June 26, 2012

Chris Hedges Is L.A. Press Club’s Journalist of the Year

from truthdig:


On a night when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were honored for their hallmark Watergate investigation, the Los Angeles Press Club named Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges as the 2011 journalist of the year in the online category. Truthdig received honorable mentions in Best Website Exclusive to the Internet and in Group Weblog.

In awarding him the organization’s top prize for online writers, the judges offered high praise for Hedges, calling him “Champion of the 99%—mortal enemy of the 1%. This former war correspondent turns out weekly columns packed with insightful and biting opinion.”

Hedges was also honored in 2009 as the Online Journalist of the Year by the L.A. Press Club. He was given the Best Online Column prize in 2010 for his Truthdig essay “One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists.” ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/la_press_club_names_hedges_online_journalist_of_the_year_20120625/

June 26, 2012

Lost in Translation

June 26, 2012

Children's books have changed......

June 26, 2012

After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet

After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet
The post-summit pledge was an admission of defeat against consumer capitalism. But we can still salvage the natural world

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 June 2012


It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.

The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.

The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.

We have used our unprecedented freedoms – secured at such cost by our forebears – not to agitate for justice, for redistribution, for the defence of our common interests, but to pursue the dopamine hits triggered by the purchase of products we do not need. The world's most inventive minds are deployed not to improve the lot of humankind but to devise ever more effective means of stimulation, to counteract the diminishing satisfactions of consumption. The mutual dependencies of consumer capitalism ensure that we all unwittingly conspire in the trashing of what may be the only living planet. The failure at Rio de Janeiro belongs to us all. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/25/rio-governments-will-not-save-planet

June 26, 2012

Jimmy Carter: A Cruel and Unusual Record (America's shameful human rights record)

from the NYT:


A Cruel and Unusual Record

By JIMMY CARTER
Published: June 24, 2012


THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/opinion/americas-shameful-human-rights-record.html?_r=1

June 26, 2012

Thousands of Israelis Join 'Citizen's Mutiny' After Violent Arrest of Protest Leader

After violent arrest of the symbolic leader of Israel's social justice mov't,
thousands pour onto streets in rage

June 25, 2012

Legal Aid Society Sues New York City over Bogus Pot Arrests

from AlterNet:


Legal Aid Society Sues New York City over Bogus Pot Arrests


It is no secret that NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly’s internal memo ordering his officers to follow the law on marijuana "in public view" arrests did not work -- and now the Legal Aid Society has filed a lawsuit accusing police of ignoring it. After Kelly’s September order, the NYPD continued to uncover marijuana via routine stop-and-frisks, during which police either told suspects to empty their pockets and belongings or did so themselves. Even though the pot wasn’t in public view until cops made it that way, they continued to charge people with the more serious crime of weed that is visible.

“It’s certainly a sad commentary that the commissioner can issue a directive that reads well on paper but on the street corners of the city doesn’t exist,” said Legal Aid’s attorney Steven Banks. Kelly’s memo resulted in a temporary dip in marijuana arrests, but 2011 -- with more than 50,000 marijuana arrests -- was the second highest year for pot busts in New York City history. Almost 90% of those arrested were Black and Latino, the majority of them young men.

The lawsuit filed against the city and the Police Department Friday seeks the court to declare the practice illegal under state law and forbid officers from making the bogus arrests for which they should already be punished. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/991170/legal_aid_society_sues_new_york_city_over_bogus_pot_arrests/

June 25, 2012

States Lacking Income Tax Get No Boost in Growth

(Bloomberg) Governors seeking to expand their economies by eliminating income taxes find little support for the idea in the record of U.S. states that lack such a levy.

The BGOV Barometer shows the nine states with the highest personal income taxes on residents outperformed or kept pace on average with the nine that don’t tax their residents’ incomes, according to a study of economic output, unemployment and household income by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The findings show cutting state income taxes to stimulate growth relies on “flawed analysis” based on the theories of economist Arthur Laffer, said Carl Davis, a senior analyst at ITEP in Washington and author of the report. Laffer’s work was cited by Republican Governors Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma as a reason to cut income taxes as a way to stimulate job growth and attract business.

“Being low-tax doesn’t generate economic competitiveness or long-term economic viability,” said Ralph Martire, executive director at the nonpartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in Chicago. “There are other factors that are far more important. The state tax burden overall is marginal compared to federal tax burden.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-25/states-lacking-income-tax-get-no-boost-in-growth-bgov-barometer.html

June 25, 2012

David Suzuki: Why Planet’s Survival Requires Undoing Its Economic Model

Pt. I

Pt. II



from Democracy Now! :

As the Rio+20 Earth Summit — the largest U.N. conference ever — ends in disappointment, we’re joined by the leading Canadian scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki. As host of the long-running CBC program, "The Nature of Things," seen in more than 40 countries, Suzuki has helped educate millions about the rich biodiversity of the planet and the threats it faces from human-driven global warming. In 1990 he co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation which focuses on sustainable ecology and in 2009, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. Suzuki joins us from the summit in Rio de Janeiro to talk about the climate crisis, the student protests in Quebec, his childhood growing up in an internment camp, and his daughter Severn’s historic speech at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when she was 12 years-old. "If we don’t see that we are utterly embedded in the natural world and dependent on Mother Nature for our very well-being and survival ... then our priorities will continue to be driven by man-made constructs like national borders, economies, corporations, markets," Suzuki says. "Those are all human created things. They shouldn’t dominate the way we live. It should be the biosphere, and the leaders in that should be indigenous people who still have that sense that the earth is truly our mother, that it gives birth to us. You don’t treat your mother the way we treat the planet or the biosphere today."

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/25/david_suzuki_on_rio_20_green

June 25, 2012

The Misruling Class: Meritocracy worship bedevils America

from In These Times:



The Misruling Class
Meritocracy worship bedevils America.





BY Christopher Hayes


We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities. The consequences of this simple, devastating realization define American life. The failure of the elites and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society. It structures and constrains the very process by which we gather facts, form opinions, and execute self-governance. It connects the Iraq War and the financial crisis, the Tea Party and MoveOn, the despair of laid-off autoworkers in Detroit to the foreclosed homeowners in Las Vegas and the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans: nothing seems to work. All the smart people fucked up, and no one seems willing to take responsibility.

The key both to Barack Obama’s political success and to his political setbacks lies in his ability to connect to our core sense of betrayal and his inability to deliver us from elite failure.

Obama only had a fighting chance at the Democratic nomination because of the credibility bestowed by his appearance at a 2002 Chicago rally opposing the invasion of Iraq, where he referred to the impending invasion as a “dumb war.” He, alone among the leading contenders, was able to see that the emperor had no clothes. He invoked, time and time again, the great social movements in American history that attacked the authority of the unjust institutions that preserved the status quo. And he advanced a critique of American politics at the end of the Bush years that homed in on the fundamental dysfunctions, improper dependencies, and imbalances of power that had led to the mess we were in.

But as much as Obama spoke to the desire of Americans for reconstruction, and reform, he also cultivated the support of those members of the elite who had grown disgusted with and weary of the Bush administration, and who longed for restoration of authority rather than a revolution from below. Barack Obama may have constantly invoked his years as a community organizer in Chicago, but he spent just as much time at Harvard Law. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13352/the_misruling_class