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Photo by: joanneleon. May, 2013.
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Bradley Manning Supporters Say Exposing Criminals is not a Crime
Outside Ft. Meade where Bradley Manning's trial will take place, hundreds rallied to say that Obama Admin. attacks on whistle-blowers is an attack on democracy (Note: estimates of crowd size varied from 500 to over one thousand) Correction: Mr. Meola is identified on screen, this should read: 'Ward Reilly' of Veterans For Peace).
Secrecy Cult: 'Manning leaked less than 1% of classified docs'
One hundred fifty four years: The amount of time whistleblower Bradley Manning could spend behind bars. His espionage trial begins later today in the US, after his arrest in 2010, which saw him charged with aiding the enemy after he leaked thousands of classified documents online. As RT's Marina Portnaya reports - his court martial process begins at a time when the US is accused of being anything but truthful or transparent.
This is amazing. For three nights (so far) in Istanbul, people in their homes went to their windows, doors and balconies and banged pots and pans, and turned their lights on and off in solidarity with the protesters. In one of these videos, the narrator said it was 2am. He says: "Istanbul. All the city is turning on and off the lights supporting the protest in Taksim and now in all the cities... It's getting bigger and bigger... Every one of us is awake in all of Istanbul. It's now 2 a.m. It's getting bigger and bigger."
The people of Istanbul do home protests in solidarity -- bang pots and pans, turn lights on and off
Nobody Can Predict The Moment Of Revolution ( Occupy Wall Street )
This is not a surprise "some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down". Vetting for a new Attorney General is probably being done as we speak. But as I was saying yesterday, this might be a tricky job to fill. I'm of the opinion that this AG does not have a lot of autonomy. This NYT article is a sure sign that Holder will be gone soon since the White House and friends of the White House are now leaking negative sentiments about him while at the same time making nice statements about him officially. That's the tell. He's a goner.
Seeking a Fresh Start, Holder Finds a Fresh Set of Troubles
Over the course of four and a half years, no other member of President Obama’s cabinet has been at the center of so many polarizing episodes or the target of so much criticism. While the White House publicly backed Mr. Holder as he tried to smooth over the latest uproar amid new speculation about his future, some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down, viewing him as politically maladroit. But the latest attacks may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics.
The White House views the attacks on Mr. Holder as a “political agenda” and “would not hasten the departure of someone who’s competent and runs the department and is a friend because there’s a drumbeat,” said William M. Daley, a former White House chief of staff under Mr. Obama. “Whoever Barack Obama puts in there, these people will try to drumbeat him out of there, no matter what.”
But that does not mitigate the frustration of some presidential aides. “The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time,” said a Democratic former government official who did not want to be identified while talking about friends.
Some advisers to Mr. Obama believe that Mr. Holder does not manage or foresee problems, the former official said. “How hard would it be to anticipate that The A.P. would be unhappy?” the former official said. “And then they haven’t defended their position.”
Can't embolden the critics! This administration and their supporters make good use the constant criticism from the over the top wingnuts in order to wave off all legitimate criticism and in the big picture, conflate the two. Anyway, the White House is leaking about this, obviously. Look at the byline on that article. His days are numbered.
We Must Not Accept This Economic 'New Normal'
Yes, the economy is improving, but too many Americans are being left behind, while the rich keep getting richer
by Bernie Sanders
We must not be content with an economic reality in which the middle class of this country continues to disappear, poverty is near an all-time high and the gap between the very rich and everyone else grows wider and wider.
The good news is that instead of losing more than 700,000 jobs a month as we were five years ago, we've been gaining almost 200,000 jobs a month since January. The bad news is that, in addition to those job numbers being much too low, nearly 60% of the jobs gained since the "recovery" are low-wage jobs that pay less than $14 an hour, while most of the jobs lost during the recession were decent-paying middle-class jobs.
Just so many lies.
Economic Storm Clouds Ahead
Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. But the recent jubilance is enough to make even weather forecasters blush. “Just look at the bull market! Look at home prices! Look at consumer confidence!”
Please.
[...]
Almost all the forward movement in the economy is now coming from consumers — whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity. But wages are still going nowhere, which means consumer spending will slow because consumers just don’t have the money to spend.
On Thursday the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending rose 3.4 percent in the first quarter of this year. But the personal savings rate dropped to 2.3 percent — from 5.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. That’s the lowest level of savings since before the Great Recession. You don’t have to be an economic forecaster, or an astrologer, to see this can’t go on.
The Biggest Criminal Enterprise in History
Terracide and the Terrarists Destroying the Planet for Record Profits
We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night. A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth. It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.
The United States of Whatever: Ecocide and the Soul of a Nation
The reality of and the outward toll inflicted by greenhouse gas engendered Climate Change is clearly evident (to all but the corrupt and devoutly ignorant) e.g. increasingly destructive and deadly tornadoes and hurricanes, destruction of marine life, severe droughts and rapacious wild fires—landscapes of death, scattered debris and shattered lives.
But what are the psychical affects of chronic denial, noxious indifference and compulsive prevarication as related to a matter as all encompassing and crucial as our relationship with the climate of our planet?
Our current catastrophe of estrangement, termed "our way of life," we experience as a denuding of resonance, meaning, and purpose, as a prevailing sense of emptiness and unease, as a craving for distraction, as an inchoate longing for change and transformation, yet a diffidence to the point of paralysis insofar as any means to expedite longing and libido into societal-altering action.
PKK fighters set up camp in northern Iraq
Hundreds of Kurdish fighters have arrived in northern Iraq as part of a peace deal with Turkey. The pact, which was signed in March, ended a decades-long conflict that killed about 40,000 people.
Al Jazeera's Omar Al Saleh reports from the Iraqi border with Turkey, where he was given access to one of the PKK's secret camps.
From the right-wing Jerusalem Post. I don't know if this is really what it's all about -- more imperialist meddling and redrawing of lines, and/or remaking the Middle East in a way that is more favorable to Israel, but it's certainly a big part of it. In order to get the support of various other parties who are involved, I'm sure there are a lot of sub-goals that came along as part of the deal, i.e. a Middle East that is favorable to the Gulf States, the U.S. and Britain. I don't know about France. They seem to be more focused on retaking their former colonial regions in Northern Africa.
The propaganda about humanitarian interventions is solely for the purpose of getting Americans and others to sacrifice blood and treasure to achieve the goals of our imperialist government and our imperialist friends. They really don't care what happens to the people in the countries that they are busting up in order to achieve their visions and the visions of the multinational corps who need stability for their resource extraction operations and transportation needs. And of course after things are blown up they have to be rebuilt, and there is money to be made in that by western corporations and finance deals by the bankers, etc. You could do this forever, right? And get rich from it?
I think it's pretty easy to understand all of that. What's really confusing is the various factions, motives, alliances, etc. For instance this JP article denounces the Sunni fundamentalism when at the same time, it's the Gulf states who are organizing the rebels in Syria, for example, and some of their strongest Arab allies (allies might be too strong a word to use, or not the right word) are Sunni. What's not clear is how much the right-wing Israelis goals and the goals of NATO and the Gulf States align. From this article, they seem to be at severe odds. The neocon goals of remaking the Middle East and the U.S. foreign policy, which demonstrates a continuation of the same or similar neocon goals of remaking the Middle East, seem aligned. Maybe it's now just come down to disagreement about the specific ways to remake the Middle East. I don't know. It does look like one thing that may come out of it is a new country called Kurdistan, and one that has perhaps always existed but just not officially. It certainly has been fought for. Whether or not the U.S. thinks that this natural country should be officially formed now is not anything that our government talks publicly about. It requires breaking/redrawing the boundaries of at least three other countries: Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Perhaps also Iran. Iraqi Kurds may have been promised this by NATO during the Iraq war in exchange for their cooperation.
The World from Here: Kurds, Jews and a new Mideast
Kurdish suffering under Arab, Turkish and Iranian rule infuses them with a natural affinity for Jews and Israel.
Sunni imperial rule – under the guise of what has been known as pan Arabism – may now be broken beyond repair. The Arab “sacred cow” – the so-called “Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine” – has failed to unify the Arab world and may now have “two hoofs” in the slaughter house.
While regional realignments may result in a Middle East more amenable to Israel, dangers are still proliferating.
[...]
The often violent competition for power and control among Islamic groups in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, among other states, that house Sunnis and Shi’ites, Alawites, Kurds, Druse, Christians and others continue to cut through and across the random boundaries’ that were established by the British and French empires as a result of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916.
[...]
What stands behind most of the violence in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and other areas is Arab Sunni fundamentalism in its various forms – whether Salafi, Wahhabi, or Muslim Brotherhood. All forms of radical Islam threaten the existence of the Alawites, Kurds, Lebanese Shi’ites, Christians, and other members of the non-Sunni ethnic and religious groups, including non-fundamentalist Sunnis.
[...]
But tectonic shifts triggered by the Islamic revolutions over the past few years may succeed in liberating the region from Sunni Arab imperialism and create a better future for the region’s minorities. The Kurds, while overwhelmingly Sunni, see the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabis by and large as Arab imperialists trying to force them to abandon their Kurdish identity and become Arabs – probably the reason most Kurds loathe the Muslim Brotherhood.
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