Nathan Schneider: Ask not who’s co-opting you, ask whom you can co-opt

Schneider at Waging Nonviolence ..

Rather than arguing about whether the 99% Spring is co-option or not — spoiler alert: it is — Occupiers can be strategizing about how to co-opt it back even more. How can all these newly-trained troops be mobilized into Occupying? What specific actions can they be drawn into to practice what they’ve learned? How can people in the movement further turn these people’s attention to structures of oppression, rather than to stump speeches and delegates? These are questions that call for creativity — which fortunately the movement, if it still in fact has its mojo, shouldn’t have a problem delivering. If the movement really does have something better to offer than the liberal and reformist bloc, now’s the time to prove it

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, April 20, 2012

Julian Assange’s first show on RT – Interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah

Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, April 19, 2012

Glenn Greenwald: Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics

Glenzilla ..

A new news show hosted by Julian Assange debuted yesterday on RT, the global media outlet funded by the Russian government and carried by several of America’s largest cable providers. His first show was devoted to an interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has not given a television interview since 2006. The combination of Assange and a Russian-owned TV network has triggered a predictable wave of snide, smug attacks from American media figures, attacks that found their purest expression in this New York Times review yesterday of Assange’s new program by Alessandra Stanley

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, April 19, 2012

Democracy Now: Kony 2012 – Ugandans Criticize Popular Video for Backing U.S. Military Intervention in Central Africa

.. read Democracy Now transcript
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Atrios: THE ONE TRUE WANKER OF THE DECADE – Tom Friedman

as expected, Atrios ..

[Friedman on Charlie Rose] - "I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie ... We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it ... What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?
Well Suck. On. This.
Okay. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."
... [snip] ...
For years Friedman spent dithering about the war. Oh gee it wasn't going well, but the light at the end of the tunnel might be around the corner in another critical 6 months, leading me to coin the term Friedman Unit, or the F.U. It wasn't just Friedman of course. Basically every pro-stay in Iraq person would utter some version of "the next six months is critical" on a regular basis. For years I put these statements in my calendar, and six months later would remind the world that nothing had changed and we are still in Iraq and the stupid fucking fuckstick is still writing in your newspaper or on the teevee blathering about the next crucial six months. The state of the world is what it is in large part because people in positions of great power think this absurd buffoon of man is a Very Serious Person

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Atrios: WANKER OF THE DECADE – 1st Runner Up, Fred Hiatt

Atrios ..

Some years back I had a wee epiphany when I realized that, for the most part, we aren't supposed to to read the WaPo editorial page. It isn't actually for us. It's a means for certain elites to send messages to each other, a way for the "Gang Of 500" to take their battles public, to signal their interests and priorities. There are some exceptions to this, some columnists who write for readers, but for the most part it's simply a conversation by and for elites. If you're good enough, smart enough, and, doggone it, Fred Hiatt thinks you're important, there's no limit to the amount of bullshit you can have blessed by him. On his page is where the Washington Consensus is defended daily, truth be damned. Krauthammer. Broder. Hoagland. Kristol. Novak. Cohen. Lane. Cupp. Thiessen. Kurtz. Samuelson. Diehl. Kelly. Noonan. Will. Ignatius. Parker. Marcus. Milbank. Gerson. Some of these people are no longer with us, and I have no idea which ones Hiatt is really responsible for, but I'm a lazy blogger so I'll just throw them all in his column. Imagine assembling this collection of horrors, and being proud of it

pretty sure Tommy Friedman will win this contest .. Atrios coined the term "Friedman units," i.e. (from Wikipedia): "One Friedman Unit is equal to six months, specifically the "next six months", a period repeatedly declared by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to be the most critical of the then-ongoing Iraq War even though such pronouncements extended back over two and a half years" - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, April 16, 2012

Atrios: WANKER OF THE DECADE – 2nd Runner Up, Andrew Sullivan

Atrios/Eschaton ..

While the horrible events of 9/11 predated, somewhat, THE ESCHATON DECADE, among the numerous consequences was the rise of the warbloggers. Sullivan had a longish media career, but was also one of the early bloggers. And after 9/11, General Sullivan enlisted in the Fighting 101st Keyboard Kommandos, otherwise known as the "warbloggers," whose primary mission was to fight America's most important enemy, the enemy at home known as "Americans." In the Sunday Times of London on September 16, 2001 (!!), Andrew had these lines: "The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column." This was 5 days after 9/11 (presumably written a couple of days before) .. As we get higher and higher on this list, I get more tired even as the wanking of the wankers becomes greater and greater

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, April 16, 2012

Democracy Now: SDS Founder, Veteran Activist Tom Hayden on Participatory Democracy from Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street

.. read transcript
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 15, 2012

Mike King: Counter-Insurgency as Insurgency

King at CounterPunch ..

[MoveOn et al's] 99% Spring is attempting to graft itself to Occupy and hollow it out from the inside out, imposing rigid norms of non-violence and deference to police authority, while watering down our politics and introducing well-funded and trained institutions that are either fully invested in, or dependent upon, the exist power structure – and have the resources, connections and will of self-preservation to navigate the Occupy ship into a doldrums from which it will never emerge. Despite the undemocratic and self-defeating norm of consensus, we, as an Occupy movement, still have a sense of what we came here to do. We didn’t come here to sign petitions or to get Obama reelected. We didn’t come here to “have a voice in the system”; we came here to flip it on its head. We will not be co-opted. We should not have our tactics determined by the Democratic Party. We should not let ourselves be undermined from within. We have the capacity to call the 99% Spring out for what it is – a deluded attempt by the Obama campaign to kill two birds with one stone, to take the hundreds of thousands in the street demanding real democracy (laying bare the utter failure of the Obama administration and the American State) and turn it into a vehicle to re-elect him. So that he can bomb Iran with impunity, or continue to deport more undocumented immigrants than any other president, or cover-up more massacres in Afghanistan, or think that half-baked rhetoric about inequality coupled with more tax breaks for businesses represents “Change we can believe in.”

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, April 13, 2012

Atrios: Wanker of the Decade Countdown

Atrios/Eschaton is counting down the 10 worst wankers since he started his blog 10 years ago .. so far he's down to 4th runner up

The ESCHATON DECADE has been a pretty fucked up decade, a time when this country stopped even bothering to pretend to live up to many of its supposed ideals. We go to war and kill lots of people for no good reason, elites have eliminated any accountability for themselves for criminal wrongdoing, we've tortured and assassinated people, and the response to massive economic suffering and related criminal fraud has been to give lots of free money to the people who caused it all. And one premise of his blog is that all of this shit happens, in part, because of the fucking wankers who rule our public discourse. Paying too much attention to it every day can be bad enough sometimes, but reliving it all again is actually a bit painful

Diane Sawyer is 7th runner up for her Bush/Cheney-fellating Dixie Chicks interview .. I'll keep y'all posted on the top 3 wankers - mab .. read more
UPDATE: Wanker of the Decade 3rd runner up is .. [drum roll] .. Joe Klein
UPDATE #2: Someone at Daily Kos (ManOutOfTime) has a Guide to Atrios's Wankers of the Decade
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, April 13, 2012

Naomi Wolf: How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses

Wolf in The Guardian ..

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time .. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations .. The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness .. Remember, you don't need to have done anything wrong to be arrested in America any longer. You can be arrested for walking your dog without a leash. The man [in the Supreme court case] who was forced to spread his buttocks was stopped for a driving infraction

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, April 12, 2012

Charles Davis: The liberal betrayal of Bradley Manning

Davis filling in for vacationing Glenn Greenwald in Salon ..

Alyssa Rosenberg, a blogger for the Center for American Progress, declared her “main opinion of Bradley Manning” to be that “it sounds like he has pretty serious emotional problems and turned out not to be a particularly effective whistleblower.” .. Joy Reid, a Democratic pundit who often appears on MSNBC, likewise dwells on Manning’s alleged emotional problems and gayness .. In this case one might well ask: What if Rick Santorum said it? When the Nixon administration sought to discredit Ellsberg back in 1971, it played by the same book as Reid and other Obama loyalists unwilling to believe their president is persecuting a hero, breaking into his psychiatrist’s office in a vain attempt to uncover evidence of mental illness. Today, the liberal media does the government’s work for it .. the treatment of Manning – labeled “appropriate” by Obama; as “cruel” and “inhuman” by the UN special rapporteur on torture – threatens the mainstream liberal narrative about the American state. If a Democratic president is torturing a whistle-blower who primarily exposed atrocities authorized by his Republican predecessor, it’s almost as if . . . well, best not to think about that .. “There’s a long tradition of liberals, especially in the first few decades after the Cold War, of being opposed to, say, the vulgar witch-hunting, hysterical anti-communism of Joseph McCarthy,” says [civil rights attorney Chase] Madar, “but being supportive of the much more professional anti-communism of, say, Harvard University.”

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Nathan Schneider: How to succeed in reoccupation without really trying

Schneider in Waging Nonviolence ..

For lots of organizers, I’ve noticed, the operating presumption is that occupation — something comparable to last fall but somehow surely better — constitutes a prerequisite to further political action. Consequently, a considerable amount of the energy of the most talented organizers in New York (as well as, evidently, in Oakland and San Francisco) has been directed toward failed reoccupation attempts .. What if the first thing people thought of when they heard the word “Occupy” was, “Oh, those are the kids trying to take down the most dangerous bank in America and who saved my friend’s home from foreclosure”? Do stuff like this, and you’re creating a dilemma for the whole society. You’re asking everyone to choose sides — not about a little occupation, but about major features of everyday economic life. Do I want Bank of America to foreclose on my neighbor or not? Do I want my kids to spend their post-college lives enslaved by debt or not?

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, April 11, 2012

OWS.org: Wall Street #Occupied

Occupy Wall St dot Org ..

For the first time since our movement against economic inequality and political corruption began, Occupy Wall Street is literally occupying Wall Street. As of 3am eastern time [April 10th], over 40 Occupiers are sleeping on Wall Street near the corner of Broad across from the New York Stock Exchange .. On April 6, [at Union Square] NYPD gathered once again for the nightly ¨eviction theater¨ only to find Occupiers had moved to the sidewalks and erected a sign declaring their legal right to do so. When police moved in arrest them, Occupiers on livestream read the law permitting sleeping on sidewalks as political protest. In Metropolitan v. Safir, the U.S. District Court covering New York City ruled that ¨ the First Amendment of the United States Constitution does not allow the City to prevent an orderly political protest from using public sleeping as a means of symbolic expression." The police backed down. The tactic quickly became a model for other Occupations

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Glenn Greenwald: Oscar-nominated U.S. filmmaker Laura Poitras repeatedly detained at border

Glenzilla ..

It’s hard to overstate how oppressive it is for the U.S. Government to be able to target journalists, film-makers and activists and, without a shred of suspicion of wrongdoing, learn the most private and intimate details about them and their work: with whom they’re communicating, what is being said, what they’re reading. That’s a radical power for a government to assert in general. When it starts being applied not randomly, but to people engaged in activism and journalism adverse to the government, it becomes worse than radical: it’s the power of intimidation and deterrence against those who would challenge government conduct in any way. The ongoing, and escalating, treatment of Laura Poitras is a testament to how severe that abuse is

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, April 9, 2012

David Sirota: Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need New Roads

Sirota ..

Instead of beefing up public transit, cities build neighborhood-destroying highways, cars fill up those highways, cities then build more highways to alleviate traffic, and then yet more cars flood the roads, creating even more traffic .. But what happens when America suddenly tones down its love affair with the automobile? At that point, could we still justify destroying neighborhoods to make room for bigger roads? Could we still pretend that more roads are truly necessary? Could we still overlook the fact that road construction creates fewer jobs than public transit projects?

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 8, 2012

Smithsonian: Looking Back on the Limits of Growth

Smithsonian magazine ..

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth. Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030 .. However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint

there's a graph that show Turner's predictions from 1970 to 2000 were correct, then shit hits fan in 18 years unless we change course - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 8, 2012

Adbusters: #PLAYJAZZ, Tactical Briefing #28

Adbusters ..

Our Spring offensive is building toward a climactic May uprising… time to come out of winter hibernation and play jazz like we’ve never played it before .. one of the softer aesthetic moments of our Spring offensive could well be the #LAUGHRIOT on May 18, the day the G8 leaders meet in Camp David. There is something totally ludicrous, absurd, even insane about the eight most powerful people in the world deciding to do the people’s business people behind closed doors and razor wire fences. This veneer of legitimacy is our tragedy turned to farce. As Aristotle observed, to laugh is uniquely human… Imagine the scene: first a few hundred of us, then a few thousand, then millions of people across the world — each in their own way, some individually, some collectively in flash mobs, offices, parks, encampments — all breaking out in uproarious laughter on May 18

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, April 7, 2012

The Canary Party and Grassroots Autism Organizations Call for Firings of Health Officials in the Wake of New Autism Numbers

This is a press conference held recently in NYC that a group my brother Mark is involved in organized to respond to the new autism numbers (one in every 88 kids) - here's a portion of the press release

Canary Party Chairman Mark Blaxill, speaking on behalf of [The Age of Autism, AutismOne, Autism Action Network, Autism File, The Canary Party, Center for Personal Rights, The Coalition for Safe Minds, Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy, Focus Autism, National Autism Association and Talk About Curing Autism], representing tens of thousands of families, have committed to the public and to officials that, “We are not going away. We cannot. We all live with autism every day in one way or another. We will not stop pushing until we get accountable leadership and until we reverse this devastating epidemic.”

-mab
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, April 7, 2012

Brian Moench: Autism and Disappearing Bees, A Common Denominator?

Moench in Common Dreams ..

studies [show] autistic children and their mothers have a high rate of a genetic deficiency in the production of glutathione, an anti-oxidant and the body’s primary means of detoxifying heavy metals. High levels of toxic metals in children are strongly correlated with the severity of autism. Low levels of glutathione, coupled with high production of another chemical, homocysteine, increase the chance of a mother having an autistic child to one in three. That autism is four times more common among boys than girls is likely related to a defect in the single male X chromosome contributing to anti-oxidant deficiency. There is no such thing as a genetic disease epidemic because genes don't change that quickly. So the alarming rise in autism must be the result of increased environmental exposures that exploit these genetic defects .. as participants in modern society we are all now exposed to over 83,000 chemicals from the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the consumer products we use. Pregnant women and their children have 100 times more chemical exposures today than 50 years ago. The average newborn has over 200 different chemicals and heavy metals contaminating its blood when it takes its first breath. 158 of them are toxic to the brain

Moench is President of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment - Utah has the highest rates of autism in the country - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, April 6, 2012

David Swanson: Catching Rachel Maddow’s Drift

Swanson on Firedoglake ..

Two flatly contradictory claims toward the end of “Drift” sum up my ambivalent attitude toward the book. First, Maddow writes that “there are no examples in modern history in which a counterinsurgency in a foreign country has been successful. None!” Then, a few pages later, back on the theme of reckless spending, Maddow writes: “‘We don’t have any enemies in Congress,’ a senior defense official told me in 2011. ‘We have to fight Congress to cut programs, not keep them.’ And those are basically the only fights the Pentagon ever loses.” Well, except for every single counterinsurgency, every single war, the war on Iraq, the war on Afghanistan, the war on Pakistan, the war on Libya, the wars back to the start of the book in Vietnam. None of those nations are better off because of U.S. bombs. The United States is not better off because of having bombed them. The United States does not control them. They have not submitted to its will. Why not admit that the Pentagon always loses? Why not admit that its losses are crimes and must always be immoral and illegal in every instance? What does Maddow want us to do with a story of the dogs of war gradually going mad, if the story claims that those dogs provide a “service” and tend to “win”?

excellent article + must read - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, April 5, 2012

Connecticut Poised to Abolish Death Penalty

David Dayen at Firedoglake ..

Almost imperceptibly, and despite nominal support nationally for capital punishment, states are, one by one, abolishing the death penalty, citing the risks of executing innocents, the inherent biases in the system, and the extreme costs. Legislatures in New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois have abolished the death penalty in recent years, and the courts in New York found it in violation of the state Constitution. Now, Connecticut is poised to become the 17th state to ban the death penalty .. Maintaining Death Row and managing the death penalty system is prohibitively expensive. A ballot measure this November in California will seek to abolish the death penalty, and one of their major selling points is the billion-dollar-a-year cost

god forbid we abolish it on moral grounds - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, April 5, 2012

David Dayen: Federal Judge Assigns Homework on Judicial Review to Justice Department

Dayen on Firedoglake ..

[Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th circuit to DOJ lawyer] "I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday…a letter stating what is the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice, in regard to the recent statements by the president, stating specifically and in detail in reference to those statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review. That letter needs to be at least three pages single spaced, no less, and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the president’s statements and again to the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice." So you have a federal judge assigning homework to the Justice Department on the concept of judicial review, designed to embarrass the President. These Federalist Society types are really feeling their oats, ay?

"three pages single spaced.." i'm speechless - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Dean Baker: The Cost of Health Care in Europe, The Debut of Professional Wrestling on NPR

Dean Baker on Firedoglake ..

National Public Radio told listeners that, “Like the U.S., Europe Wrestles With Health Care.” If the wrestling in Europe is anything like the U.S., then we must be talking about professional wrestling. (“Hit him over the head with a chair!”) The per person cost of health care across Europe is far less than in the United States. According to the OECD, in 2009 (the most recent year for which it has comparable data), per capita health care expenditures in the United States were $7,960. In France, Germany, and the UK, the three countries featured in the piece, the costs were $3,978, $4,218, and $3,487 respectively

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Occupy San Francisco Creates Social Center in Vacant Church Building

from Occupywallst.org ..

In another sign of the Occupy movement's diversifying tactics and growing spring momentum, yesterday Occupy San Francisco liberated a vacant building owned by the Archdiocese of San Francisco and announced plans to establish a permanent occupation -- including a social center, shelter, and food bank -- on the site .. Most recently (as of 1am Pacific time), police had surrounded the building with barricades to prevent supplies from getting inside. Occupiers have announced they will serve breakfast at 9am and are inviting everyone to join them! Local media described the action as a ¨well-organized takeover.¨ Speaking to local press, a representative of Occupy SF stated, "There is no reason why any building should be vacant when people have no housing. We ask that the archdiocese do the right thing and allow these services in these buildings." In part directing their message at Church officials, Occupy SF hung a large banner quoting from the Bible: "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses."

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, April 2, 2012