curate:
rekomuse:tjjourian:teflonwonton:hahaihateeveryonehaha:del-corona:lakrymosa
Democracy Now, November 29, 2011: Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate
AMY GOODMAN: Here in this country. U.S. citizens abroad as well as others abroad and others abroad in this country as well as U.S. citizens.
DAPHNE EVIATAR: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re picked up off the street and you have no trial.
AMY GOODMAN: And it could be for things you’ve done here in this country. If you communicate with Al Qaeda, you’re suspected of being even a supporter of Al Qaeda in some way or of Al Qaeda’s associated forces. And the U.S. gets to decide who they think is associated with Al Qaeda, and that list grows longer almost every day.
AMY GOODMAN: Now again, suspected. This is not that you’ve been convicted.
DAPHNE EVIATAR: Suspected. And this is military custody without trial. So, this is for example what we have in Guantanamo Bay and at Bagram only you’re now expanding the battlefield, as you said, to the United States. And, explicitly, some members of congress have said recently, yes, the battlefield now is the United States as well and the U.S. military ought to be able to operate here as well. And one other point, another very controversial provision in the bill and what the administration has particularly objected to, is the mandatory military custody provision which would say anyone suspected of terrorism in any way connected to Al Qaeda would have to be put into military custody. So, the government wouldn’t even have the option. So, all these FBI investigations that are thwarting terrorist attacks and local police investigations, immediately that would have to be turned over to the U.S. military, and that would become a military action here in the United States, on U.S. soil.
sexartandpolitics:
“Give him a nickel, sweetheart. After all, you made a couple of million on the war.”
A. Redfield was New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hoff’s pseudonym for work published in The Daily Worker and New Masses in the 1930s. Check out more cartoons here.
War profiteers should be boiled alive. I have absolutely no compassion for them.
theatlantic:
At Occupy Camps, Veterans Bring the Wars Home
We’re in a coffee shop near McPherson Square, the location of Occupy DC, and Michael Patterson, 21, and I are having hot cocoa on a cold November night. He’s wearing an Iraq Veterans Against the War sweatshirt and baggy shorts. It’s freezing outside. “I’m from Alaska,” he offers as an explanation. He’s been sleeping in a tent in D.C. for over a month now. I’ve traveled to five Occupations in two countries. In every demonstration (including the one in Canada) I’ve found a vet to talk to:
In Zuccotti Park, Army Specialist Jerry Bordeleau, 24, was sitting next to a table of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) literature. On his sweater were two buttons: an Iraq Campaign metal and one from the IWW. He served two tours in Iraq and now says he’s unemployed and can’t find work for over $10 an hour. And he can’t live on $10 an hour. When I asked him why he’s at Occupy Wall Street he says, “I went and fought for capitalism and that’s why I’m now a Marxist.” Read more.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.
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Howard Zinn (1922-2010.)
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doctorswithoutborders:
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has provided specialized care to 53 women, men, and children who were raped in a series of incidents that occurred between January 19 and 21 in South Kivu Province in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Most of the rape…
Look around at the economy, the public school system, the federal budget deficits, the fiscal conditions plaguing America’s state and local governments. We are giving short shrift to all of these problems and more while pouring staggering amounts of money (the rate is now scores of billions of dollars a year) into a treacherous, unforgiving and hopelessly corrupt sinkhole in Afghanistan.
(I stand in awe of the heights of hypocrisy scaled by conservative politicians and strategists who demand that budget deficits be brought under control while cheering the escalation in Afghanistan and calling for ever more tax cuts here at home.)
We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That’s really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don’t do anything about it, that’s violence.
I’m guessing some of it has to do with wealth inequality and the resulting distance between the haves and have nots in everyday society. When the people who do your nails and bag your groceries and bus your table aren’t fully visible in your busy world of IPods and Blackberries, perhaps you begin to think of them as pets who need training or children who require discipline. I don’t know. But something has gone terribly wrong and decent people had better wake up and realize that this radical, nihilistic right wing ideology that calls itself “conservatism” is now in the process of bringing the cruelty of its racist past into the 21st century and applying it to the entire middle and working class of this country.
Privileged bodies, whose mobility is unrestricted worldwide, get to decide where capital goes, where factories are built, where coal is mined. In the wake of advanced, global capitalism, of course not everyone can move through the world freely, because if they did, what’s to stop them (us) from moving to places where wages are livable, land is unpolluted and resources are plentiful? Because at the end of the day, that’s what Western immigration laws are about: protecting access to centuries of amassed (stolen) wealth, and perpetuating a system wherein white bodies can move through the world at will, taking what they need.
