May 7, 2014

Cecily McMillan Verdict Proves Dissent Is Dangerous

Cecily McMillan Verdict Proves Dissent Is Dangerous

Tuesday, 06 May 2014 10:55
By Anne Meador, DC Media Group | Op-Ed


The conviction of Occupy Wall Street protester Cecily McMillan for assault on a police officer shows that the judiciary is corrupt and dissent will not be tolerated. We can no longer call ourselves a democratic society, and as Chris Hedges says, we are living in the “post-constitutional era.”

Since 9/11, the justification given for incremental loss of our freedoms has been “keeping us safe from terrorism.” But in truth, governments always seek to accrue more power to control their populaces in service to elite economic interests. It is an imperative which pre-dated 9/11, but one that afterwards spiraled out of control.

A heightened state of fear, a subliminal awareness of being expendable in the neo-liberal economy and the distraction of consumer culture have kept the majority of Americans in paralysis. In the meantime, institutions which protected our rights have been systematically undermined. This, unfortunately, is the regime we now live under:

The Authoritarian State

Dissent will not be tolerated. Cecily McMillan was prosecuted for assaulting a police officer when she herself was assaulted. Prosecuting her for felony assault with severe penalties serves only one purpose: to deter further protest and scare the rest of us into submission. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23526-cecily-mcmillan-verdict-proves-dissent-is-dangerous

May 7, 2014

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, chronically Republican

New Mexico Governor Martinez Accused of "Wholesale Disregard of the Law"

Tuesday, 06 May 2014 09:15
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report


Tracy Hughes was a career employee in the New Mexico Environment Department who was just three months away from being eligible for retirement when she was fired by an appointee of New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez.

"It was clear from the campaign (of right-wing Tea Party Gov. Martinez) I was going to be gone," Hughes told Truthout. "The environment agency was clearly going to be targeted to clear out employees and prepare a new agenda for the Martinez administration."

The Martinez administration calls itself "business friendly," but Hughes, along with environmental lawyers, activists, authors, renewable energy advocates, and current and former state employees told Truthout that Gov. Martinez is little more than a lobbyist for big oil and gas, the copper and dairy industries, and other environmentally destructive industries that decide to set up shop in New Mexico.

"The Martinez administration will make sure that environmental protection does not get in the way of industry being able to do business in New Mexico," Hughes, who now works for an energy and environmental law firm, added. As an example, she pointed to the "copper rule," legislation the Martinez administration passed that allows copper mines to pollute the groundwater on their property. "I worked on (opposing) the copper rule, and what I saw happen on the copper rule was that it was wholesale disregard of the law by the Martinez administration," Hughes said. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/23511-new-mexico-governor-martinez-accused-of-wholesale-disregard-of-the-law

May 7, 2014

NARAL Ramps Up Attacks On Obama Nominee Michael Boggs: 'He's Worse Than We Thought'

WASHINGTON -- The reproductive rights advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice America will launch a new attack Tuesday on one of President Barack Obama's most embattled judicial nominees, Michael Boggs, pointing to new evidence of Boggs' right-wing record on abortion rights when he served as a Georgia state legislator.

In an email that will be sent to supporters Tuesday evening, NARAL president Ilyse Hogue says the group has uncovered votes that Boggs cast in favor of "personhood" legislation and in favor of a bill requiring abortion providers to put detailed information on the Internet, including how often they provided abortion services. The "personhood" measure would have granted legal rights to fertilized eggs.

"It turns out that judicial nominee Michael Boggs is even worse than we thought. We just uncovered evidence that Boggs voted for a bill that would have laid the groundwork for 'personhood,' which is one step away from overturning Roe v. Wade," reads the email, obtained by The Huffington Post ahead of its release.

On top of that, Boggs' vote for legislation requiring doctors to list how often they provided abortion services is "exactly the kind of list that we've seen violent anti-choice extremists use to harass and terrorize doctors at their homes and offices," the email continues. "Our allies on the Senate Judiciary Committee need to hear from you today so they know how important it is to ask Michael Boggs about his complete record." ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/06/naral-obama-michael-boggs-abortion_n_5275016.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

May 6, 2014

Organized Labor, Public Banks and the Grassroots: Keys to a Worker-Owned Economy

by Matt Stannard.
PUBLISHED ON MAY 1, 2014


Worker-owned cooperatives build economic democracy, but how do we build more worker-owned cooperatives? Here are three valuable allies to help us get there.

Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.

For Richard Wolff, whose most recent book is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, this time-honored form is also the key to arenewed movement for economic democracy. For Wolff, a synergy of labor and the left around worker-owned cooperatives promises to be an “unapologetically anticapitalist” strategy, challenging “the essence of the capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee relationship” and reshaping it in an egalitarian fashion.

And it’s a cause more and more people on the economic periphery – and their allies in economic justice movements – are taking up. More workers are taking the plunge, too, from solar energy co-ops that provide infrastructure for renewable energy, to the 25 worker cooperatives in Queens, including the newly formed Pa’lante Green Cleaning. Here, people committed to a new economy are practicing and preaching to, as Wolff puts it, “take over the enterprise,” bypass Wall Street and economic oligarchy, and build new economic structures either in defiance of, or alongside, old ones. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://rdwolff.com/content/organized-labor-public-banks-and-grassroots-keys-worker-owned-economy

May 6, 2014

Lewis Lapham and Thomas Frank Forecast the Next American Revolution

via truthdig:





Harper’s Magazine associates Lewis Lapham and Thomas Frank have had their eyes on America and its moneyed rulers for a combined nine decades. In a conversation in late March at the Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt, the two talked about the current “Revolution” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and named the forces conspiring to drive the nation into another age of upheaval. The discussion was featured in Frank’s column on Salon on Sunday under the title “Our Sad ‘Mad Men’ Revolution: How Consumerism Co-Opted Rebellion.”

To begin, Lapham, who says that as a journalist he has never been concerned with stoking revolution, describes the current issue of his Quarterly as taking on revolutions of various kinds—“political, scientific, technological.” To his mind, he says, those of us alive today are always in the midst of the revolution announced by Karl Marx in 1848, which is “the constant change in the means of production and the reducing of all human meaning and endeavor to a money transaction.”

Americans on both the right and left are anxious for drastic social change. Many are seeking to make it happen themselves. Lapham understands the evolution of civilizations, of which revolution is a part, to occur along lines determined by ongoing historical trends, including the breakdown of a society’s overextended parts in the manner that growing bubbles inevitably pop. “I suspect that if any genuinely revolutionary change takes place it will be forced upon us by a collapse of some kind in the system,” he told the bookstore audience. “That’s another form of revolution that you find across time where the civilization or the ancien regime falls apart of its own dead weight. And in the ruins, the phoenix of a new idea or a new thought or a new system of value takes its place. But that’s not something that can be organized by a committee or preached from a column in the New York Times, or even by a four-day conference about American values sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.”

“I don’t think we have to be concerned that we’re not parading around in the streets,” he added. “It will come of its own accord sooner rather than later.”

In a chilling story about the limited vitality available to the American counterculture, Lapham described “the death of the Beat Generation in San Francisco in 1959,” which he said he witnessed. He was at the scene’s “last holdout” bar on a Tuesday afternoon. Beat figures John Kerouac, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were long gone. Out of nowhere a Hollywood producer, “dreadful looking … gold chain, white shirt, paunch, slicked back hair,” walks in and tells all the young, somnolent patrons he wants to cast them as extras in a movie. The pay was $50 a day each, but the boys had to shave their faces and put on khaki pants and blue button-down shirts, and the girls, tweed skirts. “One of you can still look dark and sullen,” the guy said. “This is a movie for Americans.” Everyone ignored him. Then he finally stopped talking. .............................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/lewis_lapham_and_thomas_frank_talk_the_next_american_revolution_20140504

May 6, 2014

After Pledge of Sunlight, Gov. Cuomo Officials Keep Their Email in the Shadows

This piece originally ran on ProPublica.

Adopting a tactic that has been used by officials ranging from Sarah Palin to staffers of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, aides to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are sending emails from private accounts to conduct official business.

I know because I got one myself. And three other people who interact with the governor’s office on policy or media matters told me they have too. None of the others wanted to be named.

The tactic appears to be another item in the toolbox of an administration that, despite Cuomo’s early vows of unprecedented transparency, has become known for an obsession with secrecy. Emailing from private accounts can help officials hide communications and discussions that are supposed to be available to the public.

“Government business should never be conducted through private email accounts. Not only does it make it difficult to retrieve what is a government record, but it just invites the suspicion that a government employee is attempting to evade accountability by supervisors and the public,” said Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, a frequent requester of records under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. .....................(more)

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

May 5, 2014

Lewis Lapham and Thomas Frank Forecast the Next American Revolution

via truthdig:





Harper’s Magazine associates Lewis Lapham and Thomas Frank have had their eyes on America and its moneyed rulers for a combined nine decades. In a conversation in late March at the Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt, the two talked about the current “Revolution” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and named the forces conspiring to drive the nation into another age of upheaval. The discussion was featured in Frank’s column on Salon on Sunday under the title “Our Sad ‘Mad Men’ Revolution: How Consumerism Co-Opted Rebellion.”

To begin, Lapham, who says that as a journalist he has never been concerned with stoking revolution, describes the current issue of his Quarterly as taking on revolutions of various kinds—“political, scientific, technological.” To his mind, he says, those of us alive today are always in the midst of the revolution announced by Karl Marx in 1848, which is “the constant change in the means of production and the reducing of all human meaning and endeavor to a money transaction.”

Americans on both the right and left are anxious for drastic social change. Many are seeking to make it happen themselves. Lapham understands the evolution of civilizations, of which revolution is a part, to occur along lines determined by ongoing historical trends, including the breakdown of a society’s overextended parts in the manner that growing bubbles inevitably pop. “I suspect that if any genuinely revolutionary change takes place it will be forced upon us by a collapse of some kind in the system,” he told the bookstore audience. “That’s another form of revolution that you find across time where the civilization or the ancien regime falls apart of its own dead weight. And in the ruins, the phoenix of a new idea or a new thought or a new system of value takes its place. But that’s not something that can be organized by a committee or preached from a column in the New York Times, or even by a four-day conference about American values sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.”

“I don’t think we have to be concerned that we’re not parading around in the streets,” he added. “It will come of its own accord sooner rather than later.”

In a chilling story about the limited vitality available to the American counterculture, Lapham described “the death of the Beat Generation in San Francisco in 1959,” which he said he witnessed. He was at the scene’s “last holdout” bar on a Tuesday afternoon. Beat figures John Kerouac, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were long gone. Out of nowhere a Hollywood producer, “dreadful looking … gold chain, white shirt, paunch, slicked back hair,” walks in and tells all the young, somnolent patrons he wants to cast them as extras in a movie. The pay was $50 a day each, but the boys had to shave their faces and put on khaki pants and blue button-down shirts, and the girls, tweed skirts. “One of you can still look dark and sullen,” the guy said. “This is a movie for Americans.” Everyone ignored him. Then he finally stopped talking. .............................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/lewis_lapham_and_thomas_frank_talk_the_next_american_revolution_20140504

May 5, 2014

Organized Labor, Public Banks and the Grassroots: Keys to a Worker-Owned Economy

by Matt Stannard.
PUBLISHED ON MAY 1, 2014


Worker-owned cooperatives build economic democracy, but how do we build more worker-owned cooperatives? Here are three valuable allies to help us get there.

Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.

For Richard Wolff, whose most recent book is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, this time-honored form is also the key to arenewed movement for economic democracy. For Wolff, a synergy of labor and the left around worker-owned cooperatives promises to be an “unapologetically anticapitalist” strategy, challenging “the essence of the capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee relationship” and reshaping it in an egalitarian fashion.

And it’s a cause more and more people on the economic periphery – and their allies in economic justice movements – are taking up. More workers are taking the plunge, too, from solar energy co-ops that provide infrastructure for renewable energy, to the 25 worker cooperatives in Queens, including the newly formed Pa’lante Green Cleaning. Here, people committed to a new economy are practicing and preaching to, as Wolff puts it, “take over the enterprise,” bypass Wall Street and economic oligarchy, and build new economic structures either in defiance of, or alongside, old ones. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://rdwolff.com/content/organized-labor-public-banks-and-grassroots-keys-worker-owned-economy

May 5, 2014

Chris Hedges: The Post-Constitutional Era

from truthdig:


The Post-Constitutional Era

Posted on May 4, 2014
By Chris Hedges


The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

“In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime.”

Afran, Mayer and I brought the case to the U.S. Southern District Court of New York in January 2012. I was later joined by co-plaintiffs Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, journalist Alexa O’Brien, RevolutionTruth founder Tangerine Bolen, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla.

Later in 2012 U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest declared Section 1021(b)(2) unconstitutional. The Obama administration not only appealed—we expected it to appeal—but demanded that the law be immediately put back into effect until the appeal was heard. Forrest, displaying the same judicial courage she showed with her ruling, refused to do this. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_post-constitutional_era_20140504

May 4, 2014

David Sirota: We’re All Just Grenades in the Partisan Wars

via truthdig:


We’re All Just Grenades in the Partisan Wars

Posted on May 2, 2014
By David Sirota


It is hardly controversial to say that one of the big turnoffs about American politics is its disconnect with even the most grim human consequences. No matter how serious the issue, the political class seems pathologically determined to present everything as a fun-and-games, red-versus-blue battle whose only important consequences have to do with the next election. As politicians, operatives and reporters focus primarily on the horse-race discussion of ever-more-grave issues, the life-and-death human ramifications for millions of people are effectively written out of our democratic discourse.

There are plenty of examples of this odious dynamic, but perhaps this era’s textbook case comes from a recent article in Politico magazine about natural gas exploration in Colorado—and more specifically, the extractive process known as fracking.

The context for the article is key: It appeared only weeks after the release of a Colorado School of Public Health study showing a potential link between birth defects and proximity to Colorado fracking sites. That study followed others showing possible links between fracking in Colorado and health hazards such as water and air pollution.

Birth defects and toxic pollution—this is serious and macabre stuff. You might therefore think that politicians would refrain from insinuating that such issues are important only for how they might affect the next election. You might also think that even the most hardened politicos would be sure to at least pay lip service to the idea that actual lives—not just professional politicians’ careers—are at stake.

But, of course, you would be wrong. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/were_all_just_grenades_in_the_partisan_wars_20140502