U.S. is the Worst Police State in the World – By the Numbers
This article by Glen Ford is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
When U.S. corporate media operatives use the term “police state,” they invariably mean some other country. Even the so-called “liberal” media, from Democracy Now to the MSNBC menagerie, cannot bring themselves to say “police state” and the “United States” without putting the qualifying words “like” or “becoming” in the middle. The U.S. is behaving “like” a police state, they say, or the U.S. is in danger of “becoming” a police state. But it is never a police state. Since these privileged speakers and writers are not themselves in prison – because what they write and say represents no actual danger to the state – they conclude that a U.S. police state does not, at this time, exist.
Considering the sheer size and social penetration of its police and imprisonment apparatus, the United States is not only a police state, but the biggest police state in the world, by far: the police state against whose dimensions all other police systems on Earth must be measured.
By now, even the most insulated, xenophobic resident of the Nebraska farm belt knows that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world. He might not know that 25 percent of prison inmates in the world are locked up in the U.S., or that African Americans comprise one out of every eight of the planet’s prisoners. But, that Nebraska farmer is probably aware that America is number one in the prisons business. He probably approves. God bless the police state.
For the American media, including lots of media that claim to be of the Left, it is axiomatic that China is a police state. And maybe, by some standards, it is. But, according to United Nations figures, China is 87th in the world in the proportion of its people who are imprisoned. China is a billion people bigger than the United States – more than four times the population – yet U.S. prisons house in excess of 600,000 more people than China does. The Chinese prison population is just 70 percent of the American Gulag. That’s quite interesting because, non-whites make up about 70 percent of U.S. prisons. That means, the Black, brown, yellow and red populations of U.S. prisons number roughly the same as all of China’s incarcerated persons. Let me emphasize that: The American People of Color Gulag is as large as the entire prison population of China, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people.
However, police states must be measured by conditions behind the bars, as well as raw numbers of inmates. And, by that standard, the American Gulag is even more monstrous.
Civilized people now recognize that solitary confinement is a form of torture. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, reports that solitary confinement beyond 15 days at a stretch crosses the line of torture, yet, as Al Jazeera recently reported, it is typical for hundred of thousands of U.S. prisoners to spend 30 or 60 days in solitary at a stretch. Twenty thousand are held in perpetual isolation in so-called supermax prisons – that is, they exist in a perpetual state of torture. Studies now show that, all told, 80,000 U.S. prisoners are locked up in solitary on any given day.That’s as many tortured people as the entire prison system of Germany, or of England, Scotland and Wales, combined.
If that is not a police state, then no such thing exists on planet Earth.
How to have an opinion on women’s reproductive rights
This article is re-posted from PR Watch. For those interested in opposing fracking in West Michigan you can contact Mutual Aid GR grpeoplesassembly@gmail.com and http://banmichiganfracking.org/.
The future of New York’s water supplies and the health of its millions of citizens hang in the balance as Governor Andrew Cuomo decides whether to end the state’s moratorium on new wells to drill for “natural” gas through the controversial industrial process of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Activists estimated that over two thousand concerned citizens joined the march in Albany Monday to try to persuade Cuomo not to lift the moratorium — statewide or in some counties — a decision expected to be announced some time after Labor Day.
The process of fracking involves pumping large quantities of fresh water, along with chemicals and sand, into shale formations in order to crack the rock and extract gas. The “proprietary” blend of chemicals used by corporations in this process is largely kept hidden from the public, but the formulae that have been analyzed have been revealed to contain numerous toxic substances, including known carcinogens and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Fracking has the documented potential to contaminate drinking water sources, and has been shown to contaminate both water and land — in addition to spoiling millions of gallons of fresh water as part of the drilling process. Fracking has rapidly expanded across the U.S. as new technology has allowed the drilling to cost companies less money, plus the relative lack of regulation has also allowed corporations to tap some aquifers and rivers without paying any usage fees, and some drillers cheaply “dispose” of the resulting contaminated water by injecting it into the ground, a practice that a new study suggests can cause earthquakes. New York has been heavily targeted by the industry because the state sits atop a piece of the Marcellus Shale formation.
As part of a growing global resistance movement to fracking, New Yorkers marched Monday to the state capitol building and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Protestors also delivered a pledge, signed by thousands, calling for a ban to fracking in New York. The pledge — which noted that any approval of fracking would go against the advice of numerous scientists, economists, and medical professionals — stated that the risks associated with fracking cannot be mitigated through regulation. Those who signed the pledge promised to engage in non-violent acts of protest in the event that the Cuomo’s administration allows new wells to be fracked in the state.
Industry Calls Protestors “Extreme Fringe,” a Claim Sen. Avella Rejects as “Laughable”
The expected decision from state officials will conclude a regulatory and environmental review, which has been heavily criticized by state residents who accuse government regulators of having an overly cozy relationship with the gas industry. One example of this collusion came from emails obtained by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which found that the New York Department of Environmental Conservation gave the industry early access to a set of proposed permit and regulations for fracking last year, access that was not given to the general public to weigh in on and help shape.
In an article by a local news outlet, an industry spokesperson, John Conrad, labeled Monday’s protestors as part of an “extreme fringe.” Conrad operates a consulting firm, Conrad Geoscience Corp., and is a member of the “Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York.”
New York state Sen. Tony Avella, who has pushed for a ban on fracking in the Empire State, told the Center for Media and Democracy that Conrad’s claim was “laughable” and that there “is nothing fringe about the everyday citizens, neighbors, farmers, scientists and environmentalists” who have expressed their legitimate concerns about fracking.
John Armstrong, of the organization “Frack Action,” one of the 60-some organizations that organized the demonstration, said that the state’s review has neglected to take into account independent reviews of the environmental and health risks that fracking poses. “There is nothing radical about citizens aligning themselves with groups like the New York Breast Cancer Network and American Nurses Association, some of the major groups which have come out against fracking,” he said.
The protest, which included street theatre and an effigy of Cuomo with an angel and devil on either shoulder, came on the heels of other recent demonstrations directed at the governor. Hundreds of concerned residents showed up at a policy summit Cuomo recently held in New York City and at “Governor’s Day” at the State Fair, both last week.
Industry Front Group Called “Energy in Depth” Attacks Critics
As the gas industry touts the number of jobs it claims it will create in New York, in neighboring Pennsylvania an estimated 70 percent of gas rig jobs are going to people from out of state, according to Laura Fisher, senior vice president of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.
But with its deep pockets, the industry has been able to push its talking points not just on its economic claims but also on its assertion that fracking is “clean” and “safe.” One of the ways they have done this is through Energy in Depth (EID), a front group for gas companies that is connected to the “American Petroleum Institute” and the “Independent Petroleum Association of America.”
As documented by blogger Dory Hippauf, EID consists of several interrelated fronts in several states, with ties to various PR firms, gas companies, and political lobbyists. The group has worked extensively to try discredit those who express concerns about fracking, which has included targeting the New York Times and the Oscar-nominated documentary film “Gasland,” and its director Josh Fox.
Fox recently released a new short film that exposes oil and gas industry internal documents which show that some companies have privately expressed concerns about well safety and water contamination, despite the industry’s PR campaign to claim the public’s concerns are misplaced. In response, EID attacked the film, but failed to address the leaked documents. Fox has compared EID to an “attack dog” that “drank too much Red Bull.” Fox was at Monday’s rally, along with other well-known individuals such as environmentalist Bill McKibben and actress Debra Winger.
EID’s tactics in its efforts to discredit concerned citizens were highlighted by one of the speakers at the rally, acclaimed author and ecologist Sandra Steingraber who has been a leading voice on the risks that fracking presents to New York communities. In its blogs, EID has made personal attacks on Steingraber, for example, calling her the “most emotional of all anti-natural gas opponents on the battlefield,” and commenting on her prior cancer diagnosis, the fact that she wears makeup, and the size of her home, as well as mocking her last name, in addition to other comments irrelevant to the scientific studies she uses to defend her concerns about fracking.
“Hey, gas industry: I am not afraid of you. And that’s not because I’m fearless. It’s because I am so scared for the future of my children on a fracked-up planet that I have no fear left over for you,” Steingraber said.
In her speech, Steingraber called the growing resistance towards fracking the “greatest human rights movement in New York State since abolition and suffrage” and said that “I choose to believe in a vision of an unfractured New York that turns its back on nineteenth-century thinking and fossil fuels and leads the world in the creation of a clean energy economy.” Sandra held a sign made by her son which read “I Don’t Want to Move to Vermont,” a neighboring state that has banned fracking, like Germany and France. Steingraber is author of “Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.”
Resistance to Fracking Is Growing and Some Turn to Direct Action
Monday’s demonstration in Albany is part of a widespread, global movement against fracking that is gaining momentum. In June, Pennsylvania citizens occupied a mobile home camp to temporarily stave off eviction of families that were told their land was being sold to a private water corporation which will pump millions of gallons of water from the Susquehanna River to be used in fracking. In July, Ohio citizens blocked access to a fracking injection well, shortly after 1,000 gallons of chemical-laden fracking wastewater spilled along five miles of road in a nearby residential area. In the same month that activists blockaded entry to a drill site in a Pennsylvania state forest, UK residents chained themselves to the fence surrounding an exploratory drilling site in Chesterfield, among other actions.
This summer, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon also launched “Artists Against Fracking,” which includes over 130 artist who have called on Cuomo to ban fracking, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Lady Gaga, Zooey Deschanel, The Strokes, The Flaming Lips and Beastie Boys.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times Tuesday, Lennon highlights the disinformation campaign funded by the oil and gas industry, noting that America’s Natural Gas Alliance has spent $80 million in PR campaign that includes the help of Hill and Knowlton, a PR firm that in the 1950s and 1960s tried to convince Americans that tobacco had no links to cancer.
“Natural gas has been sold as clean energy. But when the gas comes from fracturing bedrock with about five million gallons of toxic water per well, the word ‘clean’ takes on a disturbingly Orwellian tone. Don’t be fooled. Fracking for shale gas is in truth dirty energy. It inevitably leaks toxic chemicals into the air and water. Industry studies show that 5 percent of wells can leak immediately, and 60 percent over 30 years. There is no such thing as pipes and concrete that won’t eventually break down. It releases a cocktail of chemicals from a menu of more than 600 toxic substances, climate-changing methane, radium and, of course, uranium,” Lennon said in his op-ed titled “Destroying Precious Land for Gas.”
The Possibility of Political Consequences for Giving In to the Industry
According to one of the organizers of Monday’s demonstration in New York, Corinne Rosen with Food and Water Watch, fracking fluid and its waste are not only laden with toxics but a decision by the governor to approve fracking in the state could be toxic to Cuomo’s reputation, who is an otherwise generally popular governor.
“People are going to hold the governor accountable for this decision. The fact that he sees people coming to these rallies, and calling his office may be why the decision has not yet been made,” Rosen said. “You see regular New Yorkers, who might not be typically involved in these types of issues, standing up because the health of their families is at stake.”
Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On
This article by Bruce A. Dixon is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
Too much agreement between Republicans and Democrats has always been bad news for those at the bottom of America’s class and racial totem poles.
Back in 1875, Frederick Douglass observed that it took a war among the whites to free his people from slavery. What then, he wondered, would an era of peace among the whites bring us? He already knew the answer. Louisiana had its Colfax Massacre two years earlier. A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic bombings, shootings, mutilations, murders and threats had driven African Americans from courthouses, city halls, legislatures, from their own farms, businesses and private properties and from the voting rolls across the South. They didn’t get the vote back for 80 years, and they never did get the land back. But none of that mattered because on the broad and important questions of those days there was at last peace between white Republicans and white Democrats — squabbles around the edges about who’d get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game.
Like Douglass, the shallow talking heads who cover the 2012 presidential campaign on corporate media have noticed out loud the remarkable absence of disagreement between Republican and Democratic candidates on many matters. They usually mention what the establishment likes to call “foreign policy.” But the list of things Republicans and Democrat presidential candidates agree on, from coddling Wall Street speculators, protecting mortgage fraudsters and corporate wrongdoers to preventing Medicare For All to so-called “foreign policy,” “free trade,” “the deficit” “clean coal and safe nuclear power” and “entitlement reform,” is clearly longer and more important than the few points of mostly race and style, upon which they disagree.
| 15 | Although unemployment is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression, the federal government should NOT enact any sort of WPA-style program to put millions of people back to work. Under Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, Depression-era unemployment was tackled head on by direct federal hiring to dig subways, build roads, schools, parks, sewers, recreational facilities and public buildings. Oblivious of this history, Democrat Barack Obama maintains that only the private sector can or should create jobs. |
| 14 | Medicare, Medicaid and social security are “entitlements” that need to be cut to relieve what they call “the deficit.” Republicans have been on record for this since forever, though they claim not to want to mess with the Medicare people already over 65 are getting. One of the first acts of the Obama presidency was to appoint a bipartisan panel stacked with “deficit hawks” like Republican Allan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles to recommend raising retirement ages and cutting back Medicaid, Medicare and social security, and pass a law directing Congress to have an up or down no-amendments vote on its recommendations. Fortunately the “cat food commission”, as it was called, was deadlocked and offered none. But Obama and top Democrats, most recently House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi continue to express their readiness for some kind of “grand compromise” with Republicans on this issue. |
| 13 | Climate change treaties and negotiations that might lead to them should be avoided at all costs. The differences between them are only style. Democrats admit that climate change exists and is man-made, Republicans say it’s a myth. But both ignored the Kyoto protocol and Obama like Bush before him, has worked tirelessly to delay, derail and boycott any actual talks that might lead to constructive international climate change agreements. |
| 12 | NAFTA was such a great thing it really should be extended to Central and South America and the entire Pacific rim. Again, there are differences in style. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama sometimes mumbled about renegotiating parts of NAFTA, and such. But even before the primaries were done, press reports had him assuring the Canadian government this was only campaign rhetoric, raw meat for the rubes. In four years he has pushed NAFTA-like “free trade” corporate rights agreements with South Korea, most of Central America and is now secretly hammering out something called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. |
| 11 | Banksters and Wall Street speculators deserve their bailouts and protection from criminal liability, but underwater and foreclosed homeowners deserve nothing. Well, maybe not exactly nothing. Republicans think underwater homeowners deserve blame for forcing banksters to offer millions of fraudulent high-interest loans were then re-sold to investors around the world. Democrats think underwater homeowners deserve empty promises of help that never quite arrives for most of the foreclosed, the about-to-be foreclosed, their families and communities. But both agree on free money for banksters and speculators but no moratorium on foreclosures and no criminal investigations of mortgage and securities fraud. |
| 10 | Palestinians should be occupied, dispossessed and ignored. Iran should be starved and threatened from all sides. Cuba should be embargoed, and Americans prohibited from going there to see what its people have done in a half century free of Yankee rule. Black and brown babies and their parents, relatives and neighbors should be bombed with drones in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and similar places. The politicians and corporate commentators have a misleading name for this. They call it “foreign policy.” The realistic term for it is global empire. |
| 9 | Africa should be militarized, destabilized, plundered and where necessary, invaded by proxy armies like those of Rwanda, Ethiopia, Burundi or Kenya, or directly by Western air and ground forces, as in Libya. President Georgia Bush announced the formation of AFRICOM, the US military command for the continent which has officially swallowed all US civilian diplomatic presence. But only a black US president, even under the cover of “humanitarian war” could have invaded an African nation and openly dispatched special forces to Central Africa. |
| 8 | US Presidents can kidnap citizens of their own or any nation on earth from anyplace on the planet for torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial or murder them and neighboring family and bystanders at will. To be perfectly fair, there are distinctions between Republicans and Democrats here that don’t amount to differences. Republicans Cheney and Bush got their lawyers to say these things were OK and did them. Democrat Obama got Congress to enact “laws” giving these acts a veneer of fake legality, something a Republican probably could not have done. |
| 7 | Oil and energy companies, and other mega-polluters must be freed to drill offshore almost everywhere, and permitted to poison land and watersheds with fracking to achieve “energy independence”. The Republicans say “drill baby drill” but it seems only Democrats can chill out enough supposed “environmentalists” to make this happen. Obama campaigned on restricting offshore drilling four years ago, and reversed himself just before the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. The White House cooperated with BP in lying to the public about the extent of the disaster and has shielded BO from paying anything like the value of actual damages incurred to livelihoods, human lives and the environment. |
| 6 | The FCC should not and must not regulate telecoms to ensure that poor and rural communities have access to internet, or to guarantee network neutrality. Republicans have always been in favor of digital redlining, against network neutrality. Barack Obama claimed on the campaign trail he’d take a back seat to nobody in guaranteeing network neutrality. But he appointed as FCC chair a man who helped write the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1995, which gave away the government-built internet backbone to a handful of immensely powerful telecoms like AT&T and Comcast, and flatly reversed himself on network neutrality. The Department of Justice was forced to stop the ATT-T-Mobile merger by a storm of public outrage, but approved the Comcast-NBC deal. |
| 5 | Of course there really ARE such things as “clean coal” and “safe nuclear energy”. Again these are things Republicans have always pretended to believe. At the 2008 Democratic convention Democrat Barack Obama joined them, declaring he intended to be the president of “clean coal and safe nuclear energy.” Obama is building a wave of 33 nuclear plants across the country, the first two in mostly black and poor communities of Georgia and South Carolina where leaky existing nukes are causing cancer epidemics. The people know these things are myths. But Republican and Democratic candidates for office, all the way down to state and county officials seem not to. |
| 4 | Immigrants must be jailed and deported in record numbers. To be really fair, one should note that on this issue Republicans talk a mean game about sending them all back and jailing tens or hundreds of thousands along the way. But only President Obama has walked the walk, deporting over a million immigrants in his term in office, often with little or no due process and after housing many for months in atrocious privatized immigration prisons. |
| 3 | No Medicare For All. Forget about it eliminating the Medicare age requirement so that all Americans would qualify.. Republicans never wanted Medicare even for seniors, let alone everybody. Six or seven years ago Illinois State Senator Obama was telling audiences that if they elected Democrats to Congress, the Senate and the White House, they’d get single payer health care. But once in office he excluded Medicare for All from the proposals on the table, and enacted a national version of Massachusetts RomneyCare, requiring everybody to purchase private health insurance or be penalized. |
| 2 | No minimum wage increases for you, no right to form a union, no right to negotiate or strike if you already have a union, and no enforcement or reform of existing labor laws. Again, Republicans have always opposed minimum wage laws. Obama promised to boost the minimum wage his first two years in office, while he still had majorities in the House and Senate. But he didn’t do this, or pass legislation beefing up the right to organize unions, which has been eroded under Democrat and Republican administrations alike. |
| 1 | The 40 year war on drugs must continue, and even mention of the prison state is unthinkable. There are 2.3 million people in US prisons and jails today, a per capita total that beats the world. Politicians of both parties wag their fingers in multiple directions. But as Michelle Alexander points out, if the US prison population were rolled back to say, only 1 million, the level it was about 1980, this would mean one million jobs, as contractors, sheriffs, cops, bailiffs, judges and functionaries of all kinds would have to go out and find real jobs. |
The rabbit hole goes still deeper. We didn’t have to stop at these fifteen points of Democrat-Republican agreement, but you get the idea. Just as in Frederick Douglass’s day, the more Democrats and Republicans agree, the worse it is for the rest of us.
There was a time when black America had its own principles, and formed the immovable leftmost rock of the American polity. But in the 21st century, that rock has been dissolved by a tide of corporate money. With the rise of a cohort of black corporate Democrats and a right wing black Democrat in the White House there is no longer even any vaguely leftish influence on Democratic party politics. The House Progressive Caucus is the biggest in Congress, with over seventy members, but is powerless and irrelevant. Except for stylistic flourishes, the music they listen to and the color of some faces, the differences between Republicans and Democrats seem to exist mostly in political marketing campaigns and inside our own heads.
New Video kicks off campaign to challenge the US prison system
The following information is re-posted from Brave New Films.
Think about this. The United States is spending over $200 billion a year on a justice system that locks up more people than any country on earth. We have more prisoners than China. More than Russia. More than anyone. This colossal system is hitting our communities with staggering financial and human costs.
That’s why we’re launching a major new campaign here at Brave New Foundation — like Koch Brothers Exposed, Rethink Afghanistan, Walmart, Outfoxed, and others we’ve done. This campaign is called Beyond Bars. It aims to change Americans’ thinking and inspire action through short videos and shareable graphics exposing the U.S. system of mass incarceration.
This system is a beast — gobbling up resources that should be going to communities. WATCH THE VIDEO.
Beyond Bars will investigate corporations that profit off incarceration and politicians that use “tough on crime” rhetoric to scare voters. But we won’t just expose the negative; we’ll also show better ways to achieve public safety: things like prevention, rehabilitation, and job opportunity. Such solutions would save untold billions of dollars every year while making communities safer.
Amway, part of coalition that opposes Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs ballot initiative
Last week, MLive ran a story with the focus on West Michigan groups that oppose the Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs November ballot proposal.
The story tells readers that Amway and other West Michigan businesses and business associations are formally opposed to the Michigan constitution mandating that 25% of Michigan’s energy must be renewable energy by 2025. This business group believes that is a bad approach and that it will not result in the amount of jobs the ballot initiative proponents are claiming.
The only source used in the MLive article was an Amway spokesperson, although the article does link to a previous article about Ottawa County Democrats who support the ballot initiative.
The MLive article fails on many levels. First, it does not explore the main reasons for organized opposition to the November ballot initiative. Anyone who knows the philosophical nature of the Chamber of Commerce and many businesses like Amway, would know that they are opposed to most forms of government intervention in the economy. This is an ideological issue, which the MLive writer does not acknowledge or explore.
Second, there is no indication that this is an organized effort to opposed the Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs November ballot initiative. The West Michigan entities identified in the MLive article are part of a coalition known as CARE – Clean, Affordable, Renewable, Energy. This coalition is made up of more than just West Michigan businesses and business association, including:
• Acemco Inc. • Agape Plastics • Amway • Betz Industries • Eagle Alloy • The Frederick Douglass Foundation of Michigan • Grand Rapids Area Chamber • Great Lakes Die Cast • Master Finish Co. • Metal Components, LLC. • Montcalm Alliance • Montcalm Commission on Aging • Montcalm County Panhandle Area Chamber of Commerce • Muskegon Lakeshore Chamber of Commerce • Rothbury Steel • Steve’s Antique Auto Repair • Sunrise Acre Farms • Trendway Corp. • Wyoming-Kentwood Area Chamber of Commerce.
In addition, there are numerous current and former politicians in Michigan who oppose this ballot initiative such as Ken Sikkema, Frank Kelly, Bill Schuette and local state Rep. Dave Agema. Agema has this to say about his opposition to the Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs ballot initiative:
This will lead to huge increases in your energy bills. Once again, someone will be subsidized with your tax dollars making huge profits at your expense and not producing the jobs they claim. It’s an artificial stimulus program that will not work. Since our energy costs will skyrocket, businesses will locate elsewhere to avoid these costs. Instead of creating jobs, we’ll lose them. This does not create an environment for businesses to want to come to Michigan. This is a recipe for lost jobs and higher energy costs for all involved. Follow the money and watch who gains.
Lastly, the MLive article fails readers in that is does not seek out any independent or third party voices/perspectives. The lack of a third perspective limits the debate to whether or not to support this particular ballot initiative and omits any possible discussion about any serious energy policy that might operate outside of the current industrial mindset. Serious environmental consequences are not even part of how the debate between these two opposing forces has been framed.
Pro-business group releases second propaganda video
Earlier this year we told you about a video that went viral on Earth Day. Starting last week, the group that produced the first video, Free Market America, has released a second video entitled We Fight.
This second video from Free Market America was designed to coincide with the beginning of the GOP Convention in Florida and follows in the footsteps of Frank Capra’s series of WWII propaganda films with the title Why We Fight.
The video begins with a montage of comments from US presidents and then the narrator begins by tossing about terms like liberty and freedom. The narrator also makes the point that “we live in turbulent times and that “our generation is being called not to win a revolution, but to preserve one,” while the footage shows the Founding Fathers.
The propaganda spot says that this century has the potential to be another American Century, without any clarification or context. That some writers refer to the 20th Century as the American Century is because of the political and economic power of the US. However, most apologists for the US will not acknowledge that the US peak of political and economic power came at the expense of the rest of the world and many of its own people. The 20th Century saw numerous US wars, invasions and occupations, primarily motivated by economic interests, whether it was the CIA coup in Iran in 1953 or the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. For more details see A Century of US Military Interventions from Wounded Knee to Libya.
At one point in the video when the narrator is again pontificating about liberty and how there are some that do not understand how liberty can be lost, the video footage shows occupy actions around the country, a clear jab at this grassroots movement disgusted with the system of power in this country.
The video ends with several “regular people” saying that they will fight, some for freedom, some for liberty and some for the free market. It is telling that it ends with someone saying they will fight for the free market, since this is what the group behind the video is all about. We Fight really means, we fight to maintain the US system of power.
The Free Market America is instructive and worth watching, not only to see the propaganda message they wish to inject into the public consciousness just prior to the election, but also the media production techniques and the meta-narrative they use, which make for a useful example of contemporary propaganda.
We’re #1: US sets record arms sales in 2011
This article is re-posted from the Center for Public Integrity.
2011 was a very good year for U.S. arms sales, with more than triple the business from the year before. 
According to a new report to Congress, worldwide sales of U.S. weapons last year added up to $66.3 billion. That accounts for more than three-quarters of 2011 arms sales worldwide, which is “the highest single year agreements total in the history of the U.S. arms export program.”
The report was prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) as part of their annual study of arms sales.
In 2010, the U.S. authorized $21.4 billion in sales, which led CRS to describe the jump as “extraordinary.” In terms of overall sales, Russia was distant second to the United States, having moved $4.8 billion. The previous record was in 2009, when the U.S. did almost $31 billion in sales.
Since the start of 2008, 81.4 percent of U.S. arms sales agreements have gone to the Middle East while 16.04 percent have gone to Asian countries.
In the report, CRS notes that sales to developing nations were a major driver in lifting 2011 U.S. sales, jumping from $14.3 billion in 2010 to $56.3 billion in 2011. CRS points to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as countries that bolstered their arms purchasing in 2011, which CRS says could be linked to concerns over Iran. Saudi Arabia purchased more than $33 billion in arms from the U.S., including 84 new F-15 jets and upgrades for 70 older models.
The Saudis were not alone in purchasing weaponry in the region. The United Arab Emirates purchased 16 Chinook helicopters for just under $1 billion total; Oman shelled out $1.6 billion for 18 F-16 fighters. Egypt added land forces, spending $1 billion on M1 Abrams tanks, a sale that the Pentagon has used to argue for freezing domestic production of the Army’s signature land vehicle.
But “the U.S. arms agreements with Saudi Arabia were extraordinary,” concluded the report, as they “represent, by far, the largest share of U.S. agreements with the world or the developing world in 2011.”
The selling of arms to Saudi Arabia is not without controversy. As the Center reported in June, the country has continued to receive steady flows of arms from the United States despite being on a State Department watchlist for human rights violations. Since the start of 2004, Saudi Arabia has purchased $75.7 billion in arms.
Another country which has received weapons despite human rights abuse concerns is the tiny nation of Bahrain. Earlier this year, the Center reported that the U.S. lifted a freeze on arm sales that had been put into effect due to human rights abuses during the “Arab Spring” uprising. Like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain is a major strategic partner for the U.S. The Persian Gulf nation received $80.4 million in military financing from the U.S. between 2005 and 2010 and is home to a 60-acre U.S. naval base which houses the U.S. Fifth Fleet.
No law requires that U.S. arms be exported only to countries that the State Department — in its annual human rights assessments — determines are treating their citizens well. Instead, a more narrow restriction known as the so-called “Leahy Law,” named for author Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and passed in 1997, prohibits U.S. assistance to specific military and police units deemed responsible for human rights abuses.
While the United States was clearly the leader in weapons transactions, a number of other countries took part in the global arms trade, including France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy — traditional Western European arms suppliers. China has also begun to rise to prominence in this area, although they still lag significantly behind the U.S. and Russia.
Immigrant Rights groups in Michigan are taking action
Two different immigrant rights groups in Michigan are taking action on behalf of immigrants who are faced with increasing public hostility and abuse by the system.
In West Michigan, the group Justice For Our Neighbors (JFON) is offering resources, along with other agencies, for young immigrants under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) act. The group, known as Michigan Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (“MCIRR”), developed a two-step process of intake sessions followed by larger form preparation workshops.
Each agency will use a common intake form and work together to host the workshops. Applicants need to participate in the intake session to ensure they understand the risks and benefits of their application. The participants will meet with an attorney to confirm they are eligible for DACA. There is a nominal fee for an intake and the workshop. Costs for the intake is $30, but JFON’s intake is free of charge (by appointment only).
On Thursday, September 20th, JFON will host its first intake session at their Holland Clinic Site. To make an appointment, find information about this event, or to view a DACA information sheet, visit their website www.jfonwestmichigan.org.
To find a comprehensive list of DACA events across Michigan go to www.michiganimmigrant.org.
The other major news in immigrant rights has to do with the issue of border patrol abuses. The Michigan Alliance for Immigrant Rights sent out this media release yesterday:
Today, immigrant advocate groups and 11 members of Congress called for an independent investigation into reports of abuse at the hands of Border Patrol. Congressman Hansen Clarke’s office represented the other U.S. Representatives and joined immigrant groups representing states from New York to Washington requesting Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of Border Patrol practices. 
“When Border Patrol targets people based solely on their race or religion, rather than their behavior, they are weakening our national security and undermining our civil rights,” said Dawud Walid, Executive Director Council on American-Islamic Relations – Michigan, “We need Border Patrol to play by the rules, and act like professionals.”
The letter calling for the GAO investigation of Border Patrol comes after a number of reports of abuse by Border Patrol ranging from detaining people based on nothing but their skin color or apparent religion to denying food and water to those detained. Most notable among these reports is a a two-part PBS “Need to Know” documentary that includes eyewitness testimony of from a Border Patrol agent whistle blower . ”After years of internal investigations, it’s become clear that Border Patrol can’t police itself. Even former agents have come forward to confirm the problems with abuse,” Ryan Bates, Director, Alliance for Immigrants Rights – Michigan. “It’s time for an independent watchdog to help get Border Patrol under control, which is why we’re so glad that eleven Members of Congress have called on the GAO to begin an investigation.”
The media release also cites several recent reports of border patrol abuse, such as A Culture of Cruelty and the One America Northern Border Report.
This Day in Resistance History: IWW members sentenced to 20 years in 1918 for “obstructing the war”
Despite constitutional claims to supporting free speech, the US federal government has a long history of criminalizing speech, especially during times of war.
The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 as a means of prosecuting anyone who publicly opposed World War I, which included opposing military recruitment and interfering with military operations.
However, the Espionage Act, like today’s Patriot Act, was really designed to target dissident groups and individuals in the US that the power structure determined with a threat to that power.
One such group that was targeted by the US government during the US involvement in WWI was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor group also known as The Wobblies.
The Wobblies were engaged in radical labor organizing that was different than most other unions, since they allowed Blacks, women and recent immigrants to be part of their union. The IWW also was unique in their mission as workers in that they outwardly oppose capitalism and sought to create an economic system that was run by workers for the benefit of all.
Many of the Wobblie chapters were also critical of the US involvement in WWI, since they saw it as a capitalist war, where working class people were forced to fight against other working class people in order to benefit the capitalist class. The IWW passed a resolution at their national convention in 1916 and in their newspaper, the Industrial Worker, they wrote: “Capitalists of America, we will fight against you, not for you! There is not a power in the world that can make the working class fight if they refuse.”
Such a critique got the attention of the federal government, which began a campaign to turn public opinion against them. This campaign involved the cooperation of various news agencies throughout the country, which would print editorials damning the IWW for speaking out against the war and accused them of being “a threat to the nation’s security.”
This attack against the Wobblies is well noted by James MacGregor Burns and Stewart Burns, who state:
In September 1917, despite an intensive investigation that failed to substantiate allegations that the Wobblies were paid German agents or had violated the espionage or conscription acts, the Justice Department took action against them. Its agents swept down on union offices and the private homes of union members from Chicago to Spokane and seized every document they could find—including the love letters of Ralph Chaplin, the editor of Solidarity. From the several tons of “evidence” collected in the raids, the government constructed charges that the IWW—if not directly paid by the Germans—was at any rate a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the war effort, advocating draft refusal and military desertion. Federal indictments were brought in Chicago and four other cities. When the Chicago trial opened in April 1918, more than 100 Wobbly leaders were in the dock—Big Bill Haywood among them. Each faced more than a hundred separate charges. The government did not intend, nor did it have evidence, to prove the guilt of every individual on all counts. Instead, for a month and a half prosecutors took turns reading from the captured documents and lecturing the jury on the subversive and atheistic nature of Wobbly doctrine. The defense attempted to put its accuser—the capitalist system—on trial. A succession of union members took the stand to testify about their experiences in the struggle against the exploitation of man by man.
The Wilson administration ordered the Justice Department to raid 48 IWW branch offices across the country. Of those that were put on trial, most of them were found guilty on August 28, 1918 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, plus heavy fines. Although they appealed the sentences, most did serve several years in federal prison until they were pardoned by President Harding.
However, the result of the raids, arrests and incarceration of hundreds of Wobblies, along with deportation of hundreds more, diminished the ranks of the radical union in such a way that it never recovered until decades later.
The resistance to US militarism and capitalism by the Wobblies should be a lesson for those resisting today. Such radical politics will not be tolerated by the power structure, but resisting such policies are unavoidable if we want a truly free society.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 