September 23, 2014

Sept 20: Bernie Sanders - Bill McKibben - Naomi Klein - Kshama Sawant - Chris Hedges - Brian Lehrer

Published on Sep 21, 2014
The Talk before the Walk, the night before the 9/21 climate change march in NYC: Among issues raised, elected socialist Kshama Sawant declares saving the planet requires the public taking ownership of the public corporations, especially Big Oil, so they actually serve the public and the planet !!! plus: Will Bernie please run against Hillary? Bill MiKibben, Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Kshama Sawant, on a panel moderated by Brian Lehrer with a huge crowd at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Manhattan.
video, unedited, by Joe Friendly

September 23, 2014

Chicago’s Cop Watchers: Youth stand up to police violence

from In These Times:


Chicago’s Cop Watchers
Youth stand up to police violence.

BY KARI LYDERSEN


The spontaneous uprising in Ferguson over the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown has cast the national spotlight on racially charged police violence, a slower-burning but increasingly potent movement has been building in Chicago. Young activists and veteran organizers are working to demand accountability and justice for communities that routinely endure violence and harassment at the hands of the city’s police force.

In late August and early September, hundreds of people marched in a series of protests on the West Side against the fatal police shooting of 19-year-old Roshad McIntosh. As in Ferguson, community members are demanding the department release the name of the officer who shot McIntosh. Police say McIntosh pointed a gun at officers; community members have said he was unarmed and on his knees when he was killed.

Chicago has a long history of struggles between communities and police, from union members who fought with police in the 1800s to the Black Panthers in the 1960s to the 1990s-2000s movement against police torture—namely the alleged systematic use of electric shocks, beatings and other brutality to obtain confessions under former Police Commander Jon Burge. Burge is now in prison, serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for perjury and obstruction. But police brutality, misconduct and shootings continue to make headlines and roil communities in Chicago.

In late August, for example, prosecutors brought charges against a West Side police commander accused of shoving a gun down a man’s throat, holding a Taser to his groin and threatening to kill him during an incident in 2013. A lawsuit filed this spring involved officers videotaped beating and threatening a handcuffed, diminutive woman who managed a tanning salon being raided over prostitution allegations. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17147/chicagos_cop_watchers

September 23, 2014

Great (and currently apropos) quote from Hannah Arendt:

[font size="4"]“There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.”[/font] -- from The Origins of Totalitarianism

September 23, 2014

Your Beer Are Belong to Us !!!!

Giant Corporations Want to Control All of Your Beer

Monday, 22 September 2014 11:04
By Benjamin Dangl, Toward Freedom | Report


The variety of the craft-brewing wave sweeping the US makes drinking beer more fun than ever. Maine’s Flying Dog Brewery brews a beer from local oysters, and the Delaware-based Dogfish Head uses an ancient beer recipe they dug up from 2,700-year-old drinking vessels in the tomb of King Midas.

But as this trend spreads, there’s another revolution going on that’s concentrating most of the world’s beer into the hands of just a few mega-corporations. These kings of beer are riding the wave of craft brewing enthusiasm, buying up smaller breweries, and duping customers along the way.

“If you want to listen to Milli Vanilli, I suppose that’s a choice you get to make. Just know that you’re making that choice,” is how Greg Koch of Stone Brewing Company put it.

Take Blue Point, Long Island’s first microbrewery. A couple of home brewers started the company ten years ago, but this year, Anheuser-Busch InBev bought Blue Point for $24 million. John Hall, the founder of Chicago’s Goose Island beer, told a reporter in 2013, “Goose Island is a craft beer, period.” Yet it too was sold to AB InBev in 2011. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26351-giant-corporations-want-to-control-all-of-your-beer

September 23, 2014

Laura Flanders: It's Not the Carbon; It's the Capitalism!

by Laura Flanders


The big climate march in New York City and a big new book have concentrated attention on the climate. Enough denial and delay the marchers chant; This Changes Everything, says Naomi Klein in her latest call to action.

"It's not about carbon, it's about capitalism," says Klein.

I couldn't agree more. It's time we faced not just the symptoms, but the system that is cozying us up to catastrophe.

Our economic system of extract, exploit and profit is colliding with our eco-system, writes Klein and in case anyone is unclear about the consequences of that: when the ideology of infinite growth meets the reality of finite fuel and earth, reality is the odds-on favorite. We can't keep drilling and billing the future forever.

It's a relief to see people in the streets and a relief to see Crisis and Capitalism in the same sentence. We heard plenty about the crisis of capitalism during the last recession. What Klein keeps us thinking about is the crisis that is capitalism. After all, only people in crisis will work long hours for low pay and someone else's profit. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26372-it-s-not-the-carbon-it-s-the-capitalism

September 23, 2014

UN Report: Human-Caused Climate Disruption Is "Severe, Pervasive, Irreversible"

(Truthout) A recently released draft of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report concluded that anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is fully upon us, will dramatically worsen unless something is done immediately - and that something is on the level of a wartime response. The report noted that ACD is "severe ... pervasive ... irreversible."

The authors of the draft report used the word "risk" 351 times, "vulnerable" or "vulnerability" 61 times, and "irreversible" 48 times, and added: "The report found that companies and governments had identified reserves of these [fossil] fuels at least four times larger than could safely be burned if global warming is to be kept to a tolerable level."

The world is already on track to be at least 4 degrees Celsius warmer before the end of the century due to missed carbon targets, while incredibly, worry over short-term costs of investments to address the risks resulting from runaway ACD continues to paralyze any meaningful action toward its mitigation.

As though that's not enough bad news, the World Meteorological Organization announced in early September that global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached record levels in 2013, and are rising at their fastest rate since 1984. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/26297-un-report-human-caused-global-warming-is-severe-pervasive-irreversible

September 23, 2014

Juan Cole: Shock & Awe In Syria: It never Works

By Juan Cole

The London pan-Arab daily “Hayat” (Life) reports this morning on the air strikes conducted on ISIL positions in Raqqah, Syria, by the United States and several Arab allies.

The Syrian government acknowledged that the US gave fair warning it would bomb Raqqah to the Syrian ambassador to the UN. That is, the US may not militarily be coordinating with Syria, but it does inform the regime of enough information to avoid a shoot-down.

Not only ISIL positions but also some targets of the Jabhat al-Nusra or Succor Front (the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) were struck by the US and its allies. Once you enter a war, it doesn’t stay limited.

The US deployed not only fighter jets but also drone strikes and Tomahawk missiles, presumably fired from a destroyer from the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. It targeted suspected arms depots, the mayor’s mansion (used by ISIL as its HQ in Raqqah), and checkpoints, among other things. Dozens of ISIL fighters were said to be killed and more wounded. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.juancole.com/2014/09/shock-never-works.html

September 23, 2014

"After each war there is a little less democracy left to save." ......

....... -- Brooks Atkinson


"Blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed." -- Bruce Springsteen


"The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment." -- Chris Hedges


"How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?" -- Dwight D. Eisenhower


"All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished." -- Eleanor Roosevelt


"History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse." -- Eric Alterman


"No war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people." -- Eugene Debs


"War is just a racket...I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else." -- Smedley Butler


"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -- George Orwell


"War is a bankruptcy of policy." -- Hans Van Seeckt


"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H.L. Mencken


"How can you make a war on terror if war itself is terrorism?" -- Howard Zinn


"The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution." -- John F. Kennedy


"You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!" -- Leo Tolstoy


"We have guided missiles and misguided men." -- Martin Luther King Jr.


"It's very common for the victims to understand a system better than the people who are holding the stick." -- Noam Chomsky


"All warfare is based on deception." -- Sun Tzu


"He that is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." -- Thomas Paine


http://antiwar.com/quotes.php

September 23, 2014

Chris Hedges: The Coming Climate Revolt

Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?” The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The event, moderated by Brian Lehrer, occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City.

We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.

We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.

The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane.

.....snip.....

If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we begin to build mass movements that carry out repeated acts of civil disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes we must do, the corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the way all calcified states react. It will use the security and surveillance apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all dissent with force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in place to, with the flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under martial law. When acts of mass civil disobedience begin on Monday morning with Flood Wall Street and later with Occupy the U.N., the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the Occupy movement, reveal itself. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_coming_climate_revolt_20140921

September 22, 2014

Robert Reich: Why Ordinary People Bear Economic Risks and Donald Trump Doesn’t

Why Ordinary People Bear Economic Risks and Donald Trump Doesn’t
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2014


Thirty years ago, on its opening day in 1984, Donald Trump stood in a dark topcoat on the casino floor at Atlantic City’s Trump Plaza, celebrating his new investment as the finest building in Atlantic City and possibly the nation.

Last week, the Trump Plaza folded and the Trump Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy, leaving some 1,000 employees without jobs.

Trump, meanwhile, was on twitter claiming he had “nothing to do with Atlantic City,” and praising himself for his “great timing” in getting out of the investment.

In America, people with lots of money can easily avoid the consequences of bad bets and big losses by cashing out at the first sign of trouble.

The laws protect them through limited liability and bankruptcy. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://robertreich.org/post/98079430765