Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
|
Good Morning!
Crossandra "Orange Marmalade" (Photo by joanneleon. July, 2012)
“Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible.
“When, through process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of the government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers.
“These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance.
“It is thus, by discrete action, we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”
Montagu Norman, Governor of The Bank Of England, addressing the United States Bankers’ Association, NYC 1924
News
Huge development. Is this a political decision? A return to counterterrorism strategy and an abandonment of counterinsurgency strategy? An adjustment to the counterinsurgency strategy? How do we get out of Afghanistan now?
Coalition Sharply Reduces Joint Operations With Afghan Troops
KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of tightly intertwining its forces with Afghan troops, the American-led military coalition has sharply curtailed ground-level operations with the Afghan Army and police forces, potentially undercutting the training mission that is the heart of the Western exit strategy.
The new limits, which were issued Sunday and require a general’s approval for any joint work at the small-unit level, was prompted by a spike in attacks on international troops by Afghan soldiers and police over the past six weeks. There was also fear that anger over an anti-Islam movie could prompt more of what the coalition calls insider attacks, American officials said.
Coalition officials stressed that their officers would still be paired with higher-level Afghan units, and that the basic concept of training, advising and fighting alongside Afghan units in the field to ready them to fight on their own remained at the core of war strategy.
Nato's Afghanistan decision shatters implausible claims of progress
Decision to suspend joint Nato-Afghan operations clearly came as surprise to defence chiefs and strikes at heart of UK strategy
For months, if not years, Britain's defence chiefs have made it clear they are desperate to get out of Afghanistan. They have clung to the increasingly implausible claim that training and mentoring Afghan security forces was going well, indeed better than expected.
That claim has been shattered by Nato's decision, taken at the behest of the US, to suspend joint Nato-Afghan ground operations. The decision strikes at the heart of Nato and British strategy.
[ ... ]
But that threat to Britain's national security has been long gone. Hammond appeared to admit as much last week. "We have to be clear why we came here in the first place," he said in an interview with the Guardian. Now that al-Qaida had been "eliminated" from the country, it was not right to ask British troops to put their lives at risk for nation-building.
FBI: Monitoring Occupy was within rules
The FBI says its newly disclosed surveillance of the Occupy movement in Northern California stayed within federal rules and did not result in "unnecessary intrusions into the lives of law-abiding people."
The American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained FBI surveillance documents on the movement in a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, wants to know why the agency is withholding nearly two-thirds of the records it says it has, and why it is citing national security as one reason for the nondisclosure.
Despite the media spin or blackout, Occupy is still very much alive and people came out of the woodworks for the #S17 celebrations and protests. Mass arrests did not stop the Occupy protesters. All of the conditions that caused the movement to rise up still exist, and the movement lives on.
Occupy's Protest Is Not Over. It Has Barely Begun
Nevertheless, I think the ready conclusion that the protests have fizzled is based on a misconception of the nature of movements, a misconception influenced by the metaphors we rely on. We think of these eruptions as something like explosions, Fourth of July fireworks perhaps that shoot into the sky, dazzle us for a moment, and then quickly fade away. The metaphor leads us to think of protest movements as bursts of energy and anger that rise in a great arc and then, exhausted, disappear.
In fact, no major American movement of the past fits that description. The great protest movements of history lasted not for a moment but for decades. And they did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.
Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying common institutional causes and movement passions that mark these events so we can name them, as the abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy is likely to unfold in a similar way.
And it will not subside quickly. Like earlier great movements that changed the course of American history, Occupy is fueled by deep institutional lacunae and inconsistencies. The mainly young people who are Occupy represent a generation coming of age in societies marked by an increasingly predatory and criminal financial capitalism that has created mass indebtness and economic insecurity. At the same time, the policies that once softened the impact of economic change (which some commentators once thought were necessary for the "legitimation" of capitalism) are being rolled back.
I love how they use the word "clashes" to describe NYPD grabbing people off the sidewalk and arresting people for no reason, just because they came to NYC for #S17, essentially.
'Occupy' Inconveniences
At times members of the New York Police Department clashed with protesters, and 182 arrests had been made by 8 p.m. Monday, mainly for disorderly conduct and impeding vehicular access or pedestrian traffic, NYPD chief spokesman Paul Browne said. Another 43 were arrested over the weekend, during a series of rallies and marches, according to Mr. Browne.
[ ... ]
"There's tens of millions of dollars spent protecting the perimeter so we're shaking something up," she said about the police.
While business wasn't brought to a halt, commutes were snarled and workers were delayed by the activity.
OMG, I'm so surprised!
Obama is stealing Wall Street from Romney
Commentary: It’s not about positions, issues or values
I know, I know. Many of you are going to call me liberal patsy, a mouthpiece for President Obama. You’re going to say I’m in the tank, a Democratic hack. Blah, blah, blah.
Whatever. You can disagree with me, but you can’t argue with facts, and you can’t dispute history. If it were the other way around, I’d call it as such.
The fact is, Romney is behind.
And history shows that, as a presidential election nears, Wall Street — represented by the securities, banking, insurance and real-estate industries — tends to go with a winner.
That was quick -- fast service from the appeals court. Can't have too many days go by where the president cannot indefinitely detain Americans without due process! Or assassinate them! The judge didn't even off an explanation.
Appeals court unblocks indefinite detention law
A single federal appeals court judge put a temporary hold Monday night on a district court judge's ruling blocking enforcement of indefinite detention provisions in a defense bill passed by Congress and signed into law last year by President Barack Obama.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier issued a one-page order staying the district court judge's injunction until a three-judge appeals court panel can take up the issue on September 28.
Lohier offered no explanation or rationale for the temporary stay. However, the Justice Department has asked the appeals court to block the injunction issued by U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest last Wednesday.
Iran Says Two Nuclear Sites Were Hit By Explosions
An Iranian nuclear scientist says two of his country's nuclear facilities were attacked last month, in separate explosions that he blamed on sabotage. Fereydoon Abbasi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, revealed that two different locations were targeted by explosions on August 17, one day before U.N. inspectors came visit the sites. One was at the well-known Natanz nuclear facility and the other was at Fordow, a deep underground uranium enrichment site believed to be heavily protected against a possible airstrike.
Abbasi claimed the attacks were acts of sabotage, and while he did not accuse the United States or Israel of being behind them, the two countries are believed to be waging a covert war against the Iranian nuclear program, using both cyberwarfare and assassinations to disrupt their ability to build a nuclear weapon. Abbasi himself survived an assassination attempt while driving in his car two years ago. The explosions knocked out power lines to centrifuge machines, a tactic that has been used to destroy such machines at Natanz in the past. He also claimed that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been infiltrated by “terrorists and saboteurs,"
Hidden Causes of the Muslim Protests
Part of the answer is that the video itself did offend people. But, as when a single offensive remark from someone you've long disliked can make you go ballistic, the explanation for this explosion goes deeper than the precipitating event. What are the sources of simmering hostility toward America that helped fuel these protests? Here is where you get to answers that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney wants to talk about and that, therefore, hardly anybody else talks about.
[ ... ]
[1] Drone strikes. [ ... ]
[2] Israel-Palestine. [ ... ]
[3] American troops in Muslim countries. [ ... ]
Again, the claim that the attack was about the film. This is just not credible, no matter how much this administration wants to use it as a convenient explanation for political reasons.
Afghanistan suicide bomber hits foreigners on Kabul bus
Up to 12 people are reported to have been killed in a suicide bomb attack on a minibus carrying foreigners near the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Eight South Africans were killed in the attack which took place on a major road leading to the international airport.
Afghan insurgent group Hezb-e-Islami has claimed responsibility for the blast, which it says was in response to a recent anti-Islam video.
It comes as Nato says it will restrict operations with Afghan forces from now.
Blog Posts of Interest
The Evening Blues - 9-17-12 by joe shikspack
How Many of the Protests Have Gotten Diplomatic Documents? by emptywheel
The Impact of Foreclosures: 3/5 of Milwaukee’s African-American Voters Cannot Be Located by David Dayen
On Fourth Anniversary of Lehman Collapse, No Fundamental Change on Wall Street by David Dayen
Shamanistic Economics by Dan Kervick, New Economic Perspectives
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel = Bain Capital Strategy II by Superpole
The Credit Crunch Song [Oh Mr. Banker]
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
|