Media Alert: Defend the First Amendment
In anticipation of police repression at the anti-NATO protests in Chicago starting this weekend, FreePress is asking people to sign on to this letter to send a message on the rights of free speech and freedom of the press.
Since September, police have arrested dozens of journalists and activists around the country for the “crime” of trying to document political protests in public spaces.
People with smartphones and cameras are changing the way we record and share breaking news. In return, police have targeted, harassed — and in many cases, arrested — those trying to bear witness.
Whether you’re a credentialed journalist, a protester or a bystander with a camera, you are guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of access to information. In the digital age, these freedoms mean that we all have the right to record.
Free Press and a coalition of free speech and digital rights groups have sent a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department to defend this right.
This article by Dave Lindorff is re-posted from CounterPunch.
A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.
The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”
Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.
The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”
The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”
A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written.
Remember, this vast yet centralized operation — what Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.
Among the documents obtained by the PCJF in this second batch of responses to its FOIA filing is one from the NOC Fusion Center Desk dated Nov. 5, 2011, which collects at the federal level and then distributes the names and contact information of a group of Occupy protesters who were arrested during a demonstration in Dallas, TX against Bank of America, one of the nation’s biggest predatory lenders. Although none of the seven arrested were charged with any serious crime (six were charged with “using the sidewalk!”), their names and contact information were widely disseminated by the DHS.
Fusion Centers, a post-9-11 creation, are a federally-funded joint project of the DHS and the US Justice Department which are designed to share intelligence information among such federal agencies as the DHS, the FBI, the CIA and the US Military, as well as state and local police agencies. By their nature they are designed to circumvent legal constraints on various agencies, for example the ban on CIA domestic spying, or the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars active military activity within the borders of the US. There are currently 72 Fusion Centers around the US.
Another group of documents shows that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle — all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression.
Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination overtly, higher officials in the DHS ordered the recall of the request but then simply rerouted it through “law enforcement channels,” where presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the coordination of local police responses. In response to that order, the documents show that the duty director of the NOC wrote that he would “reach out” to “LEO LNOs (liaison officer) on the floor” to assist. Verheyden-Hilliard explains that LEO is FBI’s nationally integrated law enforcement, intelligence and military network.
On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal with Occupy movement actions.
Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence loop.”
Given the subterfuge revealed in these documents that went into trying to create the illusion that the DHS was and is not coordinating a national campaign of spying, disruption and repression against Occupy activists, it is almost comical to find documents that show the DHS was in “direct communication with the White House” to obtain advance approval of public statements by DHS officials denying any DHS involvement in anti-Occupy actions.
These documents show that both DHS and one of that department’s police arms, the Federal Protective Service (FPS) were in direct contact with Portland, Oregon’s police chief and mayor, discussing how to deal with protesters who were in part on federal property. The coordination between the feds and the local police and political authorities were intense. Yet the approved statement sent to DHS from the White House read:
Any decisions on how to handle specifics (sic) situations are dealt with by local authorities in that location. If a protest area is located on Federal property and has been deemed unsanitary or unsafe by the General Services Administration (GSA) or city officials, and they make a decision to evacuate participants — the Federal Protective Service (FPS) will work with those officials to develop a plan to ensure the security and safety of everyone involved.
There was, comically, also a White House-approved DHS “background” statement, too! (Typically background statements by federal officials are supposed to be used when they want to tell a journalist the true situation but don’t want to have that statement attributed to them or their department. Having it pre-approved by the White House defeats that purpose and is simply a manipulation of the media.)
The faux “background” information included the following–a flat-out lie:
DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments writ large.
Tellingly, the documents also include a Dec. 5 copy of the “Weekly Informant, ” an intelligence report published by the DHS’s Office for State and Local Law Enforcement. The issue includes an update from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concerning the activities of the Occupy Movement. PERF, Verheyden-Hilliard notes, is the group that the federal government claims organized a series of multi-city law enforcement calls to coordinate the police response to Occupy, which led immediately to the wave of violent crackdowns. It was at those meetings that police were advised among other things to act at night, to use aggressive tactics and weapons like tasers and pepper spray, and to take steps to remove journalists and cameras from the scene of crackdowns.
The overall sense from these latest documents is that Washington and the DHS, along with the FBI, was the nexus of the crackdown, orchestrating it, encouraging it, and attempting to cover its tracks.
The documents among other things expose the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the “We are the 99%”-chanting Occupiers, while actually acting in the interest of Bank of America and its fellow financial sector mega-firms in trying to crush the movement itself.
To see all the new FOIA documents, go to the PJIF website.
Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has surpassed the $10 million mark, according to data from the Center for Responsible Politics.
Comparatively, the other candidates (10 in all) who are challenging Stabenow have raised collectively less than $5 million, with former Congressman Pete Hoekstra the closest with $2,701,341.
Hoekstra and Clark Durant, the top challengers to Stabenow are receiving funds from companies that have clear agendas, such as Bank of America (has given $14,750 to Durant) and Amway, which has given Hoekstra $18,800 to date.
The insidious nature of companies like Amway and Bank of America make it easy for those stuck in a right/left dichotomy to say this is why people should re-elect Stabenow, since she is not as tied to corrupt, money grabbing corporations as her opponents are.
However, a closer look at Senator Stabenow’s contributors would make it clear to any free-thinking person that her allegiance is to the same capitalist class.
At the top of the list of entities donating to Stabenow’s re-election campaign is Emily’s List, a political action committee that gives money to Pro-Choice Democrats. The rest of the list is much less ideologically driven or one-issue driven and clearly represents corporate America.
These companies essentially represent who Senator Stabenow will be accountable to, since they are the ones providing the bulk of the funds necessary for her to get re-elected.
There are those entities from the financial sector, that not only engaged in fraudulent behavior that led to the 2008 financial crash, they are also entities that were bailed out by US taxpayers and continue to benefit from any real government regulation.
JP Morgan Chase is primarily backing incumbents this year, since it has been clear that the current members of both the House and the Senate support the current financial status quo. The same is the case for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanely, like JP Morgan Chase, are primarily backing incumbents.
The list of major donors to Senator Stabenow also includes health insurance giant Blue Cross/Blue Shield and “we don’t pay any corporate taxes” poster-child, General Electric.
The rest of the list is mostly made up of Michigan-based corporations, which reflects whose interests Stabenow defends in Washington – companies such as DTE Energy, Dow Chemical, GM and the Ford Motor Company. These are companies, which were major contributors to Senator Stabenow in 2006 and 2000, which is further evidence of her allegiance to the capitalist class.
In March, labor unions across the state announced an effort to change the Michigan Constitution by making collective bargaining rights part of the Constitution.
According to the Protect Our Jobs site:
“For more than a year, Lansing politicians and corporate special interests have made one attack after another on Michigan workers: cutting middle-class families’ wages, health care benefits, retirement security and safety protections. They’re not done yet — there are more than 80 bills waiting for a vote in the state Legislature that would strip basic protections from working people.”
Last week, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce formally came out against such an effort with their own rhetoric about what would be good for the state’s economy.
The Chamber’s Press Release on the Protect Our Jobs campaign states in part:
“This anti-taxpayer petition drive is squarely aimed at repealing dozens and dozens of cost-saving reform measures recently enacted by Gov. Snyder and the Michigan Legislature,” noted Jim Holcomb, Senior Vice President, Business Advocacy & General Counsel for the Michigan Chamber. “Across the nation, Michigan is increasingly being recognized as a leader in government efficiency and reform for enacting common sense solutions to government spending, but this proposal is a power grab by government employee unions who want to maintain the status quo without regard for the Michigan taxpayers footing the bill.”
“The Michigan Chamber doesn’t currently have a position for or against right-to-work,” Holcomb added. “However, the idea that a special interest group would amend the state constitution to cut off debate about legislation it doesn’t like is unfair and unwise.”
These last two sentences are interesting and worth looking at. While it is true that the Michigan Chamber of Commerce has not taken a strong public stand on the issue of making Michigan a Right to Work state, several local Michigan Chambers have come out in favor.
The Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce created a lobbying entity known as the West Michigan Policy Forum, which makes as one of its stated goals the implementation of Right to Work laws in Michigan. At their 2010 Summit, the West Michigan Policy Forum made Right to Work a key goal and even brought anti-union PR strategist Rick Berman to present on how to change public opinion about Right to Work.
The Michigan Chamber President Rich Studley concluded in the Press Release:
“Government employee unions have declared war on our state’s economic competitiveness with this deceptive and counterproductive ballot proposal. Michigan’s job providers did not ask for this fight. But we will do whatever it takes to defeat the union’s plan to stop reinventing Michigan.”
It seems pretty clear that with these words that there is a class war going on in Michigan. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce and groups like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy have made it clear that profits are valued over working people in Michigan.
The ballot initiative by many labor groups in Michigan may not be the best response to challenge the power of capital, but it has clearly exposed the class war that capitalists continue to wage against working people.
Occupy Chicago Week of Actions – Press Conference
This video is re-posted from ZNet.
Occupy Chicago hosted a press conference on May 10 in the Windy City in preparation for the upcoming week of actions at what has been billed at is the NATO/G8 Protests.
The press conference featured people with Occupy Chicago, the People’s Summit, National Nurses United, CanG8, Iraq Veterans Against the War, mental health advocates, the American Friends Service Committee, musicians and Chicago Indy media.
Does the Black Political Class Actually Protect or Defend Black People? If Not, What Do They Do?
This article by Bruce Dixon is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
Let’s take a trip to an imaginary black America, a place in which black leaders regularly stood on their hind legs to safeguard and protect the interest of their constituents against greedy banksters and institutional racism in the job, credit and housing markets. It’s a pretend world where African American politicians are busily engaged in building and expanding opportunity for all, and leading the fight for peace, jobs, justice, and quality education and participatory democracy. It’s a mythical place where prominent blacks in the business world too, work to create good jobs and stable communities and provide key support to the civic organizations engaged in this work as well.
Imagine that the Katrina disaster had occurred in such an imaginary world. Black America’s best and brightest would have convened hundreds of meetings and workgroups in real and virtual spaces across the country. Urban planners, educators, and professionals of all stripes would have speedily devised just and equitable plans for regional education, transit, agriculture, tourism and more. They would have insisted that the six figure number of black Gulf Coast residents deported to the four corners of the continental US on buses paid for by charitable donations to the Red Cross be returned and put to work rebuilding a just and sustainable region. This single example reveals that such a world, if it did exist would differ so profoundly from the one we know as to be almost unrecognizable.
In the real world that does exist, we now have more than 10,000 black elected officials, from small town mayors and sheriffs up to forty-some reps in Congress and the president. Still, black unemployment, black incarceration rates, foreclosures on black homeowners and the gap between black and white family wealth are at or near all time highs, with not a one of these key indicators moving rapidly in any good direction.
Black faces are found more often than ever in corporate boardrooms. Chevron named a tanker after Condoleezza Rice, one of its longtime board members. In recent years, black corporate execs have run the NAACP, the National Urban League and big-city school systems like Atlanta, where public schools CEO Erroll Davis boasts that he learned all he needed to know about running a school system in his time on the board of BP. Black-owned and operated banks in cities like New York are heavily invested in gentrifying developments that push African Americans out of the five boroughs toward the suburban periphery, or in many cases, back to the South. Some contend that it is the shriveling of urban housing and job markets in places like Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Detroit that accounts for the net flow of black population in the twenty-first century reversing from the north back to the south, something not seen in almost a hundred years.
National black leaders, even with popular winds at their backs were unable to prevent the legal lynching of Troy Davis. Since the freelance killing of Trayvon Martin more than thirty police and vigilante killings of young blacks have occurred, and our leaders can’t point to even the beginnings of any official process on the national level aimed at preventing the next thirty. Like the man whose lower lip brush the ground and whose upper lip caresses the clouds, they are all mouth.
Local black political leaders in places like Columbia SC and Atlanta GA have proved as vicious toward the homeless as any of their white colleagues. Black mayors like Philly’s Michael Nutter have endorsed widespread stop-and-frisk policies that presumptively criminalize black youth, and like his black and white counterparts in City Halls across the land, the mayor of Philadelphia tells parents and children that there is no alternative to the piecemeal destruction of public education, driving it into a crisis whose only solution, we will be told, is privatization. The black mayor of Newark is pushing to privatize that city’s water system, and the black mayor of Atlanta has proposed taxing rainwater that some catch as an alternative to the city’s wate rsupply.
At the 2004 Democratic convention, pointedly held on and constantly referring to the anniversary of King’s 1963 March on Washington, Barack Obama gathered more than 20 African American generals and admirals on stage around him, hypocritically linking their mission with that of the apostle of economic justice and nonviolence. Despite the fact that black America is the most antiwar segment of the US population, Barack Obama has boosted military spending to all time highs, has put more troops in more countries than any of his predecessors, and is waging wars in more countries, including African countries than any president in recent memory.
At that Democratic convention, just like the one in North Carolina this year, the goodie bags and receptions will be held by AT&T, the nuclear industry, GE and GM, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Insurance, drone manufacturers and “defense” contractors, defending US interests in more than 140 countries. Nobody will be the least surprised when Barack Obama again proclaims himself the president of “clean coal and safe nuclear power.” For the black political class, the road leads to exactly the same destination as their white counterparts.
The Congressional Black Caucus and the CBC Foundation like the careers of most black politicians, and traditional civil rights organizations, from NAN to NAACP, the Urban League, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and the National Conference of Black State Legislators, is funded by the generous contributions of actors like Microsoft, Boeing, Lockheed, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and on and on and on on and on. It’s hard to regard most of the black political class these days as anything but sock puppets for the folks who fund their careers.
The Congressional Black Caucus still stages a weeklong annual celebration of itself and the black political class. A look at its weeklong agenda any time over last few years shows lots of relationship workshops, celebrity meet-and-greets and workshops on how to be a black military subcontractor, a black real estate developer, a movie producer, or a contractor with the Department of Homeland Security. You will search in vain for workshops on how to organize to protect black homeowners and keep them in their homes, how to prevent municipal and state privatizations of transit, education and infrastructures, how to organize unions and strike for better wages and conditions, or sessions how to obtain permanent title to vacant urban land for community agriculture projects.
There are a handful of corporate actors, like Koch Industries and Exxon-Mobil that give exclusively or mainly to Republicans. But these are relatively few, and there are some big players that give mostly to Democrats as well. For the most part however, corporate America is happily bipartisan, with a pronounced bias toward incumbents of whatever party and color, and only too happy to shine on the favorite charities of black congresscreatures in the inner city, or Tom Joyner’s computer giveaways, or pet charter schools in black communities, to name just a few.
President Barack Obama, far from being the exception to this rule, will be standing atop a heap of more than one billion dollars in direct corporate contributions to his re-election campaign this year, in addition to another billion in indirect contributions to super-PACs, state and national Democratic parties, and other channels, even without the nickels and dimes of a diminishing number of hopeful ordinary people.
Since it doesn’t protect us, doesn’t defend our jobs, our homes, our education, our children or our elderly, all that the black political class can do for black people, all they can do to prolong their careers, is to wave in our faces the rancid racism of their Republican colleagues. And that’s what Republicans are —- not their rivals, but their colleagues. Keeping the black conversation focused on what racist s.o.bs these Republicans are is vital to the survival of the black political class. It takes attention away from the fact that black politicians in power, of whatever party, no matter what they say on the campaign trail, pursue roughly the same policies in office, in keeping with the fact that they all have the same funders.
The ideology of the black political class is best described with the clumsy world “representationalism”. It’s supposed to “represent” us, mostly by looking like us, but while not defending our children or elderly, not protecting our families or jobs or institutions, not defending our political gains or the public sector that our advocacy built. And the last thing the black political class will do is argue with militarism or war, even though these penalize black communities and nonwhite people around the world. It is only now, with the ascension of a black president, prominent blacks in all branches of the military, courts and corporate American that the end of the representationalist rainbow can clearly be seen. This is it. This is as good as it gets.
It’s time for something completely different. It’s been a long time since we had black leadership that didn’t depend on corporate America for its funding. But until our people can throw up new leaders and mass organizations whose bills aren’t paid by corporate elites, little will change. It’s time for all of us, and especially for those who would be leaders to let pharaoh go.
This article is re-posted from Corpwatch.org. Editors note: GRIID has reported significantly on Enbridge over the past two years, both because of their role in the Alberta Tar Sands Project, but also because of the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil disaster.
War has been declared on Enbridge, a Canadian oil company, by a chief from the Nadleh Whut’en in British Columbia. Chief Martin Louie was attending the company annual general meeting in Toronto where he spoke out Wednesday against the environmental impact of the company’s tar sands operations.
“How far are they willing to go to kill off the human beings of this country? Enbridge and the government are going to go on fighting us,” said Louie. “The war is on.”
Some 700 miles directly south of the Enbridge meeting, on the very same day, Bob Kincaid of Coal River Mountain Watch leveled similar charges against Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America at their annual general meeting in Charlotte North Carolina, for the impact of mountaintop removal mining.
“You are part of the poisoning of Appalachia and so is every one of your directors and so is every one of your shareholders,” Kincaid said. “You are part of the destruction of an entire region of the country.”
These two new and unconventional fossil fuel sources –tar sands and mountain top coal together with shale rock – have been dubbed “extreme energy” sources by Professor Michael Klare of Hampshire College, to signify the extraordinary and expensive technology needed to extract energy from them. The rush to exploit these source – from rural North Dakota (see “North Dakota Shale Boom Displaces Tribal Residents”) to the deserts of South Africa (see “Fracking South Africa”) that has sparked angry protests because of the devastating environmental consequences.
This week the battle against extreme energy was taken to the company annual meetings by environmental and social justice groups. The Nadleh Whut’en were part of the Yinka-Dene Alliance which is protesting Enbridge’s $5.5-billion project that would pipe crude from tar sands in Alberta over 1,100 kilometres to the West coast where the fuel is to be loaded on supertankers to take to Asia.
The protestors brought with them a declaration that read in part:
“We are the Indigenous nations of the Fraser River Watershed. We are many nations, bound together by these waters. Enbridge wants to build pipelines to pump massive amounts of tar sands crude oil through the Fraser’s headwaters. An oil spill in our lands and rivers would destroy our fish, poison our water, and devastate our peoples, our livelihoods, and our futures. Enbridge has many pipeline oil spills every year, including this year’s large spill into Michigan’s Kalamazoo river. We refuse to be next.”
The company claims it is doing a good job. “We wouldn’t be proposing this project if we didn’t have utmost confidence that we could both construct and operate the project with utmost safety and environmental protection,” Enbridge spokesman Todd Nogier told CBC TV.
Brian Moynihan responded the same way to the activists in North Carolina who told him that Bank of America was poisoning Appalachia. “Sir, our environmental team will take a look at it. We look at it all the time,” he told the shareholders who booed him.
Coal River Mountain Watch activists disagreed. “A human health crisis is exploding in Appalachia and Bank of America lights the fuse every day,” said Bob Kincaid, noting that as much as five million pounds of explosives are used every day in Appalachia to extract coal. Kincaid estimated that the practice caused 4,000 deaths a year in West Virginia: “That’s a newborn who never knows a clear breath, a 4-year-old who never gets to be a 5-year-old, a mother who never gets to be a grandmother.”
At the same annual general meeting on Wednesday, Bank of America also saw a number of protestors speak out against the company’s mortgage practices. For example Sister Barbara Busch, a Catholic social justice worker who runs a Cincinnati-based homeowner advocacy group called Working In Neighborhoods, told Moynihan that his bank was the hardest to deal with (41 percent of her customers have their loans managed by Bank of America) “(W)we have no one to talk to. They do not call us back,’ she said of the loan officers. “I understand, Mr. Moynihan, that you really believe that you’ve done something, but … you’ve got to do something about your mortgage servicing.”
The North Carolina protests were coordinated by the Unity Alliance which brought together groups like Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Jobs with Justice, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Pushback Network, and the Right to the City Alliance.
Although the Bank of America protests are now over, the activists plans to be back – for the Democratic National Convention slated to take place in the city this coming September.
‘Lucy’ Obama and his ‘Charlie Brown’ progressives
This article by Conor Friedersdorf is re-posted from The Atlantic.
Over and over, the president tricks interest groups into thinking he’s an ally, only to yank away the thing they desire.
Check out Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, openly speculating that President Obama is going to embrace same-sex marriage because he needs money from gay people. “Gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money,” he reported. NBC’s David Gregory agreed. For some reason, neither man seemed to think this theory reflects poorly on the president.
Then the conventional wisdom shifted. Observers were basing their guesses on the fact that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Vice President Joe Biden had both made statements in support of same-sex marriage. The same-sex-marriage supporters who praised these developments were as quickly dismayed when the White House walked back Biden’s statements, insisting that like Obama, Biden’s views on the subject were still “evolving,” a euphemism that seems to mean they’ll favor either marriage equality for gays or discrimination against them depending on their moment-to-moment judgments about what’s best for them politically.
Sounds like Mitt Romney’s position!
Observing all this, Romney 2012 booster Jennifer Rubin aptly noted, “This is becoming the proverbial Lucy and the football. One wonders how often pro-gay-marriage activists, like poor Charlie Brown, are going to fall for this stuff.” But Lucy just had one Charlie Brown. Obama has a whole roster of would-be kickers, and a habit of teeing up the ball only to callously pull it away.
Don’t progressives see this?
Obama tricked the cannabis community into thinking his Justice Department would go easy on medical marijuana in states where it is legal, broke his promise, then misled voters about his options.
Obama tricked anti-war voters into thinking that he wouldn’t order American troops into battle unless there was an imminent threat to America or a declaration of war from Congress, then went to war in Libya, violating the War Powers Resolution, even though neither condition was met.
Obama tricked transparency advocates into thinking he’d celebrate whistleblowers and set new standards in open government. He has prosecuted whistleblowers as aggressively as any president in history, and presided over a dramatic escalation in what the federal government does in secret.
Obama tricked executive-power critics into thinking he would roll back the excesses of the Bush Administration. He has transformed those excesses into matters of bipartisan consensus, and gone farther in some respects, as when an American citizen was killed extra-judicially on his order.
Obama tricked immigration-reform advocates into thinking he was a fellow traveler, then upset them with Secure Communities, record-breaking deportation levels, and a failure to improve immigration detention.
Obama tricked Iraq War opponents into thinking that he would exit the country by the withdrawal date that George W. Bush negotiated. The Iraqi government wouldn’t let him keep troops in the country beyond that date, although he tried to break his promise. Now the Obama Administration pays a small army of private-security contractors to protect America’s presence in that country.
Obama tricked critics of indefinite detention into thinking that he abhorred the practice, only to sign a bill that institutionalized it.
Obama tricked critics of signing statements into thinking he wouldn’t issue them. But he’s done so on many occasions
Obama tricked critics of the state-secrets privilege into thinking he’d reverse Bush-era uses of the tactic. Instead he’s continued it.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but these examples are sufficient to draw a conclusion: Progressives shouldn’t trust what Obama says, or what they think he believes. They should judge his actions. It’s the only way to distinguish between promises he aims to keep and things he’s said to mislead small constituencies into thinking he’ll do more for them than is justified by reality.
Next Thursday, the Kent County Health Department, Strong Beginnings and Healthy Kent 2020 will host a Health Equity forum.
The Thursday morning event will feature speakers from Ingham County’s Health Equity and Social Justice Department, Kent County data, a new video exploring issues like class, race and other health determinants.
The forum will also include a block of time for small group discussion focused on how to address these larger structural injustices to overcome health inequity throughout the county.
The forum is free and open to the public. Please register by calling 632-7100.
Health Equity Forum
Thursday, May 17
9:00AM – Noon
Kent ISD Conference Center
1633 E. Beltline Ave. NE, Grand Rapids
Monsanto’s Deep Roots In Washington
This article is re-posted from OpenSecrets.org.
It’s planting season, which brings to mind one of the most ubiquitous names in agribusiness: Monsanto. 
Love it or hate it — and there are plenty of people on either side — the company controls much of the agricultural market, and also sells products for the suburban yard such as the weed-killer Roundup. Roundup is the core of Monsanto’s agricultural breakthrough: The company produces genetically modified seeds that are resistant to the herbicide, making it easy for farmers to spray whole fields of soy or corn and kill only the weeds. Food production made easy.
On the flip side, environmentalists and organic food fans maintain there are too many unknowns and potential dangers involved with genetic modification. Monsanto, which last year had revenues of $11.8 billion, has become their bogeyman.
But such efforts as grassroots petitions and proposed legislation to require at least the labeling of genetically modified food have thus far withered on the vine next to Monsanto’s deeply rooted Washington presence, which has proved resistant to most lines of attack.
According to OpenSecrets.org data, in the first three months of this year, Monsanto spent $1.4 million lobbying Washington — and spent about $6.3 million total last year, more than any other agribusiness firm except the tobacco company Altria.
Monsanto’s interests in Washington are diverse. It lobbied bills ranging from the American Research and Competitiveness Act of 2011, which would extend tax credits for companies doing research, to several bills that would change the way the Department of Homeland Security handles security at chemical facilities — chemicals being a big part of Monsanto’s product portfolio.
And just as important as Monsanto’s legislative agenda for 2011 and 2012 is its regulatory one: the company’s lobbying reports list the departments and agencies it visited to talk to federal bureaucrats and appointees as they wrote rules to implement and enforce Congress’ handiwork. That explains why Monsanto reports having lobbied the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and many other executive branch offices. 
The FDA currently is the target of a petition signed by more than 1 million people, according to a sponsor known as Just Label It, asking the agency to require that genetically engineered food be labeled as such. The petition, sponsored by a coalition of environmental and food groups, is an attempt by activists to make an end-run around Monsanto’s Washington operation — a necessity because their lobbying dollars pale in comparison to the cash spent by Monsanto and others in the industry. For instance, one of the coalition members, the Environmental Working Group, has spent just $82,000 on lobbying this year — or about 5 percent of Monsanto’s total.
“The power of Monsanto, whether in the halls of Washington, or in farm country, should not be ignored,” said Environmental Working Group spokesman Alex Formuzis. “Monsanto comes armed with some of the deepest pockets and a bench of influential lobbyists, which makes the coalition’s efforts over GMO labeling on behalf of consumers a very tough fight indeed.”
Another upcoming matter of great interest to Monsanto: the new farm bill, an omnibus piece of legislation that sets the nation’s agricultural policy and deals with nearly every aspect of the country’s farming and food industries. The current bill expires in 2013; when it went through Congress, Monsanto filed more lobbying reports on it than any other organization. The process of piecing together a new proposal is already well under way.
The company’s access to members of Congress who are likely to be key in shaping the final legislation may be eased by the contributions of its very active PAC, the Monsanto Citizenship Fund. Already this cycle it has spent $383,000. The biggest recipient of that money so far is Rep. Frank D. Lucas (R-Okla.) who has received $20,000 from Monsanto’s PAC — $10,000 for his campaign committee and $10,000 for his leadership PAC. Lucas happens to be the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee — no farm-related legislation is passed without his say-so.
Monsanto has hedged its investment with the agriculture committee, though — it also gave $13,500 to Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), the top-ranking Democrat on the committee. So far this election cycle, Monsanto’s PAC has given $77,500 to 17 members of the House agriculture committee, or their leadership PACs.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 