Free Speech Blazing

Michael Eric Dyson Speaks On Obama

2009-05-29T13:18:00.001-05:00

The Politics of Office

2009-05-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 5/16/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

There are many things to be learned by the nation's most recent presidential election; some new; some old.

In some ways, this election marked a new page in history, and as such, has had impacts and influences that were quite unprecedented.

In other ways, this election is an exercise in continuity, as the administration, like the 2006 congressional elections before it, strove mightily to reassure the wealthy and well-to-do that nothing essential would change, and their interests would be protected.

And while President Barack H. Obama ran on the promise of change, he has adopted some of the same policies of the Bush administration.

He will not release photos of U.S. soldiers mistreating, abusing, torturing and/or humiliating foreign prisoners and detainees.

He will continue the military commissions begun under the Bush-Cheney regime, albeit with some procedural changes.

And several of the so-called 'black sites', secret prisons placed around the world and administered by the CIA, will keep right on humming.

And, of course, he will continue to prosecute the wars begun and waged under the previous administration; though it appears Afghanistan will garner the lion's share of White House attention.

Boy, what a difference an election makes.

Or, put quite another way, running for an office is worlds away from getting it.

The fact of the matter is the previous administration comprised perhaps the greatest collection of rogues, scoundrels and corporate criminals since the time of Herbert Hoover, but it matters not.

No matter what crimes were committed, no matter how badly the Constitution was shredded, no matter how many 'black sites' or Guantanamo's, they know that they are immune.

Their impeachment argument was 'off the table' : now, any real prosecutions are. Why? Because that's politics.

There's a French saying: "Plus ca change...." "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

--(c) '-9 Mumia Abu-Jamal

!*Free Mumia Movement Fundraising Appeal

2009-05-27T11:38:00.000-05:00

Fundraising is a political task, & so this is an intensely political appeal. We are literally non-profit because we have no "stuff" to sell. All we "sell" is our commitment to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners. But we need money to fulfill the goals we've set to free Mumia.

First, we've been relying on other organizations to lend us their sound systems for rallies & marches, and sometimes we just can't make it happen. Not every activist who has an important story to tell is a street orator, so we are too often stuck in New York or Philly with dynamic speakers but no sound system to make them heard. Convinced that everything is possible, a trio of our most dedicated organizers went forth & actually purchased a portable sound system so we can demonstrate for Mumia anywhere we can travel. This has cost us $350, and it came out of a hard-working activist's rent money. We need your donation right now to put the rent money back in his pocket. Ten donations at only $35 will keep the wolf from the door.

Our big campaign to demand that the Justice Department grant Mumia a civil rights investigation is gathering tremendous momentum, with some really high-profile names, such as Ruby Dee, Cornel West, and Charles Rangel signing on, as well as thousands of folks from the U.S. and abroad. To go forward with lobbying in D.C., we are working to raise $2,000 to charter a bus.

We also want to be sure that folks who take a day off from work and family responsibilities to travel 9 hours and lobby will feel empowered to do it. We'd really like to offer free bus fare and meals to Mumia's lobbyists, who will be educating and raising the consciousness of our elected officials. We're asking for seed money to make sure that no one who is willing to go is excluded. Please give generously to make a real change in our nation and to help free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

You may donate online at www.freemumia.com, clicking on the How to Help link or send checks and money orders (payable to Free Mumia Coalition, NYC/IFCO) to us at our fiscal sponsor, IFCO [Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization]:

IFCO
402 West 145th Street
New York, NY 10031

Call 212-926-5757 with any fiscal questions or 212-330-8029 (Mumia Hotline) with any other questions.

Government for Whom?

2009-05-27T11:37:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 5/2/09] (c} '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

As the economy tumbles like weeds in an old western, companies are getting bailouts in the double digit billions, while workers are being asked to "sacrifice."

Those at the top of the corporate wheel have not only lost little, they've not been asked to give anything back. Indeed, they've not even been asked what they're done with over $300 billion bucks!

The only thing certain is they've not done what they promised to do when they first began to beg for public monies!

But when automotive industries tried to get the kind of help that their brothers in banking got, they were kicked in the pills, and the political elites demanded that they use this economic crisis to whip up on the auto unions -- to fire more workers, cut pay, and rifle the pension envelopes of retirees!

And what of Pres. Barack Obama, who received the votes of millions of labor families?

If you listened instead of looked you might've thought Bush was back, judging by the rhetoric: "It will require unions and workers who have already made extraordinarily painful concessions to make even more.*

The UAW (United Automotive, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers Union, Intl.) has given up so much in the last few years that it ain't funny. Several years ago, management pushed for, and got, a two - tiered pay system, where new workers received about 1/2 the pay of other workers -- and temporary worker status.

How is it remotely fair that those who have less are being asked to give up more?

For decades, people have believed that Democrats were more beholden to labor, given their years of voting for that party. But can one still believe this after the debacle of NAFTA?

Is this what labor voted for?

Way back in 1990, a key Republican analyst, Kevin Phillips, described the Democrats as "history's second-most enthusiastic capitalist party." *

If you look at the top pay at the boards of American companies, you'll find dudes like GM's Lyle Wagoner, who pulled down a cool $23 million dollars when he split -- not to mention a $69 thousand annual pension.

If this is what people are voting for -- more betrayal -- why bother?

--(c) '09 maj

[Source: *Zinn, Howard, A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present
(N.Y.: Harpers Perennial [2003 ed. {orig. 1980} ], p. 579.)

Credit Card Execs Going Off

2009-05-27T10:52:00.001-05:00

New Credit Card Laws - watch more funny videos

No Cost of Living Increase for Social Security Recipients

2009-05-12T13:23:00.000-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Immortal Technique

2009-05-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

Michigan Man Who Fathered 14 Kids With Different Women Owes $530G in Child Support

2009-04-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

Saturday, April 11, 2009
Associated Press

FLINT, Mich. — Authorities in Michigan say a man fathered 14 children with different women and owes more than $530,000 in unpaid child support.

The Flint Journal reports 42-year-old Thomas Frazier was jailed Thursday. Court records say he owes six years of support payments.

The newspaper says the unemployed man could be held for 90 days if he doesn't pay $27,900.

Frazier says he thinks he fathered only three of the children and that it's unrealistic for authorities to expect him to pay child support that was $3,000 a month at one point.

Frazier remains held at the Genesee County Jail. It wasn't immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could speak for him.

America's Most Dangerous Cities - Top 25

2009-04-13T11:41:00.001-05:00

1. New Orleans, LA
2. Camden, NJ
3. Detroit, MI
4. St. Louis, MO
5. Oakland, CA
6. Flint, MI
7. Gary, IN
8. Birmingham, AL
9. Richmond, CA
10. North Charleston, SC
11. Cleveland, OH
12. Baltimore, MD
13. Miami Gardens, FL
14. Memphis, TN
15. Youngstown, OH
16. Atlanta, GA
17. Compton, CA
18. Orlando, FL
19. Little Rock, AR
20. Minneapolis, MN
21. Washington, DC
22. Philadelphia, PA
23. Jackson, MS
24. Newark, NJ
25. Milwaukee, WI

The Seven Signs of Terrorism - Ridiculous

2009-04-13T11:40:00.000-05:00

!*FANTASTIC WBAI Radio Show on Mumia!

2009-04-10T11:04:00.002-05:00

The WBAI Show last night gave out so much information that it is something
that everyone should listen to, it clearly spells out exactly how the system has
ignored it's own laws at every turn and has an answer to every question that
the kill-crazy cops and their supporters raise to try and murder our Bro. It's
up to ALL of us to build a movement too big for that to happen!! The
radio show is riveting, not boring, please listen to it and use it for P.E. !

PLEASE HELP TO COVER EVERY CORNER OF THE
INTERNET WITH THESE IMPORTANT UPDATES!!
===============

http://www.phillyim c.org/en/ wbai-mumia-abu- jamal- featuring-pam- africa-linn- washington-and- vincent- southerland

http://www.indybay. org/ newsitems/2009/ 04/10/18587371. php

http://archive. wbai.org/ files/ mp3/090409_200001ww live.MP3

Listen to the April 9, 2009 WBAI Radio show "Where We Live" focusing on the case of death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the April 4 US Supreme Court ruling which rejected Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new guilt phase trial.

The show is hosted by Suzanne Ross, who is Co-Chair of the New York City Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and features as guests:

--Pam Africa, Coordinator of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

--Linn Washington Jr,, Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Temple University professor of journalism

--Vincent Southerland, Assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund

On Monday, April 4, the US Supreme Court Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new guilt phase trial (in official legal terms, they rejected his petition for a "writ of certiorari").

Abu-Jamal's appeal was based primarily on the US Supreme Court's 1986 "Batson v Kentucky" ruling which stated that a defendant deserves a new trial if it can be shown that the prosecutor used peremptory strikes to remove otherwise qualified jurors simply because of their race. At Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial, prosecutor Joseph McGill used 10 or 11 of his 15 strikes to remove otherwise acceptable black jurors.

The US Supreme Court has not yet decided whether it will further consider the Philadelphia DA's appeal of the 2001/2008 rulings of two lower courts, which ruled that Abu-Jamal deserves a new sentencing hearing if the death penalty is to be re-instated. Therefore, if the US Supreme Court rules in favor of the DA, Abu-Jamal can then be executed WITHOUT a new sentencing hearing!

For more information on the Supreme Court ruling here.

Please sign the online petition for Mumia here: www.petitiononline.com/supreme

==============================================================

Mumia's New Book On Jailhouse Lawyers
"More Than A Book Party" events to be held around US, marking the March release
Purchase Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A., directly from City Lights Books. Read the foreword by former political prisoner Angela Y. Davis and an interview with Mumia about his new book. In Mumia's words, "This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion- dollar endowed universities, but in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America."

"More Than A Book Party" events will be held in the US around April 24, to mark Mumia's birthday and the release of Jailhouse Lawyers. Read more about events in: Philadelphia (including a Revolutionary Week of Events), NYC, Oakland, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, Houston, Washington, DC, and Baltimore.

Read reviews by: Linn Washington, Jr., J. Patrick O'Connor, and Kiilu Nyasha
==========

EMERGENCY STRATEGIZING MEETINGS:

When: Saturday, April 11, 2009 10 am – 12 noon
Where: Abiding Truth Ministries Church, 5701 Washington, Ave. Philly
Contact: 215 476 8812 or ICFFMAJ@aol. com
GET FLYERS FOR UPCOMING EVENTS - E-mail icffmaj@aol.com

NY: Open Meeting in Response to the Outrageous and Racist Ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court
When: Saturday, April 11, 2009, 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Where: Solidarity Center, 55 West 17th Street, 5th Floor
(btw. 5th & 6th Avenues)
Directions: 1, 2, 3, A, C, E, F, or V to 14th Street
Sponsored by: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC)
freemumia.com • 212-330-8029

The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!

Audio of most of Mumia's essays are at: http://www.prisonradio.org

http://mumiapodcast.libsyn.com/
Mumia's got a podcast! Mumia Abu-Jamal's Radio Essays - Subscribe at the website or on iTunes and get Mumia's radio commentaries online.

Mumia Abu-Jamal's new book -- JAILHOUSE LAWYERS: PRISONERS DEFENDING PRISONERS V. THE USA, featuring an introduction by Angela Y. Davis -- will be released soon! It will be available from City Lights Books at a 30% discount weeks before you can get it at any other bookstore, or from Amazon. Sign up for an email alert and when the book becomes available for sale you'll receive an email letting you know: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100448090

In support of Mumia and the publication of JAILHOUSE LAWYERS, organizations around the country will be holding "More Than a Book Party" events on or around Mumia's birthday, April 24, 2009. If you are planning to organize an event or would like to order in bulk, you can also receive a 45% discount on any bulk orders of 20 copies or more. The book retails for $16.95, for orders of 20 copies or more the discounted price would be $9.32 per book, plus shipping and handling. Prepayment would be required and books are nonreturnable. If you or your organization would like to place a bulk order, please contact Stacey Lewis at 415.362.1901 or stacey@citylights.com

Let's use the opportunity of the publication of this brilliant, moving, vintage Mumia book to build the momentum for his case, to raise the money we desperately need in these challenging economic times, to get the word out – to produce literature, flyers, posters, videos, DVD's; to send organizers out to help build new chapters and strengthen old ones, TO GET THE PEOPLE OUT IN THE STREETS … all the work that we must do in order to FREE MUMIA as he faces LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE OR EXECUTION!

Please make a contribution to help free Mumia. Donations to the grassroots work will go to both INTERNATIONAL CONCERNED FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL and the FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL COALITION (NYC).

WWW.FREEMUMIA.COM

Please mail donations/ checks to:
FREE MUMIA ABU JAMAL COALITION
PO BOX 16, NEW YORK,
NY 10030
(CHECKS FOR BOTH ORGANIZATIONS PAYABLE TO: FMAJC/IFCO)

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
215 476-8812
212-330-8029

Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:

Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370

WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CAN *NOT* REST!!

Subscribe: mumiacolumns- subscribe@ topica.com
Read: http://topica. com/lists/ mumiacolumns/ read
Subscribe ICFFMAJ email updates list by e-mailing
icffmaj@aol. com!

!*"May Day '09" by Mumia Abu-Jamal

2009-04-10T10:57:00.000-05:00

[Speech writ. 3/23/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

While May Day has historically been a day of worker's solidarity and a celebration of labor power, this is not a day or year like any other.

That's because many nations are in the midst of economic recession and financial failure, and it is workers worldwide who are suffering from layoffs and mass firings in almost every sector of the global economy.

While labor is depressed, capital is aggregating to itself bigger and larger shares of national and global wealth, as governments rush to bail out banks and investment firms, but only if they are "too big to fail."

Under the newly amended rules of capitalism, corporations (especially in the financial sector) can scam, steal, and hustle virtually everyone, and when the economy falls, the government sails in and bails them out with public money!

Under a system such as this, capitalism can never lose. It's like a gambling casino, where the house rules change every half hour (or depending on who's winning and who's losing!)

But workers are losing.

Around the world, workers are facing lost jobs, vanished careers, foreclosed homes, and families broken and shattered against the grinding wheel of Capital.

This will be one hell of a May Day -- but it's the one that globalized capital has fashioned for us all.

Only if labor is truly globalized can it fight for and demand its fair share from the ravages of capitalism.

Let that be our mission for May Day -- and for tomorrow.

--(c) '09 maj

!*April 11 NY/Philly Emergency Mtgs. for Mumia!

2009-04-10T10:51:00.002-05:00

Flag this message!*April 11 NY/Philly Emergency Mtgs. for Mumia!
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 8:24 PM

From: "MUMIA ABU-JAMAL"
Add sender to ContactsTo: nattyreb@gmail.com

PAM AFRICA IS ASKING FOR ORGANIZERS EVERYWHERE TO HELP STRATEGIZE
TO SUPPORT MUMIA DURING THIS URGENT TIME, WE HAVE TO BUILD AND
STRENGTHEN THIS MOVEMENT IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE!!

via: nycjericho@gmail.com
======================

Emergency Meeting in Response to the U.S. Supreme Court Ruling

On April 6, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new guilt-phase trial. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to consider the Philadelphia DA's separate appeal, which is attempting to execute Abu-Jamal WITHOUT a new sentencing hearing. In response to yesterday's rejection, Abu-Jamal's lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, will be filing a "petition for re-hearing" in the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 6:00 p.m., there will be an open strategy session to determine our next steps forward.

This isn’t the first time the Supreme Court chose not to look into this case. It’s quite obvious that they don’t want to look into the case because of its political implications. They clearly are holding fast to the rule that “the Black man has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” We must not let them get away with it.

Since the highest court in the land didn’t even bother to explain why they turned down the case, it’s our job to analyze the situation and respond strategically and forcefully.

After the strategy meeting, we will watch the recently released documentary, "In Prison My Whole Life", shown at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and in the British Parliament this year. The film provides a comprehensive overview of the case and includes the recently released photos showing how Philadelphia police tampered with crime scene evidence. Dinner will be available for $5, and it will be served promptly at 6:00 p.m.

What: Open Meeting in Response to the Outrageous and Racist Ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court

When: Saturday, April 11, 2009, 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Where: Solidarity Center, 55 West 17th Street, 5th Floor
(btw. 5th & 6th Avenues)

Directions: 1, 2, 3, A, C, E, F, or V to 14th Street

Sponsored by: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC)
freemumia.com • 212-330-8029
--
Free All Political Prisoners!
nycjericho@gmail.com • www.jerichony.org
=======================

via: icffmaj@aol.com
EMERGENCY STRATEGIZING MEETING:
When: Saturday, April 11, 2009
10 am – 12 noon
Where: Abiding Truth Ministries Church, 5701 Washington, Ave. Philly
Contact: 215-476-8812 or ICFFMAJ@aol.com

!*LA / Houston / Baltimore Programs for Mumia!

2009-04-10T10:49:00.000-05:00

The Abolition Movement is sponsoring a "More Than Just a Book Party" to celebrate Mumia's birthday as well as his new book. It will be at S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, 3815 Live Oak in Houston's Third Ward from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. Activists Ester King and Ray Hill will read from the new book and we will honor Texas writ writers Prince Imari Obadele, Bobby Mudd and Salvador Gonzales. There will be an update on Mumai's case as well as spoken word and cake and ice cream. For information, Abolition.Movement@hotmail.com or 713-503-2633.

In struggle,
Gloria

BALTIMORE
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL BIRTHDAY PARTY & BOOK RELEASE
"MORE THAN A BOOK PARTY"
Mumia writes: "This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion-dollar endowed universities but in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America ... It is law learned in a stew of bitterness, under the constant threat of violence, in places where millions of people live, buy millions of others wish to ignore or forget"

Let's use the opportunity of the publication of this brilliant and moving, vintage Mumia book to build the momentum for his case, to raise the money we desperately need in these challenging economic times, to get the word out – to produce literature, flyers, posters, videos, DVD's; to send organizers out to help build new chapters and strengthen old ones, TO GET THE PEOPLE OUT IN THE STREETS … all the work that we must do in order to FREE MUMIA as he faces LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE OR EXECUTION!

In the spirit of Mumia's book, we dedicate these "More Than a Book Party" events to the thousands and thousands of jailhouse lawyers who practice their craft in their own and their brothers' (and sisters') struggle for justice, against all odds and with the high risk of being subjected to the venom, punishment, and brutality of the prison system that is directed against them more than to any other sector of the prison population.

Featured Artists: Labtekwon, Chris
Speakers: Doc Cheatam -Baltimore Branch NAACP
Shanell Bryant -Baltimore Chapter INPDUM
Mike Stark -Campaign to End the Death Penalty
Max Obuszewski
Wendy Hess -Public Justice Center….AND MORE
$5 Donation---No one turned away for lack of funds

$10 for a copy of the new book “Jailhouse Lawyers”

April 24, 2009

7pm-11pm

Cork Factory Building

Cork Gallery

4th Floor Doorbell #9

302 E. Federal St.

Baltimore, MD 21201

Sponsored by: International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Baltimore Friends of MOVE, Baltimore Chapter of the NAACP, Baltimore Chapter of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, Soilciarity Center, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, Pulbic Justice Center

For More Information: (443) 850-2840 ameejill@hotmail.com

!*4/18 Ramona Africa at Hamline Law School!

2009-04-10T10:48:00.000-05:00

The NLG midwest regional conference & Hamline Law School's PRISON REFORM PROJECT present:

RAMONA AFRICA AT HAMLINE LAW SCHOOL: Speaking on the legal battle of the MOVE 9, the upcoming MOVE 9 parole hearings, the MOVE organization, Political Prisoners in America and the American Prison System.

LOCATION:

St. Paul, Minnesota – Saturday, April 18, 2009 – 1536 Hewitt Avenue Saint Paul, MN 55104 (Hamline Law Building Rm. 105; Located off Pascal St, which intersects Hewitt Ave)

SOME BACKGROUND:
In 1978, when the police raided the MOVE home, the family fled into the basement of their home to avoid the attack, police attempted to flood them out with high-pressure hoses. During the attack, police officer James Ramp was killed by a single gunshot. Nine members of the MOVE family were charged with Ramp´s murder, and received 30-to-100-year sentences.

There is ample evidence that none of the nine was responsible for Ramp´s death. Even television and radio stations initially reported that Ramp was killed by “friendly fire’ from officers firing at the MOVE house. Police--clearly intent on killing MOVE members, including children, trapped inside--had fired over 2,000 rounds of ammunition.

But any evidence that could have supported the defense in the case was destroyed by Philadelphia police following orders from Mayor Frank Rizzo to bulldoze the house, leveling it within hours of the assault. Noted Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington described it as “the fastest destruction of a crime-scene site in history.’

MOVE “9” members Chuck, Debbie, Delbert, Eddie, Janet, Janine, Merle, Mike and Phil Africa were given the excessive sentences on May 4, 1980 by Judge Edward Malmed. When Malmed was a guest on a radio show a few days after the sentencing, journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal called in to ask him who killed Ramp. Malmed replied, “I haven´t the faintest idea.’ He said that since “they call themselves a family, I sentenced them as a family.’

In 1985, the police once again laid siege to the MOVE household. This time they dropped a C4 explosive on the building killing 11 MOVE members. Ramona Africa survived this assault. After surviving the bombing, she was charged with conspiracy, riot, and multiple counts of simple and aggravated assault. Subsequently Ramona served 7 years in prison. Since her release from prison, Ramona has tirelessly worked as the MOVE Minister of Communication on behalf of the MOVE 9, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and all political prisoners and prisoners of war.

WWW.ONAMOVE.COM

For more info on MOVE and to sign a petition calling for the MOVE 9's immediate parole visit:www.onamove.com
For info on this event or info on the PRISON REFORM PROJECT contact:

pmurphy06@hamline.edu

Beating Back Batson by Mumia Abu-Jamal

2009-04-10T10:26:00.001-05:00

NOTE from Sis. Marpessa: Here's a link to excerpts of Ass't DA McMahon's training video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv9SJPa_dF8

Check that short piece out (57 secs), and then please re-read this piece Bro. Mumia wrote last year:

Beating Back Batson
[col. writ. 9/6/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

For those who read court opinions, few can ignore the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 Batson v. Kentucky decision.

Essentially, it prohibited the State from removing Black jurors for racial reasons. It re-wrote the rules from the Swain v. Alabama ( 1965) case, where the court required systematic discrimination over a number of cases, over a period of years. Needless to say, such a challenge was clearly beyond the resources of most people, and relatively few were made, and even fewer successful. It is hard to resist the suspicion that this was merely judicial lip service to a principle that was easily ignored, in the breach.

For, it took over a generation, over 20 years, for Swain to be overruled by Batson, and now, Batson is beginning to bear an eerie resemblance to its unworkable parentage, because courts have been loathe to grant relief, and have either created new rules, or simply ignored its dictates.

We see this at work recently in a number of cases, among them Com. v. (Robert) Cook, WL 284060 (July 24, 2008). In this case, the DA used 74% of his strikes to remove 14 Black jurors. Incredibly, the Phila. Court of Common Pleas initially found that even this didn't constitute a prima facie case of discrimination. Later, it found a prima facie case, but ruled that the DA put forth sufficient race-neutral reasons for exclusion, and therefore not a violation of Batson.

Recently, the PA Supreme Court agreed, even though the DA couldn't recall why he removed 2 Black jurors -- or, in other words, couldn't articulate a justification.

Now remember -- Batson states that the improper removal of one juror violates the constitution. One -- not 14.

But here's the kicker. The DA in Mr. Cook's case made a video training tape, where he taught his fellow prosecutors how to violateBatson - and how to lie about it to judges.

But perhaps the then prosecutor, Jack McMahon, didn't need to work that hard, for courts would take up the slack. For where the DA can't remember a reason, the court will invent one.

This is especially egregious in this case, for the man who wrote the opinion was the DA when McMahon made the tapes, but now sits as Chief Justice of the court. Can you spell 'conflict of interest?' Did he recuse himself? (What do you think?)

For over a decade, Pennsylvania courts have painted McMahon as the bad guy, a kind of rogue prosecutor, and most of his convictions have been reversed (except Cook's), but McMahon wasn't, and never should've been, the issue. For he was simply describing the pattern and practice of the office, and training his colleagues in techniques used over years of trials.

Mr. McMahon was putting into words what DAs did to get convictions. Does that mean his office sought a fair and impartial jury? In McMahon's words, " Well, that's ridiculous. You're not trying to get that." In fact, McMahon explained, their jobs were to get the most "unfair" jury possible. And, in many cases, that meant getting as few Blacks to serve on the jury as possible.

Batson is as empty as Swain was, for if they don't want to give it up, any reason will do.

They proclaim ideals of fairness that bear no relationship to the real process happening daily in courtrooms all across America.

That would be, to quote McMahon, "ridiculous."

-- (c) '08 maj

Supreme Court lets Mumia Abu-Jamal's conviction stand

2009-04-10T10:20:00.002-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/ 04/06/mumia.supreme.court/
By Bill MearsCNN Supreme Court Producer

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court has let stand the conviction of former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sent to death row for gunning down a Philadelphia police officer 28 years ago.

He contends blacks were unfairly excluded from the jury, and has been an outspoken activist from behind bars.

The justices made their announcement Monday. A separate appeal over whether Abu-Jamal deserves a new sentencing hearing has not been taken up by the high court. Prosecutors are appealing a federal appeals court ruling in Abu-Jamal's favor last year on the sentencing issue.

The case has attracted international attention amid charges of prosecutorial misconduct and the inmate's outspoken personality. Abu-Jamal, a former radio reporter and cab driver has been a divisive figure, with many prominent supporters arguing that racism pervaded his trial. Others countered Abu-Jamal is using his skin color to escape responsibility for his actions. They say he has divided the community for years with his provocative writing and activism.

He was convicted for the December 9, 1981, murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Faulkner had pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother in a late-night traffic stop. Witnesses said Abu-Jamal, who was nearby, ran over and shot the policeman in the back and in the head.

Abu-Jamal, once known as Wesley Cook, was also wounded in the encounter and later confessed to the killing, according to other witnesses testimony.

Abu-Jamal is black and the police officer was white.Incarcerated for nearly three decades, Abu-Jamal has been an active critic of the criminal justice system.

On a Web site created by friends to promote the release this month of his new book, the prisoner-turned-author writes about his fight. "This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion dollar endowed universities but in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America."

His chief defense attorney, Robert Bryan, had urged the justices to grant a new criminal trial, but the high court offered no explanation for its refusal to intervene.

"The central issue in this case is racism in jury selection," Bryan wrote to supporters last month. Ten whites and two blacks made up the original jury panel that sentenced Abu-Jamal to death.

A three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals a year ago kept the murder conviction in place, but ordered a new capital sentencing hearing. That court ultimately concluded the jury was improperly instructed on how to weigh "mitigating factors" offered by the defense that might have kept Abu-Jamal off death row. Pennsylvania law at the time said jurors did not have to unanimously agree on a mitigating circumstance, such as the fact that Abu-Jamal had no prior criminal record.

Months before that ruling, oral arguments on the issue were contentious. Faulkner's widow and Abu-Jamal's brother attended, and demonstrations on both sides were held outside the courtroom in downtown Philadelphia.

Many prominent groups and individuals, including singer Harry Belafonte, the NAACP and the European Parliament, are cited on his Web site as supporters. Prosecutors have insisted Abu-Jamal pay the price for his crimes, and have aggressively resisted efforts to take him of death row for Faulkner's murder.

"This assassination has been made a circus by those people in the world and this city who believe falsely that Mumia Abu-Jamal is some kind of a folk hero," said Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham last year, when the federal appeals court upheld the conviction. "He is nothing short of an assassin."

!*Mumia in Danger!...Hold April 29th!

2009-04-10T10:18:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday Evening, April 29th2009

Come and Participate in an Emergency Community Forum and Book Party!

RACE MATTERS-THE DEATH PENALTY
& THE INCREDIBLE CASE
OF
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!

And the Release of his latest book
“JAILHOUSE LAWYERS”

This event comes just after the US Supreme Court denies his attorneys’ appeal
while acknowledging the right of the prosecution to be heard on the reinstatement of his death sentence!

This event is a part of Int’l Freedom Week for Mumia
where actions are taking place around the world in support of Mumia

Investigative Reporter Hans Bennett who uncovered photos revealing
Philadelphia Police tampering with the crime scene
calls the Supreme Court decision a “terribly dark day for justice in the U.S.”

This special event will feature
Pam Africa-Intl Con. Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Lawrence Hayes-Black Panther Party formerly on Death Row in New York State
Dr. Matthew Johnson-New Jerseyans For A Moratorium on The Death Penalty
& The Peoples Organization for Progress
Delacy Davis-Black Cops Against Police Brutality

DON’T MISS THIS EVENT!

Newark Public Library-4thFloor Auditorium
5 Washington Street, Newark
6-8pm/Free Admission
For more information, please call 201-602-0780
Sponsor-Frontline Artists
Other endorsing and cosponsoring organizations include
The Peoples Organization for Progress and The New Black Panther Partywith mumia's vicious kaptors putting out a rumor that mumia had been found dead in his cell, please treat this announcement annexed and below with the utmost seriousness...

Ode to the Lions

2009-04-08T12:03:00.000-05:00

Detroit is where they built that car named Christine
Despite that the Lions went 0 and 16
Before the season started, they ran out of steam
They weren’t good enough to beat a college team
The ’76 Buccaneers no longer dwell on the bottom
A much worse team, the ’08 Lions got-‘em
The Lions really stink and we all know
Can they go winless two seasons in a row?
The Detroit Lions, that team is dead
At Ford Field with paper bags on your heads
The Detroit Lions, the shame of the city
The NFL’s top loser, so have no pity
The Detroit Lions, they’re such an easy score
The other 31 teams, they pimp that whore
Let’s bash that team from Fawnskin to Scranton
On the first ballot send them losers to Canton.

-Aquil Aziz
Copyright © 2009

Pharma Not in Business of Health, Healing, Cures, Wellness

2009-04-08T10:05:00.000-05:00

Marc Sims & Dr. Scott Whitaker

2009-04-08T09:15:00.000-05:00

Dr. Scott Whitaker says no to Barack Obama, New World Order & Universal Health Care (Part 2 of 2)

2009-04-08T09:06:00.000-05:00

Dr. Scott Whitaker says no to Barack Obama, New World Order & Universal Health Care (Part 1 of 2)

2009-04-08T09:03:00.000-05:00

Some Wisdom From Dr. Scott Whitaker

2009-04-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

The Burnerz - Cops Hate Kidz

2009-04-07T18:19:00.000-05:00

Vinnie Paz Mockumentary - A Little Humor

2009-04-06T13:15:00.001-05:00

Congratulations, America … Children are Being Tortured in Your Name

2009-03-17T11:11:00.002-05:00

George Washington’s Blog
May 21, 2008

Over the last 24 hours, news about U.S. torture has been leaking out:

• A former prisoner testified to Congress that he was beaten, hung by his arms for five days, subjected to electrical shocks and, "They stuck my head into a bucket of water and punched me in the stomach," he said. "I inhaled the water. … It was a strong punch."

• The FBI was so disturbed at what they saw at Guantanamo that FBI staff created a "war crimes file" to document accusations against American military personnel at Guantanamo. For example, the head of the FBI’s national security law unit wrote in July 2003: "Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don’t know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war"

• The U.S. military not only tortured prisoners for themselves, but also did the "dirty work" of "softening up" prisoners for Chinese interrogators

The U.S. has also tortured prisoners to death in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Not bad enough for you?

Well, the U.S. has imprisoned 2,500 children since 9/11 as "enemy combatants", in violation of the Geneva Convention against classifying children as POWs.

Still not disgusted?

Okay . . . Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh says that the U.S. Government has videotapes of boys being raped at Abu Ghraib prison (see also this and this).

This doesn’t come as a complete surprise, given that assistant deputy Attorney General John Yoo has publicly argued that the president can order the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.

Congratulations, America. This is being done in your name.

If you’re not sick to your stomach by learning that your government has been killing and torturing people - including children - then you are a psychopath or a pervert.

Don’t try to tell me that torture is a necessary evil. It is well-known by professional interrogators that torture doesn’t work. Experts on interrogation say that torture actually interferes with the ability to gather useful information.

'Moneychangers in the Temple'

2009-03-16T14:50:00.002-05:00

[col. writ. 3/7/09]
(c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

For readers of the Bible's New Testament, few stories illustrate the anger of Jesus of Nazareth better than that of his expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple, for they had, in his words, turned it into a "den of thieves." *

This event is memorable for it shows him not speaking in anger, but acting. Some artists have depicted him actually whipping moneychangers out of the Temple as they flee amidst chaos.

That imagery was borrowed several millennia later when American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made his famous "Fear Itself" inaugural address. As the country fell under the deep freeze of depression, Roosevelt spoke words that were recognized by many of that age when he said, "....[T]he rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous moneychangers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men."

Roosevelt continued: "The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit."

Those words were spoken on Jan. 20, 1933.

That was 76 years ago, and once again, the 'rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods' have failed, and the nation is ripped by the icy chains of depression. Yeah -- I said depression, for just six months ago the president assured the country that the state of the economy was 'sound', even as the nation was locked in a recession for the better part of the year.

If it ain't a depression, it's a dime's distance away from it.

But this ain't '33.

The money changers who steered the economy onto the rocks haven't admitted defeat. They are making more money -- indeed, they are given taxpayer's money -- as they burn through more.

The more they lose, the more they want.

These moneychangers aren't being whipped out of the temple -- they're given bigger tables!

Look at AIG, Goldman-Sachs, Citigroup --not just mo' money, but mo', mo' and even mo' money!

Because, in the eyes of Washington and the Federal Reserve, they're 'too big to fail.'

Under that illogic, they will swallow the moon -- and get bigger, while the nation's economy worsens by the hour.

This ain't a 'den of thieves', it's a Temple of thieves, where the banks have stolen the wealth of millions on the front end, only to loot the treasury on the back end. They are getting paid for sacking the economy -- and the only thing these politicians can say is, "want more?"

--(c) '09 maj

[Sources: *Bible, New Testament chapters: St. Matt. 21:12-13; St. Mark 11:15-17; Luke 19:45-46 {KJV) ].

The Obama Deception - Posting It Again

2009-03-16T10:59:00.000-05:00

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Files Brief in Supreme Court in Mumia Abu-Jamal Case

2009-03-16T10:39:00.002-05:00

March 5, 2009

(New York, NY)- Today the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) filed a friend of the court brief in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal's claim of racial discrimination in the selection of the jury for his 1981 death penalty trial. LDF's brief supports Mr. Abu-Jamal's request for United States Supreme Court review of his appeal urging enforcement of the laws that require courts to promptly investigate evidence of discrimination against African American prospective jurors.

Specifically, LDF objects to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit's use of a restrictive interpretation of Batson v. Kentucky, a Supreme Court decision prohibiting prosecutors from excluding prospective jurors on the basis of race, to conclude that Mr. Abu-Jamal failed to present sufficient evidence to support his claim of racial discrimination in jury selection. LDF's brief explains that the Third Circuit's conclusion that the only way to prove that racial discrimination infected the jury selection process is to document the race of all members from the panel of prospective jurors and the race of all stricken jurors ignores other significant indicators of discrimination in jury selection and contradicts the Supreme Court's command that courts examine a wide array of evidence to properly ferret out discrimination in jury selection.

As applied to Mr. Abu-Jamal's case, the Third Circuit decision means that the trial prosecutor's pattern of strikes against African-American prospective jurors, a culture of discrimination in the prosecutor's office (including a videotaped training advocating the exclusion of prospective jurors of color), a comprehensive statistical study documenting a pattern of exclusion of prospective jurors of color by the prosecutor's office and other such evidence is insufficient to suggest discrimination. LDF's brief explains that turning a blind eye to such credible evidence of discrimination not only conflicts with the law but also undermines public confidence in integrity of the courts.

"We believe that the Third Circuit's interpretation of the law will have the effect of shielding discrimination and undermining the rights of criminal and capital defendants to a fair trial. It is our hope that the Supreme Court will accept and review Mr. Abu-Jamal's case to make sure that courts respond promptly and appropriately when confronted with real questions about the existence of racial discrimination in jury selection," said John Payton, LDF President and Director-Counsel.

# # #

ABOUT LDFThe NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) is America's legal counsel on issues of race. Through advocacy and litigation, LDF focuses on issues of education, voter protection, economic justice and criminal justice. We encourage students to embark on careers in the public interest through scholarships and internship programs. LDF pursues racial justice to move our nation toward a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all.

MORE LESSONS FROM LUZERN COUNTY (PA)

2009-03-16T10:32:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 3/2/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Recently, a piece was produced on the scandal in Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, where 2 judges pleaded guilty for playing their parts in a kickback scheme that netted them over 2 and 1/2 million bucks.

The beneficiaries of their hustle were private juvenile prison builders, owners and investors (oh -- and themselves, of course).

The losers were hundreds of Luzerne County's children, kids who were treated like cattle, as they were shuffled through so-called 'courts' -- without counsel --, where so-called 'judges' sent them away from their parents, their siblings, and their fellow students, for acts as benign as passing notes, or sending fresh emails -- to private prisons for profit!

While the judges pleaded guilty to relatively minor charges, some other officials at the court, from county clerk to deputy court administrator have followed the judges in plea agreements.

What is utterly remarkable is how easily and effortlessly these judges did their thing, in stark violation of the state's Juvenile Act, * with virtual impunity, for almost a decade!

One must wonder, where were the lawyers looking out for the interests of these kids? Or were they so cowed, so shocked, so shaken by a 'long train of abuses' that they were silenced by the ugliness of corruption, and the aura of fear?

Pennsylvania law allegedly provides protections for children, including the right to counsel (even if they couldn't afford it), and a legal presumption that all kids should remain with their families. As a general rule, a child shouldn't have been detained unless she posed a danger to others, their property, or herself. There are exceptions to this rule, and they were whether the child was charged with committing major felonies, like robbery, rape or murder.

There was apparently another exception -- whether or not President Judge Mark Ciavarella or Senior Judge Michael Conahan wanted to make some quick bucks.

They were subject to a higher law -- get money!

What the Luzerne County scandal has shown us is that what happens in many courts is both a business and a mystery. For millions of Americans, the law is a puzzle written in Latin, one unable to decode.

It also shows us that sometimes the criminal is sitting on the bench, wearing a black robe.

--(c) '09 maj

[* See various PA statutes, like Tit. 42 Pa. C. S. 6301 et seq. (Re: Purposes of "Juvenile Act": To preserve the unity of the family whenever possible or to provide another alternative permanent family when the unity of the family cannot be maintained.) ; Tit. 42 Pa. C. S 6337: (Re: 'Right to Counsel': (....{A} party is entitled to representation by legal counsel at all stages of any proceedings under this chapter and if he is without financial resources or otherwise unable to employ counsel, to have the court provide counsel for him. If a party appears without counsel the court shall ascertain whether he knows of his right thereto and be provided with counsel by the court if applicable. Counsel must be provided for a child unless his parent, guardian, or custodian is present in court and affirmatively waive it....)]

The Passing of the Papers

2009-03-16T10:24:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 3/1/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

For American newspapers, some that have been giants for generations, this is the age of Ragnarok. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok marked the destruction of the universe, when even the gods fell from their heaven. (Asgard).

For ages, newspapers have been the seedbeds of the information garden. Although seemingly threatened by the new technologies of radio and TV, this proved more appearance than actuality, for both mediums relied on the data uncovered by intrepid, although little-know newspaper reporters.

But we are now in the age of the Internet, a medium that only one newspaper (the Wall St. Journal) has successfully exploited.

That, added to lower circulation, and the flight of advertisers to the 'net, has spelled doom for newspapers.

In recent days, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer have been forced to face the dilemma of bankruptcy.

Just a week ago, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado closed its doors after a century and 1/2 of operation. As of Sept. 2006, the Rocky Mountain News had a reported circulation of over 250,000. But the key isn't circulation, it's advertising -- and advertising is fleeing.

Indeed, about 2 years ago, a media research firm executive said some papers didn't want bigger circulation -- they wanted a smaller, but more wealthy circulation base.

Colby Atwood, head of Borrell Associates, told a New York Times reporter that a "quality circulation" is more preferable "than quantity", and it was a "rational business decision" to "shed" the subscribers who cost more and generate less revenue." *

When newspapers intentionally "shed" some subscribers they are cutting their own throats in pursuit of fool's gold.

And although most articles don't mention it, I remain convinced that newspapers are dying for quite another reason. In a time of war, when readers needed their services most, many papers simply took a dive, and served the interests of power, rather than the needs of the people. Most papers sold the president's line because they feared that they would be seen as disloyal in wartime, and lose subscribers.

Instead, they lost readers anyway, because people couldn't believe what they read in black and white.

In fact, even before the Iraq war some news execs sent memos to their staffs warning them NOT to show wire photos of civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war. One memo told reporters to "play down" such stories.*

Is there any wonder that such a product is in decline?

--(c) '09 maj

[Sources: *Perez-Pena, Richard, "Why Big Newspapers Applaud Some Declines in Circulation," New York Times, Mon., Oct. 1, 2007, p. c1.:

*Johnson, Chalmers, NEMESIS: The Last Days of the American Empire (Metropolitan Books: New York, 2006), p.30.]

The Obama Deception - A New Film By Alex Jones

2009-03-16T08:08:00.001-05:00

America faces new Depression misery as financial crisis worsens

2009-03-13T14:38:00.000-05:00

Mike Harvey in Sacramento

By the wide stretch of the American River in Sacramento, history is repeating itself. Here, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, men and women who had lost everything and despaired of finding work built rough shelters and huddled around fires.

Now the spiral of job losses and house repossessions has left another wave of Americans homeless, and a new tent city is growing rapidly on lumpy, derelict land between the river and the railway tracks here in the capital of California.

There are more than 300 people living in scattered encampments stretching a couple of miles along the river bank. As many as 50 more arrive each week. Unemployment in Sacramento reached 10.4 per cent in January and California is suffering some of the worst repossession rates in the country, with as many as 500 people losing their homes every day last year.

Charity workers in the city can no longer cope with the number of people coming to them for help. The shelters are full, with one home that caters for women and children turning away 200 people a night.

Joan Burke, director of advocacy for the homeless charity Loaves and Fishes, said: “The folks we deal with typically are the working poor. But right now the economy is in such turmoil that it is affecting a new layer of middle-class earners - construction workers, farm labourers, retail workers, restaurant staff.

“People who have earned good money but have not got any savings are finding out about the reality of being just one or two pay cheques away from becoming homeless.”

Jim Gibson, 50, arrived at the tent city four months ago. A construction worker, he had been employed in the Bay Area around San Francisco for 32 years without ever giving any thought to finding the next job.

Most recently he had a job on a site in Sacramento and found a rented apartment to live in. When he lost the job six months ago he quickly went through the little savings that he had. He moved into a motel room, but with no jobs to be found he was forced to begin selling his possessions - including his tools.

In the end he spent his last $30 on a one-man tent and headed for the burgeoning tent city. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would end up here,” he said.

Inside his tent is a neatly folded set of spare clothes, a sleeping bag and blankets. He has nothing else: all his family photos, the possessions of a lifetime, have gone. “I sold them or gave them away. Where could I keep them?”

A widower, Jim has five adult children living locally - but he will not tell them where he is. “They don't know, and I am not going to burden them. In part it is my pride, but they are also just one pay cheque from joining me here.”

Yesterday Jim joined his new friends, Genaddiy Tomashov, 57, and Anthony, 32 in a makeshift communal tent. They sat on plastic chairs around a fire, with a cooking pot suspended above it. In a corner of the structure, which lost its roof in high winds and torrential rain last week, were piles of tin cans and bottles of water donated by the local food bank. They keep each other company and, when they have money for a bus pass, they go off in search of work. From time to time a local business pays $35 for a five-hour stint holding a sign on the street.

They see four or five new tents springing up each day. Yesterday Ronn Harrison, 46, turned up with a sleeping bag, and $8 in his pocket. A carpenter who had come out of a state alcohol rehabilitation programme last year, he had moved in with his father in Fresno, but could not stay there. He has worked two days since last August. “I have had to downsize my way, all the way out here. There was nothing left for me to do,” he said.

There is no sanitation and no running water in the tent city and, while Jim's area is as neat as possible, elsewhere among the blue Tarpaulins there are growing piles of rubbish and rotting food. Although Sacramento has a Mediterranean climate, days of heavy rain recently turned much of the site into a quagmire.

On the other side of the railway tracks, towards the city centre, Loaves and Fishes provides showers and a midday meal for 650 homeless people a day. The charity is campaigning for the city to provide a “safe haven” for the homeless, with proper facilities and garbage disposal.

Sister Libby Fernandez, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, has seen the tent city grow from a few individuals a year ago into a big problem for city officials. The dome of the State Capitol, where the California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger conducts his daily business, is visible from the levee by the river where she parks her golf cart whenever she visits.

Sister Libby estimates that out of a population of 500,000 in Sacramento, there are 2,000 homeless in shelters across the city and another 2,000 living on the streets or in tent cities, either hidden or out in the open. “Camping outside is illegal but the authorities cannot move on so many people. In any case, they have nowhere else to go.”

Jim said that, while he was confident he would get out of the tent city, he was not sure when. “California has been living in the fast lane all these years. I took my job for granted and all of the sudden the recession hit. I never thought building would stop, but it has. People weren't ready for it.

“This is the bottom of the barrel.”

Depression déjà-vu

— The Great Depression was triggered by the New York stock market crash of 1929. It was the longest and harshest depression yet experienced by the industrialised Western world

— By late 1932 US stock values had dropped to 20 per cent of their previous worth. By 1933 11,000 of the US's 25,000 banks had failed and unemployment was at 25 per cent. Industrial production declined by 47 per cent and GDP by 30 per cent. The effects were felt around the world

— The recovery began with President Roosevelt’s New Deal programme in 1933, which ushered in a government-regulated economy, as well as reforms in industry, agriculture, finance, waterpower, labour and housing

— The British decline stopped soon after the gold standard was abandoned in 1931, but recovery did not begin until the end of 1932

Source: www.britannica.com

Tiger Shark Video

2009-03-13T13:33:00.000-05:00

Running Backwards

2009-03-03T16:23:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 2/26/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Few sciences are more complex than economics, for despite the plethora of formulas claiming to define its workings, economics remains a bedeviling mystery that confuses and confounds the best minds time and time again.

That's often because our economic ideas are formed not only by our experiences but by our beliefs, and as such, we defend our ideas based not on evidence, but on our theoretical constructs -- again, what we believe.

We are free marketeers, or Keynesians; we follow the theories of Adam Smith, Henry George, David Ricardo or Karl Marx the way we follow our favorite basketball team, win or lose.

Sometimes those theories blind us to the bigger game of life outside our doors.

Much of the current economic crisis is the direct result of the economic theory of deregulation, made, not under George Bush alone, but in the waning days of the Clinton administration. For it was in 1999 that Clinton's treasury secretaries, first Robert Rubin, and later Larry Summers, advocated the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a 1933 law which prohibited commercial banks and investment banks from functioning in the same house.

The reason? None other than ole FDR. President Franklin D. Roosevelt explained as much in his famous "Fear Itself" inaugural speech of 1933, when the nation was reeling in the grips of the Great Depression. Roosevelt said,"...there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money..."*

In November 1999 President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, essentially repealing Glass-Steagall, by tearing down the brick wall between commercial and investment banks. The securities industries went on a tear, making millions, billions and then tens of billions on speculation with other people's money-- until the house of cards came crumbling down in November 2008.

The speculation business didn't just become toxic. It was poison in the 1930's, and came back to life in the late '90's more poisonous than ever.

By then, both political parties were parties of deregulation, for both were instruments of corporate power, and both were the authors of today's Great Recession, if not the Depression to come.

--(c) '09 maj

[*Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1st Inaugural Address, 1933 ("The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear Itself" speech), repr. in Labour & Trade Union Review (No. 194: Feb. '04), p.6]

Wildin' On Wall Street

2009-03-03T16:18:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 2/23/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

For years now, banks, investment houses and brokerage firms have engaged in a feverish dance of hustling from home-owners, using devices like ARM's (adjustable rate mortgages), offering loans at low or no interest which balloon into traps, forcing foreclosures that insured new properties could be sold, with the hustle being hustled anew.

You know what these hustlers think of the economy that they've brought to the brink of disaster? You needn't look far, for cable systems were ablast with the video of a 'reporter' on the trading floor of the stock exchange going full tilt over the alleged misdirection of monies going to homeowners struggling to make their mortgages.

It looked like a pig fighting for more slop in his trough -- upset that he couldn't get it all. They were angry that the other pigs of Wall Street couldn't get more, while standing amidst the economic wreckage.

The nation's economy is falling not only because of the epic greed on Wall Street -- the long Iraq debacle, with its 'lost' billions certainly didn't help -- but these princes of capital certainly played a pivotal role.

And the irony isn't that they want more; it's that these pigs will probably get it!

For if capital is anything, it is hopelessly amoral.

Its only interest is gain.

If any people in America know this, it's African Americans, whose grandparents were capitalist - owned chattel like horses or swine.

Except for a tiny band of radicals called abolitionists, many of whom were driven by deep religious fervor, few in American life considered slavery wrong, for many considered it as natural as grass growing on the lawn in spring.

The reason the economy is still stuck in idle isn't because of a lack of stimulus; it's the tremendous distrust on both sides.

Bankers are afraid to lend lest they won't be repaid; lenders are afraid they'll be trapped and tricked by slick language hidden in loan agreements.

Meanwhile, the House of Capital crumbles from within and without.

--(c) '09 maj

Inheriting an Empire

2009-03-03T16:10:00.002-05:00

[col. writ. 2/21/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Of all the myriad things to inherit, perhaps the worst is an empire, for such a transmission brings with it the duty of defense, which, in time, invariably becomes defending the indefensible.
For empires are constructed of crimes, and similarly so maintained.

They are birthed in invasion, nursed on occupation and raised on the cruel gruel of repression, torture and brutality.

That is their intrinsic nature as shown by the abundant examples of history. This was shown best by Rome, which ravaged the then-known world to enrich the 'eternal city'. Nations were invaded, their nobles either slain or enslaved, puppets were installed, and the natural resources extracted to feed the ever-hungry maw of Rome.

For millions of Blacks, the Obama election has sparked a new way of thinking and speaking of an America that has, heretofore, been a subject of considerable ambivalence. For perhaps the first time in U.S. history (certainly since Reconstruction), millions speak of the U.S. as "we", instead of "they."

This may well be a turning point in American history.

But is the American Empire "ours" simply because a Black man is the nation's chief executive?

Did we vote it into being, or did we merely inherit it?

Most who voted for Obama certainly didn't vote for the Iraq War, one of the most overt imperial projects in modern U.S. history. They supported a quick and decisive end of the war - not its continuation nor its expansion.

Indeed, of all Americans, Blacks opposed the war the most vehemently, according to national polls.

Perhaps it was the deep memory of national oppression that made it so unseemly to support such an oppressive occupation against the Iraqi people; perhaps it was the clumsiness of the government's lies used to 'sell' the invasion.

But empires begotten by violence and exploitation are poisonous things that damage both sides of this deadly duo.

The British Empire toiled for generations to conquer and exploit over 1/2 of Africa, most of Asia and two-thirds of the Americas. But all of that crumbled when the nation was almost broken under the weight of the Germans, and she was too weak to hold her colonies. Indeed America, as the strongest to emerge from the war, inherited much of Britain's loss, as well as other European powers.

It inherited the Vietnam War when the French could no longer sustain it, and paid a heavy price of death and defeat.

Empires shouldn't be inherited lightly, like knick-knacks from an elderly grandma.

This is especially so in democracies, where the people allegedly determine public policy, for what public policy could be more dire than imperial war?

--(c) '09 maj

!*Mumia's Life Death Struggle/Legal Update 2/8

2009-02-23T12:20:00.002-05:00

via; Freedom Archives
==================

Date: February 8, 2009

From: Robert R. Bryan, lead counsel
Subject: Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row - U.S. Supreme Court

Download the document HERE
<http://www.freemumia.com/pdfs/febupdate.pdf>

New case filing in Supreme Court On February 4, 2009, the U.S. SupremeCourt docketed and accepted for filing the Petition for Writ ofCertiorari, with supporting Appendix, that I had submitted December 19,2008 on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. (AbuJamal v. Beard, U.S. Sup. Ct. No.08-8483.) A copy of the petition is attached. The central issue in thiscase is racism in jury selection. The prosecution systematically removedpeople from sitting on the trial jury purely because of the color oftheir skin, that is, being black. The bigotry that killed Martin LutherKing, Jr., so many years ago, has been rampant in the case of my clientand is a central part of the state's quest to murder him in the name ofthe law.

Prosecution's separate Supreme Court petition In an entirely separatecase (Beard v. Abu-Jamal, Sup. Ct. No. 08-652), the prosecution isseeking to overturn the victory we achieved last year in the U.S. Courtof Appeals for the Third Circuit. (Abu-Jamal v. Horn, 520 F.3d 272 (3rd Cir. 2008).) In that ruling the court ordered a new jury trial on the question of thedeath penalty. Our Brief In Opposition will be filed in the SupremeCourt on February 13, 2009.

Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense -- The legal defense for Mumia needshelp. The costs for our litigation in two case before the Supreme Courtare substantial. To help, please make your checks payable to the"National Lawyers Guild Foundation" (indicate "Mumia" on thebottom left). The donations are tax deductible, and should be mailed to:

Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012

Conclusion -- Mumia remains on Pennsylvania's death row. We are in an epic struggle in which his life hangs in the balance. What occurs now in the Supreme Court will determine whether Mumia will have a new jury trial,or die at the hands of the executioner.

As I have previously pointed out, Mumia is in greater danger than at anytime since his 1981 arrest. Your support and activism is needed. Thisgreat journalist and author does not belong on death row or in prison. We must not rest until he is free.

Yours very truly,

Robert R. Bryan
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117

Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal[E-mail: RobertRBryan@aol.com

Economy of Ashes

2009-02-23T12:16:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 2/4/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

What we are seeing in the economy is something not seen in this country since the 1930's -- the time of the Great Depression.

If we think of the companies shedding jobs like trees shedding leaves, they are so numerous that it may prove easier to name companies that haven't -- (if we could find any!)

In January alone, some 1/2 million workers got pink slips.

And this economic crisis is global. Europe is locked in a financial vise, and big countries, like England and France, have announced ambitious stimulus packages. England has openly nationalized prominent banks facing default. Iceland has, for all intents and purposes, declared bankruptcy -- with not just banks, but government itself is failing.

And while China, the site of the world's most robust economy is still growing, its rate of growth has fallen so fast that some 20 million people -- 20 million! -- have lost their jobs, a direct result of the U.S. economic recession.

Over a year ago, American economist Nouriel Roubini, speaking at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, said the U.S. economy looked "like an emerging market."

Roubini predicted that the U.S. would enter a recession which would last at least a year. he added, "The debate is not whether we're going to have a soft or hard landing. The question is only how hard the hard landing will be." *

A Chinese economist echoed that sentiment. Yu Yongding, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences described the Chinese economy as at "quite a delicate stage." The problem, he concluded, was the "very bad situation" in the U.S.

Globalization was sold as the next best thing to the industrial age, when Americans would live in the warm glow of the information age, lit by computer screens, and the rest of the world would do scut work.

How's that working out, as the economy crumbles?

--(c) '09 maj

[*Source: Landler, Mark, "U.S. Policies Evoke Scorn at Davos: Fed Caved In to the Markets (or Maybe It Dawdled), Critics Say, New York Times, Thurs., Jan. 24, 2008, p. C9.]

Music Over the Mall

2009-02-23T12:09:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 1/28/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

As a student of history, of politics and of music I viewed the recent presidential inauguration with considerable interest.

And while it was obviously a moment of historic proportions, it can't be said that it held surprise.

That's usually because politics tends to flatten highs, and lop off lows, as politicians attempt to appeal to the broadest base.

That's also because political systems strive for the safety and security of protocol; the safe refuge of precedent, to give the image that all is well, that the U.S. endures,and the empire is essential unchanged, and still regnant.

I therefore beheld it from a distance; interested, yes, but not engaged.

If anything was utterly remarkable, it was the vast throng, standing for hours in the biting cold for as far as the eye could see.

Yet, for all the glitter and spectacle, what moved most was something quite unexpected.

John Williams' composition (he of "Star Wars" and "Jaws" fame), "Heirs..." performed by violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo- Ma, clarinet player Anthony McGill and pianist Gabriela Montero, was a breathtaking piece of musical mastery. Perlman began the piece, his violin sounding a mournful dirge that was almost funereal. He was joined shortly thereafter by Yo-Yo Ma's deeper cello, which echoed this theme, painting a picture of wintry mourning, of emotional heaviness. This mood was shattered by McGill's light, airy clarinet, which was as triumphant as the coming of spring. By the time Montero graced the keys, the theme had wholly changed. From winter, to the bright warmth of spring, from dissonance to ebullient unity.

To say this was a composition of beauty and brilliance would be understatement.

It was a work finely tuned to its time. It was a music nicely pitched to the passing of a political era.

It teaches us that music. at its best, can be magical.

It was so wondrous that I wept.

--(c) '09 maj

!*3/10 NY Live From Death Row! w/ Pam Africa + DR Prisoners

2009-02-23T11:56:00.002-05:00

via: info@freemumia.com
================

LIVE FROM DEATH ROW! with PAM AFRICA, International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

City College - 137th St. & Amsterdam, NY - NAC Ballroom
Tuesday, March 10 - 7 PM

These are America's condemned, who bear a stigma far worse than "prisoner." These are America's death row residents: men and women who walk the razor's edge between half-life and certain death.--Mumia Abu-Jamal, Pennsylvania death row prisoner, from his book 'Live from Death Row'

Over 3,500 men and women sit on death row across this country. This national tour will bring you their voices and their struggles.

The tour features death row prisoners speaking live via speakerphone. Including:

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
Pennsylvania death row prisoner, author of Live from Death Row, We Want Freedom and numerous other books

KEVIN COOPER
California death row prisoner who came within 3 1/2 hours of being executed before he won a stay of execution

TROY DAVIS
On death row in Georgia and came within hours of execution in 2008 before he won a stay

STANLEY HOWARD
Former death row prisoner and torture victim still imprisoned in Illinois; contributing writer to the New Abolitionist...and more!

Also speaking at City College:
Lawrence Hayes, former NYS death row prisoner
Yusef Salaam, exonerated in the Central Park jogger case

LIVE FROM DEATH ROW!
City College - 137th St. & Amsterdam - NAC Ballroom
Tuesday, March 10 - 7 PM

www.nodeathpenalty.org
nyc@nodeathpenalty.orgSponsored by: Campaign to End the Death Penalty & the Free Mumia Coalition-NYC

The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!Audio of most of Mumia's essays are at: http://www.prisonradio.org

PLEASE CONTACT:International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJP.O. Box 19709Philadelphia, PA 19143Phone - 215-476-8812/ Fax - 215-476-6180E-mail - icffmaj@aol.comWeb - www.freemumia.com
AND OFFER YOUR SERVICES!Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-JamalAM 8335
SCI-Greene175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370
WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CAN *NOT* REST!!

Subscribe: mumiacolumns-subscribe@topica.comRead: http://topica.com/lists/mumiacolumns/readSubscribe ICFFMAJ email updates list by e-mailingicffmaj@aol.com!
[Check out Mumia's latest: *WE WANT FREEDOM:A Life in the Black Panther Party*, from SouthEnd Press (http://www.southendpress.org); Ph.#1-800-533-8478.]

!*MUMIA Releases NEW BOOK!/Events Planned Nationally on his Birthday!

2009-02-23T11:42:00.002-05:00

YOUR SUPPORT IS GREATLY NEEDED,
ATTEND AND/OR HOST YOUR OWN EVENTS!
===============================
via: info@freemumia.com
NEW BOOK! (View Book at http://www.freemumia.com/april242009.html)
JAILHOUSE LAWYERS: PRISONERS DEFENDING PRISONERS V. THE U.S.A.
Authored by MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
--------

APRIL 24 MUMIA'S BIRTHDAY NATIONALLY COORDINATED "MORE THAN A BOOK PARTY" EVENTS

Mumia writes:

"This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion-dollar endowed universities but in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America .. It is law learned in a stew of bitterness, under the constant threat of violence, in places where millions of people live, buy millions of others wish to ignore or forget"

Let's use the opportunity of the publication of this brilliant and moving, vintage Mumia book to build the momentum for his case, to raise the money we desperately need in these challenging economic times, to get the word out – to produce literature, flyers, posters, videos, DVD's; to send organizers out to help build new chapters and strengthen old ones, TO GET THE PEOPLE OUT IN THE STREETS … all the work that we must do in order to FREE MUMIA as he faces LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE OR EXECUTION!

In the spirit of Mumia's book, we dedicate these "More Than a Book Party" events to the thousands and thousands of jailhouse lawyers who practice their craft in their own and their brothers' (and sisters') struggle for justice, against all odds and with the high risk of being subjected to the venom, punishment, and brutality of the prison system that is directed against them more than to any other sector of the prison population. THESE ARE THE HEROES AND SHEROES WE WILL HONOR. INVITE SOME OF THEM WHO ARE FORMER PRISONERS TO PARTICIPATE IN YOUR "MORE THAN A BOOK PARTY EVENTS!!!

MUMIA BIRTHDAY "MORE THAN A BOOK PARTY" APRIL 24TH EVENTS ALREADY SCHEDULED IN:

-PHILADELPHIA

-NEW YORK (NOTE: SCHEDULED FOR SATURDAY APRIL 25TH BY THE FREE MUMIA COALITION TO AVOID CONFLICT WITH OTHER EVENTS)

-SAN FRANCISCO
-PITTSBURGH
-PORTLAND
-BOSTON
-WOODSTOCK
AND OTHERS !

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
215 476-8812
212 330-8029

TO ORDER BOOKS CONTACT: STACEY@CITYLIGHTS.COM
OR CALL

FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE GRASSROOTS WORK: (FUNDS WILL GO TO BOTH INTERNATIONAL CONCERNED FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL AND THE FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL COALITION (NYC)) ONLINE GO TO:

WWW.FREEMUMIA.COM
OR MAIL CHECKS TO:

FREE MUMIA ABU JAMAL COALITION, PO BOX 16, NEW YORK, NY 10030
(CHECKS FOR BOTH ORGANIZATIONS PAYABLE TO: FMAJC/IFCO)

The Fallen

2009-02-23T11:36:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 2/12/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

A nation's economy is always a work of complexity, which accounts for the divergent opinions of economists, who often come down on different sides of the big issues, as in what works, and what doesn't.

Broadly speaking, the conflict is between classic and Keynesian economics, with the former of the view that the market is self-regulating, and the latter of the view that the market isn't self-regulating, but must be massaged and managed by government fiscal policies.

The latest stimulus package is Keynesian (after British economist John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946], as was the bailout of the banks and financial institutions.

It seeks to influence events by an aggressive expansionist fiscal policy.

But it seems like this is less stimulus than stopgap, for it seeks to stimulate something that is in almost deadly shape.

Look at it this way; if your heart stops, and you are given a powerful jolt of electricity, your heart may resume beating, but the problem is hardly solved.

You don't need a defibrillator unless the body (the system) is in an advanced state of collapse. And it's that state of serious illness that isn't being seriously addressed, for the American economy has been ill for quite some time.

Much can be traced to the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) era, which sought to emphatically transform the economy to one run on information and financial services, with the manufacturing to be exported to foreign markets where labor was cheaper.

Unfortunately, no serious educational efforts were undertaken to adjust to this dramatic economic shift, and instead, a decade was wasted on largely irrelevant battles over No Child Left Behind, when millions of children experienced school as a test-taking prison, instead of a site of substantive learning.

With manufacturing hollowed out, and real wages falling annually, how could the economy not have a massive seizure?

For, of all the money roaring through the U.S. economy, over 70% is from personal consumption of goods and services, which means the economy is consumer-driven.

Let us illustrate; the U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for 2006 was over $13 trillion. Personal consumption of goods and services came to over $9 trillion.

The net effect of joblessness and lowered wages is a hit at the heart of the economy, that $750 billion could hardly touch.

Until the fundamentals can be recognized and corrected, these problems will continue, and the economy will sputter along, until the next heart attack.

--(c) '09 maj

With 'Judges' Like These....

2009-02-23T11:31:00.002-05:00

[col. writ. 2/7/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

In Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, there are 9 judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Two of them just pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to convict and sentence juveniles to a private prison, so that they could get kickbacks from the prison's builders and owners.

According to published accounts, Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan sent hundreds of boys and girls to the private facility, and pocketed some $2.5 million in kickbacks.

This was accomplished not merely because of the venal greed of the judges, but because virtually none of the children were provided with legal representation.

When the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center filed a petition in the PA Supreme Court calling the county's practice of adjudicating and sentencing some 250 kids to jail without legal representation unconstitutional, the state's highest court denied the petition on Jan. 8, 2009. To make matters even worse, recently filed criminal information states that the 2 judges used their power and influence in the county to de-fund the county juvenile facility, precisely as they were steering kids to the private jail (boy -- talk about privatization!).

Nearly a month later, the state's highest court changed their minds, vacating the denial.

What transpired in the interim?

Well, for one thing, the 2 judges provisionally pleaded guilty to federal charges of honest wire service fraud.

Hundreds of children get socked into jail, after demonstrably unconstitutional proceedings with no legal representation, and the state's highest court doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

The media reports on this outrage, and the PA Supreme Court expresses little interest.

This is the nature of judging these days, when even kids are expendable fodder for the prison industrial complex.

Luzerne County is the state's 10th largest county, with just over 300,000 souls.

At least 22% of their judges have admitted being corrupt, in the sordid business of selling the freedom and well-being of poor children for profit.

--(c) '09 maj

{Sources: Legal Intelligencer, 2/3/09; 2/4/09.}

Ship Of Fools

2009-02-10T16:49:00.002-05:00

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars
February 9, 2009

Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it.

The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, American’s largest creditor.

The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Americans lost their jobs every day.

In addition, December’s job losses were revised up by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000. The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000. If this keeps up, Obama’s promised three million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses.

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com/) reports that this huge number is an understatement. Williams notes that built-in biases in seasonal adjustment factors caused a 118,000 understatement of January job losses, bringing the actual January job loss to 716,000 jobs.

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs. The Household Survey shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the US media is a fabrication. Williams reports that

"during the Clinton Administration, ‘discouraged workers’ those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had–were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been ‘discouraged’ for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18% in January, from 17.5% in December."

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data from a government that lies to us every time it opens its mouth, the US unemployment rate is already at depression levels.

How could it be otherwise given the enormous job loss from offshored jobs. It is impossible for a country to create jobs when its corporations are moving production for the American consumer market offshore. When they move the production offshore, they

shift US GDP to other countries. The US trade deficit over the past decade has reduced US GDP by $1.5 trillion dollars. That is a lot of jobs.

I have been reporting for years that American university graduates have had to take jobs as waitresses and bartenders. As over-indebted American consumers lose their jobs, they will visit restaurants and bars less frequently. Consequently, Americans with university degrees will not even have jobs waiting on tables and mixing drinks.

US policymakers have ignored the fact that consumer demand in the 21st century has been driven, not by increases in real income, but by increased consumer indebtedness. This fact makes it pointless to try to stimulate the economy by bailing out banks so that they can lend more to consumers. The American consumers have no more capacity to borrow.

With the decline in the values of their principal assets–their homes–with the destruction of half of their pension assets, and with joblessness facing them, Americans cannot and will not spend.

Why bail out GM and Citibank when the firms are moving as many operations offshore as they possibly can?

Much of US infrastructure is in poor shape and needs renewing. However, infrastructure jobs do not produce goods and services that can be sold abroad. The massive commitment to infrastructure does nothing to help the US reduce its massive trade deficit, the financing of which is becoming a major problem. Moreover, when the infrastructure projects are completed, so are the jobs.

At best, assuming Mexicans do not get most of the construction jobs, all Obama’s stimulus program can do is to reduce the number of unemployed temporarily.

Unless US corporations can be required to use American labor to produce the goods and services that they sell in American markets, there is no hope for the US economy. No one in the Obama administration has the wits to address this problem. Thus, the economy will continue to implode.

Adding to the brewing disaster, Obama has been deceived by his military and neoconservative advisers into expanding the war in Afghanistan, a large mountainous country. Obama intends to use the draw-down of US soldiers in Iraq to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. This would bring the US forces to 60,000–600,000 fewer than US Marine Corps and US Army counterinsurgency guidelines define as the minimum number of soldiers necessary to bring success in Afghanistan–and less than half as many as the army that was unable to occupy Iraq.

The Iranians had to bail out the Bush regime by restraining its Shi’ite allies and encouraging them to use the ballot box to attain power and push out the Americans. In Iraq the US troops only had to fight a small Sunni insurgency drawn from a minority of the population. Even so, the US "prevailed" by putting the insurgents on the US payroll and paying them not to fight. The withdrawal agreement was dictated by the Shi’ites. It was not what the Bush regime wanted.

One would think that the experience with the "cakewalk" in Iraq would make the US hesitant to attempt to occupy Afghanistan, an undertaking that would require the US to occupy parts of Pakistan. The US was hard pressed to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq. Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan?

One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment. Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home.

But this solves only half of the problem. Where does the money come from to support an army in the field of 650,000, an army 4.3 times larger than US forces in Iraq, a war that has cost us $3 trillion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs. This money would have to be raised in addition to the $3 trillion US budget deficit that is the result of Bush’s financial sector bailout, Obama’s stimulus package, and the rapidly failing economy. When economies tank, as the American one is doing, tax revenues collapse. The millions of unemployed Americans are not paying Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes. The stores and businesses that are closing are not paying federal and state income taxes. Consumers with no money or credit to spend are not paying sales taxes.

The Washington Morons, and morons they are, have given no thought as to how they are going to finance a fiscal year 2009 budget deficit of some two to three trillion dollars.

The practically nonexistent US saving rate cannot finance it.

The trade surpluses of our trading partners, such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, cannot finance it.

The US government really has only two possibilities for financing its budget deficit. One is a second collapse in the stock market, which would drive the surviving investors with what they have left into "safe" US Treasury bonds. The other is for the Federal Reserve to monetize the Treasury debt.

Monetizing the debt means that when no one is willing or able to purchase the Treasury’s bonds, the Federal Reserve buys them by creating bank deposits for the Treasury’s account.

In other words, the Fed "prints money" with which to buy the Treasury’s bonds.

Once this happens, the US dollar will cease to be the reserve currency.

In addition, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia, countries that hold enormous quantities of US Treasury debt in addition to other US dollar assets, will sell, hoping to get out before others.

The US dollar will become worthless, the currency of a banana republic.

The US will not be able to pay for its imports, a serious problem for a country dependent on imports for its energy, manufactured goods, and advanced technology products.

Obama’s Keynesian advisers have learned with a vengeance Milton Friedman’s lesson that the Great Depression resulted from the Federal Reserve permitting a contraction of the supply of money and credit. In the Great Depression good debts were destroyed by monetary contraction. Today bad debts are being preserved by the expansion of money and credit, and the US Treasury is jeopardizing its credit standing and the dollar’s reserve currency status with enormous quarterly bond auctions as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, the Russians, overflowing with energy and mineral resources, and not in debt, have learned that the US government is not to be trusted. Russia has watched Reagan’s successors attempt to turn former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into US puppet states with US military bases. The US is trying to ring Russia with missiles that neutralize Russia’s strategic deterrent.

Putin has caught on to "comrade wolf." He has succeeded in having the president of Kyrgyzstan, a former part of the Soviet Union, evict the US from its military base. This base is essential to America’s ability to supply its soldiers in Afghanistan.

To stop America’s meddling in Russia’s sphere of influence, the Russian government has created a collective security treaty organization comprised of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan is a partial participant.

In other words, Russia has organized central Asia against US penetration.

To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Stephen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspiracy–Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks, and Mona Charen–are ecstatic over Obama’s appointments. They don’t see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney.

Not only are Obama’s appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel Lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran.

The unreality in which he US government operates is beyond belief. A bankrupt government that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!

The world has never seen such total mindlessness. Napoleon’s and Hitler’s march into Russia were rational acts compared to the mindless idiocy of the United States government.

Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan. When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, "Frankly, we don’t have one." NBC reports: "they’re working on it."

Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid "mission creep without clear parameters," the US "needs a clear mission."

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed? How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?

Research related articles:

Canada firm on quitting Afghanistan by 2011
Russia to ship equipment to finish Iranian nuclear plant
Irish Times Lisbon poll fools public - Deception has set in for referendum 2
Woman fools Japan’s airport security fingerprint system
Hezbollah says US ship is threat
Russia sinks Georgian ship trying to attack Russian navy ships
Another Russian Bomber Intercepted Near U.S. Navy Ship
Who’s going to Finance the rising US National Debt?
‘US ship nearly fired at Iranians’
Iranian aid ship to break Israeli siege of Gaza
Army Officials Say Many More Active-Duty Troops Are Needed
‘Iran aid ship nears Gaza’

CHINESE SICK LEAVE: 'I NO COME WORK TODAY!!!

2009-02-10T16:46:00.001-05:00

Note: I received the following joke in an email today. It's probably old, but what the hell, I'll share it with the rest of you anyway.

Hung Chow calls into work and says, 'Hey, I no come work today, I really sick. Got headache, stomach ache and legs hurt, I no come work.'

The boss John says, 'You know something, Hung Chow, I really need you today. When I feel sick like you do, I go to my wife and tell her to give me Sex. That makes everything better and I go to work. You try that.' Two hours later Hung Chow calls again. 'I do what You say and I feel Great. I be at work soon.........You got nice house'

Alex Jones Interviewing Gerald Celente Trends Forecaster

2009-02-01T01:22:00.001-05:00

Officer Jack Boot Rants About FEMA Camps

2009-01-31T21:29:00.000-05:00

Freedom Rider: Black America Surrenders

2009-01-29T15:23:00.002-05:00

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

By a twist of fate, this Obama critic ended up with a silver ticket, the least prestigious standing room ticket, for the presidential inauguration ceremony. I was among the crowd of nearly two million love struck Obama supporters. They hailed from every region of the country, but they were united in their love for Barack Obama.

The racial demographic was mixed black and white, but the black faces were disproportionately represented, particularly among the non-ticketed portions of the crowd. Their coats were covered with Obama buttons and they kept their heads warm with Obama caps and hats. Some pushed babies in strollers or senior citizens in wheel chairs, all amidst streets packed so tightly with pedestrian traffic that public safety was at risk.

Feelings about the new president are more than just positive, they are joyful, and not just among black people. The political clinical depression brought on by the last eight years cannot be under estimated. Humans want to be happy, and happiness experienced with large groups of other giddy beings meets fundamental psychological needs.

But just 72 hours after the new president took office, he started killing people. U.S. military drones killed at least 20 people in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, all in the service of the war on terror. Obama has spent many months saying he would do exactly that, even though the Pakistani government has repeatedly asked the U.S. to stop killing its citizens in a pointless effort to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

It is true that Obama signed an executive order pledging to close the military prison at Guantanamo and other detention sites within one year. It is also true that the Center for Constitutional Rights warns that it can be closed in a shorter period of time, and that closure without a return to civilian trials is a sham and a continuation of the travesties of justice committed by this country.

The celebrations surrounding the Guantanamo order should have been very short lived. While he gave with one hand, Obama took with the other. On Monday, January 19th, his last full day in office, George W. Bush asked a federal judge to stay an order forcing the government to release classified documents related to a warrantless surveillance lawsuit.

A few days later, President Barack Obama replaced Bush as the defendant in the case, siding with the previous administration's request to keep the documents secret and thereby preventing plaintiffs from making their case for redress of government wrongdoing.

None of these facts matter to the Obama lovers. They literally do not care what he does. Throughout 2008 the honest idol worshippers said as much. They didn't care what Obama did as president, they just wanted him to become president. Some reasoned, with some degree of a sad logic, that white people had ruined the world, so what would be so bad about a black man doing the same thing.

Others lied. They claimed that if they could just get their guy elected, they would hold his feet to the fire and demand a progressive agenda. Of course, very few of them actually meant what they said. Election night joy was followed by the joy of watching his transition take shape. As he chose one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress to serve as chief of staff and kept the same defense secretary who served under Bush, they were silent and demanded silence from others as well. So much for feet and fires.

The experience of personally witnessing this madness in action was both difficult and illuminating. Scattered boos emanated from the crowd as we heard the new president politely thank his predecessor by name. One black woman admonished her fellow celebrants not to be so rude. I felt compelled to speak up with this stranger and point out that booing was entirely appropriate. The not very bright woman replied that Obama would take care of everything, so there was no need for any of us to say a word or even utter one little boo to protest criminality.

This woman is not alone in her twisted thinking. For the first time in history, black Americans have willingly become accessories to their government's criminal activity and willingly developed amnesia about that history. Gone are the days when black Americans could be counted on to oppose wars of aggression abroad and wars against people here at home. Now that the president looks like them, he has carte blanche to do whatever he likes and he can expect nearly unanimous approval of any action he takes.

They don't care that he is asking John McCain for advice or that he replaces Bush in defending illegal surveillance on Americans. They don't care about people in Waziristan, or Afghanistan or Gaza. They don't care that Obama pledged to use his political capital to change Social Security and Medicare, their only safety nets in an uncaring society.

They don't even care about themselves. During the campaign they pointedly gave him permission to ignore them and their condition, all to help insure electoral victory. Black people happily threw themselves under the Obama bus and loudly proclaimed themselves to be less important than one man's career success.

They do care that a black woman is first lady and that she is now described as a fashion icon. They care that white people gush over her cute children. Some have even convinced themselves that a black president will improve the way they are personally viewed by most white people. The denial is boundless.

The Obama phenomenon will get much worse before it gets any better. If the sight of Barack and Michelle dancing at inaugural balls puts lumps in throats, what will happen when they meet the Queen of England or the Pope? What will happen when he appears on national television to tell us that he has decided to drop bombs somewhere in the world?

As happened with other presidents, his approval ratings will soar along with the body count he creates and for the first time, so will the hearts of black America. Black people will join white people in celebrating the power of the American state and will foolishly see themselves as having an interest in maintaining an awful status quo.

Sadly, this stratospheric level of support can only end if truly terrible events take place. It is difficult to contemplate what could be so bad that black people will awaken themselves from such deep, self-induced slumber.

Our numbers are currently small, but little by little, as the economy crumbles, or the war on terror spreads, new eyes will be opened. It won't matter that we are in the minority because minorities have always been in the forefront of making history.

Individuals must be ready to act as events unfold. The willingness and ability to see the opportune moment cannot be lost. That is the only hope for black people, the nation, and for the world at large. This is not the moment to worry about someone too foolish to boo George Bush.
We must remain true to our convictions not only because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows it is the only thing that brings about true change.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com. More of her work is also available at her Black Agenda Report archive page.

ADHD Drugs Cause Hallucinations in Children; Psychiatry Pushes Hallucinogenic Drugs for Profit

2009-01-29T12:44:00.002-05:00

Mike Adams
Natural News
Tuesday, Jan 27, 2009

New research published in the journal Pediatrics reveals that the ADHD drugs prescribed to millions of children are causing them to experience frightening hallucinations. Children on these drugs hallucinated that snakes and bugs were crawling all over them, says Reuters, and some kids taking the drugs experience other bizarre psychotic side effects such as thinking they ran into a wall and falling to the ground even when no wall was present.

ADHD drugs, of course, are powerful psychotropic mind-altering chemicals that are often molecularly identical to street drugs. The industry of psychiatry is virtually owned by Big Pharma, which hopes to drug every child, teenager and adult with at least one mind-altering medication.

The drugs reviewed in this study include: Ritalin and Focalin XR (Novartis), Adderall XR and Daytrana patch (Shire), Concerta (Johnson & Johnson), Strattera (Eli Lilly), Metadate CD (Celltech Pharmaceuticals) and Provigil (Cephalon).

Researchers noticed that only children taking these drugs suffered from hallucinations. Those taking placebo had no hallucinations, and the children who stopped taking ADHD drugs saw their hallucinations cease.

Reuters reports that “…FDA researchers urged doctors to discuss the potential side effects with parents and children to help ease their anxiety if such symptoms should occur.” So instead of getting their kids off these drugs, the FDA thinks parents and kids just need to “talk about the hallucinations” to ease their anxiety.

And if that’s not enough, I suppose, there are anti-anxiety drugs they can both take in order to avoid getting too uptight about the fact that their children are on hallucinogenic drugs.

Stop the insanity!

I’m just going to come right out and say the obvious: These children are tripping out on hallucinogenic, mind-altering street drugs. This isn’t “treatment” for some genuine health problem; it’s a legalized mass-drugging campaign that’s permanently harming the brains of children while earning sick profits for Big Pharma.

The psychiatric pill pushers have managed to turn a generation of children into druggies who are now demonstrating the same symptoms as a street junkie burnout. And rather than trying to get kids OFF these drugs, the FDA, Big Pharma and modern psychiatrists are doing everything in their power to put MORE kids on these dangerous, hallucinogenic drugs!

That this continues in America today is outrageous. In a nation that spends billions of dollars on the so-called “War on Drugs” — see the Drug War Clock at http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm — to ignore the mass drugging of its own children with hallucinogenic street drugs relabeled as “medication” is unconscionable.

If there’s really a War on Drugs, why doesn’t that war target the biggest drug pushers of all? Big Pharma has put more kids on drugs than any street corner crack dealer could ever hope to achieve. In fact, the entire industry of psychiatric medicine is little more than a legalized drug dealing network that hides behind the jargon of “medicine” and “therapy.”

Mind-numbed parents lead to drugged children

It’s not just the industry that’s to blame on all this, either: Parents who allow their children to be drugged with these hallucinogenic ADHD drugs are just as much a part of the problem. In the same households where parents are adamantly restricting their child’s use of pot or alcohol, they will literally feed that same kid dose after dose of hallucinogenic street drugs on the advice of a psychiatric medicine quack who’s on the take from Big Pharma.

What are they thinking? Say no to drugs, but say yes to hallucinogenic psychotropic drugs if a corrupt psychiatrist tells you your kid needs them?

Somehow, when speed is labeled under Big Pharma’s brand names, it eludes all rational thinking by parents, doctors, pharmacists and drug war zealots. It is one of the largest sectors of the hallucinogenic drug trade in America, and yet it goes completely unnoticed by virtually everyone.

My latest hip-hop song takes a shot at mind-altering medications with some disturbing, uncensored lyrics. Listen to “SSRIs - S.S.R.Lies” here: http://www.naturalnews.com/SSRIs_S_…

The ugly truth about the War on Drugs

The War on Drugs, of course, was never really about ending drug use in the first place. It was about eliminating the competition for Big Pharma, making sure kids get off generic black market drugs and get onto brand-name Big Pharma drugs. To legitimize this mass drugging of children, the industry of modern psychiatry was created, with all its imaginary (hallucinated?) disorders and dysfunctions used to befuddle the public with seemingly intelligent-sounding technical jargon.

It’s all just drug-pushing psychobabble, of course. Disorders like ADHD are purely fictional, having no basis in reality whatsoever, and the brain shrinkage pointed to by psychiatrists who claim ADHD causes stunted growth is actually the result of the amphetamine drugs they put the kids on. It is well documented that drugs like Ritalin cause stunted grown and reduced brain size (http://www.naturalnews.com/021944.html).

The degree of quackery present in the psychiatric industry today is simply staggering. And to think that mainstream doctors defend this quackery is yet more evidence that modern medicine has nothing whatsoever to do with actual science; it’s all based on a Cult of Pharmacology where all drugs are considered good and necessary, regardless of the mountain of evidence showing them to be dangerous and medically useless.

This is where I have to challenge all the so-called “skeptics” out there who attack natural medicine. These skeptics and self-proclaimed quack observers are, in fact, among the greatest quacks of all. Why? Because they aren’t skeptical in the least about psychiatric medicine!

The skeptics are quacks

Where is the skepticism about this home-grown brand of legalized drug pushing? Where are all the intelligent questions demanding proof that ADHD is a genuine disease and not just something made up to sell more drugs? The skeptics are silent when it comes to psychiatric medicine, and in their silence they reveal themselves to be quacks.

Logic, reason and scientific evidence are all thrown out the window on the subject of psychiatric disorders. The most rational-sounding skeptics are instantly transformed into psychobabble-spouting quacks who defend the indefensible — the mass drugging of children with powerful hallucinogenic street drugs as “treatment” for some imaginary disease.

Sure, the skeptics will attack meditation, crystals, prayer, intention, chiropractic care and even herbal medicine (all of which can be healing, by the way), but when it comes to the loopy loose logic of psychiatric medicine inventing diseases and drugging up the children with hallucinogenic amphetamines, they swallow the whole thing without blinking an eye!

So much for the credibility of the so-called skeptics and quack busters. It turns out they’re quacks themselves. They’ve simply subscribed to their own form of quackery: Drugs and surgery for all!

The quacks are on crack, and they’re supporting an industry that hands out speed to the children. Meanwhile, the War on Drugs fills the prisons with people who smoked a little weed while completely ignoring the psychiatric pill pushers. Crazy, huh? I’m beginning to thinking everybody’s on drugs!

Just remember, folks: If you want to sell drugs to kids, just get FDA approval first. It keeps the DEA off your back and fools parents into thinking your hallucinogenic drugs are “medicine.”

Research related articles:

Film Review: GenerationRx Documents Chemical Abuse of Children by Pharmaceutical Industry, Modern Psychiatry
Big Pharma’s New Mass-Drugging Agenda Pushes Statin Drugs for Healthy People
Children as Big Pharma Guinea Pigs: 98 Percent of Drug Trials on Children Have no Safety Checks
Prescription Drugs Kill 300 Percent More Americans than Illegal Drugs
Hormone Replacement Therapy Doubles Risk of Breast Cancer, Women Warned to Stop HRT Drugs
Psych Doctor Nemeroff Barred from Emory University Chairmanship after Revelation of Secret Financial Ties to Big Pharma
Pfizer Implicated in Human Drug Experimentation on Critically Ill Children in Nigeria
Schoolchildren could be given ’smart drugs’ in a bid to boost brainpower
Americans Drug Their Children with 300 Percent More Psychotropic Meds
Psychiatric Medications Should be Prescribed to Healthy People, Declares Medical Journal
Don’t call the kids obese: Parents to get ‘prissy’ letters telling them they’re children are overweight
Parents Warned: Avoid Ritalin

Kiss The Bill of Rights Goodbye

2009-01-28T12:26:00.000-05:00

US Supreme Court says passenger can be frisked

2 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police officers have leeway to frisk a passenger in a car stopped for a traffic violation even if nothing indicates the passenger has committed a crime or is about to do so.

The court on Monday unanimously overruled an Arizona appeals court that threw out evidence found during such an encounter.

The case involved a 2002 pat-down search of an Eloy, Ariz., man by an Oro Valley police officer, who found a gun and marijuana.

The justices accepted Arizona's argument that traffic stops are inherently dangerous for police and that pat-downs are permissible when an officer has a reasonable suspicion that the passenger may be armed and dangerous.

The pat-down is allowed if the police "harbor reasonable suspicion that a person subjected to the frisk is armed, and therefore dangerous to the safety of the police and public," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.

The case is Arizona v. Johnson, 07-1122.

Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury

2009-01-28T12:19:00.001-05:00

Monday, January 26, 2009; 12:00 AM

MONDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.

HFCS has replaced sugar as the sweetener in many beverages and foods such as breads, cereals, breakfast bars, lunch meats, yogurts, soups and condiments. On average, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of HFCS, but teens and other high consumers can take in 80 percent more HFCS than average.

"Mercury is toxic in all its forms. Given how much high-fructose corn syrup is consumed by children, it could be a significant additional source of mercury never before considered. We are calling for immediate changes by industry and the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] to help stop this avoidable mercury contamination of the food supply," said the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's Dr. David Wallinga, a co-author of both studies.

In the first study, researchers found detectable levels of mercury in nine of 20 samples of commercial HFCS. The study was published in current issue of Environmental Health.

In the second study, the agriculture group found that nearly one in three of 55 brand-name foods contained mercury. The chemical was most common in HFCS-containing dairy products, dressings and condiments.

The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda in the production of HFCS is common. The contamination occurs when mercury cells are used to produce caustic soda.

"The bad news is that nobody knows whether or not their soda or snack food contains HFCS made from ingredients like caustic soda contaminated with mercury. The good news is that mercury-free HFCS ingredients exist. Food companies just need a good push to only use those ingredients," Wallinga said.

More information

The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry has more about mercury and health.

SOURCE: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, news release, Jan. 26, 2009

OSCAR GRANT -- and YOU

2009-01-28T12:18:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 1/17/09 (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Like you, I've seen the searing phone-camera tape of the killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant, of Oakland, California.

And although it's truly a terrible thing to see, it's almost exceeded by something just as shocking. That's been how the media has responded to this police killing, by creating a defense of error.

This defense, that the killer cop who murdered Grant somehow mistook his pistol for his Taser, has been offered by both local and national news reporters -- even though they haven't heard word one from Johannes Mehserle, the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cop who wasn't even interviewed for weeks after shooting an unarmed man!

If you've ever wondered about the role of the media, let this be a lesson to you. You can see here that the claim that the corporate media is objective is but a cruel illusion.

Imagine this: if the roles were reversed, that is, if bystanders had footage of Grant shooting Mehserle, would the media be suggesting a defense for him?

Would Grant have been free to roam, to leave the state a week later?

Would he have made bail?

The shooting of Oscar Grant III is but the latest, West Coast version of Amadou Diallo, of Sean Bell, and of hundreds of other Black men -- and like them, don't be surprised if there is an acquittal -- again.

Oscar Grant is you -- and you are him, because you know in the pit of your stomach that it could've been you, and the same thing could've happened.

You know this.

And what's worse is this: you pay for this every time you pay taxes, and you endorse this every time you vote for politicians who sell out in a heartbeat.

You pay for your killers to kill you, in the name of a bogus, twisted law, and then pay for the State that defends him.

Something is terribly wrong here--and it's the system itself.

Until that is changed, nothing is changed, for we'll be out here again (in the streets) -- chanting a different name.

--(C) '09 MAJ

Obama's Time

2009-01-28T12:16:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 1/20/09 (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

With poise and considerable grace, Barack Hussein Obama took the stage of history, and tried to turn a mammoth page in the book of America's national life.

With an air of seriousness and exuding confidence, he glided across the stage, shaking hands, giving hugs, and kissing ladies. He seemed to particularly revel in shaking hands -- and hugging! -- the next to the last number of the exclusive club of 44, former president George W. Bush.

But if Barack Obama was the shining star to Bush's fading star of this political moment, the other star that shone brightest was the People, who filled the streets in ways that seemed unprecedented -- by the millions.

Faces beamed warmth and excitement, seemingly ignoring the frigid temperatures.

There was, as there ever is in political gatherings, pomp and circumstance, but popular good nature seemed to radiate from the people,who stood in the cold for hours to witness a history that few thought they would live to see: the installation of a man of discernible African heritage taking the helm of the ship of state.

If the nation beamed with excitement, the world drew an almost collective breath of relief at the sight not only of Obama's inauguration, but the leaving of a man seen as the quintessential 'ugly American.' While things will probably not change as drastically as some hope, and others fear, the transition from an administration seen as blusterers, saber-tattlers, and fear-mongers to one at least capable of projecting competence and intelligence seems like a sea-change.

To paraphrase Shakespeare's play "Macbeth", of Bush's departure from office, 'Nothing so became him as leaving it.'

Has this change been more symbolic that substantive?

This we shall surely see.

--(c) '09 maj

EARTHA KITT -- (1928-2008)

2009-01-23T16:45:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 12/25/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

For generations, the name, Eartha Kitt, was synonymous with sexy, sultry, and outspoken.

In an industry where careers can sometimes be measured in minutes, Eartha Kitt was the real thing, for quite a while; dancer, singer, actress, and on occasion, a comedian.

Since the tender age of 14, she worked the stage, and for nearly 7 decades, she left her indelible imprint by her work on the big screen, TV, and on recordings.

On Jan. 26, 1928 she was born in South Carolina as Eartha Mae Kitt.

She danced, sang, and acted her way into the hearts of millions.

In 1968, she dared speak out against the Vietnam War, when the war was raging at it's hottest, and was both blacklisted and hounded for doing so. That's because she spoke at a photo op at the White House in the face of First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson (wife of Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson). For daring to speak her mind at the heart of the empire, and for denouncing an Imperial war, the media and the state tried to 'disappear' her. She had to go abroad to find her freedom of speech, where she remained for nearly a decade.

For those who want to see her as a seductive chanteuse, the 1958 film, St. Louis Blues, starring Nat King Cole, Ruby Dee, Pearl Bailey and the gospel great, Mahalia Jackson, is a great source. For a slightly comic turn, see her as an amorous entrepreneurial cougar on the hunt for a young Eddie Murphy in the 1992 film Boomerang starring Halle Berry as the principal love interest.

Although she was known as the quintessential sex kitten for her acting, her public outspokenness came at quite a cost. Her comings, goings, doings and sayings were tracked by both the FBI and the CIA.

She moved through life with an intelligence, wit and nerve that made her distinctive and unforgettable.

Eartha Mae Kitt was 80.

--(c) '08 maj

[Source:African Arts and Letters, eds, Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (Phila., PA: Running Press, 2004.]

'Imperial Power & Counter-Power': (M.A. Jamal's Remarks to the Rose Luxemburg Conference in Germany / Jan. '09

2009-01-23T16:34:00.000-05:00

[sp. writ. 12/30/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal]

If one is to address the reactions to the recent election of Illinois Senator Barack Obama to the U.S. Presidency, this can perhaps be best encapsulated by the term, exultation.

For if ever a political figure rode the currents of a stellar alignment, Barack Obama did so.

The exultation was both national and global.

In my 1/2 century of life, I can recall no presidential election that elicited so profound a political -- indeed visceral! -- response.

When one considers what role the left had in such a spectacular political event, again we must look to alignments; not of stars, but of constituencies, which converged to not only elect Obama, but to also close the door to the ruinous politics of the U.S. right wing, represented by the incumbent President, George W. Bush, and his presumed political heirs, Arizona Sen. John McCain, and Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin of the Republican Party.

While the U.S. left was a constituent part of the larger constituency, it neither drove nor directed the forces that elected Obama. In many ways it was hostage to those forces.

Those forces were youth -- those between 18-28, who mobilized in ways never seen before; it was also African Americans who voted in unprecedented numbers for one they perceived as one of their own; add to this millions of women, some of whom felt, frankly, disrespected by the choice of Palin, who, though a woman, betrayed an astonishing lack of knowledge and expertise on issues, especially given the very real possibility that her running mate, sen. McCain, might not survive the rigors of office.

But one cannot ignore the significant segment of those who felt betrayed or disaffected by the hard-right tilt of the Republican Party -- which ran almost exclusively on the notion that Obama was a "socialist", who in Palin's oft-repeated quote, "pals around with terrorists."

For those beyond our shores, it may be necessary to briefly decode this language. The "socialist" tag was a kind of cleaned - up, classy version of 'communist', the ultimate slur in U.S. capitalist politics, only exceeded by the post 9/11 term "terrorist" (and by calling Obama a "pal" of terrorists, it was tantamount to calling him one).

The last reference was to the alleged friendship between Obama and William Ayers, a Hyde Park educator who, in the 1960's, was a leading member of the Weather Underground, student anti-war and anti imperialist activists, who engaged in acts against property, and who supported the Black liberation movements of the era.

In point of fact, Obama was, by no measure, a leftist.

In the Spring of 2008 issue of The Black Scholar, African-American studies professor, Charles P. Henry makes the point explicitly, citing both Obama's own words, as well as a political biography of him in the New York Times Magazine. (1)

Obama's quoted remarks are instructive:
The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam,
which means that either you're a 'Scoop' Jackson Democrat or you're suspicious of any military action. And that's just not my framework .(2)

Obama's choices were illustrative of two poles of the Democratic Party: Sen. Henry 'Scoop' Jackson was so pro-war that he was called the "Senator from Boeing". (3) ; Hayden by contrast, was a student anti-war activist, and member of S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society). (Interestingly, Obama never referred to himself as a Jesse Jackson Democrat either).

This leads us to the next query on the role of the U.S. anti-war movement; in a word, it is moribund.

This, paradoxically, can be traced to the massive demonstrations of Spring 2003 in protest of the imminent Iraq War. For millions of people, this was their first, and last experience of mass action. Sadly, the lesson they learned was of their impotence, not their power, for Bush promptly ignored the protests, rattled the sabers of war, and launched Operation Shock and Awe.

For many people, unused to popular protests, this short-term failure to stop the war blinded them to the rarity that such mass protests represented: never had the nation seen such mass protests before the war was begun. At this stage, the people were a Counter-Power, but they stopped far too soon.

To further analyze the question of whether the election of Obama represents a leftist surge, or if the anti-war movement is in its ascendancy we need only recall that Obama is neither a leftist nor is he anti-war. The early stages of his electoral campaign were explicitly against the Iraq War. As he ran in the later stages, his sound bites announced a troop withdrawal in Iraq was necessary to buttress U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Indeed, given the events occurring as these words are written, there will probably be more U.S. anti-war protests against the Israeli blitzkrieg on Gaza in the next 2 weeks, than there was against the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan in the last two years.

That, I think, succinctly states the case of where we are.

But where we are need not determine where we can go. For people move by inches and by leaps. This was, undoubtedly, a giant step in U.S. history. This was not a day ever envisioned by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln or even John F. Kennedy.

Yet, one of Black America's most revered historians, Vincent Harding, (author of the classic, There is a River), spoke for far more than himself when he said, "So my hopes are very much focused on him, but not on him alone. I see the energy that's been built up over these two years of campaigns, and I see the possibility that we could gather ourselves together and begin to ask, in a very powerful way, not what should Barack Obama be doing next, but where do we go from here? What is our role as committed, progressive citizens to move to the next stages?"

Harding, a close confidante of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ended his comments on the Obama election with this fitting suggestion: "Maybe a democracy needs community organizers more than it needs commanders."(4)

Maybe so.

It appears Dr. Harding is suggesting that instead of empire, we need a republic, for if history teaches us anything, it is that the two realities are un- reconcilable. In the days of ancient Rome, the advent of empire spelled the end of the republic.

In 193 C. E., an African seized the throne of Rome. Emperor Septimius Severus extended Rome's power, and strengthened its empire. His sons succeeded him, and exceeded him in cruelty and brutality.

They didn't bring change -- they brought continuity.

Will this empire be any different?

Danke! Aus die Todeszelle,
Hier Sprecht Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Endnotes

1. Traub, James, "Is His Biography Our Destiny?", New York Times Magazine, November 4, 2007, pp.50-55.

2.Hayden, Tom, "An Appeal to Barack Obama", post to ariannahuff@aol.com, November 8, 2007; cited in Henry, Charles P., O"Obama '08 -- Articulate and Clean,"The Black Scholar, (Spr. '08) [vol. 38:no.1}, p.6, fn.17.

3.Johnson, Chalmers, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p.211. Boeing received some $20 billion in defense contracts in 2006.

4. Wane, Aly (compiled by), "Historical Moment: Black Thinkers Reflect on the Election of Barack Obama", Syracuse Peace Council's Peace newsletter (Jan. '09: #780), p.7.

36 HOURS: Death in a Cell

2009-01-23T16:30:00.000-05:00

[col. writ.1/12/09] ('09) Mumia Abu-Jamal

The strangulation death of 19 year old Ronnie L. White in a jail cell in Upper Marlboro, Prince George's County, Maryland, after 36 hours confinement has confronted Ron Harris, the teenager's father.

A month ago Harris told reporters, "it's been six months, and still nobody can tell me who killed my son or what happened leading up to his death." Harris added, "I want to know why there is still so much secrecy in this case and why, after all this time, I still don't have answers."

And despite the empanelment of a county grand jury looking into the case, Harris still has no answers, for the grand jury disbanded without bringing any indictments.

Community groups, from the People's Coalition for Police Accountability, Cas de Maryland, and the Princes George's County of the NAACP have protested the death of Ronnie l. White, and braved the bitter December winds to gather together to demand a true, fair and impartial investigation into his death, and the prosecutions of all involved.

That's because White died 36 hours after his arrest in connection with the death of a Prince George's county cop, who was hit by a car allegedly driven by White.

White's father is left with little more than questions after the events of June 2008. Ron Harris says, "My son died in solidarity confinement in a jail. They knew who was working in the unit and where he was that day. The doors were locked, and only a few people had keys. Yet, after all this time, they say they don't have enough evidence to know who did it? Why not?"

Community groups smell a cover up.

For more info: P.# 301-779--7432 or email : fightpolicebrutalit yinpg@gmail. com

maj

The Forgotten Martin Luther King

2009-01-23T16:26:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 1/15/09] '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is once again being resurrected this time of year, in part because his birthday is approaching, but also, of course, because of the imminent swearing-in of President-elect Barack H. Obama -- the first Black man in U.S. history to be so honored.

As often is the case, the Rev. King who is being projected today bears little relationship to the real, live, breathing and growing man behind the name.

Like many men, he had his highs and his lows, his fears and his doubts, his inspirations and his insights. His Washington speech (known as "I Have a Dream") was neither his finest, nor his most profound, but like many Black preachers who are master orators, he brought his best to it.

King, like many busy leaders, had others write some of his speeches, and one of those men was Vincent Harding, now a theologian and historian. Harding contributed to Kings' groundbreaking N.Y. Riverside Church speech, delivered precisely a year before his assassination (where he denounced the Vietnam War), marking his break with an American president (L. B. Johnson), the corporate media, and many of his closest allies in the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference.)

President Johnson felt betrayed by King, and the media turned from praise to ridicule. In his book, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (N. Y.:Orbis, 1996), Harding quotes from the Washington Post editorial page which slammed King, who "had diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people" because of his speech against the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese called, 'the American War')

But betrayals didn't stop him, nor did nasty editorials deter him. Indeed, the violence of war radicalized him deeply, so much so that he said later, "the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism" (Harding, 101).

Think of that: capitalism, militarism, and racism -- as evils.

When's the last time you've heard that?

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being radicalized by the churning events around him -- and, a year before his death, he was both anti-war and anti-capitalist.

Ask yourself, if King were alive today, with his views, could he be elected president?

If not, why not?

What does that say about the nation's political system?

--(c) '09 maj

Huey: A Memory (1942-1989)

2009-01-23T16:25:00.001-05:00

[piece writ/4POCC 1/15/09], (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Huey P. Newton's name, and more importantly, his history of resistance and struggle, is little more than a mystery for many younger people in their 20's.

The name and works of a third rate rapper is more familiar to the average Black youth, and that's hardly surprising given the failure of the public school system.

For the public school system is invested in ignorance, and Huey P. Newton was a rebel -- and more, a Black Revolutionary.

Inspired by the civil rights movement and the violent attacks on Blacks trying to vote, Huey felt a bolder, more radical stance was needed.

At the age of 24, he co-founded the Black Panther Party, and the group expanded by leaps and bounds. Begun in Oct. 1966, in 3 years it had grown to over 40 chapters and branches across the country, with an international section in Algiers, North Africa.

Dedicated to the principles of Black self-defense and Black freedom, the Party became the foremost radical group of the era, with a wealth of supporters and enemies.

Chief among enemies was the US government, which, in the words of the FBI's head, J. Edgar Hoover, considered it "the greatest threat to national security."

For many thousands of Black youth, the rebelliousness of the Party spoke to their spirits more truly than did the peaceful resistance represented by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Huey was not a pacifist, and neither were millions of Black people.

But Huey, for all his brilliance, flair and resolve, was only human, and as the saying goes, 'to err is human.' Under attack from without and within, the party made missteps that contributed to it demise by the early 1980's.

But it is the best of Huey P. Newton that survives -- the bold soldier, the Minister of Defense, the thinker and writer -- who gave his best to the Black Freedom movement; who inspired millions of others to stand.

--(c) '09 maj

Jewish Racism/Terrorism

2009-01-15T16:42:00.002-05:00

After viewing this video clip, WOW! I really don't know what to say. Hamas is labled as terrorist and it's okay for Israel to violate international law by bombing schools and hospitals, civillians, men, women and children. Hamas don't have the weaponry that the Jews have. So they're already at a disadvantage, but they're the terrorists. What's happening in Gaza is a crime against humanity being perpetrated by zionist terrorists in the name of fighting terror. America is pumping money and weapons into Israel and in the meantime, Gaza is suffering a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. No food, no medicine and far less inferior weaponry. Despite all the brainwashed garbage spewing forth from the people's mouths in the video, I know who the real terrorists are. My heart and prayers go out to the people of Gaza. Don't expect a President Obama to change anything. He will continue the polices and practices that were set up over many years and made worse under the outgoing Bush idiocracy (administration).

Here's An Interesting Quote To Ponder Over

2009-01-15T16:29:00.001-05:00

"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves."

— Menachem Begin - Israeli Prime Minister 1977–1983

What More Can I Say???

2009-01-15T13:47:00.002-05:00

We live in world full of sick and satanic people. The worst of this element can be found in the elite class. Yes, I'm talking about the establishment, which is composed of politicians, businessmen, clergy, academics (teachers, professors), medical professionals and television/radio personalities and military personnel.

The same filth and festering evil that is found in the bottom of the barrel can also be found at the top. It's the dross and dregs of civilization; satanic people who wish to bring in a new world order.

Looking at them on the television as they discuss the new world order you can see the glee and hear the excitement in their voices. It's those very same people who foam at the mouth while rubbing their crotches while staring at scared little children. The same sick perverts who masturbate to snuff films of children.

Begging and pleading only arouses them more. Torture puts them in a state of ecstacy; turned on by the cries of their victims.

Predatory devils who say that 80% of the world population must be wiped out for the good of humanity. Their avaricious greed; their lusts for power and control feeds their drive. Devils, who ejaculate to maggots crawling all over a blood saturated skull, thus calling that art. How sick these demons are.

From the wilderness of North America, this is Aquil Aziz signing off.

A New Year's Execution

2009-01-15T11:08:00.002-05:00

The murder of Oscar Grant, Jr. by BART police in Oakland is nothing more than a cold-blooded execution. This pig committed a capital offense as far as I'm concerned. My heart goes out to Oscar Grant's family, who had to watch someone they love and care about be executed face down on the ground by police seething in evil.

The result of this Nazi style killing is a family left in mourning and a four year-old baby girl fatherless. Most of us have seen the video clips and it's obviously clear that this ravenous and racist devil cop Johannes Mehserle clearly drew his weapon and fired one round into the back of a prone Oscar Grant, Jr.

Only the police can viciously gun down a person in front of a crowd of witnesses and on camera and walk away scot-free. If an ordinary citizen like myself or Joe Blow had done such a thing, we would have been arrested, tried, and convicted. We would be spending 25 to life in prison or sitting on death row. A cop does it and is put on paid administrative leave. They don't have to answer any questions and the police union attorneys are on standby to protect one of their own. But who protects us from them?

If any ordinary citizen had shot a cop, they would be lucky if they're taken into custody in one piece and alive. The accused would be facing capital murder charges.

Police can shoot people anytime, anyplace, anywhere and not only walk away from the hands of justice; but they still may have their jobs and pension. I don't believe that the system will punish Johannes Mehserle for this cold-blooded murder of Oscar Grant, Jr. Afterall, he's a Black man and the lives of Black folks has no value anyway.

Just looking at how the case is being handled we can tell that the district attorney don't really want to bother pursuing charges against officer murderer. When a cop kills in cold-blood it's all about intent and what was the cop's state of mind. But if Joe Blow kills a cop, intent is thrown out the window all together.

No the question that remains is what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do to protect ourselves and loved ones from state sanctioned murderers who hide behind the shield? We're not getting justice no matter how you look at it. Officer Murderer will walk away free once again.

How many more Rodney Kings, Amadou Diallos, Sean Bells or Oscar Grants will it take? Will it take us killing the police? Is that what the police want? If police kill a person in front of a crowd of people, then the officer(s) should be leaving the scene in a body bag too.

Since the police always manage to escape justice, the day is very near when people begin taking matters into their own hands. Black people, we are all Oscar Grants and Rodney Kings and Sean Bells. The only solution to police terrorism is to retaliate.

Lets be real, President Obama is going to do nothing about this. As I sit and watch white liberals pat themselves on the back because a Black president has been elected, that has not changed the racist climate of America and we can see the racism and anti-Black sentiments from Benton Harbor, Michigan to Jena, Louisiana.

The only tool of leverage that we have left is retaliation. If we sit by and do nothing, then our children will have no future, because they'll be fair-game for police. To be shotdown and murdered in the name of the law. It is obviously clear who the real terrorists are and who's the biggest gang in America. They have a vast network weapons and resources. They abuse their power and authority. They can plant evidence on you and frame you up for crimes. They can maliciously beat and shoot people in front of witnesses and on camera. They can lie and intimidate witnesses and suborn perjury. They can beat and torture suspects for "confessions" to crimes. They can plant informants of have informants lie to justify SWAT teaming peoples homes. This is the true nature of the police. To protect and serve who?

Welcome to the rule of tyranny.

Welcome to the reality of police terrorism.

From the wilderness of North America, this is Aquil Aziz signing off.

Oakland's Not For Burning?

2009-01-15T08:55:00.002-05:00

By George Ciccariello-Mayer
January 9, 2009

Oakland.

In 1968, Amory Bradford penned a volume entitled Oakland's Not For Burning, documenting the tinderbox that the city had become, and the lamenting the inevitability with which it would explode. But the assertion contained in the book's title was hardly credible, coming as it was from a Yale-educated former Wall Street lawyer and New York Times general manager whose only business in Oakland came via the U.S. Commerce Department. Some forty years later, in the early hours of this year of ostensible hope, the reality of the persistence of racism in Oakland became devastatingly clear, sparking a powerful response the likes of which this city hasn't seen in years. But luckily, the condescending voices of moderation, like that of Bradford a generation prior, seem have little traction with those who have seen enough police murder.

A New Year's Execution

After responding to reports of "a fight" on a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train, BART police detained the train at the Fruitvale station, forcibly removing several young men from the train as dozens of bystanders watched. Several of the men, all young and mostly black, were lined up, seated, along the platform. Some were cuffed, Oscar Grant was not. As he was attempting to defuse the situation, BART police decided to detain him, placing him face-down on the platform, with one officer kneeling near his neck, and another straddling his legs. For some still unexplained reason, one officer, now identified as Johannes Mehserle stood up, pulled his gun, and fired a shot directly into Oscar Grant's back.

The bullet went through Grant's back, ricocheting off the platform and puncturing his lung.

There are gasps from the bystanders and shock on the face of the other officers, who clearly didn't expect the shot to be fired. Grant, who was begging not to be Tasered at the time of the shot, clearly didn't expect it either. But this surprise notwithstanding, the decision was then made to cuff the young man as he lay dying. As an added precaution, BART police then sought immediately to confiscate all videophones held by the train passengers, in an effort to cover up the murder. Luckily for everyone but the BART P.D. and Mehserle, several videos managed to make it into the public domain, where they went viral and were viewed on Youtube hundreds of thousands of times in the following days. In a rare show of journalistic integrity, local Fox affiliate KTVU aired one of the videos in its entirety.

The standard protocol---deny, distort, cover-up---had clearly been disrupted, and BART spokesman Linton Johnson even went so far as to criticize the leaking of the video, arguing that rather than clarifying events, public access to the video would "taint" the investigation. BART was on a back foot, and popular anger was on the offensive.

A Corporate Police Force

BART Police are a notoriously problematic organization, existing in a gray area between public and private, funded by taxpayers but operating under a corporate structure which lacks all accountability and oversight. According to the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

The structure of the BART police force is a recipe for disaster. BART's general manager (who is not an elected official and has no expertise in law enforcement) hires the BART police chief... There is no police commission, no police review board, not even a committee of the elected BART board designated to handle complaints against and issues with the BART police... There is, in other words, no civilian oversight.

And this "disaster" has been more than merely hypothetical: in 1992, a BART cop shot unarmed Jerrold Hall in the back of the head with a shotgun as he walked away, after firing a warning shot. In 2001, BART police shot a mentally ill man who was unarmed and naked. And according to Tim Redmond, writing in the same paper, "BART made a monumental effort to cover [the Hall slaying] up," and in the end, "Nothing happened... BART called the shooting justified." As of yesterday, BART hadn't yet interviewed the officer, Johannes Mehserle, who insisted on invoking Fifth Amendment rights not to speak. And just when they claim to have compelled him to do so, he abruptly resigned, thereby ending any internal affairs investigation that may have taken place. There still remains, according to BART, a criminal investigation, but if the past is any indicator, this won't get far.

But let's not fool ourselves. Even publicly-run organizations like the Oakland Police Department, which has all the ties in the world to elected power, operates with an informal shoot-to-kill policy for black teenagers. This was as clear in the 2007 murder of Gary King as it is with Oscar Grant today. And since the district attorney responsible for bringing charges against the police works closely with these same police on a daily basis and in a shared enterprise of delivering convictions, we should not be surprised that not a single police murder in recent years has even seen disciplinary action. "No one we talked with," writes the Chronicle, "from the district attorney's office to lawyers who work either side of police shootings - could remember a case in the last 20 years in which an on-duty officer had been charged in a fatal shooting in Alameda County."

Does It Matter What Really Happened?

We have all seen the video, and rumors are swirling about how to interpret its contents. The officer clearly fires a fatal shot into Oscar Grant's back while the latter is face-down on the floor. A flurry of "experts" have intervened to give their analysis. While such expert testimony usually functions to justify the police, even among these experts some are shocked and disgusted by what they see. One expert, after concluding that the gun had accidentally gone off, watched video from another angle, after which he changed his conclusion: "Looking at it, I hate to say this, it looks like an execution to me."

Others are insisting that Mehserle meant to pull out his (less fatal) Taser, but this theory has since been discredited. Firstly, a Sig-Sauer handgun weighs three times what a Taser weighs, and the shape is completely distinct, and another expert noticed in the tape that the officer had previously withdrawn his Taser, located for safety reasons on the other side of his belt. In other words, he knew he was going for the gun. Hence the claim of accidental discharge, but this too raises a serious question of plausibility: when Mehserle drew his gun, Grant couldn't see it, and so there could be no claim that it was meant to threaten the victim into passivity. In the end, if Mehserle is ever forced to give a statement, he will likely turn to the tried-and-true excuse that he "suspected" Grant had a gun in his pants.

But none of this matters, all the debate of the officer's "intention" only serves to reinforce the fact that, while white cops are allowed to have intention, this is a quantity denied to their victims. This fact of racist double-standards is not lost on those who, realizing that there will be no "justice" in this case, have taken to the streets to demonstrate their rage at the unprovoked execution.

"I'm Feeling Pretty Violent Right About Now"

While friends and family were gathered for Grant's funeral, a number of organizations called a demonstration where he was killed, at Fruitvale BART station. Circulating by internet and Facebook, the call reached many thousands, and in the end some 500-600 protestors and mourners came together to make speeches and lament this murder. At a makeshift memorial behind the BART station, candles are burning, and hand-written messages appear: "Oscar, we watched you grow up from a lil' boy down the street into a man," and "O., RIP, peaceful journey, God only pick da best."

As an indication of the contrasting sentiments that divided the crowd, where someone had scribbled "Fuck the police," another had covered the expletive with another message: "Forgive." But forgiveness wasn't on the minds of many. Several of the more radical protestors climbed onto the BART turnstiles, displaying a red, black, and green flag. One shouted:

I've got the mentality of my parents who were Black Panthers, I'm tired of talking, I'm thinking like L.A. in 1992. Y'all can have your megaphone speeches, I been through that, I'm black, I don't need more speeches. Let's take a stand today, because tomorrow ain't promised!

While some on the mic attempted to soothe the crowd, insisting that burning up the city was "too easy" and "useless," the message didn't seem to resonate much with the crowd. And why should it? We were standing in the middle of "Fruitvale Village," a corporate paradise in the middle of a historically Latino district, which clearly doesn't belong to the local residents. It was clear where the momentum was going, as the biggest cheers went up for the more radical voices who seized the mic: "I'm feelin pretty violent right now," one insisted, "I'm on some Malcolm X shit: by any means necessary. If I don't see some action, I'ma cause a ruckus myself."

Oakland Burning

While some remained to hear additional speakers, including hyphy hip-hopper Mistah FAB and the recently-founded Coalition Against Police Executions (CAPE), several hundred set out on a militant and rapidly-moving march north on International Boulevard. The police response was initially hands-off, despite the tenor of the chants: "No Justice, No Peace: Fuck the Police," and "La Migra, La Policia: La Misma Porqueria." If those in the passing cars and stuck in traffic were of any indication, the local population knew exactly what was going on, why we were protesting, and were largely sympathetic.

As the march wound around Lake Merritt, it turned sharply to the left, a shortcut to BART headquarters. This seems to have thrown off the police, who were clearly unprepared for what came next. A single police car, parked sideways at 8th and Madison to prevent access to the BART headquarters, became the target of the crowd's increasing fury. Sensing the tone of the crowd, a cop reached in and grabbed her helmet before scurrying away. Within moments, the police car was destroyed and nearly flipped over, and a nearby dumpster was burning.

A few seconds later, the air was thick with teargas. Evidently, seeing their own property destroyed was too much for the police to stomach. (Note: there is no truth to the CNN report that tear gas was deployed to protect a surrounded officer). I get a noseful of teargas, and a protestor near me is shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet, and needs to be helped off, as the crowd quickly sprints north toward downtown. Passing through Chinatown, dumpsters full of fresh produce are emptied into the street to slow the march of a line of riot police. When the crowd reaches Broadway, there is momentary confusion, with some continuing straight to Old Oakland, some pushing left toward Jack London Square, and others urging a move rightward toward the city center.

The police took advantage of this momentary indecision, with a full line charge that send many of the furious demonstrators sprinting and left many arrested. When the crowd regrouped, it was promptly encircled at 14th and Broadway, and a standoff ensued. Either by design or by a predictable quirk of the police organization, nearly every riot cop in the street was white, some sneering defiantly. And if the crowd of demonstrators was largely multiethnic, it was clear by this point that the functional vanguard was composed largely of the young, black teenagers most acutely aware of their relationship to the police. There were chants of "We are all Oscar Grant!" and several protestors lay in the middle of the street with their hands behind their backs, mimicking the position in which Grant was executed.

Some small fires were set, and the police moved in again, pushing the crowd down 14th toward Lake Merritt. The spearhead of the demonstrators rushed forward to shouts of "We the police today!" smashing and torching vehicles, and while this was done out of anger it was far from irrational, as the press will certainly present it. Rather, it was the result of a very clear line of reasoning that goes something like this: we have to do something, and in the face of police impunity, this is all we can do. Nothing would be more irrational than a blind faith that the police will do the right thing, given all the historical evidence to the contrary. While the press is doing its best to find bystanders to decry the "vandalism" involved, it couldn't ignore the testimony Oakland Post reporter Ken Epstein, who was writing an article on the killing when he looked out his office window to see his Honda CRV in flames: "I'm sorry my car was burned," Epstein admitted, "but the issue is very upsetting."

The crisp wintry air swirled and the lights twinkled along the surface of Lake Merritt as demonstrators demolished a local McDonalds, at which point a line had clearly been crossed: a police armored personnel carrier came tearing down the street at 45 miles per hour, firing rubber bullets and sending the crowd scattering. The scene was surreal, with padded riot cops leaping off the vehicle in an effort to win an impossible footrace with younger and fitter demonstrators.

Dellums Steps In, Steps Out

From the early moments of the demonstration, the position of the mayor, Ron Dellums, was at issue. Here was a mayor with a great deal of popular respect, with longstanding civil rights credentials, but who had done little to slow the pace of police killing, among the other ongoing ills plaguing postindustrial Oakland. With tear gas swirling and the APCs circling, the mayor decided to make his appearance at around 9pm, walking the few blocks from City Hall down to 14th and Jackson to address the angry crowd himself. Several times he attempted to scurry away under hard questions that he could not answer, with the standard responses: we should all take it down a notch; there will be an investigation.

I don't remember what it was exactly that I yelled at the mayor, but it certainly got to him. As he was leaving the crowd, he turned and walked directly up to me, putting his face a mere inches from my own.

Dellums: What I want people to do now is calm down. I've told the police to stand down, and I hope you all can do the same. Both sides need to be peaceful right now so we can find out exactly what happened.

Me: But we know what happened! We've all seen the video: A cop pulled his gun and shot an unarmed black man in the back. And you know there are reasons that certain people have guns pulled on them and others don't.

Dellums: There are two processes currently underway...

Me: The process is if I shoot someone, I'm arrested. But if a cop shoots someone, he gets put on paid administrative leave until everyone forgets about it.

Dellums: I'm asking both sides to be peaceful...

Me: Both sides? I haven't killed anybody, this crowd hasn't killed anybody. The police have killed somebody, and you're in charge of the police! Who runs this city? When will the prisoners be released?

Dellums: Soon...

Dellums then returned to City Hall, surveying the damage. But as he entered, the angry crowd booed thunderously. And despite his claim that the police had been ordered to stand down, clashes broke out immediately on the same block, more fires broke out, and more teargas was deployed. The mayor's intervention could do little to calm Oakland's frazzled nerves. His claim that the people have lost faith in the police rings empty for people who never had such faith in the first place, people who have seen vicious police murder after police murder without so much as an indictment.

The demonstrators continued to express their pent-up rage, engaging in running battles until nearly 11pm, when a mass arrest seems to have quelled the resistance for the moment. All in all, official numbers show 105 arrests (including 21 juveniles), more than 80 of which occurred after Dellums claims to have told OPD to stand down. Who knows if his promise of a speedy release means anything at all. Support and solidarity demonstrations are scheduled this week for the prisoners' arraignments, and with another mass mobilization scheduled for next Wednesday, this is far from over.

Intention as Privilege

As I have said, and at the risk of controversy I will repeat: it doesn't matter if Mehserle meant to pull the trigger. He had already assumed the role of sole arbiter over the life or death of Oscar Grant. He had already decided that Grant, by virtue of his skin color and appearance, was worth less than other citizens. And rather than acquitting the officer, all of the psychological analyses and possible explanations of the shooting that have been trotted-out in the press, and all the discussion of the irrelevant elements of Grant's criminal history, have only proven this fundamental point.

If a young black or Latino male pulls a gun and someone winds up dead, intention is never the issue, and first-degree murder charges are on the agenda, as well as likely murder charges for anyone of the wrong color standing nearby. If we reverse the current situation, and the gun is in Oscar Grant's hand, then racist voices would be squealing for the death penalty regardless of intention. And yet when it's a cop pulling the trigger, all the media and public opinion resources are deployed to justify, understand, and empathize with this unconscionable act. One side is automatically condemned; the other automatically excused.

For now, the fires are out. But despite the soothing words of Barack Obama and Ron Dellums, there is no lack of fuel and no lack of spark in Oakland.

George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at UC Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, and can be reached at gjcm@berkeley.edu.

Balls Of Steel - Annoying Devil

2009-01-08T16:29:00.000-05:00

Balls Of Steel: The Annoying Devil - Watch more Free Videos

Balls Of Steel - Militant Black Guy

2009-01-08T16:28:00.001-05:00

Balls Of Steel Militant Black Guy - Watch more Free Videos

Angel Of Death - Jedi Mind Tricks Feat. Immortal Technique

2009-01-08T09:09:00.002-05:00

I can't stop rockin' this joint. It's straight fire.

United States of Terror Documentary

2009-01-07T16:22:00.001-05:00

American Drug War Documentary

2009-01-07T16:20:00.001-05:00

The Cure For Police Terrorism

2009-01-07T09:52:00.002-05:00

When the terrorist cops in New York were found not guilty of all charges in the murder of Sean Bell and the attempted murder of two of his friends on his wedding day, that event set the precedent of open season on all Black people throughout America, with black men being the main targets in particular.

And now we fast-forward to January 2009 only to see a BART pig in California draw his weapon and discharge one round into the back of a subdued Black man, who already had two police officers on top of him.

This was done in front of several witnesses at a train station. All of a sudden, there must be an investigation of the circumstances that lead to the shooting. WTF??? Okay, let the investigation take place while the officer is in custody with charges pending. If anyone else had done the exact same thing that this murderous officer had done, that person would be charged and held without bail.

Pigs can commit crimes in front of a crowd of people, the media, a television audience and still get a verdict of not guilty; if they're even charged at all. The state has given the cops a greenlight to kill us and our children. What will it take? What are we going to do about it? March!

So what, the state don't give a damn, when Rev. Al Sharpton and those of his ilk march in the street chanting the same old mantra of "No Justice, No Peace!"

It's obviously clear that we will not be getting any justice. My question is when will the "No Peace" part of the action will be taking place? The police are killing us, so what are we going to do?

I've said this many times before: If we don't take radical acts of self-defense, then the pigs will be shooting our five to ten year old children. Before we know it, police will run up on our babies lying snug in their strollers discharging 60 rounds. Then the justification will be, while he was bundled up in his blanket, the infant pointed what appeared to be a firearm at police and the officers had to make a split second decision. Because of the courageous action of the officers, lives were saved.

Not only would the officers escape prosecution, they would be decorated with awards for valor and promoted.

This is reality. This is America!

Police departments hire people with criminal records and give them guns. I find it hypocritical that under the law a convicted felon cannot own or posess a gun, but if he or she goes the route of law enforcement then they can have own/posess one. Then they have the power to arrest people and do whatever the hell they want to do to.

And the cops with criminal records aren't arrests and convictions for petty crimes. Police departments are hiring people with records for assault, assault with a deadly weapon, even attempted murder. Don't take my word for it, go and look it up.

So in closing, I leave you with some food for thought from both the Bible and Holy Qur'an:

O you who believe, retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain: the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the female for the female. . .And there is life for you in retaliation, O men of understanding, that you may guard yourselves. Holy Qur'an 2:178-179

And fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you but be not aggressive. Surely Allah loves not the aggressors.

And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from where they drove you out, and persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it; so if they fight you (in it), slay them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.

But if they desist, then surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

And fight them until there in no persecution, and religion is only for Allah. But if they desist, then there should be no hostility except against the oppressors.

The sacred month for the sacred month, and retaliation (is allowed) in sacred things. Whoever then acts aggressively against you, inflict injury on him according to the injury he has inflicted on you and keep your duty to Allah, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty. Holy Qur'an 2:190-194

And be not weak-hearted in pursuit of the enemy. If you suffer they (too) suffer as you suffer, and you hope from Allah what they hope not. And Allah is ever Knowing, Wise. Holy Qur'an 4:104

And We prescribed to them in it that life is for life, and eye for eye, and nose for nose, and ear for ear, and tooth for tooth, and for wounds retaliation. But whoso forgoes it, it shall be an expiation for him. And whoever judges not by what Allah has revealed, those are the wrongdoers. Holy Qur'an 5:45

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
Exodus 21:24-25

And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbor; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him;
Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.
Leviticus 24:19-20

And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
Deuteronomy 19:21

We are justified in defending ourselves against our oppressors, and it don't matter if they're police. We have a God-given right to protect, preserve and defend our lives and the lives of our children. The police will not stop killing us until we start killing a whole lot of them. For everyone of us that dies at the hands of cold-blooded murderous cops, five of them should die. Playtime is over. Either we rise up and fight back or die like a bunch of bitch ass wimpering cowards.

Black people better recognize that President Barack Obama is not going to do shit for us. This is not going to stop because he's the president. In fact, more and more Black people will be killed by the police and the Chosen One, Lord Obama will simply look the other way.

From the wilderness of North America, this is Aquil Aziz
Aquil.Aziz@gmail.com

Video Clip Of Police Terrorism In California

2009-01-07T09:30:00.003-05:00

Last night I posted the link to this from a California news web site. I got the video clip of the actual shooting below from www.infowars.com. The only difference between Bush and Obama is that tyranny is now wearing a black mask. Presidents like Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 have built the FEMA camps across this country. And now it looks like it will be President Obama's job to start filling them up.

The day is near when retaliation against the terroristic police will be a common thing. People so sick and tired of what's happening will be showing at the pig's homes and gun them down and their families. And the majority of the people that will be doing this is going to be white people. I give white people credit, when they wake up and see that their rights and property is being threatened, they grab their guns and get it poppin'. I'm all for Satan casting out Satan. Gun sales are up all over the country and when the federal government decides to go with full scale confiscation, there will be a lot of shooting. I am so sick and tired of seeing my people being beaten and murdered by jack-booted racist thugs and they call this law enforcement. I just laugh as white people sit there on the television giving us the corporate media propaganda that America has turned the corner and race does not matter at all. Whitey just pat themselves on the back and they foam at the mouth with glee. Just because there is a black president in Amerikkka doesn't mean that the police terrorism will stop and that the disproportionate number of Black men being tossed into the Amerikkkan gulags will slowdown. I say God curse America, tear this motherfucker down!!!

Police Terrorism - Cop Shoots Black Man While Face Down

2009-01-06T22:01:00.002-05:00

The terrorist pigs are at it again. Click on the link below to see a cold-blooded devil cop draw his gun and shoot the man while he was face down on the ground. The shoots him in the back and he dies. This was an act of state terrorism and first degree murder.

http://www.ktvu.com/video/18409133/index.html

American Warning - Video

2009-01-05T16:48:00.000-05:00

American Warning - Video

2009-01-05T11:05:00.000-05:00

Orange drinks with 300 times more pesticide than tap water

2009-01-05T10:15:00.000-05:00

By Sean Poulter
Last updated at 12:53 AM on 05th January 2009

Fizzy drinks sold by Coca-Cola in Britain have been found to contain pesticides at up to 300 times the level allowed in tap or bottled water.

A worldwide study found pesticide levels in orange and lemon drinks sold under the Fanta brand, which is popular with children, were at their highest in the UK.

The research team called on the Government, the industry and the company to act to remove the chemicals and called for new safety standards to regulate the soft drinks market.

The industry denies children are at risk and insists that the levels found by researchers based at the University of Jaen in southern Spain are not harmful.

The researchers tested 102 cans and bottles of soft drinks, bought from 15 countries, for the presence of 100 pesticides. The UK products were bought in London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrews and at Gatwick Airport.

The experts said the levels found were low under the maximum residue levels allowed for fruit, but they were 'very high' and 'up to 300 times' the figure permitted for bottled or tap water.

The chemicals detected included carbendazim, thiabendazole, imazalil, prochloraz, malathion and iprodione. They are mainly applied to fruit after harvest to stop it developing fungal infections and rotting.

A total of 19 products were bought in the UK, all made by Coca-Cola.

Two orange drinks bought in the UK contained imazalil at 300 times the limit permitted for a single pesticide in drinking water.

Two similar products contained 98 times the legal drinking water limit for thiabendazole.

The average level of the total pesticide contamination of the British drinks was 17.4 parts per billion - 34.6 times the EU maximum residue level for water.

Coca-Cola GB insisted the products are safe. A spokesman said: 'All of the drinks tested meet the safety regulations relating to food products made from agricultural ingredients, which include drinks with fruit juice as an ingredient.

'The generally miniscule levels that were detected were well within the acceptable daily intake levels and these findings should reassure consumers there is no safety issue here.'

Unrest caused by bad economy may require military action, report says

2009-01-05T10:08:00.002-05:00

By Diana Washington Valdez / El Paso Times
Posted: 12/29/2008 12:00:00 AM MST

EL PASO -- A U.S. Army War College report warns an economic crisis in the United States could lead to massive civil unrest and the need to call on the military to restore order.

Retired Army Lt. Col. Nathan Freir wrote the report "Known Unknowns: Unconventional Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development," which the Army think tank in Carlisle, Pa., recently released.

"Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities ... to defend basic domestic order and human security," the report said, in case of "unforeseen economic collapse," "pervasive public health emergencies," and "catastrophic natural and human disasters," among other possible crises.

The report also suggests the new (Barack Obama) administration could face a "strategic shock" within the first eight months in office.

Fort Bliss spokeswoman Jean Offutt said the Army post is not involved in any recent talks about a potential military response to civil unrest.

The report become a hot Internet item after Phoenix police told the Phoenix Business Journal they're prepared to deal with such an event, and the International Monetary Fund's managing director, Dominique Strauss-Khan, said social unrest could spread to advanced countries if the global economic crisis worsens.

Javier Sambrano, spokesman for the El Paso Police Department, said city police have trained for years so they can address any contingency, but not with the military.

"The police (department) trains on an ongoing basis as part of its Mobile Field Force Training," Sambrano said. "As a result, the police will be able to respond to emergency situations, such as looting or a big civil unrest. The police (department) does not train with soldiers."

Earlier this year, Pentagon officials said as many as 20,000 soldiers under the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) will be trained within the next three years to work with civilian law enforcement in homeland security.

Joint Task Force-North, a joint command at Biggs Army Airfield, which conducts surveillance and intelligence along the border, comes under NORTHCOM. No one was available at JTF-North to comment on the Army War College's report. NORTHCOM was created after the 9-11 attacks to coordinate homeland security efforts.

Soldiers under the former Joint Task Force-6 (now JTF-North) supported the Border Patrol in El Paso with its drug-interdiction operations.

In case civilian authorities request help or become overwhelmed, El Paso has several National Guard and military reserve units that can be called on. In 1992, National Guard and active Marine and Army units were deployed to help police control riots and looting in Los Angeles.

Charles Boehmer, political science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, was skeptical about the Army War College report.

"The military was not called out during the Great Depression, and I don't think our economic problems are as bad as they were then," he said. "The military always has contingency plans. It's a think tank's job to come up with scenarios, but that doesn't mean it represents an active interest on the part of the (Pentagon)."

Diana Washington Valdez may be reached at dvaldez@elpasotimes.com; 546-6140.

Corporate Media Notices War College Report on Economic Crisis

2009-01-05T09:18:00.002-05:00

Kurt Nimmo
[1] Infowars
Wednesday, Dec 31, 2008

It took a while for them to come around, but the corporate media has finally taken note of the U.S. Army War College report predicting civil unrest due to the private bank engineered economic crisis now gearing up and threatening to kick into Mad Max mode.

From the El Paso Times:

A U.S. Army War College report warns an economic crisis in the United States could lead to massive civil unrest and the need to call on the military to restore order.

Retired Army Lt. Col. Nathan Freir wrote the report “Known Unknowns: Unconventional Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development,” which the Army think tank in Carlisle, Pa., recently released.

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities … to defend basic domestic order and human security,” the report said, in case of “unforeseen economic collapse,” “pervasive public health emergencies,” and “catastrophic natural and human disasters,” among other possible crises.

The report also suggests the new (Barack Obama) administration could face a “strategic shock” within the first eight months in office.

[2] Read the rest of the story at the El Paso Times.

And there is Motley Fool CAPS, the website supposedly designed to help the little guy beat the market. Motley does a follow-up on the original corporate media story published by the [3] Phoenix Business Journal and little covered beyond the blogosphere and alternative news websites like Infowars and Prison Planet. Raw Story and Newsmax also covered the story.

A CAPS blogger attempts to make a funny out of the situation, although it is no laughing matter:
This likely has been posted before…..sorry if you are reading it again. But with this being the Holidays and all, with some of us busy lighting candles, or partying with Santa, or whatever…..a few may have missed it.

I am not saying any of the above will happen…..simply the Pentagon now thinks it is a possibility and is making preparations for civil unrest. If the Pentagon thinks economic collapse is a relevant issue….should we at CAPs?????

Should we red thumb or green thumb in the event of an economic collapse??? Which symbols would you red and which would you green??? Just like the Pentagon, Alstry plays to win….regardless what comes our way.

CAUTION!!!!!!….for those of you that actually like the Constitution and its implications….contemplating the above can have serious adverse consequences on your mental well being and potentially your physical health. For immediate relief of emotional symptoms, my suggestion is try some prosecco with fresh pomegranete sprinkled thoughout….the bubbles causing the seeds to dance will make you smile…..drinking them will make you feel more relaxed….in moderation of course……you don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease…..otherwise you might be just like the Fed:)

[4] Read the Motley Fool CAPS article.

Alex Jones has talked about martial law and a military dictatorship on his radio show and in his films for years. It now appears, with the release of the in-your-face War College report, at least a few corporate media outlets are beginning to pay attention, although Motley Fool and the El Paso Times are hardly the Washington Post or the New York Times.

But then it is the role of the corporate Mockingbird media to ignore the obvious and when confronted with the facts denounce those who speak the truth as nutty conspiracy theorists.

Research related articles:

IMF Chief Warns Of Riots In Response To Economic Crisis
Corporate Media Reporting Mistakes on NIST WTC 7 Report
India, Corporate Media Moves To Frame Pakistan For Suspicious Attacks
Glenn Beck Highlights Threat Of Martial Law Following Economic Crisis
False flags attacks common but rarely reported in the corporate media
Did John Negroponte Help Create the Economic Crisis?
America’s economic crisis is beyond the reach of traditional solutions
Kucinich: Bankers partied as economic crisis hit
Media Endorse $700 Billion Economic ‘Rescue’
Icelanders Protest Economic Crisis
The Week that America Woke Up to the Economic Crisis
Bankers Want World Economic Government To Solve Financial Crisis They Created

A Ponzi Scheme Within A Ponzi Scheme

2009-01-05T08:57:00.002-05:00

Bob Chapman
Infowars
December 30, 2008

Dwarfing the Madoff Ponzi scheme, which in the end may turn out to be, at least in part, a scam to feign investment losses for purposes of ripping off insurance companies with invalid claims for fraud while bilking taxpayers out their hard-earned money with deceitful requests for government bailouts and tax breaks, is the Social Security Ponzi scheme. While the Madoff Ponzi scheme, so-called, may be measured in the tens of billions, the Social Security Ponzi scheme can be measured in the tens of trillions, making it a thousand times worse. The Social Security system is truly a Ponzi scheme in the classic sense, where the first contributors to the fund are paid benefits mainly out of the funds received from the contributions of later participants.

The Social Security system we are familiar with was originally enacted in 1935 by an incredibly corrupt Congress (much like the current one), and signed into law by FDR, a corrupt and ardent Illuminist who did as he was told to do by his Illuminist Puppet Masters (principally John Rockefeller, Jr. and J P Morgan, Jr.). At that time, the Social Security system was known as the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program. The OASDI was not implemented until 1937 due to Constitutional challenges, but suffice it to say, the Illuminist puppets in the Supreme Court of that day, who were every bit as corrupt as FDR and the Congress, made sure the Socialist agenda went forward.

The Ponzi aspects of this Social Security scam were enhanced by one of the main conspirators in this scheme, the Federal Reserve. Shortly after the Social Security system was implemented in 1937, our central bank inflated our currency by increasing the supply of money and credit in order to boost prices and incomes and take us out of depression. This process accelerated in 1941 in order to fund the war effort as WWII got underway following the 911 event of that time, namely, the attack on Pearl Harbor, which our government knew was coming way before it happened, but then turned a blind eye to the upcoming attack so we could be dragged kicking and screaming into the next Illuminist war for profit. Incomes and prices rose as Americans went to work to power the war effort, thus causing incoming Social Security contributions to burgeon, while simultaneously debasing the value of the benefits being distributed, thus further enabling the Ponzi scheme to be perpetuated.

Note how in 1933, just prior to the enactment of the OASDI in 1935, bankster-buddy FDR took us off the gold standard domestically, leaving only dollars and dollar-denominated accounts held by foreigners backed by gold. That meant we had a domestic fiat currency, which allowed the Fed to do as it pleased with the supply of money and credit in the US, and as you may have guessed, the Fed chose to increase the supply quite dramatically to fund WWII so the military-industrial complex could grow filthy rich. This tied in perfectly with the Social Security Ponzi scheme as we became an economic powerhouse in the aftermath of WWII, with a peak in the late 1960s, by filling the Social Security fund with fresh infusions of inflated cash to keep the Ponzi scheme going, while debasing the fixed benefits being paid out to retirees.

Next came the Vietnam War, and more debt, especially to foreign nations, and more inflation from an increase in the supply of money and credit to fund the latest war for profit. This brought about the final debasement of our currency after the London Gold Pool failed to cap the price of gold, resulting in a bank holiday in Britain during the Johnson Administration. President Nixon, also an ardent Illuminist, at the request of his Puppet Masters, in order to stop the outflow of our national gold to foreigners due to war debt and to enhance the Fed’s ability to increase money and credit to fund Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, took us completely off the gold standard in 1971. As a result, inflation went out of control as our currency became purely fiat in nature, with double-digit inflation peaking in the early 1980s. Once again, the resulting inflation furthered the Social Security Ponzi scheme, which was an integral part of Johnson’s Great Society program.

In order to placate complaints about the effects of inflation on the purchasing power of benefits, which grew quite pronounced with the passage of time, an attempt was made to counteract the impact of inflation by providing for cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) based on official inflation rates. Not to be daunted, the elitists made sure that the Bureau of Lying (Labor) Statistics (BLS), which they totally control with their puppets at the BLS, put out greatly understated official inflation statistics, usually at one half to one third of actual inflation, a process known as hedonics, which they use to screw Social Security recipients out of their proper COLA increases.

As you can see, Inflation is the best tool available to perpetuate the Social Security Ponzi scheme, by burgeoning incoming money at the full rate of inflation while benefits are increased by only a fraction of the actual rate of inflation. This has changed recently, because wages have stagnated, and this has put stupendous pressure on our already bankrupt Social Security system, a huge, gargantuan Ponzi scheme that is about to unravel.

Make no mistake about it; this was an Illuminist scheme to impoverish the middle class, not to provide for people’s security. Ask Social Security recipients how many of them feel secure based on the miniscule benefits they are receiving. This was a Communistic spreading of wealth from the middle class to the poor, not from the wealthy to the poor, since FICA contributions have always been cut off at a level of income associated with the middle class, leaving the wealthy free of FICA liability on most of their income because Social Security benefits are capped, presumably making FICA deductions, above the designated maximum level of income, unfair. In the end, the poor are still poor, the middle class has now joined the ranks of the poor, and the wealthy are now fabulously wealthy, which results are characteristic of any Communistic or Fascistic form of governance. Between the Social Security system, the Income Tax system and the Federal Reserve System, they will spend, tax and inflate, respectively, the American sheople into oblivion.

Their Communistic, Fascistic mantra has been: Give us your money and we will take care of you from the cradle to the grave. They will take care of you all right — in a Halliburton-built, slave-labor internment camp, complete with disinformation centers where they will brainwash your children to make them into good, quiet, dumb, cooperative sheople-serfs. This mantra has in fact been used to help fund all their plans for world government by extorting a myriad of taxes out of you, and one of the main taxes which has been used to fund their plans has been the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), which funds their Social Security Ponzi scheme, which, as a result, has actually become a Ponzi scheme within a Ponzi scheme.

So how has our Social Security system become a Ponzi scheme within a Ponzi scheme? We’ll tell you how. Our reprobates and sociopaths in Congress have regularly, over many decades, overspent money to fund their pork projects and social welfare programs to win votes, and to grease the wheels of the Illuminist wars for profit which power the military-industrial complex. This has resulted in massive budgetary current account deficits.

Adding to our woes are the trade deficits, which we have to fund by borrowing from foreign nations, thus increasing our national debt. These trade deficits have been caused by the gutting of our manufacturing sector through free trade, globalization, off-shoring, outsourcing, and both legal and illegal immigration. Illegal currency manipulations by exporting nations like China, Japan, Russia and EU nations have also contributed to the trade imbalance by giving these nations unfair trade advantages via debasement of their currencies, which makes their exports cheaper in our country, and which makes our exports more expensive in their countries. These nations also provide subsidies to their domestic industries, thus decreasing their cost of goods and increasing their bottom lines. All these currency manipulations and subsidies make a mockery out of the concept of free trade. We need fair trade, not free trade.

Police: Father Killed Son, 2, Over Child Support Debt

2009-01-05T08:51:00.002-05:00

Date: Monday, January 05, 2009, 11:26 am
By: Janet McConnaughey, Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS - Danny Platt said he was under a lot of pressure. He apparently owed his estranged wife $4,000 in back child support.

But there were no signs of stress when the 22-year-old father, accused of killing his two-year-old son over the child support debt, went to pick up his little boy for a weekend visit, his mother said Sunday.

On Friday, several hours after her son, Ja'Shawn, left, Daniella Powell received a phone call. It was Platt. He said their son had been kidnapped and quickly hung up.

Powell called back in disbelief. She said her husband gave different accounts of the kidnapping. She asked if he had called police. He said he had, but when she called authorities, they hadn't heard from him.

Police said Platt made up an elaborate story about his son being kidnapped by three men armed with AK-47 rifles late Friday night. Platt eventually confessed to the killing, telling authorities he "would kill either his wife or his child before he paid child support," Police Superintendent Warren Riley said Saturday.

Later, he led police to the boy's body. He has been booked on a charged of first-degree murder.

On Saturday night, as he was being led to jail in handcuffs, Platt said he was under a lot of pressure and acknowledged killing his son, but disputed the slaying occurred solely over the debt to his estranged wife.

"I'm sorry about killing my baby," Platt told reporters. "I had a whole bunch of reasons."

It's not clear whether Platt has an attorney. Telephone messages left Sunday for New Orleans police and the coroner's office were not immediately returned.Powell said Sunday the two never had any violent fights and Platt wasn't going through any emotional problems.

"He knew what he was doing. He killed my two-year-old son," she said.

Powell said her son's body was found in a plastic bag at a park. She and her family were busy preparing her son's funeral arrangements.

"I don't have money for anything. We are trying to come up with it now," Powell said.

Police said Saturday in announcing the arrest that Platt hadn't seen his son in quite some time. Powell said Platt had taken the boy trick-or-treating on Halloween, but acknowledged they hadn't spoken for a couple of months. However, she didn't think it was odd Platt wanted to spend the weekend with his son.

Ja'Shawn was excited about seeing his father, she said. "He went to the door and said, 'Daddy' when he came to pick him up," she said.

US Group Implants Electronic Tags in Workers

2009-01-04T00:30:00.002-05:00

Published on Monday, February 13, 2006 by the Financial Times
by Richard Waters

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them.

CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police.

Embedding slivers of silicon in workers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as one of the next big growth industries.

RFID chips – inexpensive radio transmitters that give off a unique identifying signal – have been implanted in pets or attached to goods so they can be tracked in transit.

“There are very serious privacy and civil liberty issues of having people permanently numbered,” said Liz McIntyre, who campaigns against the use of identification technology.

But Sean Darks, chief executive of CityWatcher, said the glass-encased chips were like identity cards. They are planted in the upper right arm of the recipient, and “read” by a device similar to a cardreader.

“There’s nothing pulsing or sending out a signal,” said Mr Darks, who has had a chip in his own arm. “It’s not a GPS chip. My wife can’t tell where I am.”

The technology’s defenders say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory. But critics say any implanted device could be used to track the “wearer” without their knowledge.

VeriChip – the US company that made the devices and claims to have the only chips that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration – said the implants were designed primarily for medical purposes.

So far around 70 people in the US have had the implants, the company said.

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2006

What the FDA Won’t Tell You about the VeriChip

2009-01-04T00:16:00.001-05:00

By Dale Hurd
CBN News Sr. Reporter

CBN.com – (CBN News) - A little electronic capsule, smaller than a dime, could be one of the biggest technological advances in how we share and store private medical records. It may also be one of the most controversial.

Known as the VeriChip, it is a microchip that is implanted under a person's skin, and then scanned with a special reader device to reveal important medical data about that person.

Applied Digital, the Florida-based company that makes the VeriChip, hopes the implant will revolutionize how doctors obtain medical information, particularly in emergency situations.

Theoretically, if a person can't speak, medics could scan that person and quickly be linked to a database that would provide crucial information like the patient's identity, blood type and drug allergies.

Dr. Csaba Magassi, a plastic surgeon in Northern Virginia, is among a nationwide network of doctors who are ready and waiting to implant the VeriChip into willing patients. His office receives calls daily from people inquiring about the chip.

Dr. Magassi said, "If you are in an auto accident, [and] you are unconscious, they could scan you, know exactly who you are; your medical history can easily be printed out onto the hospital record."

Dr. Magassi added, "If a patient comes in requesting the VeriChip, I usually tell them it takes between two and five minutes to place the device in place. A needle which contains the VeriChip is inserted. The needle pushes the device through, and it is implanted permanently. Put a bandaid on and you are done."

Dr. Magassi demonstrated the procedure for CBN News on an apple. Once the microchip was inserted, the hand-held scanner read the number on the chip using radio frequency waves. Think of it as a human barcode.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the VeriChip implant for medical use in humans in October, a huge victory for Applied Digital.

In an effort to jumpstart interest, the company launched the "Get Chipped" campaign. It is offering a discount to the first few hundred people who get the implant, and also plans to donate hundreds of scanners to the nation's trauma units to promote use of the VeriChip.But in a letter obtained by CBN News from the FDA to the VeriChip makers, the microchip is not completely safe. In fact, the letter lists a whole host of health risks associated with the device, including "adverse tissue reaction," "electrical hazards" and "MRI incompatibility."

Applied Digital and the Food and Drug Administration refused our requests for an interview to discuss these risks.

Consumer privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht said, "There are millions of people that have read the press reports about all the positives of this technology, but really have no idea about its dangers."

Albrecht strongly opposes the VeriChip for the physical risks it poses, as well as the privacy risks. She has been called "the Erin Brokovich of RFID chips."

On her Web site, www.spychips.com, Albrecht reveals the potential dangers of the VeriChip and other radio frequency identification methods.

Albrecht said, "There's a very serious concern that, already, engineers and people who think along those lines are already thinking like hackers and criminals -- they're already starting to say, how can this system be compromised, how can it be abused? When you are dealing with a radio frequency device, by design, it is transmitting info using invisible radio waves at a distance.

In this case, that distance is only a couple of inches or a couple of feet so it’s not a huge distance, but it means that anyone who can get within a couple of inches or a few feet of you, even with a reader device they have hidden in a backpack or a purse, would be able to scan that number, obtain that info and potentially duplicate it."

And it is not just private medical information at stake. The microchip implant technology has been around for several years now, and has been used for a variety of different applications.

Thousands of chips have been implanted in pets by veterinarians for identification purposes. Livestock is now chipped to track things like mad-cow disease. Manufacturers are putting chips in products like clothing and shoes for marketing research.

In Mexico, the attorney general and his top aides were chipped for security purposes. And, in Spain at the Baja Beach Club, patrons can get a microchip with their financial information implanted, so they can pay for their cocktails with a swipe of the arm. As these pictures seem to suggest, getting chipped is fun and painless.

Applied Digital also launched a brand new application for the chip last year called the "VeriPay." This implant would hold all of a person's financial information. Rather than swipe a card or pay cash, consumers would scan their wrists for purchases. And, if a swipe of the wrist becomes too troublesome, there are already prototypes made of doorway portals that can simply scan a person and their purchases as they walk through the door.

Allbrecht said, "I think there is a very real concern that, down the road, such a chip would become mandatory. And not necessarily initially, but it would be voluntary, in the same way let’s say as credit cards or a drivers license is voluntary. No one forces you to have a driver’s license or to have a cell phone, but yet the vast majority of people do, because it is very difficult to function in a normal society without it."

For now, though, a microchip implant is voluntary. Only a few thousand chips have been sold and only a fraction of those have been implanted in humans.

For someone who wants an implant for medical purposes, Dr. Magassi and others are standing by. Magassi says, "If they want it, God love ‘em. I'll put it in. It's as simple as that."

The VeriChip just recently made its debut in a Miami, Florida nightclub, where patrons had the opportunity to "Get Chipped," much like the Baja Beach club patrons in Spain.

Oregon looks at taxing mileage instead of gasoline

2009-01-03T01:36:00.000-05:00

By RYAN KOST, Associated Press Writer

PORTLAND, Ore. – Oregon is among a growing number of states exploring ways to tax drivers based on the number of miles they drive instead of how much gas they use, even going so far as to install GPS monitoring devices in 300 vehicles. The idea first emerged nearly 10 years ago as Oregon lawmakers worried that fuel-efficient cars such as gas-electric hybrids could pose a threat to road upkeep, which is paid for largely with gasoline taxes.

"I'm glad we're taking a look at it before the potholes get so big that we can't even get out of them," said Leroy Younglove, a Portland driver who participated in a recent pilot program.

The proposal is not without critics, including drivers who are concerned about privacy and others who fear the tax could eliminate the financial incentive for buying efficient vehicles.

But Oregon is ahead of the nation in exploring the concept, even though it will probably be years before any mileage tax is adopted.

Congress is talking about it, too. A congressional commission has envisioned a system similar to the prototype Oregon tested in 2006-2007.

The National Commission on Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing is considering calling for higher gas taxes to keep highways, bridges and transit programs in good shape.

But over the long term, commission members say, the nation should consider taxing mileage rather than gasoline as drivers use more fuel-efficient and electric vehicles.

As cars burn less fuel, "the gas tax isn't going to fill the bill," said Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

The next Congress "could begin to set the stage, perhaps looking at some much more robust pilot programs, to begin the research, to work with manufacturers."

Gov. Ted Kulongoski has included development money for the tax in his budget proposal, and interest is growing in a number of other states.

Governors in Idaho and Rhode Island have considered systems that would require drivers to report their mileage when they register vehicles.

In North Carolina last month, a panel suggested charging motorists a quarter-cent for every mile as a substitute for the gas tax.

James Whitty, the Oregon Department of Transportation employee in charge of the state's effort, said he's also heard talk of mileage tax proposals in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado and Minnesota.

"There is kind of a coalition that's naturally forming around this," he said.

Also fueling the search for alternatives is the political difficulty of raising gasoline taxes.

The federal gas tax has not been raised since 1993, and nearly two dozen states have not changed their taxes since 1997, according to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

In Oregon's pilot program, officials equipped 300 vehicles with GPS transponders that worked wirelessly with service station pumps, allowing drivers to pay their mileage tax just as they do their gas tax.

Whitty said the test, which involved two gas stations in the Portland area, proved the idea could work.

Though the GPS devices did not track the cars' locations in great detail, they could determine when a driver had left certain zones, such as the state of Oregon. They also kept track of the time the driving was done, so a premium could be charged for rush-hour mileage.

The proposal envisions a gradual change, with manufacturers installing the technology in new vehicles because retrofitting old cars would be too expensive. Owners of older vehicles would continue to pay gasoline taxes.

The difference in tax based on mileage or on gasoline would be small — "pennies per transaction at the pump," Whitty said.

But the mileage tax still faces several major obstacles.

For one, Oregon accounts for only a small part of auto sales, so the state can't go it alone. A multistate or national system would be needed.

Another concern is that such devices could threaten privacy. Whitty said he and his task force have assured people that the program does not track detailed movement and that driving history is not stored and cannot be accessed by law enforcement agencies.

"I think most people will come to realize there is really no tracking issue and will continue to buy new cars," Whitty said, noting that many cell phones now come equipped with GPS, which has not deterred customers.

Others are worried that a mileage tax would undermine years of incentives to switch toward more fuel-efficient vehicles.

"It doesn't seem fair," said Paul Niedergang of Portland, that a hybrid would be taxed as much as his Dodge pickup. "I just think the gas tax needs to be updated."

Lynda Williams, also of Portland, was not immediately sold on the idea but said it was worth consideration.

"We all have to be open-minded," she said. "Our current system just isn't working."

Louis Farrakhan Speaks On BET's Show, American Gangster, 50 Cent, Rappers & More! "Some Of These Satanic Jews Have Taken Over BET"

2008-12-31T15:25:00.000-05:00

Paul Mooney Talking About Black & White Acting And Animals

2008-12-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

Paul Mooney Talking About 9/11

2008-12-29T12:09:00.000-05:00

Bury The Word Nigger (Nigga)

2008-12-29T12:08:00.000-05:00

Here's A Little XMas Humor

2008-12-23T11:22:00.000-05:00

Police assault 12-year-old girl after mistaking her for a prostitute

2008-12-23T10:03:00.000-05:00

Andrew McLemore
Raw Story
Saturday, Dec 20, 2008

A girl’s family has filed a lawsuit against Galveston police for their assault on their 12-year-old daughter after mistaking her for a prostitute.

As the girl, Dymond Milburn, walked in her front yard, three men jumped out of a van and beat her about the face and throat, one of them telling her, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”

Police attacked Milburn despite the fact that she didn’t fit the racial description of their suspects: three white prostitutes and a black drug dealer.

Three weeks after Milburn was hospitalized for her injuries, police went to her school and arrested her for assaulting an officer during the incident.

The incident occurred two years ago, and since then, Milburn has suffered behavioral problems, nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The lawsuit against the officers also alleges that the men thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker because of the “tight shorts” she was wearing. Police have not yet apologized for the incident.

The case has gone to trial, but the judge declared a mistrial the first day and a new trial is set for February.

“I think we’ll be okay,” said Anthony Griffin, Milburn’s attorney. “I don’t think a jury will find a 12-year-old girl guilty who’s just sitting outside her house. Any 12-year-old attacked by three men and told that she’s a prostitute is going to scream and yell for Daddy and hit back and do whatever she can. She’s scared to death.”

The officers’ lawyer, William Helfand, said Milburn’s father had also been arrested for attacking the officers after his daughter called for him when the police attacked her. Helfand said both would face consequences for their actions.

“It’s unfortunate that sometimes police officers have to use force against people who are using force against them. And the evidence will show that both these folks violated the law and forcefully resisted arrest,” Helfand said.

One blogger defended the story from accusations that it was a hoax because it has not been picked up by the national media and many of the facts come from the Milburn’s attorney.

But the blogger points out that neither the Galveston police department nor the Galveston district attorney’s office have responded to inquiries about the case.

As for the mainstream press, he asks. “Why don’t 90 percent of the abuses of power we look at on this site get covered by the national media?”

Obama & Biden To Protect Bush Administration Criminals

2008-12-23T09:48:00.001-05:00

Nuremberg trials also judged “a waste of time”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, December 22, 2008

It’s par for the course for Obama and Biden, the men who promised “change” but in every step of their preparations for assuming office have pursued nothing but continuity, to acknowledge that they will protect criminals in the Bush administration from prosecution for authorizing torture, a complete violation of both the U.S. constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

When asked by ABC host George Stephanopoulos if top level Bush administration officials would be prosecuted for mandating prisoner abuse, Biden said that he and Obama would be “focusing on the future,” adding “I think we should be looking forward, not backwards.”

Such rhetoric goes to the very heart of the gigantic con job the “Obama change” hoax has wrought upon millions of befuddled Americans who naively presumed that voting for the lesser of two evils would result in anything other than more evil.

Perhaps Göring, Ribbentrop and the rest of the Nazis prosecuted at Nuremberg for their war crimes were following the wrong line of defense when they claimed they were merely “following orders,” they should have just proclaimed that the world should be “looking forward not backwards” and according to the Biden/Obama view of justice, they would have got off scot free.

Likewise, pedophiles and rapists who abuse children and women in ways not far removed from what was approved at Abu Ghraib should merely tell police that since the abuse and rape occurred in the past, everybody should just move on, “looking forwards not backwards”.

Obama and Biden, with their de-facto pardons of the Bush administration torture masters, are ensuring that what happened at places like Abu Ghraib, including beating people to death, raping people with acid covered batons and sexual abuse of children, will continue to happen in future without consequence.

Of course, those that protect war criminals from prosecution should be treated no better than the war criminals themselves, and when real “change” comes to America, Obama and Biden will face the same justice as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Police: Boy Evaluated Before Weekend Detention

2008-12-23T09:08:00.001-05:00

Nov 13, 2008 7:01 am US/Mountain
By Jodi Brooks

Denver police said a 10-year-old boy with bi-polar disorder was evaluated by a third-party youth services agency last Friday before he was detained over the weekend for allegedly assaulting an officer during a violent outburst.

The independent agency called Paramount Youth Services did an assessment according to police. It consisted of 25 questions.

Officials at Centennial Elementary School called police and emergency medical technicians on Friday when Vinni Barros was disrupting his special needs class.

Barros became violent at school and the chain of events that followed landed him in juvenile detention for three days after being arrested for felony assault of a police officer.

His mother, Shantelle Fry, was stunned.

"He doesn't understand why he was put in that situation," Fry said.

According to a letter written by a teacher's aide, Barros had been running around, screaming and knocking things off the desk.

"He picked up a metal bat, put it on his shoulder and smiled at me," she wrote.

He put the bat down and eventually calmed down.

Fry questions the school's decision not to give the boy his emergency medication.

"He completely calms out on that medication," Fry said. "It's meant to drop his blood pressure low enough that he calms out."

But it may not have been such an easy call. Bi-polar disorder is complicated and school nurses typically don't have the expertise to give out strong behavioral changing medication in the context of an emergency.

"We have to make sure that we have a viable physician's order or primary care provider order, as well as parental consent," said Donna Shocks, Denver Public Schools Manager of Nursing Services.

Faced with a clear safety issue, DPS says its staff followed all of its protocols.

"We had a student that the staff at that particular school needed support. They did call safety and security from the district, we did have a registered nurse on scene as well as a police department EMT that responded to that incident," said Alex Sanchez, DPS Spokesperson.

During the encounter, Barros allegedly kicked and spit at a police officer. That's why he was taken into juvenile detention in handcuffs and charged with a felony.

"That's policy, it's protocol," said police spokesman Sonny Jackson. "If you're going to arrest somebody, you're going to handcuff them.

"Should the child go to jail? Should the child go to the hospital? Should he be released to his parents? That's done by people who are trained professionals that make those decisions."

The district attorney's office says charges against Barros will not be filed.

"We had a Chief Deputy District Attorney look at the case facts, review the investigative file, and she made a decision to decline any formal criminal charge," said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the DA's office.

He will have to show up for his court date Friday when the case is expected to be dismissed.

Fry kept Barros out of school this week. She's not sure what to do next week.

The DA's office said it is unusual to have criminal cases against 10-year-olds. Ten is the minimum age a person has to be in Colorado to face a criminal charge.

(© MMVIII CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

That Was No Small War in Georgia -- It Was the Beginning of the End of the American Empire

2008-12-23T08:38:00.002-05:00

By Mark Ames, Radar. Posted December 13, 2008.

The war in Georgia will be remembered as the place where the American Empire fell on its face.

(This article was published in the final issue of Radar magazine, which was bought out and shuttered just as this issue went to print. This is the first online publication of this article. It has been updated by the author.)

Tskhinvali, South Ossetia -- On the sunny afternoon of August 14, a Russian army colonel named Igor Konashenko is standing triumphantly at a street corner at the northern edge of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, his forearm bandaged from a minor battle injury. The spot marks the furthest point of the Georgian army's advance before it was summarily crushed by the Russians a few days earlier. "Twelve Georgian battalions invaded Tskhinvali, backed by columns of tanks, armored personal carriers, jets, and helicopters," he says, happily waving at the wreckage, craters, and bombed-out buildings around us. "You see how well they fought, with all their great American training -- they abandoned their tanks in the heat of the battle and fled."

Konashenko pulls a green compass out of his shirt pocket and opens it. It's a U.S. military model. "This is a little trophy -- a gift from one of my soldiers," he says. "Everything that the Georgians left behind, I mean everything, was American. All the guns, grenades, uniforms, boots, food rations -- they just left it all. Our boys stuffed themselves on the food," he adds slyly. "It was tasty." The booty, according to Konashenko, also included 65 intact tanks outfitted with the latest NATO and American (as well as Israeli) technology.

Technically, we are standing within the borders of Georgia, which over the last five years has gone from being an ally to the United States to a neocon proxy regime. But there are no Georgians to be seen in this breakaway region -- not unless you count the bloated corpses still lying in the dirt roads. Most of the 70,000 or so people who live in South Ossetia never liked the idea of being part of Georgia. During the violent land scramble that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the South Ossetians found themselves cut off from their ethnic kin in North Ossetia, which remained part of Russia. The Russians, who've had a small peacekeeping force here since 1992, managed to keep the brewing conflicts on ice for the last 15 years. But in the meantime, the positions of everyone involved hardened. The Georgians weren't happy about the idea of losing a big chunk of territory. The Ossetians, an ethnic Persian tribe, were more adamant than ever about joining Russia, their traditional ally and protector.

The tense but relatively stable situation blew up late in the evening of August 7, when on the order of president Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's army swept into South Ossetia, leveling much of Tskhinvali and surrounding villages and sending some 30,000 refugees fleeing north into Russia. Within hours, Russia's de facto czar Vladimir Putin counterattacked -- some say he'd set a trap -- and by the end of that long weekend the Georgians were in panicked retreat. The Russian army then pushed straight through South Ossetia and deep into Georgia proper, halting less than an hour's drive from Saakashvili's luxurious palace. All around me is evidence of a rout. A Georgian T-72 tank turret is wedged into the side of a local university building, projecting from the concrete like a cookie pressed into ice cream. Fifty yards away you can see the remains of the vehicle that the orphaned turret originally was part of: just a few charred parts around a hole in the street, and a section of tread lying flat on the sidewalk. Russian tanks now patrol the city unopposed, each one as loud as an Einstrzende Neubauten concert, clouding the air with leaded exhaust as they rumble past us.

But listening to Colonel Konashenko, it becomes clear to me that I'm looking at more than just the smoldering remains of battle in an obscure regional war: This spot is ground zero for an epic historical shift. The dead tanks are American-upgraded, as are the spent 40mm grenade shells that one spetznaz soldier shows me. The bloated bodies on the ground are American-trained Georgian soldiers who have been stripped of their American-issue uniforms. And yet, there is no American cavalry on the way. For years now, everyone from Pat Buchanan to hybrid-powered hippies have been warning that America would suddenly find itself on a historical downslope from having been too reckless, too profligate, and too arrogant as an unopposed superpower. Even decent patriotic folk were starting to worry that America was suffering from a classic case of Celebrity Personality Disorder, becoming a nation of Tom Cruise party-dicks dancing in our socks over every corner and every culture in the world, lip-synching about freedom as we plunged headfirst into as much risky business as we could mismanage. And now, bleeding money from endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're a sick giant hooked on ever-pricier doses of oil paid for with a currency few people want anymore. In the history books of the future, I would wager that this very spot in Tskhinvali will be remembered as both the geographic highwater mark of the American empire, and the place where it all started to fall apart.

I first visited Georgia in 2002 to cover the arrival of American military advisers. At the time, the American empire was riding high. A decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia seemed to be devolving into an anarchic and corrupt failed state, while the U.S. just kept getting stronger. Within months of President George W. Bush's swearing-in, Time ran a column boasting that America didn't need to accommodate Russia anymore because it had become "the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome." That same year we invaded Afghanistan without breaking a sweat. The New York Times magazine proclaimed: "The American Empire: Get Used to It." A new word, hyperpower, was being used to describe our history-warping supremacy.

The military advisers were dispatched to Georgia ostensibly to train that country's forces to fight local Al Qaeda cells, which everyone knew didn't exist. In reality, we were training them for key imperial outsourcing duties. Georgia would do for the American Empire what Mumbai call centers did for Delta Airlines: deliver greater returns at a fraction of the cost. They became a flagship franchise of America Inc. It made sense for the Georgians, too: Their erratic and occasionally violent neighbor Russia wouldn't fuck with them, because fucking with them would be fucking with us -- and nobody would dare to do that.

The imperial masterminds who fixated on Georgia as an outsourcing project must have figured we'd score a two-fer by simultaneously winning strategic control of the untapped oil in the region and also managing to stick a giant bug up the raw southern rim of our decrepit old rival Russia.

To enact this plan, America deftly organized and orchestrated the so-called Rose Revolution, which I witnessed in Tblisi in 2003. Saakkashvili's predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, was judged unreliable, so in a multilayered soft putsch that used every lever of influence at our disposal, the U.S. replaced him with Saakashvili, a Columbia-educated hothead who speaks perfect neocon. In the Western media, the Rose Revolution was portrayed as 1776 redux (starring Saakashvili as George Washington with a permanent five o'clock shadow). A more perfect vassal for George W. Bush's foreign policy could not have been found than "Misha," as he is fondly known. He stacked his cabinet with young right-wing fanatics, and made sure he had a coterie of mountain-biking American advisers with him at all times. This crew included John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, whom Misha paid more than $1 million in lobbying fees.

This project in Georgia was just a high-profile example of a broader Bush strategy. All around Russia's southern border, America laid claim to former Soviet domains. After 9/11, Putin infuriated many of his army commanders and security chiefs by agreeing to let the U.S. set up bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for the Afghan invasion. Once the Taliban was removed from power, America decided that it felt like staying. After all, who was going stop us? Given the sorry state of their affairs, the Russians certainly weren't. So by 2002, Putin was stuck with American pie dripping down his cadaverous bloodless face. But after years in which Russia rebuilt itself on the back of soaring commodity prices (today it's the world's largest producer of oil), our advantages in global power politics have started to tilt Putin's way. Slowly and quietly he got American forces thrown out of Uzbekistan and all but sidelined in Kyrgyzstan. And then, here in Georgia, he seized the opportunity to really hammer home his point.

During my visit to Georgia in 2003, if someone had told me that in five years American military advisers would be hightailing it from their main base in Vasiani to avoid getting slaughtered by advancing Russian forces, I would have slapped him with a rubber chicken for insulting my intelligence. Yet there they were: gasping for air in the lobby of the Tblisi Sheraton, insisting off the record that the conflict was all the Georgians' fault, not theirs.

Why Misha decided to attack is still a mystery. He claims he was forced to level Tskhinvali to preempt a Russian invasion, but that doesn't make military sense, and has since been debunked by both Georgians and OSCE monitors on the ground; others believe that he struck because, with Bush on his way out, he thought this would be his last chance to regain control of South Ossetia. Another theory popular among journalists and pundits is that the notoriously "hotheaded" (some would say "mentally unstable") Saakashvili was suckered into his doomed invasion by a clever Russian ruse, part of Putin's plan to punish the West for recognizing Kosovo and other crimes of imperial insensitivity. Personally, I'd vote for number two. (Putin has offered an alternative hypothesis: that Misha intentionally sparked a war in order to boost John McCain's prospects in the U.S. election.) Prior to the offensive of August 7, Georgians cut off Russian television and Internet sites in South Ossetia, then rained Grad rockets and artillery on the capital and surrounding villages. The early-hours blitz was, as one Ossetian told me the day before, "shock and awe." At least half the population fled into Russia. People I spoke to in the refugee camps, mostly women, were still in a daze -- they told of fleeing their burning villages under fire, of Georgians raping and murdering, of grenades thrown into civilian bomb shelters, of tanks running over children. (It was impossible to corroborate these individual stories, as is generally the case in trying to sift fact from inflamed rumor in refugee camps.)

Reliable casualty counts for the broader conflict are still all but impossible to get, but as of late August the Russians admit having lost 64 soldiers, and the Georgians a combined 215 soldiers and civilians. In both cases, the real number is probably much higher. On the civilian front, Ossetian sources claim that 1,500 were killed in the Georgian assault -- Putin called it a "genocide" -- but many Westerners dismiss that figure.

Privately, however, American advisers and defeated Georgian commanders admit to "total defeat." Indeed, Arkady Ostrovsky of the Economist, a British reporter who has long been close to Saakashvili, told me that on the day of the cease-fire, the Georgian leader spoke of shooting himself, and was only dissuaded when word came of a supportive statement by Condi Rice. "It was sad to watch," Ostrovsky told me. "I should have been more critical of Saakashvili back when it might have counted. A lot of us should have."

That's exactly the kind of full-spectrum smackdown the Russians were aiming for. And Konashenko wants us all to see it, so he offers to take me and some other reporters to the city of Gori in occupied Georgia. Russia seized control of the city at the end of hostilities, essentially cutting its foe in two and leaving it exposed to Vladimir Putin's whims. "We'll show you Gori -- the city is spotless," Konashenko says cheerfully. "We could have destroyed it, but we didn't. Of course, there's a little bit of damage here and there."

The next morning, I head toward Georgia in the back of a Russian army truck, winding through the countryside of South Ossetia. Many villages have been burned and completely leveled. In the minority ethnic- Georgian communities, the sour odor of death hangs in the air, as those who survived the Ossetians' reprisal attacks had little time to bury their dead friends and relatives.

When we arrive in Gori, the locals seem unnerved by our presence. They shy away as aggressive reporters point cameras and pursue them along the cobblestone streets for a quote. At first, some say that they are grateful that the Russian forces are there to protect them from marauding Ossetian and Chechen irregulars, who had swept through parts of Georgia murdering civilians and looting homes before the Russians arrived. After a half hour, the Georgians we talk with get used to our presence. A few summon the nerve to quietly pull me aside and whisper things like, "Are the Russians ever going to leave?" and "We don't have any information here. Is this going to be Russian territory forever?"

In Gori's vast central square there is shattered glass on the sidewalks, but as Konashenko promised, the city is largely intact. It is also starkly empty, as if a virus or neutron bomb had wiped out the civilian population. Most of the city's inhabitants have long since fled to Tblisi, along with the soldiers.

As we hop out of the army trucks, one of the Russian commanders points to a limp banner flying at half-mast over the polished-granite administration building on the far side of the square, "You see?" he says. "The Georgian flag is still flying. This is Georgian territory -- we're not annexing it like the media says." This kind of boast, conquering a country and then making a big noble show of respecting its sovereignty, was something that had once been reserved for America's forces. How quickly history has turned here.

The other Western journalists fan out for some atrocity hunting, digging for signs that the Russians might have dropped a cluster bomb or massacred civilians. The foreign-desk editors back home have been demanding proof of Russian evil, after largely ignoring Georgia's war crimes in South Ossetia. It's a sordid business, but the reporters are just following orders.

After an hour in the 90-degree heat, I head over to the city's central square, where I stumble across a stunning spectacle: dozens of Russian soldiers doing a funky-chicken victory dance in the Georgian end zone. They're clowning around euphorically, shooting souvenir photos of each other in front of the administration building and the statue of Stalin (Gori's most famous native son) while their commanders lean back and laugh. I approach Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Bobrun, assistant commander of the Russian land forces' North Caucasus Military District -- the roughest neighborhood in Western Eurasia -- and ask him how he feels now, as a victorious military leader in a proxy war with America.

"I have never been so proud of Russia -- magnificent Russia!" Bobrun crows, an AK strapped over his shoulder. "For twenty years we just talked and talked, blabbed and blabbed, complained and complained. But we did nothing, while America ran wild and took everything it could. Twenty years of empty talk. Now Russia is back. And you see how great Russia is. Look around you -- we're not trying to annex this land. What the fuck do I need Georgia for? Russia could keep this, but what for? Hell, we could conquer the whole world if we wanted to. That's a fact. It was Russia that saved Europe from Genghis Khan. Russia could have taken India and the Middle East. We could take anything -- we took Alaska, we took California. There is nothing that Russia could not take, and now the world is being reminded again."

"Why did you give California back?" I asked. It has always baffled me why a country would abandon prime coastal real estate for the frozen swamps of Siberia -- I always assumed it was because the Russians were ashamed when they found themselves holding onto a chunk of this planet as perfect as California: like B-list nerds who successfully crash a Vanity Fair Oscar party, but within minutes of their little triumph, skulk out of the tent out of sheer embarrassment, knowing they never belonged there in the first place.

"We gave it all back because we don't need it," Borisov boasted, puffing out his chest. "Russia has enough land, what the hell do we need more for. But if others want to start something, this is what will happen. Russia is back, and I am so proud."

As the day wore on, the Kremlin press pool organizers finally rounded us up, and we headed back again along the same victory trail. It was on this second visit to ruins of Tskhinvali, as dusk approached and the violence seemed to already acquire a kind of abstract tone, that I started to realize that I was looking at something much bigger than the current debate about Russian aggression or who was more guilty of what -- pulling the camera much farther back on this scene, I understood that I was looking at the first ruins of America's imperial decline. It's not an easy thing to spot. It took years after the real collapse for Russians to finally accept that awful reality, and to adjust accordingly, first by retrenching, not overplaying an empty hand, slowly building up without making any loud noises while America ran wild around the world bankrupting itself and bleeding dry.

And now it's over for us. That's clear on the ground. But it will be years before America's political elite even begins to grasp this fact. In the meantime, Russia is drunk on its victory and the possibilities that it might imply, sending its recently-independent neighbors into a kind of frenzied animal panic. Experience has taught them that it's moments like these when Russia's near abroad becomes, once again, a blood-soaked doormat in the violent epochal shifts -- history never stopped here, it just froze up for a decade or so. And now it's thawing, bringing with it the familiar stench of bloated bodies, burned rubble, and the sour sweat of Russian infantry.

We have entered a dangerous moment in history -- America in decline is reacting hysterically, woofing and screeching and throwing a tantrum, desperate to prove that it still has teeth. Which it does -- but not in the old dominant way that America wants or believes itself to be. History shows that it's at this moment, tipping into decline and humiliation, when the worst decisions are made, so idiotically destructive that they'll make the Iraq campaign look like a mere training exercise fender-bender by comparison.

Russia, meanwhile, is as high as a Hollywood speedballer from its victory. Putting the two together in the same room -- speedballing Russia and violently bad-tripping America -- is a recipe for serious disaster. If we're lucky, we'll survive the humiliating decline and settle into the new reality without causing too much damage to ourselves or the rest of the world. But when that awful moment arrives where the cognitive dissonance snaps hard, it will be an epic struggle to come to our senses in time to prevent the William Kristols, Max Boots and Robert Kagans from leading us into a nuclear holocaust which, they will assure us, we can win against Russia, thanks to our technological superiority. If only we have the will, they'll tell us, we can win once and for all.

Mark Ames is editor of the Moscow English alt weekly, The eXile. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

WHAT HAPPENED TO FREEDOM?

2008-12-19T10:56:00.000-05:00

by: Jamal Hart
(Mumia Abu-Jamal's son)
12/08

“Known worldwide as an almost mythical birthplace of liberty, the hope and freedom acted as a kind of psychic magnet, drawing the poor and oppressed from the class-bound aristocracies of Europe in rivers of emigration as well as Black captives escaping from southern bondage and Black freedmen and women fleeing a humiliating and soul-sapping southern apartheid. The Philadelphia that the stalwart Frederick Douglass beheld with snarled contempt would more than double in size in half a century rising from 650,000 people in 1860 to 1.5 million by 1914.”

-“A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. Quoted from “We Want Freedom” by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Firstly, I would like to take this time to request a moment of silence for all of our fallen heroes and sheroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom against the oppression of this wicked injustice system among innocent people.

I humbly would like to thank each and every one of you who came out in support of this year’s Class-War Prisoners event. Your solidarity is greatly respected. I give the greeting in many tongues to everyone in attendance by saying As-Salaam-Alaikum, Hotep, Ona MOVE, and Greetings to the masses who sacrificed their time to attend this important event. You have been chosen to become informed, abreast and intuned with a constant struggle that connects us all. I thank the Partisan Defense Committee for their massive support and love over the years throughout this atrocious ordeal. I stand in total solidarity with the labor force and with all people who take a stand against injustice and oppression.

I want you all to know that I have been constantly pushing for liberation quite vigorously and many of you inspire me to push harder and remember the words of a great freedom fighter Sis. Harriet Tubman who said, “I started with this idea in my head. There’s two things I have a right to: Death or Liberty.” (Quoted from the book “We Want Freedom” by Mumia Abu-Jamal).

From the beginning, as many of you know all too well, we are fighting for Mumia Abu-Jamal to be exonerated to freedom. We the people here today and abroad will not compromise in the liberation and freedom of him from behind enemy lines. The supporters constantly expressed this urgent message: FREEDOM OVER A NEW TRIAL!

So many times we have witnessed the vile injustice orchestrated in those so-called rooms of justice (AKA the courtrooms). Too many have been unjustly persecuted and railroaded either because of the color of their skin, a poor person or even a combination of both. God forbid they publicly oppose this outright oppression! They will be prosecuted, ridiculed and even have their character defamed to a demoralized state by this mendacious legal system.

By you being here today either to support this movement or join it for the first time, you are showing your awareness and solidarity to expose and demolish the unsavory racist courts the police state and racist Death Penalty Act that feeds off the working poor. We must collaborate and fight to achieve the one goal to free Mumia and all of our freedom fighters including myself from behind enemy lines.

The senseless murders at the hands of these racist rogue law enforcement officers nationwide are robbing the lives of our youth, women and men to feed their taste for blood like vampires. We cannot allow these injustices to go unchecked and accept their lies thereby causing their behavior to be justified.

The Courts from the lower level to the Supreme Court wants to act as if they cannot see that Mumia Abu Jamal is innocent. All of the evidence is clear and convincing and it is either overlook or dismissed by these rogue courts. However, when a rogue police officer opens fire on innocent working class people and immigrants, somehow they get swift justice and are freed of all charges.

As a man who didn’t think twice to become the voice of the voiceless, Mumia stepped up to the plate to expose this demonic system. A system that was and still continues to enforce intense oppression on African Americans throughout this nation by murderous police officers who hide their venomous ways behind their shields. It then allows them to freely practice corruption, extortion and murder among other unpleasantries. A prime example of this is what happened on Osage Avenue on May 13th, 1985 where 11 MOVE members were brutally murdered by this murderous government. Another example is the attempted assassination of my dear father Mumia on December 9th, 1981 in downtown Philly when these rogue police officers not only shot him, but beat him even while inside the emergency room of Jefferson University Hospital. WHAT HAPPENED TO FREEDOM?

Comrades, the only way we will get freedom for our political prisoners who are suffering in the prison hells of this country is to come together becoming a solid force for the poor and working class. We must reach one to teach one and educate the masses on the political history of America’s oppression.

Many of you assisted in change history in America by voting for the first African-American President showing the world that anything is possible in America. As that was an accomplishment, so should the goal of galvanizing the people and educate them on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and too many more being railroaded by a mendacious legal system.

Comrades, we all know that these are trying times. We must step up to the plate and push harder until my dear father Mumia is ultimately free! At some point we need to get a grip and demand the freedom of this innocent man.

Lastly, I remind all of you as I remind myself everyday that we must not allow our adversaries to wag the tail of a dog and allow them to spoon-feed us with their deceiving lie that America does not have any political prisoners.

I am before you today in spirit to express to you that the only way Mumia will be free is for all of us to mobilize like never before and demand that freedom he and all of our freedom fighters so rightfully deserve. We must let them know that we will never give up! There is NO compromise!

FREE MUMIA NOW!!!

Jamal has been incarcerated since 1996. Please write to show a brother some love at the following address:

Jamal Hart #50597-066
FCI Loretto
P.O. Box 1000
Loretto, PA 15940-1000

Blame the Takers, Not the Makers

2008-12-19T10:07:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 11/23/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

When multiple media outlets put out the same story line, these companies, seemingly separate, establish a media narrative that quickly congeals into an apparent popular opinion -- even when such views actually reflect a narrow slice of elite opinion.

We saw this at work in the now infamous run-up to the Iraq War, when almost all corporate news outlets united to cheerlead the war, based on lies.

More recently we've seen a profound political distaste for the auto companies, with a special vehemence for the United Auto Workers (UAW) who are portrayed as greedy, lazy 'ne'er-do-wells', who are paid far more than they're worth.

Rarely are executive compensations questioned, but men and women on the line are repeatedly pointed to, quite unfairly.

This is the psychological fruit of decades of wars on workers, which really comes from the turn of the last century, when law and corporate opinion criminalized unions as 'syndicalism.'

Through decades of bitter labor struggles, these laws were overturned, but business never really agreed to the core idea of workers' rights, and bided its time until a better season.

That season arrived with the election of Ronald Reagan, who, although he ran on the feel-good nationalism of "Morning in America", waged an old fashioned war against unions by breaking the Air Traffic Controllers -- literally putting them in chains to break their strike in 1981.

No matter which party won an election since then, they placated business and hit labor.

One need look no further than the Democrat, William J. Clinton, who fought for NAFTA, which, because it supported businesses when they went offshore in search of cheap labor, severely weakened union power across the board.

Isn't it ironic that media reflects such an anti-union bent when many corporate (at least newspaper employees) reporters are members of the Newspaper Guild?

But union membership isn't determinative; company ownership is. And media is often a small part of a much larger corporate conglomerate.

When the UAW was strong, it strengthened the hand of labor almost all across the board.

The UAW fought long and hard for the wages they've earned. They shouldn't be dogged for this.

They are the makers, not the takers.

The media narrative should be, why aren't all American workers paid a more decent wage?

That's the story that should be the lead on the front page.

--(c) '08 maj

A Secret Recession?

2008-12-19T10:04:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 12/2/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Now, we know.

Not only has it been officially confirmed that the U.S. economy is in a recession, but the nation has been in recession since December -- 2007!!

Is it just me, or have I seen sitting president, G.W. Bush say, repeatedly, that 'we're not in a recession?'

Is it possible that the man with a master's degree in business administration didn't know what a recession was?

Or is it simply that his aides didn't tell him?

Or is it that he didn't want to acknowledge it, as this would be but another stain on what can only be called his dysfunctional presidency?

With over a million jobs lost since the first three quarters of the year, the nation's biggest banks crumbling in hours, and with two wars being fought on a Chinese credit card, how could we not know? How could he not know?

Did the members of the administration handling finance keep it a secret from the President? Or did the presidency keep it secret from the People?

Now comes the report from the National Bureau of Economic Research confirming what millions knew by just looking out the window, or strolling in a mall.

Now, it's official.

If ever anyone wonders if they can trust their politicians, remember the recent assurances to millions -- "we're not in a recession", we're not in a recession...."
(Do you believe it yet?)

--(c) '08 maj

More Money for 'Masters': None For You

2008-12-19T09:54:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 11/29/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

As the nation's economy seesaws between bubble and bust, people are becoming more and more aware of the obscene levels of disproportion between average workers and their CEO's. (Chief Executive Officers)

During congressional hearings where businessmen begged and politicians lectured, much was made of the costs of private jets used to carry them to Washington.

But this was actually a pittance when one considers the rarely discussed issue of executive compensation.

When we look at 12 of the world's most advanced economies, the U.S. is head and shoulders above all others in pay ratios between CEO's and average workers.

In 2006, the average CEO made 364 times more than the average worker. As amazing as this sounds, this was down substantially from 2000, when CEO's made525 times more than the average worker. In 2007, it was 344 times more than the average worker.

As crazy as this sounds it's normal when one considers the bubble that is the nation's boardrooms, where buddies look out for buddies, almost completely divorced from the company's performance.

The other reason such arrangements are rarely successfully challenged is that they are based on contracts signed between corporate boards and CEO's, and are often the terms upon which a CEO joins a firm.

Contracts are the bedrock of American business, and indeed, among the foundations of the U.S. Why so?

Read the Constitution. There it is: Article I; Section 9:
No State shall...pass any laws... impairing the Obligation of
Contracts.....

So what if the contract guarantees the CEO be paid $30 million bucks a year, and the company lost $200 million in revenues? Fire 25,000 workers! A contract is a contract, right?

That's the American way. At least that's the way pushed by big business in the last few decades. In 1980, the average CEO made 42 times more than the average worker. By 1990, it more than doubled to 107 times.

As the economy was falling like dominoes, Wall Street paid out $33 billion in executive bonuses just last year.

It's hard to resist the temptation that business is just a machine -- a money-making machine - to benefit the CEO, the board, their cronies, occasionally shareholders -- and last of all, employees.

It is precisely this machine that built the sub-prime problems, the foreclosure plague, and the present economic repercussions of the latest bursting bubble of wild speculative greed...while paying CEO's fortunes fit for kings.

--(c) '08 maj

[Source: Landy, Heather, "Executive Pay Sparks Outrage", The Washington Post (Nat'l Wkly. Ed.], Nov. 24-30, 2008, pp. 7-8; Maloney, Brenna and Todd Lindeman, "Behind the Big Paydays", The Washington Post, Nov. 24-30, 2008, {Nat'l. Wkly. Ed.} (graphic of pay ratios), p.7.]

False Freedom

2008-12-19T09:48:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 12/7/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

There is a certain sense in the minds of millions in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, that we have reached the promised land.

The imagery and oratory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is invoked, to suggest that his Dream, as articulated in his epic "I Have a Dream" speech, has been realized.

There is a deep sense that freedom is here, as we all live in a 'post-racial America'.

Or do we?

To be sure, we are all on the brink of history, for this has never happened before.

But there was a time, quite a while ago, when similar feelings swept the nation, and especially Black hearts, that a new day was breaking, and the old ways had fallen away, when freedom was as real as rain.

I speak of the Reconstruction era, when the nation formally extended civil rights to millions of Black men (not to women, notably) and scores of Black people took office in state and federal legislatures, beginning a wave of progressive legislation to better the abominable living conditions of millions, Black and white alike.

But Reconstruction was short-lived, due to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the betrayal of Black freedmen by the federal government, and the campaign of white terrorists against Black people and Republicans, which converged to reassert white supremacy.

The Supreme Court also played a pivotal role in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), which, despite the clear language of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, supported states rights over federal constitutional rights, and thus signaled to the South that its denial of rights and segregation of Blacks wouldn't offend their reading of the Constitution.

The hopes, dreams and freedoms of millions were dashed for more than a century, so that the lie of white supremacy could prevail.

At the end of the Civil War, when slavery was formally abolished, Black people were so joyous that many changed their names to reflect this new-found freedom to define themselves. They organized their own churches. They opened schools and businesses. They ran for and won local and national offices. They sat on juries. And they married in droves.

Within a generation, all of these freedoms were washed away, by law, custom and a vicious reign of racist terrorism.

What this history revealed is freedom can be ephemeral.

It matters not what is written in constitutions, nor the rhetoric or promises of politicians. It matters what people fight for.

If history teaches us anything, it is that it matters what social movements struggle for.

-- (c) '08 maj

'Penny Wise -- Pound Foolish'

2008-12-19T09:42:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 12/6/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into financial houses, banks and insurance companies , and the needle on the nation's economy has barely budged from "E".

Now the nation's big three auto companies are at the table in Congress, asking for their share. Not surprisingly, the banks have (despite political claims at the time) tightened, not loosened, credit, a fact that contributes to the once Big Three coming to Congress, for banks have declined to loan money to them!

The auto companies have echoed the banks' arguments, that they too are 'too big to fall', but they are finding a quite different audience than did the financial bigwigs.

That's because they occupy vastly different niches in the nation's political economy, as this new era reflects the transition from manufacturing to financial services as engines of capital production.

While the punditocracy has attacked the automakers for their workers' pay rates, few have been critical of the fees paid to those at the mid-ranks of the financial services industry, only the executives at the top.

That's in part because the political class identifies with, and serves, the financial services sector -- and quite a few come from that world (think of former senator -- and now New Jersey's Governor, John Corzine, for example). That's also because financial services have contributed generally to politicians (Think Enron and the presidential and gubernatorial career of George W. Bush, for example).

And while unions certainly contribute to political campaigns, few have come from the shop floor to the halls of Congress.

That explains the disparity of treatment for the two sectors.

The engines of America's economy aren't Detroit nor Wall Street; they are everyday people, who fuel the economy by their shipping, their use of services, and their wealth of daily business transactions.

Detroit is in trouble today, not because they pay their workers too well, but because their place in the domestic market is slipping annually. Until more people willingly purchase their products, their condition can only worsen.

Before the massive, whirlwind bailouts, the Bush administration tried a modest stimulus package for some Americans, to little effect. That stimulus was too modest, and too limited.

What if 1/2 the money spent on Wall St. went to average Americans?

If they'd spent it, it would've recharged the economy; it they had put it in banks, it would've strengthened bank holdings, making a freeze unlikely.

But the money went to Wall Street, where it sits, as frozen as a Christmas turkey.

The economy moves as a foundation of millions of people; when they can no longer participate it has nowhere to go, but down.

--(c) '08 maj

Somali Woes: The Perils of Intervention

2008-12-19T09:33:00.000-05:00

[col. writ. 12/11/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

On the coastal outcrops of East Africa, in an area known as 'the horn', Somalia sits like a sentinel jutting into both the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

Although Somalians have recently been in the Western press because of a half-dozen sensational cases of piracy, the nation has a long and distinct history, centuries before the era of European colonialism.

As long ago as the 1400's, Somalis fought border wars with their western neighbor, Ethiopia. But like many African nations, interference by the West has meant disaster for the people.

Somalia was colonized by the French, the Italians and later, the British, who split the country into separate territories. But throughout the colonization era, they kept their language (Somali), their culture, their history and sense of Somali nationhood.

In 2006, as part of the U.S. misguided 'War on Terror', the U.S. supported an Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somali, that transformed a bad situation into a worse one. The occupation stirred up Somali nationalism, which strengthened hard-core Islamist forces, which have spearheaded Somali resistance against the Ethiopians.

Now comes word that the Ethiopians are rushing for the exits. By January, 2009, they should be gone.

In the aftermath of this bloody unpopular occupation has grown a deeply radicalized and militarized generation of youth that has no lived memory of schools, of peace, or of communal well-being; only war and strife.

When the U.S. supports proxy wars against nations it doesn't like, it rarely reaps anything better than bitterness.

For the U.S., as one of the world's richest countries, can often afford such expenses, but it doesn't know the time or form of repayment.

Seven years ago, the U.S. experienced one form of repayment when an offshoot of the mujahadin army which forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan, growing stronger in men, money and material by the day.

If Sept. 11th has taught us anything, it should be that wars abroad can become strikes at home.

We've not heard the last of Somalia.

(c) '08 maj

That Was No Small War in Georgia -- It Was the Beginning of the End of the American Empire

2008-12-17T14:54:00.002-05:00

By Mark Ames, Radar
Posted on December 13, 2008, Printed on December 17, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/112457/

(This article was published in the final issue of Radar magazine, which was bought out and shuttered just as this issue went to print. This is the first online publication of this article. It has been updated by the author.)

Tskhinvali, South Ossetia -- On the sunny afternoon of August 14, a Russian army colonel named Igor Konashenko is standing triumphantly at a street corner at the northern edge of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, his forearm bandaged from a minor battle injury. The spot marks the furthest point of the Georgian army's advance before it was summarily crushed by the Russians a few days earlier. "Twelve Georgian battalions invaded Tskhinvali, backed by columns of tanks, armored personal carriers, jets, and helicopters," he says, happily waving at the wreckage, craters, and bombed-out buildings around us. "You see how well they fought, with all their great American training -- they abandoned their tanks in the heat of the battle and fled."Konashenko pulls a green compass out of his shirt pocket and opens it. It's a U.S. military model. "This is a little trophy -- a gift from one of my soldiers," he says. "Everything that the Georgians left behind, I mean everything, was American. All the guns, grenades, uniforms, boots, food rations -- they just left it all. Our boys stuffed themselves on the food," he adds slyly. "It was tasty." The booty, according to Konashenko, also included 65 intact tanks outfitted with the latest NATO and American (as well as Israeli) technology.

Technically, we are standing within the borders of Georgia, which over the last five years has gone from being an ally to the United States to a neocon proxy regime. But there are no Georgians to be seen in this breakaway region -- not unless you count the bloated corpses still lying in the dirt roads. Most of the 70,000 or so people who live in South Ossetia never liked the idea of being part of Georgia. During the violent land scramble that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the South Ossetians found themselves cut off from their ethnic kin in North Ossetia, which remained part of Russia. The Russians, who've had a small peacekeeping force here since 1992, managed to keep the brewing conflicts on ice for the last 15 years. But in the meantime, the positions of everyone involved hardened. The Georgians weren't happy about the idea of losing a big chunk of territory. The Ossetians, an ethnic Persian tribe, were more adamant than ever about joining Russia, their traditional ally and protector.

The tense but relatively stable situation blew up late in the evening of August 7, when on the order of president Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's army swept into South Ossetia, leveling much of Tskhinvali and surrounding villages and sending some 30,000 refugees fleeing north into Russia. Within hours, Russia's de facto czar Vladimir Putin counterattacked -- some say he'd set a trap -- and by the end of that long weekend the Georgians were in panicked retreat. The Russian army then pushed straight through South Ossetia and deep into Georgia proper, halting less than an hour's drive from Saakashvili's luxurious palace. All around me is evidence of a rout. A Georgian T-72 tank turret is wedged into the side of a local university building, projecting from the concrete like a cookie pressed into ice cream. Fifty yards away you can see the remains of the vehicle that the orphaned turret originally was part of: just a few charred parts around a hole in the street, and a section of tread lying flat on the sidewalk. Russian tanks now patrol the city unopposed, each one as loud as an Einstrzende Neubauten concert, clouding the air with leaded exhaust as they rumble past us.

But listening to Colonel Konashenko, it becomes clear to me that I'm looking at more than just the smoldering remains of battle in an obscure regional war: This spot is ground zero for an epic historical shift. The dead tanks are American-upgraded, as are the spent 40mm grenade shells that one spetznaz soldier shows me. The bloated bodies on the ground are American-trained Georgian soldiers who have been stripped of their American-issue uniforms.

And yet, there is no American cavalry on the way. For years now, everyone from Pat Buchanan to hybrid-powered hippies have been warning that America would suddenly find itself on a historical downslope from having been too reckless, too profligate, and too arrogant as an unopposed superpower. Even decent patriotic folk were starting to worry that America was suffering from a classic case of Celebrity Personality Disorder, becoming a nation of Tom Cruise party-dicks dancing in our socks over every corner and every culture in the world, lip-synching about freedom as we plunged headfirst into as much risky business as we could mismanage. And now, bleeding money from endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're a sick giant hooked on ever-pricier doses of oil paid for with a currency few people want anymore. In the history books of the future, I would wager that this very spot in Tskhinvali will be remembered as both the geographic highwater mark of the American empire, and the place where it all started to fall apart.

I first visited Georgia in 2002 to cover the arrival of American military advisers. At the time, the American empire was riding high. A decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia seemed to be devolving into an anarchic and corrupt failed state, while the U.S. just kept getting stronger. Within months of President George W. Bush's swearing-in, Time ran a column boasting that America didn't need to accommodate Russia anymore because it had become "the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome." That same year we invaded Afghanistan without breaking a sweat. The New York Times magazine proclaimed: "The American Empire: Get Used to It." A new word, hyperpower, was being used to describe our history-warping supremacy.

The military advisers were dispatched to Georgia ostensibly to train that country's forces to fight local Al Qaeda cells, which everyone knew didn't exist. In reality, we were training them for key imperial outsourcing duties. Georgia would do for the American Empire what Mumbai call centers did for Delta Airlines: deliver greater returns at a fraction of the cost. They became a flagship franchise of America Inc. It made sense for the Georgians, too: Their erratic and occasionally violent neighbor Russia wouldn't fuck with them, because fucking with them would be fucking with us -- and nobody would dare to do that.

The imperial masterminds who fixated on Georgia as an outsourcing project must have figured we'd score a two-fer by simultaneously winning strategic control of the untapped oil in the region and also managing to stick a giant bug up the raw southern rim of our decrepit old rival Russia.

To enact this plan, America deftly organized and orchestrated the so-called Rose Revolution, which I witnessed in Tblisi in 2003. Saakkashvili's predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, was judged unreliable, so in a multilayered soft putsch that used every lever of influence at our disposal, the U.S. replaced him with Saakashvili, a Columbia-educated hothead who speaks perfect neocon. In the Western media, the Rose Revolution was portrayed as 1776 redux (starring Saakashvili as George Washington with a permanent five o'clock shadow). A more perfect vassal for George W. Bush's foreign policy could not have been found than "Misha," as he is fondly known. He stacked his cabinet with young right-wing fanatics, and made sure he had a coterie of mountain-biking American advisers with him at all times. This crew included John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, whom Misha paid more than $1 million in lobbying fees.

This project in Georgia was just a high-profile example of a broader Bush strategy. All around Russia's southern border, America laid claim to former Soviet domains. After 9/11, Putin infuriated many of his army commanders and security chiefs by agreeing to let the U.S. set up bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for the Afghan invasion. Once the Taliban was removed from power, America decided that it felt like staying. After all, who was going stop us? Given the sorry state of their affairs, the Russians certainly weren't. So by 2002, Putin was stuck with American pie dripping down his cadaverous bloodless face. But after years in which Russia rebuilt itself on the back of soaring commodity prices (today it's the world's largest producer of oil), our advantages in global power politics have started to tilt Putin's way. Slowly and quietly he got American forces thrown out of Uzbekistan and all but sidelined in Kyrgyzstan. And then, here in Georgia, he seized the opportunity to really hammer home his point.

During my visit to Georgia in 2003, if someone had told me that in five years American military advisers would be hightailing it from their main base in Vasiani to avoid getting slaughtered by advancing Russian forces, I would have slapped him with a rubber chicken for insulting my intelligence. Yet there they were: gasping for air in the lobby of the Tblisi Sheraton, insisting off the record that the conflict was all the Georgians' fault, not theirs.

Why Misha decided to attack is still a mystery. He claims he was forced to level Tskhinvali to preempt a Russian invasion, but that doesn't make military sense, and has since been debunked by both Georgians and OSCE monitors on the ground; others believe that he struck because, with Bush on his way out, he thought this would be his last chance to regain control of South Ossetia. Another theory popular among journalists and pundits is that the notoriously "hotheaded" (some would say "mentally unstable") Saakashvili was suckered into his doomed invasion by a clever Russian ruse, part of Putin's plan to punish the West for recognizing Kosovo and other crimes of imperial insensitivity. Personally, I'd vote for number two. (Putin has offered an alternative hypothesis: that Misha intentionally sparked a war in order to boost John McCain's prospects in the U.S. election.) Prior to the offensive of August 7, Georgians cut off Russian television and Internet sites in South Ossetia, then rained Grad rockets and artillery on the capital and surrounding villages. The early-hours blitz was, as one Ossetian told me the day before, "shock and awe." At least half the population fled into Russia. People I spoke to in the refugee camps, mostly women, were still in a daze -- they told of fleeing their burning villages under fire, of Georgians raping and murdering, of grenades thrown into civilian bomb shelters, of tanks running over children. (It was impossible to corroborate these individual stories, as is generally the case in trying to sift fact from inflamed rumor in refugee camps.)

Reliable casualty counts for the broader conflict are still all but impossible to get, but as of late August the Russians admit having lost 64 soldiers, and the Georgians a combined 215 soldiers and civilians. In both cases, the real number is probably much higher. On the civilian front, Ossetian sources claim that 1,500 were killed in the Georgian assault -- Putin called it a "genocide" -- but many Westerners dismiss that figure.

Privately, however, American advisers and defeated Georgian commanders admit to "total defeat."

Indeed, Arkady Ostrovsky of the Economist, a British reporter who has long been close to Saakashvili, told me that on the day of the cease-fire, the Georgian leader spoke of shooting himself, and was only dissuaded when word came of a supportive statement by Condi Rice. "It was sad to watch," Ostrovsky told me. "I should have been more critical of Saakashvili back when it might have counted. A lot of us should have."

That's exactly the kind of full-spectrum smackdown the Russians were aiming for. And Konashenko wants us all to see it, so he offers to take me and some other reporters to the city of Gori in occupied Georgia. Russia seized control of the city at the end of hostilities, essentially cutting its foe in two and leaving it exposed to Vladimir Putin's whims. "We'll show you Gori -- the city is spotless," Konashenko says cheerfully. "We could have destroyed it, but we didn't. Of course, there's a little bit of damage here and there".

The next morning, I head toward Georgia in the back of a Russian army truck, winding through the countryside of South Ossetia. Many villages have been burned and completely leveled. In the minority ethnic- Georgian communities, the sour odor of death hangs in the air, as those who survived the Ossetians' reprisal attacks had little time to bury their dead friends and relatives.

When we arrive in Gori, the locals seem unnerved by our presence. They shy away as aggressive reporters point cameras and pursue them along the cobblestone streets for a quote. At first, some say that they are grateful that the Russian forces are there to protect them from marauding Ossetian and Chechen irregulars, who had swept through parts of Georgia murdering civilians and looting homes before the Russians arrived. After a half hour, the Georgians we talk with get used to our presence. A few summon the nerve to quietly pull me aside and whisper things like, "Are the Russians ever going to leave?" and "We don't have any information here. Is this going to be Russian territory forever?"

In Gori's vast central square there is shattered glass on the sidewalks, but as Konashenko promised, the city is largely intact. It is also starkly empty, as if a virus or neutron bomb had wiped out the civilian population. Most of the city's inhabitants have long since fled to Tblisi, along with the soldiers.

As we hop out of the army trucks, one of the Russian commanders points to a limp banner flying at half-mast over the polished-granite administration building on the far side of the square, "You see?" he says. "The Georgian flag is still flying. This is Georgian territory -- we're not annexing it like the media says." This kind of boast, conquering a country and then making a big noble show of respecting its sovereignty, was something that had once been reserved for America's forces. How quickly history has turned here.

The other Western journalists fan out for some atrocity hunting, digging for signs that the Russians might have dropped a cluster bomb or massacred civilians. The foreign-desk editors back home have been demanding proof of Russian evil, after largely ignoring Georgia's war crimes in South Ossetia. It's a sordid business, but the reporters are just following orders.

After an hour in the 90-degree heat, I head over to the city's central square, where I stumble across a stunning spectacle: dozens of Russian soldiers doing a funky-chicken victory dance in the Georgian end zone. They're clowning around euphorically, shooting souvenir photos of each other in front of the administration building and the statue of Stalin (Gori's most famous native son) while their commanders lean back and laugh. I approach Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Bobrun, assistant commander of the Russian land forces' North Caucasus Military District -- the roughest neighborhood in Western Eurasia -- and ask him how he feels now, as a victorious military leader in a proxy war with America.

"I have never been so proud of Russia -- magnificent Russia!" Bobrun crows, an AK strapped over his shoulder. "For twenty years we just talked and talked, blabbed and blabbed, complained and complained. But we did nothing, while America ran wild and took everything it could. Twenty years of empty talk. Now Russia is back. And you see how great Russia is. Look around you -- we're not trying to annex this land. What the fuck do I need Georgia for? Russia could keep this, but what for? Hell, we could conquer the whole world if we wanted to. That's a fact. It was Russia that saved Europe from Genghis Khan. Russia could have taken India and the Middle East. We could take anything -- we took Alaska, we took California. There is nothing that Russia could not take, and now the world is being reminded again."

"Why did you give California back?" I asked. It has always baffled me why a country would abandon prime coastal real estate for the frozen swamps of Siberia -- I always assumed it was because the Russians were ashamed when they found themselves holding onto a chunk of this planet as perfect as California: like B-list nerds who successfully crash a Vanity Fair Oscar party, but within minutes of their little triumph, skulk out of the tent out of sheer embarrassment, knowing they never belonged there in the first place.

"We gave it all back because we don't need it," Borisov boasted, puffing out his chest. "Russia has enough land, what the hell do we need more for. But if others want to start something, this is what will happen. Russia is back, and I am so proud."

As the day wore on, the Kremlin press pool organizers finally rounded us up, and we headed back again along the same victory trail. It was on this second visit to ruins of Tskhinvali, as dusk approached and the violence seemed to already acquire a kind of abstract tone, that I started to realize that I was looking at something much bigger than the current debate about Russian aggression or who was more guilty of what -- pulling the camera much farther back on this scene, I understood that I was looking at the first ruins of America's imperial decline. It's not an easy thing to spot. It took years after the real collapse for Russians to finally accept that awful reality, and to adjust accordingly, first by retrenching, not overplaying an empty hand, slowly building up without making any loud noises while America ran wild around the world bankrupting itself and bleeding dry.

And now it's over for us. That's clear on the ground. But it will be years before America's political elite even begins to grasp this fact. In the meantime, Russia is drunk on its victory and the possibilities that it might imply, sending its recently-independent neighbors into a kind of frenzied animal panic. Experience has taught them that it's moments like these when Russia's near abroad becomes, once again, a blood-soaked doormat in the violent epochal shifts -- history never stopped here, it just froze up for a decade or so. And now it's thawing, bringing with it the familiar stench of bloated bodies, burned rubble, and the sour sweat of Russian infantry.

We have entered a dangerous moment in history -- America in decline is reacting hysterically, woofing and screeching and throwing a tantrum, desperate to prove that it still has teeth. Which it does -- but not in the old dominant way that America wants or believes itself to be. History shows that it's at this moment, tipping into decline and humiliation, when the worst decisions are made, so idiotically destructive that they'll make the Iraq campaign look like a mere training exercise fender-bender by comparison.

Russia, meanwhile, is as high as a Hollywood speedballer from its victory. Putting the two together in the same room -- speedballing Russia and violently bad-tripping America -- is a recipe for serious disaster. If we're lucky, we'll survive the humiliating decline and settle into the new reality without causing too much damage to ourselves or the rest of the world. But when that awful moment arrives where the cognitive dissonance snaps hard, it will be an epic struggle to come to our senses in time to prevent the William Kristols, Max Boots and Robert Kagans from leading us into a nuclear holocaust which, they will assure us, we can win against Russia, thanks to our technological superiority. If only we have the will, they'll tell us, we can win once and for all.

Mark Ames is editor of the Moscow English alt weekly, The eXile. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

© 2008 Radar All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/112457/