Left Unread

Bush was born on third and thinks he hit a triple.–Jim Hightower

As a failed human being pretends to be king of the (as yet) most powerful nation on earth, creates unending chaos, and commits endless acts of atrocities in our name,

Unassuming, ordinary people … whose minds have been softened by subconscious selection and substitution, a sense of entitlement to the lifestyle supported by the suffering of others, infected by years of a psychopathic “morality” leaving them supremely susceptible to [a] type of organised hysteria … (from SOTT.net)

Remember when the pResident said on Nov. 6, 2001, “You’re either with us or against us?” In this climate, fewer and fewer people on earth are with him. These days, in April 2008, the world seems divided between the jackals and the dodos. The overriding question remains, Why can’t (or won’t) anyone stop this miserable little man on his mission to decimate life itself?

And the sickness continues to flood in…

The Economy

Out of 300 million Americans, 48 million don’t have health insurance and access to health care, and 28 million buy their groceries with food stamps. Welfare is dead. Long live welfare for the Welfare King of the 21st Century

While Bear Stearns shareholders may still have been unhappy about their losses even at the higher price (the stock had been worth more than ten times as much a year earlier), in reality this was a very generous gift from US taxpayers. As an inducement to carry through the takeover, the Fed gave J.P. Morgan up to $30 billion in guarantees, in case the bank has to make good on Bear Stearns’ liabilities. In other words, J.P. Morgan is being given the opportunity to do some gambling, with the taxpayers committed to making good any losses. The money that J.P. Morgan paid for this privilege went to Bear Stearns shareholders, not the taxpayers. Read it all>>

But now we can all sit back and relax because the government is now taking immediate action by overseeing the unregulated financial institutions. Really?

Here’s a concise history of U.S. deregulation. It names names and policies that rarely if ever made the media since the 1930’s. The rulers and their cronies probably hoped we wouldn’t notice. And we didn’t.

Wars, Present and Future

Cheney Believes War Is Not the People’s Business
by Helen Thomas

The Salt Lake Tribune 26 Mar 2008 –WASHINGTON – Back in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s worst days when he was grappling with the Vietnam quagmire and raucous anti-war protests at home, he said that in the big decisions about war and peace: “The people should be in on the take offs as well as the landings.”

Tell that to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who apparently couldn’t care less what Americans think – except every four years at election time.

Cheney made that clear in an intriguing interview with ABC News on his recent Middle East trip. Despite the difficulties surrounding the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago, Cheney insisted, “It was the right thing to do.”

When the interviewer told him that two-thirds of Americans say the war in Iraq is not worth fighting, Cheney scoffed. The administration would not be “blown off course by the fluctuations in public opinion polls,” he vowed. Read the rest>>

When a Great Power Goes Mad
by Robert Parry

Consortium News 28 Mar 2008 — With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what’s transpired.

With a few exceptions, these media/political reflections have had the feel of self-rationalizations, more than self-criticisms. They’ve conveyed a sense that the U.S. system is doing just fine, thank you, although a few mistakes were made.

So, you have President George W. Bush, the chief author of this catastrophic war, declaring that “normalcy is returning back to Iraq” even as fighting rages across much of the country and rockets rain down on the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

Bush’s comment invited comparisons to the acronym coined by U.S. Army soldiers during World War II: SNAFU for “situation normal, all fucked up.” Read the rest>>>

Hersh: Don’t trust Washington on Iraq

PressTV 27 Mar 2008 — Prominent journalist Seymour Hersh says the US is ‘in real trouble’ because news coverage on Iraq is anything but balanced and unbiased.

When the American government says the US is winning in Iraq and is not torturing prisoners, they are just words, Hersh told his audience of journalism students in Regina, Canada. “We are in real trouble [in Iraq].”

Pointing to the changes reporting has undergone since the Vietnam War, the award-winning journalist explained that reporters are now embedded with troops who cloud their judgment and therefore do not touch the same kind of issues.

“It has led to a lot of lousy reporting,” continued Hersh. “I don’t think it is bad for a journalist to come back (from covering a war) and say it s***s.”

Hersh said media outlets spread ‘fake’ news and suggested his audience resort to translations of local media sources when learning about issues concerning the Middle East.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Myron Hersh first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War.

Clear and Present Evidence: Fascism in Your Face

Vilified as ‘Terrorists,’ Eco-activists Face New Offensive by Business

TheNewStandard 7 Feb 2008 — In an attempt to shield private property and development from saboteurs, business lobbyists are pushing new laws that would further criminalize the actions of radical ecological activists. Government officials and corporations are applying the rubric of anti-terrorism to penalize those who destroy company or government property when protesting mistreatment of animals and the ecosystem.

Last month, federal grand juries in Oregon and California indicted 14 people on various conspiracy charges for their alleged involvement in the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) or the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) — underground groups responsible for dozens of acts of property destruction as a strategy for protecting vulnerable species.

While some federal officials and media reports liken the defendants to domestic terrorists, others, including some legal experts and free-speech groups, say the label is an intentional misnomer without legal basis.

The Actions

In Oregon, a 65-count indictment charges 11 defendants with involvement in seventeen arson and property-destruction attacks between 1996 and 2001. The incidents involve meat processing plants, lumber companies and other public and private targets.

Defendants in California are accused of conspiring to use fire and an explosive to damage property of the US Forest Service Institute of Forest Genetics, a fish hatchery, cellular telephone towers, and electric power stations. Though their alleged plot was reportedly foiled by a federal informant, two of the defendants face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

Over the past quarter century, the ELF and ALF have taken responsibility for numerous crimes of arson, vandalism and property destruction against institutions the groups say harm people, animals or the environment.

The FBI says that these and related groups have committed more than 1,100 “criminal acts” since 1976, causing more than $110 million in damage.

In an October 2001 press release, the ALF claimed responsibility for one of the activities listed in the Oregon indictment: releasing 200 horses and setting four timed incendiary devices in Litchfield, California. The group accused the BLM of rounding-up wild horses for slaughter to clear public land for cattle grazing.

Similarly, ALF spokesperson Dr. Jerry Vlasak said the motive behind the arsons of a ski resort expansion in Vail, Colorado in 1998 was to prevent the destruction of land inhabited by the lynx, which was added to threatened species list after the attacks.

After the recent arrests, FBI Director Robert Mueller called animal rights and environmental “extremism” one of the Bureau’s highest domestic terrorism priorities.

But the activists say they are on a mission to defend, not terrorize. Vlasak said property destruction is used after other avenues of environmental and animal-rights activism are exhausted.

“There are people working on legislation, there are people working on public education, there are people holding protest signs, but those things alone will not achieve the end result of animal liberation,” Vlasak told The NewStandard.. “So people who are willing to break the law to stop animals being exploited are just one part of a liberation movement.”

As a policy, the decentralized, anonymous groups do not harm humans during their activities. Rather than directly instilling a sense of fear in individual humans, the ALF and ELF engage in acts of property destruction as a means of raising the costs of doing business until they are a deterrent to conducting practices the activists oppose.

From Buzz-word to Legislation

The groups railing against so-called “eco-terrorism” cite the public interest in their campaigns, yet private interests influence their policy initiatives.

One of the originators of the term “eco-terrorism,” Ron Arnold, is the founder of the “wise-use movement,” a loose network of groups opposing environmental regulation and pushing for more industrial development on public lands. Arnold, who once told the Toronto Star that he wished to “eradicate the environmental movement,” currently serves as vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a pro-business research organization. He has pushed the concept of the eco-terrorist threat in his published writings, media appearances and congressional testimony.

Another industry-backed advocacy group, the Center for Consumer Freedom, heads the movement for ecological terrorism laws. Heavily funded by restaurant, alcohol and tobacco interests, the organization has pressed the FBI to investigate radical groups, like the ELF and ALF, as well as mainstream organizations like the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). David Martosko, the Center’s research director, testified at a Senate hearing in May 2005, saying, “The threat from domestic terrorism motivated by environmental and animal rights ideologies is undocumented, unambiguous and growing.” Among the Center’s other priorities is fighting against healthy-eating and anti-smoking campaigns.

Business lobbies have also drafted model legislation to addresses radical environmentalist crimes. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative public-policy organization funded by more than 300 corporations, collaborated with the US Sportsmen’s Alliance, an advocacy group for hunters, fishers, and trappers, to write the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act. If passed into law, the Act would consider arson, property destruction or trespassing acts of domestic terrorism“ if committed by animal-rights activists.

The groups also wish to criminalize acts providing “financial support or other resources,” including lodging, training or transportation to aid eco-terrorist activities. An online registry of convicted offenders that would include personal information and photographs is another recommendation in the draft bill.

So far, the lobbying effort against eco-terrorism on the federal level has failed. In 2003, Representative Chris Chocola (R-Indiana) introduced the Stop Terrorism of Property Act, which would have codified “eco-terrorism” as a federal crime, but with 54 co-sponsors, the bill died in committee. On the state level, however, lawmakers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, South Carolina, Arizona, Washington and Hawaii are pushing various versions of the ecological terrorism legislation.

Defining a Terrorist Threat

Though Justice Department officials publicly refer to the ALF and ELF defendants as “terrorists,” none is formally charged under terrorist criminal statutes, nor are the terms “eco-terrorism” or “domestic terrorism” in either indictment. Legally, “domestic terrorist” refers to a specific category established in the federal criminal code, USC 2331, as enhanced by the USA PATRIOT Act.

The federal government’s elastic public use of the term “eco-terrorism” has drawn some criticism from the public and officials.

According to William Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University, the legal framework for terrorist-related crimes as well as public perceptions of domestic terrorism have been redefined since the September 11 terrorist attacks. He noted that prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, what might now be considered “domestic terrorism” cases could be tried under conventional criminal laws“ like conspiracy to harm others and conspiracy to commit murder.

But Banks commented that while ELF and ALF activists might be considered protesters and in some cases, criminals, they do not meet his threshold for domestic terrorism because they do not perpetrate violence against civilians in order to instill fear.

There is, however, some legal precedent for categorizing animal-defense groups as “terrorists” in the 1992 federal Animal Enterprise Protection Act, which defines “animal enterprise terrorism” as the “physical disruption to the functioning of an animal enterprise,” including research labs, testing facilities, zoos, aquariums, and circuses.

This week, six activists with a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty will be tried under this Act in New Jersey, charged with using their website to incite violence against the animal research company Huntingdon Life Sciences, which reportedly kills about 75,000 animals every year for research.

The Magic Word

Some lawmakers, seeking to put eco-terrorism in perspective, have criticized the targeting of environmental activists as unwarranted.

At a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works last May, Senator Barak Obama (D-Illinois) cited the FBI’s own assertions that crimes by the ELF and ALF had been decreasing. Obama suggested that the FBI’s 2003 statistics showing more than 7,400 hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, and 450 environmental crimes by industries violating clean air and water laws and improperly transporting and disposing of hazardous waste, demonstrated that there were much bigger threats.

“While I want these [ELF and ALF] crimes stopped,” the senator said, “I do not want people to think that the threat from these organizations is equivalent to other crimes faced by Americans every day.”

Free-speech advocates say that aside from misguided crime-fighting priorities, there are serious repercussions of the “eco-terrorism” dragnet, especially in light of the recent evidence of FBI and law enforcement surveillance of protest groups.

Larry Frankel, legislative director of the Pennsylvania branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the language of the bill introduced in his state stigmatizes only certain political viewpoints. For example, he said, under the proposed statue, people who blockade a road to stop old growth logging could potentially be eco-terrorists, “but if an environmental law firm was preparing a brief to go to court, to file an injunction to stop [the logging], and someone came in and trashed their offices so they couldn’t get the brief done, they wouldn’t be guilty of eco-terrorism.”

Frankel believes this is a pattern to stifle political activism. “People will not want to come out to engage in protest activity because they’re afraid of being arrested as a terrorist and that the government will use these terrorist fighting tools to impose harsher sentences on people who are merely engaged in protest activity and not terrorist activity.”

Betty Ball with the Boulder, Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center agreed, saying her organization has seen membership and donations drop since the FBI called one of their civil disobedience actions at a military base an “act of terrorism.”

Stu Sugarman, an attorney in Portland, Oregon, who has represented numerous Earth Liberation Front defendants in the past, said the prevalence of the word “eco-terrorist” is an example of successful government propaganda. And he fears that use of the term by federal officials and the press could affect the judges and juries considering the fates of the current defendants.

He noted that another popular term for groups like the ALF and ELF, “saboteurs” suggests “somebody who’s really not going to cause that much damage; certainly somebody who’s not going to harm people… But a terrorist is somebody who goes out and tries to kill people.”

“Terrorism is a magic word,” said Sugarman. “It’s like child abuse or drunk driver. It immediately conjures up the image of a really bad person who we want out of society.”