Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
(vid) Guantanamera: Pete Seeger
At age 42 Jose Marti lost his life in the cuban Liberation Movement.
He first became active at age 17 and spent much of his life in exile,
including in New York.
What Happened to Canada?
Monday 30 January 2012
by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed
Police confront protesters outside 2010's G-20 meeting in Toronto, Canada, June 25, 2010. (Photo: G20 Protest Photos)
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.
“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”
“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.
Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.
Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”
No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.
“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.
(vid) 400 Protesters Including 2 Journalists Arrested In Oakland 1/28/2012
Protest marchers kettled by Oakland Cops in front of YMCA
and then arrested for trying to escape through the YMCA.
Newt Gingrich: I would ignore supreme court as president
Thursday 19 January 2012
Republican presidential candidate would order military to defy judges' ruling extending legal rights to terror suspects
Read by 1,580 people
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich listens to a question during the Personhood USA presidential forum in Greenville, South Carolina. Photograph: Chris Keane/Reuters
Newt Gingrich has pledged that on his first day as president he will set up a constitutional showdown by ordering the military to defy a supreme court ruling extending some legal rights to foreign terrorism suspects and captured enemy combatants in US custody.
The Republican contender told a forum of anti-abortion activists ahead of South Carolina's primary election that as president he would ignore supreme court rulings he regards as legally flawed. He implied that would also extend to the 1973 decision, Roe vs Wade, legalising abortion.
"If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it," said Gingrich to cheers.
The Republican contender, who has made no secret of his disdain for the judiciary, said that as president he would expect to have repeated showdowns with the supreme court. He said the court would lose because it is the least powerful and least accountable arm of government.
Gingrich said the first confrontation would be over its historic ruling, known as the Boumediene decision, that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in US courts.
"I fully expect as president that there will be several occasions when we will collide. The first one, which is actually foreign policy, the Boumediene decision which extends American legal rights to enemy combatants on the battlefield is such an outrageous extension of the court in to the commander in chief's role.
"I will issue an instruction on the opening day, first day I'm sworn in, I will issue an executive order to the national security apparatus that it will not enforce Boumediene and it will regard it as null and void because it is an absurd extension of the supreme court in to the commander in chief's (authority)."
Gingrich has said before that he regards the president as above the court when the two branches have fundamentally differing views but he went further in committing himself to setting up a constitutional crisis on his first day in office.
The Republican candidate cited what he said were precedents, including Abraham Lincoln's refusal to accept the Dred Scott decision denying that former slaves were citizens.
Gingrich's interpretations have previously been met with disdain. President George W Bush's attorney general, Michael Mukasey, has said that a president selectively ignoring supreme court decisions would turn the US in to a banana republic.
At the same election forum, Rick Perry, the Texas governor, did not go so far as Gingrich but he did say that as president he would seek to pack the supreme court with judges who would overturn the ruling legalising abortion.
"When we have a president that appoints two or three more supreme court justices - that's what the next president of the United States is liable to do - those from my perspective should be individuals who are strict constructionists who look at the constitution and interpret it in a way that our founding fathers wrote it," he said. "Therefore Roe vs Wade would be overturned."
While that comment was less contentious than Gingrich's approach, Perry created his own ripple of controversy by once again speaking ill of a foreign country.
"Think about 35,000 children every day are aborted in China. That country is destined for the ash heap of history unless it changes its values," he said.
What america's simple minded little Newt fails to realize is that it is his own narrrow-mindedness, selfishness, and greed for money and power that is king of the world's ash heap. It is the trilogy of "isms" --- nepotism, narcissim, and ethnocentricsm that makes him and the people like him the ass of all trash.
These are big words for such a little man as Newt Gingrich but they are not meant for him. These words are meant for american voters who certainly are smart enough to get out a dictionary if need be and are smart enough to vote and prevent people like Gingrich, Romney and Perry from leading our country and the world into a garbage pit of their own making, one they stand atop of and spit down upon the rest of us.
~cleanelectric
The Republican contender told a forum of anti-abortion activists ahead of South Carolina's primary election that as president he would ignore supreme court rulings he regards as legally flawed. He implied that would also extend to the 1973 decision, Roe vs Wade, legalising abortion.
"If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it," said Gingrich to cheers.
The Republican contender, who has made no secret of his disdain for the judiciary, said that as president he would expect to have repeated showdowns with the supreme court. He said the court would lose because it is the least powerful and least accountable arm of government.
Gingrich said the first confrontation would be over its historic ruling, known as the Boumediene decision, that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in US courts.
"I fully expect as president that there will be several occasions when we will collide. The first one, which is actually foreign policy, the Boumediene decision which extends American legal rights to enemy combatants on the battlefield is such an outrageous extension of the court in to the commander in chief's role.
"I will issue an instruction on the opening day, first day I'm sworn in, I will issue an executive order to the national security apparatus that it will not enforce Boumediene and it will regard it as null and void because it is an absurd extension of the supreme court in to the commander in chief's (authority)."
Gingrich has said before that he regards the president as above the court when the two branches have fundamentally differing views but he went further in committing himself to setting up a constitutional crisis on his first day in office.
The Republican candidate cited what he said were precedents, including Abraham Lincoln's refusal to accept the Dred Scott decision denying that former slaves were citizens.
Gingrich's interpretations have previously been met with disdain. President George W Bush's attorney general, Michael Mukasey, has said that a president selectively ignoring supreme court decisions would turn the US in to a banana republic.
At the same election forum, Rick Perry, the Texas governor, did not go so far as Gingrich but he did say that as president he would seek to pack the supreme court with judges who would overturn the ruling legalising abortion.
"When we have a president that appoints two or three more supreme court justices - that's what the next president of the United States is liable to do - those from my perspective should be individuals who are strict constructionists who look at the constitution and interpret it in a way that our founding fathers wrote it," he said. "Therefore Roe vs Wade would be overturned."
While that comment was less contentious than Gingrich's approach, Perry created his own ripple of controversy by once again speaking ill of a foreign country.
"Think about 35,000 children every day are aborted in China. That country is destined for the ash heap of history unless it changes its values," he said.
What america's simple minded little Newt fails to realize is that it is his own narrrow-mindedness, selfishness, and greed for money and power that is king of the world's ash heap. It is the trilogy of "isms" --- nepotism, narcissim, and ethnocentricsm that makes him and the people like him the ass of all trash.
These are big words for such a little man as Newt Gingrich but they are not meant for him. These words are meant for american voters who certainly are smart enough to get out a dictionary if need be and are smart enough to vote and prevent people like Gingrich, Romney and Perry from leading our country and the world into a garbage pit of their own making, one they stand atop of and spit down upon the rest of us.
~cleanelectric
BREAKING: Police Fire Projectiles at Students from Occupy UC Riverside Protesting Board of Regents
Thu Jan 19, 2012 at 05:49 PM PST
BREAKING: Police Fire Projectiles at Students from Occupy UC Riverside Protesting Board of Regents
Share428
The cease-fire against California students appears to be over.
Students from UC Riverside, protesting today's Board of Regents meeting, were confronted by riot police, with multiple reports indicating they were fired upon with paint-filled bullets and other projectiles that injured several at the scene.
The students, many of whom are associated with Occupy UC Riverside, today protested and (ultimately) shut down a Board of Regents meeting where tuition hikes were planned to be discussed.
The meeting was adjourned when students who managed to get inside refused to be silent in the face of skyrocketing tuition costs. After the meeting was closed, the board members were escorted off of campus amidst what were, for most of the day, incredibly peaceful and nonviolent protests.
Here is a report from ABC's local affiliate on what transpired before police began attacking protesters:
While things remained peaceful in the early afternoon, after the board members were escorted from campus, students amassed to continue their protest and were confronted by riot police – reportedly a mix of campus police and officers from the municipality – who forced them to disperse using fired projectiles that injured several protesters.
Why were these students today at UC Riverside protesting?
Tuition for students in the University of California system has nearly quadrupled in the last ten years, with plans for tuition – approximately $14,000 at most campuses – to double within the next four years.
Such increases, both past and future, make pursuing a degree at a UC campus a liability for many, and prohibitive for more still.
And one wonders why college students, leaving school with record amounts of debt, are giving up on the American dream, are raising their voices in anger, are refusing to remain silent.
Things cannot continue this way for a creative society to thrive. And students at UC Riverside understand this with a painful immediacy that drove them today to confront those who command the University of California system's purse strings.
May their voices, in numbers, continue to grow.
-----------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter @David_EHG
-----------------------------------
Students from UC Riverside, protesting today's Board of Regents meeting, were confronted by riot police, with multiple reports indicating they were fired upon with paint-filled bullets and other projectiles that injured several at the scene.
The students, many of whom are associated with Occupy UC Riverside, today protested and (ultimately) shut down a Board of Regents meeting where tuition hikes were planned to be discussed.
The meeting was adjourned when students who managed to get inside refused to be silent in the face of skyrocketing tuition costs. After the meeting was closed, the board members were escorted off of campus amidst what were, for most of the day, incredibly peaceful and nonviolent protests.
Here is a report from ABC's local affiliate on what transpired before police began attacking protesters:
While things remained peaceful in the early afternoon, after the board members were escorted from campus, students amassed to continue their protest and were confronted by riot police – reportedly a mix of campus police and officers from the municipality – who forced them to disperse using fired projectiles that injured several protesters.
This screenshot, just one of many taken from live streams that covered incidents today, shows abrasion wounds from paint bullets fired at students by police. Photo via @marymad.
This incident – another show of disproportionate force by police in the University of California system – adds to a growing list of shameful moments, most notably the indiscriminate use of pepper spray at UC Davis.
Riot police confront and use extreme force to disperse student protesters. Photo by @OccupyUMD.
Why were these students today at UC Riverside protesting?
Tuition for students in the University of California system has nearly quadrupled in the last ten years, with plans for tuition – approximately $14,000 at most campuses – to double within the next four years.
Such increases, both past and future, make pursuing a degree at a UC campus a liability for many, and prohibitive for more still.
And one wonders why college students, leaving school with record amounts of debt, are giving up on the American dream, are raising their voices in anger, are refusing to remain silent.
Things cannot continue this way for a creative society to thrive. And students at UC Riverside understand this with a painful immediacy that drove them today to confront those who command the University of California system's purse strings.
May their voices, in numbers, continue to grow.
-----------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter @David_EHG
-----------------------------------
Author's Note:Video has been posted from the scene at UC Riverside which shows much of the confrontation:
Originally posted to Writing by David Harris Gershon on Thu Jan 19, 2012 at 05:49 PM PST.
Also republished by California politics and Occupy Wall Street.
China's Wealth Disparity Erupts in Wukan Protests
Posted by: Dan Beucke on December 16, 2011 at 6:30 AM
The Occupy Wall Street protests in the U.S. are a delayed reaction to a bursting property bubble, which led to a jobs crisis and rising anger over financial influence and wealth disparity. What’s happening right now In China — angry protesters seizing a village and forcing Communist officials to retreat — is a dramatic example of what happens when a similar toxic mix plays out in a totalitarian society.
The protests in Wukan, a coastal village in Guangdong province, began three months ago over land seizures. They exploded this week after party officials tried to seal off Wukan with riot police, setting up roadblocks, blocking fishing boats, and beating residents. On Wednesday the party was forced to back down, saying it would halt a controversial real estate project and investigate local officials. The images out of Wukan are a startling contrast to the usual way Chinese officials manage to snuff out any sign of public discord.
At the heart of the protests is a corrupt system in which local officials seize land, evict poor tenants, and sell it to rich developers to fund government operations. A Bloomberg article last October described this strange twist on the Communist Revolution:
Land disputes and growing numbers of “mass incidents” (the Chinese term for any large public protest) aren’t the most spectacular manifestation of China’s class tensions. In two separate cases this year, sons of powerful officials were found guilty of running down peasants with their cars. One of the men was executed after admitting he stabbed to death a young woman whom he feared would seek payment for her injuries.
(Photographer: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images)
The Occupy Wall Street protests in the U.S. are a delayed reaction to a bursting property bubble, which led to a jobs crisis and rising anger over financial influence and wealth disparity. What’s happening right now In China — angry protesters seizing a village and forcing Communist officials to retreat — is a dramatic example of what happens when a similar toxic mix plays out in a totalitarian society.
The protests in Wukan, a coastal village in Guangdong province, began three months ago over land seizures. They exploded this week after party officials tried to seal off Wukan with riot police, setting up roadblocks, blocking fishing boats, and beating residents. On Wednesday the party was forced to back down, saying it would halt a controversial real estate project and investigate local officials. The images out of Wukan are a startling contrast to the usual way Chinese officials manage to snuff out any sign of public discord.
At the heart of the protests is a corrupt system in which local officials seize land, evict poor tenants, and sell it to rich developers to fund government operations. A Bloomberg article last October described this strange twist on the Communist Revolution:
Mao Zedong won the hearts of the masses by redistributing land from rich landlords to penniless peasants. Now, powerful local officials are snatching it back, sometimes violently, to make way for luxury apartment blocks, malls and sports complexes in a debt-fueled building binge. City governments rely on land sales for much of their revenue because they have few sources of income such as property taxes. They’re increasingly seeking to cash in on real estate prices that have risen 140 percent since 1998 by appropriating land and flipping it to developers for huge profits.Market reforms that began under Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s sparked spectacular economic growth — and widened the divisions between rich and poor, city dwellers and farmers. The share of income collected by the top 1 percent of China’s earners more than doubled between 1986 and 2003, to 5.87 percent, according to the incomes database of Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. (That was still lower than the share held at the time by their U.S. counterparts, 14.87 percent.) China ranked 53rd on the CIA’s list of countries with the most unequal incomes — lower than the U.S. (40) — based on 2007 data.
Land disputes and growing numbers of “mass incidents” (the Chinese term for any large public protest) aren’t the most spectacular manifestation of China’s class tensions. In two separate cases this year, sons of powerful officials were found guilty of running down peasants with their cars. One of the men was executed after admitting he stabbed to death a young woman whom he feared would seek payment for her injuries.
(Photographer: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images)
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