Teenager Commits Suicide After Police Launch Social Media Campaign Against Him
When a teenager failed to appear in court on substance abuse charges, the police began cyber-bulling him on Facebook.
Cops Shoot Family Dog Just Because
Police officers in a Chicago suburb sat in front of a home for 20 minutes, then without any provocation shot the family dog.
We Need to Address the Profound Stupidity That Afflicts America
Crackdown on Florida high school science student is prime example of American idiocy.
Texas Students Thrown in Jail for Days ... as Punishment for Missing School?
Texas's solution to truancy appears to be making kids miss even more school as they sit in jail.
Texas Jailers Ran a 'Rape Camp' Behind Bars, Women Claim
This is unbelievable.
After deadly police beating, witness cellphones confiscated
David Sal Silva was reportedly seen and recorded being beaten to death by California police
“Hero” cop, honored by Obama, accused of double rape
A former Philadelphia police officer who was once seated next to first lady is held on bail for raping two women
California police accused of erasing video of lethal beatingWitnesses say Kern County officers erased evidence of a police beating that left man dead
Life in the American slaughterhouse: Police violence and AuroraAn examination of police violence and what it means for the culture
More On US Police Brutality Here.
General stories about the US police here.
Here is an interview about a show about the prohibition (notice the similarities to the modern drug war?)...
Ken Burns discusses the unforeseen consequences of Prohibition and the political and economic shifts that led to its end. (see original show)
The Colbert Report
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Video: Bill Moyers Journal: Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander fromBillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander on Injustice Two talented lawyers who’ve dedicated their careers to fighting inequality, Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson, join Bill Moyers on the Journal to examine justice and injustice in America 42 years after King’s death.
Alexander believes that King would be deeply troubled by the remaining inequality in America. As she tells Bill Moyers, “I think Martin Luther King would be thrilled by some of the individual progress of African Americans, but stunned, absolutely stunned and saddened, by the state of African Americans as a whole today.”
Stevenson adds that to reach King’s dream, America must address the causes of poverty, “I think in America, the opposite of poverty is justice. I think there are structures and systems that have created poverty, and have made that poverty so permanent, that until we think in a more just way about how to deal with poverty in this country, we’re never gonna make the progress that Dr. King envisioned.”
Both believe that America’s policies of mass incarceration continue the cycle of poverty. America is the largest jailer on the planet, with 2.3 million people behind bars. But the policy of mass imprisonment, unique among industrialized nations, disproportionately affects minorities, especially African American men. One in 100 adults in America is behind bars, but one in nine African American men aged 20 to 34 is behind bars. Much of this arises from the “war on drugs.” According to Human Rights Watch, African American adults have been arrested at a rate 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white adults in every year from 1980 to 2007. Yet, according to government statistics, African Americans and whites have similar rates of illicit drug use and dealing.
Follow Bill Moyers through his website (click here).
Understanding the source of America's Prison Economy:
Prisons for profit(PBS): "Corporations are running many Americans prisons, but will they put profits before prisoners?"
From Fareed Zakaria (The only part he missed/left-out was the police brutality that exists in the States):
The chart below shows the number of prison inmates per capita in the United States compared with other major countries. The incarceration rate in the United States is more than three times that of Iran, six times that of China, and ten times that of Japan. (Source: The Economist via blogs.cfr.org/lindsay)...
"Another chart on America's prison population from GOOD Magazine showing U.S. incarceration rates per 100,000 over time."
Experiment by Adam Kokesh
The Set-Up
Arrested
Arrested By The Feds & Released Without Charges
Beaten Up By The Cops & Released Without Charges (Cops in the US just beat up people for fun!)
This qualifies me for a drug war Purple Heart, right?!? (Half my hand is still numb & my arms are bruised up.)
Notes:
1. There are "900 bases in 150 countries"
2. From The Economist: Indeed, the one lesson that can be drawn from the data is that today's strategic priorities can shape deployments for decades to come, long after the original reason for putting G.I.s in a particular region has gone.
3. "[W]e can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things." Wolfowitz, 2003.
4. Economics perspective: Manufacturing jobs have become more specialized requiring less labor and more technical expertise - i.e. small companies making big ticket items such as fighter jets; this means less people are employed, smaller number of people make huge profits and these huge profits make the economy look like its growing when actually its just a few companies making huge profits benefiting a small group of people.Senator Bernie Sanders also thinks sending manufacturing jobs abroad is bad economic policy.
5. Comedic perspective: Colbert Report: Solutions to America's Financial Worries - World War III
6. Millions of jobs vs hundreds, possibly thousands of jobs, created by small companies with big ticket items.
7. Article: 11 Ways That Amerika Is Becoming More Like North Korea .
8. Interview: Ben Lowy describes his photographic work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arresting people just because someone says so with any due process of law.
9. "The Pentagon needs to conduct a "serious inquiry" into the Air Force for letting a retired general turned Boeing executive participate in a war game for a $51 billion aerial tanker contract Boeing was competing to win, Sen. John McCain said Thursday in a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta."
10. Remains of 274 Soldiers Dumped in Virginia Landfill - Fox News Video [Original article here.]
11. "They've taken all the heat they want to," Barr said. "They paid a lot of money for an aircraft that doesn't work."
12. "How do you break an internet? Easy. SOPA." Judge Andrew Napolitano
13. Comedic perspective: At last, the U.S. government brings swift justice to hardened criminals on YouTube.
14. Interview: Colbert Report: Stop Online Piracy Act - Danny Goldberg & Jonathan Zittrain.
15. Corporate money in politics has gone from bad to worse - Politicians, if opposed to Wall Street or even big pharmaceuticals, have to fear a possible Add attack by corporate money in the electoral process -http://youtu.be/G9qZZVqSQdo .
Did Hollywood Help Make NSA Surveillance Permissible?
Movies have got us used to the sight of people as pixellated quarry, tracked by powerful technology.
Bombshell: Government’s 'Insider Threat Program' Obligates Federal Workers to Spy on Their Colleagues
McClatchy newspaper group tells the story that mainstream media ignores
Related Blog Post: NSA: Overview Of The Real-Life Version Of "Enemy Of the State"
BBC News Reports: "US using A thermal-imaging plane"
Hollywood: In "Behind Enemy Lines" they had a satellite with thermal imaging technology (this same sort of thermal imaging technology was used in a Constitutional way inthe hunt for the Boston Bomber) ... I guess it's easier to put one on planes to comb large areas or it would be like the Stormtoopers combing the desert.
There's a New Fascism on the Rise, and the NSA Leaks Show Us What It Looks Like
The power of truth-tellers like Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media.
In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
The American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term "public relations" as a euphemism for state propaganda. He warned that an enduring threat to the invisible government was the truth-teller and an enlightened public.
In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known as The Pentagon Papers, revealing that the invasion of Vietnam was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church conducted sensational hearings in the US Senate: one of the last flickers of American democracy. These laid bare the full extent of the invisible government: the domestic spying and subversion and warmongering by intelligence and "security" agencies and the backing they received from big business and the media, both conservative and liberal.
Speaking about the National Security Agency (NSA), Senator Church said: "I know that the capacity that there is to make tyranny in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law … so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
On 11 June, following the revelations in the Guardian by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg wrote that the US had now "that abyss".
Snowden’s revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone, is further evidence of modern form of fascism – that is the "abyss". Having nurtured old-fashioned fascists around the world – from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia – the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology.
Fred Branfman, who exposed the "secret" destruction of tiny Laos by the US Air Force in the 1960s and 70s, provides an answer to those who still wonder how a liberal African-American president, a professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness. "Under Mr. Obama," he wrote for AlterNet, "no president has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police state." Why? Because Obama, like George W Bush, understands that his role is not to indulge those who voted for him but to expand "the most powerful institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962."
In the new American cyber-power, only the revolving doors have changed. The director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was adviser to Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state in the Bush administration who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US with nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have co-authored a book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the former CIA director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the Prism spying program, revealed by Edward Snowden, that provides the NSA access to all of us who use Google.
Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of this. These are exercised by political, economic and military designs, of which mass surveillance is an essential part, but also by insinuating propaganda in the public consciousness. This was Edward Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns were convincing Americans they should go to war in 1917 and persuading women to smoke in public; cigarettes were "torches of freedom" that would hasten women’s liberation.
It is in popular culture that the fraudulent "ideal" of America as morally superior, a "leader of the free world", has been most effective. Yet, even during Hollywood’s most jingoistic periods there were exceptional films, like those of the exile Stanley Kubrick, and adventurous European films would have US distributors. These days, there is no Kubrick, no Strangelove, and the US market is almost closed to foreign films.
When I showed my own film, The War on Democracy, to a major, liberally-minded US distributor, I was handed a laundry list of changes required, to "ensure the movie is acceptable". His memorable sop to me was: "OK, maybe we could drop in Sean Penn as narrator. Would that satisfy you?" Lately, Katherine Bigelow’s torture-apologizing Zero Dark Thirtyand Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, a cinematic hatchet job on Julian Assange, were made with generous backing by Universal Studios, whose parent company until recently was General Electric. GE manufactures weapons, components for fighter aircraft and advance surveillance technology. The company also has lucrative interests in "liberated" Iraq.
The power of truth-tellers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media. WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because it provides truth-tellers with a means to get the truth out. This was achieved by Collateral Damage, the cockpit video of an US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and Assange for state vengeance. Here were US airmen murdering journalists and maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly enjoying it, and describing their atrocity as "nice". Yet, in one vital sense, they did not get away with it; we are witnesses now, and the rest is up to us.
5 So-Called Liberals Who Kowtow to U.S. Imperial Murder
What does it mean to be called a 'liberal' when you don't stand in the way of killing innocents?America's intellectual elites and political leaders not only ignore the suffering of America's victims but perpetuate it. They're often called "liberals," but what does it mean when they either tacitly endorse the killing of millions of innocents, or openly promote it?
Here are five of the biggest offenders:
--The Atlantic Magazine recently published a long piece entitled "In Defese of Henry Kissinger". But author Robert Kaplan did not even bother to respond to the main charge against Mr. Kissinger: that he lawlessly helped kill, wound or make homeless over 6 million human beings. For a Kaplan and Kissinger 6 million war victims of U.S. war-making from 1969-72 do not even exist. Since it is impossible to defend the morally indefensible, they remain as silent as was the world that ignored the murder of their (and mine) Jewish forbears in Word War II.
-- Tom Brokaw wrote a best-selling book entitled "Boom!: Talking About the Sixties: What Happened, How It Shaped Today, Lessons for Tomorrow." But he too failed to even once mention U.S. murder of civilians in Vietnam, the key fact that produced a giant peace movement and "Sixties" revolt against authority in the first place. He instead presented the Vietnam war, as do most U.S. school textbooks today, as a conventional war between armies. As in 1984 the death of over 1 million Vietnamese were consigned to the memory hole.
-- A 90th birthday party was recently held for Henry Kissinger, whose "lawless cruelty" in Indochina as N.Y. Times columnist Anthony Lewis termed it was not only known to but protested against by Bill and Hillary Clinton in their youths. But now, as the Daily Beast breathlessly described, it was Bill Clinton himself who gave the "best speech" honoring Kissinger and a broadly grinning Hillary Clinton who showed up adorned with not only one of de la Renta "best gowns" but Oscar himself. John Kerry also gave a speech flattering the man he had once called a "war criminal". Tina Brown wittily tweeted "90 is the new 30", as dozens of smiling liberal media, political and government luminaries came one by one by Kissinger's table to offer fawning obeisance to the living American with more blood on his hands than any other.
-- Mr. Obama has just nominated Samantha Power to be U.N. Representative. Power stands out among most liberal power-seekers for showing sympathy for the "non-people" of Darfur and other nations. But she has not dared risk her career to speak out on behalf of the far more numerous victims of her own nation -- from Iraq to Yemen to Libya -- and should she become US Ambassador to the U.N., she will will find herself defending more Executive murder and assassination of the innocent.
- Perhaps most striking is the case of Secretary of State John Kerry. In 1971, in a courageous act for which he will be honored far more than his present career, he stated on Meet the Press that "I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I shot in free-fire zones, fired .50-caliber machine bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts are contrary to the laws of the Geneva Convention, and all were ordered as written, established policies from the top down, and the men who ordered this are war criminals."
Now that he has joined the Executive Branch. however, Mr. Kerry is not only defending but covering up the truth of lawless U.S. drone strikes by claiming that they are only aimed at named Al Qaeda leaders, i.e. "dozens of highly trained, skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives". He also put his personal credibility on the line by declaring that"when I first came in here, I reviewed this policy personally". If so, it is inconceivable that he does not know that it is "signature strikes" that have killed 3-5,000 people whose names the U.S. does not even know, vs. only 77 named "senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders." He has thus lied about U.S. war crimes, as did the superiors he accused of doing so 30 years ago.
For more about the American government's role in the death of millions of innocents, read Branfman's latest story, "World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution? The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government."
Article: Chris Hedges Defends Snowden's Heroism in the Face of a Growing Smear Campaign
How America's Bully Economy leads to a "Bully Society"
Jessie Klein's new book explains how school shootings, bullying and stressed-out kids stem in part from the U.S.'s cutthroat economy.
9 Ways the Right’s Ayn Randian Experiment Screws Over the Young
The decades-long assault on our core social values is on the verge of consuming its first complete generation of Americans.
Article: How Inbred Elites Are Tearing America Apart
Satirical Context to understand some of the strange rules Corporations are allowed (more than an average person/family for sure):
Article: US vice president Dick Cheney has been charged with "organised criminal activity" over allegations about abuse in privately-run prisons.
Investigating prisoner abuse will be a political food fight, and that is messier than torture. (03:31)
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Notes on Fareed Zakaria's responses:
1. So I think the White House is probably calculating exactly how much pressure they can put. They started out very tough with the Russians, thinking that they might even kind of push them into doing something. And it became very clear the Russians weren't willing to do that. So they're now playing nicer. They're saying, look, can't you help us?
The U.S. has extradited a number of people. But this is a unique situation. This is a situation in which the person that we're talking about has revealed that the United States is engaging in massive surveillance programs of many, many foreign countries and governments. So from the point of view of those foreign countries and governments, it is, of course, a very complicated issue. I bet you that if you were to poll public opinion in Russia or China, they would support what their governments are doing right now.
Implication: Amount of surveillance much larger than expected.
2. The Muslim Council of Britain issued an unequivocal statement condemning the latest killing, supporting British soldiers, and urging the police to do whatever it needed to, unhindered and unhampered. That is precisely the kind of statement all leaders of Muslim communities need to make whenever one of these kinds of attacks takes place.
Answer: Yes, I agree. Not because the acts of a few people represent a religion but because the South will probably elect the next President. They don't like non-whites or anybody for that matter.
3. "Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American," he added. ...
Cheney described Snowden as a "traitor" on "Fox News Sunday" saying his actions were "one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the U.S."
Asked if Cheney thought Snowden was spying for China, he said he was "deeply suspicious."
Answer: I covered Cheney here & here & here (kinda). A taste above.
4. "One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the penalty."
That was Martin Luther King Jr.'s definition of civil disobedience. It does not appear to be Edward Snowden's.
He has tried by every method possible to escape any judgment or punishment for his actions. Snowden has been compared to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. But Ellsberg did not hop on a plane to Hong Kong or Moscow once he had unloaded his cache of documents. He stood trial and faced the possibility of more than 100 years in prison before the court dismissed the case against him because of the prosecution's mistakes and abuses of justice.
Answer: Snowden's case is not the same because it's NOT the SAME lineage from the last whistle blower to this one. Notice that the last whistleblower was around during Kissinger (known as a "War Criminal" byD Swiss)-Nixon reign. Since then everyone is being tapped. Notice how different the #US is now from 50 years ago... I made an outline above. Especially notice why Cheney's "deeply suspicious" ABOVE is highlighted.