The day after Rachel was killed, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised President George W. Bush a “thorough, credible and transparent investigation.” Yet according to a Human Rights Watch report from 2005, Israel’s “investigations into Corrie’s killing … fell far short of the transparency, impartiality, and thoroughness required by international law.” The civil trial, Craig Corrie says, is not about the monetary damages, but discovering information, and “like [South African Archbishop] Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society.”

.. read more

It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous–yet it is now taken for granted.

corrupt green orgs named in the article include Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, NRDC, The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International – mab .. read more

During the months of his internal exile in the Obama administration, the old lion hadn’t been just licking his wounds. Volcker turned out to be a better organizer than Obama. He organized several other senior eminences to support his call to restore Glass-Steagall, including Nicholas Brady, treasury secretary under Bush I, Bill Donaldson, SEC chair under Bush II, and Roger Altman, Robert Rubin’s former deputy

.. read more

“Suddenly there are more people who want to know what it actually is,” said [Louisville resident Fred] Hicks, head of the Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, whose members seek more government regulation of business, health care and wages. Nationwide, the Democratic Socialists of America partly credits the term’s usage with a 64 percent rise in memberships between 2008 and 2009 … A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 53 percent of Americans thought capitalism was better than socialism; 20 percent preferred socialism; and 27 percent were uncertain

.. read more

The CBO projects that the relatively weak public option-the one limited just to the exchange in the House health care bill-would secure roughly one-fifth of that market, equal to around 6 million people (PDF). The CBO concluded that, as a result of those 6 million customers, the public option will take in $298 billion (PDF) in direct premiums, exchange subsidies, and risk adjustment payments from 2013-2019. However, with the public option removed, but the individual mandate remaining, that $300 billion will instead go straight to the private insurance corporations’ books

.. read more

Over the last few years the coal industry has suffered one setback after another. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 123 plants have been defeated, with another 51 facing opposition in the courts. Of the 231 plants being tracked, only 25 currently have a chance at gaining the permits necessary to begin construction and eventually come online. Building a coal plant may soon be impossible

.. read more

Local businesses are educating communities, changing economic policies, and even outperforming chain competitors… independent retailers in communities with active “Buy Independent” or “Buy Local” campaigns reported an increase in holiday sales three times stronger (up three percent) than those in cities without such campaigns (up one percent)

.. read more

Latin America took another historic step forward this week with the creation of a new regional organisation of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The United States and Canada were excluded. The increasing independence of Latin America has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade, affecting not only the region but the rest of the world as well

.. read more

Looking at these numbers, it is mind boggling that the White House decided the path forward on health care reform is to try to basically push the current Senate bill, almost unchanged, while trying to stop the public option from being included. It is an unbelievable act of political malpractice. A five-year-old could do a better job seeing what the right political play should be. Only in our broken “democracy” could the opinion of a handful of lobbyists representing one of the most unpopular industries in American have more sway than the opinion of roughly 65% of Americans

meanwhile corporate media hacks like Dana Milbank still call the public option “unpopular” with a straight face – mab .. read more

The author of the op-ed, Lara M. Dadkhah, is identified by the Times merely as “an intelligence analyst.” In the body of the op-ed, the author identifies herself as “employed by a defense consulting company,” without telling us which company, or what her relationship might be to actors who stand to lose financially if the recognition that killing civilians is bad for the United States were to affect expenditures by the United States military.

.. read more

Recall that one year ago, Obama instructed the DEA to follow his campaign pledge and respect local statutes legalizing medicinal marijuana. When the DEA kept raiding pot dispensaries in states that had passed such laws, Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated the cease and desist decree, stating that “What (Obama) said during the campaign is now American policy.” As even more raids nonetheless continued, the Justice Department then issued an explicit memo ordering federal agents to refrain from prosecuting those who are in “compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” And yet the DEA has recently intensified its crackdown.

.. read more

The post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There’s even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn’t call the cops is known as the “Cool Off.”

.. read more

The issue isn’t whether [Austin plane crasher] Stack’s grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC’s Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are “a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen.” Fox News’ Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: “I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?,” to which Herridge replied: “they mean terrorism in that capital T way.” All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: “a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.”

.. read more

If the public option with a state opt-out was only a few votes shy of 60, it should clearly have at least 50 votes for passage by a reconciliation measure that can’t be filibustered, right? What Reid’s spokesman now appears to be saying is that the public option doesn’t have even 50 votes in the Senate.

here we go again – mab .. read more

The Bank of North Dakota – the nation’s only state-owned bank – might seem to be a relic. It was the brainchild of a failed flax farmer and one-time Socialist Party organizer during World War I. But now officials in other states are wondering if it is helping North Dakota sail through the national recession

.. read more

This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory.

.. read more

We dummies are not supposed to notice that [Adam] Smith was writing in the 1700s when there was no such thing as market-dominating, multi-national corporations, just mostly small family businesses. We’re also supposed to forget that most market transactions of Smith’s day were between buyers and sellers. There wasn’t a cottage industry of middlemen or all-the-time-in-your-face marketing… Everybody loves Adam Smith, until they read him and understand that the small business free-market he envisioned is a far cry from the predatory corporate capitalism we have today.

.. read more

The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue .. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

Lewis is the author of Liar’s Poker .. read more

The Midwest and the South do have an abundant supply of untapped, low-cost, low-carbon power–it just hasn’t been defined as green yet. The solution to some of the woes of nineteen of these states can be found right in their high-carbon infrastructures: old manufacturing plants, municipalities and agricultural produce waste energy that can be profitably “recycled” onto the grid to create power as clean as that from solar and wind but far cheaper. In fact, energy now lost as steam and gases by the region’s manufacturing plants, as well as municipal and agricultural waste, could create as much energy as sixty-nine nuclear power plants, according to figures commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency

.. read more