Duty to Warn

One media pundit described the event as an earthquake caused by so many jaws hitting the floor at once. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post for a cool $250 million. A family owned and operated newspaper for nearly eight decades was just gobbled up for a little more than 1% of Bezos's massive personal fortune.

The Washington Post was the gold standard for investigative journalism in America when it came to national security. It broke the Watergate scandal. It defied Nixon again when it published the Pentagon Papers along with the New York Times. It was an early partner with the Guardian in publishing some of Edward Snowden's revelations, although it seems to have gotten cold feet as of late. Perhaps we are seeing why.

Had Bezos been shopping for just any big marque newspaper he could have picked up the Boston Globe for a paltry $70 million just last month. He is one of the few that could easily outbid the Koch brothers for the LA Times and/or the Chicago Tribune. Big name newspapers are a steal for tech moguls. The Washington Post was what he wanted and the Washington Post is what he got.

Michael Moore and his team of volunteers has again wowed the film industry and viewers with more films, film panels, film school, and film parties than ever before. Moore is committed to making the festival more accessible to all viewing guests and had several free film screenings as well as free panels and discussions. As Moore described, "This year we worked harder than ever to provide a fun and affordable festival for everyone, no matter their budget. We want everyone to be able to enjoy just great movies in the one of the most beautiful areas of the country."

And "Just Great Movies" were exactly that. From documentaries on Afghanistan, Gore Vidal, Nixon, and Nuclear Energy, the film festival viewers were changed and intrigued by the in-depth and thoughtful presentations. Narrative films such as "Kon Tiki", "Much Ado About Nothing," and "Bypass" among many others thrilled the viewers with their humor and sexy style.

I'm on my way to Madison, Wisconsin, and I hope you are too, and not just for the beer and (veggie) bratwursts. Here are seven other good reasons:
· The Student Power Convergence, Aug. 1-5 (ending now, but folks sticking around).
· The Democracy Convention, Aug. 7-11.
· The Veterans For Peace Convention, Aug. 7-11.
· Marking the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki together with opponents of war.
· The opening of Dirty Wars with after-screening talks with Jeremy Scahill.
· The daily singing and protesting in the state capitol!
· And the big town hall meeting, Aug. 7, on "Illegal Wars, Torture & Spying: Millions Demanded Bush's Impeachment; Should Obama be Impeached for Continuing Bush's Crimes?"

Activists are converging on Madison, allowing for cross-fertilization and creative planning of future actions for peace and justice in the United States. I recently invited Roshan Bliss of the Student Power Convergence, Ben Manski of Democracy Convention, and Doug Rawlings of Veterans For Peace to discuss these events on my radio show, Talk Nation Radio. Click and take a listen.

Like all schoolchildren in America, Congress is now on summer recess. Predictably, while unsupervised, they have taken to playground shoving and taunting in earnest. A troika of ardent NSA defenders took to the airwaves Sunday to claim that they were fully informed. Meanwhile a member of the small but growing wing of Congress with the reading comprehension skills to digest the Constitution took to social media to dispute them.

Thursday afternoon at 2:31 an email was sent to Congressional staffers through the House email system called “E-Dear Colleagues.” The system electronically mimics the old style of sending paper memos between lawmakers in what was called a “Dear Colleagues” letter. According to a staffer who was interviewed about the email, this system is high traffic and as a result is used by “less than half of Congressional staffers.” He went on to describe the email list as opt-in only by topic and “kind of spammy.” Most effective communication and appointments made between lawmakers happen through their staff schedulers.

Having agreed to Putin's conditions of not making additional revelations, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden packed his bag and moved to an undisclosed location somewhere in Russia after having been granted temporary asylum. The revelations continued anyway as the Guardian released another top secret document detailing another NSA spying program called XKEYSCORE. The heavily redacted XKEYSCORE document details how the NSA searches internet users actual communications contents as opposed to metadata.

Army private and whistle-blower Bradley Manning was found guilty of 19 separate charges at his court martial on Tuesday. He was not convicted of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy, which carried the death penalty. The convictions include six violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. These convictions alone could cost Manning 60 years behind bars. The espionage convictions are considered especially chilling to the press, as now news “sources” can be prosecuted for much more serious charges. Taken together with the recent 4th circuit court of appeals decision against James Risen, which allows a journalist to be jailed for not revealing a source, the net effect is will be to force the press to participate in the potential life imprisonment of any person who reveals war crimes if the government classifies documents related to those crimes.

Detroit was bankrupted by that bizarre phenomenon known as “American exceptionalism.” The lack of a socialist or labor party arguing on behalf of factory workers and establishing an industrial policy led to the death of the world’s most powerful manufacturing center.

Detroit’s demise is personal to me. I lived there most of the first 31 years of my life. I was born in 1955 when, to quote Bob Seeger “They were making Thunderbirds.” We lived on the west side of Detroit in a working class neighborhood with people of mainly Appalachian descent, called Brightmoor. In 1961, my family moved to 12802 Stout, still in Brightmoor. My dad worked in a tool and die factory across the street, a job essential to the automobile industry.

The sun rose with a moral verdict on Bradley Manning well before the military judge could proclaim his guilt. The human verdict would necessarily clash with the proclamation from the judicial bench.

In lockstep with administrators of the nation’s war services, judgment day arrived on Tuesday to exact official retribution. After unforgiveable actions, the defendant’s culpability weighed heavy.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house,” another defendant, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, wrote about another action that resulted in a federal trial, 45 years earlier, scarcely a dozen miles from the Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning faced prosecution for his own fracture of good order.

“We could not, so help us God, do otherwise,” wrote Berrigan, one of the nine people who, one day in May 1968 while the Vietnam War raged on, removed several hundred files from a U.S. draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with napalm in the parking lot. “For we are sick at heart…”

North Carolina — once poster child for the New South — now displays the nightmares spawned by the Tea Party right no longer restrained by the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court’s conservative gang of five disemboweled it in the Shelby case.

In North Carolina, Republicans took the General Assembly in 2010 and the governorship in 2012. The takeover received rather unprecedented support from one right-wing multimillionaire, Art Pope — who, according to progressive publication The American Prospect, singlehandedly provided about 80 percent of the funding for the state’s conservative groups.