Duty to Warn

Published today, MLK Day 2012: The Military Industrial Complex at 50 is the most comprehensive collection available explaining what the military industrial complex (MIC) is, where it comes from, what damage it does, what further destruction it threatens, and what can be done and is being done to chart a different course.

Authors (from within and without the MIC) contributing chapters to this collection (and available for interviews) include: Ellen Brown • Paul Chappell • Helena Cobban • Ben Davis • Jeff Fogel • Bunny Greenhouse • Bruce Gagnon • Clare Hanrahan • John Heuer • Steve Horn • Robert Jensen • Karen Kwiatkowski • Judith Le Blanc • Bruce Levine • Ray McGovern • Wally Myers • Robert Naiman • Gareth Porter • Chris Rodda • Allen Ruff • Mia Austin Scoggins • Tony Russell • Lisa Savage • Mary Beth Sullivan • Coleman Smith • Dave Shreve • David Swanson • Pat Elder • Jonathan Williams • Ann Wright.

Short bios of the authors are available here David Swanson

The book is available at MIC50.org in paperback, bulk discount, audio, PDF, kindle, Epub, and iPad/iPhone.

To Democratic citizens of the U. S.:
The proposal for the Keystone XL Pipeline to move oil from the northern Canadian sand tar pits to Texas was included in essential legislation late last year. Read the following letter to learn that The Keystone XL Pipeline would be disastrous environmentally, and would not provide jobs gasoline, or diesel fuel in the U.S.

It would be very profitable for the big oil companies which now have a fallacious advertising campaign.

On Saturday, December 17, 2011 the Senate passed a Bill 98 to 10 (39 Republican Senators (80%) voted for it.) to extend the FICA (Social Security) Tax cut, extend unemployment insurance benefits, and continued the pay primary care physicians at the current rate to care for Medicare patient. The fees were scheduled to be cut by 27% on January 1st. That would weaken Medicare by denying some patient care. The Senate then adjourned for the year.

Since December 14, Mumia has been kept in solitary in SCI Mahanoy's dungeon. Its restrictions and conditions belie its modern construction. On January 6 Mumia told us that he wants all of his supporters to broaden this call, to not just focus on his case, but to understand that all torture units must be shut down.

The Human Rights Coalition is a group of prisoners, family members, and supporters that have been exposing and challenging state torture in Pennsylvania for years. HRC states "Mumia may be in solitary, but he is not alone. The PA Department of Corrections holds approximately 2,500 people in solitary confinement on any given day, many of them for years at a time." Please visit these websites to learn more: Human Rights Coalition and Solitary Watch.

Please write, call, and email today! The defeat for the State, having to openly declare that Mumia will live, and recognizing that they can no longer legally execute Mumia, has resulted in a severe backlash. After his transfer off of death row, Mumia was thrown in the hole at SCI Mahanoy.

I want to thank the ‘Free Press’ & Tom Over for the coverage of the Occupy movement. However, while I admire & respect Tom’s hard work in covering the movement, there was a formulation in his latest piece that I feel needs to be examined.

The article spoke of Occupy activists being afraid of “being taken over by big unions and the Democratic Party.” While I’d make no attempt to discuss the motives of that, or any other, political party, as a life-long member, activist & leader of the United Steelworker’s Union, I can absolutely assure you that no one, from national AFL-CIO President Trumka, to state, local unionists, all the way down to rank & file unionists here in Columbus, has any approach directed at “taking over” this wonderful new movement. As a leader, organizer of, the local Steelworker’s Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR), we invited and were very happy to have numerous Occupy activists attend our annual Christmas dinner. We were overjoyed to offer a good meal and friendship to these activists, even asking them to address the steelworkers and friends present.

‘Retirement Heist,’ by Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Schultz, is certainly one of the most important books published in the past few decades. For the past three decades, we’ve been inundated with hysterical announcements from the corporations that they faced a “crisis” due to “runaway pension and health care costs.”

These undue burdens were bringing the entire economic system down, they said. American companies, we were told by a corporate owned media, just couldn’t compete with “unfair competition,” all because of outrageous “entitlements.” Ellen Schultz has shown, with meticulous research, how financial institutions, corporations, were able to use accounting tricks, rulings by corporate controlled government oversight bodies, ridiculous tax incentives, deception and outright lies to literally destroy the structure of retirement security that took decades of struggle by America’s working people to put in place.

New Hampshire’s primary grabs headlines today, but if history is any guide, the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary will play a far greater role in determining the Republican winner.

Of that state’s population, 28 percent are African American, and could be a major factor in the primary. But Republican candidates have made little effort to reach out to the black community. Republican South Carolina voters are likely to be nearly as white as they were in Iowa and New Hampshire. All the Republican candidates will pay tribute to Dr. King on his birthday next week, but they seem oblivious to one of his greatest contributions: the creation of the New South.

Don't take it from me. Take it from the book being published today that will mainstream the movement to end corporate personhood: "Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do, And What You Can Do About It," by Jeff Clements with foreword by Bill Moyers.

Clements traces the development of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood back long before the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision two years ago this month, in particular to President Richard Nixon's appointment of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court in 1972. Led by Powell's radical new conception of corporate rights, Clements shows, the court began striking down laws that protected living breathing persons' rights in areas including the environment, tobacco, public health, food, drugs, financial regulation, and elections.

SIX PROBLEMS UNIQUE TO 2012 NEW HAMPSHIRE ELECTIONS:
1. Removed safeguards for its same-day registration system.
2. Ignores the law on ballot-stuffing safeguards
3. Breaks the chain of custody
4. Conceals vote-counting from the public, in violation of Article 32 of its own Constitution
5. Removed candidate recount rights (2009)
6. Made it illegal for public citizens or members of the press to examine the ballots after the election is over (2003)

TWO THINGS YOU CAN DO
1. Get involved with Protect the Count NH or Watch the Vote 2012 (links below)
2. Monitor the trap doors

WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT NEW HAMPSHIRE'S FIRST-IN-NATION PRIMARY?

Like the Iowa caucus system, it forces candidates to answer real questions from actual people. Political strategists like their candidates to plan their media (setting up media ops that are nothing short of laughable; placing their candidates in cornfields, in tanks, on factory assembly lines, donning catcher's mitts and plaid shirts and baseball caps.) Unscripted moments are forced on candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire, where locals won't vote-ya if you hide behind photo ops.

Maybe they’re trying to remind us that democracy isn’t merely a matter of casting that little vote once every Leap Year — but, far, far more significantly, it’s about getting that right to vote in the first place, keeping that right, and having it matter.

Every one of these rights is in jeopardy as 2012 opens and another presidential election season gets serious. But this is nothing new.

After all, democracy is nothing if not a perpetual nuisance to the powerful. It asserts that public policy is everyone’s business, and that the concerns of even the most financially and socially marginal citizens are equal to those of the most elite. Indeed, no one is marginal in a democracy — a concept we embrace as a nation but don’t believe. And thus citizens are marginalized all the time.

As activists and journalists debate whether Homeland Security and the CIA are actively involved in the recent domestic crackdown on the Occupy movement, evidence mounts that the progressive populist movement is being targeted by COINTELPRO style repressive tactics.

Four of the seven Occupy Columbus activists who were arrested on November 15 appeared at pre-trial before a Franklin County municipal judge on Thursday, January 5, 2012. The four had pled not guilty after being charged with “negligent trespassing” for entering the lobby of a US Bank. The activists were touring Columbus banks to inquire about their banking policies. Two of the Occupy activists have pled guilty to a minor misdemeanor trespass charge, and one has not entered a plea.

At the January 5 hearing, the four turned down a plea deal from the prosecutors and received a continuance. They will reappear for another scheduled pre-trial on February 9.

At this moment the four appear ready for a full blown trial that may possibly reveal ties between federal and local police authorities regarding surveillance of the Occupy movement.