Restore Rule of Law. #FreeAssange

They came after Julian because he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians; because he exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo; because he exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other UN representatives from China, France, Russia and the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included the eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; because he exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military regime; because he exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, that they authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of U.S. citizens in Yemen, and that they secretly launched missile, bomb and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians; because he exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform; because he exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party; because he exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the NSA permits the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.

Hedges, Chris. “Revisiting the case of Julian Assange and the reality of the “rule of law”.” Salon. June 15, 2021. https://www.salon.com/revisiting-the-case-of-julian-assange-and-the-reality-of-the-rule-of-law

There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Julian in the embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Julian is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration.

… the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.

#FreeAssange

USA: We need to make an example if Assange. How else do we stop journalists from exposing our war crimes?

People: Stop committing war crimes.

No one responsible for the murderous Iraq and Afghanistan wars, or the war crimes committed, has been prosecuted, let alone punished. Yet the publisher who exposed their cimes is facing a lifetime in jail.

If you are not fighting to #FreeAssange you are literally condoning the US administration’s defiance of the US constitution. You are part of the problem.

#FreePress

#FreePoliticalPrisoners

My Alma Mater is taking Koch Money

Tufts University’s new research center is funded by Koch money. As we see with George Mason University, their money never comes without strings. Tisch College has done great work in recent years dealing with voting security and voter engagement among the younger demographics through CIRCLE.

This is an incredibly concerning development.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/08/koch-influence-taints-new-tufts-based-think-thank-the-tentacles-of-the-mercatus-center.html

Democracy Means Voters Make Their Own Choice

Just chill out on people who might not be so sure about voting in this election. Use positive points of encouragement because every meme you post trying to shame voters is going to have the opposite effect. Shame is not a motivator. And trust me, the argument that not voting Democrat is a vote for DJT is simply not mathematically correct, so stop using that one.

I was incredibly impacted by Dre’s speech, when this first aired back in early 2017 and we were all still trying to make sense of what was happening. His coworkers admission that she voted for DJT because life got worse for her family during the 8 years of Obama, and then this speech at the climax, really helped me understand that the voting divide in the US is not as binary as the MSM makes it seem. Good people voted for DJT, and will do so again. If we don’t like it, we need to understand the people who feel left behind and provide real solutions for them. And we need to know that DJT is NOT an existential threat, because he can only get away with the shit he does because the GOP Senate lets him, and frankly, the Democrat-led House funds him. This is not a story of good versus evil.

There should be enough positive reasons you can come up with to advocate for the Democratic candidate. RBG is a good one. I want her to have a retirement. For me, I said that the current administration’s withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Treaty was the act that most endangers every American, as well as people worldwide. As much as I dislike neo-liberal politicians and their politics, if the Democratic candidate vows to return to the Iran treaty, they have my vote.

Bill Clinton Slights Black Leader at Another Black Leader’s Funeral

Why did Bill Clinton use the platform of a black man’s eulogy to defame another black man? You need to learn why Bill Clinton still feels so threatened by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael).

To understand, listen to Ture’s indictment of capitalism at 32:11 – 35:15:

Democrats who voted with GOP to reject 10% decrease in Defense budget

139 Democrats who voted with the GOP to reject a 10% decrease in the Defense budget yesterday. You see, the Democrats have a majority in the House, so if the Democrats wanted this to happen, they could’ve made it happen.

1. Adams
2. Aguilar
3. Allred
4. Axne
5. Bera
6. Beyer
7. Bishop
8. Blunt
9. Boyle
10. Brindisi
11. Brown
12. Brownley
13. Bustos
14. Butterfield
15. Carbajal
16. Carson
17. Cartwright
18. Case
19. Casten
20. Cicilline
21. Cisneros
22. Clyburn
23. Connolly
24. Cooper
25. Correa
26. Costa
27. Courtney
28. Cox
29. Craig
30. Crist
31. Crow
32. Cuellar
33. Cunningham
34. Davids (KS)
35. Davis
36. Dean
37. DeGette
38. DeLauro
39. DelBene
40. Delgado
41. Demings
42. Deutch
43. Engel
44. Escobar
45. Finkenauer
46. Fletcher
47. Foster
48. Gallego
49. Garamendi
50. Garcia (TX)
51. Golden
52. Gonzalez
53. Gottheimer
54. Haaland
55. Harder
56. Higgins
57. Himes
58. Horn
59. Horsford
60. Houlahan
61. Hoyer
62. Kaptur
63. Kilmer
64. Kim
65. Kind
66. Kirkpatrick
67. Krishnamoorthi
68. Kuster
69. Lamb
70. Langevin
71. Larsen
72. Larson (CT)
73. Lawrence
74. Lawson (FL)
75. Lee (NV)
76. Levin (CA)
77. Lipinski
78. Loebsack
79. Lowey
80. Luria
81. Malinowski
82. Maloney
83. McAdams
84. McBath
85. McCollum
86. McEachin
87. Morelle
88. Moulton
89. Mucarsel-Powell
90. Murphy (FL)
91. Norcross
92. O’Halleran
93. Panetta
94. Pappas
95. Pascrell
96. Perlmutter
97. Peters
98. Peterson
99. Phillips
100. Price (NC)
101. Quigley
102. Rice (NY)
103. Richmond
104. Rose (NY)
105. Rouda
106. Roybal-Allard
107. Ruiz
108. Ruppersberger
109. Ryan
110. Scanlon
111. Schneider
112. Schrader
113. Schrier
114. Scott (VA)
115. Scott (GA)
116. Sewell (AL)
117. Shalala
118. Sherrill
119. Sires
120. Slotkin
121. Smith (WA)
122. Soto
123. Spanberger
124. Stanton
125. Stevens
126. Suozzi
127. Swalwell
128. Thompson (CA)
129. Titus
130. Torres (CA)
131. Torres (NM)
132. Trone
133. Underwood
134. Veasey
135. Vela
136. Visclosky
137. Wasserman Schultz
138. Wexton
139. Wild

Anti-Semitism is the new McCarthy-style Smear Tactic

Let’s be clear: if you read the mainstream media claims that anti-semitism is a problem of both the Right and the Left, you are being hoodwinked. Anti-semitism is a right-wing problem full stop. The Left is not anti-semitic.

Since it is common amongst my friends on the Left to be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, we object to the hostility of the current Right-wing Netanyahu regime, but not Israel itself. The establishment, however, like to minimize the complexity of these positions into a simple claim that many of us hate Jews.

Our views on the human rights abuses by the state of Israel against the Palestinians does not equate to anti-semitism.

The New York Times recently ran a front-page article on anti-semitism that was riddled with so many inaccuracies, the fact that it showed no real balance in its thesis was not even the main reason that it should not have been published. Under the headline “Extremes of Right and Left Share Ancient Bias,” the article goes on to list dozens of instances of real terror towards Jews perpetrated by people espousing global right-wing, white nationalist principles. Many of instances resulted in physical violence towards and murder of Jews.

In order to justify their inflammatory headline, they needed examples of left-wing extremes. They offered two examples:

• A few Gilet Jaunes protesters angrily ranting at a despicable, racist, right-wing philosopher, a vocal Zionist who happens to be Jewish.
• Tweets of U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, for which she has apologized. (The New York Times has already needed to publish two retractions on factual errors in the way the reporter characterized Omar).

I’d love to ask the many who take the reporting of the New York Times as gospel: how can this be accepted as a reasonable parallel?

When a Conservative member of the UK parliament stood up and said that it would be disgraceful for the Government to allow the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn a voice in Brexit negotiations because “he is a Marxist and anti-semite,” I was stunned by the idiocy of this statement. Those without historical blindness will recall that the U.S. McCarthy witch hunts largely targeted Jews under the catch-all of being Communist sympathizers. Many Jews were leaders in the socialist movement before McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher succeeded in silencing discussion on socialist principles.

Does anyone else see this tragic irony?

I have followed the so-called accusations of Mr. Corbyn and none of the reasons cited give me any reason to believe he hates Jews. To their disgrace, the British news services have seemed to give in to the repetition of the accusation and simply report it as if it were fact.

Rachel Riley is a TV gameshow presenter in the UK and she has been very vocal attacking the Left, because of the abuse she is getting on Twitter as she engages in an active campaign to discredit the Labour party for institutional anti-semitism. She is grossly misinformed, using her celebrity to spread lies, and actively asking people to leave the Labour Party. Well, for supporters of the Labour Party, Riley’s style of attack is incredibly personal. She is campaigning against the party fighting to improve the lives of workers, the NHS, and human rights to name a few of their priorities. These are life and death issues for many in the UK, where the situation has gotten gravely dire during the ten years of Conservative-inflicted austerity.

I image such matters of survival might not be issues of concern for someone with a privileged Essex upbringing. But Riley needs to accept that her campaign to discredit Labour is directly damaging people. And while targeting Labour, she is silent on the horrifying hate rhetoric of the British Right. She ignores the studies that show anti-semitism is much more prevalent in the Conservative Party, including its leaders. She has also aligned herself with groups using aggressively questionable and sometimes violent tactics. 

Moreover, while publicizing her victimhood, Riley has been very irresponsible and borderline abusive herself. She fights to shutdown any who disagrees with her, not to engage or “inform”, but to silence. She has called Jewish dissident and one of the word’s leading intellectuals Noam Chomsky an anti-semite, and repeatedly did the same to any who challenge her false assertions, publicly naming people on Twitter. This included two incidents of teenage girls who have in turn been subject to death threats by Riley’s “supporters.”¹

• Riley was gleeful following an assault on Jeremy Corbyn a month ago, when he was punch in the head while meeting constituents.
• This is the same country in which Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a ‘Britain first’ white nationalist in 2016.²
• Just this week, British Army soldiers used a picture of Jeremy Corbyn for target practice.

Yet the British media continue to give her victimhood a platform without challenging the bias in her position.

Did Riley offer the Labour Leader an apology when she said Corbyn deserved the assault, or even take a moment to consider how she is contributing to this hate vitriol and possible outcomes because of it, if Ms. Cox’s murder is not a good enough example? 

It’s very common for Left wing politicians to be the target of smear by establishment media. After all, the establishment benefit from the status quo and fear changes proposed by the Left—they have a clear interest to vilify anyone on the Left, and it seems that rhetoric once uttered becomes a truth, and is repeated, and repeated.³ This is why we have to stop this discussion now. The Left wing is NOT anti-semitic. These claims are nothing short of simple McCarthyism to discredit dissent.

 

¹ https://medium.com/@shaunjlawson/enough-is-enough-rachel-riley-gnasherjew-and-the-political-weaponisation-of-antisemitism-5251bb1adec5

² https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/16/labour-mp-jo-cox-shot-in-west-yorkshire

³ As an aside: if you are an NYT reader, do not read the racist rhetoric of Bret Stephens. It is a disgrace that the NYT would publish his propaganda.

 

How the Media Continues to Fail Us

The public shares the blame for accepting a fourth estate that simply regurgitates US policy statements as fact, and stopped questioning established worldview post-Cold War.

WMD

16 Years Later, How the Press That Sold the Iraq War Got Away With It

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone. March 22, 2019

In an excerpt from his new book Hate Inc., Matt Taibbi looks back at how the media built new lies to cover their early ones.

“Defense budgets exploded. NATO expanded. The concept of a “peace dividend” faded to the point where few remember it ever existed. We now maintain a vast global archipelago of secret prisons, routinely cross borders in violation of international law using drones, and today have military bases in 80 countries, to support active combat operations in at least seven nations (most Americans don’t even know which ones).

“The WMD episode is remembered as a grotesque journalistic failure, one that led to disastrous war that spawned ISIS. But none of the press actors who sold the invasion seem sorry about the revolutionary new policies that error willed into being. They are specifically not regretful about helping create a continually-expanding Fortress America with bases everywhere that topples regimes left and right, with or without congressional or UN approval.”

So, who’s culpable? Who deserves blame?

Media

• New Yorker editor David Remnick, who later scoffed, “Nobody got that story completely right,” who wrote a piece called “Making the Case,” was a source of many of the most ferocious pro-invasion pieces
• The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, one of a number of WMD hawks who failed up after the war case fell apart.
• New York Times reporter named Judith Miller
• Washington Post (Fred Hiatt) and New York Times (Thomas Friedman) were key editorial-page drivers of the conflict
• MSNBC unhired Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura over their war skepticism
• CNN flooded the airwaves with generals and ex-Pentagon stoolies, and broadcast outlets ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS stacked the deck with 266 of 267 guests in a two week period who promoted the war.
• Prominent Democrat voices like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and even quasi-skeptic Nick Kristof (who denounced war critics for calling Bush a liar)
• Neoconservatives like Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan
• Winger goons like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter

Administration

• Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer
• Current administration official John Bolton
• Condoleezza Rice
• British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his foreign policy advisor David Manning, assistant to Blair spokesman Alistair Campbell named Phillip Bassett, Foreign Office communications chief John Williams and British intelligence officials like Sir John Scarlett

Exactly one major news organization refused to pick up pom-poms, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. All the other major outlets, whether they ostensibly catered to Republican or Democratic audiences, sold the war lie.

Max Follmer, The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right, HuffPost.com.
March 28, 2008, updated May 25, 2011.

And so it continues…

Venezuela

“We’re particularly bad when it comes to regime-change stories, and have seen this just recently.”

Multiple news organizations, including the New York Times, reported forces loyal to Venezuela’s Maduro (our latest regime change target) burned food aid sent by Western humanitarian convoys. It turned out the opposition burned the cargo. A CNN reporter said it was a “classic case of how misinformation spreads… from an unconfirmed rumor… to the mass media,” failing to realize the screwup started when a CNN crew claimed they saw the burning episode.

This slapstick idiocy was like something out of Evelyn Waugh. It was so bad the Onion ran a story called, “New York Times Corrects Story By Admitting They Burned Venezuelan Aid Convoy.”

Political Smears

This week Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote a smear job¹ of former-journalist David Sirota, recently hired as a speech writer for Bernie Sander’s 2020 presidential campaign. This hit job was published in The Atlantic. This is part of their ongoing political assassination of the US political Left by the mainstream establishment media. Even though the foundational arguments of the article have been discredited and its timeline determined to be fictional,² neither Dovere or The Atlantic have published a retraction. Even though Dovere himself states elsewhere that his recount is a “fuzzy overlap of Sirota’s unofficial work for Sanders with his presenting himself as an independent journalist.”³

 

¹  Edward-Isaac Dovere, Bernie Sanders Just Hired His Twitter Attack Dog, The Atlantic. March 19, 2019.
²  Glenn Greenwald. The Crux of the Accusations Against David Sirota From the Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere is False. The Intercept. March 23 2019.
³  Edward-Isaac Dovere, From a Bogus Website to Bernie Sanders’s Inner Circle, The Atlantic. March 22, 2019.

Do You Know the Powell Manifesto?

You want to. The Powell Memo was first published August 23, 1971. It outlined how the establishment class should undermine the power of the subversive New Left through business, academia and politics in order to maintain authority. It was a call-to-action for businessmen of the world to unite for their self-preservation. Read more…

 

Reclaim Democracy! The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto). April 3, 2004, modified August, 26, 2018.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The authors at Reclaim Democracy! offer a call to action:

One of the great frustrations we’ve had at Reclaim Democracy! is that foundations and funders whose work is thwarted by corporate domination have failed to learn from the success of these corporate institutions. They decline to invest in long-term education and culture-shifting that we and a small number of allied organizations work to achieve. Instead, they overwhelmingly focus on damage control, short-term goals and make social change organizations plead for funding every year, rather than making long-term investments in movement-building. This approach stands no chance of yielding the systemic change needed to reverse the trend of growing corporate dominance.

Patient nurturing of movement-building work remains the exception to the rule among foundations that purport to strengthen democracy and citizen engagement. The growing movement to revoke corporate personhood is supported almost entirely from contributions by individual (real) people like you. Please consider supporting the work of groups that devote themselves to this essential movement-building work, rather than short-term projects and results demanded by most foundations.

MOYERS & COMPANY. The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations. September 14, 2012.

In this excerpt from Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson explain the significance of the Powell Memorandum, a call-to-arms for American corporations written by Virginia lawyer (and future U.S. Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell to a neighbor working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Businessmen of the World, Unite!

The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping — a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980.[5] On every dimension of corporate political activity, the numbers reveal a dramatic, rapid mobilization of business resources in the mid-1970s.

USAF Strategic Command is Under Water

This is Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska. Home of the USAF Strategic Command. It’s under water due to flooding of the Missouri River. It is considered one of the most critical installations of the U.S. Air Force.

55th Wing Public Affairs / Published March 18, 2019, Official United States Air Force Website

https://www.afrc.af.mil/News/Article/1787869/offutt-afb-battling-flood-waters

This base is critical to US defense, and this flood could even be called an emergency. “This is an example of a vital threat to our national security from a climate-related disaster, and more of this kind of thing is likely in the future.”

It houses extremely high-value reconnaissance and command and control aircraft—massively expensive platforms that are essential to national security

It is the beating heart of STRATCOM, that oversees America’s strategic nuclear forces. In fact, a brand new command bunker, buried underground at the base, was just opened in January—which sounds far less than ideal considering water is now nearly covering the end of the base’s runway.

While climate change linked flooding has long threatened U.S. Naval bases like Norfolk, Virginia, Offutt is a reminder that climate change also poses risks to bases far from sea.

Remember Fukashima? You know what happens when nuclear arsenals are flooded? Fukashima is an ongoing crisis despite the refusal of the Japanese government to disclose the extent of the radiation that continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean.