairchild C-123 cargo plane, N4410F, formerly USAF 54-679, (c/n 20128), shot down over Nicaragua on October 5, 1986, while delivering supplies to the Nicaraguan Contras. During the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, it was established that the aircraft was shot down while participating in a covert operation devised and approved by elements of the United States government. The two pilots and a radio operator died in the crash, but Hasenfus was able to parachute to safety, having disobeyed orders by wearing a parachute on the mission. He was captured by Nicaraguan government forces, tried, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In December 1986, at the request of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, he was pardoned and released by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

The Magical Mystery Tour

Germany’s Organized Mystics, Grandchildren of Fascists, Demand Their Cash Last week one of Germany’s highest courts rankled Catholic bishops by ruling that the state recognized the right of Catholics to leave the church — and therefore avoid paying a tax that is used to support religious institutions. The court ruled it was a matter of religious freedom, while religious leaders saw the decision as yet another threat to their influence on modern German society.
With its ruling the court also dodged the thorny issue of what happens when a parishioner formally quits the church, stops paying taxes, but then wants to attend services anyway. The court said that, too, was a matter of religious freedom, a decision that so rankled religious leaders fearful of losing a lucrative revenue stream that they made clear, right away, that taxes are the price for participation in the church’s most sacred rituals: no payments, no sacraments.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Germany issued a crystal clear, uncompromising edict, endorsed by the Vatican. It detailed that a member who refuses to pay taxes will no longer be allowed to receive communion or make confession, to serve as godparents or to hold any office in the church. Those who leave can also be refused a Christian burial, unless they “give some sign of repentance,” it read.
“Whoever declares they are leaving the church before official authorities, for whatever reason, impinges on their responsibility to safeguard the community of the church, and against their responsibility to provide financial support to allow the church to fulfill its work” before their death, it read.  The tussle highlighted the long-established but increasingly troubled symbiosis between church and state in Europe that, repeated polls have shown, grows more secular-minded as each generation moves further away from the church. Like many European countries, Germany’s churches are independent but function in partnership with the state, which collects taxes from members of established religions and then funnels the revenues back to the religious institutions, for a fee, in keeping with a 19th-century agreement following abolishment of an official state church.
Income from church taxes in Germany amounted to about $6.3 billion for the Roman Catholic Church in 2011, and $5.5 billion for the Protestant, mostly Lutheran, churches in 2010, official statistics show. The money goes to support hospitals, schools, day care and myriad other social services, but a sizable amount of the Catholic money is also channeled to the Vatican.
The German church tax — which is 8 to 9 percent of the annual income tax — is so steep, however, that many people formally quit the church    www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/world/europe/german-church-ties-tax-to-sacraments-after-court-ruling.html?ref=global-home

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Fifth Straight Degenerat Detroit Top Copper Fired The alleged sex scandal is the second for Godbee in recent years.
Godbee’s pending retirement is the latest scandal to follow a departing police chief. His predecessor, Warren Evans, was fired after his affair with Detroit Police Lt. Monique Patterson was revealed.
Ella Bully-Cummings, the city’s 38th police chief, resigned the day former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was charged with several crimes relating to the text message scandal; while her predecessor, Jerry Oliver, resigned after he was caught trying to carry a pistol onto an airplane. www.detroitnews.com/article/20121003/METRO01/210030433/Source-Godbee-expected-announce-resignation?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

So Long

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