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Friday, August 17, 2007 |
Naomi Klein: "As we think about reaching this other possible world, I want to be very clear that I don't believe the problem is a lack of ideas. I think we're swimming in ideas: universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren't new ideas. They're enshrined in the UN Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.
I don't think our problem is money, lack of resources to act on these basic ideas.
And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don't believe that what is lacking is political will at the highest levels, cooperation between world leaders. I don't think that if we could just present our elites with the right graphs and PowerPoint presentations - no offense - that we would finally convince them to make poverty history.
The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world. I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power. That's what we're missing. 'The best lacked all convictions,' Yeats wrote, 'while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' Think about it. Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan's oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?"
That is all very nice, too nice. Our confidence?
Actually, what is happening is a massive world revolution of the greedy neocon kind and people are being ensnared in the rhetoric that they can take part in it, by the media in corporate hands. What we need is a change of system. That will only come about when the system crumbles under its own greed and can't keep up its promises to the masses. We can be sure of this: they will encroach on the rights and welfare of an ever increasing number of people. Neocon capitalism is a self-defeating system. As competition can only end in one huge monopoly, it will become too heavy and unsustainable. The neocons are ruining our environment, our health care, our freedom and justice, our democracy. It's them against the people.
People like Bush are usurpers who should be tried and hung from the highest tree in the best Texan style.
11:29:26 AM 
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Salon: "A federal jury in Miami today unanimously found U.S. citizen Jose Padilla guilty of 'conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas'. In so doing, the jury dealt an enormous blow not only to Padilla himself, but also to the theory which the Bush administration cited to justify its most extremist power over the last six years - namely, the power to imprison U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, with no charges of any kind.
Padilla's story is by now depressingly familiar. Arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in April, 2002, he was declared to be an 'enemy combatant' by George Bush and imprisoned in a naval brig for the next three-and-a-half years with no charges brought against him. The day following his arrest, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft called a hastily arranged news conference in Moscow to announce that Padilla was attempting to detonate a radiological weapon in the U.S., and from that point forward, the media referred to him as the 'Dirty Bomber'.
For a substantial time, Padilla was denied all access to the outside world, including even access to a lawyer. In court, the Bush DOJ repeatedly argued that the President possesses the power to imprison even U.S. citizens indefinitely and with no charges simply by decreeing them to be an 'enemy combatant', with no review of any kind and no opportunity to contest the validity of the accusations.
The administration repeatedly contended that it was exercising this extraordinary and definitively tyrannical power - a power literally denied for centuries even to the British King - because it claimed that dangerous terrorists like Padilla could not be tried in a U.S. criminal court. Today's verdict - along with scores of other terrorist convictions obtained with full due process rights both in the U.S. and other places, such as England - gives the lie to that claim.
All along, the Bush administration could have, should have, and was constitutionally obligated to charge Padilla with crimes if it wanted to imprison him. There is no more defining American liberty than the right to be free of arbitrary executive imprisonment, and like so many other basic liberties, the Bush administration violated and assaulted this right for no reason whatsoever."
Firedoglake: "... as a clinician, I have worked with torture victims and, of course, abuse victims for a few decades now, actually. I think, from a clinical point of view, he was tortured."
The American system of justice under the Bush regime is rotten to the core. It's the arrogance of power that knows it is wrong and therefore cannot but violate the law.
EarthTimes: "Former DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey allegedly confessed during a prison interview with prosecutors that he ordered the death of Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown in 2000, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said Thursday."
Reuters: "People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program."
KSLA: "Could martial law ever become a reality in America? Some fear any nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. soil might trigger just that. KSLA News 12 has discovered that the clergy would help the government with potentially their biggest problem: Us."
11:12:28 AM
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