From Yes Lab:
I wondered whether I, neophyte matador, could bring down this behemoth, world-famous for charging towards profit while trampling underfoot the average worker,” said the OWS activist/torero whose first fight this was. “Come what may, I knew I must try.
The case of Bradley Manning has exposed much about the hypocrisy and incoherence of the Obama White house.
After Manning had spent the better part of a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, much of which time stripped naked and constantly surveilled — all without trail — Obama, the former Constitutional Law professor, assured the press that he had checked with the Pentagon, which assured him that everything being done to Manning was “appropriate”.
It is hard not to concur with IOZ’s assessment, who characterizes Obama’s response to Manning’s pre-trial torture as “the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate’s expense report”, and as Obama himself as “an asshole of the worst order” who, though he doesn’t “delight in cruelty like his predecessor”, is nevertheless “grossly indifferent to it”.
Since then, the U.S. King Commander of Chief has publicly judged Manning to be guilty without trial, in the same breath as he maintained that the U.S. is a nation of laws. This is especially disturbing because even if Manning ever gets to have a trial, he will be judged by Obama’s subordinates. Greenwald asks: “How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”
Something about this situation reminds me of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread (as well as Megacity One’s Judge Dredd):
It is important to remember that, according to the chat logs obtained by Wired, Manning was motivated by a concern for transparency and the “public good”:
i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.
This weekend, Democratic partisans have been beaming that Obama was able to best birthers in a war of wits at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. But after his war on whistle-blowers, and especially the pre-trial detention, torture and judgment of Manning, the funniest line might have been when the President praised the “daring men and women” who “risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced and everyone deserves to know the truth.”
Other notes:
Although Manning is now being transferred to medium security prison in Kansas, the Pentagon is planning on holding Manning in “pre-trial confinement” for the indefinite future.
The Obama White house has tried to banish reporters from official print pools for merely reporting on a protest in support of Bradley Manning.
Here is the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg discussing Obama and Manning.
As corporations and the rich become expert at tax avoidance, the bill for Washington’s Imperial Swan Song gets passed along to chumps like you and me. Consider these stats:
Over the past 12 years income for the richest U.S. Americans quadrupled as their tax rate was almost cut in half.
Corporations and the wealthy use offshore banks and tax havens to avoid paying taxes and other government regulations.
Many of the largest corporations avoid paying any taxes at all.
Half of your income taxes go to pay for the Imperial military machine.
And here is 9 other things the rich don’t want you to know about taxes.
Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings asks a relevant question: What if we all stopped paying taxes?
Here are some charts come (from a collection at Mother Jones and the WRL) to help visualize:
PS: Here are ways to resist war tax, from the War Resisters League.
This weekend, in the second CicLAvia, 7.5 miles of Los Angeles streets were liberated from the relentless hegemony of the internal combustion engine.
If Los Angeles has a future, it looks like this:
But one thing occurred to me in that terrible moment when the yellow Department of Transportation convoy came to reassert automobile supremacy at 3PM. Against my own anarchistic sensibilities, I must admit that (at least in this instance) it took the full power of the municipal government (Mayor, Police, Dept. of Transportation, etc.) just as much to liberate the streets as it did to shut them down again.
Nothing symbolizes more acutely the dark matrix of corporate hegemony, war, lies, unaccountability, torture and secrecy than the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 8 years ago.
This weekend, as the U.S. Executive Branch (without Congressional approval) began bombarding yet another oil rich predominantly Muslim country, Los Angeles joined other cities in protest to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a “supreme international crime” according to principles laid out by the International Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.
As I did last year, I documented the event in video. This year the most compelling speaker was Mike Prysner, an Iraq War Vet and co-founder of March Forward!, a anti-war veterans group. Here is a recording I made of his speech at the rally, edited with time lapse video of the protest march:
The AP reported that “hundreds” of people marched, but the time lapse sequences seem to indicate more. Looks like at least a few thousand to me.
Meanwhile, in D.C., Daniel Ellsberg and about 100 others were arrested in protests outside the White House.
From The Juice Media:
Rap News, Episode 7: It’s 2011 and amid a flurry of political leaks and revelations, revolutions have rolled across North Africa and The Middle East, sweeping regimes and dictatorships before them. Join your host Robert Foster for long overdue analysis of these events, asking the question that’s on everyone’s lips — where will revolution spark next? But when a news flash comes in from a special embedded correspondent, the episode takes an unprecedented turn, as that very question is answered in dramatic fashion. How will the world treat the latest courageous country to throw off the yoke of oppression? Is any cow sacred in this time of massive upheaval? Can there be any doubt that History Is Happening?
In a discussion with Oliver Stone, Micheal Moore and Christopher Hedges, Al-Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara “examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex”:
And here is another relevant quote from an older article by Normon Solomon on the same topic, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex“:
In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”
Some source material links from The Juice Media:
Took last month off, so haven’t yet posted on the Park 51 controversy. Don’t have to write anything though, since the following video just about sums it all up:
(h/t to O. Perez)
