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| "Who killed Barack Obama?" (Photo: T. Graham) |
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Obama - "Put Him Up Against Wall & Shoot Him": Ex-Generals Advocate Coup While Militia Group Advocates Assassination
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FRACK-QUAKES: Fracking May be Causing Earthquakes - Massachusetts Considers Preemptive Legislation After Mulitple Fracking-Associated Earthquakes in Texas
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| Haiti Earthquake, photo taken on Jan. 17, 2010: Could the United States face a super-earthquake caused by Fracking? (Photo: RIBI Image Library) |
An environmental committee at Massachusetts Statehouse has approved a bill imposing a 10-year ban on fracking for natural gas. The move comes as a wave of earthquakes in Texas has raised new concerns over the controversial drilling technique.
The Massachusetts fracking moratorium bill is designed to protect the state's drinking water from possible contamination and thus "ensure that the health and prosperity of our communities is maintained," according to one of the legislation's sponsors, Northampton Democratic state Rep. Peter Kocot, cited by AP.
To become law, the temporary ban on fracking has yet to be approved by the lawmakers and signed by the Democratic Governor, Deval Patrick.
The Massachusetts legislative move was taken on Friday, the day after Texas was struck by a 3.6 magnitude earthquake, one in a row of similar episodes during the last three weeks. The finger of blame is being pointed at fracking. The series of small earthquakes caused no casualties, but left local Texas residents fearing worse could be in store.
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Egypt's Military Dictators Tighten Grip On Power: Enact New Law That Criminalizes Protests and Legalizes Crackdown
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| Protesters at Tahrir Square, Feb. 7, 2011: Egypt's military junta would like to make such "unauthorized" protests a thing of the past. (Photo: Ramy Raoof) |
Egypt's new law criminalizes protest, legalizes crackdown (via GlobalPost)Enlarge Egyptian police use a water canon to disperse protesters during a demonstration organized by human rights group 'No Military Trials for Civilians' in front of the Shura Council in downtown Cairo on Nov. 26, 2013. A new law passed by Egypt's…
Africans in Israel Face New Deportation Laws: Perceived as A 'Threat' to Israel's 'Jewish Character'
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| Ethiopian child at an "absorption center" in Israel. (Photo: Vadim Lavrusik) |
New laws include a crackdown on employers of African immigrants, the detainment of illegal migrants for one year without trial, and "grants" of up to $3,500 for illegal immigrants willing to return to their country of origin. Human rights groups say most African migrants in Israel face threats to their lives in their homelands.
Israel adopts new measures against African migrants (via AFP)The Israeli cabinet approved Sunday measures aimed at deporting thousands of Africans who illegally entered the country and who are perceived by it as a threat to its Jewish character. A statement from the prime minister's office said that beyond the…
The Pitiful, Brainwashed American Consumer: Fighting, Shooting, Stabbing Over The 'Right'... To Buy Things
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| While many Americans shop for bargains, many retail workers use the holiday season to remind buyers of low wages and poor working conditions. (Wal-Mart Strike, Oct 2012: Photo - Neon Tommy) |
- In Las Vegas, a shopper is shot in the leg over a television set.
- In Claypool Hill, VA, one man pulls a rifle and gets stabbed over a Wal-Mart parking spot.
- At a Wal-Mart in Clinton, UT a woman was trampled by deal seekers.
- A man was peppered sprayed at a Wal-Mart in Garfield, NJ during an argument with a store a manager.
- In Realto, CA, a police officer was injured and two people arrested after a fight at Wal-Mart.
- A man was stabbed in the stomach at a mall in Carlsbad, CA.
The following videos accurately depict some of the goings on at stores throughout the US and Puerto Rico.
'Stop & Frisk' and Racist Policing: Cops Arrest Man 56 Times for Trespassing - At His OWN Job - Terrorizing Blacks To Inflate Arrest Stats
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| Earl Simpson being arrested at his place of employment for "Trespassing." The store owner installed a camera to document police harassment. |
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NSA Nightmare Scenario Comes True: Agency Planned To Use Spy Technology To Smear 'Radicalizers' - Logged Online 'Sex Activity'
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| Whistleblower Edward Snowden: Revelations from documents leaked by the former NSA contractor continues to shock and amaze. (Illustration: DonkeyHotey) |
NSA Spied On Porn Habits Of 'Radicalizers,' Planned To Use Details To Embarrass Them (via Techdirt)The latest report on leaked Snowden docs from Glenn Greenwald (along with Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post) shows how the NSA had a plan to use the porn surfing habits of certain people they didn't like to discredit them. If this…
Nuclear Hypocrisy: A-Bomb Maker Pakistan Breaks Ground On New Nuke Plant - Not A Peep From US, Israel or Europe
Pakistan has Atomic weapons, have tested them and is even reportedly willing to supply an A-bomb to Saudi Arabia on demand. And when Pakistan starts construction on another nuclear plant (with China's help), we don't here a peep from the United States, Europe, or Israel. Yet the United States, Europe and Israel work feverishly to control Iran's development of nuclear power.
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| Bomb. (Illustration: _Gavroche_) |
Pakistan launches largest nuclear power project (via AFP)Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday launched the construction of the country's biggest atomic power plant and vowed to pursue further projects to make nuclear the largest energy source. The 2,200-megawatt plant is to be built with Chinese…
US '60 Minutes' Star, Lara Logan, Given Leave Over Benghazi Report
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| Lara Logan was lead correspondent on 60 Minutes' false Benghazi Story. |
US '60 Minutes' star given leave over Benghazi report (via AFP)CBS News on Tuesday put a correspondent for flagship program "60 Minutes" on leave over flaws in a critical report about last year's attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Lara Logan, a South African, also abruptly canceled her scheduled appearance…
The 'Knockout Game' Is A Myth
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| Knock Out (Photo: Daniel Novta) |
The 'Knockout Game' Is A Myth: Excerpts
The "Knockout Game" is a Dream Come True for Racist White Conservatives
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| Adapted from "Day 29: Knockout!" (Photo: Mike Nelson) |
By Chauncey DeVega
I share no sense of linked fate with Marvell Weaver, the hoodlum who was arrested for playing the "knockout game" and then decided to do an interview with the local news about his exploits.
After watching Weaver's pathetic explanation for the logic of his crime, I am left wondering what happened to shame?
Right-wing trolls are doing their best to play up the foolishness called the "knockout game". It is a new moral panic that combines white anxieties about black criminality, fear of black young people, and stereotypes about "African-American violence" which have been cultivated by white supremacists since Reconstruction.
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RELATED VIDEO: The 'Knockout Game' Is A Myth
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The emails, comments, and stories on Right-wing websites about the faux moral panic "knockout game" phenomena are not rooted in a fair concern about crime and youth brigandry. Rather, the "knockout game" meme is rooted in a pathologically white racist obsession with "black crime"--what is alone and unique in its distinction, as white privilege has disallowed any discussion of "white crime" in America's public discourse.
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The 'History' of Thanksgiving - Which 'Truth' Should We Tell?: Sweetness and Light - Or, Savagery and Strife?
The 'Real History' of Thanksgiving
Which 'truth' should we tell?
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One history tells us that the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of the multiple massacres of Native Americans. |
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But then. . .
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Another history tells us that the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of love and unity between Native Americans and the Pilgrims. . . |
Republican Tells Anti-Jewish Joke at Campaign for a GOP Gubernatorial Candidate - Then Runs for Virginia Senate
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| 10th Congressional District Republican Committee Chairman John Whitbeck. (Youtube Capture) |
GOP official runs for Virginia Senate after telling anti-Jewish joke at Cuccinelli event (via Raw Story )A Republican official who called attention to himself earlier this year for telling an anti-Semtic joke at a campaign event for former gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli announced this week that he would be running for Virginia Senate. “So you…
Israel Heads for a Terrifying Split: Government At Odds With American Jews Who Want a Nuclear Deal and Reconciliation With Iran
Israel heads for a terrifying split (via The Economist)APPEARANCES to the contrary, the Israeli government does not have a problem with the terms of the deal that was struck on Iran's nuclear programme on Sunday. Rather, the Israeli government has a problem with the fact that a deal was struck on Iran's…
New Jersey Waitress Who Was Denied Tip Because She Was Gay May Have Forged Receipt: Report
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Shoot Obama, We Now Have the Authority - Says Christian American Patriots Militia Leader
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| Eingemauerte Nazis. (Photo: Max Braun) |
Christian American Patriots Militia leader: We now have authority to shoot Obama (via Raw Story )An apparent threat made against President Barack Obama’s life posted on Facebook has caught the attention of the Secret Service. Agents declined to comment on the post, which has been removed but was preserved in screen captures by Social News Daily…
US Reminds Afghan President Who's In Charge: Tells Him To Sign Troop Deal 'Or Else' - All US Troops Pulled Out Next Year
Before the assembly the Taliban had threatened to target delegates if they backed the bilateral security agreement (BSA) to allow US forces to remain in the country after 2014. The "illegal and insignificant pact of slavery with America will neither benefit the American invaders nor criminal slaves", they said in a statement referring to the jirga members. The jirga members backed the BSA.
US warns Karzai it may leave no troops in Afghanistan (via AFP)US national security advisor Susan Rice told Afghan President Hamid Karzai Monday that a delay in signing a troubled security deal risked the US pulling troops out of the country completely next year. The US said that Karzai had called for "new conditions…
The 16,000 Dow: Recovery or Transfer of Wealth from the Majority of the Population to the Super-Rich?
Side by side with the sweeping growth in social misery and destitution has been the vast expansion in wealth of the super-rich. The world’s billionaires have had their combined net worth double since 2009, according to a report published earlier this month by UBS and Wealth-X. Even though the United States has only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it has a third of the world’s billionaires, according to Forbes.
Global Research, November 25, 2013
The Dow is up by 24 percent over the past year, having doubled since 2009. The S&P 500 is likewise up by 28 percent.
Far from expressing a genuine and healthy economic recovery, however, the rise in the stock market has paralleled a vast expansion of social misery and an unprecedented expansion of social inequality.
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| Occupy Wall Street: Wall St under "Lockdown" - Near Zuccotti Park, Oct 2011. (Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
The reason for this vast increase in destitution is not hard to find: between 2007 and 2012, the median household income in the United States had plummeted by 8.3 percent. The precipitous fall was due to a combination of a sharp fall in the percentage of the population that is employed, and a fall in wages. The percentage of the US working-age population that has a job has fallen by 4.6 percent since 2008, while manufacturing wages have fallen three percent since May 2009.
A report in October by the National Center for Homeless Education, based on figures provided by the US Department of Education, found that over 1.1 million children enrolled in public schools were homeless at some point in 2011-2012, 72 percent higher than before the onset of the economic crisis.
Side by side with the sweeping growth in social misery and destitution has been the vast expansion in wealth of the super-rich. The world’s billionaires have had their combined net worth double since 2009, according to a report published earlier this month by UBS and Wealth-X. Even though the United States has only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it has a third of the world’s billionaires, according to Forbes.
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| Occupy Wall Street: Zuccotti Park, Oct 2011. (Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
US income inequality grew four times faster in the first three years of the Obama administration than under Bush, according to figures published Saturday in the New York Times. As the newspaper reports, “From 2001 through 2008, during the George W. Bush administration,” the ratio of mean (average) to median income “grew at 0.28 percentage points per year. From 2009 through 2011, the latest year for which the data is available, the ratio increased 1.14 percentage points annually, or roughly four times faster.”
The vast growth in stock prices is not the result of impersonal and impartial economic laws, but rather definite policies pursued by the Obama Administration. This administration has, during its entire existence, done everything in its power to prop up the financial system asset values of the super-rich.
This has taken the form of a vast transfer of wealth from the population to the financial oligarchy.
The present rally began in March 2009, following a key set of decisions made by the Obama Administration to make it unmistakably clear that it would abide no impingement on the wealth of the financial oligarchy, and offload the burden of the financial crisis onto the working class.
Occupy Wall Street Takes Over Broadway - Time Square:
NYPD: Forming up and awaiting orders.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
NYPD: Forming up and awaiting orders.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
Just days before, Obama had made clear that he would oppose any serious attempt to limit the compensation of executives at the bailed-out insurance giant AIG, and the administration moved to block a proposal by congress to block a $165 million bonus payout to AIG executives, to be paid with bailout funds.
Then, on March 30, Obama outlined his proposal for the restructuring of the auto industry, in which the White House made the imposition of sweeping wage and benefit cuts the precondition for the provision of federal funds to bail out the auto industry.
Those three events combined to create the biggest four-week rise in the Dow since 1933.
At the end of 2010, the Administration agreed to extend for two years the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, while implementing a cut in payroll taxes for both employers and employees that drained funds from the Social Security system.
Occupy Wall Street Takes Over Broadway - Time Square:
Broadway entertainers join the protest.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
Broadway entertainers join the protest.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
The crisis over the federal debt ceiling in the summer of 2011 ended with a deal to impose over $1 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years, along with an agreement that another $1.2 trillion in across-the-board “sequester” cuts would be triggered at the beginning of 2013 if no deficit-cutting deal had been reached between the White House and Congress by then.
In the course of those crisis negotiations, Obama offered unprecedented cuts in Medicare and Social Security as part of a “grand bargain” with the Republicans.
Later in 2012, the so-called “fiscal cliff” crisis resulted in the triggering of the sequester cuts, beginning last March. The current budget and debt limit impasse will likely be used to extend the sequester cuts, compounding the already severe impact of cuts in programs ranging from Head Start to housing subsidies to legal aid for the poor.
Earlier this month, the White House and Congress implemented a 5 percent reduction in food stamp benefits, the first nationwide reduction in benefit payments in the history of the program. By all indications, the political establishment will do nothing to prevent the expiration of federal extended unemployment benefits beyond the 26-week cutoff for most state unemployment assistance programs. The extended unemployment benefits are scheduled to expire in December.
Throughout this entire period, the attack on workers at the federal level has corresponded with a relentless attack on the wages and benefits of state and local workers, coupled with a relentless assault on social programs at state and local levels, including the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters and social service workers. This process has found its latest expression in the bankruptcy of the city of Detroit, which is being coordinated with the White House to set a precedent for using bankruptcy to slash the pensions and benefits of city workers.
The ability of the government to impose these draconian attacks was entirely dependent on the suppression of the class struggle by the trade unions and the pseudo-left allies of the Democratic Party. Throughout this period, the working class has sought to resist the sweeping attacks on its living standards, but in every struggle has been betrayed and undermined by the trade unions.
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| Occupy Wall Street: Zuccotti Park, Oct 2011. (Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
What are the central lessons to be drawn from this? First, that the Obama Administration is an instrument of Wall Street, in alliance with the military-intelligence complex, and has focused all of its efforts on transferring social wealth from the majority of the population to the super-rich.
The stock market boom is not an indicator that the crisis has been resolved: far from it. It is an expression of the fact that the government and Federal Reserve have no solutions to the crisis confronting the capitalist system.
The fundamental problem is the capitalist system itself. The working class must end its political subordination to the Democratic Party, and fight to build a new mass political movement, based on a socialist program. Such a movement must demand that the Wall Street casino be shut down, and that the trillions of dollars stolen from the population must be returned, the banks and corporations nationalized, and society reorganized on the basis of meeting social needs, not private profit.
Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.
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Copyright © Andre Damon, World Socialist Web Site, 2013
Free Expression, Surveillance, and the Fight Against Impunity
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| Internet Surveillance. (Illustration: Mike Licht) |
Journalists, bloggers and others who speak out against the powerful risk terrible repercussions for their work. Around the world, they face physical intimidation, violent attacks, and even murder for speaking out.
When such crimes are committed against those who exercise their right to free speech, the perpetrators all too often go unpunished. Those who are meant to enforce the law turn a blind eye. The oppressors can act with absolute impunity.
Every November 23rd, free speech organizations around the world draw attention to these travesties of justice in a Day To End Impunity. The number of uninvestigated crimes and unsolved murders of journalists makes for depressing reading—as does the slow but inexorable increase in victims who are targeted for their online work. Since 1993, the Committee to Protect Journalists have recorded the deaths of twenty-nine online reporters who were murdered for their work. Seventeen of those crimes went unsolved and unpunished.
But in a digital world, it's not just crimes of physical violence that can chill speech. The spread of surveillance technology means that crimes against privacy can be used to intimidate or limit the work of free speech, too.
Investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova has been a constant irritant to the ruling cliques of Azerbaijan, exposing corruption and graft in the very highest levels of government. Shortly after CNBC reported on her investigations into the wealth of the family of President Ilham Aliyev, intimate videos recorded by a surveillance camera hidden in her bedroom were distributed online. It was a clear attempt to discredit her.
Those who planted that camera were never punished. Instead, Ismayilova herself has forced by a local court to sweep the streets of her country, completing a 220 hour community service punishment for attending a peaceful protest in Baku.
In Venezuela and Russia, opposition reporters' private phone conversations are selectively played on the state media. In Russia, lawyer and blogger Alexei Navalny found a surveillance device in his home.
In the United States, PEN American Center has documented the effect of apparently uncontrolled surveillance on reporters and writers in the United States. Elsewhere, agents of the "Five Eyes" governments are apparently spying on the internet traffic of users in other countries, in direct contravention of local laws, and with complete impunity.
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| Surveillance Center: Rouen, France. (Photo: Frédéric BISSON) |
Free speech needs privacy. Unlawful surveillance against writers and speakers must be investigated and punished, and never excused or ignored. We cannot let a culture of impunity grow around crimes of surveillance.
To find out how you can help in the fight against impunity, see the Day Against Impunity website.
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