December 2011
63 posts
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Glenn Greenwald: Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president | The Guardian
It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America’s enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and...
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Shahan Mufti: From Pakistan to Afghanistan, U.S. Finds Convoy of Chaos | Bloomberg Businessweek
The route from Karachi to Kabul was the best way to get supplies to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the main artery for a Pashtun trucking empire—until Pakistan shut it down
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Adam Shatz: Whose Egypt? | London Review of Books
A liberal Egypt was briefly alive among the people in Tahrir Square who desperately wanted to be a part of the modern world. But as Ernst Bloch once remarked, we all live in the present, but ‘not all of us live in the same now.’ And what the revolutionary youth discovered, once Mubarak was overthrown and the country began to have a genuine...
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Rebecca Solnit: Compassion Is Our New Currency | TomDispatch
The groups working on climate change now, notably 350.org and Tar Sands Action, have done astonishing things already. Most recently, with the help of native Canadians, local activists, and alternative media, they very nearly managed to kill the single scariest and biggest North American threat to the climate: the tar sands pipeline...
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David Villano: The Growth of Degrowth Economics | Miller-McCune
Growth commonly refers to an increase in gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of a country’s goods and services in a given period. Because overall GDP can correlate with higher quality of life, officials in the U.S. and around the world often target GDP growth as an overriding policy objective in itself. But the correlation is...
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Tom Engelhardt: The Four Occupations of Planet Earth | TomDispatch
Like the attempted occupations of the global economy and the Greater Middle East, each spurred by a sense of greed that went beyond all bounds, the occupation of our planet is guaranteed to create its own oppositional forces, and not just in the natural world either. They are perhaps already emerging along with the Arab spring,...
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Russ Baker: The Military and Those Strange Threats to Obama | WhoWhatWhy
As noted earlier, ties between security services and either overt participation or willful ignorance of mortal threats to politicians is not unheard-of. A recent example is the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Even in modernized Western democracies like Sweden and France, elements in...
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Cullen Murphy: Is America ungovernable? | Prospect
American governance is messy by nature—that is one of history’s lessons. Another is that it’s messy by design. Those on both the right and left wring their hands over the inability to pursue a clear agenda, yet, to use the language of Silicon Valley, gridlock is not a bug but a feature. With an eye on what had happened to republican Rome, the...
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Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz: Local police stockpile high-tech, combat-ready gear | Center for Investigative Reporting
Police say greater firepower and more protective equipment became increasingly necessary not only as everyday criminals obtained deadlier weapons, but also in response to 9/11 and other terrorist attacks. They point to a 1997 Los Angeles-area shootout with heavily armed bank...
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Adaw Serwer: I Guess Posting Videos Online Can Make You a Terrorist | Mother Jones
For government authorities increasingly worried about the growth of the English-speaking extremist community and the possibility of homegrown terror, the Mehanna conviction may provide what is, in their view, a salutory chilling effect. For civil libertarians concerned about the government being able to prosecute...
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Matt Taibbi - Obama and Geithner: Government, Enron-Style - Taibblog | Rolling Stone
The problem with companies like Lehman and Enron is that their executives always think they can paper over illegalities by committing more crimes, when in fact all they’re usually doing is snowballing the problem so completely out of control that there’s no longer any chance of fixing things, thereby killing the...
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Avi Kramer: Gassed | Guernica
In the early 2000s, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, the main gas company operating in Wetzel, was not the Fortune 500 company it is today. (Based in Oklahoma City, Chesapeake Energy had a net income of $1.7 billion in 2010. It is currently #263 on the Fortune 500 list.) But that began to change when the George W. Bush administration’s EPA loosened environmental...
“We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an...”
– Dan Gillmor, Professor, Cronkite School of Journalism. 2012 will be the year of the content-controller oligopoly.
Nieman Lab is running an interesting 2012 preview series by asking prominent journalism observers what they think the upcoming year will hold.
Gillmor believes the open Internet —...
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Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich: The Making of the American 99% | TomDispatch
“Liberal elite” was always a political category masquerading as a sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite some traction, though, at least for a while, was that the great majority of us have never knowingly encountered a member of the actual elite, the 1% who are, for the most part, sealed off in...
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Dean Baker: Obama’s stimulus failure | The Guardian
The president could have rescued the economy by pushing for more stimulus. Not doing so was an error of epic proportions
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Bill Keller: The Pakistanis Have a Point | The New York Times Magazine
Talk to Pakistani politicians, scholars, generals, businessmen, spies and journalists — as I did in October — and before long, you are beyond the realm of politics and diplomacy and into the realm of hurt feelings. Words like “ditch” and “jilt” and “betray” recur. With Americans, they complain, it’s never a commitment, it’s...
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John Heilemann: 2012=1968? | New York
In 2008, Barack Obama lit a fire among young activists. Next year, Occupy Wall Street could consume him.
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Glenn Greenwald: Bradley Manning deserves a medal | The Guardian
The oppressive treatment of Manning is designed to create a climate of fear, to send a signal to those who in the future discover serious wrongdoing committed in secret by the US: if you’re thinking about exposing what you’ve learned, look at what we did to Manning and think twice. The real crimes exposed by this...
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Zach Carter - SOPA: Washington Vs. The Web | The Huffington Post
The opposition has succeeded in slowing legislative momentum. Sources in Congress and on K Street now say that Senate is unlikely to vote on its measure by the end of the year. And the bill’s prospects become much slimmer in 2012, an election year in which members will spend much more time away from the Hill.
Yet in the...
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Nick Turse: Making Repression Our Business | TomDispatch
As the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively. It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the region, building up military bases and brokering weapons sales and...
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Christopher Hitchens dies aged 62 | The Guardian
The writer, journalist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62 after crossing the border into the “land of malady” on being diagnosed with an oesophageal cancer in June 2010. Vanity Fair, for which he had written since 1992 and was made contributing editor, marked his death in a memorial article posted late on...
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James Kwak: Too Big To Stop | The Atlantic
Regulatory capture can occur for many reasons: outright bribery and the hope of future job offers are possibilities, but so are ideological conformity and the desire for good relationships and a peaceful life. The result is the same, however: an agency that cannot or does not enforce the public interest against powerful private actors. In that case, the...
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Robert Scheer: There Goes the Republic | Truthdig
What’s alarming is not just that one pernicious aspect of the defense spending bill, but the ease with which an otherwise deadlocked Congress that can’t manage minimal funding for job creation and unemployment relief can find the money to fund at Cold War levels a massive sophisticated arsenal to defeat an enemy that no longer exists.
Throwing...
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Military given go-ahead to detain US terrorist suspects without trial | The Guardian
Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.
Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the...
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Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq | The New York Times
The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a...
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Brendan Greeley and Alison Fitzgerald: Pssst…Wanna Buy a Law? | Bloomberg Businessweek
The American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit based in Washington, brings together state legislators, companies, and advocacy groups to shape “model legislation.” The legislators then take these models back to their own states. About 1,000 times a year, according to ALEC, a state legislator...
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Josh Harkinson: Meet the Financial Wizards Working With Occupy Wall Street | Mother Jones
High up in a Manhattan conference room on Sunday, a group of investment gurus discussed Occupy Wall Street. Should they support a set of tough-sounding financial reforms just proposed on the campaign trail by presidential candidate Jon Huntsman? Or was it reasonable to demand even deeper reforms?...
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U.S. Safety Board Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers | The New York Times
A federal agency on Tuesday called for a ban on all cellphone use by drivers — the most far-reaching such recommendation to date — saying its decision was based on a decade of investigations into distraction-related accidents, as well as growing concerns that powerful mobile devices are giving drivers even more reasons to...
How Fox News is helping Barack Obama's re-election... →
guardian:
Jonathan Freedland writes for Comment is Free:
By any normal standards, Obama should be extremely vulnerable. Not only is the economy in bad shape, he has proved to be a much more hesitant, less commanding White House presence than his supporters longed for. And yet, most surveys put him comfortably ahead of his would-be rivals. That’s not a positive judgment on the president –...
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David Kristjanson-Gural: Capitalism is the Enemy of Democracy | truthout
So, it is an odd fact of American life that capitalism is equated with democracy while, at the same time, acting as democracy’s most corrosive force. But think about it, if capitalism really supported democracy, if it really welcomed open, honest, wide-ranging debate about the values and practices of corporations and...
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Russ Baker: The Saudi Arab Spring Nobody Noticed | WhoWhatWhy
Hear the one about the Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia that nobody noticed?
No, this is not a joke. It is a real situation—and a cautionary example of what happens when Western governments and their media are more favorable to some “revolutions” than others.
With the Syrian regime, long out of favor with the West, we heard about the...
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Tony Davis: The frog and the polar bear | Grist
Why can’t Americans seem to get their heads around climate change? While the recession, the Tea Party, a lack of media coverage, and other forces have taken a bite out of public support for the issue recently, the problem has its roots in human nature, researchers say.
Columbia psychology professor Elke Weber was among the early researchers...
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William Astore: Fighting 1% Wars | TomDispatch
As we fight wars of choice in distant lands for ever-shifting goals, what if “our troops” simply continue to grow ever more remote from us? What if they become “their” troops? Is this not the true terror we should be mobilizing as a nation to prevent? The terror of separating our military almost totally from our nation — and ourselves.
As...
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Glenn Greenwald: The growing menace of domestic drones | Salon
Unsurprisingly, GA’s annual lobbying budget is in excess of $2 million. AeroVironment’s lobbying expenditures are now close to $1 million each year. Meanwhile, a top GA in-house lobbyist, Gary Hopper, personally doles out tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to key House members of both parties who work on defense...
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Abigail Caplovitz Field - Dear Attorneys General: If You Want to Be Re-Elected, Sue the Banks | Reality Check
If you want to be reelected–in those 41 states where voters get to have their say on how well you’re doing your job–you’d better get busy and indict some document fraudsters, or at least sue the big banks for their deceptive and deeply damaging practices. That’s because voters are...
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Mohammed el Gorani and Jérôme Tubiana: Diary | London Review of Books
One day they started moving prisoners again. They picked you from your tent, put you naked, shaved your head and beard (I was too young to have a beard), then beat you. They dressed you with orange clothes, handcuffed you, and put gloves with no fingers on you, so you couldn’t open the handcuffs. ‘You guys are going to a place...
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Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front | Los Angeles Times
For decades, U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. They have ruled that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws. Advocates say Predators are simply more effective than other...
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Michael T. Klare: Playing With Fire | TomDispatch
All of this ensures that, environmentally, militarily, and economically, we will find ourselves in a more, not less, perilous world. The desire to turn away from disastrous land wars in the Greater Middle East to deal with key issues now simmering in Asia is understandable, but choosing a strategy that puts such an emphasis on military dominance...
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Matt Taibbi - Indefinite Detention of American Citizens: Coming Soon to Battlefield U.S.A. - Taibblog |Rolling Stone
Here’s where I think we’re in very dangerous territory. We have two very different but similarly large protest movements going on right now in the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement. What if one of them is linked to a violent act? What if a bomb goes off in a police station in...
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Todd S. Purdum: One Nation, Under Arms | Vanity Fair
Just over 50 years ago, in his farewell address from the Oval Office, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the dangers inherent in a powerful “military-industrial complex,” and just three days later—as if in proof of Eisenhower’s words—John Fitzgerald Kennedy famously vowed to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support...
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AP Exclusive: Inside Romania’s secret CIA prison | Google News
WASHINGTON (AP) — In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city, is a secret that the Romanian government has tried for years to protect.
For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed Bright Light — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable...
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Glenn Greenwald: The-We-Are-At-War! mentality | Salon
But this need to embrace the idea that We-are-at-War! is driven far more by psychological and emotional desires than it is legal or policy views. It’s all about feeling strong and purposeful — we are Warriors for a great cause just like our noble forefathers who won the Civil War and vanquished the Nazis – and has virtually nothing to do with...
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Freeman Dyson: How to Dispel Your Illusions | New York Review of Books
Another theme of Kahneman’s book, proclaimed in the title, is the existence in our brains of two independent sytems for organizing knowledge. Kahneman calls them System One and System Two. System One is amazingly fast, allowing us to recognize faces and understand speech in a fraction of a second. It must have evolved from the...
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Drone Crash in Iran Reveals Secret U.S. Surveillance Effort | The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The stealth C.I.A. drone that crashed deep inside Iranian territory last week was part of a stepped-up surveillance program that has frequently sent the United States’ most hard-to-detect drone into the country to map suspected nuclear sites, according to foreign officials and American experts who have...
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Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery: Occupied Washington | Mother Jones
Americans are not opposed to the rich getting richer—as John Steinbeck is said to have noted, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” But this prospect only satisfies so long as people believe that with luck...