Group items tagged

President-elect Barack Obama offered Americans a unique opportunity to directly relay their concerns to the incoming administration when his change.gov website unveiled its "Open for Questions" tool late last week. The result of that tool's first round of voting may have surprised Obama and his staff: two of the top ten questions -including the highest ranking question - concerned marijuana policy and questions that challenged the drug war in general took 16 of the top 50 spots. Many were disappointed, though unsurprised, by the administration's response to the question that landed in the top slot. When asked whether or not he would "consider legalizing marijuana so that the government [could] tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs [and] a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.," Obama's team responded with a resounding "no," stating simply that the President-elect "is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana."

ABOUT THIS PROJECT For years, the Yes Men have been tinkering with side-splitting mischief as a way to fight injustice. Our latest film about those efforts, The Yes Men Fix the World, won lots of awards and was released all over the planet... but it simply did not fix the world.  So a year ago, we decided that showing what we do wasn't enough: we needed to help people to actually do it themselves. We called our idea The Yes Lab for Creative Activism. It's a factory for meaningful mischief, and a system for helping organizations and individuals carry out Yes Men-style actions on their own, to get media attention for important issues. But the Yes Lab is more than that: it also aims to help YOU take action on issues of social importance. Today, after a year of testing and nearly a dozen successes, we're proud to announce that the Yes Lab is ready for prime time! It's got a set of cool tools in development, that will soon help YOU get involved in new Yes Lab projects, and even to launch them. And it's got a new home at NYU, with space, lots of eager participants, and an ambitious new structure that will soon be cranking out many new projects. The trouble is that in spite of all that, we still have zero budget for the first round of projects themselves! And that's why you're reading this now. We're asking for $10,000, to make the all-new Yes Lab the lean, mean, change-making machine it can be. Any amount raised over $10,000 will bankroll projects beyond the first round.

The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.

I'm sorry but I don't want to be an Emperor - that's not my business - I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say "Do not despair". The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die liberty will never perish. Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you - who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural

One of the most original and provocative books of the past decade is "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (Rowman & Littlefield). "A critical look at salaried professionals," says the cover, "and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives." Its theme is postmodern America, but also applies to Britain, where the corporate state has bred a new class of Americanized manager to run the private and public sectors: the banks, the main parties, corporations, important committees, the BBC.

US universities and colleges could end unlawful US wars and stop banksters' rigged-casino fraud if they taught the central facts of these issues. This four-part series of articles is an open proposal for their action. Feel free to share it.

When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique -- one I naively believed back then -- was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they "lacked spine" and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them.  It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP. 

Some Americans justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well-intended interventions for the good of their people, and the security of our nation and the world. They believe that the President MUST have had evidence of national security risk before taking the last and dire step of invasion. This is a crucial point. If there was credible evidence of imminent threat to US national security, then the wars were justified under the UN Charter for self-defense. However, if the evidence was not credible, or fabricated, then these wars are illegal Wars of Aggression. So which is it? Americans and the world no longer need BELIEVE anything; the specific evidence used to justify invading two countries is now public knowledge. All we have to do is match the government's claims to the exact evidence and you can decide for yourself. This article lays it out. First, as you may recall, there were four basic claims of fact presented by political "leadership" to invade Iraq:

If, as Lessig conclusively demonstrates, Congress is indifferent to the will of the people and to democratic debate - because it has been captured by monied interests to whose interests it exclusively attends - then the people lose the ability to affect what government does in any realm. It doesn't make much difference which problem you believe is most pressing: this is the dynamic that lies at the heart of it. Inaction on climate issues is due to the power of polluters and energy companies; the power of the private health insurance industry blocks fundamental health-care reform; endless war and civil liberties abuses are sustained by the power of the surveillance and National Security State industries; and a failure to achieve real Wall Street reform is due to the fact that, as Sen. Dick Durbin amazingly acknowledged about the institution in which he serves, "the banks frankly own the place." Without finding an effective way to address that overarching problem, the only recourse for citizens becomes either passive acceptance of their powerlessness (i.e., apathy and withdrawal) or disruption and unrest fomented outside of the electoral system (the driving ethos of OccupyWallStreet).

Why KBR continues to be awarded huge open-ended, cost-plus, no-compete contracts from the Pentagon is a question worthy of a criminal investigation, because their track record as a military contractor suggests that "KBR" is actually short for "Kickbacks, Bribes & Ripoffs".  According to the POGO Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, since 1995 the company has been involved in not less than 23 documented cases of misconduct including but not limited to Overcharging the Government, Violation of Anti-Kickback Act, Excessive Subcontract Costs, Fraud and Accepting Kickbacks, Exposing Troops to Hazardous Water Conditions, Bribery to Win International Government Contracts, Overpricing Fuel, Breach of Contract, Hurricane Relief Contract Overcharges, Sexual Assault, Freight Forwarding Kickbacks, Procurement Irregularities, and Conspiracy to Defraud the Government.  For this KBR has paid millions in fines, which it surely considers a small price to pay for the billions it continues to receive in new federal contracts every year:

Jack Heyman, a recently retired business agent for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union local 10, drove through the Port of Oakland and called in the following statement to Truthout at 9:25 AM Pacific time:"The port of Oakland is effectively shut down. None of the ships are being worked. There is limited trucking activity by non-union workers but the port is effectively shut down. Trucks waiting to pick up containers are backed up over a mile," Heyman said. The truck backup was confirmed by the Oakland Tribune.According to Heyman, this partial shutdown was initiated by the rank-and-file workers at the port, in solidarity with the call for a general strike by the Occupy Oakland protesters. The union's official position on the strike call was to work in the morning and then join the demonstrations in the evening, but according to Heyman, the rank and file decided to vote with their feet and not fill key jobs at the port this morning.